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By biggest, I mean how "big" was the setting that your players actually got to play in? Three Galaxies, Manhunters, Mechanoids, the rest of the Megaverse?

Just curious.

-STS

Played in a number of Three Galaxies games, and a few that were megaverse-spanning (via having a Shifter in the party who knew his business).

Most, however, are much more low-key.

Played in a game where everyone was True Atlanteans (at first), working to overcome the Splugorth and take back Atlantis. A side plot involved freeing the REAL King Arthur, and retrieving Excalibur, and climaxed with my shifter/witch facing Mephistophles in single combat while everyone else escaped.

He died, of course. But that was a side plot in the main game, before we began an assault on Atlantis, itself.

"Fleets of the Three Galaxies" is the distillation of a Phase World campaign that I ran involving space opera, time travel, and a cosmic Cold War. It was probably my "biggest" in that sense.

In my first campaign growing up, the game master liked the idea of the party growing in power, forming a nation, and conquering the world. There were a number of things that he let us do that upon looking back wasn't very realistic to the setting.

Part 1

We started out protecting a small town on the eastern US coast from monster raiders. We had a few run-ins with mechanoids, slpugorth slavers, and Shemarrians. We made a big score when we raided a coalition depot and managed to break through the hatches of three Coalition IAR Abolisher Bots, kill the pilots, and capture them. We sold those on the black market to provide seed money for our organization. Somehow we made contact with the Kingdom of Tarnow and ordered a bunch of equipment from them including a number of Sea Stars and MDC chainmail armor that was shipped to our base on the US coast. The mechanoids spider fortress became active and a major threat to the area. We had a long fight with the mechanoids befriending Archie 3, and destroying a few factories before launching a major raid infiltrating the spider fortress, and ultimately wiping out all the mechanoids on board and capturing it with the help of Archie 3.

Archie was happy with our success and we gained a partnership with Archie and a relationship with him similar to Hagan, and shared our ideas and ambitions with him. Archie expanded, and built additional large underground complexes and factories that built mechanoid bots, and components for additional spider fortresses, and more important a robotic Mechanoid Digger (we found the schematics on the captured spider fortress). It took four or five game years for Archie to construct the Mechanoid Digger.

During the next few years we had an adventure in Europe with the NGR, Gargoyles, and Gene Splicers. Somehow we captured a Gene Splicers ship, but I forget how that happened, but now Archie can build the Omni-Bots. We also did a reconnaissance mission to Atlantis that ended at the Splynn dimensional market. Somewhere at the Splynn dimensional market we learned about Phaseworld, but weren't able to go there. We then made it to space using We bought a kittani Fan-Jet Hydrofoil Skimmer there, and later brought it back to archie who reverse engineered it and we started producing upgraded versions we called SA100's that had Triax missile drums on them from the Jager PA. It wasn't until we developed a relationship with some mages guild contacts connected to the Tolkien that we were able to go there. We recruited/hired some of the shifters and mages to open a dimensional portal to Phaseworld, and made a number of purchases there that were brought back to Archie to reverse engineer.

Using this tech from Phaseworld we upgraded the SA100's engines and flew them into space. After surviving and fighting off a bunch of kill satellites we had a few adventures in the mutant's in orbit setting, going to each of the stations. The people from the moon colony didn't speak to us, and we never learned of their connection to Cyberworks or the other Archie (our Archie friend didn't tell us either for some reason). We ended up making closest ties with the Laika station. After learning about the value of water/ice in space, and how it is basically their currency, we flooded the market with lots of ice, to the point that it disrupted the space economy, and gained a lot of money in the process. We used this money to buy some ships from Laika station and a Scimitar Frigate from Phaseworld. Then we claimed the Graveyard station and started repairs on it and eventually brought it back into operation under our control.

The Gargoyle and Brodkil empires joined forces and launched a large invasion of the Tarnow kingdom in Poland. We learned that the city was under siege and used our Tolkien friends to travel their and open up a Rift from Tarnow to central Germany for everyone to escape (including the king). The city/kingdom was overrun but most of the people made it out. We then learned that this invasion of Tarnow was just a prelude to a larger invasion of the NGR with armies in the tens of millions. Most of this war the GM played out with percentile rolls determining the result of different battles in a quick and fast way. The Gargoyle and Brodkil almost cut the NGR in half with the city of Frankfurt being the last line between northern Germany and the south, and that is where they held the line, and eventually the Gargoyle's and Brodkil forces were expended, and retreated. The NGR spent the next year slowly retaking their territory, but a lot of border cities were destroyed.

When the Mechanoid Digger was complete we used it to attack Atlantis. Atlantis launched a bunch of defensive measures against it, trying to blow it up, but we had the Digger drill right down under ground come up from beneath Splynncryths palace. In the mean time we had arranged a group of mages from Tolkien to put up a large interdiction field in a dome around the city/palace/pyramid that prevented dimensional teleportation or long distance teleportation. The entire pyramid with Splynncryth inside was devoured by the Digger as it emerged from beneath the ground. A bunch of armies surrounded it and attacked but using a wide blast from the Diggers plasma it swept in a 360 degree arc killing everything within a mile. We had to defend the inside of the Digger that was attacked by a number of High lords and other minions who teleported inside the bridge but we dealt with those before we retreated back under ground.

With Splynncryth dead, there were numerous slave revolts in Atlantis. We reached out to the Kittani and told them that we knew the location of more Mechanoids out in space in the milky way, and by channel their anger at the mechanoids, we managed to convince them to help us take over Atlantis so we could work together to launch a big attack on the mechanoids in space. This lead to a civil war in Atlantis between the Kittani and the other minions, and eventually the Kittani came out ahead after all or most of the High Lords were killed. During the civil war we freed all the human slaves, and appointed ourselves as the leaders of the human factions in Atlantis, and allied with the Kittani. After the war the Kittani sealed off the gateways to other worlds of Splynncryth to prevent more counter invasions through the rifts.

