Soapbox: About the Industry

all i game with, i learned from kids books

by Sandy Antunes
Nov 19,2002

all i game with, i learned from kids books

Whenever inspiration lapses, I just flick on boing-boing-boing, PBS Kids! And there we have it, new game settings and adventure seeds!

Once you've seen enough talking socks with hands up their butts and strangely two-dimensional creatures able to leap into inanimate objects, though, you start to think two things:

1. Is this like a bad Legion of Super Heroes issue?
2. Just what setting should I use these ideas in?

Fear not! Here are three fine adventure seeds-- 1 via PBS, 1 via Nickelodean, and 1 from Disney (the triumvirate of corruption).

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Champions 5th Edition (Hero Games)

A radiation lab experiment goes wrong when the scientist's child accidentally lets her dog free and he runs into the apparatus. The radiation makes the dog turn red and blow up to enormous size, creating Clifford, the Big Red Superdog, defender of humanity!

To keep to the Clifford formula, the following conceits are necessary:

1. Animals can speak to each other and understand humans, but humans do not (by default) speak animal languages.
2. Clifford's powers (other than sheer size) are super strength and high damage resistance. He is able to lift things, create shock waves, and destroy items by impact. His dinosaur-like footsteps can be very soft if he concentrates.
3. Any dog can hide behind the smallest of trees and not be seen.
4. All game sessions must end with a homily.

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Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium)

With the success of Blue's Clues, the introduction of blink-hopping straight-geometry-hating little odd looking dogs who can teleport into artworks or books became tremendously popular among the suburban family set, with all kids clamoring for one. Alas, the hounds of tindalos don't domesticate well, and sometimes turn on their child owners.

Proper play in this genre has the following assumptions.

1. Blue is a benign Hound of Tindalos; others of her race need not be so.
2. Blue's primary ability is to be able to enter any object and be part of its subspace. For example, entering a Map puts Blue in that country, cartoon-style; entering a Van Gogh puts Blue in an art museum; entering a picture of the Sun puts Blue in space.
3. Blue's companions may follow Blue in or out of the subspace; failure to follow Blue out means they are stranded there forever.
4. People don't die in Blue's Call, rather, they simply are said to 'have gone to college'.

All games consist of 3 clues to solve the great occult mystery postulated by Blue. No one knows what happens if it remains unsolved, since a choir of outside voices will always chime in with the correct answer if the characters fail to spot them.

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World of Darkness (White Wolf)

Snow White was buried instead of put in a glass coffin, and thus never found by the Prince. Instead, the apple's poison wore off after a few centuries and she arose, the happy progenitor of all vampires.

This perky-goth[tm dorkstorm press] take on the WoD is based on a variant of Disney's hacked-up tale of Sleeping Beauty. Rather than address such a ridiculous concept further, I'll instead suggest people read the atrocious Anne-Rice-writing-under-a-pseudonym soft-core porn 'Beauty' book series to realize that, woah, a lot of people take some of these fairy-tale inventions way too seriously.

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Live happily ever after!
Or else!
Sandy
sandy@rpg.net