Movie themed campaigns

[MasterMercury]

I’m writing a campaign for my little siblings right now. I’ve done a few with them previously, and the one they’ve liked the most was kind-of blatantly based off of Wizard of Oz. So, I’m trying my luck with another movie campaign, this one based off of Frozen.

I’m just curious if anyone else has made campaigns or little adventures based off of movies, how they worked out for you, and how you balanced the movie and D&D lore.

I’m debating if I want to make Christof a ranger with an animal companion or a shape-shifting Druid.

[Blackhawk748]

I did a twisted version of Its the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown (think Robot Chicken style). Linus had gone mad and was a Cleric of the Great Pumpkin and the PCs needed to go stop him, fighting through an army of plant monsters.

[ElevenSided Die]

I once, many any years ago, played in an Alice in Wonderland inspired game. It was a very long time ago, so I've forgotten the specifics...as I recall it, it was rather in the same style as American McGee's Alice, though it preceded that game by more than a decade. The standard D&D roles fit quite nicely with the theme; I believe I played a druid, who was not at all happy with the distortion and corruption that was blighting the landscape.

[Honest Tiefling]

I’m debating if I want to make Christof a ranger with an animal companion or a shape-shifting Druid.

Kirstoff is a guy who travels around in the wilderness with an animal sidekick. I think ranger wins hands down.

Might I suggest also using material from Tangled? (Technically, there is a cameo that suggests they might be in the same world). That way, you are keeping to the tone of the movie, since both are Disney films, but you have a bit more material and perhaps throw your players for a loop.

Also, I want to see a Gothel vs. Elsa throwdown.

[Slipperychicken]

I did a twisted version of Its the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown (think Robot Chicken style). Linus had gone mad and was a Cleric of the Great Pumpkin and the PCs needed to go stop him, fighting through an army of plant monsters.

So you got a chance to use this great pumpkin statblock? https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxK...k5ZWRmZmM/view

[JAL_1138]

The trouble with movie-themed campaigns is that somebody will know the plot and try to jump the rails the minute they catch on.

Spoiler: spoiler-filled examples

Show

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? "Your father's old associate Donovan enters your office—" "I shoot him, because he's secretly a Nazi."

Frozen? "The charming Hans asks you to danc—" "I stab him, because he's secretly plotting to assassinate me."

The Godfather? "You have just returned from the war, and it's the day of your sister's wedding—" "I tell my sister not to go through with the wedding, and tell my father not to trust Solozzo or Don Barzini, and warn him Carlo, his soon-to-be son-in-law, and Paulie, his driver, are on Barzini's payroll."

Etc., etc., so on and so forth.

Star Trek once even had a "holodeck goes crazy" episode (why do they even keep that thing around?!) as a result of Data jumping straight to the solution on too many Sherlock Holmes simulations, because he had all the Arthur Conan Doyle stories memorized.

The Spoony One may be a contentious figure in gaming circles, but he had a video addressing this problem and how he solved it for a Babylon-5 RPG that was actually pretty good. The players and their characters completely replace the canon heroes, or can at least take over as the main heroes if the canon ones are still there, and everything else is alternate-universe from that point on. A character who's well-known as a villain from the series might be just an encyclopedia salesman now, for all the players know (and, importantly, they're told this at the outset). That way they can't jump the plot, and that guy—you know that guy (whom I'll admit to being on occasion) can't say "but wait, at this point in the series chronology, So-And-So would have been doing XYZ, not ABC, because in Episode 12 and the novel Whatever it says..." and whatnot.

Another option is the side story. Major canon characters (and plotlines to an extent) simply do not appear because your characters are elsewhere doing other things. You don't blow up the Death Star because you're on Nar Shadaa collecting bounties for Hutt crime lords; you don't destroy the One Ring because you're in Dale in the north working with the dwarves of the Iron Hills to repel the Orc invasions; you don't try to beat Belloch and the Nazis to the Ark of the Covenant because you're in an ancient Roman territory looking for the Spear of Destiny. Spoony talks about a Star Wars game getting completely derailed by a cameo from Darth Vader, wherein the players drop everything else and try to kill him, because he's a major villain and they saw it as a chance to be epic and/or rewrite canon history. That kind of change to the film plots not being the problem (see alternative continuity above), but rather the abandonment of everything else in the campaign in order to do it. The side-story can work in something with a big enough setting—it's pretty much the foundation for the various incarnations of Star Wars RPGs in general (although they do often have stats for canon characters and plot points like the Death Star in case of alternate continuity games instead) or games like Call of Cthulhu (you rarely ever play through the exact plot of a published Lovecraft story)—but it can fall apart if there's not enough source material and the characters end up playing second-fiddle to canon characters and the main plot; it's better to go with alternate-continuity instead in that case.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

It wasn't best known as a movie when I ran my game - but I ran a Lord of the Rings-based Star Wars game, set in the latter Republic days before the Empire.

