Smuggler's Misirlou: The first thought I had, after seeing a few episodes of Cowboy Bebop, was "what if it was a different sort of music?" For some reason, as I thought on this more, I went to Surf Rock. It has that same sort of wacky yet serious edge, I think, and more importantly that sort of personality to it. But you can't just do Cowboy Surf Rock, you need to change it up more, make it more Surf, make it more American and not a re-interpretation of Americanism. You need to make it different for the sake of it being different.
So, instead of bounty hunters, fringe traders. Not necessarily smugglers, though right on the border thereof. Give everything in the universe that complex, hot pace. Make the stories always about how these tarnished heroes, struggling to figure out where to unload sixteen tons of sporks or twelve crates of rotten bananas to somehow eke out a profit, however slim.
The Future Through Tomorrow: Classic Science Fiction has such wonderfully outlandish views of various planets in the Solar System. Heck, it has a wonderful sort of feel overall. So extrapolate it beyond the swamps of Venus and the canals of Mars. Bring it to each and every planet in the system, the Jovian tyrants, the Plutonic ice lords. Take all that camp and cook it in an oven set to low modernity. It's Gernsback 2000, it's making hard SF off of a squsihy SF basis. So there's still the outlandish sort of feel to the whole thing, but it's constantly brushing up against downright low-key stuff.
Menne in Blakee: Technocracy-oriented Mage Renascence game, but downplaying all the sort of metaphysical questions for humor and action. The party are MiBs, but a joking sort of presentation of them in Renascence format. The "are we the good guys" section is downplayed for keeping the sort of tedium of protecting the Earth from the evils of the great beyond.
Necessary Evil: It's stolen completely from the game of the same name. I've never desired to run an SuperHero RPG until I heard the concept. The idea is that the big bad guys come and kill off all the Super-Heroes, so the Super-Villains team up to get rid of the big bad guys, if only because, "if anyone's conqueroring this planet, it's going to be me."
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So, instead of bounty hunters, fringe traders. Not necessarily smugglers, though right on the border thereof. Give everything in the universe that complex, hot pace. Make the stories always about how these tarnished heroes, struggling to figure out where to unload sixteen tons of sporks or twelve crates of rotten bananas to somehow eke out a profit, however slim.
The Future Through Tomorrow: Classic Science Fiction has such wonderfully outlandish views of various planets in the Solar System. Heck, it has a wonderful sort of feel overall. So extrapolate it beyond the swamps of Venus and the canals of Mars. Bring it to each and every planet in the system, the Jovian tyrants, the Plutonic ice lords. Take all that camp and cook it in an oven set to low modernity. It's Gernsback 2000, it's making hard SF off of a squsihy SF basis. So there's still the outlandish sort of feel to the whole thing, but it's constantly brushing up against downright low-key stuff.
Menne in Blakee: Technocracy-oriented Mage Renascence game, but downplaying all the sort of metaphysical questions for humor and action. The party are MiBs, but a joking sort of presentation of them in Renascence format. The "are we the good guys" section is downplayed for keeping the sort of tedium of protecting the Earth from the evils of the great beyond.
Necessary Evil: It's stolen completely from the game of the same name. I've never desired to run an SuperHero RPG until I heard the concept. The idea is that the big bad guys come and kill off all the Super-Heroes, so the Super-Villains team up to get rid of the big bad guys, if only because, "if anyone's conqueroring this planet, it's going to be me."