A New Setting

[Diamond Spear]

On 12/5/2018 at 5:49 AM, Jmonty said:

If we want to attract younger people one of the trends for them is still the Harry Potter universe. I was thinking of something in this style, only a bit more adult, or teenager. Not strictly for kids. May be something between Potter and The Magicians. Strict rules for magic (fixed lists of spells at first, for a quick start), a hidden world, some foes and conspiracies, real problems from the real world of a teenager (like in the Spiderman comics) and not just magical problems.

 

So the Vampire Academy books setting? Which actually isn’t a bad idea, mind. 

[Diamond Spear]

On 12/5/2018 at 4:01 AM, Lord Liaden said:

Hey, the thread started off with Diamond Spear asking for suggestions for a new setting because he wanted to be creative. I was under the impression it was about doing something cool that hadn't been done to death before. I'm not sure when the priority turned to publishing something aimed at drawing in newcomers.

Hey if I can work on something that does both that’d be great. And let’s face it, it’s hard to come up with an idea that hasn’t been done a bunch. 

[Diamond Spear]

Also sorry I’ve been absent from the thread. Some things at work blew up.  

[Lord Liaden]

No worries, and sorry to hear that. I hope you recovered the fragments for analysis.

[Diamond Spear]

20 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

No worries, and sorry to hear that. I hope you recovered the fragments for analysis.

I did. I had them analyzed three times and got the same result each time: I’m completely crazy. ?

 

On topic: I’ve been thinking since I posted it that maybe the Vampire Accademy books really would be a project worth doing. Is anyone else here familiar with them?  

[Jagged]

I'd support the idea of a  "modern" pulp setting and disagree with the comments that it is counter to the aesthetic. There are quite a few genres out there at the moment that attempt to mix an old-world sensibility with up to date or futuristic technology. It has grown quite naturally from steampunk. I am thinking of things like Penny Arcades Automata, the "Kids-on-bikes" genre or even things like Netflix's Riverdale and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

[Duke Bushido]

I agree with modern Pulp as a good thing.  The problem, at least as I've seen in regards to comments here and moreso in the real world when the subject comes up is that we are far enough removed at this point in time that a huge chunk of people seem to think that Pulp is "guys in hats."

 

The charm of Pulp was a lot of things-- even the hats, of course, but Pulp will, at least to me, always be about exhilarating adventure.

 

Now to narrow that down a bit: thrilling adventure with Pulp tropes.  Such as:

 

The Heroes were not just people of action, they were people of _resolve_.  They were people firmly aware of their moral compass, and who used that compass as an actual compass: it guided their lives, from the tiniest decision to the risk of their lives.  They did not question themselves, because what they did they did for the preservation of morality and "goodness" and to ensure the punishment of the wicked. Justice was not something you waited for a judge and seven thousand short-attention-span strangers on Twitter to define for you: justice was punishment for evil deeds, and it was the absolute _duty_ of every man, woman, and child to work-- actively!-- to ensure that justice was served.  There were rules, and the righteous enforced them.  There were laws, and the good lived by them.  There were social mores, and living one bit less upright than you were capable of was unthinkable: it was the place of all virtuous people to remember that they were honor bound, by unspoken social contract, to be the best examples of virtue they could be.  All adults were leaders, and leaders inspire.

 

People knew in their hearts that they were not only responsible for others, but for _themselves_.  No one did anything without the resolve that comes from knowing that what you are about to undertake-- and all you may suffer from it-- are results of nothing but your own decisions and your own actions.  You understood the importance of that in society, as well.  Society should be concerned about others; you knew that.  But making society responsible for you was evil.  No man was a man who was not responsible for himself.  No woman was a woman who could blame away her problems.

 

Attitude was fifty percent of pulp.

