Sometimes I find monotonous tasks a good time for thinking about campaign ideas. Mowing the lawn has helped me develop Traveller and Heroes Unlimited ideas. Today I was sanding a cabinet door to refinish it. I'm using one of those little Black & Decker Mouse brand handheld sanders and dealing with somefairly think varnish, so it takes me like 2 hours for each cabinet door. Redoing the kitchen cabinetry had therefore become an ongoing home project.

Anyway, while sanding today some ideas bubbled up through my noggin. The first was "Savage Cyborgs", a game of Savage Worlds using the ridiculous setting material for Gary Gygax's old Cyborg Commando game. If you don't know anything about Cyborg Commando I suggest you click here right now. It's pretty silly stuff. But what can I say? I like silly stuff. I've been gaming for more than 20 years and "kill orc, take gold" still seems like a viable adventure idea to me. From my seat Terminators killing Aliens seems like good clean rpg fun.

On the serious side, the thing that draws me to Cyborg Commando is the fact that it truly epitomizes both the paranoia and the jingoism of the last part of the cold war. I haven't read a copy yet, but all reviews of the game I've seen indicate that Gary Gygax basically reshoots the film Red Dawn but sends it through a sci-fi filter. Just like the alien invasion films of the 50's.

I've been reading the book Queen Victoria's Little Wars, basically an overview of British military adventures of the 19th century. I doubt you'll find more riveting tales of imperialist shenanagins in any other period. Reading this stuff, I start to wonder why so many sci-fi empires reach back to the Roman era for inspiration. The Great Game of imperialism contains more than enough fodder for a Traveller style campaign.

I also had some ideas pop into my head about a fantasy campaign setting, basically a collection of islands in the middle of the ocean. Sorta Britain if it were located where the Canaries sit. I tend not to put ideas like these to paper because I'm not certain I even _want_ a coherent fantasy campaign setting. An old hodge-podge like the World of Greyhawk usually works just fine for me.