And one more, let's go.
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STORYTELLING
One very, very noteworthy aspect of Disney storytelling is musical numbers. So I want those to be a genuine force of nature in Cosmos. Maybe not encourage gamers to attempt to tell their story that way (unless they're a really, really good improv group), but I'll certainly incorporate music into stories such as The Choices. ...And I'd love to actually see an improv group play the game with musical numbers. Or, you know, just watch anybody play Keys & Kingdoms in any style, watch 'em livestream it, that would be incredibly cool. Gotta make it first.
Babes in Toyland reminded me that musical numbers don't just need to express emotion or move the plot forward, sometimes there can be a song for absolutely no reason. Hey, why not, whatever force of nature causes people to burst into song probably doesn't always have a handle on what's plot-relevant. Oh, and Babes has strong nursery-rhyme motifs. Those are kind of like fairy tales. Often lumped together. Just... can't forget about those.
The Little Mermaid was the first film of the Disney Renaissance, and one of the things that made it a major comeback for Disney was that they started including truly epic music. Most Disney films were musicals before the Renaissance, of course, but before The Little Mermaid the songs in animated films were just little ditties; the Renaissance started making them massive Broadway-style production numbers. So I thought maybe we could usher in a modern era of Cosmos by having it so musical numbers are much more grand than they used to be... then again, I'm not actually interested in producing any Cosmos stories set in the world's distant past, so I guess what I have to keep in mind when telling Cosmos stories is that there's a place for big musical numbers and there's a place for little ditties. Whatever sets the mood best! Gotta learn how to do that better, there are way more things that a musical number can convey besides what a character is feeling.
And as I said: force of nature. These songs are not artistic interpretations of the characters' feelings, they're things that are actually happening. Something takes over people's minds and bodies in emotional moments and they express it through song and dance. I don't intend to examine that too much, just occasionally acknowledge it in-story, for instance by having a musical number from some other story we don't get to see pass by our main characters. In The Lion King, "I Just Can't Wait To Be King" is apparently Nala's plan for ditching Zazu... how does that work? Taking advantage of the medium, so to speak, might be something characters can do.
Aside from music, Dumbo got me thinking about circus tropes. Circuses have gone pretty far out of style, but they make for a good setting for a mystery or horror story. Let's think of the utilities, the societal changes, the storytelling potential, of a world where any animal can be tamed! Think again to Dumbo, where much of the work of setting up the circus tent is done by the elephants.
An element I've often neglected in my own writing throughout my life: weather. Rain, wind, snow, and other weathery things are great to give a story some atmosphere or just a little bit of life and relatability. Just thought, I believe from looking at Bambi and its atmosphere, that I need a reminder of that. I often forget that scenes set at night exist.
Cinderella's fairy godmother, who delivers much of her dialogue in rhyme, inspired the idea of characters who, well, do that. It's a common quirk in fantasy stories and extremely appealing if you don't suck at it. Some GMs are up to the task, so I hear. Easier than musical numbers, for sure. Alternatively, maybe characters who speak entirely in quotations and proverbs, like Vincent from The Black Hole.
Here's a thought I had from hearing Davy Crockett's nigh-unintelligible frontier dialect... well... dialects. In most of my fantasy worlds, I've just pictured all the characters sounding American regardless of where they're from, as you often see in cartoons and anime. If any character in such a work has an accent, it's conveying their personality, not where they're from. But dialects -- and for that matter, actual languages -- that ought to be a thing, y'know? There shouldn't just be one human language and one elf language, there oughta be, you know... places... where people sound different... I don't imagine there'll ever be a shred of consistency from one Cosmos story to another, but, you know, something to keep in mind.
Here's an idea I wrote down due to watching Old Yeller, but a thing I've mused about briefly in the past. See, Old Yeller is a Western in the sense that it takes place in the time and place of most Westerns, but ultimately it's a fairly mundane family drama, a slice-of-life. I would love to see more slice-of-life stories set in fantasy worlds where all this earth-shaking magic stuff goes on. What's everyday life like for a farmer? Outside of the occasional goblin attack, what's their family situation, their mundane life drama?
