Keys & Kingdoms

Here's a little bonus thing to go alongside the seven Team Salmon ideas, because Keys & Kingdoms starts its life as a tabletop RPG rather than a cartoon, and that shall be what it's best known for, one hopes. With rules descended from Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder via the open-source game license, the theme and the setting are heavily influenced by Disney - predominantly fairy tale based, but with aspects from every title and genre Disney has ever tackled (plus a few things sneakily brought in from traditional animated films from other companies; also, the cutoff point will be after Kingdom Hearts III and Wreck-It Ralph 2 are released; we'll try really, really hard to ignore everything Disney does after that so the setting doesn't get too bloated with stuff), all reinterpreted, with their original identities filed away, to become something that makes more sense for an RPG. Something we can legally sell as a gamebook!

So this blog entry is the outline of the Keys and Kingdoms basics, as they stand in my head right now. Let's start with the character classes; I figure the best class list would be made of every D&D class to have been a core class in multiple editions, which conveniently, is also the core class list of 5th Edition, which will be the primary source of the K&K rules, a nice and simple system with some depth. Let's sort them by the edition in which they first became core classes:

1: Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue
2: Paladin, Ranger, Druid, Bard
3: Barbarian, Monk, Sorcerer
4: Warlock

More detailed fleshing-out of the characters will be done by an "archetype" system; for instance, a ranger can choose to have their abilities lean toward archery, two-blade fighting, hunting, or beast mastery, just as an example, and have a unique path of abilities based on that chosen archetype while also gaining certain abilities that every ranger gets.

Then there are the core races. I came up with ten archetypes I'd like to be the core races and have been working on building lore around them. Plenty more races will be added in later updates to the game, I'm sure. For now, we have, well, not exactly ten core races - more like eight core races and two concepts I'm still working on but would really like to be options found in the core rules, if that would work.

Human: As in most RPGs, humans provide the baseline, no unique perks or disadvantages besides, perhaps, being short-lived and equally predisposed to good and evil.
Dwarf: The classic RPG dwarves with significant influence from the dwarfs of Snow White.
Elf: I couldn't think of any Disney property that has elves in it, but you can't have an RPG that has humans and dwarves without elves. I think they'll take some influence from the Atlanteans of Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
Gargoyle: Just straight-up the gargoyles from the TV show Gargoyles. Taking as much lore as possible from the show and its supplemental materials.
Fairy: There were lots of fairies in the early Disney films - Pinocchio's blue fairy, Cinderella's fairy godmother, the three good fairies of Sleeping Beauty, and let's not forget Maleficent herself is technically a fairy too. Not only do I want these fairies to all exist under a single blanket, inspired by the Children of Oberon from Gargoyles, but also make them a core race. The idea is that while most fairies are as powerful as gods due to their age, your player character is a new fairy who has only just come into existence.
Pixie: Inspired by Tinker Bell and her little franchise, teeny-tiny flying player characters with strong connections to nature and humanity.
Merfolk: Yup, I'm making mermaids a core race. A lot of people don't like the underwater part of games. I'm hoping I can make it interesting enough to justify this core race.
Native: Anthropomorphic animals inspired by Mickey Mouse and his supporting cast. The concept is that while they're not exceptionally common, they're the oldest race in existence and everyone instinctively recognizes them as normal even if they've never seen one. They can resemble any animal; they can all be a single race because, like Walt's original creations, they have no capabilities that resemble those of the animal they're based on; they're very human.
Nemo: One of those that's more a concept than a core race, the nemos are inspired by the Nobodies from Kingdom Hearts. In the K&K universe, a nemo is someone who was brought back from death, but whose soul was used to make an incorporeal undead creature, leaving them alive but soulless. Can't quite count them as a race because this is something that could happen to any of the races. A nemo has elemental powers and difficulty handling their emotions and, well, some incentive to become normal again while also being totally cool to handle as a long-term player concept. Gotta figure out how to balance the advantages and disadvantages.
Heart Construct: This idea I came up with because I wanted a race that could represent characters as diverse as Pinocchio, Tron, Baymax, Olaf - any artificially-created being given life by the love and passion of their creator, whether created through art, magic, or technology. In retrospect, I'm not sure this idea would work as a "race", per se, but I do want such characters to be available as a prominent option for players, so... we'll work on that.

