Action Movie Heartbreaker Discussion

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Tue Jun 16, 2015 6:13 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger#Story

The actual dates given in Chrono Trigger are nonsense (there were no cat people in 65 million BC):
Pre-civilization / Sabertooths + Cavemen
Pre-history, doomed civilization / Atlantis + Hi-Magic
Middle Ages / Knights
Renaissance / Steam Punk
Modern
Future

Personally, I don't think you *need* WWII, Wild West or Exploitation junctures, the 20th century isn't *that* different, but 9 junctures would still be manageable.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Tue Jun 16, 2015 8:23 pm

You definitely want the Wild West/Victorian era. That's recent enough that even the dullards in the group can reasonably expected to know what you are talking about but long enough ago that you could plausibly get in a duel with your state senator or be inconvenienced by meaningful tech level differences. As far as I'm concerned the big question is whether the window of opportunity should stretch back far enough that you can punch Napoleon.

Sakuya Izayoi · Post by **Sakuya Izayoi** » Tue Jun 16, 2015 9:06 pm

Seems like you could lay out what tech levels exist, and distinguish which year the juncture actually lead to in your campaign based on what characters the players roll up with. Your 1800s juncture definitely leads to Cowboy Land if osmeone wants to play a cowboy, but if someone wants to play a Jonathan Joestar mix of martial arts and sorcery, it probably leads to the other side of the Atlantic. And if no one wants to be cowboys or Victorians but you have both Shaft and Deathwish on the table, then you'll be well served to have Exploitation City be one of the places you can quantum leap to, and it can be vague where the 1800s portal goes.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Jun 16, 2015 9:30 pm

A juncture is worth worrying about if:

Heroes from that era are noticeably different from heroes in other eras.
Villains in that era are noticeably different from villains in other eras.
There are set pieces you can set your adventures in that are unavailable in other eras.

By that standard, WWII totally qualifies. You have Nazi villains, you have Greatest Generation fuckers for heroes, and you have a bunch of Nazi castles and famous battlefields and shit. Normandy Beach is the new Hoth.

That being said, there is no real difference as far as that goes from like 800 CE to about 1450 CE. All of those are basically the same because you have knights and castles and shit. Wherever you stick the juncture, King Arthur is from then. And people have without irony dressed up King Arthur as a Roman and a Renaissance dude and everything in between.

So your 19th century world has Cowboys and Pirates and Victorian Gentlemen and shit. Your medieval world has knights and kings and shit. Your Archaic world has Egyptians and Caesars and shit. There's no need for the 60s or 70s because people can have muscle cars and bad hair in the contemporary juncture. The only thing we're really losing is having Evil Communists, but I submit that actually the Ruskies and ChiComs weren't really that great as villains and in retrospect we feel kind of like dicks when we murder Vietnamese agents.

As for the future, there are indeed explody futures and urban dystopic futures. You can do both, by having the future have wastelands between cities (Judge Dredd, or the remake of Total Recall work like this). Or you could just have two different time periods in the future. In any case, you want there to be access to player characters who are the guy from Minority Report (super agent for the urban dystopic future government), and characters who are the guy from Mad Max (warrior of the wastes). It would actually be fine either way, but I lean towards having two future junctures myself.

-Username17

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Tue Jun 16, 2015 11:16 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:A juncture is worth worrying about if:

Heroes from that era are noticeably different from heroes in other eras.

Villains in that era are noticeably different from villains in other eras.

There are set pieces you can set your adventures in that are unavailable in other eras.
By that standard, WWII totally qualifies. You have Nazi villains, you have Greatest Generation fuckers for heroes, and you have a bunch of Nazi castles and famous battlefields and shit. Normandy Beach is the new Hoth.

That being said, there is no real difference as far as that goes from like 800 CE to about 1450 CE. All of those are basically the same because you have knights and castles and shit. Wherever you stick the juncture, King Arthur is from then. And people have without irony dressed up King Arthur as a Roman and a Renaissance dude and everything in between.

So your 19th century world has Cowboys and Pirates and Victorian Gentlemen and shit. Your medieval world has knights and kings and shit. Your Archaic world has Egyptians and Caesars and shit. There's no need for the 60s or 70s because people can have muscle cars and bad hair in the contemporary juncture. The only thing we're really losing is having Evil Communists, but I submit that actually the Ruskies and ChiComs weren't really that great as villains and in retrospect we feel kind of like dicks when we murder Vietnamese agents.

As for the future, there are indeed explody futures and urban dystopic futures. You can do both, by having the future have wastelands between cities (Judge Dredd, or the remake of Total Recall work like this). Or you could just have two different time periods in the future. In any case, you want there to be access to player characters who are the guy from Minority Report (super agent for the urban dystopic future government), and characters who are the guy from Mad Max (warrior of the wastes). It would actually be fine either way, but I lean towards having two future junctures myself.