In 101 Dalmatians, Horace and Jasper watch a game show, in which contestants guess what sort of crime someone was imprisoned for. I love a good sadistic game show, not nearly enough of those in fiction! Not that the show was especially sadistic, just got my gears turning about such things.
The Aristocats features a lot of interesting geography which our cat heroes must travel through using their limited means, being cats and all. So, I'm all for that, elements of travel and geography. Especially when you're small. Blustery days and rainy day disasters, inspired by the original collection of Winnie the Pooh shorts. Sailing stories, involving lighthouses and coasts and stuff, like in Pete's Dragon. And what sort of magic may be brought about by solar eclipses and meteor showers, as seen in Dragonslayer?
Also in Dragonslayer -- a Paramount film which Disney co-produced, but when determining the contents of my collection, I thought it looked interesting enough that I wanted to see it -- the wicked dragon Vermithrax demands a virgin sacrifice. Why the sacrifices have to be virgins, I don't know, she just eats them, there's no magical component of a virgin that she needs. Said sacrifices are determined by lottery. Rich people "secretly" rig the lottery so their daughters aren't in there, and one main character is a blacksmith's daughter who's been disguising herself as a boy all her life to avoid the lottery. So, lots of story ideas there, as well as the mentor figure's gambit, involving his own death and resurrection in a lake of fiery water. All these elements of Dragonslayer's story provide magic system ideas as well. The presence of a virgin is also vital in Hocus Pocus. Virginity is, of course, a patriarchal social construct, so I don't know if magic would be able to recognize its existence, but perhaps people make it a factor in their magical rituals regardless.
Tron has some good story ideas that work really well in any story, not just its digital setting. For one thing, arcades feature prominently in its human-world segments... and you know what? Arcade games are a thing I can totally see existing in a world with magic but no computer or video technology. Some kind of enchanted way to tell a story. Meanwhile in the Grid, they've got a bread-and-circuses thing going on; a lot of gladiator games. The iconic lightcycle battles, plus that concentric-rings-over-a-bottomless-pit game, and then just normal gladiator matches. It's established that certain minorities receive sub-standard gladiator training, likely to result in their deaths. And that minority? Those who still profess belief in Users. Yes, when we first see the world of Tron, the Master Control Program has set up a regime -- a very hypocritical one, which oppresses the people and feeds them the line that the gods don't exist and that believing in them is illegal, while the elites enjoy open communication with the gods. That's... a fucking fascinating set-up, it's a shame that Tron itself barely gets into it. More for me, I guess!
Something Wicked This Way Comes takes place at a carnival. A magic carnival! So, put that in the bank, but regular carnivals are cool places to set a story as well. And any good carnival includes my absolute favorite place to set a dramatic confrontation -- a hall of mirrors.
Ah, Return to Oz ideas... well, that movie basically opens with electric shock therapy, that's pretty good shorthand for a story that's about to be really fucked up. And how about this: the shocking wreckage of an iconic location! Like the Emerald City. Of course, there aren't any iconic locations in Cosmos yet, and I'm not quite ready to shake up the place's status quo by destroying a city, maybe later. Can wreckage be shocking on its own, without previous familiarity with the place...? Meh, probably not. And then, how 'bout this: villains who love to make deals and wagers. Disney is known for this in its animated films by Clements and Musker -- Ursula, Jafar, Hades, and later Dr. Facilier -- but I first observed it here in Return to Oz. Apparently. It was in my notes, but I don't remember that part.
