Hope everyone is doing well. Caught a bit of a cold last week so I’m a tad behind i’m afraid – sort of a case wwhere one thing led to another and I got sick.
Way With Worlds Book:
This one is probably due around March 2016. It’s actually a pretty regular piece of work since it’s all written – the challenge is the editing and making sure everything from 70 something columns actually coheres. The size also means it takes a little longer to edit than my last work.
I’m actually pleased with how solid it is. There’s a lot in there, and I’m going to be adding a bit more . . .
though I don’t know if I’ll add any new columns. I think I said 90% of what I need to say, though I’ve still got a way to go through edit #1.
Plot Twist Generator:
As noted I figured it out. Now if I can get well I can get back to it . . .
Respectfully,
– Steven Savage
http://www.musehack.com/
http://www.informotron.com/
http://www.seventhsanctum.com/
As the decades progress with the History of Adaptations, the type of movie that is popular is changing. Biblical epics gave way to musicals, then biblical remakes, then modern thrillers. Not seen in the most popular list are Westerns*, despite them being a quarter of Hollywood’s output , from feature films to serials to television, plus radio series. The Western is a very American genre, celebrating the expansion of the US into an unknown frontier. The original Star Trek was marketed as “Wagon Train to the stars” to get the concept of the show through to executives. In the 1966-67 television season, when Star Trek first aired, there were eighteen Westerns aired on the three TV networks. Gunsmoke still holds the record for the longest running television drama, beating Law & Order in number of episodes, and has its roots in radio before airing on TV in 1955.
Westerns lost popularity in the Seventies. The Vietnam War had American questioning their country and its myths. Blazing Saddles, released in 1974, took the tropes of Westerns and skewered them with parody, much like how Airplane killed the airplane disaster film popular in the Seventies. Heaven’s Gate, released in 1980 and based loosely on the Johnson County War of 1889-1893, may have been the final nail in the coffin along with ending the New Hollywood era of the auteur director. Since then, Westerns have been made, but not in the same numbers as before.
Police procedurals took over the niche Westerns had. There is a similarity between the two genres. A lawman protecting the community against the black hats that threaten it is a common plot in Westerns. That same plot is the bread-and-butter of the police procedural. Dragnet, first appearing on radio in 1949 and television in 1951, set the tropes for the genre. Jack Webb, the creator of Dragnet, used the same approach with Emergency, a fire department procedural focused on paramedics in Los Angeles. The police procedural took over the Western’s place on television schedules, with series like Hawaii Five-0 in the Seventies, Miami Vice in the Eighties, and the Law & Order franchise through the Nineties to the new millennium.
Today, though, a new mythos has emerged, building on ideas in both Westerns and police procedurals. The superhero, while around since the age of the pulps and mystery men, has become a dominant force. Superman has appeared on radio, in live-action television and movies, and in animated series. Batman has almost kept pace, with no radio show featuring the character but appearing in the Superman radio series. Between June 2015 and 2020, there are fifty-one planned superhero movies, plus several TV series. While nowhere near the number of Westerns during that genre’s peak, the amount of money being put into developing these fifty-one movies is far beyond what Hollywood invested in oaters.
Superheroes, like Westerns, are uniquely American**. Unlike Westerns, superheroes aren’t based on historical figures, allowing the characters to remain bigger than life without the worry of an indiscretion being discovered by historians. However, like some Westerns, superheroes are vigilantes keeping communities safe from villains who would otherwise be untouchable. Batman touches on both the Western and the police procedural, touching on ideas in The Lone Ranger as someone outside the law working to enforce it and being an investigator, as seen in numerous police procedurals and detective stories. Marvel’s The Avengers can be seen as similar to movies like The Seven Samurai and its Hollywood version, The Magnificent Seven, with a number of heroes being brought together to fight off a threat.
While people may believe that the superhero bubble will pop, what needs to be kept in mind is that Westerns, as a genre, lasted decades with higher levels of saturation. Police procedurals are still around. While NBC cancelled Law & Order through an ill-advised move, its spin-off, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, first appearing in 1999, is still on the air. CBS has its own police procedural franchise in CSI: Crime Scene Investiation, starting in 2000, and still going with CSI: Cyber. Superhero media outside comics may continue for some time.
