[Interest Check] Riverworld

[stormwyrm]

I imagine that some folks out there are familiar with Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series of science fiction novels, and I believe there have been a few television mini-series created loosely based on the novels, though I'm not too familiar with them. In any case, the premise behind the books is basically every human who has ever lived on Earth is resurrected by an alien civilisation on an obviously artificially engineered planet that consists of nothing but a single long river valley that runs roughly 30 million kilometres from source to mouth. Some 36 billion humans, from the first Homo sapiens to people of the early twenty-first century, are simultaneously resurrected on the banks of this immense river, to their twenty-five year old selves, in perfect health and free of any genetic or acquired defects. No one ever gets sick, all non-fatal injuries will regenerate in a reasonable amount of time, and anyone who suffers fatal injury will soon enough respawn somewhere else along the river, reasonably far away from whoever killed them. Food and other necessities can be obtained by means of a 'grail' that is given to every person, which daily will provide enough food and some luxuries for its owner. The world is extremely metal-poor and as such most civilisations that would wind up appearing along sections of the river will generally have at most Stone Age technology.

Basically every player in this game will have to be some historical character. Any historical character from any time period of the history of the world from the Upper Paleolithic to the modern era. The mysterious alien beings that run the world behind the scenes are out as PCs, of course.

Since I have absolutely no experience running group games here (although I have GMed tabletop RPGs long ago) and barely any experience playing them for that matter, I'm going to put this out to see if any GM and players might be interested in running this. I'm in as a player if anyone wants to try. This could be a system game too, not important.

[Various]

This is probably so old to be irrelevant, but this could be a fun thing to do. GURPS is a system that tries (and mostly succeeds) at being a generic system to cover anything (cf. D&D which only tries to cover high fantasy). It had a sourcebook for adapting Riverworld with its system.

I read the books as a teenager but it's been years. I remember most specifically things like Goering of all people treating this resurrection as a way to become a much better person the second time around.

Anyway, it'd be an interesting thing to try.