Chainsaws & Sorcery

[Bryan]

I have a vague idea for a setting and was wondering if anyone had any ideas on major elements that I'm overlooking or maybe a version of it exists as a game already and I just haven't seen it.

Most urban fantasy that I see goes with the premise of high fantasy in a modern setting but I've always liked Sword and Sorcery more. S&S in the modern day might be too contradictory, theme-wise but I think that it can be done. A lot of this is coming from eighties fantasy and/or horror movies such as Big Trouble in Little China, Golden Child, House 2: the Second Story and Evil Dead 2. There are also more modern influences like Drive Angry or Supernatural.

For a system, I'm thinking of either Savage Worlds or a modernized Pulp Cthulhu. Maybe Monster of the Week but I haven't really looked at that yet.

The basics that I have in mind are as follows;

1. At least as much horror as fantasy. Let's face it, S&S characters faced some scary ****; a lot of it Cthulhu-style. A good place to begin with the story elements for this setting would be horror movies as much as fantasy resources.

2. Magic is strange and unknowable. a lot of urban fantasy that I've seen treats magic like science that we don't understand yet. I'm more inclined towards a Cthulhu-esque route. Magic is bizarre and madness-inducing. Even practitioners have a very limited understanding of how it all works. There should also be very thin boundaries, if any boundaries at all between sorcery, psionics and weird science.

3. The old world intrudes upon the modern. Like Golden Child and Big Trouble in Little China, ancient cultures have powerful, often mystical influences just under the surface of modern society.

4. The player characters are human. I don't actually believe that S&S protagonists have to be human. First of all, I don't like concrete boundaries in genres. Secondly, there are examples of nonhuman S&S characters like Elric, who is basically a re-skinned elf. That being said, I explained before that the supernatural is meant to be bizarre and unknowable. The player characters are normal people who went through a life-altering story and are now living a life somewhat removed from normal society. Sort of like Jack Burton, Wang Chi, or Ash Williams after the credits rolled on BTiLC or Evil Dead 2. This is a setting where the alien raised by kind humans is going to be more Brightburn than Superman. I'm not absolutely firm on this but it would have to be one hell of a back story for me to allow a player to have a nonhuman character.

5. Sometimes there is no supernatural element. Most S&S stories included the supernatural but sometimes a warlord was just a warlord. The player characters are not necessarily monster hunters, traveling around and looking for something supernatural to kill. They're more like drifters who are pulled into a variety of adventures. It's just as easy for them to face purely human criminals or mercenaries as some unspeakable evil.

So that is about it. Any suggestions, comments or critiques are appreciated.

[noob]

Being more something than superman on anything but bruteforce is easy.
Superman is anthipathic, does not feels emotions at all except for anger and kills as many people as possible while pretending it was collateral damage.
Also Superman is quite stupid most of the time.
So being less evil that superman is trival.
Being more evil than superman on the other hand is hard: most people are not able to do that.

Sadly I can not find anything about the brightburn expression so I can not understand what it means: the web is polluted by a movie preventing me from finding what the adjective brightburn means.

[JNAProductions]

Being more something than superman on anything but bruteforce is easy.
Superman is anthipathic, does not feels emotions at all except for anger and kills as many people as possible while pretending it was collateral damage.
Also Superman is quite stupid most of the time.
So being less evil that superman is trival.
Being more evil than superman on the other hand is hard: most people are not able to do that.

Sadly I can not find anything about the brightburn expression so I can not understand what it means: the web is polluted by a movie preventing me from finding what the adjective brightburn means.

What superman are you talking about? Movie Supes?

[noob]

What superman are you talking about? Movie Supes?

The one in the latest series of movies which willingly crash his opponents in as many innocent civilians as possible.
I mean it is a plot point in the next movie that superman killed many of the employes of batman in one of the buildings in the scene where superman intentionally use zod as a blunt weapon to smash buildings in order to kill as many people as possible.(I mean if superman did not want to kill as many people as possible then superman would have bashed zod downwards instead of bashing it toward as many buildings as possible)
We also see that this superman only cares about his television image and will not do good things if it is not televised.
As an additional proof of the utter and complete lack of human emotions of that superman is that you can see in the movies that his face never took any expression and that he did not save his father while he could have done so without revealing his identity trivially and even if he had to actually reveal his identity if he was an human (in emotional terms) he would still have saved his father but he does not because superman is utterly unable to feel love toward an individual because superman is an evil alien monster.