 

The rest was high adventure, split evenly between falling-from-grace type stories involving crime-- detectives or policemen or gangsters or enemy spies-- dealings with evil people, or perhaps recovering from your evil past, and exotic locations.  We as a country knew so little about the rest of the world (which is, unfortunately, the source of the misguided rumors that we never bothered learning), and as such the world was filled with mysterious locations-- every jungle had treasure and lost civilizations; every continent had a jungle!    Those little bits of random art on the maps covered over long-forgotten islands filled with voodoo priests and volcanoes.  Every plane crash discovered a hole in the earth, leading to all the hollow layers inside our planet, each large enough and mysterious enough to be yet another world.

 

Action and adventure was the rest of pulp.

 

 

And that's why no one is interested today-- the younger folks, I mean.

 

We've spent a couple of generations teaching them that society works best when you wait for it to hand you things.  We've spent a couple of generations teaching them that no shortcoming or defect of character is their own fault.  No one has the right to stand up for himself, and if you're obnoxious enough, you can do whatever you want, any way you please.

 

I don't know a nice way to say it, so if someone can help me out here, I'd love to edit it in, because at this point all I can say is something along the lines of "we have filled the world with too many self-absorbed self-important candy asses who want nothing more than what they can get without effort, because someone somewhere owes it to them."

 

I guess that will do for now, but it really doesn't seem like the nicest way to say that.  At any rate, that's our new social norm: you're the most special because you say you are, and everyone else should have to cope with that and make sure you're happy all the time.

 

Even if that does _not_ apply specifically to a person-- or even if it does not apply to _ANY_ person, ever, it really is what's being pushed as the new "way things should be."  It's really hard to take someone who thinks _that's_ the ideal society and convince them that Pulp is anything but a moral aberration.  It saddens me.  Honestly, I blame the loss of the Western as common entertainment.  That's where we were introduced to these ideals, early on, and we all reinforced it in each other.  Whether we personally behaved accordingly or not, we understood that society was totally about being self-reliant and self-responsible. 

 

 

But I suppose we could replace all that with cool beaver-felt hats and cars with bobbly headlights.  Those are cool, too.

 

 

As far as that goes, though:

 

Pulp lived at least as long as did Heinlein.  The "Golden Age" of comics?  Pulp.  Righteous good guys, serving society. Clear-cut bad guys.  Fantastic adventure.  Exotic locations.  I'd like to break this down further, but I have talked well more than long enough, and it all boils down to "Pulp is that segment of entertainment that becomes more and alien with each generation, and less and less intriguing to them."

 

 

Duke

 

(seriously: if anyone can think of a nicer way to say that, let me know and I'll edit it in there)

 

 

 

[Brian Stanfield]

12 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

(seriously: if anyone can think of a nicer way to say that, let me know and I'll edit it in there)

 

I don't think there is a nicer way to say what you're saying: "Kids these days . . . sheesh! We're going to hell in a hand basket. Get off my lawn!" 

[Brian Stanfield]

On 1/4/2019 at 7:49 PM, Duke Bushido said:

Honestly, I blame the loss of the Western as common entertainment.  That's where we were introduced to these ideals, early on, and we all reinforced it in each other.  Whether we personally behaved accordingly or not, we understood that society was totally about being self-reliant and self-responsible. 

 

After giving this some thought, I'd have to say that I think you may be surprised at just how many Westerns have been released since 2000. Hundreds. We haven't heard of many of them, of course, but there were lots of B Westerns back in the day too. Even tv series, such as Deadwood, Westworld, even Longmire, have been immensely popular. There were many that were highly received, such as The Revanent, which was nominated for best picture and won best actor, as well as No Country for Old Men, True Grit, and Hell or High Water. I was actually quite surprised at how many Westerns I've seen that were produced since 2000, most of them quite good and popular. There is still a strong longing in the American consciousness for those better and simpler days which never actually existed, but which we wish had. And there are plenty in production right now, suggesting there is a great desire for these films as well. Check out IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/search/title?release_date=2000-01-01,2018-12-31&genres=western&sort=release_date,desc. Heck, Robert Duvall pretty much rebuilt his career doing Westerns in the past 20 years. 

