We crib the elves, dwarves, orcs, and hobbits from Tolkien all the time but what about a bit of a halloween shift?

Years ago, the dark lord forged his weapons.  Nine they were, watches of exquisite workmanship.  One for the Fords, one for the Rockafellers, one for the Kennedys, one for Capone and another one for Hughs.  But that's five and of the other four history does not tell.  And these weapons he gave to the great and the powerful but like all his gifts there was a catch.  For in his magic kingdom, the lord made another watch and this he linked with cunning and esoteric sciences to the nine and through this link controlled them with lies and truths long hidden.  And he raised up a castle and a park like a temple of science in the guise of a child's fairy kingdom and he brought them and their children into it and by the time they left he owned them.  But his bitterness cankered within him and he was brought low and bound in a chamber of frozen slumber waiting.  But the master watch was lost.

And the world turned and the slow cold thoughts of his heart that he wound within the watches ticked on.  Years flowed by with smoke and smog and turmoil and war and the world teetered on the brink.  Some say that Nixon took the master watch from Kenedy and took it to China.  Others tell that Bill Gates or Steve Jobs had it.  Some say the government has it locked away or that Regan used it and some of the lesser watches to overthrow the Soviet union.  But now, new lights are rising in the magic kingdom.  New sciences are spreading his vision across the silver screen.  And soon the science needed to break the bands of death itself will be in the hands of his inner circle and the dark lord will rise again to rule the earth.

Hell yeah!

It would make a badass Unknown Armies-like campaign. I remember an old  Dragon magazine that put a Top Secret mission in a Disney-esque amusement park and I have taken the actual park and put it into Gamma World which was pretty gonzo. Since I live in California, I have played in a few con adventures where the GM used Disneyland and I have heard of a number of others, including a twisted Disney After Dark Vampire LARP. My buddy played in it and it turns out that the classic Disney characters are real, immortal and dangerous...however bound to the Park.

Hell yeah! And yes yes yes, Unknown Armies all over.

A couple of years ago, I considered doing a one-shot scenario taking place inside Club 33, the exclusive club in Disney Land (487 members). It were going to be a 50s-60s James Ellroy-style scenario, where the most powerful men (Hughes, Nixon, Kennedy, Hoffa, et al) in USA sat inside the most exclusive club in the happiest place in the world, and planned death, drugs and decadence while their influence slowly spread to the park outside, corrupting and twisting it.

So yeah, pretty much Mordor.

In Nomine, with either Kronos, Prince of Fate, or Nybbas, Prince of Media. Could even use the Liber Reliquarum relic creation rules to whip something up for the watches.

The players would likely be servitors of Yves, Archangel of Destiny, or Christopher, Archangel of Children -- or at least receive an urgent request from those in service to them.

Could easily take them into the Ethereal realm as well to fight within the dreams and nightmares of children... and could just as easily have those images spill out into the Corporeal realm (real world of Earth). I now have a very evil use for the "It's a Small World After All" soundtrack.
:cool:

I am surprised no one has made Wizards of Mickey into an RPG yet.
That would be funny if Disney used it as the basis for their proposed LARP project.

http://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-94458.html

Whipped up a quick IN SjG one-shot:

Pitch: An angel and demon chase through the dreams, and places, of ravers puddled all throughout the raves of the American hemisphere on one night.

Premise: One of the Disney watch MacGuffins. Your Dreams servitor found it, but a Nightmare servitor noticed. Both of you can hop into one person's dream in one Earth location, switch to second dreamer the first dreamer knows, and pop out at the second dreamer's Earth location. The chase is on.

Location: The entire Americas during one night, among all the candy kid ravers who have ever met each other once and liked Disney characters. Well over 80% chance any other dreamer is also at a rave (I mean, why bother texting them. We all end up in the same parties anyway). Also is a night where Disneyland is open late and having a "rave" going on, like high school grad night.

Goal: Stay alive, don't lose the watch, and if so never let the Nightmare servitor reach Disneyland in Anaheim with the MacGuffin watch.

Bonus points:
1. Run the game under blacklights, with glowsticks and glow-in-the-dark dice.
2. Happycore v. Gabber soundtrack (dreams v. nightmares) with "It's a Small World After All" playing atop.
3. Players communicate at the table mostly through hand signs, as the in-character music will be too loud. (extra points for actually playing the soundtrack too loud and forcing everyone to remember their American Sign Language.)
4. Bottled waters represents your life pool, drink your damage. When you're dry, you're down.

probably took me longer to type this up than to come up with it. now go, have fun. :cheerleader:

Unknown to the world of men, still struggling deliriously to free itself from the womb of evolution, lashing idiot ignorant destruction and glorious innocent creation to either side, the older myths and legends, those tales and fables were more than simple yarns to caution insolent babes or entertain by the firelight.

They are instead representative of antediluvian archetypal entities buried deep beneath the earth, lost in tangled forests, or frozen in the creaking ice, and their faintest distant echoes can upon occasion be summoned by telling those tales, for they answer to their names.