• The One Ring became a Sith Holocron that promised awesome powers (if I recall rightly, the bearer could use it to personally hyperspace to places through the "Dark Veil")
• Sauron was replaced by my personal take on Darth Bane, who was forming as a Sith Shade.
• Mordor was a barren volcanically active planet orbiting a dark star (a brown dwarf - giving out enough heat to warm the planet, but hardly any light).
• Gandalf and Saruman were Jedi masters, and Rivendell was the Jedi Council.
• The Misty Mountains were replaced by a stellar nebular - hyperspacing through it was very tough due to all the shifting matter.
• Moria was a planet with the abandoned ruins of a civilisation who made a star-gate that could jump through the nebula...

... and so on.

The players didn't notice.

[JAL_1138]

It wasn't best known as a movie when I ran my game - but I ran a Lord of the Rings-based Star Wars game, set in the latter Republic days before the Empire.

• The One Ring became a Sith Holocron that promised awesome powers (if I recall rightly, the bearer could use it to personally hyperspace to places through the "Dark Veil")
• Sauron was replaced by my personal take on Darth Bane, who was forming as a Sith Shade.
• Mordor was a barren volcanically active planet orbiting a dark star (a brown dwarf - giving out enough heat to warm the planet, but hardly any light).
• Gandalf and Saruman were Jedi masters, and Rivendell was the Jedi Council.
• The Misty Mountains were replaced by a stellar nebular - hyperspacing through it was very tough due to all the shifting matter.
• Moria was a planet with the abandoned ruins of a civilisation who made a star-gate that could jump through the nebula...

... and so on.

The players didn't notice.

Also a good way to borrow inspiration. Translated to another setting and sufficiently altered, films (and shows, novels, comics, etc.) can be great sources of material. I don't know that I'd call them "themed" games, but it definitely can work, and can work beautifully.

As long as nobody catches on and jumps the plot, or finds something the translation to another setting causes to be a plot hole.

I'm curious as to why, in this instance, if they were tasked to destroy a Holocron, they didn't just chuck the thing into the nearest star or black hole (there's a big cluster of black holes near Kessel called "the Maw" if they can't find one elsewhere). Doesn't matter how powerful a force-user you are, nothing leaves a black hole (except Hawking radiation but that's weeeeird stuff, and may not technically leave the black hole so much as be the product of extreme gravity creating a particle-antiparticle pair near/outside the event horizon in which the antiparticle falls into the black hole and annihilates some mass in it while the normal particle doesn't, such that the black hole only appears to emit a particle even though nothing actually escaped from within the event horizon). And even if they don't go for a black hole, it isn't likely a holocron is going to a) survive at all and b) be recoverable from the innards of an ordinary main-sequence star (one of which is presumably near the planet where they acquire the holocron), if pitching it into a volcano or into a brown dwarf (whichever one they did) would also suffice to destroy it.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

...

I'm curious as to why, in this instance, if they were tasked to destroy a Holocron, they didn't just chuck the thing into the nearest star or black hole (there's a big cluster of black holes near Kessel called "the Maw" if they can't find one elsewhere). Doesn't matter how powerful a force-user you are, nothing leaves a black hole (except Hawking radiation but that's weeeeird stuff, and may not technically leave the black hole so much as be the product of extreme gravity creating a particle-antiparticle pair near/outside the event horizon in which the antiparticle falls into the black hole and annihilates some mass in it while the normal particle doesn't, such that the black hole only appears to emit a particle even though nothing actually escaped from within the event horizon). And even if they don't go for a black hole, it isn't likely a holocron is going to a) survive at all and b) be recoverable from the innards of an ordinary main-sequence star (one of which is presumably near the planet where they acquire the holocron), if pitching it into a volcano or into a brown dwarf (whichever one they did) would also suffice to destroy it.

Well, in my take on SW, the Force totally transcends space/time - hence why Ben was able to detect the destruction of Alderaan instantly while in hyperspace (arguably another dimension / plane / universe / whatever) - so the Force Shade in the Holocron could totally escape a black hole.
The One Holocron - containing untold Dark Energy coupled to a Shade of Bane's power - could only be unmade in the Dark Energy collector where it was first made, or the Shade would be released and reunite with Bane, or go do stuff on its own accord - either way, it's bad.

Of course, we really shouldn't get too technical with genuine science in a game setting in which suns are literally sucked into a planet's core in order to power superweapons. The main reason that it had to be destroyed in the facility where it was made was because that'd be cool.

[JAL_1138]

Well, in my take on SW, the Force totally transcends space/time - hence why Ben was able to detect the destruction of Alderaan instantly while in hyperspace (arguably another dimension / plane / universe / whatever) - so the Force Shade in the Holocron could totally escape a black hole.
The One Holocron - containing untold Dark Energy coupled to a Shade of Bane's power - could only be unmade in the Dark Energy collector where it was first made, or the Shade would be released and reunite with Bane, or go do stuff on its own accord - either way, it's bad.

