Gaming and the Kung Fu Gorillas

A lot of the movies I watch are just flat out terrible.  My current GM Patty was recently reminded of a rather notorious movie I have spoken of semi-fondly in the past that contained *two* Kung Fu practicing gorillas.  Well, at least two actors in terrible gorilla costumes in any event.  She seemed aghast that I spend so much time on bad cinema. I cannot deny that the movie is beyond bad. But what I can tell you is that I glean a lot of good plot elements from bad movies.  Maybe not this one, but some.  The movie in question is Bruce Lee The Invincible.  Watch if you dare.

In truth a lot of my influences, gaming and life, are decidedly low brow.  I grew up sneaking around my parents so that I could watch professional wrestling and Kung Fu Theater.  The Saturday Night Creature Feature and the Late Late Show rounded out my early pop cultural education.  Many gamers grew up on Tolkein and Star Wars.  My influences run more toward Edgar Rice Burroughs and Hammer Films.  In my early post college years, I didn't have cable, so I wore out the video stores and watched every crappy movie they had to offer.  A number of those films had the occasional good idea in them, irrespective of their low budget, bad acting, and poor production.  I have re-purposed many of the best of those ideas in the games I run over the years.  Often, I will watch a crappy movie, knowing that it is crappy, just to find that one good idea that I hope it contains.

As a result, I came upon quite a few gems in the rock pile.  A number of those were the earliest Hong Kong imports.  On a pop cultural level, I was ahead of the curve on the Asian film boom of the 1990s.  Many of the best Hong Kong films really do not deserve to be mentioned in the poor company of much of what I have watched.  The Hong Kong Cinema of the late 80s and 90s was always colorful, often inventive, and regularly absolutely nuts.  Really what better source of cool game ideas could you want?

HK Cinema was such a fertile ground for gaming that Robin Laws turned his inestimable talent toward making  a game that used those gonzo cinema conventions as game conceits.  Feng Shui was the result.  It is quite unlike many other games of the time, because it encourages the characters to be larger than life action heroes instead of deeply nuanced characters.  The PCs regularly engage in big set piece fights for no other reason than that would be a really cool thing to do.  To give you an example of the aesthetic, but one of my favorite source books for the game is entitled Blowing Up Hong Kong!

The Game incorporates an intriguing back story.  There are sites of mystical power spaced throughout the world, but concentrated in Hong Kong that serve both as foci for  mystical power and portals to travel between key time periods, the present, and the Netherworld.  Various groups from each of the time periods use the portals to travel through time in an effort to find more of the portals and control them.  If any group is able to control enough of the portals, they might be able to find a way to make their time/dimension extend into the other dimensions.  In the base story line of the game, the players are members of the Dragons, a ragtag bunch of heroes from the present timeline who are interested in controlling enough of the portals to prevent any of the other factions from gaining preeminence.

Now this story is compelling enough, but if I ever got to run a Feng Shui campaign, I would like to add my own wrinkle, one that incorporates the plot of a b-movie I saw a little over a decade ago.  The movie in question is Hong Kong 97 , a 1994 film that is not great, but is decidedly better than the Kung Fu Gorilla movie.  In 1997 in real life history, Britain's 99 year lease on the island of Hong Kong expired  and government of the island reverted to China.  At the time, this caused a great amount of anxiety for Hong Kong's citizens.  Hong Kong 97 tells the story of British corporate spy who assassinates a member of the Chinese takeover delegation and then struggles to escape the island before the takeover can be completed.

My campaign idea is this:  the players are all in Hong Kong about a year before the takeover.  They have no idea about the Feng Shui sites on the island, but are dragged into the conflict when a dangerous entity from one of the other times breaks into a public place and begins killing folks indiscriminately.  Gradually, the PCs learn about the shadow war for the power sites, and the dire implications of what will happen if some other time controls enough of them.  What is worse, the Communist Chinese are very aware of the power sites they are about to inherit and plan to use them for their own sinister purposes.  Can our intrepid heroes keep the other timelines at bay, while simultaneously preventing the bad actors of their own world from controlling these sites of power?  As the time for the handover gets closer, can they figure out a way to shut down the sites and escape Hong Kong in time to escape the retribution of the new Chinese regime?

The Seven Assassins of Dr. Fu Manchu

Several years ago, I struck upon the idea of running a series of games in seasons, much like television shows.  The idea was that I would pick a game and run a dedicated story arc of ten to twelve sessions duration with a definite conclusion, but also enough hooks to pick the game back up an run a new season later.  I ran two such games, a Legend of the Five Rings campaign in which entailed a single Winter Court at Kyuden Bayushi, and a James Bond RPG based spy game.  The limited scope allowed me to really pull out the stops and create some of what I consider the best material I have ever produced. Both of them were really successful, but circumstances prevented the second seasons from ever happening.  The L5R game did have a couple of one shots run since then.  The spy game ended on a bit of a cliff hanger and it has never been revisited.

Clive Reston in
 younger days.

It had been years since I ran a spy game and I really wanted to draw in a lot of my own personal pop cultural influences.  In order to do that, the I incorporated a number of decidedly pulpy elements, but played them absolutely straight.  In perhaps any other medium, this would have likely been a disaster.  For my game, though, it worked!  The players were all MI-6 agents called together initially to thwart a plot of suspected Chinese origin.  The PC's section chief was Clive Reston, a character from the 1970s comic book Master of Kung Fu (who was heavily hinted to be the descendant of both Sherlock Holmes and James Bond).  Over the course of the adventure, the players eventually uncovered a plot by none other than Fu Manchu himself!  Long thought dead, the players determined that the insidious doctor has graduated from reliance on the Elixer Vitae and moved on to full blown cloning.  With a clone army at his disposal, Manchu's plot revolved around the construction of an orbital laser with which to hold the governments of the world hostage.

