Origin Stories: The Anti-Party
If your table is anything like mine, then you love a good pop culture reference. It’s something of an informal tradition in my group that each session must contain at least one Lord of the Rings and one Monty Python joke. As a matter of fact, when we were first starting out this comic years ago, one of the very first scripts I wrote was on the subject. For the sake of posterity:
Text: Forsake not the customs of thy people. Recite therefore the ancient jests of the shrubbery, the holy hand grenade, and the dread word “ni.”
Pic: A horrible monster has ripped Fighter’s arm off. Thief recoils in horror.
Dialogue:
Thief: Fighter! Your arm!
Fighter: Just a flesh wound. I’m invincible!
Scrollover: You’re a loony.
That was also the first script Laurel ever tossed in the “Rejected” bin.
“It’s too obvious,” she said. And you know what, gang? I think she was right. The best pop culture references are subtle ones, and it’s easy for them to become obnoxious when they become too plentiful. Movie references in particular can creep in all over the place, even when you don’t want them.
Case in point, I once thought to make a cool goblin cabin boy character for a “D&D meets Pirates of the Caribbean” game. I’ve mentioned this goblin a time or two in the past, but I don’t think I’ve ever told you his origin story. As is my habit, I decided to base the PC off of an existing character template, in this case the only other goblin cabin boy of my acquaintance. My take on the character was a stowaway from England, and so he needed an English name. To my American ears, Terrence sounded like a good start. And after a bit of scrolling through the big list of English Surnames, my eye alighted on Gilliam.
“Terrence Gilliam,” I said to myself. “That’s got a nice ring to it.”
You may not believe me when I tell you it was an accident. Certainly my DM didn’t.
“Oh,” he said when I told him. “It’s going to be one of those games. I see how it is.”
Hand to God though, I didn’t know what he was talking about. I just laughed and nodded along like you do when you don’t understand a joke. It was only when I got home later and googled the name that I realized what I’d done. At least we wouldn’t have to work too hard making Monty Python references for the rest of that campaign.
What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever seen movie references intrude into a game where they weren’t wanted? On the other hand, have you got any especially awesome ones to share? Let’s hear your tales dwarf tossing and sword-based systems of government down in the comments!
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…Isn’t Oracle functionally blind? Why does she need sunglasses?
I mean, I guess no one doesn’t need sunglasses, but still.
Well that was my unexpectedly interesting read of the morning. I always thought of it more as a trope than a set of practical reasons: https://sciencetrends.com/4-key-reasons-blind-people-wear-sunglasses/
“Dwarf tossing”? You mean that Dwarven sport where they take turns tossing members of lesser races either going for distance or accuracy depending on what rule-set they play with?
Hwat?!? ‘Ah ‘ave been an elf ‘oo ‘as been tossed by a dwaarf in o’er to be, ‘ow you say, de’ecting ze traps. As ah man o’ ‘onour an’ grace, ah did na’ seek retributeeon, instead merely berating heem. When ‘ee stopped zis “dwarf tossing”, ah did na press ze matter further. But now, ‘oo would dare to say zat elf are being of ze lessar races?! ‘ow dare ye, sar!?!
It doesn’t make for much of a story, but I’ve played with that one player whose PCs were all “I want to make that character from [thing]!”
If she had fun with that, then sure, that’s good for her. It can also get a little boring for every party to need to accommodate the latest cutesy catgirl she copied from some anime or another.
Magus is fine once in a while. When every character someone ever plays is Magus, it gets kinda dull.
Yeah… There’s an important distinction to be made between templating off of an existing character and literally playing that character.
Back when my brother and I were still playing Pathfinder, we decided to roll up a character based off Lu Bu. Big barbarian samurai fellow who uses a naginata and such. Even statted out his horse into a Red Hare. It was fun for the first few levels, but roleplay wise Lu Bu got kinda boring outside of his ultimate warrior schtict. My brother wasn’t too partial to betraying others for personal gain (and this being PFS doing so is liable to get him kicked out for toxic behavior) and while people did understand the reference from time-to-time, it never really went further than recognition.
Ain’t nothing wrong with making a character based off an existing character or just as a reference. But try and plan to be more than a mere homage.
Well bloody said! In my mind, it’s good to have a starting place, but you’ve got to be willing to grow and shape the character beyond the shtick.
Yeah, being an unstoppable badass hitting 1d10+20+ each hit was kickass and all, but after a while there was a sense of identity lost as others started doing the same damage or when wizards do what wizards typically do. And Lu Bu was never the freelance merc type. If this was a West March game something could’ve been done, it in PFS my brother just didn’t feel like he was Lu Bu anymore.
