Alzrius said:
As always Talien, your work amazes me. The attention to detail here is nothing short of incredible, and the way the timeline and campaign introduction are laid out breathe new life into this great campaign about hunting the dead.
You're too good to me Alzrius.
Alzrius said:
By the way, where do you find the people who help you out with these campaign specifics?
I've discovered a very important fact. Any franchise of any popularity has fans. Those fans will collect data for you. Not for role-playing, but because they're fans. A very high percentage of franchises have fan-fic writers who like guidelines to flesh out their own universes. Some folk just like a timeline to keep things straight in their fan fiction, others like guidelines so they can see how each new piece of the puzzle (a new comic, a new movie) fits in.
These people are role-players waiting to be discovered. They know more about their subject than anyone else, but they don't necessarily apply it to role-playing.
Me? When I find someone with that much information, it MAKES me want to write a RPG about it. I just can't resist the pull of someone doing all that research FOR ME.
All I do is repackage it. I wish I could say I really wrote the majority of Ghostbusters -- or even Terminator or the other RPGs. For the most part, the really hard work was done by the people who have web sites already. I'm just taking advantage of what's out there already.
I really wish that every franchise was developed this way. That is, that the guys who worked on the product 1) had access to everything related to the franchise, including movies/comics/novels/whatever, 2) were real fans -- RABID fans -- who could rival anyone on the Internet.
I have seen this happen just twice: The Batman cartoon series and Lord of the Rings.
Lord of the Rings is easy. Peter Jackson is a fanatic for his subject and he did what I did -- he went out, found people who were doing LotR stuff already, and recruited them. Then he found people who maybe didn't realize they had that much in common with LotR, and recruited THEM. He put all the pieces together and he was a huge fan of the whole work. That zeal shows in everything he does.
(Not to compare myself to Peter Jackson either, I'm not that great, but I try to emulate his approach in everything I do -- fandom and love for the idea first, THEN the rest comes).
The Batman cartoon is another perfect example. Paul Dini took the backstory of the Batman comic. Then he mixed in what was cool about the movie. Then he took characters from the old 70s show and juiced them up. Parts he didn't like, he threw out. Parts he liked, he kept -- Batman's batwing and batmobile designs are from the movie, as are some of the character designs for the Penguin and Catwoman. Mister Freeze was NEVER as cool as he is in the cartoon (far cooler than the movie!). In fact, they wrote their OWN version of the movie "SubZero" that was way better than the actual movie itself.
The movie industry finally figured out that Paul Dini respects and loves the Batman license. Not the hacks who are obsessed with putting their own "spin" on the license so that everyone knows they made it. Paul wants Batman to BE Batman and he's not afraid to be invisible when mixing all the Batman ideas into a new, coherent franchise. I could go on about how he did a great homage to the Superman cartoons of the old days, but at this point I'm just ranting.
Okay, last example: The Real Ghostbusters cartoon. The cartoon was running before there was a second movie and then, when the new movie came out, they INCORPORATED the changes into the storyline! You've got to put your ego aside to do that. You've got to love the license and respect the fans to do that...even if you think the second movie was weak.
And oh yeah, J. Michael Straczynski (writer of Bablyon 5) wrote a bunch of the episodes, including the Collect Call of Cthulhu episode.
Rant off.
I think the reasoning behind how they were able to do that involves the copyrights limiting exactly how Cthulhu is depicted. IIRC, Chaosium, for example, holds the copyright to Cthulhu in RPGs, and August Derleth's publishing company (can't recall its name) has the copyright for stories involving Cthulhu, but no one has the copyright on Cthulhu cartoons, so the Great Old One can be depicted there.
Yeah, the Call of Cthulhu license is completely wacky. But that's okay, Straczynski did an excellent job with what he did -- in a "kid's" cartoon!
Sorry, I'll stop breathing heavy and retreat to my corner now, I'm passionate about doing a license right and it bugs me when any creative effort is hampered by politics with the license. Which is why I wish ArthurQ a lot of luck, it's a loooong road to travel.
