Tabletop Games with their own pages:
Board Games
- Daybreak : According to designer Matt Leacock, the game was going to have the players drawing tokens out of a cloth bag to resolve planetary effects and tipping points
. They had to scrap this mechanic because of the emissions generated by the cloth bag, and replaced it with dice rolls. Leacock did end up preferring the new iteration because it was simpler and "made for a good metaphor for the uncertainty involved with those effects".
Role-Playing Games
- 7th Sea: The first edition ended on a story arc where a ship had managed to sail beyond the mystical barrier that kept Theah (a continent roughly analogous to Europe, China, and the Middle East) and the chains of islands around them (representative of the United Kingdom, Nordic countries, and Polynesia) separate from the rest of the world. There were also plans to reveal the true nature of the Syrneth, and why their artifacts seem to fall into four general camps. The second edition, now under John Wick Presents, is a reboot, and doesn't have a barrier in place.
- Big Eyes, Small Mouth: Before Guardians of Order folded, there were plans to expand many of the franchise-based entries to the series. For instance, there were plans to supplement the Tenchi Muyo! series by including entries for Tenchi Universe, Tenchi in Tokyo and Pretty Sammy (the first entry only had the OVA and only the first 13 episodes to it).
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition:
- When designing 4E, the designers decided they wanted to do a Shout-Out to Narnia and the intelligent animal fantasy concept. So originally, the Dragonborn race from 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons was originally supposed to be a race of non-anthropomorphic talking lions based on Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia. The idea was dropped because of questions of how they would handle equipment and they were at first altered into dragons (since they believed Dungeons & Dragons should actually have dragons as a playable race) and then later into humanoid dragons called Dragonborn. (Of course, they weren't called the Dragonborn in the original concept.)
- Wizards of the Coast's Fantasy Setting Search was a contest that eventually went with Eberron, but quite a few settings were submitted; like Dawnforge, The Sunset Kingdoms, and Morningstar. One of the two runner-ups was developed by Rich Burlew - imagine what might have happened if he had won instead.
- Ravenloft: Before sales declined and their license to print 3E products reverted to Wizards Of The Coast, Arthaus had planned a thirteen-sourcebook run for their Gazetteer series. The narrator S would have traveled to Clusters and Islands, some of them from on board a hired ship crewed by supporting characters. Each book would've included a different half-fiend scion of the Gentleman Caller. Eventually, Azalin's intentions for them and for S would have been revealed, as would the Caller's plot to father a new and unstoppable Dukkar on a youthified Madame Eva. There was actually going to be a 4th Edition version of Ravenloft released in 2011, but it was cancelled because they couldn't get it quite right.
- Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition:
- Exalted:
- The setting was originally going to have the strange mechanical world of Autochthonia in its core, but was cut for space. There was eventually an expansion to the world of Brass and Shadow, but it's been an optional addition for the entire run of the game.
- In the game's very earliest planning stages, there was only one type of Exalted, the Dragon-Blooded, with powers based on the kinds of magic they used. Said magic changed the Exalted physically in different ways depending on the type used.
- At one point in development, The Fair Folk were supposed to be Lunars gone wrong, driven insane by prolonged exposure to the Wyld; the Fair Folk went on to become their own thing, while the chimera filled the slot of Lunars gone wrong. Third Edition eventually dropped the idea of Lunars gone wrong altogether, with chimera simply being Lunars with hybrid spirit shapes.
- When it came time to do the Fair Folk as a playable group, they were supposed to use European faerie tropes laid over a new and unique portrayal, rather than played straight, but the original drafts simply played the tropes straight, so as damage control they were quickly rewritten to draw on Hindu Mythology instead.
- For Third Edition, one proposed new Exalt type was the Devianics, demon-created Exalted with a level of power comparable to the Dragon-Blooded. They didn't make the cut due to the difficulty of making them something different from "the Infernal Exalted, but weaker".