The issue that is occurring, as the History of Adaptations project will examine in greater detail, is that superheroes started in a medium considered to be for children. Comics, despite the strides made in appealing to adults, are still seen as being for kids. Westerns, while at times family fare, still could be seen by the entire family, again with exceptions. Police procedurals are definitely aimed at adults, with series aimed at a younger audience tweaked to avoid adult situations. Supers, though, still have the public image as being something aimed at children and teenagers and, thus, not to be taken seriously. The same issue exists for Young Adult novels; superheroes, though, are a visual medium and aren’t seen as being as literary.
That said, superheroes present a new American mythology, one that is still being created while building on the myths and legends of history. There is potential within the genre. Marvel Studios, through its Avengers Initiative series of movies, is showing that supers can be added to any number of genres, from technothriller to space opera, to create something new. There may be a bubble, but it’s not ready to deflate yet.
* With the exception of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the Sixties.
** As uniquely American as possible when half the creators of the first superhero, Superman, was Canadian. Joe Shuster hailed from Toronto, Ontario, and elements of that city can be seen in Metropolis.
Well been awhile, so here’s where we are!
Plot Twist Generator
After examining the options, I’m going to go straightforward randomization – putting together, iterating, and/or extending common elements. So you’ll have twists like “The villain is the protagonist’s mother” or “The villain is the protagonist’s mother, and has a deadly disease” and so on. I could try and provide various boundaries and options, but it’s just going to lower the level of detail and potential, so why not go a little broad?
Now I’ve got to start on it, but it feels comforting to have a focus.
Other Generators
I need to get to that one, but I’m kicking one around inspired by a particular TV show. Darn it.
Way With Worlds Book
Editing this now. It’s going pretty smoothly, but I need about 2-3 edit runs to make it ready for “real editing.” The book itself promises to be 450 or so pages long, so this is a lot of work, probably easily 3+ months before I get it into enough shape I want someone else to go over it. So I think it’s very likely we won’t see it until 2016.
However, I think the edit of the . . . uh . . . . rewrite . . . is going to make the book much better. I can tone up or streamline language, expand information, make things clearer, and make it flow better. The new chapter structure breaks the columns into logical subsections that really add consistency to the lessons.
Sailor Moon Book
On top of all of this, I am writing a book on Sailor Moon fandom with a co-author and friend. You can find more here at my personal blog. This one has no exact deadline, but it’s probably a year away from completion, more of a long-term project.
More Columns
Working to bring another column here to the Codex. Stay tuned . . .
Respectfully,
– Steven Savage
http://www.musehack.com/
http://www.informotron.com/
http://www.seventhsanctum.com/
The History of Adaptations
Twenties
Thirties
Forties
Fifties
Welcome to the history of adaptations. I’ve been looking at the top movies of each decade, analyzing them to see which ones were original and which ones were adaptations, and of the adaptations, what the source material was. I’m using the compiled list at Filmsite.org as a base. Last time, there was an unexpected twist. Turned out, the Fifties had the worst adaptation-to-original ratio so far, with just three movies being original and two of those being Cinerama demos. Prior, the ratio was about 2:1, remaining roughly constant from the dawn of the film industry.
The Sixties were a time of change and upheaval. The Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, Beatlemania, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the growing role of television, and that’s the short list. New Hollywood got its start during this decade; young filmmakers made their mark on the industry, affecting how studios produced movies. Colour was the default film process unless the director chose black-and-white for artistic purposes.
The popular movies of the era:
1960
Swiss Family Robinson – a Disney live-action adaptation of the 1812 novel, Der Schweizerische Robinson by Johann David Wyss.
1961
One Hundred and One Dalmatians – a Disney animated film adapting the book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith.
1962
Dr. No – adapted from the James Bond novel of the same name by Ian Fleming.
The Longest Day – adapted from the book of the same name by Cornelius Ryan about the D-Day landings in 1944.