The Black Cauldron, being that rare Disney film that's actually a high fantasy instead of a fairy tale, had some good ideas. It starts with a wizard's apprentice -- a classic character archetype, and not one often seen in D&D; in D&D, you start at level one, when you're already a functioning wizard. I do have to wonder what "level zero" is like, how do you get to the point of being a first-level wizard? Something to ask in the next section, I suppose, and while I'm at it, maybe I can justify multiclassing a little better, that's a thing that tends to come out of nowhere. Also here: undead armies. Now, in a lot of high fantasy stories, undead armies are completely invincible. Because they're dead already. While a bit of pure hopelessness is a nice thing to feel in a story, this is an RPG universe; nothing is invincible. Still, undead armies are dead useful (heh): no need to eat or rest, no will of their own with which to question your orders, definitely hard to beat that. But they can be destroyed. Finally, there's ending a story with a sacrifice play, when the only way for good to win is your own death. Need reasons to do that.
So, I love me a good action setpiece, and The Great Mouse Detective had some really good ones -- tiny action setpieces for tiny adventurers. That's just a whole lot of fun all around. Plus, the final battle was inside a clock tower, that's a bitchin' place for a confrontation.
A lot of D&D campaigns are episodic stories. There's presumably a singular goal for an entire, shall we say, "season", but each individual "episode" has a unique setting and plot on its way to that goal. The Brave Little Toaster is a good example of a film with an episodic adventure plot.
The final battle of Who Framed Roger Rabbit employs many popular tactics from classic cartoons -- mentioned here because several different aspects can come into play in the rules of the game, both as magic items such as the singing sword or the portable hole (the latter being not just a Bugs Bunny stable but also an actual D&D magic item), and non-magical items such as cartoon bombs and anvils. Also in Roger Rabbit, I figure that fair play mysteries, with all the pieces fitting together, are great genres for a story in this setting. And in any given story, there are certainly some things that you can only do... when it's funny. Hmm, there's an RPG on that subject by the name of Toon. Maybe I should give it a peek.
There's a moment in The Rocketeer when the hero is cornered by some criminals and he gets away from them by playing on their patriotism. Just liked that moment, wanted to note it for later.
Near the climax of Aladdin, Jasmine plays her part by seducing Jafar so he doesn't notice Aladdin sneaking in. I like that; the careful placeful of feminine wiles is a great story and character moment. Just... emphasis on "careful", you don't want it to look like it's the only thing your female lead is good for. But if she can't fight, if that's the best possible way she can contribute, as it certainly was for Jasmine in that moment... basically this is a thing that has to be done really, really well.
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey is, well, an incredible journey, it's right there in the title, plenty of adventure ideas in there. Highlights include the antics of iconic American wildlife such as raccoons, skunks, and porcupines. And they meet a lost child along the way. Rescuing a lost child, a little bit of heartwarming glurge to engage in, yeah?
Hocus Pocus has one notable idea in it, outside all of the magic -- ways you can use modern technology to trick people from the past! I'd say Cosmos has enough technological stuff going on that this is possible, some of it is probably fairly recent, and some people live a long time and have maybe been out of the loop for a while.
I like the relationship dynamic between Sally and Jack in Nightmare Before Christmas. They both call the other "my dear friend" in song lyrics, and Sally's solo reveals that as much as she wants him romantically, she doesn't think she has a chance -- but she cares for him and his friendship anyway, and that's just a very nice healthy dynamic you don't see often enough. Jack reciprocating at the end of the film notwithstanding, you know, I just like relationships and stuff regardless of what kind of story I'm telling, you know?
The Three Musketeers has a lot of cool stuff, like the torchlit waterways and catacombs where a villain secretly operates. Windmills are an interesting setpiece as well. The film also has a brief use of possibly the most classic possible element of any swashbuckling tale: the chandelier. Whether you're swinging across a room on it or dropping it on your enemy's head, for all your swashbuckling needs, it's the chandelier.
Another swashbuckler staple: wining and wenching, baby! In the film, Porthos gives D'Artagnan some tips about wenching, and not in a "how to pick up girls" way, the resident wenches are completely in on the lessons, and I kinda like that. In a world as sex-positive as the fantasy worlds I try to create, I can totally see a very casual scene set in a tavern, in which a bunch of men and women have an enjoyable, healthy conversation about how to get someone in bed and have a good time. Later on, the queen and the servant girl who is bathing her, they have some girl talk about their romantic lives, and, hey, that's just appealing in every possible way.