Finally, I want to talk about themes - given the diverse nature of the setting ("all things Disney" does cover a good portion of human existence, after all; to that end, the themes aren't based on Disney so much as genres of general fiction) I want to associate most adventures with one of the following themes, and keep the themes separate for the most part, occasionally bleeding into one another.

Fairy Tales: The core theme, a pseudo-European fantasy place where everything is pretty and has that Disney magic.
Mythic: With roots in more traditional RPG environments and epic historical and mythological stories from real societies, be it Arthurian, Viking, Greek, Egyptian, Arabian, Chinese, Japanese... a mixture.
Pirates: A pirate theme! Caribbean and otherwise. It's basically a genre even if it's never been an especially successful one, but it's fun and doesn't quite mesh with any particular historical era, so it's a whole theme.
Cowboys: The western theme - men with guns and horses. Hey, there's a good reason that's a genre too. Mixing with all the other themes will add plenty of epic weirdness, and most of the Americana in the setting can go under this umbrella.
Tribes: Sort of a Conan the Barbarian setting, with cavemen fighting dinosaurs and things based on real tribal people and their history and mythology; Native American, Mesoamerican, Polynesian, and African primarily.
Aliens: The science-fiction, cosmic side of the setting - spacecraft and lasers, computers and cyberspace, inter-dimensional travel and alien beings. To be kept at arm's length of most of the setting for the most part, but it's definitely there.
Urban: The modern city experience. Spectacular powers might be seen in more of a superhero context here, and this theme is where one is most likely to encounter those fully-clothed mice living on the fringes of human society that seem to be so common in animation. Maybe I should have made them a core race...

Beyond that, it's all just musings. The process will involve watching just about every Disney film ever made and implementing as much of its mythology as possible into the setting, rebuilding it into something original.

UPDATE:

Had one particular idea that was so significant I had to mention it, and I thought I'd throw in a couple of other meaningful ideas as well:

Myshka: The name of the aforementioned race of civilized rodents. Need to come up with a mythology for them. And yeah, they're so common in animation that they really ought to be a core race in this setting. There should also be some sort of insect equivalent (think Jiminy Cricket), and perhaps lizard and bat varieties, as they're rather common in "mouse world" stories.
Carforged: A way to implement, well, Cars, in a spoof of D&D's very own warforged. Not a core race, but perhaps a prominent one.
Monsters: Animated films don't often contain an assortment of monsters to fight, hence why Kingdom Hearts usually goes with the Heartless and associated creatures as its common opponents. The idea I had would be to use common RPG opponents such as goblins, orcs, and ogres, but base their behavior and attire on the various types of Heartless, turning every Heartless variety into a distinct creature of its own, with the illustrations making it clear where the inspiration came from.
Wildlife: Possibly important enough to be yet another theme - both fairy tales and animation frequently feature a look at animal society. Think The Jungle Book, Tarzan, and especially The Lion King. The notion is: every animal family (on the taxonomic level) has a language; it's all but impossible to learn this language unless you've grown up with it, a la Mowgli or Tarzan, and animals, though as intelligent as people, have no means of communicating with them. Transforming into an animal, a common enough occurrence in both fairy tales and RPGs, naturally grants you the ability to speak with them. Certain races might have the ability to speak with certain animal groups. Whatever other concepts I end up going with, it's definitely big enough to merit a theme.

UPDATE:

Feeling the need to keep this blog post current for whatever reason, I've decided that, as the nemo and the heart construct don't seem to work as core races, I'll be replacing them with the myshka and the syrsa, the name for the Jiminy Cricket-style humanoid insects. That leaves three tiny core races... there'll have to be specialized adventures for tiny characters.