I’m a big fan of science fiction, fantasy, and everything between or tangentially related to the above. (I also rather like Dickens, and enjoyed reading The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, lest anyone think I only read completely fantastical stuff. Though now that I think about it, the sheer amount of coincidence in Great Expectations could almost qualify it as fantasy. That’s not my point, though.)
One of my favorite things is genre busters. I said the other day that I enjoy reading things that break out of the normal molds. Well, not just reading. One of the reasons I like anime (and manga) so much is because there’s a marked tendency to stray farther from the norm than we usually see in Western media. A lot of this, I think, has to do with the fact that drawing a really cool vampire-demon-thing and drawing a regular person are much more similar, budgetarily speaking, than filming the same things. And to be fair, it’s often not that they don’t conform, but that they conform to a different set of stereotypes and genres.
But where else can you enjoy a slice-of-life story on a terraformed Mars? (Seriously, if you know, tell me. There’s gotta be others, right?) I read a lot of YA for the same reason — YA is a market in which genre-bending and outright genre-busting are generally well received. I love the Pern books (though technically sci-fi, they have their share of fantasy tropes). I love King’s Dark Tower series.
For the period of time that Dragon magazine ran with Polyhedron on the flipside, I had a subscription. Every two months I would get Dragon in the mail and immediately ignore every single adventure in it, flipping it over to get to the Polyhedron mini-game. The cancellation thereof was one of the great tragedies of my youth. (Can I say that yet, or do I need to wait a few more years?) The mini-games were great. There were about a dozen of them in all, and they took the D20 rules I knew and loved and converted them into some wild, and fascinating, things. A D20 update for Spelljammer. Thunderball Rally, a 70s race-across-the-US (and blow up everything in your path) game. Mecha Crusade. Omega World, a Gamma World-inspired post-apocalypse game of doom. I loved, and love, these, each and every one; to this day I occasionally pull these old troopers out when I want to run a one-shot.
And not just the one-shots that they’re designed for. I prided myself on the ability to, on the spur of the moment, throw together a wildly disparate setting for a session or minicampaign from the various elements at my disposal. I once ran a Spelljammer campaign using the vehicle modification rules from Thunderball Rally. (Don’t ask me how.) I ran post-apocalyptic D&D with mecha. Call of Cthulhu racing games. (The Thunderball Rally rules were a perennial favorite of mine because of the vehicle customization. I’ve not before or since seen a better system in an RPG for tricking out your ride. I know they’re out there, but humor me.) Give me an hour, a spark of an idea, and my bookshelf, and I would pull rulesets from a half-dozen different sources to create a wildly experimental campaign of doom. I loved that. (Still do. Shhh, it’s a secret.)
This is actually a lot of why I don’t like 4th edition D&D as much as 3rd — it’s not nearly as adaptable. The sole fact that monsters use different rules than PCs again just breaks my heart. In my Zosias games, the monster manual is really the Great Big Book o’ Races. I almost wish I was joking. Want to play a blink dog paladin? Sure, it worked pretty well last time. Awakened horse fighter? That guy had great potential, pity the campaign never carried on. The saving grace of my ability to run the game is that I do the same thing for NPCs. Amnesic green dragon dreamwalker? Great.
I’ve got more and more coherent things to say on the subject, but I’ll save that for another day. For now, over and out.
Current Music: Avril Lavigne, Sk8tr Boi, and Alice in Chains, Them Bones, on loop.
