Thoughts on a future campaign - part three

For part three of this brainstorming experiment I'll start with Samurai 7. This anime is based on Akira Kurosawa's movie Seven Samurai. What I'm interested in here isn't the plot (it's a good plot, but it's also pretty basic role-playing game fare), but the anime's interesting setting. For a campaign inspired by this anime I'd be shooting for samurai versus mecha, and since the mecha in Samurai 7 have a decent steampunk feel to them, I'd likely play that angle up. So we could really call this setting Steampunk Samurai. A few things are worth noting here - one there is nothing saying the samurai have to be the "good guys," and there is plenty of room for blending after all the bandits in Samurai 7 were samurai before they turned themselves into giant mecha and Kikuchiyo (who may be my favorite samurai in both the anime and the movie) is a cyborg.

A number of different themes could be pursued from this setting. One of the anime's themes is what does a warrior do when there is no war to fight. If I stick with the idea of the samurai being the protagonists that theme meshes nicely the idea of traditional samurai trying to find a purpose when war has been taken over by giant mecha. On the other hand going with the idea of Samurai as the antagonists I could shoot for capturing the feeling of a civil war breaking out as mecha warriors struggle to overthrow their samurai oppressors. The idea of combining mecha (steampunk style or otherwise) with samurai appeals to me, so even if I don't end up using this for my next campaign it's an idea I'd like to continue kicking around and develop for future use.

From here my thoughts turn to the country of Ōto from the CLAMP manga Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle (and of course the anime Tsubasa Chronicle). The country of Ōto is based partly on Japan's Taishō era (1912-1926 during the reign of Emperor Taishō) an interesting time with traditional Japanese customs coexisting with westernized elements. That is all great from both a literary and historic point-of-view, but for the role-playing perspective the country of Ōto also features Oni hunters (and naturally Oni for them to hunt). In the manga/anime Ōto turns out to be a giant virtual reality video game which while I won't completely rule that out as an option, I am pretty unlikely to implement that particular detail. Sufficed to say I wouldn't set a campaign directly in CLAMP's country of Ōto, but I would draw heavy inspiration from that story arc for this hypothetical campaign.

The logical evolution from the country of Ōto is to ponder Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle itself. Using this as an inspiration yields probably the most wide open campaign of all the ideas I've floated to my players. If my idea to base a campaign on Suzumiya Haruhi is an opportunity to parody every genre, this campaign would be an excuse to play in every genre, and visit any world I'm familiar with be it from my own imagination, a book, manga, comic, anime, movie, or any other source of media under the sun. The keys to doing this right would be preparation (I'd want to have a few different worlds at the ready when going into this), and character creation (the player characters would greatly benefit from compelling reasons to be traipsing all over the multiverse). I'd almost guarantee that ×××HOLiC's Yūko would be the NPC responsible for sending the player characters on their merry way across the dimensions so it would be interesting to work out how I'd enforce the give-up-that-which-is-most-important-to-you cost she'd charge for giving them the ability to travel the multi-universe (and an example of why character creation would be so important for this campaign, the player characters would need to have a good reason for paying such a steep cost).

With that I think I'm ready to bring this experiment to a close. I certainly have more ideas for possible campaigns, but BESM 3rd edition wouldn't be my first choice to run any of them and since I'm operating under the assumption that my players want to do a BESM 3e campaign there isn't a lot of point in pondering them at this time (fun though it would be).

On a completely different note this talk of Tsubasa Chronicle and ×××HOLiC reminded my that not too long after I first posted descriptions of those two anime I ran across a brilliantly succinct description of them both on the message boards at HERO Games. When I read them I thought them so perfect I was actually mad I didn't think of them myself, and jealous because I wasn't sure I could ever write so clearly. With a little more thought on the matter I realized that while they were the perfect description to give to me, they perhaps were not universally useful to all people. I still think them brilliant, but admit they require knowledge of CLAMP and Doctor Who to get the full effect. Anyway from the HERO Games Discussion Boards I give you Michael Hopcroft's (one of the two big anime guys on the HERO Games Discussion Boards) descriptions of Tsubasa Chronicle and ×××HOLiC:

Tsubasa Chronicle: What Doctor Who would look like had CLAMP created it. A young man travels from world to world, recovering the "feathers" that signify the lost memories of the girl he loves, knowing the one he can never recover is her love for him. He is accompanied by the girl, a sorcerer who has given up his magic and a ninja warrior with serious anger management issues, and their means of travel a marshmallow-bunny-thing with a very perky personality and an enormous ego.

×××HOLiC, on the other hand, features a character who is what [the character of] The Doctor would be like if created by CLAMP. Yūko Ichihara, an enigmatic sorceress with a unique reach in time and space, runs a Tokyo shop that grants wishes for a price. She has taken a schoolboy with spiritual powers under her wing, subjecting him to a humiliating and dangerous indentured servitude. Yūko is amusing, witty and whimsical -- frequently alarmingly so (she created two little girls to keep her company and gave them obscene names) and drives Watanuki just as crazy as the Sixth Doctor drove poor Peri.

I leave you with some advice courtesy of Roy Focker of Macross Zero and Super Dimension Fortress Macross fame: