Days of the Future Past would make a fantastic RPG.

In reply to my own post yesterday I was trying to think a of setting that hasn't quite been done yet (at least to death and to my knowledge) that incorporated some of the same themes as The Road but was so compelling as to make me want to run a game of this very weekend! I won't be doing that, I still need to run my intro scenario to Savage Worlds, but I could see running a game of Days of the Future Past either in the Marvel U or in an original setting. The themes here of being on the run, being the last of your people (in this case mutants), and having to be very careful with the limited amount of supplies you can scrounge up while on the run are combined in this setting with The Road's parent-child companionship.

In reality the story itself is very short, but it's not hard to flesh it out. Here's a quick rundown of the two-issue story (mostly thanks to Wikipedia due to how long it's been since I've read it myself): The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in our time tries to assassinate a popular anti-mutant senator. The X-Men try to stop them, and in the process are warned by the future version of Kitty Pryde that a terrible future awaits them if they fail to stop the assassination. In this future all mutants are confined to concentration camps where their powers are neutered and we get to see many of the X-Men we know and love are either dead, missing in action, or forever stuck in a camp.

Running a short campaign that starts by introducing the players to modern day characters and big names in the world that results in them failing or succeeding, depending on what the Senator really is setting out to do, to save his life. Then you fast forward and have the players update their characters from what happened in the last 15 years. You explain that many new technologies have been developed specifically to hunt them down and account for their powers, but you give them a goal. Hell, throw in some Terminator-esque ability to go back in time and change the past to prevent their own reality, and you can have some real fun. The players could even go back to the time of the first session they played where the modern day versions are now NPC's controlled by you and a possible roadblock or source of aid to the heroes to acheive whatever they need to in order to stop the future from happening. I've never really thought about time travel in an RPG before, but the idea of players confronting past versison of their characters now as NPC's controlled by the GM sounds like a lot of fun!