 

As for Pulp, a lot of those Westerns cross over with Pulp themes of good vs. evil, law vs. crime, and all those themes, as well as high adventure. For whatever reason, Jackie Chan went through a series of high adventure Westerns (Shanghai Noon, its sequal, and Around the World in 80 Days) that are perfect examples of Pulp adventure. Walker, Texas Ranger is a perfect series of bare knuckled (or booted?) crime fighting adventure---Hell, I once saw Walker stare down a bear and win! Django Unchained is Pulp for sure, and the Lone Ranger, and for whatever ungodly reason they re-made The Magnificent Seven because there was, apparently, a demand for such a thing (it's more Western than Pulp, but still . . . ). 

 

For non-Western Pulp, I could only come up with a couple of ideas, although they also cross over with Fantasy, but they still count. The Golden Compass has globetrotting adventure written all over it, and was a popular series of books as well. The Librarians series on tv is also Pulpy, although the tendency these days is to mix Pulp with Urban Fantasy, so I won't argue these too much. Journey to the Center of the Earth definitely fits the bill, as does Jumanji and King Kong. We can debate whether they should have been remade, but the fact of the matter is that they were box office smashes, which means there is a demand for these sorts of movies.

 

The point is, I think there's still a lot of demand for Westerns, for sure, and Pulp, if only in spirit, even with the millennials. So don't despair, my friend! All is not lost!

[Chris Goodwin]

A lot of original pulp stories in the "mystery men heroes" mold were pretty dark and violent.  Effectively, Dark Champions in the 1920's.  The "two-fisted heroes" of Justice Inc. and Pulp Hero are essentially 1-2 (the happier end) on the campaign ground rules scales for morality, realism, outlook, etc., but you could as easily apply those to a modern setting.  The A-Team, for instance, is more or less modern pulp, as is Big Trouble in Little China.  (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_Heroes; I'm not sure how "modern" it is, considering it was published in 1975, but it's definitely outside of the original "pulp" period.) 

 

If you look at the Shadow, Doc Savage, early Batman (effectively a pulp mystery man), the Lone Ranger... those guys carried guns, they'd kill in self defense, sometimes they'd outright murder their foes.  4-5 on the above mentioned scales.  (In fact, there was one "pulp hero" who would essentially mind-edit his foes to remove their criminal tendencies and create new personalities for them -- I can't remember which one offhand but it was one of the big names.  I can't find anything in either the Shadow or Doc Savage that indicates it was one of them, but I'm sure someone here will know which one.) 

 

Edited, to pay the thread tax.  I'd like to see a good fantasy world with a twist; not related to the "Hero Universe"; not something that's "generic fantasy" as run through the filter of D&D.  I'd like to see a good urban fantasy magic school, as someone mentioned above, with decent worldbuilding behind it.  

[Duke Bushido]

8 hours ago, Brian Stanfield said:

 

A WHOLE LOT OF THINGS I WOULD LOVE TO ADDRESS, BUT I'M ON A PHONE AND THAT JUST AIN'T HAPPNIN WITH A TOUCH SCREEN, I'M AFRAID. 

 

 

Short answer:

 

Westworld isn't really a western.  It takes place in a western setting, but the characters are weaker and more social, and the morality archetypes aren't there. 

 

Longmire was more of a deconstruction of the western, and I don't think I've ever heard of Deadwood.  I'll have to check it out. 

[Old Man]

Straight heroic Westerns have become far less commonplace.  The last few Westerns I remember seeing:

 

Hostiles: Grim.

True Grit: Antiheroic, but the good guys win.

Hateful Eight: Oh god.

The Revenant: Oh, oh god.

Django Unchained: Come on man.

Westworld: Way more complex than any Western.

3:10 to Yuma: I'm conflicted.

The Magnificent Seven (remake): The most heroic and easily the worst film on this list.

 

It's possible that other good Westerns exist and I just haven't seen them, but it seems to me that most Westerns that have emerged since 2000 are either gritty, comedic, or scifi.

 

[Old Man]

On 1/8/2019 at 7:11 AM, Chris Goodwin said:

Edited, to pay the thread tax.  I'd like to see a good fantasy world with a twist; not related to the "Hero Universe"; not something that's "generic fantasy" as run through the filter of D&D.  I'd like to see a good urban fantasy magic school, as someone mentioned above, with decent worldbuilding behind it.  