1963
Cleopatra – adapted from the book, The Life and Times of Cleopatra by CM Franzero. Running over four hours, Cleopatra almost bankrupted 20 Century-Fox due to cost overruns and signalled the end of sprawling epics.
1964
Mary Poppins – adapted from the novel of the same name by PL Travers, Disney used a mix of live action and animation in the production.
My Fair Lady – musical adapted from the play, Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw
Goldfinger – the third James Bond novel to be adapted and the one to set the standard for all other 007 movies to follow. The second novel adapted, From Russia With Love was released in 1963.
1965
The Sound of Music – adaptation based on the play of the same name, which itself was adapted from a 1956 film from Germany, Die Trapp-Familie and the autobiography, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria von Trapp.
Doctor Zhivago – adapted from the novel of the same name by Boris Pasternak.
Thunderball – the fourth James Bond movie, though not an adaptation. Fleming worked with producer Kevin McClory prior to Dr. No to create Thunderball, which would lead to legal issues that would see elements from the movie be unavailable to United Artists and, later, MGM, including SPECTRE. McClory would remake Never Say Never Again with Sean Connery as Bond in 1983. SPECTRE returned to the main film franchise in 2015 in SPECTRE with Daniel Craig.
1966
The Bible: In the Beginning – adapted from The Book of Genesis in The Bible.
Hawaii – adapted from the novel of the same name by James A. Michener.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – original. The epic spaghetti Western by Sergio Leone with music by Ennio Morricone and considered the third movie in the Dollars trilogy, following A Fist Full of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More.
1967
The Jungle Book – adapted from the book by Rudyard Kipling. This will be the last Disney animated movie to appear until the Nineties.
The Graduate – based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Charles Webb.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner – original. The movie’s release came six months after the Loving v. Virgina ruling that struck down restrictions on mixed-race marriage in the United States.
1968
Funny Girl – based on the 1964 stage musical of the same name, which itself was based on the life of actor, singer, and comedian Fanny Brice. Barbra Streisand starred in both the musical and the movie as Brice.
2001: A Space Odyssey – original. Arthur C. Clarke worked with Stanley Kubrick on the story for the movie before writing the book. Clarke’s follow-up novel, 2010: Odyssey Two took into account changes made in the movie after Clarke had finished writing his novel.
1969
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – original but based loosely on outlaws Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, aka the title characters.
Soundtracks became notable in films, and not just for musicals. While music did play a role in films prior to the Sixties, the advent of rock-and-roll meant that a memorable, popular song could be played on the radio as part of the Top 40. 2001: A Space Odyssey married science fiction and classical music, including The Blue Danube Waltz in synchronization with the docking of a Pan-Am space place to an orbital station. Cross-pollination is just beginning in this era, with the fruits to be seen in later decades. Links in the list of popular films above go to songs best remembered from the work.
Of the twenty movies listed above, fifteen are adaptations. It is not until 1965, though, that an original work appears, and even that film, Thunderball, is part of a franchise. Also of note, two movies were made in conjunction with a novelist; Thunderball and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of the adaptations, three – My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Funny Girl – were based on stage works with the remaining dozen adapting literature. Movies have taken over the niche that theatre once held. Broadway is still key, but film and television have filled the gap that was once vaudeville.
The ratio of adaptation-to-original is now 3:1, worse than the early decades but an improvement over the previous. Stage plays are still being adapted, but not to the degree as in the early years. Adaptations remain popular, though, even over fifty years after the film industry began. The rise of the auteur director could change things into the Seventies.
Let’s see what I can cover this week!
Way With Worlds
OK, Way With Worlds is now all uploaded and included into a book format – which means sorting, then editing. It’s also looking to be enormous – try about 450 pages when done. That’s 120 pages more than any of my last books. It’s good it’s already basically done and in need of editing . . . but that’s a lot of work. So yeah, I don’t think we’ll see this one until 2016.
It’s going to be interesting to rewrite what is basically a rewrite, but I want to bring more coherence to the various essays, fill in gaps, and basically make it a manual for worldbuilding. So I guess it’ll be version 3.