- Another proposed Exalt type for 3E was the Chosen of the Depths, who were intended to be a conceptual take on the undersea. When the writers started discussing the Chosen, they found they were pretty much Exalted pelagothropes (human mutants adapted to saltwater life), so they provisionally decided to go with that, moving the Chosen from being a new Exalt type to being a collective term for the Exalted pelagothropes who'd fought as part of the undersea Niobraran League against the other Exalted in the distant past.
- 3e also had three Exalted types conceived as foils for the Lunars and Sidereals, bringing some of their themes into relief; the Hearteaters and Umbral Exalted were to be Lunar foils, while the Dream-Souled were to be Sidereal foils alongside the Getimians. However, introducing new Exalted types incurs a certain trade-off, both in that time and effort needs to go into writing their books rather than the previously established Exalted, and in their needing to have a place in the setting and potentially complicating things through interactions with the established Exalted. When a new dev team took over, they came to the conclusion that Lunars didn't need foils given their dynamics with most of the established Exalted (one-time seconds of the Solars unwilling to return to that position, with the Lunar bond with the Solars also carrying over to the Abyssals and Infernals as corrupted Solars, and long-standing adversaries of the Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals), and Sidereals didn't need another one on top of the opportunities raised by the introduction of the Getimians and Exigents. So they decided to have them be optional canon, included in an appendix to the Exigents book (it doubling as the make-your-own-splat book), laying out their themes, concepts and backstories, and describing their Charmsets in sufficient detail to homebrew them, with an option of getting upgraded to their own splatbook depending on reception. For the curious, all three are featured on pages 54-55 of the 3e core; the woman with the aurora is a Hearteater, the man tormented by a shadow-monster is an Umbral Exalt, and the man in a toga is a Dream-Souled.
- Further to that, little to nothing is known about what the original concepts for the Exalts that became the Umbrals and Dream-Souled were, apart from them being tied to a line in an Infernal Exalted preview PDF from the 3e core Kickstarter about the Yozis Isidoros and Oramus creating their own Exalted, and the Yozis being disquieted by the results, with the Dream-Souled being Isidoros's Exalted and the Umbrals being Oramus's. When the new dev team took over, they basically had to reinvent them from scratch because they knew next to nothing about them. As for the Hearteaters, all they had of them was their name.
- Getimians were originally conceived as being Chosen of Sacheverell alone, but the writing team had a conversation where someone misremembered their patron as being Oramus, and the combination of the two made sense for the Getimians - among other things, being the Primordials who represent what Is and what Is Not - so they decided to go with it.
- The theme for the Getimian Caste marks also changed in development; initially, they were trigrams, in keeping with their Taoist themes, then the alchemical symbols for the seasons, before their final and official theme, the astrological symbols for the asteroids Ceres, Juno, Pallas and Vesta.
- Gundam Senki is Gundam's One Year War setting using the Mekton rules. An English-language release was planned, but fell through.
- Flying Circus: In the original Kickstarter, one of the playbooks was called "the Sheltered", fallout-shelter inhabitants descended from nobility. This had morphed into the Scion playbook, with the shelter aspect of their backstory being dropped, by the game's first public release.
- Infernum: Gareth Hanrahan, the game's creator, said on his twitter that there were formerly plans for a second edition using the D&D 4th edition system, but now says it isn't going to happen.
- New World of Darkness:
- Geist: The Sin-Eaters: When the game was still in development at White Wolf, there was still debate about what the next game line for the setting was going to be. One idea in the running was to make a game about angels, with the angels in question merging with the souls of human hosts. They decided to go ahead with a ghost-oriented line, but kept the idea of gestalt entities. Five years later, they revisited the idea with a somewhat different interpretation of angels...
- Olivia Hill proposed Fury: The Scourge as a potential NWOD game line, but it ultimately didn't get picked up. The basic idea is that you play someone akin to The Spectre, someone who got screwed over, who lashed out and took revenge... and got chosen by something to become a supernatural agent of vengeance, punishing selected sinners. An expanded version of the pitch can be found here.