During the final battle of The Three Musketeers, the villainous Cardinal reveals that he's been packing a pistol under his big red cardinal robes and shoots Aramis, a truly shocking moment I absolutely adored, and a few minutes later, Aramis turns out to have survived due to the oversized crucifix he was wearing under his clothes, though heck if I know how that particular detail can ever happen in an RPG. And at the end of the film, the king gives a big speech about the strong protecting the weak and being there for the vulnerable, the little guy, and that, well, that moved me, we need that in the modern world.
So, the Robin Hood bit of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. The opening scene of The Return of Jafar shows us that Aladdin now steals from thieves who stole from the rich, and distributes it to the poor. That's... new. And the writers didn't really think it through. Imagine that, the writers of a cheap-ass straight-to-video cash-cow sequel didn't really think things through. For one thing, we don't know who the thieves stole this treasure from, so we have no reason to think Aladdin is justified in redistributing it instead of returning it to its rightful owner. For another, just dropping valuable treasures at random in the poor areas of Agrabah is just going to start riots and get people hurt... to be fair, he does that during the "Prince Ali" number in the first film too. So, you know, I like the heart of the idea, they just had to think it through better.
As I've already mentioned when talking about genies and lamps, the writing in The Return of Jafar is actually very good in some places; it was the first of the straight-to-video cheapquels Disney had their Florida studio cranking out between 1994 and 2008 and thus far the only one I've covered in my collection, but I'll be watching most of them, and I expect some highs and lows. Some extremely clever moments come at the climax. For example, Jafar at one point saves Aladdin's life because he's not satisfied with simply seeing the hero tumble over a waterfall, he wants real revenge -- so he frames Aladdin for the regicide of the Sultan and disguises himself as Jasmine so he can sentence Aladdin to death, then briefly gives Aladdin a glimpse of his real face while he's on the chopping block, allowing Aladdin to die without hope and know who killed him. That is some amazing villainy right there. And another amazing moment resolves it moments later: Iago breaks the glass orb that the Genie is trapped in at the exact same moment the headsman is starting to swing his sword at Aladdin's neck, but Genie still manages to escape the dungeon fast enough to whisk him away. It was amazing, and I wonder how often an act of such super-speed can be employed in K&K games...
So, a few story thingums from The Lion King, such as a stampede event? Hmm, I've never seen game rules for that, that sounds exciting. Lion King has strong Shakespearean motifs, as does Gargoyles of course, let's see how well we can implement some of those! And, er, note to self: remember gay men, would ya? I like M/F and F/F because, well, I'm a man and I like women, so those are both visually appealing and attractive to me, but I have to remember M/M, it's not inclusive to just include the kinds of relationship that turn me on, sends the wrong message.
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GAMEPLAY
I haven't had a whole lot of ideas regarding K&K gameplay, even now while I'm studying games in general I'm still not sure how it all fits together and I'm much more focused on world. Certainly not a lot of game mechanic ideas that came out of watching the collection, but... let's see what we've got here that belongs in the rulebook. Mostly, it seems I'm working with ideas for non-magical objects and locations for which a rulebook might include some guidelines.
Musical Instruments: First idea? I like musical instruments. I'm thinking a musical instrument list as long and comprehensive as the weapon list! ...Well, that sounds like a ton of useless padding, actually. Maybe not.
Vehicles: "Once Upon a Wintertime" from Melody Time features a horse-drawn sleigh. That's super-romantic, and I assume in wintry climates, actually useful! So, that got me thinking about vehicles: wagons, carriages, chariots, sleighs, each with different utilities. Same with boats. As for cars, well, maybe they're a fascinating new thing, as seen in The Wind in the Willows -- not quite widespread yet, but definitely around. Maybe some car-crushing big rigs, like the villain drives in The Rescuers Down Under.