Generators
I’m still kicking around how to do the plot twist generator – got a bit held up between work and having some dental work done, along with other chores. I just can’t find an “in” yet so if anyone has suggestions, please, contact me. Otherwise I may just take a stab at it and see how it goes – I just would hate to restart this thing after a lot of initial effort.
Thanks to Steven Universe, I’m also considering a “Gem” generator. Well a generator of “Gem-based alien techno-wizards” or something. You know, nothing truly openly tied to the show. But let’s just say it seems there’s a need among that growing fandom . . .
Other Writing
No idea yet what else I’ll write here, so it’ll be Ryan for awhile. I’m sure something else will get me fired up to write about creatively . . . . I just wish I knew what . . .
Respectfully,
– Steven Savage
http://www.musehack.com/
http://www.informotron.com/
http://www.seventhsanctum.com/
Short round up this month. Just a few of note.
Absolutely Fabulous movie coming.
AbFab is returning. Jennifer Saunders, creator and star of the original show, has confirmed that a movie will be filmed this summer, once a budget has been set. Saunders has said that the movie will bring back the main characters, including Joanna Lumley’s Patsy.
Steven Spielberg and SyFy Channel to bring Brave New World to the small screen.
Aldous Huxley’s dystopia Brave New World is being adapted by Spielberg for SyFy as a miniseries. Huxley’s novel looked at a future Earth where consumerism won the day, leading to a sterile world except for areas that refused to conform.
The Rock to play Jack Burton.
John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China will be remade with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the Kurt Russell role. Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz, who wrote X-Men: First Class, will write the script. Johnson wants to bring in John Carpenter, the director of the original, on the film.
Alphanumeric! ReBoot reboot confirmed.
Corus Entertainment is set to reboot the 90s CG-animated cartoon, ReBoot, with a full twenty-six episodes. The original series, the first one to use CG, lasted four seasons, with the last being comprised of two made-for-TV movies. The series ended on a cliffhanger, with the virus Megabyte having taken over Mainframe. The new series, ReBoot: The Guardian Core, is set to pick up with four sprites defending their system with the help of the VERA, the last of the original Guardians.
Speaking of the 90s, The Powerpuff Girls are returning, too.
Once again, the day will be saved! The Powerpuff Girls are returning to Cartoon Network, with new voices and new producers. The reboot will be prodiuced by Nick Jennings, of Adventure Time, and Bob Boyle, of Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! Tom Kenny will return as the Narrator and the Mayor.
- The old man with jobs for heroes is a dragon
So dragons can shapeshift in your world? And they don’t always get along with each other?
Think back to The Hobbit and put your Imagining Hat back on. Imagine that Gandalf was a dragon. That Smaug was a rival of his, for territory or treasure or something else, or maybe just an undesirable loose cannon and potential threat somewhere two or three centuries down the line.
So Gandalf-the-dragon tracks down some dwarfs that have a personal stake in the issue, gives them advice, and sends them in the right direction. Even helps them pick up a hobbit for the journey, too. And the thrush that mentions Smaug’s Achilles’ heel? Shapeshifted Gandalf again.
Lesser beings are pieces on a magnificent chess set, moved around by their draconic betters. These are moves in conflicts that can last for centuries before they even come to open blows, and sometimes never do.
Another dragon doesn’t even have to be facing down the metaphorical barrel, either. Dragons can have a multitude of reasons for manipulating humans into doing their dirty work for them.
And sometimes, of course, dragons head off potential trouble by giving false reports about themselves. Imagine the look on a dragon-hunter’s face when it’s discovered that the secret vulnerability ze was going to exploit doesn’t actually exist.
- The dragon used to be an old man with jobs for heroes
Alternatively, let’s go back to characters like Fafnir. Dragons aren’t born, they’re made, they’ve become. Sufficient greed and obsession, centered on a sufficiently-large hoard, can cause a transformation into a dragon. It may be slow and gradual or very sudden.
A dragon’s new life came on account of its hoard, and its life is forever subject to the same. Dragons can be controlled by holding their hoards for ransom. Luckily, this is usually as far as it goes. A dragon’s strength and power are linked to its hoard and it can be killed if the hoard is destroyed, but dragons seldom fear this fate. They know how hard it is for their former peers to do away with such treasures. More likely is that the thief will turn miserly as well, and a new dragon will be the result of it.
