As of right now the "Some sort of follow up to ER which differs wildly from the old one, but still has some connection lore-wise to old ER." and the "Some completely different game, with no connection to ER whatsoever." options are tied.
25 people have voted so far, but I know we've got more out there.
A lot of people seem very up on MMWW, or whatever stupid thing I'll call it. Doing that will stop Sy from throwing bricks through my window with "WHEN'S MMWW" writen on them every sunday, so thats a plus.
I got an idea: lets talk about the alternative games to "ER BEYOND" and you guys can tell me what you think of them. I also want to officially extend an offer: If we end up doing a completely new game, but people want to run their own ER beyond sort of game, I will write up a setting and give you my entire ER folder for use. And you can do whatever the hell you want with it from there. And then you can yell at me because the ER folder is nowhere near as expansive and wonderful as you think it is.
So, I've got 3 or so fairly good candidates for future games. They are, MMWW of course, A game called Oroboropolis, And a game called Homoculus.
MMWW is a game about a magical Apocalypse, where a world that is heavily reliant upon magic suddenly finds it lacking. And this magic is something that is natural in the world, so not only is the ability to do magic disappearing, but things like famine, disease, still birth and premature aging and death are becoming common. The major difficulty is that to do that sort of thing with a lot of people. There are a few ways to do it; I could handle one faction a day, monday through friday, and then update the world on saturday for one full cycle a week. But that is slow as balls. Or we could do things from a more zoomed out perspective for a lot of it. Ie, a lot of the game would be less of you in your characters, and more of a strategic thing with your group, using your characters as what amount to resources. Sending them out on missions which complete in one turn over a series of a dozen or so rolls against various stats determined by the nature of the mission. And we'd only real character control when fights between players happened. And in that case we would more than likely do those sorts of things via IRC or some dedicated thread where things could get done faster and not grind the game to a halt. The simulation would not be super in depth, but things like recruiting units, managing food and water, your resources for your magic, that sort of thing, would be fairly easy to do.
Oroboropolis is a game that I've been testing bits and pieces out of using The Deep Infirmary. It would essentially be a combat/ exploration focused dungeon crawl sort of deal. The main idea here being that Oroboropolis, the living city of the damned, has crawled across the green glass plains and is reaching it's asphalt pseudopods out towards the Grand Holy, the bastion of faith and purity in the middle of an impure world. And you, as valiant urban crusaders, are tasked with the extremely simple goal of going into Oroboropolis and purging/exorcising/slaughtering any of the unclean, otherworldly, demonic things found in there and killing the old city once and for all. You'll kill cockroach succubi with katanas and cast magic with blessed ghetto blasters and demonic cassettes. Focused more on small groups, short experiences, quick deaths and an advancement system that inevitably results in high level characters becoming high level demons for later characters to fight.
Homunculus is a game based around player characters that are 3.5 inches tall. The game world is a bit high fantasy and weird but the general gist is that you are a created being designed to work a very specific job and now you have accidentally been set free from the enthrallment that kept you doing that job. You have sapience, you have self awareness and you have a big target on your head because you are effectively vermin in the eyes of the world. The game is very much one of survival, though how you would choose to do it is up to you. The good part, or at least the different part is that you don't have a body like a normal human. You look human but you are a magical construct so your stats are spread across your entire body; ie losing a hand might make you lose points in INT. The arrangement is random, so you choose the stats but not where they end up. You are also much harder to kill; so long as there is any original part of your body left, you are still alive. And you can replace parts of your body that you've lost with other things, which will have stats of their own that then become yours. Lose your arm? Replace it with the arm of a mummified mouse you find under the floorboards! Replace your severed head with a robin's skull! Replace your leg with a custom made metal limb! It's a thing.