My online game, KLR has reached a point where I need to introduce some new plot elements. We’ve just seen a major villain taken down in a battle with exploding airships and artillery duels across the city. While there’s some mileage in dealing with the aftermath and fallout of this, the game needs a but more than that to keep the game going.
So, to try and get the creative juices flowing, I decided to select half-a-dozen random songs, and seek inspiration from the lyrics. Since I haven’t ripped most of my CD collection onto my PC, I selected the songs by rolling assorted oddly-shaped dice to determine shelf, CD on shelf and track within CD.
This gave me the following six songs:
Rush – Red Lenses
Here we have a lot of imagery associated with the colour red; sunsets, blood, dancing shoes, the Soviet Union. The nearest analogue to the Soviet Union in Kalyr is probably the Konaic Empire. They are the morally unambiguous villains of the setting.
Iommi/Hughes – Don’t You Tell Me
Am I a sacrifice?
Am I too blind to see?
I’m not a vagabond
I know what is, is meant to be
There is a better way
There comes a time I do believe
There’s a price to pay
I know where you’ve been
Don’t you tell me you don’t know
Seems to be about a betrayal, the exact nature of which isn’t specified. There’s definitely some plot potential there.
Marillion – Easter
The original song, written in 1989, is about the troubles in Northern Ireland. Made more general, a pointless death in a long-running conflict which needs to be resolved.
Pink Floyd – Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2
OK, so I can’t really fit teachers and education very well, but ‘We don’t need no thought control’ works in a setting where telepathy and mind control are common powers.
Breathing Space – Shades of Grey
There’s no need to pretend now
We all come in different shades of grey
Moral ambiguity – the protagonists of the story arc aren’t flawless, and the bad guys aren’t necessarily irredeemably bad either. But when I’ve got Nicki Jett as a player character, the first bit of that goes without saying, really.
And finally:
Uriah Heep – Time to Live (from Salisbury)
Well I spent twenty long years
In a dirty old prison cell
I never saw the light of day
…
They say I killed a man
But I never told them why
So you can guess what I’ve been through
So for twenty long years
I’ve been thinking of that other man
What I saw him do to you
There’s definitely an NPC with a significant back-story in that song.
Let’s see what I can come up with with that lot. To go into any more detail would be entering into spoiler territory!