Dwarf-keeps are generally ruled by dragons, of course. More dragons were originally dwarfs than any other species, in fact. Whether this is a natural tendency or their culture has been warped by centuries of dragon rule is anyone’s guess.
I say “alternatively” in the beginning there, but I should add that these ideas are not mutually exclusive. In this scenario dragons have already changed shape once. Who’s to say that they can’t shapeshift back, either into their original form or into anything that their minds conceive. Maybe there are supernatural tells, maybe it’s a flawless impersonation.
- The most important part of a dragon’s hoard is the dragon
Maybe dragons hoard gold and jewels. Maybe they don’t. Either way, though, the real profit from dragon-hunting is in harvesting body parts. Every part of the dragon is useful.
The scales make a serviceable armor. The fangs and claws may be made into weapons. But many of the other body parts may be rendered into potions. Dragons possess a venom in their teeth that keeps long and well in glass decanters. Or perhaps the venom, so quick to kill, is a multipurpose fluid that is also behind their fire.
Perhaps it is their blood, and causes paranoia and various hallucinations. Hence the tales of dragon-slayers that speak to birds after killing a dragon (especially if it can turn into a gas upon contact with the air, which can also add danger to the very fighting of a dragon). Or maybe the hallucinations are the natural side effect of getting down into the depths of reality, where things are truer and the phenomenal world is revealed to be merely symbolic. Or maybe it just makes you invulnerable, as Sigurd discovered.
The heart may prolong the lifespan, cure diseases, or grant strength. The eyes aren’t actually magic, but they do taste pretty good and make an excellent soup.
- The next step is body modification
Silly dragon-slayer, you don’t go and use up a dragon’s bits like that. Didn’t you hear that the future is in renewable resources?
Wizards are the elite of society. They’re almost defined by their practice of grafting parts of dragons to themselves. Some of them have a smile like a shark’s, full of razor-sharp dragon fangs. Some of them have new blood flowing through their veins, opening their ears to the language of the birds. Some have threaded dragon muscle in with theirs, or grafted tough skin in place of their own.
Almost all of them have replaced their hearts. It’s the first thing that you want to do, even if it has a fair chance of killing you. With a dragon’s heart in your chest your lifespan can be measured in the centuries.
In some ways scientific progress is right on the level for a fantasy society, but medical science (surgery in particular) is on the cutting edge, if not entirely past anything that we can do today. Wizards direct all of their efforts in this direction, because improving the grafting process is an effort that never fails to bear fruits.
Some wizards push the boundaries of what should be possible, even allowing for magical cross-species organ transplants. Some have chopped up their stomachs to make room for additional organs, and rely on intravenous drips or nutrient slurries. Others are simply content to become bloated parodies of their former selves
Wizards. Biotech. Body horror. Dragons through and through that all. What are you waiting for?
- Actually, don’t touch anything there at all, mkay?
A dragon’s hoard is cursed, man. It’s the dragon’s last revenge against thieves and murderers that would despoil it and rob its treasures.
Perhaps you hallucinate or turn mad. Perhaps you become mad with greed (maybe even as the result of partial possession by the dragon’s own spirit) until you’ll kill someone for looking at your hoard wrong.
The curse may be applied to the hoard and whoever owns so much as a single coin of it. This means that the curse can be transmitted vertically, generation to generation, and also be spread horizontally, so that many people are affected. Does it matter how much of the hoard you have, or is the person in possession of a cup subject to the curse to the same degree as the person who owns everything else? Does giving up the hoard relieve the curse?
Your turn: What are some other interesting ways that dragons could be used in a story?
R. Donald James Gauvreau works an assortment of odd jobs, most involving batteries. He has recently finished a guide to comparative mythology for worldbuilders, available herefor free. He also maintains a blog at White Marble Block, where he regularly posts story ideas and free fiction, and writes The Culture Column, an RPG.net column with cultures ready for you to drop into your setting.
The Adaptation Fix-It Shop is open again. The Shop looks at adaptations that have major problems and tries to rebuild the concept. Previously, the Fix-It Shop rejiggered the 1998 Godzilla as a action/comedy monster hunting flick and separated the two movies trying to get out from Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li.
