Recently I have been thinking about the Red Planet, Mars and how much fun it would be to run a game on that planet. Now you might go for a sci-fi game, with spaceships flying around the solar system and Mars being just one of many places you could take the heroes. That would be a fun thing to do for sure. However there is another sort of sci-fi that used to be set on Mars, a popular RPG video game even set aside one spin off game to explore it. That is a Victorian era adventure to Mars, of course people of that era could not get to Mars so such a game would have to be set in some sort of semi fantasy steam punk world. I leave naming the video game to knowing readers, perhaps I will be surprised and find out there was more than one.
The setting of Mars would also of course have to be fantasy since in reality humans could not survive on the planet without a lot of effort and technology. Mars would be the version dreamed of by writers of the time, a land filled with ancient technology with canals running across the planet and with some aliens to work with and against. In my game it would be a group of heroes who have signed on for a rescue mission, a previous exploration attempt landed on the planet but has since gone silent. The lead scientist has decided he needs to make a rescue attempt and that if you want a job done right you need to do it yourself.
Aliens normally mean high technology but I think that would ruin a steam punk game. I think in my game the aliens will have regressed in technology. A great tragedy has slammed them back into using past technology and only small amounts of the much higher technology are around to be used by people smart enough to work it out. Maybe the guards of the towns will have ray guns, but they don't know how to fix a broken one and they only have so many left. No way would they sell the tech to anyone, they need to far more than money or trade.
Of course that leaves open abandoned facilities filled with technology for highly skilled scientists to puzzle over. For heroes to discover, to repel any monsters inside and protect the scientists from any harm while they investigate. That isn't to say the heroes can't do some scientific discover of their own but that is a slow process and I think most players would rather do small scale stuff quickly and move onto more adventures.
There is also the mystery of what happened to the other crew, the initial exploration of finding friendly and not so friendly aliens. Perhaps the other crew tried to do something a bit too advanced or merely ran into someone trying to protect the technology from outside interference. Maybe they were fine all along and it was their equipment that had failed and before they could fix it the zealous leader had launched the heroes on their trip.
The Red Planet I am thinking of would be run in the D20 Modern system using the Past book for some of the rules for guns and items of the time. However being such a unique setting the GM would have to willing to write a lot of the rules himself. Other games could run it, the Call of Cthulhu system would easily work for a steam punk setting of this sort.
