Road Warrior, Other Flicks as Serenity RPG Adventure Fodder

November 27, 2009 2 comments

So picture this: a bunch of Reavers crash their ship on a frontier world. They survive, but the ship is wrecked. Naturally, they make their way to the nearest settlement. The player characters have to help defend the settlement, and evacuate the settlers to the next town over where there are better defenses. Of course, all of the settlers won’t fit in the player characters’ ship at once, and a staged evacuation would leave too few people behind to hold off the Reavers. So the player characters run decoy and draw the Reavers off so the settlers can escape.

Yup, the plot from Road Warrior twisted around a bit. For extra story blender points, throw in Smokey and the Bandit: in addition to helping the settlers, the player characters also have to get a cargo from point A to point B before a deadline, and there’s a rogue Alliance officer on their tail.

For another adventure, how about another frontier town ruled by a wealthy woman who’s set herself up as would-be Noble. The players characters get their stuff stolen, and are stuck unless they can get it back. The brains of the operation has control of muscle and is trying to take over, so the player characters get manipulated into taking him on. With Libertarian underpinnings found throughout Firefly and Serenity, however, it turns out the brains isn’t a bad guy, is better qualified to run things, and probably deserves better compensation for his efforts than the rich bitch gives him. The player characters end up having to take sides in order to beat one or the other faction and get their stuff back so they can get out. And of course, someone has to battle it out in Thunderdome.

Blender notes: mix in the Sam Raimi western The Quick and the Dead, blending Tina Turner’s Aunty Entity with Gene Hackman’s John Herod (and all I can see now is Hackman in drag at the end of The Birdcage). Replace Thunderdome with gunfights in the streets.

At some point, I need to stat everything out and use these as one-shots and convention games.