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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kinneus" data-source="post: 5069055" data-attributes="member: 48215">I'm a video game fanatic, and believe in video games as an art form. Therefore, I often borrow heavily from them. Bioware's Dragon Age was a great game, though probably not the best ever. It had three aspects I really admired: 1) A close-open-close campaign design, a standard for their games. Basically, you start off in your origin story, where you're more or less 'railroaded' into joining the Grey Wardens. From there, you have three places you have to go to. You can choose to go to them in any order, but you have to go to all three eventually. Afterward, it's on to the grand finale. It's nice because it allows at least the illusion of choice to players, but it also lets you know roughly ahead of time what you have to prepare. When you know that the players will be visiting the Dwarven Keep, the High Mountain, and the Elven Wood at some point, you know where to focus your world-building efforts. You don't know when they'll see your work and fight your monsters, but you know they eventually will.It's a few baby steps away from that deadly sin of railroading, heh. 2) It just has a cool premise of a cyclical 'Blight' that sweeps over the continent every so often. I liked the idea of an unstoppable horde that everybody knows is coming, but is unable to stop. In Dragon Age, the 'Blight' is basically a bunch of Tolkien orc rip-offs lead by a dragon, which I found lackluster. I changed it zombies for my campaign, because let's face it, zombies are cool. And a fantasy zombie Armageddon is something I've wanted to do for a while. 3) The moral choices in the game are just fantastic. Usually, when a game tries to do good or evil, it comes off very black and white. "Do you want to save the village, or murder puppies?" It's really pretty lame. Dragon Age was great about providing you actual moral quandries to answer. My favorite concerned the golems. Golems are massively powerful creatures in this universe, comparable to an entire squad of soldiers in one body. But in order to create a golem, a dwarf must be sacrificed. Ideally, only willing volunteers would be turned into golems, but everybody suspects that, in times of dire need, people might be 'drafted' into service. The main character is given the choice to destroy the artifact that allows the creation of golems. And it's a really tough choice! On the one hand, it's immoral to kill dwarves to create golems. However, what if a dwarf is willing to make that sacrifice for his people? Shouldn't he or she be allowed to? Also, just because this power was abused in the past doesn't mean it will be abused in the future. Morality aside, is it really a good idea to destroy the dwarven people's greatest weapon when they're faced with the very real threat of extinction at the hands of the Blight? Also, there's the simple fact that this is a one-of-a-kind artifact, the likes which will never be seen again. Is it really a good idea to destroy it just because you don't understand it, just because you don't like its ramifications? It's a fascinating moral question! And while moral grey area isn't the best for every decision of every campaign (we all like to unequivocably 'be the hero' sometimes), I think it's great for mine. I'll definitely let players know ahead of time that 'unaligned' is the recommended alignment, heh. Also, I was just recently inspired by Baldur's Gate again. In it, the main plot makes great use of dopplegangers, as the main character discovers that they've infilitrated a surprising number of organizations and societies. In my 'Blighted' campaign world, a major theme will be all sentient people scrambling for shelter in the face of the coming Blight. Sometimes, they will resort to some pretty terrible things in order to make sure they and their families are safe. Observing how Baldur's Gate made use of the dopplegangers gave me a great idea for a side quest. The PCs are forced by adverse weather conditions to take shelter in a backwoods town. As soon as they arrive, they're greeted by the sight of an angry mob subduing a gnome. They overhear that the gnome has been accused of murdering his wife, and will be hanged. The gnome swears he's innocent, and begs the PCs for help. If the PCs try to intervene, he finds that the town guard is unusually cold toward them. "This is none of your concern," they'll be told. "You're welcome to trade at our general store or spend the night at our inn, but you are welcome nowhere else in this town." If they choose to take shelter at the inn (and they likely will, due to the afore-mentioned bad weather conditions), they'll be flagged down by a terrified-looking halfling. The halfling will be very anxious, casting looks over his shoulder, and tell the PCs that the town has been infiltrated by some weird cult. He'll claim that almost everyone in town is a member, and those who haven't joined are being killed. Those who join are utterly transformed, seeming cold and distant to people they've been friends with for years. The halfling, who is wealthy, will beg the PCs to help him escape, or put an end to the cult. Naturally, after some investigation, the PCs discover that it isn't a 'cult' at all, but an extended family of dopplegangers that have moved in. Worrying that they're unable to withstand the Blight alone, the dopplegangers killed a few select members of the community and assumed their identities. But, naturally, a few of the murders were discovered... which forced the dopplegangers to kill even more people, and assume even more identities apiece. Small-sized humanoids, such as halflings and gnomes, can't be mimicked by dopplegangers, so they had to come up with other reasons for killing them off, ie. slaying the gnome woman and framing her husband for the murder. The PCs have a choice. If they expose the dopplegangers and confront them for their crimes, the village will quite literally fall apart. The few innocents left will have no place to take shelter when the Blight comes. Of course, if they just leave the dopplegangers to their work, it's highly likely that they'll collapse the infrastructure of the town themselves, with a handful of dopplegangers struggling to represent the entire town's population. The town will need some sort of fortification that will allow it to withstand assault from the Blight even with very few soldiers defending it... maybe a magical wall of some type? I haven't hammered out all the details yet. But, basically, it lets me combine the 'moral quandry' elements of Dragon Age with the 'dopplegangers are friggin' creepy' elements of Baldur's Gate, throw in some Invasion of the Body-Snatchers stuff for good measure, and get a pretty sweet sidequest out of it. There's some talented writers and designers making video games today, and I'm not above mining them for source material.</blockquote>

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