22 August 2011

Samurai Jack as a Setting

Thinking about watching the series and making a quick Labyrinth Lord / Swords and Wizardry / whatever other retroclone writeup about the world and the people and places.

It's a pretty evocative work of fiction, and I think that it could make for a pretty compelling gameworld. It's got a lot of similarities to the Cantina scene in Star Wars, except extrapolated to the whole planet and run by a shapeshifting master of evil. What's not to like about that?

Of course, it'd be a lot of "work" (can you really call watching the entire run of Samurai Jack work?), and would take a lot of effort, but it'd probably be worth it.

4 comments:

  1. I'm not up on SJ, but would the Ruins & Ronin SW setting be appropriate?

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  2. I think Samurai Jack's world would be a cool one for a fairly gonzo game. I lot of creating it, I think, would be in just putting in random gonzo elements (yet one's that were unified within a given adventure) rather than a lot of modelling the various elements seen in episodes themselves.

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  3. @Bighara: I'd love to take a look at the rules, but I can't figure out how to get at them. =/ The download post doesn't exist anymore, and the downloads on the sidebar have just managed to confuse me so far.

    @Trey: Well, I agree. The main reasons I'd want to put in the stuff from the shows would be the little things, like the names of some of the peoples and some example monster types. The world's big and broad enough that you can make up just about anything and make it stick, but that doesn't mean that you can't have some flora and fauna around. If I only copy-pasted the pictures from the show and gave them stats, that would hardly be exciting at all.

    I was rather thinking of my own take on it, the part that Samurai Jack doesn't see- so while you'd hear about SJ going over and smashing up some of Aku's minions, you'd never have a chance to meet him or any of the people he'd help, unless you managed to be somewhere he was and the people would tell you of the legend himself.

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