Ones and Zeros: I WISH I May #3...

I WISH I May #3...

July 28, 2002	WISH
Ginger's game WISH for this week asks about settings. How do we find settings or pieces of settings in popular culture? Choas in House of Cards: I had a pretty firm idea of what I wanted to project with Chaos, the domain beyond the place where the Shadows went mad, in House of Cards. I had Roger Zelazny's descriptions, but I needed something to tie the parts of the world that I was designing to, so that they would hang properly with RZ's. To express the primacy of will on the physical world in Chaos, I was inspired by the Dr. Who episode Castrovalva, which was inspired by the M.C. Escher painting. If I succeed in my mission, the players should think of Chaos as a very frightening place. The nice part of doing so in print is that I don't have the limitations of the TV production crew. For my short-lived Traveller:Inheritances campaign, I needed a high-tech seaport that was overcrowded and had seen better days. I merged a bit of Blade Runner with Roger Zelazny's The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and modern Hong Kong to get my mental view of the port. For Kobolds Ate My Baby!: The Grate Eskape! (OwlCon 2K2), setting needed to be both very clear and also very easy to shove into the background. The kobolds went from Luftstalag 3 to the Star Wars trash compactor, to a combination of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Beneath the Planet of the Apes, to a Smaug's side door, to that funky ice-cave in Logan's Run, to The Tomb of the Cybermen (but with frozen zombies) to a D&D vampire's crypt. The settings in KAMB are submergable. Most of the fun is seeing how the characters ~~kill~~ interact with each other. So they need to be clear, interesting, present a challenge, and not over-run the kobold-on-kobold mayhem. These were a lot of fun to string together and run.
.:Posted by Michael on July 28, 2002 10:14 AM:.