The Defenders of the Empire
I'm reading Bramn Stoker's Dracula at the moment. I read it years and years back, but I must have skipped over large sections because there are parts that I just don't remember reading (like Dracula climbing down the walls with his head facing the ground, like a squirrel or a lizard).
...and this leads into ramblings about a game setting I'm working on.
For those that don't know, I'm working on a DC Heroes RPG setting that I call "Defenders of the Empire". The setting is essentially an attempt to put late 19th century society into a 4-color comic perspective. There is, of course, the heavy influence from Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen on the general appearence of things, and I've been working on Victorian-era supertech for stuff like most houses having radio-like devices which I call tumbler boxes (which function via vibrations broadcast over cities that are picked up by crystal tumblers on the tops of peoples houses and transmitted to boxes which produce tinny radio-type stuff), or Victorian air forces that look like Victorian-styled WWI era aircraft.
There is, of course, the key team of the British Empire, who give the setting its name. They're basically the Justice League, complete with a leader who was found in a strange metal vessel in Stone Henge and can fly, is superstrong and invulnerable, and can shoot beams of heat from his eyes.
The setting also features reduxes of famous Victorian (and a few Edwardian, and one 1920s) characters, including John Carter (a telepath and astral projector who, despite being American, joined the Defenders of the Empire), Doctor Moreau (a super-villain who was forced to live in seclusion by a world that didn't understand his experiments), Dorian Gray (who's now more the setting's Vandal Savage than anything else), Ebenezer Scrooge (who's like Lex Luthor, with Bob Cratchett as his henchman), and Tarzan (as a travelling superhero, Tarzan being his codename).
One game that I'm going to be running for a friend is entitled "Jonathan Harker: Agent of Her Majesty", which postulates that the events of Dracula were a clever fiction to cover up the ACTUAL events. The actual events being that Her Majesty's Government has a division that handles supernatural threats to the Empire. Agent Harker and Agent Mina Murray are sent to Romania to stop a Count Dracula (who they know to be a vampire...which is about all they know, they've got a lot of theories on what a vampire is, and how to stop one, but no proof) from joining the Destroyer's of the Empire (the equivilant to the Injustice Gang).
As is obvious, the setting borrows heavily, and steals outright, from DC Comics. There's also a lot of homages to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Victorian-era literature, and a good deal of insanity to actually figure out how to smush people into rolls. There are also a lot of just plain made-up villains (Igor makes an appearence as a hunch backed super-scientist villain-for-hire) and heroes (the Imperial, a direct Superman reference), which make the setting amusing.
...and this leads into ramblings about a game setting I'm working on.
For those that don't know, I'm working on a DC Heroes RPG setting that I call "Defenders of the Empire". The setting is essentially an attempt to put late 19th century society into a 4-color comic perspective. There is, of course, the heavy influence from Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen on the general appearence of things, and I've been working on Victorian-era supertech for stuff like most houses having radio-like devices which I call tumbler boxes (which function via vibrations broadcast over cities that are picked up by crystal tumblers on the tops of peoples houses and transmitted to boxes which produce tinny radio-type stuff), or Victorian air forces that look like Victorian-styled WWI era aircraft.
There is, of course, the key team of the British Empire, who give the setting its name. They're basically the Justice League, complete with a leader who was found in a strange metal vessel in Stone Henge and can fly, is superstrong and invulnerable, and can shoot beams of heat from his eyes.
The setting also features reduxes of famous Victorian (and a few Edwardian, and one 1920s) characters, including John Carter (a telepath and astral projector who, despite being American, joined the Defenders of the Empire), Doctor Moreau (a super-villain who was forced to live in seclusion by a world that didn't understand his experiments), Dorian Gray (who's now more the setting's Vandal Savage than anything else), Ebenezer Scrooge (who's like Lex Luthor, with Bob Cratchett as his henchman), and Tarzan (as a travelling superhero, Tarzan being his codename).
One game that I'm going to be running for a friend is entitled "Jonathan Harker: Agent of Her Majesty", which postulates that the events of Dracula were a clever fiction to cover up the ACTUAL events. The actual events being that Her Majesty's Government has a division that handles supernatural threats to the Empire. Agent Harker and Agent Mina Murray are sent to Romania to stop a Count Dracula (who they know to be a vampire...which is about all they know, they've got a lot of theories on what a vampire is, and how to stop one, but no proof) from joining the Destroyer's of the Empire (the equivilant to the Injustice Gang).
As is obvious, the setting borrows heavily, and steals outright, from DC Comics. There's also a lot of homages to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Victorian-era literature, and a good deal of insanity to actually figure out how to smush people into rolls. There are also a lot of just plain made-up villains (Igor makes an appearence as a hunch backed super-scientist villain-for-hire) and heroes (the Imperial, a direct Superman reference), which make the setting amusing.
posted by Derek the Bard at 12:43 a.m.
1 Comments:
Dorian Grey as Vandal Savage! Brilliant!
And I'm becomming more sold on John Carter as time goes by.
- jason
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