Fu Manchu (Christopher Lee).  A great actor and
 a great character sadly misserved by five movies
 of dubious quality.

Over the course of the game, other elements from both popular culture and spy games past made their way into the narrative.  The PCs worked frequently with CIA agent Samantha Steele, the very efficient daughter of a much maligned character from our 1980s era Top Secret/James Bond games.  The investigation led the characters to locate alcoholic adult Jonny Quest and his long suffering friend/caretaker Hadji Singh in order to find out more information about the 60s cloning research of Jonny's father, Dr. Benton Quest.  The investigations eventually led to Thailand where the players had to enlist the aid of Bill Phillips, my most infamous PC from the old days.  Mr. Phillips had married a local, retired, and spent his days travelling the Thai countryside in his offroad modified Dodge Omni beating the stuffing out of child sex traffickers with his aluminum baseball bat.  Eventually, the players tracked the final piece of the orbital laser puzzle to the island of Dr. Han, and wrangled invitations to his secret martial arts death match tournament (torn straight from Enter the Dragon without a bit or remorse or shame).  The campaign ended on a bitter note as Han escaped from the island with the last piece of technology needed for the orbital laser.  The captured agents escaped, but not before one was shot to death in the attempt.

 Since the original season ended in at least partial defeat (as the middle act of most pulp-styled adventures do I must point out) and death, it falls to a new team of agents to complete the mission and defeat Manchu.  An orbital laser is not the sort of technology that can be constructed overnight.  And Dr. Manchu must still arrange for the transport of the laser platform into orbit.  As such, MI-6 still has a chance to stop the undying madman!  With their covers blown, the surviving members of the original team will need to be replaced.  Clive Reston brings together a new set of agents to deal with the threat. While Manchu prepares his space launch, it seems, he has decided to settle some old scores. Using the deadliest of his cloned army, he is sending teams of assassins out to destroy those who have thwarted his plans in the past and to obtain the aerospace technology needed to launch his laser.  Can these new agents stop THE SEVEN ASSASSINS OF FU MANCHU?

Conspiracies Dark and Deep

I first encountered Dark Conspiracy during a fallow time in my gaming career.  When I first saw the game in a Lake Charles game store in 1991, I did not have a game group.  Since my total gaming activity at the time revolved around looking at games wistfully, I am not sure how a copy made it home with me.  And yet, it did.  I fell in love with the concept immediately.  During World War II, contact was secretly made with not one, but four distinct alien races.  Initial contact was fruitful for both the American war effort and the aliens.  Human (mis)use of technology learned from the aliens led to a dimensional rift.  This tear allowed horrors from another space and time to enter our world, first corrupting the unsuspecting aliens, then making its way to human hosts.  The space-time entities work consistently to warp our world in an effort to widen the rift and allow more of their kind to enter our reality.*

Don't mind us.  We're just browsing.

   "Our" world in the original game is not quite how you remember it.  The gradual warping has made not so subtle changes to our reality.  Technological advancement was significantly hindered and in some places retro tech becomes the norm.  Imagine if the entire world regressed to the tech level of the currently embargoed Cuba.  Vacuum tube radios replace transistors.  Black and white television is the norm for all but the elite.  Weapon tech is strangely advanced, but that may just be a development in service of the alien entities. Society has regressed as well, with totalitarianism abundant.  Most American citizens sell their votes to a few major corporations in exchange for subsistence level food, shelter, and entertainment.  Unemployment and homelessness likely await those who do not comply with this system.  Care to hazard a guess who controls the corporations?

Societal changes aside, there are environmental changes as well.  The powers that be work to keep it under wraps, but many rural areas have become Demongrounds:  areas where the rips in the fabric of reality have taken hold and the inter-dimesional creatures hold sway.  Likewise, *things* from our collective nightmares move through the shadows of our cities.  Even those in the know cannot agree on whether the creatures were created to resemble our folk boogeymen, or they have actually been among us the whole time.

I originally put a really cool picture by Larry Elmore here, but the image failed.
  Perhaps I revealed more information than our proto-dimensional masters
 could stomach.

 I collected most of the products in this game line before moving back to Bowling Green.  The BG Mafia never seemed interested in the premise, but I did get to run a campaign of it for a group in the mid-2000s.  It went moderately well.  Even at that point, however, it seemed like technology in our world advanced to the point that the retrotech felt a little too campy for the serious tone of the rest of the game.  I allowed the players cell phones, for example, because it seemed so odd for "modern" characters not to have access to them.

I would posit that the game could be run successfully with the back story intact, but the radical change in our earth history not used.  If, perhaps, the actions of the  dimensional aliens were a little more subtle, then the current political and economic situation in our country could substitute nicely.  An sinister world spanning conspiracy is much better explanation for why no banker has ever gone to trial after the financial crisis of 2008, for example, than any explanation we have actually been given.

My campaign pitch is this:  The players are members of a private investigation firm in New Orleans.  An unfortunately large number of people have gone missing in the city.  As this is New Orleans, this would ordinarily pass without notice.  One of the missing, however, was the wife of a wealthy businessman who wants her back.  Big Easy police are notoriously corrupt and of no help. In fact, your employer is afraid they may be part of the problem.  As the investigation deepens, the players will discover some secrets about New Orleans that they may wish had remained secrets.  Once revealed, the players will be left with only two choices:  fight the rising evil, or be absorbed by it.

  

*Some or all of the details in this paragraph may partial or complete fabrications.  Gotta preserve the mystery for the players after all.