- Olivia's version of Changeling: The Lost 2e would have leaned into having fae things linked to the Theory of Narrative Causality. Seemings would have been a result of how a changeling escaped Arcadia, and would have had different Blessings and Curses; the Grimm Seeming in Dark Eras, who escaped by figuring out the story they were caught in and how to get out of it, was planned to tie into this version, as was an unnamed eighth Seeming in a planned Hedge supplement, who escaped by embracing randomness, chance and luck. The game got overhauled when Olivia left Onyx Path and was replaced as developer, with fae magic instead centered on reciprocity, the principle of exchange, of give and take.
- Old World of Darkness:
- Demon: The Fallen: The first draft of was very different to what it eventually became, with PCs being possessed mortals who didn't know what the demons possessing them were up to, and the game being about the struggle to retain your soul despite being in the grip of Evil (tm). Word of God is that the two versions were so different it's hard to even compare them — nothing, not the theme, the scope, or the overall feel, was the same.
- Vampire: The Masquerade: In 2015, Onyx Path announced a "4th edition" of, which would have followed on from where the original line left off at cancellation, treating the 20th anniversary edition as a side-step "nostalgia edition" that commemorated the game's previous history. It was dropped when Paradox Interactive bought White Wolf and announced their own plans for a new edition.
- Power Rangers: The final release of Heroes of the Grid has a few differences from what was originally shown in the Kickstarter pictures and demos made at conventions:
- Most of the Ranger and Zord skills were completely different in the demo build (for example, the Mastodon istantly destroyed two random foot soldiers at the end of each turn and the Megazord increased the damage output of all the rangers in the same area he's currently placed, while in the final game the Mastodon destroys only one foot soldier and the Megazord deals 1 damage to all the enemies in his area)
- Most of the actual pieces had different shapes and/or designs: the board was made of a square tile and 4 rectangular tiles instead of a circular tile and 4 curved tiles, Energy Tokens had a lightning bolt instead of a crystal and Panic Tokens were square-shaped instead of triangle-shaped.
- The Panic limits for the areas were more abundant: Angel Grove High and Ernie's Juice Bar had 6, the Industrial District 7 and Angel Grove Park 8. In the final game, Angel Grove High and Ernie's Juice Bar have a Panic limit of 5 and the Industrial District and Angel Grove Park have 6.
- The level up originally required to defeat either a Monster or 7 foot soldiers. In the final game the foot soldiers amount has been reduced to 6.
- In the demo game Deployment phase had 4 Deployment cards revealed. This was changed to 5 Deployment cards in the final game.
- Guard enemy cards were originally called Taunt enemy cards.
- Monsters and Masters originally had 3 battle cards per turn. The final game gives them 4. Also, in the demo Monsters/Masters and foot soldiers had their battle cards placed together in a single line, while the final game haves them with separate card lines.
- Trinity Universe (White Wolf) saw a lot of these:
- Before the games were originally cancelled, there were several books planned. For Trinity, there was "Asia Ascendant", covering the telepathic Ministry and the Asian continent; an aliens book covering the Qin, the Chromatics, and the Coalition, as well as rules for making them all playable, along with info on other minor alien races of the setting; and "Bright Continent", the Africa book. Of these, "Asia Ascendant" was so close to release when cancellation hit, lacking only layout and art, that it was released as a free pdf with White Wolf's permission. For Aberrant, there was "Brainwaves", the guide to super-intelligence, and "Aberrant: Nexus", covering various crossovers with Trinity. Like "Asia Ascendant", much of "Brainwaves" had been written by cancellation, and it too was released as a free pdf.
- Following "Bright Continent", the plan was to revise Trinity - advance the timeline, clean up some of the mismatches with Aberrant, etc.
- Long-time TU fan Ian Watson entered the picture a while later with plans for an unofficial Trinity adventure series resulting in the creation of a new Prometheus Chamber, which triggered all eight Aptitudes, and the creation of a new psi order from the disenfranchised of the original orders.
- Another idea Ian had was to reboot the whole TU New World of Darkness-style, with a corebook outlining the setting, then supplements on playing Novas and Psions (Daredevils could have been included in the core or given their own supplement). This actually got greenlit by White Wolf, but it didn't come to anything due to their merger with CCP.
