Sunday, September 07, 2008

take inspiration from wherever you can get it

So I'm sitting here working on a document tentatively titled "Jeff's Field Guide to 17 Unknown Gods" (as per this post) while my daughter is watching some Care Bear cartoons on a DVD she slipped into the ol' X-box. I haven't really been paying much attention to the TV show, because the Care Bears cartoons are some of the worst animated pablum I've ever seen. For an 80's kiddie cartoon the villain Noheart (see pic) is a pretty decent evil overlord, but other than that it's mostly crap.

However, I really liked the gimmick in the episode that was just on. The Care Bears' cloud-based kingdom of Care-A-Lot was threatened by a Cloud Worm. Imagine a titanic worm composed of green-tinted cloud stuff. It floats through the sky, feeding on clouds. Every chomp it took out of Care-A-Lot sent a seismic tremor throughout the land. All a DM would have to do is drop out the Care Bears part and put in its place a floating island castle. Say the castle was built by storm or cloud giants but they abandoned it and now the place is basically a hugeass dungeon in the sky. Lure the PCs onto the cloud with promises of riches and glory and then have this worm start eating the cloud they're on.

9 comments:

  1. The statement "the care bears care" got me through some really dark times. ;)

    I like your blog... finally somebody that knows about Lords of Creation.

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  2. I'd be tempted to leave the Care Bears in. When the worm shows up the PCs are faced with letting it eat the Bears and their land or saving them... quite a dilemma ;)

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  3. Perhaps they are werecarebears?

    Every Saturday morning, the seemingly ordinary inhabitants of the cloud castle turn into annoyingly cute and useless lycanthropes.

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  4. Anonymous10:24 PM

    Or not so cute and useless. The pleasent inhabitants of the cloud city the PCs are trying to help suddenly turn into ravaging werebears (possibily color coded) just as the cloud worm attacks.

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  5. i thought you werent running a dnd campaign . . .
    which system are you using for your cloud castle capeer?

    reading your blog for several months, i am astonished you are merely 27 years old . . .

    reminds me of my favorite judas priest song ;
    "you dont have to be old to be wise ; - )"

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  6. Anonymous11:04 PM

    Make the thing like a giant, leaky dirigible made of stone, that is venting steam and vapor all over the place so that it's something of a flying cloud itself. Then also it can be immense but still be mostly empty space.

    Probably there are vents and pipes that create something like a jet effect and can be directed towards the ground like an attack (create winds dispersing armies, giant superheated blasts of steam to kill everyone in a castle -- perhaps that happens to a border castle and the adventurers come across the result).

    All that ventwork sounds a bit more like dwarf-work... seems like the start of an exploration of the plane of air...

    Thank you, Care Bears?

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  7. Anonymous7:46 AM

    Cloud castle...worm creature...wait a second, I think you've talkeda bout this before...

    http://jrients.blogspot.com/2007/08/people-dont-like-this-module.html

    I think it's pretty clear this Care Bears cartoon your daughter was watching was put together by some old school D&D players!

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  8. i thought you werent running a dnd campaign . . .
    which system are you using for your cloud castle capeer?


    I'm not running a fantasy game at the moment. I just can't stop thinking about this stuff.

    reading your blog for several months, i am astonished you are merely 27 years old . . .

    Wherever you read my age must have been a place that I first visited 8 years ago.

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  9. "Lure the PCs onto the cloud with promises of riches and glory and then have this worm start eating the cloud they're on."

    I'm on it.

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