O Brother, Where Art Thou?

[Jack Spencer Jr]

I was watching this movie for, like, the nineth time and it suddenly occured to me that this would be a great idea for a RPG.

Not a game itself, but the concept of the movie could be a useful adventure-making tool.

For those of you unfamiliar with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The movie is based on The Odyssey by Homer but the setting is changed to depression-era Mississippi.  This puts an interesting take on the ancient story, like the cyclops transforming from a giant man-eating monster to John Goodman as a one-eyed Bible salesman.  The result of this is you knew the Bible salesman would be no good to Ulysses Evert McGill and his companions.  You just weren't sure how.  It was a pretty safe assumption that he wasn't going to eat anybody, was he?

The way this would work is you'd pick a classic story, such as The Odyssey, or even a neoclassic story like Star Wars or episode #34 of original series Star Trek and then "rewrite" key scenes and elements to fit the setting of the game.

Upon reflection, this has probably been done dozens of times in modules and such, but it is a perfectly valid technique worth mentioning.

[FilthySuperman]

I love the idea. Mabye we should take this to emails, or over to the "Actual Play" folder. I'd like to share a few ideas, and see what other people have come up with on "remaking the classics for an SL" What would be really cool is to get some ideas for adventures and run them without telling the players.


T.

[joshua neff]

Check this out. It's really damn cool.

& yeah, Oh Brother is probably my favorite Coen Bros. movie at this point. Brilliant.

[Emily Dresner]

It's very loosely based on the Odyssey, in kind of a strange cliff-note like fashion.  

"We thought you was a toad!"