When trying to find inspiration for roleplaying game
sessions and characters, I find it useful to turn towards less conventional
sources. Most good systems have a rich background for GMs and players alike to
draw upon. However, it often pays to look towards more unexpected areas to
breathe new life into your games. I personally find movies and TV shows useful
for coming up with encounters, premises, or even character dynamics. Obviously,
I’m not advocating for you to just wholesale steal from other media. But
virtually all art has outside inspirations and so the same applies when doing
something like RPGs. The inspiration in question doesn’t even have to be
particularly good.
The 1997 film Cube has
long been a cult classic, offering a unique premise and interesting take on the horror
genre. It follows five people who find themselves in a series of near identical
rooms differentiated only by the variety of lethal traps they house. As they
desperately try to escape this apparently endless prison, they begin to come
into conflict with each other. Cube is
by no metric a perfect film, as it's plagued by goofy acting, a garbled
message, and some questionable stereotypes. However a GM or even player could
learn a lot from the way the film engages its central premise.
The most obvious lesson is the way it uses traps, which, as
I’ve previously discussed, are difficult to use. Cube gets around their contrived nature by integrating them
directly into the plot. They are the most immediate, physical threat to the protagonists and their presence impacts all of their decisions. Additionally, the film has a very “RPG” like premise, as it features group
of individuals with certain specialties forced together by circumstance. While that storytelling convention that's hardly unique to Cube, it's rare to see it quite so "gamified."
You
could run the plot of the movie as a session, or even a whole campaign, with very little changes necessary. Not that I recommend doing that. Besides the issue of originality, a Cube RPG campaign would likely be a hard sell. However, it’s “trap
room” setup offers a number of roleplay opportunities and could be easily
applied to almost any genre. Case in point, the Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode “The Box” was very clearly
inspired by it.
However, the film has more to offer than just a unique
adventure seed. One of the least addressed but most pressing issues in the majority of
roleplaying game systems is why the adventurers are even together. The real
reason is that the players are there to be a part of the game. But within the
context of the actual story, what’s a brave paladin doing with some deplorable bandit? Cube takes characters
from various backgrounds with unique skills and deftly uses its premise to
force them together. A GM could do well to learn from the film's approach of directly using the premise to force
an unlikely group of heroes to form.
Additionally, Cube fully
explores the consequences of such a strained team. The death traps and hope
of escaping only exist to create the film’s real conflict, the threat the group poses to each other. As their journey drags on
without any respite, the group quickly finds themselves becoming more and more hostile. They’d never come together outside of this unique situation and even the hazards
of their current predicament can’t erase that fact.
Daring players and GMs can
integrate inter party conflicts into their campaigns in a similar way. They can even use
strenuous situations as a way to get otherwise amicable characters to fight
each other. As long as the boundaries are clearly established beforehand, this approach
can give everyone a better understanding of the player characters and their
roles within the group. It can also make their classes, careers, etc. have more than just a mechanical role in the campaign. Cube might
not be more than an average if unique film but it showcases conflict between its protagonists in a
very RPG-like manner.
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