I was watching Land of the Lost recently and I could not believe that I loved this show as a kid. I mean it was horrible in almost every way. I made it through half an episode before wanting Grumpy to eat them all. You know a show is kind of bad when the coolest thing on it is a really dumb T-Rex.

But the premise of the show is pretty cool. A lot of the conceptual ideas for the show were interesting. Trapped in a lost world with dinosaurs, aliens, and little to survive with. Trying to find a way home.... any way home will do.

I'd want a game set in such a place to be awesome sauce, not the cheese festival of the actual TV show. Great ideas for TV can be and usually are terribly executed. Today's show producers are doing somewhat better with improved effects and tighter script writing but I think a lot of these ideas we see on TV would be better realized in RPG settings.

So can it be done? Could Land of the Lost be great awesome sauce instead of cheese dip? What about other shows from your childhood? Do any stand out that were lousy shows with potential for game setting goodness?

:cool:

The same things that work against you trying to game in an awesome TV show work for you with a cheesy one. You don't have to use their bad sets, bad actors, or bad special effects. Land of the Lost is a particularly excellent example. You have the opportunity to set it up again and run it the way it couldalways have been.

I've used that particular pocket universe a few times, and when you have the players' imaginations of dinosaurs instead of often-repeated stop bad stop-motion toys, it can get scary. I tap into my very real childhood dread of fucking Sleestaks and evoke that in the game when they're around. It's easier to reinvent the material if folks aren't familiar with it. But even folks from my demographic who remember the slow, stiff Sleestaks with rubber band crossbows get scared when they hear that hissing in my game. I didn't imagine Sleestaks being slow when I was a kid. They were inexorable and sneaky and clearly made out of pure evil. So that's how I play them. After a few pcs get fed to the God of the Pit, the players aren't so smug about them.

Umm . . . so anyway. The point is to distill the coolness that you sense from an old, cheesy show, and present it at the table like no one has ever seen or heard of it before. Of course, there are other approaches where you use the players' familiarity with the material for humrous or surprising effect. But that's a different thing.

Not sure if it classifies as 'cheesy' but I did run a great DarkWater campaign. I used 'Duel/Mega Duel' system by Crunchy Frog and it pretty much worked like a dream.

Bah, forgot to also mention that I've always wanted someone to run a Gamma World treatment of Thundarr the Barbarian. Definitely could make something good out of that. But I want someone else to run it, so I can play it

I've always liked The Herculoids... despite the actual show being not much more than repetitive set-ups for the team to fight off some new batch of invaders. As far as I know the show never goes beyond that basic formula... doesn't expand the setting or characters or anything.

Here are a bunch of Herculoids write-ups for AD&D.

Sleestaks scared the hell out of me to, when I was a kid.

Thundarr would make for an excellent Gamma World riff. I've always imagined that sort of setting when looking at Gamma World.

The guys who made Metascape followed it up with a weird little generic game call The Ultimate Power. Basically, they took Fudge and rewrote it using their crazy ass moon voodoo dice. It seemed to lend itself to characters with one overweaning weapon or gimmick, so we created characters from Eternia. Not He-Man or any of the actual Masters of the Universe, but their hillbilly friends and relatives. Think of it as what the toy line would have looked like after twenty more years of trying to come up with something different every season. It was completely entertaining.

Quote from: stu2000;450765The guys who made Metascape followed it up with a weird little generic game call The Ultimate Power. Basically, they took Fudge and rewrote it using their crazy ass moon voodoo dice. It seemed to lend itself to characters with one overweaning weapon or gimmick, so we created characters from Eternia. Not He-Man or any of the actual Masters of the Universe, but their hillbilly friends and relatives. Think of it as what the toy line would have looked like after twenty more years of trying to come up with something different every season. It was completely entertaining.

Do you remember any of the characters' gimmicks?

We used Gamma World and AD&D together for Thundarr. The section on conversions in the DM's Guide practically demanded it.

I picked up a DVD collection of ARK 2, Space Academy, and Jason of Star Command from McKay's Used Books. What really turned me on as a kid was damn near unwatchable now that I'm in my 40's.

I grabbed the D&D Cartoon just to see how it aged and got the same reaction, although I never really warmed to it in the first place when it came out. Now I just think it is a shallow attempt at doing what Record of Lodoss War did so well.


As far as mining for ideas, there are some good ones that were executed poorly but are definitely there to be used.

Quote from: Cole;450768Do you remember any of the characters' gimmicks?

There was the usual selection of swords, axes, hammers, and mini-guns. But there were a few odd guys. One was Farsight (but with strange spelling) who had telescoping eyeballs. He could change their size, acuity, and viewing spectra. He could run them out of his head on long metal stalks like Inspector Gadget or some demented mutant crab. In fact, there were several extendo-variations.

There was Tress Durberville, who had sentient, empathic hair. It would change shape and color like an octopus. As she leveled up, she would hide shuriken in there, which it learned to throw. I believe she taught it to  write with a pencil and pick locks.

Gelatino had an amorphous body, and Gloop & Gleep-like powers (from the aforementioned Herculoids. We figured he was made of the stuff inside Stretch Armstrong.

It was an odd but engaging game. It became as silly and filthy as you probably imagine it would.

I haven't watched Ulysses 31 in ages, so I'm not quite sure what level of cheeziness I should attribute to the show. But I can picture quite well a more adult version of the story played at a RPG table. Not sure what game system I would use for that though. It would need a group of players really in the mood to play good PCs because the show's topic was often about a dilemna between doing the right thing (save people typically) and finding a way home.

Quote from: boulet;450822I haven't watched Ulysses 31 in ages, so I'm not quite sure what level of cheeziness I should attribute to the show. But I can picture quite well a more adult version of the story played at a RPG table. Not sure what game system I would use for that though. It would need a group of players really in the mood to play good PCs because the show's topic was often about a dilemna between doing the right thing (save people typically) and finding a way home.

Ulysse 31 was awesome! I totally can see it in RPG. Personally, I'd use something like Stars Without Number, retrofit psychics into the setting (it's just a matter of expanding on Thémis's faculties, i.e. it's already in the show), and basically build a sandbox with the feel of the series. Then, I would unleash the PCs in the sandbox (the curse of Zeus being akin to being thrown into the sector as through some jump gate). It could really be sweet and different.

Certainly nothing should keep someone from using an awesome TV show for an RPG setting. I was just thinking about salvaging the cheesy shows.

It may be just me but I find myself looking more and more to Robocop the series for inspiration for games in the post XP Alpha Complex.

Quote from: PaladinCA;450850Certainly nothing should keep someone from using an awesome TV show for an RPG setting. I was just thinking about salvaging the cheesy shows.

SPACE:1999 is just begging for some Traveller love.