3 WISHes
WISH #3 asks us to reveal...
Discuss three setting ideas or ideas for elements of settings that you got from movies/books/TV/etc. that you have read or seen recently.
Ignoring the "read or seen recently," because that's fairly irrelevant with my habit of rereading or reviewing older items, I finally figured out three that were decent for use.
Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons is a book that influenced me greatly as a child. It, along with King Rat and Neverwhere are three major forces for the urban faery game I'm considering. [On a tangent, no, while I generally enjoy deLint's work, I don't consider him an influence exactly, although a lot of his stuff is along fairly parallel lines. (Of his books, the only one I could say I flat-out, no reservations like is Jack the Giant-Killer.)] There's a little Emma Bull's War For the Oaks in there, of course, maybe even a lick or two borrowed from Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, but the real question is how much of it is urban versus how much of it is the faery.
They watched him leaping and whirling away, flashing black and silver in the sunlight. "Is dancing all he does?" Wizard had asked Cassie naively."Yeah," she said mockingly. "All he does is Dance. And look at derelicts and find out if they're wizards or not. And give wizards the rules of their magic. And keep the bogey-man away from the Seattle Center. Come on, Wizard."
When I was younger, after reading it and giving away (gasp!) a copy to a friend (who still hasn't returned it...but since it's been ten years, I'm not holding my breath) I began to wonder if the magic in the book was hinted at, just a delusion. Upon treating myself to a copy found through Alibris I was pleasantly surprised to find that the magic was intact.
The quoted portion very strongly intimates some of the essentials of the story, but the part that actually has stayed with me throughout the years is Cassie and how she collects children's schoolyard rhymes, and uses it as a barometer for what's happening in the local culture. I've always thought that (in Amber, at least) the fables and the schoolyard rhymes and games would reflect the Pattern, kind of like a circular hopscotch, or reminders of past battles. Benedict and the Moonriders remembered only in a snatch of rhyme, chanted in a sing-song fashion as little Bleys and Brand chase each other into the trees of Arden.
I already talked a little about the now defunct Jackie Chan Adventures cartoon we had been watching. It fits very well into the Feng Shui game as a scenario, but the truth is not that I just liked the story for itself, but because I kept imagining it as having a connection to "The Invisibles" a comic which should probably be a reference in itself... excluded only because I have a paltry two of the graphic novel collections. (And just for another page that amuses me: This has homemade action figures of the team.)
For the category of "movie I so wanted to base a Throne War off of," that wasn't one already, we have, of course, "The Nightmare Before Christmas where we'd do the Pumpkin King throne war. The game itself has been covered fairly well ("Pumpkin Town" comes immediately to mind) as an RPG, but I keep wanting to run it as a competitive situation.
I did base a little bit of the plot of SWtE from La Blue Girl, but we won't go there for now. Needless to say, I was waiting for Thalia to shout out, "My sex craft is greater than yours!" at some point. Erm...