ElizabethanPunk

[the_gneech]

During my college years, I ran a Fantasy HERO campaign in a setting that took a lot of elements from Tolkien, but was in the early stages of an Elizabethan-style era. There were still elves (mostly in seclusion), sorcerers, and the occasional troll or magic sword, but there were also flintlocks, fencing schools, and enormous hoop skirts (among the right crowd). The richest district of the Big Campaign City even had gas streetlamps. Magic was generally not something the players mucked around with, as it tended to be pretty Lovecraftian in nature.

It was a bit of a mess, but I thought it was a pretty interesting setting. 7th Sea came along later and did some similar things, although I felt they kinda went overboard with the “This nation = England, that nation = Spain” thing. (If you’re going to have that thinly-disguised a real world connection, why not just go historical?)

Anyway, after my mini-rant about steampunk yesterday, my brain was apparently chewing on the matter, because I woke up with an interesting germ of an idea that involved taking that particular setting, ratcheting it forward a few hundred years, and bringing to the forefront a minor motif that I always thought warranted more attention but never really managed to do much with. Of course, there are problems: as I say, the setting was a bit of a mess and I’d want to clean it up, and the motif I have in mind is something that is wearing a bit thin these days, even if this is a relatively unique spin on it. (Sorry for the vagueness, I just don’t want to show my hand too early if I decide to go with it.)

The biggest problem of course, is my old enemy, “Premise without a plot.” I don’t have a main character, I don’t have a storyline, all I have is a background and a few supporting characters who need heroes to support. I sometimes wonder if thirty years of GMing roleplaying games has trained me to think this way. In the early days, I kept coming up with characters and wanting to be able to play them — leading to the dreaded “GM’s player character” syndrome — so I deliberately taught myself to think about everything but the hero. These days, trying to come up with both a hero AND a story seems to make part of my creativity balk.

Ah well, into the file of story ideas it goes, at least until something more comes to me. Meanwhile, I’m going to try to keep focused on the projects I’ve already got going, unless this one starts being interesting enough to knock one of those aside. Honestly, I’d like for any of my current projects to excite me that much. I’m having a serious problem with “Meh.”

-The Gneech

Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Maybe you just need to reassess the conventional idea of "the hero".

In the TV Tropes entry on Dreamworks' Road to El Dorado, "...after seeing so many animated features whose heroes were upstaged by memorable sidekicks, [the producers] decided to just cut out the typical "hero" characters and center the film on Those Two Guys in the first place." The result is a hoot, reckoning back not just to the Hope and Crosby "Road to..." flicks, but the kind of rollicking, picaresque sword and sorcery tales that starred the likes of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.

This drops back to my recurrent insistence that there's a difference between "Sword and Sorcery" and "High Fantasy", and that D&D was built to be the former but keeps trying to be the latter. for Sword & Sorcery, you don't NEED the Big Quest With A Beginning, a Middle and an End. You don't NEED the Campbellian Hero. You need a couple of quirky characters who are interesting enough to hold the reader's interest, and you need a setting that provides just enough trouble to keep them falling in and out of it.

And us NeverNever fans know you can pull THAT off.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Well, in this particular context, by "hero" I mean protagonist. B&G are the "heroes" of the Fictionlets, for instance.

Thanks for the kind words, nonetheless! :)

-TG