I really want a tabletop adventure that conveys the feelings of Earthbound. To do this, I should probably replay the series, actually beating the Mother 2, and replaying 1 and 3. But even in absence of that, I can make something meaningful. I like the ideas of a "Perpendicular World" from The Gardens of Ynn (the RNG point crawl is also very interesting, but I think less thematically consistent, though a random point crawl could be a component of such an adventure). There are a few ways this could be approached. I could have pre-made characters that satisfy the 4-party member RPG system that is mostly common between the games in the series, though it would be ideal if these were optional (I don't like taking away agency from players in that way).
So what would this even look like? I would want to use some variation of Into the Odd's ruleset, possibly taking some things from Liminal Horror and/or Cairn. I don't really want this to be horror, at least only as much as the Mother series is itself horror. It would be relatively straightforward to mess with the mechanics of Earthbound to get it to work with ItO's ruleset. Psionics are just unique abilities to the characters that have it, and the characters that don't have their own unique abilities. Most enemies are mundane creatures driven mad by <entity>. Actually, on that, this whole subject was brought up by my thoughts on what it means for the gods of your world to be killed. The God of War series goes into it a bit, Greece is in ruins as a result of Kratos' actions. To a degree, Gygas is the god of the Earthbound universe, at least as far as the specific events of the first two games are concerned. Going into Gygas' dreams could be a good source of inspiration for the Gardens of Ynn-like universe-warping point crawl (there's also the Liminal Horror adventure Layers of Unreality which is quite similar, but themed in a completely different direction).
One enemy I thought up while laying in bed this morning would be larger-than normal beetles, like scarab beetles, that chirp their wings to call help (like the ant enemies from EB). Individually these wouldn't be particularly scary, but if enough of them swarm you it's going to be a bad time.
(HP/STR/DEX/WIL/ARMOR):
Beetle: 4/6/14/6/0 - d4 bite; chirps wings to summon another beetle, WIL save or wings get tired can can't summon more.
Players might look something like:
Ness: 12/15/13/18/1 - d6 baseball bat, PSI Rockin D12+D12
So back to the 'killing god' thing. What does it mean for the 'god' of some universe to die? In general, I think it means that universe dies with it. Maybe not right away, but eventually it will wither and die. Or another god will take its place, if that's even possible. In the case of Giygas/whatever I'm cooking up here, I think it's like this would be a dream world. Much like The Wind Fish in Links Awakening, the world exists only as a construct of the god's mind, though not all inhabitants in it are (maybe none of them are and we're really in some form of The Matrix). While this has been done before, I think there's still room for it to be explored as a campaign setting. That being said, also want something that still fits in nicely with the world of Bastion.