I am constantly developing new campaign ideas, especially when it comes to the easily malleable BECMI rules. I've decided to just start posting these, mainly to keep them organized for myself, and to share them with the few readers this blog actually sees. This latest idea was born of the question: How can I craft a supernatural hunting campaign setting without it being a mishmash of Palladium's Beyond the Supernatural, The X-Files television show, and Supernatural (one of my favorite shows of all time)? The easy answer is that I can't. Beyond the Supernatural gets the credit as far as being one of the very first games to explore a supernatural and conspiracy-laden world, and it's going to have an obvious influence on me since I dearly love the game. I don't want to just use the world within that game, however, since it's tied to the Megaversal System, and if I'm going to play BtS, I'll just play BtS. Full stop. The X-Files, Supernatural, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer will rear their well-respected heads from time to time also, since they covered just about every sort of paranormal/supernatural-hunting situation that can be dreamed up outside of Ghostbusters.
So what can I really build here?
Well, let's end the world, first of all. The Apocalypse, presented within the book of Revelations in the Bible, has come to pass. It was quite a bit more literal that many people had interpreted it. The war between God and Satan happened just like the book foretold. Many hunters tried to stop it from arriving to no avail. The hunters that weren't immediately lined up on either side of the proverbial ball worked the middle ground to mitigate damage to the world when they could. In the end, when the war was over, all the souls deemed worthy were taken to Heaven, and Hell was shattered, crushing the demonic forces and their allies.
For some unknown reason, however, some humans, monsters, angels, and demons have been left behind. No one is sure why, since it wasn't written this way, and God, being rather ineffable and inscrutable, isn't explaining it to them. Returning with the Apocalypse had come miracles, as well as magic and psychic power, and the world is vastly different after the utter destruction of the war, with the weapons of the humans, angels, demons, and other minions creating a wasteland in their wake. Humanity, what's left of it (and it's not much), is working on rebuilding the Earth with what they have to hand, and the fight against otherworldly forces continues, with skirmishes happening across the globe. Making it worse, many of the relics of power brought with each army remain on the Earth, and can be found and utilized in the fights ahead. Power unimaginable combined with a nuclear-magical wasteland environment, and plenty of strife for all.
Are these survivors abandoned? Were there no plans for them in the afterlife or the New Heaven? With Heaven closed and Hell destroyed, is the Earth now Hell? To what purpose was everyone that is still on Earth left? These will be the overarching questions of the campaign itself, which may or may not be resolved. They may well be unanswerable, but the characters will hear this question from both the angelic side and the demonic side, and often the humans caught in the middle.
