This past weekend, I visited my mother's family's old hometown of Panama City Beach, Florida. I got a chance to show my kid one of the landmark's I remembered from my childhood, the kitschy miniature golf course known as Goofy Golf. The firebreathing pink dinosaur that once demanded your attention at the roadside is, alas, no longer there, but the sphinx, giant ape, statue of Buddha, Asian dragon, Easter Island head, and assorted more mundane dinosaurs are still in evidence, along with rockets, windmills and the like.
I feel Goofy Golf is good inspiration for a point- or hexcrawl. I don't mean in its specific set-pieces (not necessarily, at least) but in the way it's basically a spread out funhouse dungeon. I like a good, well-thought out setting as much as the next guy, but I also enjoy the kitchen sink weird lost worlds. I'm thinking of things like Ka-Zar's Savage Land or the world beyond the Bermuda Triangle Skull the Slayer gets sucked into. Hollow World has more than a little of this vibe with cavemen, Rip Van Winkle still dwarves, and gaucho orcs, but there isn't as much of this done in gaming as there could be.
Making it a bounded location to be explored like a pocket dimension or lost world frees it to strain seriousness and consistency in a way than might not work in an entire setting.
3 comments:
Land of the Lost seems like another apt example of this sort of thing, even if its budget restraints and need to stay kiddie-friendly limited it from achieving its full potential.
More obscure but still available from Steve Jackson Games, there was an old Space Gamer issue with an adventure called "Big Lizzie" that cribbed Land of the Lost's basic setup and mashed it up with classic Western tropes Valley of Gwangi style for a cowboys versus bandits, cavemen, and dinosaurs chase scenario. IIRC it was statted up for at least three Wild West systems and I think the current version SJG sells includes GURPS (which didn't exist back then) as well. Noteworthy for including adventure seeds to expand the concept into a campaign format - the "pocket dimension" involved was just one of a series of "temporal preservation habitats" from different periods in Earth (and possibly other worldly) history, so you could easily throw more elements into the stew.
Sounds a lot like Land of the Lost -- the original 70s kids show. Haven't seen the movie to compare.
Land of the Lost is of a similar vein, but budget constraints held it back.
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