-Username17

I'd go with three, personally. "Near future" is a horrible overcrowded urban dystopia. "After the Fall" is the wasteland after said urban dystopia collapses. And then there's the "Far Future", with space adventures, ray guns, and rocketships that look like dildos.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Tue Jun 16, 2015 11:49 pm

Hrm, what about managing conceptual space with 3x3 array of "pasts", "presents" and "futures"?

So spitballing, something along the lines of:

Past

Swords, Spears and Sandals
Knights and Kings and Dragons
Cowboys, Pirates, Gaslamp

"Present"

Pulp and WWII
(Cold War or other suitable replacement)
Looks like today
(possible alternate to cold war to have the present smack dab in the middle of the middle)

Future

Concealed Totalitarian Dystopia
Radioactive Wasteland
Intergalactic civilization

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 6:35 am

That's a pretty good 3x3.

Advantages of the 60s/70s:

Austin Powers
Clint Eastwood Dirty Hairy
Sean Connery James Bond
Evil Communists
Shaft

That's not nothing, but we do have to ask how much of that itch we can scratch with Daniel Craig, Liam Neeson, Russian Mobsters, and Ice T. Because we can do all of those in the contemporary juncture.

20 minutes into the future lets us do all the near future hi tech bullshit like Orphan Black.

-Username17

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 5:21 pm

Hmm.

Heroes from that era are noticeably different from heroes in other eras.
Villains in that era are noticeably different from villains in other eras.
There are set pieces you can set your adventures in that are unavailable in other eras.

[*] Past 1: Troy, 500, Heracles, Pharaoh, Ceasar. Not so much villains as tests and curses of the Gods. Battles with hundreds of thousands of tiny men settled by two great champions. Secretly, you were fated to win anyway, but at what cost?

[*] Past 2: Saladin, Richard, Robin, Arthur. Villains abound, the world is composed of little else, from the common murderer to the robber baron. Battles of a few hundred noble blood settle the day, usually fought for the hand of a fair maiden or other fine ideal. Secretly, you are also a terrible, oppressive villain.

[*] Past 3: Pirates, privateers, capitalists, slavers, merchant fleets, colonialists, company men. Villainy is a dead concept, all that matters is riches, having the power to grab them, and the speed to avoid the other guy's imperial gunships. Some talk of revolution, liberty for all, usually soon found at the end of a short rope or burned by the inquisition. Secretly, the pirates aren't really villains, though they are really awful.

[*] Present 1: Wild Bill, Fineous Fog, Tesla, Verne. The great railroads, the telegraph, the broadsheets, the modern nation state they all created. The orient express or a luxury ocean liner make fine dungeon settings. Villains are local greats in their own right, a lecherous governor, a crooked judge, a famous bank robber. Secretly, the growing nationalism is a real problem.

[*] Present 1a: Indiana Jones, the Phantom. The great depression, the rise of fascism, communism, and socialism as workers in different states responded to the production glut, wage crash, and new science of propaganda. The villains are brownshirts, reds, and the old guard who'll support anyone who stands with them against the working man. Secretly, it all ends very badly for a while.

[*] Present 2&3: But then technology makes everything wonderful, and mundane. There's very little adventure in the late 20th century that is anything other than pretty fresh and also terrible (assuming para-skiing mechanics don't grab you). You could do civil rights stuff, that was rather adventurous, and then realise that a bunch of that work just got overturned in the last couple years. "Anti-gang" policing was (and is) just flagrant harassment of inner-city minorities. The "anti-communist" cold war dictatorships set up by CIA men are still blowing up in your face and you're still over there bombing those same people for not wanting the type of government you want them to have, or at least not wanting it hard enough. Eco-warriors? You chain yourself to a tree until someone finds some bolt-cutters and then you get to sign something to say you won't do that again and also pay a fine, while they cut down the thousand-year old trees for toilet paper (in NZ our leading brand of tp is made of endangered rainforest hardwoods, because illegally logged wood from poor countries is cheaper than the local stuff, which we mostly export as whole logs to make pulp from, and no one cares).

It's not like post-depression bank robbers actually live very long, and everything else is rather paperwork intensive. Realistic cops still spend most of their "active" day arresting people for non-payment of fines, whereupon they get more fines they also can't pay. Dirty Harry is a movie about a cop whose retirement present to himself is a murder spree, and that's probably the best you can do.

[*] Future 1: Scolder and Mully. The truth is out there, and it's ALIENS! The villains are so shady you'll never even see them. Secretly, nothing is ever resolved, but there's always another mystery, which will also not resolve: that needs to be enjoyable in itself.

[*] Future 2: Joe Dredd. Fr1day. Max. Beyond the reach of The Law, everything is an adventure. Your next meal, a safe place to sleep, very exiting stuff. Not particularly heroic though. Secretly, you'll end up spending all your time back in the Mega-City, because radlands are at best past-2 or present-1. Bad guys are the people who have the things you need to take from them to live another day.