 

I'd love to play in a Neverwhere campaign.

[Diamond Spear]

Over the last week or so I've rediscovered my Thieves World books and have been enjoying reading them again. I think it would make an interesting setting with appropriate tweaks for being used as an RPG, as opposed to an anthology, setting. The hardest part would be getting the various magic systems to work within the HERO powers framework. That challenge aside I like the idea of a game set in a failing empire, where gods and demons are actively engaged in the world and where power comes with a price. I think you could keep all that without playing it quite as dark as the setting was originally written.

 

Thoughts on that?

[John Desmarais]

On 1/13/2019 at 9:58 AM, Diamond Spear said:

Over the last week or so I've rediscovered my Thieves World books and have been enjoying reading them again. I think it would make an interesting setting with appropriate tweaks for being used as an RPG, as opposed to an anthology, setting. The hardest part would be getting the various magic systems to work within the HERO powers framework. That challenge aside I like the idea of a game set in a failing empire, where gods and demons are actively engaged in the world and where power comes with a price. I think you could keep all that without playing it quite as dark as the setting was originally written.

 

Thoughts on that?

 

There have been several Thieves World RPG / RPG settings published over the years - for several different game systems.  All in all, they've generally all been pretty good, if somewhat skewed towards the strengths and traits of the target system.  The Chaosium one was probably my favorite, even though I think it had the least amount of material published, as it treated the setting as a very low-magic (particularly from the PC perspective) world.

 

For someone willing to do the work, Hero is actually a pretty good system to do it, as it gives the GM a lot of control over how magic works in your game - bringing no existing system into the mix.

[Scott Ruggels]

There is an argument that the westerns since the 90’s aren’t “True Westerns”. because the morality is blurred or inverted, or subverted. They are still “Westerns due to the environments, props and costumes, but the rise of the Psychological Western, reflected the self doubt the country during the late 60’, through to the first gas crisis. I Western production was halted during the Malaise Era it seemed,

and all characters other than the Star Wars cast were self doubting if not heavily neurotic. The doubt about the VietnNam war carried through to the achievement of its Manifest Destiny 80 years earlier. (See:Little Big Man) Stories like “True Westerns  can only survive in an optimistic, and guilt free culture. We don’t have that any more. Art is a reflection of the life and times they were created in, and Pulp was a reflection of the early to mid 20th Century. A friend said that genres of popular music are only relevant as long as there were s an audience willing to pay for it. 

[Duke Bushido]

Excellent points, Scott!

 

I can find easy support for this in the "death" of cyberpunk related to the demise of the 80s.  Yes: Cyberpunk is around today.  Much like the Westerns of today, Cyberpunk is _not_ what it was.  And honestly, I don't think we can ever get that feeling back: a _huge_ part of cyberpunk was the absolute reality of the futility of struggle, since no one got anywhere that he wasn't more or less born into, and that human life had lost a lot of what made it somehow significant: life was cheap, death was easy, and there was no future for anyone.  

 

That wasn't the only theme, of course: the wild and crazy over-the-top integration of technology-- not the way we think of it today, now that we are living in that "dark future," but what we expected it to be.

 

So where did those themes originate?  They came from the culture, or course.  Us old farts remember the fallout of the Cuban Missile Crisis; we remember the cold war _vividly_, and we remember the wild fashions, the ridiculous subcultures, and the obsession with absolutely _nothing_ substantial: we wanted pretty things, fun things, and brightly-colored things.  We didn't want _anything_ that might lead to speculation about our future; we didn't want anything that depended on hope.