Today, I delve back into Dungeons & Dragons.
The first inclination is to drop a meteor swarm* on it and call it a day.
The first inclination, while satisfying, is wrong. While Dungeons & Dragons had many problems. Its 2005 direct-to-video sequel, Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God, was a far better movie and a far better adaptation, just lacking the effects budget the first movie had. The sequel works as a template on how to fix the the original. There’s also the issue of the original movie having decent set pieces that just didn’t work with all the others.
Let’s get some of the problems out of the way. Role-playing games add an extra twist to adapting that most media doesn’t, as mentioned before. While most novels, comics, TV series, and even video games have a plot, RPGs leave that up to the players. Characters are the same; in an RPG, the players create them. Settings may or may not be included, depending on the game. Dungeons & Dragons, in most editions, has The World of Greyhawk as a default setting, but with little information beyond names like Drawmij, Mordenkainen, and Zagyg. Other settings were produced and sold, and Dungeon Masters (DMs) were given world-building tips, much like Way with Worlds, to help create their own. That leaves game mechanics, which did appear in the movie.
Wrath of the Dragon God showed that it is possible to do a D&D movie. Wrath had a lower budget, but made up for it with more attention to game elements and easing those elements into the narrative. The sequel created its own setting and characters, using ideas presented in the Third Edition core rulebooks, and building on them for the plot. Wrath is proof of concept; a D&D movie can be made that isn’t bad.
With the above in mind, what can be done to repair the Dungeons & Dragons movie? The core plot is about five adventurers who band together to stop an evil wizard from overthrowing the queen. It’s a good plot, one not used too much lately in movies. The devil’s in the details, though. In a D&D game, evil wizards capable of succeeding in overthrowing a monarch tend to be capable of tossing fireballs without breaking a sweat. While a group of adventurers can defeat a much higher level opponent if they team up and work together, an evil wizard should be portrayed as smart enough to have lieutenants, henchmen, and minions in between him and any resistance. In the movie, the villain was powerful enough to command dragons and beholders, one of either can be a difficult foe for a group of adventurers.
It could be that the plot needs far more time to resolve properly than a movie can provide. Stopping anyone from taking over a kingdom can be a full campaign spread over several months of play. The same thing happened with the Dragonlance animated film; a ninety minute animated movie wasn’t enough to cover a novel. Even with the expanded DVDs of the Lord of the Rings movies, a lot had to be left out just to get the story told. Epic fantasy just doesn’t fit in a tidy 90-120 minute time slot. Three ways around the problem; the first, look at going to television. TV allows for 13-20 45-minute chunks of time, providing far more time to properly tell a story. The anime Record of Lodoss War lasted thirteen episodes, each one being 25 minutes long, and it was based on an RPG campaign.
Second method involves multiple movies. There’s a risk inherent to the approach; if the first movie isn’t a draw, the story ends incomplete. This seems to be the fate** of The Mortal Instruments. The City of Bones underperformed at the box office. leading to the sequel to be first pushed back and then cancelled, leaving the story unfinished. The goal for the repaired Dungeons & Dragons, under this workaround, is to keep the production costs down without looking cheap to maximize the box office returns. It will be a balancing act to keep the effects looking good while still not breaking the budget.
The third approach is to cut through the backstory and start in media res. The evil wizard is making his move and the adventurers have to act and act now! Details can be filled in as flashbacks and the Seven Samurai-like gathering of the heroes avoided or truncated. The key events are the discovery of the plot, the investigation into how the plot will be enacted, and the stopping of the plot and the wizard. The heroes have a time limit.
While a TV series may be the best approach, to properly fix the movie would be to keep the format***. Multiple movies aren’t a guarantee; unlike Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, Dungeons & Dragons isn’t based on a series of bestselling books. Even Star Wars was filmed to be a stand-alone work if it didn’t do well. That leaves option three, cutting out or cutting down unnecessary events and trimming the gathering of the heroes. The goal, now, is to get something that feels both epic in nature and still personal. To elevated, and the audience doesn’t have a character to follow. Too close, and the saving of the kingdom becomes overwhelming.
