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[bryant]

If I was gonna run a Buffy game, which I’m not, it would be something like this. It would be set in Los Angeles, in 1976. Warren Zevon would have just released his eponymous album. Vampires would snort cocaine alongside adult film stars, and they’d both pay the price in their own ways.

Daddy, don’t you ask her when she’s coming in
And when she’s home don’t ask her where she’s been

The Slayer would be an LA child, lanky and beautiful and terribly young for such a burden; she’d wear scarves and maybe dream of a time when she thought she could be a singer. Her smile would be sad and wise and generous, and her eyes would be the color of the ocean at sunset, when you can forget all about how polluted it is.

Dry your eyes my little friend
Let me take you by the hand
Freddie get ready Rock steady
When Johnny strikes up the band

She’d have friends: musicians, grifters, dreamers, thieves. Down on Venice Beach, there’d be a Watcher who’d given up the straight life and taken to reading the future in the tattoos of the street performers. He’d read an old ratty Tarot deck for a living. Not all her friends would like one another, but the desperate need to stay together to survive.

He took in the four a.m. show at the Clark
Excitable boy, they all said
And he bit the usherette’s leg in the dark
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he’s just an excitable boy

She’d have enemies: high gloss vampires and angry radical werewolves. There’s a demon down on the Sunset Strip who specializes in messing over drunk tourists; they wake up the next day never realizing anything happened, but when they get home they find an envelope of pictures addressed to their wives. And they say, in whispers, that there’s a sect of Hollywood stars who drink blood to keep their youth.

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was staring in my empty coffee cup
I was thinking that the gypsy wasn’t lyin’
All the salty margaritas in Los Angeles
I’m gonna drink ‘em up

And there’s a bar, where the Slayer and her pals come together after something’s happened. (Rarely, they have the chance to come together before; but times are troubled and the chances to act rather than react are seldom.) Nobody lives in one place for very long, and none of the places they live are very large: so they meet at the bar, and they drink whatever the bartender is pushing that night, and they celebrate survival until the sun comes up over the hills. Not to celebrate would be to give in to despair, and despair — in LA — is the beginning of the end.

Comments

[jadasc.livejournal.com]

I'm hip. I'm with it. When you wanna run it, let me know.

[patchworkkid.livejournal.com]

I-I-I-I like it!

To Live and Slay in LA

[amberley.livejournal.com]

Weezie Bat, Vampire Slayer. Francesca Lia Block & Joss Whedon's love child?

My other thought was "What if Laurell K. Hamilton wrote the screenplay to 'Boogie Nights'?" but I don't imagine that was what you were shooting for.

Sounds cool. You should run it. Or maybe mix it with your RPG about romantic comedies, and do a sort of John Hughes vampire flick. Mollie Ringwald as a creature of the night.

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

Whew. Good stuff. Great atmospherics. Very impressed. I should knock together a similar desc for my GenCon game with good 80s post-punk lyrics interspersed. I already had in mind a "favorite albums" part of the pre-gens' character sheets... can't wait for this weekend so I can write.

[ambar.livejournal.com]

You're not going to run it, and I'm not going to play in it. But I'd want to.

Ambar

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Very nice indeed. You could probably make a very cool campaign (of Buffy, of UA, of lots of cool games) just using Warren Zevon as patron saint and inspiration. I'd play in a second.

Since you're not really running it (are you?) I don't feel bad about claiming the Slayer as my PC. Her name is Phoebe Kane. She is, as you say, "lanky and beautiful and terribly young." And she's just been Chosen, brutally torn from a life of privilege and thrust into the sun-bleached demi monde you describe - the bad trip hangover of L.A. after the end of the 60s and the fading of the California dream. See, Phoebe's grandfather was the newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane (of Citizen Kane fame) and just as Charles Kane was a larger-than-life dramatization of Wm Randolph Hearst, Phoebe is a larger-than-life dramatization of Patty Hearst, the kidnapped California heiress. Phoebe's kidnappers, of course, are the radical werewolves and scoobies and the ragged Watcher you describe. Steven King said Donald "Cinque" DeFreeze (head of the band that kidnapped Patty) was a dark man. I think he'd make an excellent Watcher. Was Phoebe brainwashed? Her parents might think so. But really she's just been given her destiny.


(hmm - you sure you don't want to run this?)

[bryant]

Well, I want to run it /now/. Damn you.

I have in my bedroom a cultural artifact which I purchased for 10 bucks at a used bookstore; it's a complete run of Year Books from whenever they started to 2002. It comes in very handy for this kind of thing.

SEXY

[thenakedartisan.livejournal.com]

Floated across your post here. BEAUTIFUL! Love every scrap of it. Good luck running it!