The remnants of Splynncryths empire (4 other worlds) didn't give up and they sent a large space fleet to Earth to put down the rebellion (we retconned that those 4 other worlds were in the Milky Way). This was probably one of the biggest battles that we ever played out, and took a few days of gaming. The entire Splugorth fleet was protected from long range missile bombardment via a grid network of plasma force fields that surrounded the entire fleet. Each section only had 50 mdc, but it was enough to trigger any missile to detonate, and they renewed themselves each melee turn. I recall that a major part of the battle included our wing of 150 silver hawks cutting through the force fields of the Splugorthian battleships and bypassing the hulls using phaseworld OP fields and then launching all their mini missiles off from inside the hull of the ship. At the end of the fight we had them on the ropes having destroyed half of the fleet, the other half was crippled, and all of the smaller fighter craft from the 4 carriers were destroyed. We called for their surrender, and revealed that Splynncryth was really dead (they thought he was still alive), and they finally surrendered.

After 6 months of repairs to the ships at Laika Station and our new graveyard station (renamed the Grey Station), we turned the fleet around and launched an attack on the other 4 worlds of Splynncryth, however we weren't the only ones. The death of Splynncryth left a big power vacuum and another Splugorth named Lord Doomsay also launched an invasion of the 4 worlds as well.

My first Rifts group played on and off for almost 20 years and in that time they:
- Visited every continent except Australia (yes they visited Antarctica, my version)
- Went into Mexico to rescue Erin Tarn only to end up in South America (this was before the books and I think mine was cooler)
- Battle the Host and the church on Wormwood
- Visited the Robotech universe twice (1st edition)
- Had a ship that allowed them to travel into Rifts orbital community
- Allied with Freedom Euro station against Luna in a brief war
- Helped unite the orbital community to stop an invasion of MDC Triceritons with MDC versions of their equipment from TMNT Guide to the Universe
- Stopped a Nightlords Invasion of Rifts Earth centered on the New Navy and the Pacific Rim
- Two of them Visited Palladium Fantasy to collect an ancient relic and spell book
- Stopped the Mechanoids Invasion of Earth
- Followed the Mechanoids to their home dimension for intelligence
- Participated in the Juicer Uprising although as support not as the main heroes
- Joined the Gathering of Heroes and personally killed 3 of the 4 Horsemen
- Faced an ancient group of immortals (a Nightbane, a mutant with immortal super powers, a Lost One psychic immortal, and an immortal necromancer) that imitated the Four Horsemen that took them to earth orbit and nearby planets, the three galaxies, and finally an ancient underwater temple off the coast of Japan
- Multiple trips to Center / Phase World as well as visiting all three galaxies (allying with the CCW, FWC, UWW and even helping some Cosmo Knights) and one of them went to the neighboring galaxy mentioned in the book
- Multiple trips to Hades, before the book came out so mine wasn't as cool
- At least two of them visited every dimension described in DB 2: Phase World
- They faced off against the Olympian Club, who was employed by the Norse goddess Hel in her attempt to gather the ingredients necessary to create a non-humanoid body so she could become the goddess of the Mechanoids, they then had to battle Hel
- Were good friends with the Sons of Quetzalcoatl, Gilgamesh the Wanderer, and many Aztec, Greek, and Persian gods
- Just before the group stopped playing they had been facing lots of supernatural threats, that would have led to a battle with Ahriman as he tried to escape his prison

My thinking was, if I was buying a book I was going to use it and my biggest problem wasn't "what am I going to use" but "how do I choose which adventure ideas, locations and NPCs".

That's a nice list of accomplishments there.


That's an interesting one. Hel wanted to become goddess of the mechanoids, and to do that she wanted to create a non-humanoid body? ... would illusions not work?, ... ah nevermind, its because of the Mechanoids psionics.
The bigger question is would the Mechanoids be receptive to her? ... what made her think she could pull it off?

Most of that was in the first decade as at the end we were gaming with these characters only once a year or so as the players were spread out over the country and they preferred their Phase World characters. Also towards the end I did a lot of the preamble online individually with the players coming together just for the end. It was the only way we could play at the time.


All the credit for this goes to Carella as it is part of her description on pages 157 and 158 of Pantheons of the Megaverse. I loved a lot of things from this book and I used it in most groups I have run and even in convention games but when I read this storyline idea I immediately started building it into the existing campaign. It took 3 years from first gaming session to final battle, and it was one of my favorites.


She nuts.

My group regularly does Megaversal sized campaigns. Given the number of SF reading nerds in the group, we enjoy seeing what can be adapted into the setting & system. One of my favorite PCs to this day was an honorable 7ft black skinned, golden eyed assassin based on a long running SF book series.

One of the most memorable adventures was a mashup of hive mind critters from a tabletop model game on a planet we got to via a giant teleporting ring with symbols.

Have done a space-faring game in a version of the Milky Way made from mixing parts of Aliens Unlimited Galaxy Guide and TMNT's Guide to the Universe with some tweaks/homebrews (Century Station as an actual space station/SDF-1 style repurposed space delerict/Mos Eisley expy; Ghost Worlds, a celestial body-sized version of Fadetowns and other fun stuff).

Also started a "Minion War Outsiders" game (of late in hiatus to focus in a more low-key, localized game), centered on a band of demonic beings in the service of a trio of eccentric Alien Intelligences trying to mess with the Dyvval x Hades conflict in a number of ways for their own interests.