The wizard’s plot to take over the kingdom needs a bit of work. Summoning a flight of evil dragons is epic, but one dragon could turn the heroes into cinders without effort. Controlling one is enough and keeps the menace of both the dragon and the wizard intact. A quest to retrieve a means to call a good dragon to counter the wizard’s will allow the dungeon half of the title to appear. The wizard’s motive is power and riches, something the kingdom has in plenty.
Now that the villain’s plot is more or less set, a way to stop or at least neutralize him is in place, it’s time to get the heroes going. Two rogues, a mage apprentice, a dwarf fighter, and an elf ranger discover the scheme and work together to recover the MacGuffin of Good Dragon Summoning before the evil wizard can overthrow the queen. Let’s use a plot point from the original movie, the apprentice discovers that her mentor is part of the evil scheme. Instead of discovering this after stopping two half-competent thieves, she does this and then discovers them looting the lab. This gives her leverage; help her stop the evil wizard or be turned over to her mentor. The rogues, being greedy but decent people, help because while the kingdom, a magocracy, benefits only wizards with non-magical types on the edge of society, having an evil wizard in charge is a change for the worse.
A mage and two rogues aren’t an effective combat force. Earlier editions of D&D saw magic-users who could die if their cat familiar played too rough. Rogues do their best fighting when their opponents can’t see them. The group takes stock and heads to the best place to find someone who is good in a fight, a seedy tavern. “You all meet in a tavern” is a cliché, but works to get players together fast. By choosing a dive where brawls are known to occur nightly, the group can invoke the cliché without engaging it. They’re looking for the last man standing, who turns out to be the dwarf fighter. They explain what’s happening, tell the dwarf there will be lots of fighting, and work out the next step, which is to somehow summon a good dragon. The dwarf knows someone, a ranger, and leads the group to the elf. At this point, the group is as connected as it can get, and time’s wasting.
The dungeon is the location where each character can show off their abilities, though this needs to be subtle. It’s also a chance to bring in some classic monsters that wouldn’t necessarily fit into the plot, though the choices need to be careful. As tempting as it is to toss in a rust monster to scare the dwarf fighter, the creature can look a little silly. The rust monster was based off a toy that Gary Gygax used as a miniature. But, if the rust monster can be brought in and made fearsome, it is iconic to the game and easier to avoid or defeat than a beholder.
The MacGuffin of Good Dragon Summoning now in their hands, the heroes rush back to the capital, but dark clouds loom overhead. The wizard finishes controlling his dragon and sends it out to wreak havoc on the city. The heroes must now use the MacGuffin to call a good dragon while fighting off the wizard’s lieutenants and minions. It’s close, but the good dragon arrives and attacks the evil one. The heroes slip into the city as the wizard closes in on the queen, leading to the final fight. Pyrotechnics go off as the heroes battle the villain while the dragons fight in the background, reflecting the fortune of the heroes. Ultimately, the heroes win, the kingdom is saved, and triumphant music plays.
Plot aside, that leaves the effects, another point of failure. By reducing the number of dragons, that should give the effects team both the time and money to focus on just two instead of two flocks. The dungeon can be built on a set instead of on location, unless a decent catacomb can be found for less. Some set pieces from the original are lost, including the Thieves’ Guild maze, which was a high point of the film. That maze, though, just duplicates the dungeon, and can be let go. The final battle needs to reflect spells that are in the game, and the mage apprentice should run out of spells or be down to utility types like light or mage hand.
Will the above work? It depends on the cast, crew, and budget. Wrath of the Dragon God did show that a D&D movie is possible, provided that the plot can handle the effects budget available. A less ambitious plot could help, as could reducing the time spent on subplots that lead nowhere.
Next week, the June news round up.
* Ninth level magic-user spell that summons a meteor shower on an area that used to have opponents in it.
** A TV series, Shadowhunters, is in the works, however.
*** Besides, D&D has already had a TV series, albeit animated.
First of all there’s a chance to help with research on anime culture – take this poll!
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Respectfully,
– Steven Savage
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