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Following Blackbird's lead and stealing being inspired by his format, here are some potentialities for RPs. I'm going to post with the writeups I have now and later make the poll (after adding a third and perhaps even fourth option, if I feel like it).



The List:
Super Mega Cool Dystopian Space Marine Shooty Power 64 (real name pending)
Themes: Space, shooting, sci-fi, war, competing dystopias, wilderness survival, survival horror
The Hindu/Buddhist theocratic and totalitarian Eternal Empire (because monotheistic theocracies get old!) and their enemy, an I-haven't-named-it-yet corporate plutocracy, have been at war for as long as anyone cares to remember. Several of their ships crash to an "empty" planet during a skirmish. Those who survive reentry discover that with all their luck spent on making it this far, only their skill can save them. Well, perhaps also cooperation with enemies they've been taught to hate since birth and whom they don't even share a language a with.

Spirit Operations Unit Leviathan
Themes: Modern Fantasy, GUHVMINT, Espionage, Facepunching, Shooting, Wizardry, Demons, Thinly-Veiled Addiction Metaphors
Inspired to some degree by Demon's Souls, SOUL is about the titular paramilitary unit, which consumes the souls of demons (and thus by proxy - or illegally directly - consumes the souls of humans) to gain supernatural powers. Though soul consumption gives the eater greater access to magic talent, which they can use to cast spells or to augment themselves, their weapons, or their gear, as well as for astral perception, it also takes a twofold toll. The first cost is that they lose touch with their humanity over time, as is the norm. The second cost is that eating a soul is "like biting into the most succulent possible steak, chewing the most perfectly-textured and perfectly-flavored cookie possible, finishing the best possible lay, petting the fluffiest possible cat, and taking every drug in existence, all at the same time." It replaces the ability to truly enjoy anything else in life, for most users. Rarely, some won't burn out within a year or two. Players could play used-up wrecks who only take down demons for the fix, professionals who cling to codes of honor as a way to retain their humanity, relative newbies trying not to end up as either of the former, etc. This, of course, would be while being badasses who fight supernatural threats. Obviously.

I'd play SOUL pretty definitively. I'd also play Super Mario Spess Mehreen 64.

Basically, the world in SOUL appears, on the surface, to be as it exists in real life. The main divergences are that there are a lot of "serial killers" and a great deal more suspicion of going out at night. People more or less know that something isn't right, but they don't know what or why.

Some soul eaters are trained for use in warzones (generally soldiers who learn how to devour a soul on their own), but they can come from any walk of life. Most members of the SOUL program are picked up after discovering how to consume souls on their own (desperate junkies who kill someone while trying to pick up their next fix are a "distressingly frequent" source of recruits, and fostering their creation may or may not be the purpose for the state of the War On Drugs), but a few are sought out to be recruited into it, often as officers since nobody who has eaten a soul is trusted in a leadership position - once you've experienced the high of eating a soul, your decision-making is not ever going to be trusted in any matter that might involve getting another chance to.

Any person who kills another may spontaneously gain the ability to take the souls of their kills; factors that make it more likely include an inclination towards violence, propensity for addiction, being an addict for something (caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco being the most common things), desire for power, and the like, though that's a statement of odds, not of absolutes; a 100% sober virgin who kills in self-defense when attacked can also devour his or her victim's soul.

Once people have devoured a soul, they're almost always going to kill again; it's inherent to how the process changes them. At the start, it makes them stronger, makes them faster, and improves their reflexes. Soon, the more drastic alterations occur.

Magic tends to fall into a few particular categories of use. Generally, how one learns to cast magic determines which two of three elements are in play from the choices of Ease of Learning/Use, Power, and Safety.

-Wizardry (Power, Safety): Understanding the nature of the power gained from consuming a soul is a difficult task; it requires study, and is by far the rarest form of magic to find among non-sanctioned (non-government) soul eaters. Whenever practitioners of Wizardry are found, SOUL seeks to recruit them. Users of Wizardry have already demonstrated uncommon patience in regards to the use of souls, and are much less likely to be the type who exhibit irrational behavior in search of opportunities to kill things for their souls.