 

Why?  Because every single one of us _knew_, no matter how deep down we kept it hidden, that the missiles were coming.  Every day.  Every hour.  Every minute.  Every super-sonic rumble in the sky.  Was this it?  Is that them?  The news was filled with nothing but the power struggle of super-powered nations, each so afraid of looking like they might be backing down that they kept escalating.  Troop movements and war games dominated headlines, as did skirmishes between the proxies of "us" and "them."  And behind it all was the very real threat of unleashing the world-ending man made Hell.  The threats were being made, the ultimatums, and no one wanted to be caught being the second country to jump over every single line in the sand.  Every sixth-grade student _knew_ where the bombs would land land first, where the retaliations where coming from, and just how far away from a major target they were living.  We knew intimately the foolishness of bomb shelters, and the half-life of strontium 90.

 

It has an effect on you.  Not just the "Hey, let's have fun while it lasts" culture that developed, but that unshakeable _certainty_ that you would live to see fire in the skies, but not your own children.

 

That feeling: that unshakeable doom, brought on through no fault of your own-- out of your hands, and out of your power to prevent no matter how loudly you screamed, how fast your heart raced, or how deep the blisters from the heat of the outraged tears on your cheeks.  Your leaders were deaf to your sobs, and too busy preparing to kill each other, it seemed, to realize that they weren't killing each other: they were only killing you and almost four billion people like you: four billion helpless, voiceless, powerless puppets, soon to live forever as shadows on whatever bits of wall happened to survive.

 

_That_ was the _feeling_ behind cyberpunk.  The look?  Chrome and glitz and pink-and-black tiger striped trench coats?  Mirrored sunglasses inside a poorly-lit nightclub?  That was us in the real world, too: LOOK!  LOOK AT ME!  I AM REAL!  I AM _ALIVE_, DAMN IT, AND SOMEONE IS GOING TO _KNOW_ IT!  Even if it was-- you know-- other people caught in the same desperate act, looking for any kind of validation, even from a total stranger.

 

The colossal over-sized weapons, chromed and wrapped in glowing tubes?  That was what we wanted: we wanted power.  We wanted something massive that we could cradle in our arms and our souls and know that when the bad things came, we could destroy them.  We wanted the power to control our destinies, to defend ourselves, to MAKE PEOPLE SEE US and _FORCE_ them to admit that we had voices, and we were prepared to force them to listen to us.

 

The drugs?   Didn't see a lot of characters addicted to stims.  Sure, lots of them were used for combat reasons, game reasons-- but the characters with addictions, what did they want?  Depressants, as many and as strong as possible.  Dull the senses, block out the world, slip through time peacefully, and in the space of a thought: forget this world, block it out.  Skate to the end, and it won't matter anymore.  You can get through it without suffering, if you let it slip right through your mind....

 

The tech?  Think of the era: we were _all_ of us, in some ways, suffering from techno-shock, or what we used to call "future shock."  For the first time in human history, technology was becoming outdated before it even became affordable.  Sure, we're used to it now.  But then-- then, we were so close to all the eras before us, those years when Dad was still driving Grampa's old truck, because why not?  When those things that worked for your great-grandmother and your grandmother and your mother-- the things she had taught you-- were being replaced.  Faster, more disposable.  More modern.  There were people (not many, mind you, but we were made aware of it daily) walking around with plastic hearts.  There were regular news reports of how smaller and newer computers were going to let amputees walk, and it was all just around the corner.  There were cameras _hundreds_ of miles over our head that could read the book we were holding.  Print media was still the best way to get news, and the news had begun to outrun it.  Stories were left unfinished, and every single place you went someone was talking about something you'd never heard of.  Credit cards were becoming more and more used for daily convenience rather than emergency purchases-- technology had just overnight sprung out of the ground and surrounded us.  It replaced the plants we admired and the air that we breathed.

 

How did we see it going?  Mechanical limbs.  Mechanical organs.  Hover cars.  That's what we being pitched, and more than ever, it really seemed right around the corner.  But hey-- if you can make a mechanical arm, then how hard is it to make a _stronger_ mechanical arm?  Or faster legs?  Or better eyes?  And we had already seen just how all-pervasive and suddenly "normal" technology was becoming.  If you could get a better eye, would you?  Stronger legs?  How about a reinforced skull?  Or the brain!  Computers were still scary: while they were large and cumbersome, they kept telling us how they would replace us at every job, outthink us at every thought.  How do we normalize that?  