[*] Future 3: the thing with extrapolation is no one predicted cell phones in 2010, let alone wikipedia, and everyone predicted flying cars and mass space tourism. Whatever you write, in ten years there'll be a new technology you didn't see coming and everything you do predict will always be just another 50 years away. Secretly, "the future" is such a big concept space you've really got to narrow it down with some serious world-building and then tie everything to being a young Jedi and their sidekicks or whatever.

So Star Trek is Future 1 on new planets each week, Star Wars is Past 3 smuggling the wanted past the imperial blockades, that sort of thing.

Sakuya Izayoi · Post by **Sakuya Izayoi** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 6:39 pm

Shaft and Austin Powers just need a city as outrageous as they are within the gazetting of the Contemporary juncture. I could see Austin (Pugilist/Diplomancer), The Bride (Swords/Chi Poisoning), and The Bowler (Thrown/Necromancy) getting together without a time machine or cryogenics, if they were in a crazy enough location in 20XX

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jun 18, 2015 6:12 am

Sakuya Izayoi wrote:Shaft and Austin Powers just need a city as outrageous as they are within the gazetting of the Contemporary juncture. I could see Austin (Pugilist/Diplomancer), The Bride (Swords/Chi Poisoning), and The Bowler (Thrown/Necromancy) getting together without a time machine or cryogenics, if they were in a crazy enough location in 20XX

With time jumpers, locations become extremely important. While the people of the various past junctures didn't know what existed on the other side of the world, the player characters might include people from the future. And they totally do. So in the Medieval Juncture, there's a Europe full of knights, wizards, and dragons, but player characters still know about North America. And North America in that juncture is Pathfinder in the north and Apocalypto in the south. But if you go to China, it's Imperial China.

In the Ancient juncture, you can go to various sandal wearing empires in Europe and Northern Africa, and if you go to China it's Warring States / Spring and Autumn (even though that's obviously earlier than Rome, because fuck you). If you go to North America, it's Colossal Heads in the south and Quest For Fire in the north.

Basically, in the first two past junctures your important locations in North America are in Mexico and Canada. In the third past juncture there's also Caribbean Pirates. I can't for the life of me think of a reason why you'd care about that area in Ancient or Medieval. It's important to have a Cowboys area in Past 3, but that can be Mexico as well. I... don't actually think I care about Canada in Past 3.

North America in the Past


Juncture	Area 1	Area 2
Ancient	Olmecs & Monsters	Cave Dwellers & Bears
Medieval	Aztecs & Demons	Inuits & Vikings
Past	Cowboys & Indians	Pirates & Slaves

Europe in the Past


Juncture	Area 1	Area 2	Area 3
Ancient	Romans & Greeks	Egyptians	Barbarians
Medieval	Camelot England	Renaissance Italy	Arabian Nights
Past	Victorian London	Revolutionary France	Czarist Russia

-Username17

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Thu Jun 18, 2015 2:57 pm

Canada in Past 3 is basically the same "cowboys and indians", but in a colder climate and replace a lot of the luckless prospectors with luckless fur trappers.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jun 18, 2015 6:05 pm

I don't really see a lot of value added having a First Nations versus Prospectors Past Canada when you already have a Cowbuys vs. Indians Old West. All your action movie stereotype stock characters are the same. Duplicitous developer buying up land to run the railroad in? Widowed settler who doesn't want to sell? Wandering gunman with a sense of justice? Wise shaman who wishes to avert war? I mean, you can't even tell which area I'm talking about.

Anyway:

Past Asia


Juncture	Region 1	Region 2	Region 3
Ancient	Warring States China	Imperial Persia	Mahabharata India
Medieval	Imperial China	SE Asia Pirates	Warring Clans Japan
Past	Opium Wars China	Shogunate Japan	East India Company

The idea is that each location written up for each juncture there are some suggested archetypes for players, allies, main villains, and mooks. Some of the areas have magical beasts running around in them during certain junctures, and some don't. You can be a heroic Samurai in either Shogunate Japan or Warring Clans Japan. But in Warring Clans Japan you can be a Shuten Doji.

Modern Europe


Juncture	Region 1	Region 2	Region 3
The War	Occupied France	Russia Besieged	Battle in North Africa
Right Now	London Crime	Eastern Europe Spies	German Political Thriller
20 Minutes	Imperial Belgium	Militarized Moscow	Protectorate London

-Username17

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Thu Jun 18, 2015 11:04 pm

Yeah, most of North America during that era is pretty samey in terms of the breadth of possible stories. The differences of what Europeans and what Native Americans you have are relatively minor compared to the general idea that they're probably against one another and the only real question is if it's an active fight or a passive one.

I'd say that generally, stereotypical Canadian stories eschew focus on towns and settlements and go for more of a "man vs nature" lean. United States stories are more often more about building up towns. Mexican stories seem to end up being more about gunfights. So, "North America in the Past: Area 1" could just be any part of mainland North America, and then "Area 2" is anywhere in the Caribbean Sea. The major distinction between the two "locations" would then be that one has lots of horses and the other has lots of boats.