It’s a shame since as far as character building went, it’s arguably one of my best builds using the materials I had. Alas, it’s one thing to be as strong as Lu Bu, but if you can’t match his conviction you’re naught but a two-bit imitation of his superficial qualities. And no one wants to think of themselves as the cheap knock-off.
This comic not answers anything and if fact creates more questions. Congratulation!!! Now i really wonder why Barbarian and Sorcerer were tied togeter and how they manage to meet. It will be good to also know why Paladin and Oracle are dressed like Men in Black.
Paladin and Oracle are 106 miles from Chicago, they’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark out, and they’re wearing sunglasses.
Comments over. No more entries. We have a winner. #Dying
Comments are open again, i only see that movie once, years ago and paladin and oracle are both classes related to the gods, they can say “We are on a mission from god” and they actually be right about that. Also i am not from US so i may lost something so thanks for the context.
I still want to know what were doing Barbarian and Sorcerer. mainly because if told someone: “A paladin and an oracle enter a dungeon and find a barbarian and a sorcerer tied together”, well, the implication are implicating. Also in the comic it show that is not the case, or if it is the case, they are doing it wrong.
Oh snap… So uh, funny story? It’s finals week for me. Lots going on. I wrote the comic a few weeks back, sat down to write the blog post Sunday night, and completely forgot what I’d meant to talk about in the first place. I decided to go with pop culture references. That seemed to fit!
Your comment reminded me of the original topic. I’d meant to talk about joke characters that slowly become serious characters once their players get into the game. I think that would have gone a long way towards explaining that Paladin and Oracle started life as a bad movie reference before finding themselves.
Mea culpa.
Yes, it is your fault and you should be ashamed >(
Don’t worry just kidding, in fact this makes me think of the perils of references. As i am not from US i lack some cultural reference obvious like Las Vegas Strip, as i said i lack some not all. Still when one cast a reference the other persons can or can not understand them, it is the inherit danger of references. A exiled prince with the power to control people minds specially if his power is called a Geas is Lelouch. Now even when then some persons, even ones who have watched the series will not recognize the reference. References, risky business since Tom Cruise was young and handsome. You can still make the original comic and maybe one just for Barbarian and Sorcerer. I really want to know why they where tied together.
I’ve only done two “homage” characters, the second was a Barbarian named Smorgash the Blue. His tribe thought that the color blue gave you Great Powers. So he painted himself blue. As well as his armor. And his great axe. And everything else he owned. He’d make a claim of ownership by painting loot blue…
And he spoke loudly and declaratively, things like “TODAY IS GREAT DAY TO BE A HERO!” and “SMASH THEM FOR JUSTICE!”
Of course he was a Tick reference, but no one seems to have gotten it (but the Tick is pretty niche).
His name? Well, he was glutton and from a tribe of the Great Frozen North.
The first was when I was a wee lad, the year was mid 1986. I made an elven noblemen who had a great singing voice, fabulous silvery/blonde 80’s hair, and tendency towards laziness (he preferred to let his minions/underlings’/party members do all the work). His name was Jareth… and I’m not sure anyone ever got that reference either. I’ve remade him several times over the years for different campaigns.
I still want to make a Ziggy Stardust sorcerer. One day….
Holy crap! You just reminded me! I did make another homage, am androgynous elven mage named Ziegfried who specialized in summoning spiders.
Now I Have to go back and double check how many other David Bowie characters I’ve made…
I pulled one of these during my first campaign. A lighthearted All Flesh Must Be Eaten game, in which the world had fallen under darkness, insane cultists and bubblegum zombies were everywhere, and the moon had just opened its eye.
Suddenly, surprising even myself, in the best Narrator Voice I’ve ever done: “The Moon’s eye sees through flesh, earth and stone. But… can it see why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?”
A moment of stunned silence, followed by a full thirty seconds of laughter. It came completely out of nowhere, lit up the campaign, and then was never mentioned again.
Well I’ve got a solid case of second hand giggles right now, so I’m going to go ahead and say that was one of the good ones. +5 bon mot points.
Trying to introduce some of my older-generation friends to DnD, I find that cultural references are a great way to make them feel instantly more at home.
