I read Alan Dean Foster's Glory Lane back in the summer of 1990 or so, and found it entertaining if not inspirational -- one of the protagonists, a mouthy, hyperactive punk rocker named Seethe Ransom, surreptitiously burrowed himself in my brain and later re-emerged as a cyberpunk character whom I really need to do something with...but i digress.Anyway, I'm reading it again. It's a breezy read, even if the plot drags -- 115 pages into it (it's 295 pages total), still not much has happened. The premise can be summarized thusly: "The Breakfast Club Hitchhikes The Galaxy". Sure there's more to it but that's a good place to start.
What leaps out to me as potentially gameable is this part of of it: Earthlings Meet Outer Space, Hijinks Ensue. Truth be told I think I've actively resisted the idea of running a game based on that premise, but all of a sudden --perhaps because I am now older and therefore infinitely wiser-- the idea is more attractive. Today, I am more interested in a game which pits hapless 21st Century humans against the wild and wooly worlds beyond the blue, where accountants and stuntmen and art students and other mundane folk rub elbows, against their will, with --
-- well, with the crazy crap you see on the cover of that book.
The whole thing screams creaitivity, potential, fun. Naturally, it'd be a funny game, and if run as a sandbox it would require -- no, invite me, the GM, to make up all kinds of the aforementioned crazy crap to keep things going. A planet whose economy has so severely boinked itself that the only thing of real value is Tijuana Bibles? Sure. An interstellar cargo cult based on decades-old TV transmissions of Soap? Yes, please. Bargon Kaz-Moootsie, Lord Of Space, who rules the Flimpoid sector with the threat of his hideous parasitic chihuahuas? Yeah, OK. This place? Why not?!
What's amazing to me is that I started gaming in 1988 and I'm just now interested in doing it.
