Thinking Ahead

[subplotkudzu]

 I know I still owe myself a GURPS character, but prep work for yesterday's Hufflepuff & Ravenclaw gave plus some crises at work took up too much time. I have noodled around with it, making some attempt to merge the Techo and Kinetic templates from GURPS Supers under the "where No Man Has Gone Before" lens, but GURPS is always so damn intimidating because of the breadth of unique options making me afraid I'll miss something vital. 

This post isn't about that, however. I just want to share a campaign concept for my next prospectus, which is still some long time away (I already know that after I finish the current six month stint it's back to Emirikol and, quite probably, Old Lives, Old Civilizations). But after reading the disappointing Two O'Clock Eastern Wartime I wanted to steal the setting, but no aspect of the story: 

Gone To Soldiers, Every One: It's a hard time for WBG, the coastal Maine radio station, but in 1942 it's a hard time for everyone. All the men of combat age have joined the army and the station is struggling to get by with a staff of older men, teens and women. It's a hardship that is crushing some but letting others blossom, and the station owner is audaciously trying to expand its offerings to keep creditors at bay. News has to be broken, radio dramas written and performed, and the airtime filled. Lurking in the background are spies and saboteurs, gangsters and gunmen, and the every present threats of a country at war. 

I love the idea on a conceptual level, but I'm not sure I have enough to really fill a 6 -9 episode arc. Part of it is that it's just not a story that is usually told in an RPG. I have a strong suspicion that it will take no more than a session or so for it to turn into a nazi-agent hunting expedition with little to no radio content, just because that's a more standard adventure/mystery format. 

Has anyone had real luck with smaller, more personal stories of business and personal growth as the core of a campaign rather than the frosting on an adventure/mystery cake? And if not, why is it that such stories work so well for other serial fiction but are tackled so seldom in this one? 

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

I think that there is real need for such lower-level or personal adventure stories in RPGs, where the bad guys aren't in the same league as a mad-man with a word-shaking threat.

I'm thinking of the villains in the old Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew or Rick Brant stories, where the bad guys are small fry industrial spies or gem smugglers or counterfeiters. Stories where you don't need someone of the caliber of Doc Savage or The Shadow to thwart, but still need to be dealt with with someone who can use their brains better than bullets.

In the movies you have A-list and then B-movies, films without the biggest budgets for scripts or actors or writers. Maybe there's room for B-adventures, where Joe Anybody can be the hero? This was one of the charms of Call of Cthulhu where even mundane scientists or cops or librarians, none with a lot of fancy combat skills or gadgets, could be the heroes.

As for your 'Radio Station at War" idea (I have the Dunning book but I haven't read it; why does it suck?) you may want to throw in such fun as the other players have to come up with some of the radio scripts by improving furiously (making it a game inside a game).

In the hokey but fun modern B-movie "The Radioland Murders" there's death afoot in another 1940's radio station on opening broadcast night you may want to check out for possible ideas. "Lady of Burlesque", while not set in a radio show but a Burlesque show, had a similar theme of death haunting a public venue where performances were going on, and some of the performers had to turn amateur detective to save their own necks.

I've also included some ideas you may find worth borrowing from my "Radio Heroes" pulp campaign write-up, listed at the bottom of my Pulp Avengers essay (http://www.fantasylibrary.com/lounge/pulpavengers.htm).

FREX, one idea from the above "Radio Heroes" campaign skeleton that I've always wanted to use was a radio show airing a blood and thunder radio serial pretending to be real. Unfortunately some folks in the listening audience in real trouble converge on the studio headquarters of the radio show begging for help from the very surprised persons airing the show. Naive villains thinking that the fictious radio hero(es) are also real and a possible threat to their plans would make preemptive strikes against the show, and as a result drag the PC heroes into bizarre plots that they would otherwise remain happily ignorant of.

::B::

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Another Rick Brant fan! Cool!

I started a campaign in that universe years ago, Spindrift Revisited, about teenage children of world-famous scientists at Spindrift a generation later. Two of the PCs were the children of Rick and of Tony Briotti; the other two were the daughter of a Taiwanese immigrant and a boy from rural Texas who was a lightning calculator. We had two episodes about remote geosensing in Texas oilfields and two about rhino poachers in Africa, and then two of the four players moved out of town and the campaign died, to my regret.

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

I've been a fan of the Rick Brant stories for ages, and I'm only missing a few in the series (The Flaming Mountain, The Flying Stingaree, The Veiled Raiders, Danger Below, and The Magic Talisman). I've always through this would be a great inspiration for a RPG.

Your idea above sounds interesting, but doesn't Rick get friendly with Janice 'Jan' Miller? And isn't Tony Briotti a *male* archeologist?

http://www.rickbrant.com/

If you like the Rick Brant stories, I really encourage you to track down another great 'lost' juvenile series, the Ken Holt books.

::B::

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Your idea above sounds interesting, but doesn't Rick get friendly with Janice 'Jan' Miller? And isn't Tony Briotti a *male* archeologist?

Geologist/archaeologist. And yes, of course. One of the PCs was the daughter of Rick and Jan Brant (née Miller); another was the son of Tony Briotti.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I meant to add that in the continuation that I had worked out, Rick's sister Barby had married Chahda rather than Scotty. Scotty had ended up signing up with JANIG and was now an international man of mystery; I meant to introduce him in some later storyline.

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

This sounds like a lot of fun. Did you look at the Jonny Quest TV series for further inspiration?

::B::

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Hadn't seen any significant amount of it, and back then I didn't own a VCR. I've read the comic book series, but I think that may have come later.

We had a nice distribution of PC types. Rick's daughter had psychic abilities focused on animal empathy. Tony's son was a bookish sort with encyclopedic knowledge. The Texas farmboy was a lightning calculator. And the half-Chinese girl, Gwendolyn Theodora Bao, had her pilot's license and was unusually strong and athletic. So they covered most of the bases for a not wholly realistic present-day campaign. All they needed was a dog. . . .

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

I have the Dunning book but I haven't read it; why does it suck?

Primarily because the very interesting and evocative radio station story is continually interrupted by a boring Ball of Twine mystery, with the peopple investigating it making a bunch of truly stupid life decisions. In addition, it's not even an engaging ball of twine because the characters move immediately from a revelation to the next clue, giving the reader no time to digest it, and each clue doesn't provide enough information to accurately determine where things are going next, or where one might even look for the next clue until a revelation drops into your lap. Not the sort of mystery I enjoy.

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

This is quite unfortunate as Dunning's other mysteries have been very enjoyable in the past. Have you read any to compare if this is atypical or not?

::B::

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

On to the RPG aspects, there are some good ideas here, but I'm noticing how the traiditiona gaming modes are reconfiguring the idea: I'm not overly thrilled with my inclusion of the spies aspect of the prospectus entry, but it's included because of my belief that the PCs would need somethign to investigate or fight, those being the classic RPG modes. Exploration, self exploration and building something are almost always secondary.

This is not to say that the Radio Heroes campaign skeleton doesn't have legs, but in many ways the PCs become a Private Detective agency with a twist, a radio equivalent of Jessica Fletcher. There's nothing wrong with this per se - and I agree that we could also use more games with Average Joes as the heroes - but it's not quite what I had in mind. Surely there's room in RPGs for the sort of personal triumph of a woman becoming a master radio-play writer or a borderline retired station mananger trying to go from penury to fame in his last shot at the brass ring. We just don't often do that.