Hence the game where the quest-giver was a (young?) dwarf under a curse. He was supposed to inherit his father’s business (as a lumber jack) when he reached the age of majority, which for dwarves is a little higher than for humans, and every year on his birthday he turned 29 all over again. The party was being asked to help by his dying-of-old-age aunt, who was his guardian of record and caretaker of the business, and who really wanted to live long enough to see her nephew become an adult….
Of course the dwarf’s name was Benjamin.
Benny the (lumber)Jack, always turning 29.
Sure enough, in the middle of all the confusion about how everything worked, the familiarity of what they were hearing helped the group relax quite a bit, and the bard immediately wanted to play violin duos with young Benny.
Once they got comfortable, of course, the references stopped, but it was a handy tool to help ease them in to it.
Oof. Had to Google for that one. Apparently the joke was 39 though…?
Yes, but dwarven adulthood is around 40 years, so the single year younger might not have been noticed right away and wouldn’t really have caused a problem. Moving it back, so it was 11 years of not aging before adulthood makes it obvious something’s afoot, so the legal adulthood thing never triggered…. I probably put way too much thought into the whole thing, honestly.
(I’m not surprised you had to Google it, you aren’t the right generation for that joke)
Movie references no. (In terms of unwanted or impressive.)
Video game references, yes.
Fairly recently in my Curse of Strahd game we accidentally played a game of Blood Bowl with a sacred relic. Getting a “touchdown” literally killed some vampires.
(Apologies if I already mentioned this in the comments before. It was the closest thing I can think of.)
I was always a Mordheim guy rather than Blood Bowl. Football and orcs are such a natural fit though….
I wouldn’t mind movie references, cartoon references, and video game references… if one of my players didn’t insist on making references to things no one else in the party has actually seen and then laughing about them for five or so minutes while everyone else sits there confused.
Dangit Jim, I’m a DM, not an obscure culture expert!
I empathize. I went to play in a one-shot recently with some dudes I’d never met before. It was a battle of the bands scenario where we all had bard levels, and the entire session was set up to have us competing against a rival aarakocra group. When it came time for the birds to start their set, the DM triumphantly turned the laptop and showed us this. Like… the entire thing.
I don’t watch “It’s Always Sunny.” I’d never heard about that episode. And the thing about cringe humor is that, if you aren’t aware of the setup, it stops being humor and just becomes cringe.
He was a new DM, and bless his heart for trying. But as I sat there watching him and his girlfriend yuck it up for the entire duration of the video, I just had my eyes on the load bar praying for it to end.
It’s happened a few times, but only in minor cases, such as when, after watching Deadpool, a friend rolled up a human gunslinger/rogue who duel-wielded pistols and swords, but without any further resemblance (different name, no superpowers, different personality, etc.)
I did once come close to having this happening, though. In our first campaign that we had ever run, we had gotten to the point where we were having to think about what would happen when our glorious adventures came to a close. I offered to run a new campaign. We had a relatively new player, who had just started watching Critical Role. Not long after I proposed my new campaign, he came to me and stated that he was planning to play a goliath barbarian named “Grog Strongjaw”. Having not even DMed my first session yet, I let him roll up some statistics. Fortunately, the end of our campaign was still far away, and so, after a month or so, he decided to change his character to a gnome bard named Jaron Kedrikc, with his backstory being that he was a noble who’s family had been murdered and he alone had survived, and been forced to flee.
“Okay”, I thought. “Still an imitation of Scalan with Percy’s backstory, but not the same character. That’s progress”. As the months went by, this player gradually changed aspects of this character, tweaking them as he came up with his own, original ideas, until he finally had a fire gensai evoker wizard, finally ready to play a campaign with his own character, and one he could be happy with.
Unfortunately, this guy ended up getting too good at creating new, original characters, and so he now has a huge file of dozen of different character ideas that he creates, but never ends up using. This person also has a high propensity for his characters dying or leaving the party; this doesn’t seem to be a conscious decision, and all of those instances have been due to either unlucky rolls, circumstance, or poor decisions (dang it druid, he was a two failed death saves, but you choose to do an area effect spell rather than heal him!). I do wonder, though, now that he’s up to his 5th character, whether he’s doing this intentionally. Still: at least those dozens of character designs have been original.
Well hey, you saw my write up on Critical Role imitation. Good on ya for being patient with the guy. That show is a great intro to the hobby, but it sometimes takes folks a minute to move past it and find themselves.
So there we were. Opening session of Mummy’s Mark, Paizo’s Egyptian pyramid themed adventure path. Our intrepid tomb raiders included the archaeologist bard Ohio Jones (whose favoured weapon just so happened to be a whip) and the snake shaman druid Edmund Blackadder.