 

We internalize it: we make it part of us.  We compete with it, and we create a world where it can't beat us because we joined it.  Chipped brains, neurological interfaces!  It was all there; it was all right around the next block!  Granted, this is because, at that time, the "staggering-majority-that-was-almost-all-of-us" - sized majority had absolutely no idea (then) how any of this worked.  We were using things every day-- were suddenly expected to; in some cases, we flatly _had_ to!-- that we had not even a hint of understanding as to how it worked.  It was some sort of magic, and those-who-should-know kept telling us how much more was on the very cusp of happening.

 

And how do humans deal with their fears?  Some through rational thought, though that's not as successful as they pretend.  As I've noted elsewhere, it had been my dream to one day be a psychiatrist, but it was not to be.  As I continued futile studies over the years, I learned something really disappointing:  psychiatry and it's step children psychology and sociology cure _nothing_.  They simply teach you how to repress.  How to "act normal."  If you can act normal, there's nothing wrong with you that isn't wrong with anyone else.  Remember, the important part is being able to act unaffected, and _state_ that you are unaffected.  You just have to learn to not show your fears, and most of all, to not bother the rest of the world with them.  So while it helps a lot of people figure out how to continue being a part of society, it doesn't do much to help you really understand anything.

 

The human mind learns best when it plays.  We, in general, find that things aren't so scary when we are convinced we are familiar with them, and that we understand them (even if we really have no clue).  Look what we've done to all the classic monsters that haunted us as children.  Dracula was a terror to us all, alone in our dark rooms, Halloween fast approaching.   Look what we've done to him.  Anne Rice did more to take the teeth out of that tiger than anyone before, and as others followed, they became less scary.  Today they are just ridiculous iridescent fairies that are irresistibly drawn to emo chicks.  Then we tore down werewolves (having grown up in a mountain forrest, I really enjoyed werewolf stories as a kid: the monster that lived right were I did!   ) and Disney themselves now have a TV show about zombies.  Disney!  Zombies!  Zombies used to be the most terrifying thing _ever_!  Ten guys versus ten zombies.  Then it's nine guys versus eleven zombies.  Then eight to twelve....

 

That's right: to force ourselves to get a handle on something truly horrifying, we play.  We tell stories; we write books.

 

Now as long as everything I've said so far actually is to read, it must _all_ be held in mind when considering the initial works of cyberpunk.  It was that secret fear of imminent death, that need to be noticed, that urgent longing for a way to take control of our lives back into our own hands, combined with the futility of our, as we believed, forsaken futures and the cutting-edge world we had been trained to believe was just around the corner--

 

that was the look and feel of early cyberpunk. It's gone now, and I don't think it will ever really come back, any more than pulp or the western, at least not as we know them.  Sure, cyberpunk is still around: I think Gibson tosses something out every now and again, even today.  Or maybe he doesn't; I don't know, because I never got into Gibson, because he came later-- he came on what, for sanity's sake, I have to call the "right end of the cold war."  But for getting that hardcore feel of what we once knew the genre to be, he was too late.  The futility, the fear, the desperate needs-- they were going away.  All that was really left was the technology, and hey-- that's still fun to play with.  But I can't bring myself to call it "cyberpunk" any more than I call Django a "western."  The feeling is gone.  The world has changed again.

 

Sure: that initial wave was one _Hell_ of a ride, and it must have been great breeding stock, because look at the children it birthed:  Shadowrun-type stuff (which I guess is sort of cyber urban fantasy?)  urban fantasy, high-tech industrial espionage thrillers, steampunk -- all sorts of things I'm not going to go into because frankly, my friend, I'm done typing.

 

 

 

But yes: i believe I can _totally_ see your point about how society affected the western just as much as the western affected it.

 

 

oh-- and in the words of Old Man: to pay the thread tax: these are all important things to consider if you're going to attempt creating a cyberpunk setting.

