The Frankenstein game...

Just quickly while I think of it.  Another interesting game I'm looking forward to running is what I have jotted down in my notebook as 'The Frankenstein game'.

I came up with the idea after reading Gustav Meyrink's classic: The Golem.  Having been written in 1914, and its subject matter, lends itself very nicely to a vaguely off-piste Cthulhu offering.

I haven't decided yet whether to set the game in and around Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University. Or make use of some old maps of London and have them at Imperial College or perhaps Guy's Hospital as that way I could set some of the game around spooky old post-Ripper Whitechapel, an area I know well as I used to live one street away from the site of the Ripper's second murder.

The basic idea is this: The PCs are all medical students.   One Jewish PC discovers a sheaf of papers when helping his local community to tidy up an old synagogue damaged in a vicious storm.  The papers, incased in the stone altar that was cracked in two by a falling tree reveal the Jewish legend of the Golem, but a variant form of this myth which talks about constructing a golem from flesh, not clay.

And so the game sees the players locate and hire suitable premises for their experiments, and then they begin grave robbing in order to obtain body parts to assemble into the shape of a monstrous man.  Requiring fresher parts, they begin raiding the hospital morgue and eventually turn to murder in the smoggy gas-lit streets at midnight.

This is admittedly the bare bones of an idea for a game, but I think it has legs. :-)
Especially if you allow the players to create their golems with multiple limbs, beast claws from london zoo and generally go more Reanimator/Cthulhu with it.

A game in which the players are, arguably, the bad guys, can commit grave-robbing, body-snatching, and murder and create a monster they can control(?) sounds like a lot of fun to me!