A Role-Playing Game I'd Like To Play

A few years back, I was trying to figure out how to do Oz as an RPG. No, not the HBO TV series. L. Frank Baum's setting.

I think most of us have seen the movie, but the movie is not the book, which is in the public domain. As are most (if not all) of the (more than you think there are) Oz books. Project Gutenberg has most of them in a variety of formats. And they're worth reading.

Yes, they're aimed at kids. This is actually one reason I abandoned the project - the setting was too saccharine to make an effective game. Good always triumphed over evil, who - really - never even had a chance. Most of the character background elements that GM's use to hang story hooks on just don't fit in an idyllic setting such as this.

I gave up completely. Tossed my notes.

Then I watched SyFy's "Tin Man" film. It wasn't spectacular, but it was entertaining and grownup. And got me thinking about Oz again.

Then I saw this a few weeks ago. Go. Watch it now. I'll wait.

Suddenly, the land of Oz doesn't seem like quite as idyllic a setting, and I'm pondering pulling the project off of the back burner.

I can see it run as a Sorcerer game, with each PC haunted by their own demons, as it were. After all - the classic four characters were all deeply flawed in some way. In the first book. After the first book, they were just as flawed, but they didn't let their flaws get in the way - and they had different flaws.

Or maybe it would be playable in Fate - after reading through Spirit of the Century, I think it could be a good match. After all, each character had a number of distinctive traits that could easily be picked as Aspects.

Maybe it could be done in The Burning Wheel. I'm not sure which flavor of BW - it'd either have to be the core BW game or a Mouse Guard hack. Burning Empires isn't really as translatable to a different setting. I just got the core game, so I don't know how adaptable it is, yet (based on what I've seen so far, it's very adaptable). Mouse Guard, on the other hand, has an entire forum devoted to hacks such as this one.

I may have to think about resurrecting the project, which means reading the books again, looking for shadows I can amplify.

Sounds like a great way to spend a few days - reading.

Is Gaming All I Think About?

After reading last week's post, a friend of mine had the following to say to me:

It's interesting, Eric. You tied all of the fiction you have been reading back to gaming. Do you ever think about anything else?

Yes. Yes I do. I spend a lot of time thinking non-gaming thoughts. But not when I'm reading. Even non-fiction keeps throwing game ideas at me.

For example, Salt: A World History. When I read this book a few years ago, it sparked all kinds of RPG ideas to the point where my wife and I are working on a setting using some of the ideas from this book.

When I read fiction, I try to figure out which game system will best model that story. Allow me to qualify this just a bit. See, I'm a firm believer that RPG's and literature (or, for that matter, novels) are two different animals.

Wolfgang Baur put it very well in The Kobold Guide to Game Design, Volume 1: Adventures:

The worldbuilding I do with these fiction writers tends to be all about the telling detail, building the world from the character out (or building the character from the setting), directing reader attention to just the parts that matter and so on. None of this works for gamers because, as a designer, your first audience is the DM, not the players.

There's more to it than that, though. You see, writers have to come up with dialog , and most gamers don't spend a lot of time talking - action is more central to adventure RPG's than conversation is. Players don't want to chat up the guard to find the clue he has - they want to knock him out and then bring him around and beat the clue out of him. But that's a much longer discussion for another week.

That said, however, when I read The Night Angel Trilogy, I was trying to figure out which system would best model the action (and magic) of the story. I wound up figuring it'd have to be something like Sorcerer, where the rules for what is possible are extremely flexible. But there are ideas in the book that I'd love to tie into a game of my own sometime ...

When I read Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It, I was trying to figure out how to work this into a Deadlands game.

Even when I'm using Google Reader, I keep seeing links like this one, which I easily could work into a Call of Cthulhu game.

And sometimes, my reading goes from game to book - for example, I recently read that Cubicle 7 was doing a book based on The Atrocity Archives. So I checked out the Wikipedia entry, which intrigued me enough to download the sample onto my Kindle. I liked the sample enough that I bought the whole book. And the sequel. And I read the two short stories that are on Tor.com. And I added the upcoming third book to my wishlist.

Speaking of fiction-to-game:  the preorder for The Dresden Files RPG is up.  We preordered earlier this week.

So yes. If I'm reading a book (or my Kindle), odds are about 90% that my brain is still working on games.

Do you think that's a problem?