Game WISH 91: Appropriating from Fiction
WISH 91 is about Appropriating From Fiction
How often do you appropriate bits from books, movies, comics, and other sources as a player or GM? Do you like to steal names or flavor or go more whole-hog? Is there a difference between stealing for background and stealing for in-game plot?
Please take care to file off the serial numbers first! I like game universes to at least give the appearance of being unique creations of the GM and players, and I find things lifted wholesale from works of fiction detract from this. I remember being slightly annoyed with one of my online players who introduced a lot of background elements that I didn't realise had been lifted straight from Jack Vance's Alastor series, names and all. On the other hand, I did allow a player in Kalyr to run a character who's a refugee from Andre Norton's Witch World ("The Kolder are responsible for everything!"), who wandered in through an interdimensional gateway.
I've never had (to my knowledge, at least) any player in my games using names from other works, and it's not something I would allow. Names just have too much baggage associated with them. I wonder what prompted Steve, the GM of the Victorian age Vampire game at Gypsycon, to name one of the characters "Max Hastings".
On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with basing a character on someone from a favourite book or film, provided you make a reasonable attempt to file off the serial numbers. I've done this myself, with one of my favourite characters, Karl Tolhurst, who was at least partly based on Dan Ward from Iain Banks' "Espedair Street".
On the third tentacle, I doubt that many of us have the imagination or the time to create complete original setting from the whole cloth. It's also hard to sell a game concept to potential players unless you can point at some points of reference. Therefore, unless you're playing in an established commercial or licensed setting (DnD generic fantasy counts as such in my book!), you pretty much have to borrow significant setting elements from somewhere. My own Kalyr game is a case in point. It started out as combination of some elements from Julian May's Pliocene Exiles sage mixed with other bits from Gene Wolfe's New Sun and Long Sun books. The overall flavour of the setting has ended up resembling more than one of Jack Vance's planetary sagas. The theme of a static and rather hidebound society at the point where things are starting to break down is a recurring theme in Vance's novels.