[Bryan]

Being more something than superman on anything but bruteforce is easy.
Superman is anthipathic, does not feels emotions at all except for anger and kills as many people as possible while pretending it was collateral damage.
Also Superman is quite stupid most of the time.
So being less evil that superman is trival.
Being more evil than superman on the other hand is hard: most people are not able to do that.

Sadly I can not find anything about the brightburn expression so I can not understand what it means: the web is polluted by a movie preventing me from finding what the adjective brightburn means.

Brightburn is an upcoming horror movie that mimics the story of Superman, to the point of having the boy wear a makeshift cape, but with a horror twist. (Spoilers, I guess) A Midwestern married couple find an orphaned alien child and adopt him, much as the Kents did with Superman. Unfortunately, the alien boy is ostracized by the townspeople for being odd and the boy seems to have some pretty dark instincts. As near as I can tell from the trailers, the movie is about the boy's adopted mother slowly realizing that her child is a monster who is killing people.

The point that I was making was simply that if the characters meet an alien, they won't be benevolent or have an abundance of humanity.

[noob]

Brightburn is an upcoming horror movie that mimics the story of Superman, to the point of having the boy wear a makeshift cape, but with a horror twist. (Spoilers, I guess) A Midwestern married couple find an orphaned alien child and adopt him, much as the Kents did with Superman. Unfortunately, the alien boy is ostracized by the townspeople for being odd and the boy seems to have some pretty dark instincts. As near as I can tell from the trailers, the movie is about the boy's adopted mother slowly realizing that her child is a monster who is killing people.

The point that I was making was simply that if the characters meet an alien, they won't be benevolent or have an abundance of humanity.

So brightburn is identical to superman.(inhuman and without benevolence)
Heck arguably brighburn is probably more human than superman: brightburn goes as far as caring about being ostracized.
And a kid with powers doing horrible things is a rather normal thing it is just that in real life usually the kids are not powerful enough to do too bad things.
So this character is possibly more likely to grow to not be intensely evil than superman which grew to be evil and kill as many people as possible.(because this character is possibly more human than superman)

[Bryan]

Noob, I understand that I apparently triggered you with a throwaway sentence about a superhero but could you work out your issues with Superman elsewhere?

[Bohandas]

The use per day and/or direct mechanical penalties of magic need to go. The Evil Dead series was mentioned; in those movies the demons are summoned by a recording of a man transliterating an incantation, not even intendinn to cast it, and in the one of videogames (Fistful of Boomstick, IIRC) a statewide zombie outbreak is triggered when the same incantation is read over television.


Noob, I understand that I apparently triggered you with a throwaway sentence about a superhero but could you work out your issues with Superman elsewhere?

Its weird, usually that kind of tirade is about Spiderman rather than Superman.

[Bryan]

[QUOTE=Bohandas;23889219]The use per day and/or direct mechanical penalties of magic need to go. The Evil Dead series was mentioned; in those movies the demons are summoned by a recording of a man transliterating an incantation, not even intendinn to cast it, and in the one of videogames (Fistful of Boomstick, IIRC) a statewide zombie outbreak is triggered when the same incantation is read over television.

I realize it has been a minute but I think that in Evil Dead, the deadites were summoned by the guy reading the translation to the recorder. After he and his wife were dead, they went dormant until new victims showed up. They would have woken up and come after Ash and Linda (and the other three) regardless of whether the recording was played or not.

[Bohandas]

The use per day and/or direct mechanical penalties of magic need to go. The Evil Dead series was mentioned; in those movies the demons are summoned by a recording of a man transliterating an incantation, not even intendinn to cast it, and in the one of videogames (Fistful of Boomstick, IIRC) a statewide zombie outbreak is triggered when the same incantation is read over television.

I realize it has been a minute but I think that in Evil Dead, the deadites were summoned by the guy reading the translation to the recorder. After he and his wife were dead, they went dormant until new victims showed up. They would have woken up and come after Ash and Linda (and the other three) regardless of whether the recording was played or not.

Hmm, I think you may be right. The car incident happened frior to them playing the tape.

[Sam113097]

I really like this idea! The vast, isolated nature of much of America could be a great modern version of the wildlands of the Sword and Sorcery Genre, and you culd draw on a lot of sinister local myths. Have you read American Gods, by chance?