Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig

[the_gneech]

Ice storm here; but this time, I had work to bring home yesterday so I can work from here and not have to use up all of my vacation time. But who cares about work, when there's writing to be done?

Had a bit of a chat last night with katayammma about Michael Macbeth, but didn't get any real interesting breakthroughs.

What I need, really, is just an interesting spark -- an original idea, a twist ... some kind of underlying idea that the story is about. Like the guy with the pocketwatch that turns squirrels into gold [1]... some kind of an idea that works, but is from out in left field somewhere.

While pondering MM, my gaze happened to wander across my Mage: The Ascension books, and my mind flirted with that for a bit.

As you may or may not know, I wrote some stuff for Mage back in its earlier days. The line developer, Phil Brucato, was one of the players in my Richmond gaming group, and he brought one of the first copies up and ran a little playtest session with Laurie and me, which was fun and seemed to have a lot of promise.

Key word being "seemed." All of the potential coolness of Mage got rapidly sucked out by the inherent crappiness of the "World of Darkness" setting and the whole White Wolf Games mindset; within a matter of months Mage was just spitting out the same "technology is evil, angst is good" garbage that made Werewolf so annoying. Almost everything I wrote for Mage systematically had the neat and interesting ideas yanked out, to make room for more of that junk, which then had my name put on it.

Bitter? Eh, maybe a little. :P

Anyway, that's all ancient history now (in as much as 1996 can be considered ancient), and the thought I had last night was, "Y'know, there was stuff you liked about that first pass at Mage, before it was crap. And since WW never used any of the good stuff, it's still yours ... if you can dredge it up out of your memory and build something new out of it, it'd be like a pheonix rising from the ashes!"

All very well and good, but then the "Hold on a minute..." part of my brain said, "Wait, wait, hold on. Modern day wizards? Where have we heard this before? Are you sure this isn't just an attempt by your subconscious to plagiarize Harry Potter and claim it's your own idea?"

I dunno, is it? I've been using the basic "fantasy elements in the modern world" idea for a decade with NeverNever, and really Michael Macbeth is that same basic premise ... so unless I start writing "Larry Potter and the Muggles," I don't think I have to worry about that too much. But at the same time, let's not push things, eh?

The main advantage that going all the way into explicit wizardry would have over Michael Macbeth is my "let go and jump" problem. Magi will naturally encounter all sorts of wild things; Michael can only encounter things that would be right for Michael, and those things have been eluding my imagination. (Michael could not, for instance, encounter a unicorn, childproofed or otherwise. It wouldn't fit. A mage might very well be able to.)

Ah well. Have to let my subconscious chew on it some more. I need to get back to work anyhow. :)

-The Gneech

[1] And no, I can't use that idea; I stole it from "Freakazoid."

Comments

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

The really interesting thing is that the 'special group' idea and the idea of unseen others working on some things even made it into a Dr. Suess book. The Butter Battle Book which was about the arms race had a bit near the end where the ultimate weapon (whatever it was named) was something that the "backroom boys" came up with.