[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

[bryant]

Let’s take this meme out for another spin. Yep, it’s time for another Monday Mashup.

Ryan made a suggestion which I’m going to take up. He pointed out that a lot of respondants were interested in the idea but didn’t know enough about Greyhawk to take a stab at it. He suggested that I should pick a piece of modern media, and let people choose their own game for the purposes of adaptation. I think he’s right.

Thus, how to participate: pick a roleplaying world and talk about how you’d use the specified book/movie/TV show/whatever as an inspiration for a campaign or one-shot set in that world. You can post on your own blog or LiveJournal or in the comments here, as you see fit.

This week, your mashup subject is Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (The 1978 remake is also valid fodder.)

My contribution follows.

More...

Comments

surfing through from davis_square

[oakenguy.livejournal.com]

That movie has always creeped me out.

Wouldn't dieties of possessed clerics & paladins step in quickly and strongly to protect their followers, though? Okay, granted, some dieties might actually like their servants better 'podded', but still...

Re: surfing through from davis_square

[bryant]

Cool route to get here. Heh.

Yeah, that's something to be worked out. You'd need a reason why that wouldn't happen, and I am not familiar enough with the FR cosmology to make it work.

I think you'd get a lot of deities not granting clerical spells, though, at the very least.

re: Realms cosmology

[editswlonghair.livejournal.com]

The FR gods are very Olympian, very childish and squabbly. If something was happening to some of their priests, they may try to keep it a secret so others may not move to steal their worshippers or portfolio... Even good gods may act this way- Azuth may not tell Mystra about the strange goings-on amongst his followers because Mystra may censure him or Savras or Velsharoon may attempt a power play at his expense... Azuth may just keep granting spells to a compromised priest in the near term until he can figure out what is going on... enter the PCs... freelance specialists who can do some discrete investigation...

Where this scenario gets really fun is between two good priesthoods who share complementary spheres of influence and have always resented each other. If Helm's priesthood is compromised and he shuts off the spells, Torm's priests may just move in for the kill... mmm mmm mmm. The shiny happy Realms sure could use a holy war with paladins on both sides...

If you don't have them, I HUGELY recommend the 2nd edition FR god supplements- Faiths & Avatars, Powers & Pantheons, Demihuman Deities. All very well done and chock full of crunchy goodness.

One other thing about divine spells

[editswlonghair.livejournal.com]

I would also invoke the old 1st ed. rule re: cleric spells which was something like this (originally put down in Deities & demigods):

1st-3rd lvl spells are the products of the clerics faith.
4th-5th lvl spells are granted by the deities' minions (angels, demons, etc)
6th+ lvl spells come direct from the god.

So, a lot of clerics would still have a lot of low level spells. Hell, if the astral contagion has affected some of the upper planar creatures, they could be in on the action and surruptiously trying to undermine the god's own order. War in Heaven anyone?

Psi Law again...

[(Anonymous)]

I flipped through the Psi Law supplement you wrote last weekend and am struck by how similar the south american story is to what you are describing. So build on it...

Taint (or not) infected shapechangers (whatever their order is called) have discovered a way to turn normals to good enough changers. Maybe an ubermind thingy also controls... you get the drift. A band of dopplegangers is spreading through the area because of this and your job is to stop them from reaching a critical mass.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Cool, another Monday Mashup! Only on Tuesday for me since I wasn’t online much yesterday.

Fun idea. The D&D setting I know best is Dragonlance. If you transplanted the pod people into Krynn you’d have much the same contrast of paranoia and high fantasy that you describe for FR. One of the big secrets revealed halfway through the Dragonlance series is that the evil draconian armies are being manufactured from good dragon eggs. It’s a pretty ho hum secret, all things considered, so maybe you could replace it with some kind of body snatcher riff to give it a little more oomph.

But I gotta figure that when you get right down to it, in many D&D worlds, with polymorph spells, and gateways to the Abyss, and giant floating eyeballs with more eyeballs on stalks for hair that shoot fricking death rays out of their fricking eyeballs, aliens that can look like people are just not going to be all that horrifying. Unless you can think of some clever way to go right for the players’ own sense of autonomy (“something is turning PCs into … gasp … NPCs!”).

Hmm. What about a game set in the modern day, or in the Atomic Horror 1950s, where the players played the alien body snatchers? Each new person they take over they get to add to the roster of characters. Let them kibitz as much as they want and call it a hive mind.