Have you ever converted a movie into an adventure?

I found out none of my players had seen The Magnificent Seven, so I adapted it to a medieval fantasy adventure (D&D), and ran them through it.  Then one day, before a game session, I put the movie in to see how long it would take them to recognize it.  When the welcoming committee on boot hill confronted the heroes,  you should have seen the looks on my players' faces.

Another one I used to great effect was Dragonslayer.  I beefed up the adventure a bit, by adding some more dragon offspring of various ages, and a mate.  And of course a cavern beyond the burning lake accessible via underwater accessway, where the dragons' treasure pile was.  A little more treasure tucked in the dragons' scales, and a couple rings on talons were the finishing touches.  The players were tag along characters (that is, none of the players played the roles in the movie), and they went along with the NPCs and experienced the whole movie!  Luckily they compensated for the changes I had made by slaying the extra dragons, and a few of them dipped into the treasure.  I got a kick out of it when the adventure was over and I showed them the movie (without announcing what its significance was, of course).  They watched it with their mouths hanging open.

The way we played it out was a little different...

The main dragon had a wish ring on one of its talons.

The mate was guarding the treasure while the main dragon was outside wreaking havoc.

Half the PCs stayed outside to guard the Wizard and apprentice while the other half of the PCs slayed the mate.

The main dragon heard the death wail of his mate, and used a wish to restore her back to health.  She then ate one of her attackers while the others fled and got away.

One of the players sliced off the paw of the main dragon as it swooped down.  The same paw that had the wish ring.

After the apprentice blew up his master and the main dragon with him (just like in the movie), the female dragon emerged from the cave to get revenge.

The player character with the wish ring used it to force the dragon to obey his every command.

Thus the adventure diverged, and the PCs had themselves a dragon steed.

The campaign thus got off to a flying start.

I don't so much convert movies as steal characters, scenes and plotlines. Often I blend them together, then cover my tracks by setting them in milieus far removed from the source material.

I dont so much rip off movies wholesale. As much as I steal plot lines and elements. Much like Drew stated in his post. A couple that spring to mind are.
"Smokin Aces". The group played assassins competeing with one another to get to the target first. So total PVP. Same setup as the movie target holed up in a suite on the top floor.
The second that comes to mind is "The War Wagon". Which I stole elements from, for a western AFMBE campaign. I turned out way different than I expected though. I kind of expected them to tackle the wagon differently. But then again, only like one or two of the six players had ever seen the movie.

Apocalypse Now can be slotted into almost any genre imaginable.

I should know. I've tried.

DUNGEON Adventures did a series of conversions of Shakespeare's works.  Does anyone remember those?  They were extremely well done.  

But, yeah, I strip out elements rather than plots.  That's why I find that even really bad movies are good---there's usually _something_ in there I can use for a game.  

Pete

Quote from: DrewApocalypse Now can be slotted into almost any genre imaginable.

I should know. I've tried.

You mean Heart of Darkness?

-clash

My last adventure this week end had some elements from the Wizard of Oz. Just  for my personal inspiration, nothing too obvious. I generally use movies or even songs to fill in some themes, environments and characters. A few thousand mp3s and random rotation often helps when you're having DM's block...

I once needed a plot for a session in a hurry, so I ripped off The Maltese Falcon. In my story, though, the falcon statue was magic: it turned into a roc at the end and flew away.

I've always wanted to run games based on these movies:

Kelly's Heroes
Where Eagles Dare
Midnight Run
Any cop/buddy movie like 48 Hours or Lethal Weapon
Ocean's Eleven
Heat

But the ultimate, I think, would be a session based on John Carpenter's The Thing where the players don't expect it.

Good grief, the number of times I've got stuck and basically started running the plot of Star Wars....

In my defence, though, it doesn't progress too far along the existing storyline because the players always go off in a totally different direction, but you know, princess, message, evil empire... it's all good.

Quote from: transcendationHave you ever converted a movie into an adventure?

Ugh. Yes. It was my first time GMing, too. I wanted to come up with something cool and interesting. The pressure was on to impress everybody, at least in my head.

So I read this Shadis article on adapting movie plotlines to adventures. One of their suggestions was Alien. Great! I thought. Something cool and unusual, and sure, why wouldn't "fight a sneaky and deadly monster in a labyrinthine, enclosed area" work for a fantasy adventure?

