Flawed inspiration

I've done good Middle-Earth campaigns. The problem is that you need to keep it away from the main actions in the books, or you're going to run into trouble if you want to keep things on the canon track. But I've done 2 good ones, one with the PCs working for the Blue Wizards destabilizing shit out east, and a second one as a twist campaign, where the players were a bunch of guys trying to resist Numenorean encroachment to their tribe's land.

Pic related. The themes involved in TC can be great, and I very much like to try to include the morality or the sense of great powers trying to provoke a choice from a hero or the heroes but either unable or unwilling to directly get involved. And the Despiser is one of the cleverest and subtlest villains you will ever come across and I do try to make guys that emulate that.

But my god I would never run a campaign in it. It is quite literally a setting made to interact with one specific character the author made and would almost certainly not work in his absence. And if you wanted to make the game according to the sort of thematic tone of the books, I would need to spend days helping players build characters with the right mix of effectiveness and crippling psychological problems.

>the Despiser is one of the cleverest and subtlest villains you will ever come across and I do try to make guys that emulate that.

What's his shtick? I've only read the first Covenant book, and found it way too angsty to give a shit about the rest.

His shtick is that he either has some kind of precognitive or some sort of probability altering powers so that his little gambits ALWAYS work. He manages to fuck over almost everything forever in the second book by releasing one prisoner at just the right time so that

>They'll summon Covenant again
>They'll send the new high lord with the staff of law off on a dangerous quest instead of figthing his army
>Said quest will involve blowing the chance to actually use a powerful bit of magic against him.
>And break one of the fundamental laws of reality that he couldn't have broken himself.
>Give him a new, perfectly faithful servant
>Drop the staff of law into his indirect control

damn alright thanks user, I'll try to find an ebook torrent

Pic unrelated.

Some of the things in that series could be lifted and inserted into another series.
The Giants, the horses, etc.
But a lot of the best stuff was unique to that one story and doesn't work well outside of it.

Has some great lines that I've stolen. My favorite being "how do you hurt a man who has lost everything? Give him something broken".

The author and GRRM are actually friends that worked together.

>Sources that are great for creativity, but have too much faggotry to be a setting where you say "hey guys let's play this."

I want to throw these three in a blender to produce something with their shared strengths and something of their better individual characters, but less of the closed circles for gaming

Shared Pitch
In a world facing a seemingly endless tide of monsters, there's a constant struggle to keep civilization safe. Also, there may be more to the situation than it lets on, and some sort of masterminding behind the endless onslaught

Individual Pros
*The Banner Saga is very stylish. The setting is beautiful and melancholy and the Dredge are extremely stylish (and fairly unique) enemies
*AoT has the dark tone and notes of helplessness a world under siege needs while presenting a zillion onion layers of reveal
*RWBY has a functional world with a good balance between hostile wilds and islands of safety, and also fast, intricate, and at least somewhat engaging combat.

Cons:
*Banner Saga is in the fucking End Times.
*Titans are probably too bullshit OP for being the standard/only enemies in a TTRPG. Nobody wants to roll up a whole squad expecting to lose a few of them every session.
*RWBY has fewer faults as a gaming universe, the primary one being the fact that's true of any story, the main plot is already being handled by the main characters, but the show is the lowest average quality of the lot and thus has the least name recognition "sell a group on playing this" power.

Somewhere in the mess that would result from slamming these together there's a game where the PCs can pull rule of cool stunts and mix up martial arts and superpowers to fight back a diverse and engaging tide of darkness against which they are the only (or some of the very few) beacons of hope for a civilization pushed to the brink.

So...teenage anime Norse people travelling around with a caravan fighting giant stone monsters?

Altered Carbon and the other books int he series; body swapping and the ethics thereof plus live, die, live again gameplay, but too much of the books makes no sense and the author doesn't use their own technology sensibly in context or examine the limitations of it, some of which is because he was writing a noir detective story int he future rather than a sci-fi story.

Take body hopping, backups and the interplanetary beaming and drop the weird nonsensical torture stuff, the stacks being somewhere stupid and the lack of care they take with their backups.

... it could work.

I bought the first book because... well... FUCK YEAH DINOSAUR KNIGHTS!
Started reading it and after 2 pages put it down and haven't picked it back up.
Jesus H Christ the writing is horrific. I read both pages through twice to try and make sense of it but fuck it was painful.
I've never been so let down.

I don't know how much this will be appreciated, but Gate.

Pros;
*good premise: juxtaposition of modern vs fantasy elements

cons:
*anime, way too anime,
*generic fantasy setting, nothing original
*military porn, modern military completely stomps over fantasy world despite the fantasy world having magic And it seems the best magic is kept by the protagonist's harem

I know this is a bad example, since it's so little good and so much bad, but I will try and come up with something better.

Pros:
*giant bird commando soldiers
*interesting magic system: the magicians all have a specific thing they need to absorb to gain power, being denied of it, means no magic power

cons:
*annoying protagonists, could not tell the three protagonists apart, they complain about everyone being hard on them, even though they are the most privileged kids ever
*boring world, completely undeveloped