Suddenly and out of nowhere today I was thinking about this girl I knew from my MUSHing days, and about the characters we'd affect and their backstories and stuff. That was in my late teens, early twenties, really, but my mentality wasn't far off from 16.
Then I thought of what Luc Besson said about making The Fifth Element -- specifically, that it's the movie he wanted to make when he was a teenager, and in fact he started writing it when he was in high school.
Then I thought of the girl and the characters again, and it hit me -- I don't think like that any more, but it sure was fun. It was freaking epic, and angsty, and romantic and sweeping and personal and --
-- and very sixteen.
And it would be fun to do it again.
I used to have a grand dream of being a filmmaker myself. That dream looks like this now:
-- but I can sift through the rubble and salvage a few things that I could use to build a campaign setting:
- Starships, big and small
- Some kind of techno-magical do-dad with a far-fetched explanation
- Themes of virtue and frailty
- A huge-ass scope, probably even multiversal
- Idealized, epic, dramatic romantic love
- Great forces, most likely representing abstract concepts given form, clashing with each other with the fate of the multiverse at stake
- High melodrama featuring friendship, betrayal, alliances made and broken, expressed on both the galactic and personal scales
- Pyrrhic victories aplenty
- Teen angst and soap opera
- Rubber science
- Duels!
- Swords!
- Blasters!
- Adolescent commentary on the inherent weakness of humanity, and society's tendencies towards apathy/closed-mindedness/conformity/repetition/stagnation
- Tragic romance
- More teen angst
- Dashing space pirates and wizards, blowing shit up in space
- Did I mention the starships?
Soundtrack by The Alan Parsons Project.
