Designing a character by using lyrics from a song

Adventures, no. Characters, absolutely!

Though I've never played any of them, there are many MANY songs I can think of that would translate beautifully into characters. A few that immediately come to mind:

The Lady of Shallot by Loreena McKennitt (based on the poem of the same name by W.B. Yeats). a half-elvin, or elvin, or human sorceress holed up in her tower watching the Arthurian world go by in her magic mirror but never experiencing life for herself...
Champagne Tastes by Eartha Kitt: a gold-digging rogue/seductress character with very high end taste/style. Could also be generated as an aristocratic maiden (of whatever class you like) looking to nab for a rich husband.
Rhiannon and/or Seven Wonders by Fleetwood Mac. Again elvin, half-elvin, human sorceress/mage character. Rhiannon, of course, directly taken from the mythology. The character from Seven Wonders would be more of an avid "traveler" personality looking to find/experience to "wonders" of the game world.
The Passenger by Siouxie the Banshees. Another rogue type, but I could see it as a ranger or other fighting woman ("She rides and she rides" ;) from countryside to countryside searching for some man...so, could be a ranger/bounty hunter kind of character.

I did actually create a recurring NPC (idea was inspired off of an ooooold Madonna song, "Dress you up (in my love).") A bard/songstress character, an elf, who was, essentially THE "pop star" in the world who presented huge elaborate concerts with a huge road crew of minstrels of all sorts of instruments, mages/illusionists and other bards to generate lighting, fog and phantasmal effects during her performances. Protecting her from a kidnapping plot (and hunting down/bringing to justice said kidnappers) was a fun small urban side adventure.

--Steel Dragons
 

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I've never used song lyrics for a character but I have used different musicians as models for characters. Every character I've ever played has had a bit of Keith Richards or Darby Crash in them.
 

I've always thought Black Sabbath's Iron Man would make a wonderful plot for a sci-fi or post-apocolyptic game.

And I'd love to have a 1920's Call of Cthulhu game with mercenary-turned-zombie NPC after Warren Zevon's Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.

Recently we started a Dresden Files game and I wanted to make a White Court Vampire rock star with aspects based on song lyrics (from Bowie, the Stones, Elvis, AC/DC, etc.). Ultimately I went with a character closely tied to another player's character but I'm itching to eventually play that WCV character.
 

Sting: The Soul Cages

The boy child is locked in the fisherman's yard
There's a bloodless moon where the ocean died
A shoal of nightstars hang fire in the nets
And the chaos of cages where the crayfish lie

Where is the fisherman, where is the goat?
Where is the keeper in his carrion coat?
Eclipse on the moon when the dark bird flies
Where is the child with his father's eyes?

These are the soul cages

He's the king of the ninth world
The twisted son of the fog bells toll
In each and every lobster cage
A tortured human soul

These are the souls of broken factories
The subject slaves of the broken crown
The dead accounting of old guilty promises
These are the souls of the broken town

These are the soul cages

'I have a wager' the brave child spoke
The fisherman laughed, though disturbed at the joke
'You will drink what I drink but you must equal me
And if the drink leaves me standing,
A soul shall go free'

'I have here a cask of most magical wine
A vintage that blessed every ship in the line
It's wrung from the blood of the sailor's who died
Young white bodies adrift in the tide'

'And what's in it for me my pretty young thing?
Why should I whistle, when the caged bird sings?
If you lose a wager with the king of the sea
You'll spend the rest of forever in the cage with me'

These are the soul cages

A body lies open in the fisherman's yard
Like the side of a ship where the iceberg rips
One less soul in the soul cages
One last curse on the fisherman's lips

These are the soul cages

Swim to the light Swim to the light

He dreamed of the ship on the sea
It would carry his father and he
To a place they could never be found
To a place far away from this town
A Newcastle ship without coals
They would sail to the island of souls
 


I'd like to see someone base a character on this song:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEnlZbEDgow&feature=related]YouTube - The Price is Right, Cliffhangers Full Cue[/ame]
 


I've always thought Black Sabbath's Iron Man would make a wonderful plot for a sci-fi or post-apocolyptic game.

I did this once using the 2e psionics rules. Had a smallish city ruled by an evil psion who had defeted the "hero" in using some unusual powers while the other residents did nothing. When the party defeated the villian, the "hero" re-animated (he was a odd looking statue in the town square surrounded by a magnetic field) and started destroying the town and killing everybody. The PCs were floored and at a loss, not thier most successful adventure.

Also i ran a Ravenloft adventure based on "Home By the Sea" from Genisis.
 


Has anyone ever tried designing an adventure based on something like music before?

My wife and I wrote a 4-hour, 30+ person live-action game based on the works of Warren Zevon. So, Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner was a character. There were Werewolves from London, an Excitable Boy, and so on.
 

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