- Several years on, Ian ended up overseeing the official reboot, which was slightly different to his proposal above, with a corebook outlining a contemporary setting for Talents (renamed from Daredevils), and Aeon, Aberrant and Adventure! as gamelines running off the rules in the core.
War Games
- BattleTech: In 2013, there was a small announcement made by Catalyst Game Labs about the potential of jumping the timeline up to the year 3250 (it was currently at 3150) and performing a soft reboot of the setting to make things more streamlined. A small but highly vocal number of players raised such an outcry over this that Herb Beas, the line developer for Battletech at the time, stepped down and the idea was quietly scrapped aside from a few throw-away lines at the beginning of a couple of sourcebooks (all Battletech sourcebooks are written from an in-universe perspective).
- Warhammer 40,000:
- During big events such as GamesDay, Games Workshop often showcases Greens (prototype models) of possible new miniatures. While the majority of these do make it into production and later become available for purchase, some are left behind and never finished. The most notable of these is a 5th edition Eldar Guardian Jetbike, which took nearly a decade before seeing a release (with massive changes).
- The 8th edition Genestealer Cults Codex, released in early 2019, mentions in the "army building suggestion" page the existence of a Start Collecting box for the army containing an Acolyte Iconward, a squad of Acolyte Hybrids, a Squad of Neophyte Hybrids and a Goliath Rockgrinder. The box was finally released only one year after the Codex, and featured an Achilles Ridgerunner instead of the more expensive Goliath.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The first book released had some differences to later game releases: some factions were called with different names than the one they're called in later books (Fyreslayers were Red Slayers, Bonesplitterz were Bonesplittaz, Flesh-Eater Courts were Flesh-Eaters and Beastclaw Raiders were Beastclaw Ogors). Also, the Bonesplitterz shaman hero was called Juju Dok rather than Wardokk and the Ironblaster is shown as a Beastclaw unit rather than a Gutbusters one.
- Warhammer Fantasy Battle:
- Storm of Chaos was supposed to take the series setting forward depending on the results of battles played out by the community. Unfortunately, GW either assumed or hoped that the forces of Chaos would win, which backfired when the results came in and Chaos was losing horribly. Due to this, the ideas and lore presented in said campaign ended up basically being ignored, eventually leading to the End Times event down the line.
- There were originally plans a novel written by Terry Pratchett, which never went through.
- Tamurkhan: The Throne of Chaos was meant to be the first in a series of four campaign books, each detailing a Chaos invasion (one per god and cardinal direction), fleshing Chaos and other armies out in the process. None of them ever made their way past the drawing board.
- In 2012, Forge World announced The Battle of Black Fire Pass, a campaign book that would focus on the 3rd Battle of Black Fire Pass, featuring the Empire, Dwarfs and Greenskins. The only thing that was revealed to the public was its cover before the project got canned.
- The numeral I was emblazoned on the spine of Monstrous Arcanum, suggesting that it was meant to be the first in a series, as did the Incarnate Elementals described within it, which embody three of the eight winds of magic in the setting. However, since it undersold, the subsequent volumes never saw the light of day. The only surviving elements from the second volume were some monsters that had their models finished and received experimental rules.
- Concept art◊ for the Lizardmen shows a number of units and designs that never went past the design stage, including Saurus leaders wearing Skaven-pelt cloaks; Old One devices of unclear purpose, ridden by Skinks standing over sacrificed Grey Seers and carried by giant crocodiles or armored sauropod-like beasts; and giant fire-breathing snakes, one version of which serves as a steed for a Lizardman hero and is armored with decorative golden wings while the second is a true flying serpent.
- Starship Troopers: While reception for the miniatures game wasn't perfect, it was a pretty solid game and had some great miniatures. However, before it was discontinued, Mongoose Publishing had made some pretty big plans such as the introduction of two new races that were also going to appear in the second edition of the RPG, which was also intended to include more rules for playing Skinnies (The original edition only had one short section and a single Skinny class, with the promise of more later on). Since they lost the license, none of this is likely to happen.