Then let's talk flying vehicles, such as airships; we see such things in The Great Mouse Detective -- making one realize that a flying vehicle is much easier to invent or even cobble together when you're small and not much to carry, yeah? Oh, and zeppelins! Zeppelins, for whatever reason, are common visual shorthand for being in another world. ...Because they're very impractical and no normal world would continue using them if they had an alternative, hehe. Zeppelins appear in Flight of the Navigator and The Rocketeer... not to convey anything otherworldly, but it reminded me of the trope.
Eccentric Rich Guy Homes: Toad Hall in The Wind and the Willows is a grandiose mansion with all sorts of secret passages... I want to look into such places as "dungeon" settings.
Treasure: Made my first note about treasure regarding that appearing in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Treasure is, of course, a necessary aspect of any role-playing game. ...Not sure why I felt the need to remind myself of that. It is a part I tend to forget about in my own games. So, some ideas. Like in 20,000 Leagues, where they find it in sunken ships (while on that subject, ought to think of non-magical ways to dive underwater, say equivalents to an old-fashioned diving suit where you have to walk, and then a more expensive apparatus akin to scuba so you can swim). Or in The Rescuers, where pirate treasure is found in a bayou, for whatever reason.
Diseases: A fascinating game mechanic I've... never had a chance to use. Couple things to note. Rabies, as seen in Old Yeller; identified in the film by the name it had at the time of the film's setting, "hydrophoby". While I like scientific accuracy in my fantasy worlds, sometimes you do have to acknowledge that this is a pre-modern world and that society and healthcare can't always be ideal, y'know? Think, for example, how Merlin ends his duel with Madam Mim -- he transforms into a germ and infects her with a disease. I don't think that should be a thing. I think disease organisms would be largely unknown, things too small even to study with magic. Which raises the question of what kind of superstitions there would be in worlds where goblins, pixies, and changelings truly exist...
Future Inventions: Merlin, depicted in certain stories as experiencing history backwards, is interpreted in The Sword in the Stone as making a lot of anachronistic references, kind of a 60s prototype of the Genie. In addition to ending the film by suggesting that someday a film might be made about King Arthur, he has a model airplane in his study and attempts to fly it at one point. Among other things. So, I don't know, I'm not sure I want time travel to be a really big element in Cosmos, but I do have a soft spot (thanks to a prominent non-Disney inspiration of mine, The Secrets of Droon) for fantasy worlds including magical cars, submarines, planes, let's just think about what other kinds of tech we can squeeze in.
Science-Fiction Elements: Let's talk the game mechanics of such things... specifically, miscellaneous elements from Disney's first spacefaring feature, The Black Hole. Purely from a rules standpoint, I don't yet know to introduce such things to stories. So, The Black Hole... well, there's a black hole in it. Those are frightening, very existential. One character in the film has psionic powers, never explained, she just does and everyone treats it as normal. Which is good writing; if it's normal in their universe, then the characters should treat it that way and not contrive reasons to explain it to the audience. Anyway, psionic powers, those are often in D&D (never in the core rules, though, they come up later, haven't really yet in 5E), so, let's think about that. Then there's a meteor shower, with an airlock breach and the resulting frostiness.
From Flight of the Navigator, we have a spaceship that's completely seamless, with no apparent entrance. It opens by changing its shape, and changes its shape for other reasons, so, I'm thinking nanotechnology? Also, it confirms that faster-than-light travel results in some time-warp problems which it resolves via time travel. Meh, too convenient, better to just avoid the time-warp issue. Of course, in Cosmos, there's nothing in the universe far enough away that you'd need to travel at light speed, but, something to keep in mind if we ever do a harder sci-fi campaign setting...
Horror: Believe it or not, Disney has at least one horror film to their name. To their actual name, not converted into a Touchstone film later. That being the 80s cult-classic The Watcher in the Woods. ...Not that great, but hey, nice seeing Disney doing some horror and giving me some ideas for horror storytelling here in K&K. Details like glass shattering, invisible reflections, flashes of blue light... and that's all I took away from that movie, really, just those touches. It's always neat when a long-running series runs a small storyline that runs on a horror atmosphere! And I just realized I put this in the wrong category, this is storytelling stuff. Oh, right, I was going somewhere with it: mechanics-wise, it helps create a horror atmosphere if your characters have stats for their morale and sanity, and the potential to lose one or both as the horror adventure goes on, so maybe that can be a rule? Like, all the time, not just when you're running a horror episode.
