Unlikely Inspirations- Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles

                                                        Bantam Books

I’m the sort of Game Master that provides the players a lot of input in the story. That leads to a good amount of improvisation on my part, which in turn can lead to a somewhat disjointed narrative. But real life never follows a rigid narrative arc. So that means mean seemingly disparate events over the course of a campaign can’t link up to have a larger meaning. Plenty of books adopt this sort of approach but Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is closer to Roleplaying Games than most other examples. The book links up short stories written across his career, the only constant being the use of Mars as a setting. However, the repetition of certain themes, characters, and concepts, along with the stories written to unify the others, gives the anthology a surprisingly coherent storyline. The Martian Chronicles taught me that as long as a GM can keep a few fundamental elements consistent, they don’t have to worry about the individual sessions of a campaign forming a more conventional plot.

               While each story has considerably different characters, circumstances, and tones, they all share a common setting. Each story helps build up Bradbury’s vision of a habitable Mars and the strange, wondrous beings that built it. Alternatively, they establish the circumstances on earth that brought Mars’ human colonists to the red planet. Most of the stories also share themes about exploration, colonialism, technology, and nuclear war. The way in which The Martian Chronicles builds a larger narrative out of smaller, self-contained stories forms a close parallel with the way many RPG campaigns play out. It also shows that one "whole" narrative isn’t necessarily more effective or meaningful than a more fragmented one.

               In addition to offering insights into how to run a campaign, The Martian Chronicles features some strong ideas for them. While only a few stories feature direct violence, each one has significant stakes and an eerie atmosphere to accompany it. The Martian Chronicles helped teach middle school me that there’s more ways to convey threat in a story than just an adversary or some other form of direct harm. Just because science fiction can features monsters, ray guns, and the like doesn’t mean it absolutely has to. Imagery like 50s style American towns built over Martian cities and automated houses that run even after the end of the world also gave me a sense of what an unconventional, colorful but still familiar setting could be. The Martian Chronicles had a considerable influence over me as a kid and its impact extended to how I run RPGs.

Unlikely Inspirations- Cube (1997)

                                                                                                                                                                                         IMDB

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.