Arkham City: Some Influences
A number of things keep running through my mind as I put together my campaign notes.
Batman
When running a supers game, I think of roleplaying game sessions more as the equivalent of episodic television than a comic book-style story format. It’s definitely easier to plot adventures that way for Adventures Into Darkness. Adam West’s Batman, which I referenced in a prior post, may be goofy and campy, and owes a lot to 1960′s pop culture, but it’s also very close to the way the character was portrayed in comics in the late Golden Age. If you set aside the camp and look at the episodes in a serious light, the villains were utterly insane, as were the heroes. You can tweak it to be very, very dark. A guy who thinks he’s King Tut? Potentially very Lovecraftian. A man who telegraphs his crimes through Riddles? That can be twisted into the Mythos, especially if after figuring out the answer you realize there’s nothing you can do about it. Vincent Price with an egg fetish and a girlfriend who commands Russian cossacks… okay, I know there’s got to be a Mythos angle in there.
Superman
In addition to the Adventures of Superman television series, also cited in a previous post, I’ve got a book titled “Superman from the 30s to the 70s”. It reprints a ton of older comics stories, giving me a feel for how supporting characters were used, what Golden Age dialogue was like, and how sets and locations were designed and used. It will help me get a Golden Age “feel” to the game. It also shows me how the main character and his supporting cast evolved over the decades. This provides me with some insight on how I can take more recent source material and “retro-fit” it into Golden Age form.
Dick Tracy
While I don’t currently own any anthologies of the old strips, I used to own them and read them voraciously. I read the strip in the newspaper as a kid, up until Chester Gould retired and a couple of years in to the Max Alan Collins run. In addition to lifting story beats and plot ideas, I’m particularly looking at the “Moon Maid” stories. Gould worked science fiction elements into a crime strip, with varying degrees of success. I want to keep the fantastic, well, fantastic, another reason to keep the campaign rooted in weird mobsters. There’s a lot of learn from Tracy’s history.
Delta Green
There is absolutely no way I can run a post-Lovecraft game that involves weird science, crime, and government agencies without touching the Delta Green books. I don’t plan to get into conspiracy, but there are ideas to be mined and exploited.
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