Solar Powered Laser Beam Guitar

[pyat]

So, I've been thinking of an RPG in which the players portray a rock and roll band in space! This idea has been expressed before, but I think it would work especially well in “The ‘Verse,” the setting of Firefly and Serenity.

The characters wander from gig to gig in a beat up tramp freighter/tour bus, one step ahead of Consortium cool hunters. These slick customers want to ensnare the players, in an effort to commodify their sound or hook them up with a major label. All they have to do is clean up their image and lyrics, and maybe sound a little more like Kenny G, and they’ll be assured of huge contracts in the Core Worlds. Except the cool hunters are also government agents, social engineers looking to subvert the counter culture by encouraging the underground to sell out.

And of course there are rival bands to deal with, and crooked bar owners, drug dealers, gun runners, and religious fanatics. While ostensibly acting as entertainers, the players will naturally also be drawn into local revolutions, kidnapping plots, and the like. And no doubt some of them have a “secret past.” Naturally, there is room for supporting characters, like the rockumentary maker who is following the band, the sleazy agent/face man who makes their bookings, and the roadie who doubles as the ship’s engineer. If you want maximum coverage, try and find your way to Mr. Universe and his broadcast tower, and send your video out across the 'Verse!

Then there is the challenge of odd gigs. For some reason, I’m imagining a guy with a guitar holding off a thousand Reavers by playing the opening chords of Metallica’s “One,” with the blood-thirsty lunatics temporarily transfixed by music.

This concept could cover anything from treasonous balladeers and folk-rockers, bringing the message of revolution to the people, to over-the-top glam rockers in a rocket-powered tour bus, wielding Solar-Powered Laserbeam Guitars!



Yeah, this one would be at the "cheesy glam rock" end of the spectrum.

But, hey, this one has cars... in space!

And again with the cars in space!

Oooh... Spacecthulhu! Okay, these are getting sillier...

Comments

[pyat.livejournal.com]

As always, sir, you turn my game ideas up to Eleven. :)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Well, one of my players actually has Rock Band. Now that I've had a chance to think about it, I think it might actually be something doable. The thing is, I'd just have to figure out a decent campaign plan where success/failure would hinge heavily on the performance of the PCs at playing in a band versus the usual business of duking it out in a traditional fight.

Of course, they COULD have laser beam guitars and sonic wave drums and all that, and it COULD be that their performance at a rock song is actually required to drive off an invasion of Solarian Bat Fiends, or that the Evil Emperor Zing Zero has forced them to have a lethal Battle of the Bands against his Robotic Glam Metal Champions, performing on anti-grav platforms suspended above a lava pit teeming with voracious Mercurian Plasmavores....

Ooo. More crazy ideas. I've got to write this all up as a Savage Worlds scenario.