Firearms: The current D&D rules include a little section in the Dungeon Master's Guide for adding firearms to your game if you wanna mix things up. Pathfinder has a Gunslinger character class so that a character proficient in guns can be a balanced companion to the rest of the party, and Critical Role converted the gunslinger into a fighter subclass for their game. In D&D, prices are listed for the Renaissance-era guns but not the more modern or futuristic guns, suggesting that old-timey flintlock pistols and muskets can actually be invented in your fantasy world, but if you come across a shotgun, a machine gun, or a death ray, it likely came here from a whole 'nother universe and is priceless. So... yeah, thinkin' about guns. Most fantasy stories just don't have guns, even though guns were invented in the 14th century (with cannons going back as far as the 10th) and most fantasy worlds operate on a technology level a little bit after that. So, somethin' to think about.
Traps and Hazards: A big part of dungeon-crawling gameplay. First came to mind from the bear trap scene in The Fox and the Hound, a terrifying moment that's stuck with me since I was very little.
Game-mechanics-wise, traps and hazards are the same thing, but generally traps are things pre-prepared by people as defenses, hazards are just natural things that happen to get in your way; either can be mundane or magical. Here's a hazard: "the floor is lava". Return to Oz shows us that outside the borders of Oz, there's a desert in which you can't touch the sand, you have to carefully make your way from rock to rock. I don't remember what happens if you touch the sand. Mkay, quick glance at the Oz wiki, it's the Deadly Desert, and it turns flesh to dust. Cool.
Now, what about death traps? James Bond type stuff. We see Ratigan place Basil in such a trap; in true Bond villain fashion, he has better things to do than watch the trap to see if it works, allowing Basil to use his brilliance to escape it. That's a classic genre trope, right there. So, ways in which a "death trap" is distinct from a "trap"...
Other traps, as seen in DuckTales, include pressure plate booby-traps, differently colored tiles, some of which are rigged, aaaand... laser grids! And such things can make for a great big heist scene. Involving marbles! Or ball bearings, if you prefer. Also poacher snares, like in The Rescuers Down Under.
In Homeward Bound, we see a river crossing hazard with the inevitable waterfall. Also, our heroic pets catapult themselves at one point, that's a pretty slick combat maneuver if you can set up a battlefield to have that in place...
Tron Elements: There's lots of iconic imagery in Tron, and most of that imagery can take the form of useful gameplay elements. Such as the lightcycle, the space armor, the Recognizer airships, the solar sailer, and of course the disk-shaped weapons which also hold all of an individual's knowledge.
Time Travel: This can be a magical or a technological process. As with seeing the future, not a thing you can pull off in an RPG... well, at least not if you're operating on a "stable time loop" system, meaning it's impossible to change the past because in the past, you were already there doing what you're doing now. That's my favorite set of time travel rules, because it's the only one that really makes sense, but you can't pull it off in a story that you're pantsing, as in an RPG.
So I guess this is a branching-timelines setting; if you enter a time warp that keeps thrusting you further forward in time, but then manage to undo it and return to when you started, the timeline where you were constantly finding yourself moving forward, that timeline ceases to exist, or at the very least, becomes inaccessible to you. I rather like the way Avengers: Endgame handled time travel: though they implied they operated on a stable time loop, making sure to prevent branching timelines by putting the Infinity Stones back where they found them in the end, they did in fact change the past (e.g., their actions meant Loki escaped with the Tesseract at the end of The Avengers, when he didn't do that originally), but nevertheless, when they returned to their own time, it was still their original timeline. Seems to me that these new timelines, though inaccessible to the time-traveler after they return home, continue to exist.
