Some years ago, I wrote a game called Nexus, using a modified d6 system I wrote whole cloth. This game had a multiverse setting, similar in intent to most other Universal systems (probably more similar to Palladium than GURPS, but you get the idea) in that the idea was that player characters from different worlds could portal across to other planes of existence and go on adventures there, sometimes running into some universal ideas that tie the multiverse together, like common religions, identical people on vastly different worlds with new backgrounds and names, etc.
I've run that game with a couple different sets of rules, from my original to FATE to a brief flirtation with Savage Worlds. Now, I think this idea works well enough that I would run it in nearly any ruleset and port over the setting, but part of the goal was to bring it across with identical ideas, not just differences among flavors.
This eventually led to a project I've begun to consider my magnum opus in gaming...
A game intentionally written across various products and timelines played simultaneously with the other events. Its basic premise consists of two layers: 1) a game of Call of Cthulhu or Savage Worlds set in the modern era as a group of investigators comes across clues that tie their current work to a group of similar adventurers at the turn of the century. At every break point, we come to a written account or a storyteller (in game) discusses events from the past. Then we switch to 2) a game of FATE in which the players take up the roles of their historical counterparts, playing the stories their future selves are reading aloud to the rest of the party. Maybe we even check back in and cut back and forth between the threads, but that's just a flavor thing. Now, because the end of the past story is unknown (it's a mystery in the present, right?) we are completely open to a character dying in the past or a surprising doublecross.
Also, consider that each game set in the past is actually someone's interpretation of the past events. If someone is playing their investigator's own grandfather and that character dies in the past, we are forced to consider some options: Did the person writing the journal watch them fall and never check if they died? Did the grandfather ask that they have their death fabricated in the journal to protect their grandchildren? Is their grandfather a liar or an imposter and took on the identity of someone else in the party? Moreover, what if the lead cultist of the current threat is actually the chronicler of the old party, driven mad by power and exposure to the Mythos? Would it not behoove him to write outright lies into the chronicle to throw others off his path?
Players would be forced to ignore their own experiences as the characters in the past stories as we grow to accept that each author will change the characters slightly. Maybe one storyteller always makes the sexual tension an element, maybe it is ignored when one of those two characters is writing. Each account of the previous party would be colored by various factors. And would even examining their previous adventurers be a cause for the modern characters to lose their sanity or question the madness of the accounts from the past? When can a player trust his own actions, knowing that having one of his characters trust another could kill both of them?
What if a modern member of the party has already read a portion of the story the rest of the party hasn't? What if they were raised with a certain understanding of their grandfather's heroic last stand, just to find out that it isn't true as recorded by other members of his party? What does each account gain by distorting the past?
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