One of the fun things about building Homebrew settings is the ability to smash genres together and see what pretty patterns show up. It’s both an intellectual exercise and a creative break. There’s a refreshing amount of freedom that comes with being able to cherry pick the best of things you love and slapping them together.
I suppose the best examples come from published settings. Exalted, Deadlands and Shadowrun are great examples of Genre Mashups, with Exalted pulling on Western Mythology with an Eastern Aesthetic. Deadlands takes the Western setting and infuses it with a heck of a lot of Horror tropes. Shadowrun smashes Cyberpunk Dystopia with Fantasy Creatures. Heck, even the lesser known Hellas is essentially Greeks in Spaaaaace!
What this provides GMs is the ability to take 2 great tastes and see if they taste great together. From a play perspective, one has the advantage of taking tropes that are familiar and easy to relate to from 2 distinct genres and put them together in a fashion that is easy to understand, and remarkably easy to play in. Everyone knows what a hacker is like, and how Elves usually appear arrogant and aloof… so we pretty much have an idea of how an Elven hacker should act.
While I’m working on my next Deadlands session, I’m also idly running a few possible Genre / Setting Mashups that might make for something interesting to run. I don’t have a lot just yet, but some of the things that have come up in my brain are:
- Space Opera / Wuxia – In a time of Warring Star Systems, wandering swordsmen, cunning sages and wily courtiers seek their fortunes to the backdrop of the stars and in massive Chinese-architecture inspired Capital Ships, all of which center their navigations upon the Imperial Capital: Chung Kuo, or the Middle Kingdom.
- Pulp / Supernatural Horror – A series heavily inspired by the brilliant Hellboy and BPRD series by Mike Mignola, a team of misfits and strangely talented individuals are gathered to investigate, and occasionally stop dangerous Supernatural activity. Backed up with massive amounts of research into real world superstition, magical theory and monsters.
- Noir / Fantasy – Forget the idyllic fantasy cities that resemble Belle’s hometown in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. The roads stink, there are beggars everywhere and disease is a very real threat, but that’s not your problem is it? As a guild of “adventurers” you’re little more than thugs and investigators for hire, called on to do the odd spelunking job or detective work that the City Watch can’t be bothered with.
I’m certain there’s more that’s hidden away, bouncing around in my brain. But putting them up here on the blog won’t hurt either, who knows, I might inspire someone to run these combinations…
Noir/fantasy, as a concept, has been hanging around the blogosphere a lot in the past few weeks, and I have to admit the idea is both intriguing and incredibly attractive.
Personally, I’ve been working on a early industrialization (with a little bit of pulp on top)/fantasy mashup, sticking some apocalypse on top to achieve a strange, point-of-light-like world. I’m very eager to see it work in-game.
Mashups are the best. I’ve never been one for classic settings, myself.
And Wuxia/space opera, God yes.
Hey Kimyou!
Yeah, I realized that Noir/Fantasy seems to strike a common chord between gaming blogs recently as well. There’s a lot of potential for this mashup since it doesn’t really require a lot of change in rules as much as it is a shift in GMing tone and attitude towards what adventurers normally “do”.
I’m glad to hear about your early industrial age / pulp / fantasy / doomsday mashup a “Point-of-Light” approach is certainly a great way to weigh in a setting without being bogged down by too much world building minutiae.
The Wuxia / Space Opera idea is burning a hole in my head and I’m actually looking at the possibility of running this in HERO or Savage Worlds once I’ve got my brain wrapped around how the setting would work. My current list of reads for this include Qin: the Warring States and Fading Suns…
Space Opera / Wuxia?
… Star Wars.
In a time of Warring Star Systems, = Republic vs Empire
wandering swordsmen, = Jedi
cunning sages = More Jedi, but older
and wily courtiers = Amidala, I guess
seek their fortunes to the backdrop of the stars and in massive Chinese-architecture inspired Capital Ships, = Well, the circle is a favored shape of orientals since it represents equality and eternity. (e.g. Death Star)
all of which center their navigations upon the Imperial Capital: Chung Kuo, or the Middle Kingdom. = I SEE WHAT U DID THAR
…and you have to admit, Jabba does look a bit oriental….
Hi, sorry if this is completely random, but I’d like to ask where you buy d10? I’m looking for a whole bunch of d10, and I suppose you’d know where to buy.
Hobbes and Landes / Neutral Grounds are so expensive. P50 for each. Thanks dude.
Hey there Dale,
I’m afraid Neutral Grounds has pretty much stopped bringing in reasonably priced D10′s. I got a whole bunch of them when the Nova Fontana Closing Sale happened in Virra Mall. How many do you need? Maybe we can work something out? They’re mostly flat blues and reds though with white numbers. Salvaged dice from all these old boxed sets they used to sell there.
Viking Space Opera Supernatural Horor mecha!
Travel in dark matter powered longboats to plannets in far away galaxies! Every plannet encounted is sacked, burned, raped and pillaged (not in any particular order)! The slaves captured are offered to their cthulu-esque gods like:
1. Yog-ThOdin the blind mute one, He who sees though raven eyes
2. Cthorlu-He who sleeps under asgard
3. Lhockee-The many eyed many tounged tall tales teller
The other plannets fight the space vikings using Giant robots similar to Cthulu Tech.
I’ve been wanting for a while now to do what I call in my head “Heavy Metal Space Opera”… I’m thinking huge starships, space marines, crazy alien races, flashy psionics, bigass lasers, bizarre planets, and over the top heroes. Last GenCon we played a game that was basically “Sky Pirates of Jupiter”, that was pretty cool- we ended up battling over the massive energy reservoir at the planet’s core that was holding all the heavy gases that make it up together. I’m pretty sure the game ended with Jupiter collapsing in on our heads. Good times.
Hey oberonthefool,
the idea of Heavy Metal Opera intrigues me. I can totally see heavy metal fantasy (with lots of Frank Frazetta Imagery to go along with it) but Space Opera is new to my sensibilities. Do you have any notes on just how you’d differentiate it from standard Space Opera stuff or is it an attitude thing?
Noir/Fantasy is a genre mashup that the Eberron campaign setting for DnD is said to portray in its setting and pulls it off quite nicely I must say.
My fav mashup has to be sci-fi/fantasy (re: Shadowrun)
Hm. Good question, Pointyman (oh pointy man, oh, pointy pointy… er… nevermind)
Have you ever seen or heard of an old musical called WARP! ? (Don’t bother searching the net, there’s nothing on it, I only know about it from seeing an old poster in a theater I work at sometimes). Or maybe something like Colleen Doran’s A Distant Soil. Star Wars is actually pretty close, only… either a little too much metal or a little too much space, I can’t decide.
Maybe Chris Moeller’s Iron Empires? Space Armor, psychic powers, ships with cool names like “Starlance” and “Voidskimmer”, and crazy weapons like gauss-harpoons.
Flash Gordon crossed with Warhammer 40k.
I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore.
Oji the Section Chief.
Salaryman that saves the solar system against alien invaders with the power of ROCK!!
That would be from the Black Heaven anime, iirc?
Yep!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Heaven
“You are my instigator
You are my aggravator
You are my space invader”