I mostly play Call of Cthulhu and Runequest. I’ve also played a couple of homebrews of my own invention, one of which is a SF game which may make it into print in a year or two, and the other is named Millenium and is really odd – the players start out as part of humanity’s collective subconscious and then things get even weirder.

Yeah I know. It sounds like I’m in a rut doesn’t it, only playing my own games?

Here is the idea behind Millennium:

The players have to pick the ultimate team of heroes, from all history and legend to perform an extremely difficult task in the world of 2020. They will have to go up against teams of enemies who are similarly dangerous. So who do you pick? In one of my games, the players chose to be Bruce Lee, Harry Houdini, Davy Crockett, the Red Baron, and Sherlock Holmes.

Some more of the setup:

1) the heroes have not only their own knowledge, but also know everything about the current era that the player knows (not specialized knowledge, like if the player’s an EMT or whatever, but general lore).

2) the participants get to have the modern equivalent of whatever they are famous for. Example: I let the Red Baron own an airplane of his choice.

3) the heroes (and their opponents) have been wiped from history and everyone else’s recollection. This does sometimes leave weird “holes in time” but tough. In one game, the players realized that one of the Villain opponents must be a pirate, based on his actions, so they looked up pirates on the web. When they noticed that Blackbeard was missing from all the books, they knew who they were facing.

4) if the hero or other opponent was supernatural or had other weird powers, the natural laws are bent so they work. When the players faced Simon Magus in the Vatican (he’d mind-controlled the Pope), Simon was able to summon demons and create a wall of fire. In one game a player wanted to be Judge Dee, and he said Dee had a magic sword, so I allowed it.