Or not? I'm still not sure what the MCU is currently up to with its timelines, guess it'll become clear eventually... I suspect the return of the Infinity Stones merged the main timeline with the three new ones the Avengers created -- so that at the end of The Avengers, Loki both got captured and imprisoned on Asgard, eventually leading to his redemption and death at Thanos's hand, and escaped with the Tesseract and is still evil out there in the universe somewhere, as we'll learn when his TV show comes out. I think it's something like that. But see, that's the thing: no time travel story that I'm aware of has ever followed its own rules, they always take an opportunity to break them when it's dramatically appropriate, if they ever had any rules in the first place. But I think the best system would be the system that Endgame, well, appeared to run on for most of its runtime: you can travel to the past, change anything you want, bring back any objects from the past that you want, and make an alternate timeline, but once you return to where and when you started, you're back in your timeline, and the alternate one you created is forever lost to you. Similarly, if you travel to the future, your appearance in the future does not end up happening in your timeline.
Lava and Magma: Not necessarily in that order. Lava is, well, generally not as dangerous in fiction as it should be. 4th Edition D&D was probably the most realistic depiction in the history of gaming: if you touch lava and you're not 100% immune to fire, you die. 4E being uncharacteristically merciless there. Generally, there are no instant-death effects in 4E apart from that, but in other games, games where sometimes you can die instantly, lava just does a hell of a lot of damage, it's survivable. In reality, of course, you don't want to go anywhere near lava, you'll be incinerated well before you touch it, but... that's no fun at all, if that was true, where would be all the fun exploring, fighting, and escaping taking place inside volcanoes? Hrmm, yeah, I think I'm gonna go with just lots and lots of damage, being horribly wounded by lava but still crawling your way out is metal as fuck.
Special Weaponry: Quite a bit of this can be seen in The Three Musketeers. In D&D, most weapons are rather simple, rules-wise. You hit someone with a weapon, and they take damage. But let's think of more specialized gadgets and gear you can use. Porthos is the primary source of these, as he carries a dagger which splits into three, and uses it to break his opponent's weapon. He also uses a bolas, a non-lethal throwing weapon originating in South America, generally used to snare large birds. Elsewhere in the film, the Cardinal hires a guy to snipe the king... can you snipe with 17th century guns, is that a thing that's possible? And in another moment, the heroes find themselves subject to cannon fire coming from a fortress thingy, bringing us to the question of fortresses, castles, and other defensible places, and the weapons that are used to attack and defend such places, like cannons, catapults, trebuchets, ballistae, portable siege towers, and pots of boiling oil.
Dungeons: "Dungeon" in gaming usually refers to any underground environment where your adventure takes you, but an actual dungeon is, you know, where you imprison your political opponents and torture them and stuff. In The Three Musketeers, Porthos finds himself in the Cardinal's dungeon and has to fight the torturer. I imagine torturers know pretty good ways to fight, and Porthos wins the fight by sticking the guy in an iron maiden, so... rules on that and other such torture implements, though let's not neglect the inclusion of a rule about how torture doesn't actually work and good people don't do it.
Improvised Combat Actions: Let's talk about Aladdin. In Kingdom Hearts, he's a melee warrior type who uses a scimitar, a weapon he wields for only a few short seconds in his actual movie. This is because Kingdom Hearts is a video game and Aladdin's actual fighting style wouldn't translate very well to normal gameplay. He evades, he dodges, and he hinders and damages his opponents using only his surroundings, causing a fuckton of property damage. We see a bit of this in the first movie, where his tactics generally focus on escaping, but later on in his franchise he gets more active, I noticed this fighting style in Return of Jafar and I remember it's what he used in the episode of the Hercules TV series in which Hercules and Aladdin fight each other. Cool crossover. So, I like that, you don't see it much in RPGs, in video games you can't smash any object that the programmers don't say you can smash, but in a tabletop game, doing super-unexpected things like that is very much encouraged. Along with some dirty tactics, like when Scar starts off a new skirmish by flinging some hot coals in Simba's face.