Ah. That works then. I've been away from Star Wars for a while; my understanding was that Holocrons were purely-technological devices, albeit often keyed to be operable only by Force-sensitive individuals. Fancy, non-skull-shaped mimirs, basically—not repositories for spirits. A star or black hole will do the job for that. But chuck a Force Ghost into the mix and require some plot-device to destroy the Force Ghost, not just the fancy encyclopedia housing it, and it's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

Of course, we really shouldn't get too technical with genuine science in a game setting in which suns are literally sucked into a planet's core in order to power superweapons. The main reason that it had to be destroyed in the facility where it was made was because that'd be cool.

Getting too technical about fictional settings is part of the fun. Like aiming a hijacked ship at a planet, turning off the safety-cutoffs of the hyperdrive engines, accelerating it to a sufficiently-high fraction of c without actually getting to FTL speeds and punching through to Hyperspace (so as to avoid the question of how normal matter and hyperspace mass-shadows interact, if at all), and turning an ordinary bulk freighter full of tungsten into a weapon an order of magnitude more powerful than the Death Star, destroying a planet so thoroughly that every individual proton in the rapidly-expanding cloud of plasma where a world used to be is moving so blindingly fast that it carries the same kinetic energy as a Major League fastball, one of which will eventually be detected millions of years later on a blue-green planet orbiting an unremarkable yellow star in an outer spiral arm of a galaxy far, far away and be dubbed "the "Oh my God!" particle."

[Bastian Weaver]

The trouble with movie-themed campaigns is that somebody will know the plot and try to jump the rails the minute they catch on.

If they're doing it with some good role-playing, great, everyone has fun. If they're doing it badly, then they're bad players, bad! And it's not the campaign's fault. Or so I suppose.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

...
Getting too technical about fictional settings is part of the fun. Like aiming a hijacked ship at a planet, turning off the safety-cutoffs of the hyperdrive engines, accelerating it to a sufficiently-high fraction of c without actually getting to FTL speeds and punching through to Hyperspace (so as to avoid the question of how normal matter and hyperspace mass-shadows interact, if at all), and turning an ordinary bulk freighter full of tungsten into a weapon an order of magnitude more powerful than the Death Star, destroying a planet so thoroughly that every individual proton in the rapidly-expanding cloud of plasma where a world used to be is moving so blindingly fast that it carries the same kinetic energy as a Major League fastball, one of which will eventually be detected millions of years later on a blue-green planet orbiting an unremarkable yellow star in an outer spiral arm of a galaxy far, far away and be dubbed "the "Oh my God!" particle."

Actually, I'd be inclined to say that your spaceship smacks into the planet and goes crunch / boom, just leaving a fairly big crater, similar to if a plane had crashed - 'cause Newton's momentum and Einstein's relativity clearly don't work like that in Star Wars.

Anyway, this is off-topic! Back to the OP's question:

I also nicked Watership Down and turned it into a Star Wars game - away on the Outer Rim, a Force-sensitive PC had a premonition that their planet was going to be destroyed, and led a rag-tag fleet of refugees away to find a new place to settle...

My players: "Hold on, this just Battlestar Galactica!"
Me: "Oh, yeah."

[JAL_1138]

Actually, I'd be inclined to say that your spaceship smacks into the planet and goes crunch / boom, just leaving a fairly big crater, similar to if a plane had crashed - 'cause Newton's momentum and Einstein's relativity clearly don't work like that in Star Wars.

It's hard to say they definitely don't. FTL in SW only works due to the presence of an alternate "dimension" (which bears at least a passing resemblance to brane cosmology in string theory, particularly given that gravity in realspace has some effect on hyperspace, as gravity affecting all branes is used in brane cosmology to explain the relative weakness of gravity in comparison to nuclear forces and electromagnetism), which preserves the impossibility of FTL speed in realspace.

Ships require constant thrust to achieve constant velocity, and behave like aerial vehicles, which seems to violate the physics of space travel as we know them, but that could be due to the inertial dampeners that keep rapid acceleration and high g-forces from liquefying the pilots; these could also have the effect of creating a sort of "drag" resulting in the behavior we see rather than requiring entirely new physics to explain the flight mechanics.

De-orbiting asteroids as planet-killers has been done in a couple of EU books I think (Thrawn used the threat of it to stop traffic to and from Coruscant), so at least some high-speed impact effects apply, and there was apparently a case in the later EU of exactly that—a planet(oid—could have been a moon rather than a planet, I forget) getting wrecked quite badly when a ship hit it at near-lightspeed due specifically to malfunctioning hyperdrive safeties, though presumably not at as high a fraction of c since the planet(oid) was "merely" rendered uninhabitable and partly hollowed out IIRC.

Anyway, this is off-topic!

This is an internet forum. Nothing will ever stay on topic. Tangents galore!

[Blackhawk748]

So you got a chance to use this great pumpkin statblock? https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxK...k5ZWRmZmM/view

Nope, i took a giant squid and turned it into a plant, more or less.