At the very start of the campaign, the team had to send a representative up to a stage to collect the paperwork that permits them to go tomb raiding. The two look at each other and grin. “We send Monty”.
You see, Monty the Python was Blackadder’s animal companion.
That’s the worst one I’ve ever seen.
And yet, simultaneously, that is the best thing I have ever heard. Let us ponder the mysteries.
…
Serious question though. Did those characters stick around long enough to grow and change and become their own thing, or were they nothing but jokes the whole way through the campaign?
One of the two campaigns I am currently GMing is a fairly silly “screw logic, let’s be nuts/awesome!” campaign to hold over some players until our regular GM can continue a longer campaign. (This is the Suicide Squad campaign, incidentally.) So we’ve had a few instances of this, mostly by me. The first time, I learned that a player was not going to be able to make it that day and so, desiring for him to be present for the planned encounter (as the boss was a more heavily optimized version of his character from another campaign), I quickly grabbed 5 character sheets of the appropriate levels from my Myth-Weavers file of PCs I’ve made but never used and threw them in as another mercenary group the villain had hired to deal with the PCs. Lacking any real ideas for the name, and having been kind of put on the spot, I went with the Notginyu Force.
Other than there being five of them and them doing poses (they actually first appeared when the PCs walked into a dark room and a spotlight on the ceiling came on to reveal the posing Notginyus) they really didn’t have any similarities to Dragon Ball’s Ginyu Force, but it helped the players visualize the scene. (As it happens, the players were so terrified of facing 5 PCs I had created that they negotiated a deal with the Notginyus to pay them to leave them alone. So apparently I have a reputation for powerful builds.)
On a more direct note, the next boss the PCs will face will be none other than the magnificent SNOWFLAME!!!! ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZttZvL92uwU ) I needed a boss for a drug lab and had been wanting to use the Warlock Vigilante for something, so who better than a man whose superpower is shooting energy out of his hands after he snorts cocaine?
Wow. I had never seen Snowflame. I thought it was dumb.
…
And then I got to the sandwich trip scene. sensibleChuckle.gif
I think this sort of thing works well when 1) all parties know it’s a joke game going in, and 2) everybody is aware of the reference. Sounds to me like you’re doing everything right. I told the story elsewhere in this thread of my Always Sunny experience in a one shot. It broke both of those rules for me, and was therefore no bueno.
In a C’thulhu game my group came up with Mr. Winterbottom, Admiral von Schneider and … no not the rest of the cast, but Howard Carter and Lord Carnavon
I think it went great!
And yeah they met a young woman named Sophie 😀
I’m about half a year late, but I feel compelled to share my own “accidental pop culture reference” story.
Our group decided to try the anime-themed RPG “Big Eyes, Small Mouth”, 2nd edition. I chose the Tech Genius class, deciding he was a body shop mechanic in his mid-to-late teens aiming to be the best engineer around.
I was also learning Japanese in community college, and what better time to put my fledgling skills to use? Let’s see, “iron” is “tetsu” and “king” is “ō”. Sounds appropriate to my PC’s role and ambitions. So I introduced him to the group as “Tetsuō”.
“Kanedaaa~!” two of the other players immediately cried out in response.
I was startled. “How’d you know my character’s last name?!” I blurted out.
After a round of laughter, my fellow players educated me that Tetsuo and Kaneda are two main characters from the anime film “Akira”. I admitted I’d heard of it but hadn’t seen it. This came about because one of my Japanese textbooks gave “Kaneda” as an example of a common family name, and since the word “kane” can refer to metal, gold, or money depending on context, it fit my PC perfectly.
Remembering this story also reminds me I still haven’t watched “Akira”. Should probably fix that at some point.
That is freaking amazing. I hope you kept the name, because a dude showing up to BESM with a character named “Tetsuo Kaneda” is just about the most perfect intro to that game I can imagine.
Oh, I absolutely kept the name. There were no post-apocalyptic shenanigans, so my PC’s design wasn’t prophetic in that sense. However, a lot of my earlier TTRPG PCs had names that were on-the-nose references, such as a paladin named Arthur (Ghosts n’ Goblins) and a bard named Edward (Final Fantasy 4).
I don’t remember too many other details about the BESM campaign or party, except one PC was the young, sparkly, magical girl archetype, and another PC was a mecha named Big Red. While the latter might have been intended to be a partial reference to “The Big O”, I’m pretty sure the player was also thinking about the soda or the gum.
She was wrong. That script was glorious.