-Augmentation (Ease of Use, Safety): Though it initially seems weak, almost all soul eaters make some degree of use of the Augmentation magics. An art as simple as channeling the power of the consumed souls into the appropriate parts of the body as needed. Basic Augmentation can let a 95-pound, 5-foot tall girl break a bone with a glancing strike, outrun a bicyclist, or stop a knife with bare skin. Advanced Augmentation can grant the strength to throw a bus, the speed to outrun a car, the ability to take a .50 cal bullet without flinching, the visual acuity to identify someone's face from literally miles away, or the ability to function as a human computer or a brilliant tactician by augmenting brain processes. Masters of Augmentation become veritable walking tanks, weak only in their inability to prevent other magics from affecting them and to surprise attacks that hit before they can harden their skin. It's considered in the traditional paradigm to sacrifice power in that it takes more soul consumption to be able to inflict equivalent damage to the more overt forms of magic.

-Witchcraft (Ease of Use, Power. Uh oh.): Witchcraft is the most common form of spellcasting and the second most common form of magic after Augmentation (which almost any soul eater can use to some degree). Witchcraft is spell-slinging. It consists of gathering the power gained from your consumed souls and, guided by an emotional impulse, bludgeoning reality with it until reality caves in the way you want it to. Witchcraft is magic unrestrained; when you need rain of fire from the sky, a blast of ice to freeze an entire room, or the ability to rip someone's soul from their body without killing them first, Witchcraft is the answer. The price of this is in safety. Witchcraft is prone to unpredictable behavior in unskilled hands (the storm of fire you called might just hit you). Witchcraft is hard to control (see above). Worst of all, Witchcraft is likely to attract the attention of demons and free spirits.

Enchanting (The whole package): Enchanting is safe, not especially hard to do, and powerful. However, its limitations are fairly obvious in that it requires a permanent investment of part of one's consumed souls in the enchanted equipment. A blade with supernatural hardness and sharpness or a firearm that fires magic bolts instead of bullets are excellent weapons in any hands, and any non-soul-eater members of a squad will often have weapons enchanted by others. Wizardry can be used to temporarily imbue weapons with further power, and Witchcraft can use the dark magic of cursing a weapon, causing it to inflict small injuries on its users in exchange for inflicting incredible wounds upon its targets.

The primary users of the soul arts are:

Humans. A fair number of humans, especially in gangs or crime rings, end up consuming a soul sooner or later. A fair number of practitioners of Witchcraft exist in most organized crime syndicates; some even have Wizards among their ranks. Almost as frequent are serial killers, individuals who get a taste of the power of souls one way or another and can't do without more.

Free Spirits. Suspected to be the result when a soul-consuming human, demon, or other free spirit dies without having used all of the souls it has consumed for magic. The generally accepted theory is that, when this happens, the consumed souls "Reconstitute" and break free. Free spirits can be or do almost anything imaginable. Only rarely are they threats, and even more rarely are they soul-eaters, but when a free spirit of fire ends up in a metropolitan area, SOUL does what it has to.

Demons. Said to be the ones who taught the first humans how to consume their fellows' souls, demons are uniformly malevolent beings. Every single instance indicating otherwise has turned out to either be false or to be a free spirit. Demons can possess individuals who believe in them without knowing they exist; from there, they will likely either fulfill their thirst for souls or move on to attempting to manifest another demon, whereupon it will end its possession and the second demon will manifest the first. Any instance of a possession or a fully-manifested demon is treated as a major emergency by SOUL. Every demon is highly skilled in all forms of magic and is easily a match for five to ten SOUL operatives, depending on the particular demon and whether it's a possession or a full manifestation. If a demon is manifested, SOUL will pull in at least thirty members for the upcoming action, with an expectation of three members out of every four to be wounded, and about two out of every three members of the whole operation to be slain.