<< Favorite Games II | Main | Away for a Day >>

June 01, 2003

Role Call 21 - Playing the Movies

Oh, now this one's right up my alley...

What are three movies whose mood and/or situations you'd like to emulate in a roleplaying game, and why?

Only three? Well, I'll be selective...

As might be inferred from other projects (scroll down a bit on that second link, as it's near the midpoint), I'm well into cinematically influenced style in RPGs, and take lots of inspiration from movies. But let's do three I haven't been able to actually do yet...

Twelve Monkeys -- Oh, wow! This is time travel done with guts. Even Continuum is only barely scratching the surface of the deep use of paradox, doubt, and predestination that Terry Gilliam managed in this all too neglected movie. Paranoia-style post apocalyptic humor and an amazingly manic Brad Pitt performance just add to the mix. As with Memento, structure would be everything in this game, with little time loops building until the whole game comes full circle, just as the film does. And the psychological twisting could be as cruel as Power Kill. I doubt I have the skill for it ("Mementos of Amber" was hard enough!), but this is the sort of project I'd love to attempt.

Cemetery Man (originally titled Dellamorte Dellamore for its original Italian release, and not available on DVD, it seems... which is a crime! Glad I've got that old LD copy!) -- This is another odd-atmosphere piece. This time, we focus on a cemetery caretaker who, in addition to trimming weeds, has to deal with the fact that anything buried here rises as a zombie a short while later. Rather than try to convince anyone this happens and face the resulting paperwork, he just kills them again. And that's just the opening premise, from there it gets weird. This sort of horror is a fave of mine, and there are other movies that work in it as well (say Peter Jackson's worlds-from-LotR Dead Alive or Sam Raimi's Spiderman-came-later Evil Dead and, especially, its sequels), but this is a particular favorite of mine. Extremely gory horror mixed with offbeat comedy makes for a difficult atmosphere to maintain in a game, but if it could work it would be great to try.

And, in a less mind bending but still endlessly fun direction, how's about a good treatment of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World? Just a madcap treasure hunt, lacking in any functional teamwork or character skill or anything but humor. Alliances forge and shatter, plans collapse for the silliest reasons, new supporting characters wander in just to make things even more of a mess. Characters are defined by their quirks more than their skills (because they don't have much by way of skill). A perfect example of a game where failure should be the expected ending, for a WISH cross-over.

Wow... this barely dented the laser disk collection... and didn't even look to the DVDs!

Posted by ghoul at June 1, 2003 08:54 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://noneuclidianstaircase.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/14

Comments

Hey, Jack -- have you seen this? http://evildeadd6.tripod.com/ I have to admit that I haven't tried it as yet so I don't know how the system part of it works out, but I forwarded the link to Michael some time ago since he's a fan of Bruce Campbell.

And, as long as I'm here..."Mementos of Amber" was easily my favorite con-game of the year when I played it. I enjoyed it very much!

Posted by: Jenn at June 1, 2003 10:55 AM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?