Bows: Not something I got from watching these movies, but a decision that I knew had to be made at some point, and if I'm going to remind myself of it, might as well do it here. Here's the thing: as a rule in video games, if you have a good Strength score, you fight in melee, and if you have a good Dexterity score, you fight at range. The thing is, the most popular ranged weapon is the bow... which is so much heavier than a sword, do you have any idea how strong you have to be to pull the string of any bow that actually does a good amount of damage? You might say it would unbalance things if both melee and ranged combat required a good Strength score, but... not necessarily. In a lot of games, the big muscle guys who fight in melee usually carry crossbows as a backup. You don't need to be super-strong to fire a crossbow. So, yeah, it should be turned around: the big strong guys who fight in melee should carry bows, while the slender and nimble backup characters built for ranged combat should use crossbows and other ranged weapons that don't actually require immense strength. Because bows certainly do. Aiming a bow, of course, is more of a Dexterity moment than a Strength one, so here's how I think I'd do it: making a ranged attack with a bow is a Dexterity check, same as always. However, let's say there are a few types of bows; small to large, low-damage to high-damage, and every bow has a Strength requirement. If you attempt to fire a bow and your Strength score is lower than the bow's Strength requirement, the first thing you have to do is make a Strength check to see if you can even pull the string. So, very risky, using a bow if you have a Dexterity build. You need both.
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ART AND DESIGN
Some Disney ideas from the collection are basically just ideas for art appearing in Keys & Kingdoms, like in the guidebooks and stuff. Every Disney film has dazzling art, of course, with its character design, and costumes and backgrounds that really make the time and place where the film is set pop. So I like looking back on all that, but here's some more specific stuff.
In the "Dance of the Hours" segment in Fantasia, well, I had two notes about the dancers. The more obvious note: they're ostriches, hippos, elephants, and crocodiles; animals you're likely to see on the African savannah, and that's cool, will make for some nice set-dressing for a savannah setting. My other note was on, well... how very little they're wearing. The most clothed ones are the hippos, and they just have slippers and the skirt portion of a tutu. If they were human... hehe. So, I just liked that imagery; despite the Disney origins, I want Keys & Kingdoms to be very adult; violent and gritty to explore themes that make adults really think, and sexy because it's fun. Very old Disney films such as The Three Caballeros weren't shy about including what's now considered adult elements such as smoking and firearms -- I wouldn't mind normalizing such things for talking animals again, instead of having it be incongruous. So, yeah, some artwork of attractive human women who dress like the "Dance of the Hours" girls, which is to say, practically nude. Maybe it's the traditional dance attire of some culture somewhere in the world.
I've always liked taking note of certain assortments of animals -- like the various animals Merlin and Madam Mim change into when they duel in The Sword in the Stone, and the teams in the soccer game in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Might be fun to shout-out to those specific groups in pieces of artwork.
When I saw The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, I was struck by a realization: K&K artwork needs to include all kinds of blatant Disney imagery as a shout-out to the original inspiration -- to wit, the iconic clay pots in which Pooh keeps his honey. So... gotta think of other iconic imagery to use. Whatever it is, I figure we look in films set in certain countries, and put that kind of imagery in the Cosmos country inspired by that part of the world. So Pooh's honeypots would primarily appear in Sheafell, ya see? And Sheafell would include other notable artistic motifs from every Disney film set in the UK. Of course, as I said earlier when I talked about plushie constructs, my original idea for K&K artwork would be for it to depict iconic Disney scenes in a photorealistic art style, but a couple years ago Disney started doing that themselves and it sucks, so... need to find another art style, but not one that's too fanciful, still very grounded.
So, other iconic imagery to slip into the gamebook's art. How about a fork and a pipe? Classic. And I'd love to fill the books with various realistic-looking adaptations of various Muppet characters.
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And, uh, okay, finally finished this thing! Soon, I'll be looking at Disney films from 1995 and find out what they can add to the universe. And so on. Now there's the Christalss entry and then I'm done with this little time period in the blog. After that, I'm going to go onto Campfire and start building all of my worlds and stories. I do hope some people have some time to help me out with that...
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