Hardscrabble

Sounds like a good name for a Western town, as I've stated previously. I met with Wayne yesterday to talk about the next "Agent X" event, which he'd like to be a Western, so I talked about typical frontier themes and threw a few ideas his way: the rich land-grabbing rancher, the bandits extorting from the townsfolk, the floods, the meddling government.

Wayne liked the bandits so I brought up The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven and we kicked that around some and stubbed out four acts and four possible endings. If the townsfolk appease the bandits they lose all of their cash and will likely continue to do so. Should they hire gunslingers to bag the bad-guys they lose all their cash but take solace in it being a one-time payment (unless the gunslingers go into the bandit business). If they decide the fight back themselves they stand to kill the bandits and keep all their cash. And should they fight back and fail, their town gets burned down.

Should be interesting. I'm looking forward to creating some characters for this one. Now if we just added some Chinese and high tech elements we'd had ourselves a Firefly adventure.

Setting Choices

A couple of days ago a guy on the BuffyRPG list posted a question about which setting to choose for his new series.  I asked what he wanted to do with the series and his answer was pretty open-ended, so I wrote the following as I got to thinking about the strengths of different genres.

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Ok.  It sounds like you're at the early stages of there's lots of places you could go.  I've found from everything I've read and from personal experience that the theme is the best starting place for any fiction that I'm writing.  You could wait to see what your players want, but if they end up wanting something that doesn't jazz you, you might lose interest or find that writing the episodes becomes a chore.  After you know what theme you want, and a setting choice results from that, then I agree that you should run that setting by your players.  If you pick the Wild West but your players recoil from cowboy hats as from a bad smell then the deal is off.

So how do you pick a theme?  There's a ton of advice out there, but I like George Orwell's.  Write about what makes you angry.  I got pissed off at marketers who target children and teenagers after watching a documentary about the subject, and that resulted in the first season of my Buffy series (http://new-slayers.shmigget.com/themes.shtml).  

Once you've got a theme you want to explore, you can chose the best setting for that job.  Note that you can do pretty much anything in any setting, but some make that job easier than others, just as tapping a nail into a wall to hang a picture frame is easier with a hammer than a 10-pound maul.

Westerns involve small groups of people living far from established authority in less than hospitable landscapes.  If you picked the theme of Individualism and the struggle to maintain it, then the Western will give you lots of latitude (the amoral rich rancher wants to grab some good folks’ land and the Law is too far away to care, or the Law in the form of the government wants to stretch its meddling tentacles into folks’ business).  Same goes for the theme of struggling with Nature (the rains have come to the normally dry town of Hardscrabble and the flash flooding is threatening to wash damn near everything away).  

Sci-fi as a setting offers lots of strengths, but I'll argue that the greatest is the ability to disguise issues, or defamiliarize them, which allows the audience to see an issue with fresh eyes without societal biases getting in the way.  Think back to the 1969 ST:TOS episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," where the two aliens who were black on one side and white on the other fought.  That episode made people think about race relations from a fresh perspective.

Horror deals with themes of fear, despair and alienation very well, so if you were going to do something crazy — like make a TV show about how High School is a special kind of hell, for example — then a modern horror setting would be a good fit.

Form follows function, and the choice of your setting should grow from your goals.