 

 

 

 

[Scott Ruggels]

Hat's off, man. Tour De Force typing job. and as one who's early memory included Air  Raid Sirens the the Casualties read off on the Huntley/ Brinkley Report over Mom's  dinner, and in ROTC in 1982-84 (Until I flunked out of college). The Cold War was omnipresent back then.

[Brian Stanfield]

On 1/13/2019 at 8:58 AM, Diamond Spear said:

Over the last week or so I've rediscovered my Thieves World books and have been enjoying reading them again. I think it would make an interesting setting with appropriate tweaks for being used as an RPG, as opposed to an anthology, setting. The hardest part would be getting the various magic systems to work within the HERO powers framework. That challenge aside I like the idea of a game set in a failing empire, where gods and demons are actively engaged in the world and where power comes with a price. I think you could keep all that without playing it quite as dark as the setting was originally written.

 

Thoughts on that?

 

I’ve been reading the books again recently as well! I keep thinking, it seems like a Swords & Sorcery setting like Valdorian Age could be used as a backdrop for Sanctuary and it’s peculiar and very expensive magic, as well as an urban center for other adventures. 

[Diamond Spear]

I kind of think that doing Thieves World requires it not be set in an existing setting but needs to be its own thing.

 

I've been turning it over in my mind and besides the magic system(s) I think a lot of thought needs to go into fighting styles, the available equipment, the upbringing and therefore the skill sets of the "average Santuarians" and so on. So, anyone want to help me? ?

[Brian Stanfield]

3 minutes ago, Diamond Spear said:

I kind of think that doing Thieves World requires it not be set in an existing setting but needs to be its own thing.

 

I've been turning it over in my mind and besides the magic system(s) I think a lot of thought needs to go into fighting styles, the available equipment, the upbringing and therefore the skill sets of the "average Santuarians" and so on. So, anyone want to help me? ?

 

I should have been more clear: the magic in Valdorian Age May be a place to start, and only loosely the rest of the setting. Actually, it was looking through Valdorian Age recently that reminded me of Thieves’ World and got me to go back to the books in the first place. So I only offer it as an analogy to Sanctuary, although perhaps a useful starting point in translating it into HERO terms. 

[Brian Stanfield]

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

Sure: that initial wave was one _Hell_ of a ride, and it must have been great breeding stock, because look at the children it birthed:  Shadowrun-type stuff (which I guess is sort of cyber urban fantasy?)  urban fantasy, high-tech industrial espionage thrillers, -- all sorts of things I'm not going to go into because frankly, my friend, I'm done typing.

 

That post was one hell of a ride, my friend! Keep it coming! And thank you for expressing so very well the things that made us who we were as children of the Cold War.

[Old Man]

 

Re: Westerns--It occurs to me that what might actually have happened is that the genre grew up.  Honestly, when I watch early Westerns today I feel like I'm watching a kids' show.  Not that that's a bad thing, but it's clear that the genre has evolved out of the heroic black-and-white morality that it started with.  Inevitable, really, given the very morally gray time period it's set in.

 

Re: Cyberpunk--Likewise, that genre has grown to encompass more than the tech-noir it originated as, and may have become diluted as a result.  Ironically, we're closer to a cyberpunk future than ever.  We are edging closer to fully integrated cybernetics, we now have genetically edited humans, we have omniscient megacorps tracking our every word and move, and true AI seems inevitable.  It's just slightly less postapocalyptic than Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and that apocalypse is still on the table.

 

Re: Duke Bushido--keep writing man, you have a gift.  Start a blog or something.  Sheesh.

[Duke Bushido]

Thank you, Old Man.  I appreciate that.

 

As I've mentioned before, I have done some writing, here and there, and thought I might one day make a regular part of my living at it, but fact is-- well, life happens, and time goes away.  For the last few decades, I sate my hunger to tell stories by being the GM.

 

 

[Brian Stanfield]

19 hours ago, Old Man said:

Re: Duke Bushido--keep writing man, you have a gift.  Start a blog or something.  Sheesh.

 

I second this! A blog, even weekly, would be a great idea!