Books to Game Plots

About a dozen or so years ago, before I became the vastly erudite person I am now, I bought Umberto Eco's Focault's Pendulum and never got past the first few chapters.

Over spring break last week or so, I dusted off this book and gave it another go. Being much more erudite now than then, I devoured the entire novel (although the untranslated French and Latin still gave me trouble).

With some work, the basic idea of the novel could be transformed into a d20 Modern campaign, with or without FX.

Any other good books that would fit this mold?

Warren Ellis' stunning new comic series GLOBAL FREQUENCY.

Miranda Zero (god, I hate how the British seem to be genetically gifted at coming up with cool names) runs an organization that cleans up the Cold War's messes. From a Russian teleportation psion linked to an abandoned nuke to an alien invasion without any aliens to a crazed cyborg about to go nuke in LA to a woman trained to run cities like obstacle courses, Ellis provides a framework that kicks Dept. 7's @ss and provides cool character and plot ideas.

Go, read now.

If we're talking comics, you could try worse than Midnight Nation (by J. Michael Straczynski). It starts with a grisly murder in L.A. and just gets more and more disturbing. The trade is out now (all 12 issues). One of the best series I've seen in a while, and it could be adapted to a party-style game with only a little work. Very angsty, strangely uplifting.

One that might require a little more work is Peter F. Hamilton's Mind's Eye Rising trilogy of mid-21st-century novels. Not for the gadgets - those should be easy enough to cook up, even a maser pistol is really just a pistol from a game mechanics point of view- but for the abilities of the MindStar project, a British military project with... unpredictable results. It's the setting that I like, though - England, a tropical not-paradise emerging from socialist rule. Read the books, they am good. Corporate intrigue and evil communists... need more be said?

And suddenly I realise that I don't read anything more normal than that. So that's all I've got.

I love the Destroyer series.

Best damn modern pulp adventures around, all begging to become plots, and some likable and politically incorrect good guys.

Read "The End of the Beginning" and "Father to Son", and you're all caught up on thirty years' worth of over-the-top action.

Enjoyed Stephenson's "SnowCrash" and the universe it portrayed... James Alan Gardners "Expendable" and its sequels... Bethke's hilarious "HeadCrash"... I also liked Charette's Shadowrun stuff and the Cyberpunk 2020 novels... *shrug* I know there are a lot more I like that are just not coming to mind

s/LaSH said:

One that might require a little more work is Peter F. Hamilton's Mind's Eye Rising trilogy of mid-21st-century novels. Not for the gadgets - those should be easy enough to cook up, even a maser pistol is really just a pistol from a game mechanics point of view- but for the abilities of the MindStar project, a British military project with... unpredictable results. It's the setting that I like, though - England, a tropical not-paradise emerging from socialist rule. Read the books, they am good. Corporate intrigue and evil communists... need more be said?

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God, I love those books. Big-time cool sci-fi. Nice to see another fan out there. Why is it the British have such a great grasp of sci fi, I wonder.

SnowCrash! How could I forget that? Everybody listens to Reason.

And jonrog1 - British SF is probably so good because the English are more technological than most give them credit for.

They were the world leaders in jet propulsion until their planes started dissolving in midair - they made the scematics public to attempt to discover the cause, and (after they discovered metal microfracture fatigue) the superior industrial base of the USA (and other places) was able to catch up.

Then there's the energy shielding they've developed for tanks recently. But just to throw that into doubt, my father (when he was an officer in our New Zealand army twenty-three years ago) heard rumours about British armour technology that sounded strangely familiar... he's only mentioned them now because I read about that energy shielding in the paper, so I'm not breaking any treaty agreements by posting this.

And of course there's a thriving comic industry over there. 2000AD is fairly recent compared to what I was raised on... Eagle comics from the 1950s (my father's). Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future! That was great - beautiful art, plots that would still be good today, a healthy dose of Biggles sensibility.

Aha! Another idea for source material arises. Biggles, by Captain W. E. Johns. Eighty-odd titles by the Captain, a few more by others, and a bad movie that you shouldn't watch because it's not Biggles. Other than that it's not a particularly bad movie. Biggles is not just about derring-do in fighter planes.

Foucault's Pendulum would make for one wacked-out campaign.

my own ideas for d20Mod "literary" campaigns have been:

1) Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld setting. how can you not like a setting that has everyone (literally) in it?

2) a campaign set in the timeline of John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century. great sci-fi book -- lots of bizarre and interesting stuff develops over the course of the century. i know that Orbital Resonance is set in the same continuity; i'm not sure about his other books. (it appears that Mother of Storms, for instance, is not.)

3) Julian May's Pliocene Exile series. take all the people who can't adjust to modern society and send them 6 million years in the past! would have to completely overhaul the psionics system, though -- some of May's metapsychics are superhuman in power! (at one point, one of them teleports to another galaxy.)

4) a campaign set in the world of Daniel Keys Moran's Continuing Time books. i've only read The Last Dancer and have been desperately searching for The Long Run, Emerald Eyes, and The Armageddon Blues for years now. hard to explain these books, but he's got some wonderfully great and strange ideas. it would make an excellent role-playing setting.

5) after SJ Games puts out GURPS Planet of Adventure, i might consider a d20Mod campaign set on Jack Vance's Tschai (the aforementioned "Planet of Adventure"). simply tons of role-playing opportunities on this world. it's one of those pulp SF retro-futuristic "swords & blasters" type worlds. where Vance shines as a writer is at creating fascinating and bizarre cultures and aliens. the Tschai series is a good read if you can get past the 60's-era misogynist mentality.

PJ Farmer's World of Tiers would be a great rpg setting also...

American Gods by Neil Gaiman is an excellent book, and well suited to a story-oriented d20 Modern campaign--basically, gods and other supernatural creatures exist only as long as people believe in them (for instance, Eostre, the pagan fertility goddess, is going strong thanks to chocolate bunnies and Paas egg dyes, while Odin is pretty much reduced to seducing women one at a time for enough worship to subsist on).

For a non-magical campaign, Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books are a great source for the kind of things that go into planning and executing heists. Also, his Porter books (Mel Gibson's movie Payback was based on one of these) are good for a grittier look at crime, although they are written under a pseudonym which I misremember.

Comic-wise, the Preacher series by Garth Ennis, as well as his Hitman series. Hellblazer and Books of Magic are great for magic in the real world. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen goes without saying.

Anime and manga can provide a lot of inspiration as well, from guns-n-cars action pieces like Riding Bean and Gunsmith Cats to dark future horror like Wicked City (a great source for a different take on a ShadowChasers/X-Files idea; basically, the supernatural critters have their own equivalent of the Men in Black, which occasionally works with human enforcement to maintain the fragile peace between worlds).