The Dark Lord, upon learning of these halfreals while exploring the occult in his youth as a magi, applied nascent sciences and their ability to corral the vast, heaving, unruly mass of psychic energies of ascendant mankind into an almost tangible form, whereupon he summoned and bound fables and legends, ancient before the dawn of humanity, with glistening chains of plasticised nitrocellulose.

Taking ownership and control by common consent and the understanding of the still dull global consciousness, these bonds were consecrated in law and made ever stronger with each passing generation, their length extended far beyond any natural span.

Rapture fed rapture, legend and amazed eye gazed into one another and were lost, while the Dark Lord slowly, carefully forged new entities in an astral conflagration, easier to control, out of the resulting frisson, setting their likeness upon the earth to do his bidding. The watches are yet another of his many works, perhaps the most mysterious and powerful.

Possible further stuff:

• He's frozen in the fountain of youth in Florida, setting him free will probably also destroy him, a paradox
• Legal teams, secretly occultists, are straining with increasing desperation to extend copyright laws to keep the ancient entities in check, because if they get free after being fed so richly for so long it will indeed be the dawn of a new age - there is a reason these tales were only told with hushed voices... already their influence works to plumb the depths, raze the forests, and melt the ice, setting the stage for their ultimate freedom
• He's actually one of the good guys struggling to preserve the soul and spirit of mankind against other, darker entities which will gut the imagination and place humans into machines, perfect slaves, perfectly sterile, represented by the Soviet Union among other groups
• He's one of the bad guys alright, working for the above nasties
• The Dark Lord is if not one of then perhaps of the same vintage as the entities, emerging from a vaulted burial ground uncovered by excavations after the great fire of '71, or perhaps brought into being by the flames wreathing ancient native curses, drifting for a generation before incarnating

Buckets more juicy insanities here: http://theconspiracyzone.podcastpeople.com/posts/32979

Quote from: J Arcane;698943http://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-94458.html

Wow, that's pretty amazingly done.

Lots of cool ideas from other people too.

Still my own leaning was more towards absurdist techno pulp horror.  The watches are mainly listening devices and subetheric transmitters that can decode most coded messages.  Except Navaho of course.  (huh, how is that spelled anyhow?)

And the dark lord is Walt Disney, not some fallen angel.  Here, the enemy is a very clean cut and unified middle class movement who's aim is cultural homogenity and the purification of The United States of America from all "troubling and unwholesome thoughts and ideas" by any means necessary. The nine are the top business and entertainment executives.  And the opposition are hippies and artists and writers with, perhaps, Phillip K Dick as Gandalf and Paul McCartney as Sauruman...I'm not quite sure...Who's sold out the very most?

Quote from: David Johansen;698957And the dark lord is Walt Disney, not some fallen angel.  Here, the enemy is a very clean cut and unified middle class movement who's aim is cultural homogenity and the purification of The United States of America from all "troubling and unwholesome thoughts and ideas" by any means necessary. The nine are the top business and entertainment executives.  And the opposition are hippies and artists and writers with, perhaps, Phillip K Dick as Gandalf and Paul McCartney as Sauruman...I'm not quite sure...Who's sold out the very most?

You know what doesn't get enough airtime in games these days? Good old fashioned satanism. You should make the big baddie and cohorts a proper soul eating satanic cult, trying to oppress the human spirit and so open the gates for satan, or maybe they don't have an endgame, they're just in it for the yucks. That would seem appropriately futile and recursive.

I am so disappointed that this is not about playing a Middle Earth campaign with Mordor run like Disneyland. Sort of like how  Bored of the Rings has Serutan running Serutanland. With actual turnstiles and costumed characters.

Wasnt there an adventure for D&D where you ended up in an amusement park?
Either a real park, a land that looked just like a certain theme park, or a daemonic trap that just happened to look like a theme park?

The potential for mayhem is endless.

Cyberpunk 2020 had those odd city-parks inhabited by live-in workers or occasional robots biomodded to really be the characters.

This was for an actual Disney meeting presentation...


I think they are on to us...

Argh, Now I want to make a Mickey Mouse character pack for FRUA...

I don't know why, but this sounds a bit too much like some fairly distasteful real-life conspiracy theories to me; I used to love that kind of shit but these days I guess I've just become too disenchanted by what these things are packed up with in terms of real-life batshit politics.

RPGPundit

Great thread, four out of five Nixons:


I'd go with Unknown Armies or just plain old CoC BRP, with players being parents of children going missing in the park on the same day. Depending on the level of evilness in me at that day, I'd perhaps start the campaign out with them on the trail of a certain park employee (Remember the paedophile from Sandman?).

As for Walt's frozen form and satanist cults - I'd myself go with human sacrifice, needed to keep Walt's frozen form alive, until the Nine Watches can be reassembled and him unfrozen (it wasn't cancer he was fleeing from, it was Huxley's curse which caused him to wither).

I'd also run the game in modern times myself - Miley Cyrus can be Saruman, and Jonas Brothers can be Ringwraiths. Disney himself was running an ambulance just after WW1, perhaps he wasn't the creator, but only someone who found the watches in some abandoned German trench? Making him not the Dark Lord, but merely Gollum.

David... Have I told you you are barking mad? I love that in a designer!

-clash