So I went with it. We were playing MERP, and the adventure I ran went something like this: The heroes are travelling through a small kingdom, and rescue a page boy in peril. He invites them to the King's castle to be rewarded. The castle's in the mountains, set against a sheer rock face and accessible only by a narrow bridge of rock. While they're there, an earthquake collapses the rock bridge, and someone gets attacked in some room. The investigating PCs arrive there just in time to find a mangled dead courtier, and  a glimpse of a terrible beast disappearing into the. . .oh, did I mention that this castle, uh, was an engineering marvel with this ingenious ventilation system, so that there were air ducts running through all the stone walls? :deflated:

So yeah, they played cat-and-mouse with the Alie--er, Demon for a while, then finally encountered it full-on. This thing was a beastie I had made up myself using the MERP monster creation guidelines. I put a lot of work into it, statting it up and even doing a pretty involved drawing of the thing in my sketchbook (where it lingers even now, recalling my shame. . .). The first time a PC landed a hit on the thing, I had to consult the stat writeup for a special effect. I was like, "Wait just a second. . ." [scanning notes] Player: "This thing doesn't have acid blood, does it?" Me: "Er, well, the thing is, um. . .yes?" Players (yeah, all of 'em) "Oh, SCREW THIS, we're out of here!" "What, you can't leave, it's cut off!" "Hell, we'll just climb out the back windows and scale the cliff." "But--but--"

. . .and thus endeth the tale. They didn't even get down to the basement and find the court wizard's lab with all the little backstory clues about a failed magical experiment and accidentally summoning the demon. No one cared. They quit the bloody adventure. So, yeah, I've had experience with this sort of thing. Enough experience to gain a level in "Bitter GM."



BUT! That's not to say this kind of thing couldn't work! It's all in how you do it. I can't really blame Shadis for this; the basic idea of "translate 'sneaky monster starts picking off everyone in a confined environment' to your Fantasy game" wasn't a bad one. Shadis never told me to add acid blood and freakin' AIR DUCTS.

I'd say the key elements to doing this right are probably:

1) Swipe the general concept, not the individual trappings.

Was the Goddamn acid blood really that important? Not only was it unneccesary to the adventure concept, it was a gigantic tell regarding my source material, and as it happens the last straw for the players. And air ducts--God, what was I thinking? Instead of going through all the trouble to work AIR DUCTS in to fucking Vanilla Fantasy, I could have just had the Demon phase through walls or something, which would be cool in the first place and also a bit removed from the source material.

2) make it something the PCs are invested in.

This probably varies from group to group--for some people, "the adventurers are hired to go in the dungeon/save the princess/protect the village" is probably enough. For others, a deeper reason to care is likely in order. Like, if the PCs own actions released the Demon, or it threatened someone they actually cared about. As it was, despite their barbarian leader making it with the King's daughter, the PCs had no real reaon to stick around, so when the players were tired of the situation, off they went.

3) Don't slavishly follow the plot, make sure player choice is driving the thing.

Which, in my case, I guess it was. Then again, it's always the player's choice to stay at the table or walk away. So my problem was in not giving them any meaningful choice within the scenario. It was either "stay and kill the demon" or "leave." Wow, gripping drama there. 'Course, the flick I picked to imitate is pretty simple in basic structure. To wring any "interesting choice" out of the thing, I'd have to have the character dynamics of the Nostromo crew, from the traitor Android to the in-fighting humans. "I'm going back for him!" "No, goddammit, we have to stick together!" that sort of thing. Which wasn't really up to me, and probably beyond all our roleplaying chops at that point. But in any case, it's more complex movie concepts that will probably tempt GMs to play out all the plot points, which can be a killer for RPGs where players have the idea that their choices are going to matter.



Regarding your two examples: The Magnificent Seven (or Seven Samurai, or whatever)  sounds cool, and easily fun for the players. Hopefully all kinds of relationships with the villagers started flying around, from love interests to comeraderie to poor farmers that are probably gonna die next scene. At the very least, it can be a break from dungeon-crawling or castle raiding or whatever.

The Dragonslayer example strikes me as potentially problematic, for this reason: the Players didn't play the hero. Now, if you played it that way and everybody had fun, great! Not knocking it. But it's dangerous ground, 'cause of the likelihood that the PCs won't be doing the important stuff and making the important choices. Sounds like you avoided that by adding in some extra dangers and plot factors that were more PC-centric. But if the PC hadn't chopped off the dragon's hand and done that deal with the Wish ring, you'd be left with a story where the PCs are just sidekicks, and the NPC killed the Big Bad.

And finally, may I just say that I feel really, really sorry for that poor Dragoness? Her mate slain, she now spends a lifetime of magical servitude to a bunch of bloodthirsty humans. How sad.

Anyway, hope my thoughts were helpful It was useful for me at least to unpack that 18-year-old incident.

Peace,
-Joel

PS: Caudex--I've also ended up imitating Star Wars in my current D&D campaign. Completely accidentally. Just put the PC backstory puzzle peices together and there it was.

Note to myself: The next "how the players met" introduction will follow the plot of "The Breakfast Club". Including "Don't You" at the very end...

I throw a setup situation at the PCs, see how they react, then watch where they go and throw more stuff at them if they lose steam. Not a good GMing method for plots of any kind...

-clash