The Junkyard of Ideas

[featherynscale]

That phrase floated up from ritual planning last night, and it stuck to my brain. I have a junkyard of ideas, some salvageable, some obsolete, some so incomplete that they could be broken down for parts and fitted to different ideas altogether. I'm spending some time exploring that junkyard today, apparently, and here's some of what I've discovered.

• The Opera game - a video game in the style of Mortal Kombat and its ilk. You play a stagehand, moving through various locations in a theater (backstage, orchestra pit, on the boards, the catwalks, the prop closet, etc.), fighting various enraged opera characters. As you progress, you unlock different characters so that you can play as them. As the stagehand, your primary weapons are a mop and bucket, a screwdriver, and a roll of gaff tape. You fight characters like Escamillo (the toreador from Carmen) with his cape and sword, Violetta (La Traviata) who fights with a fan (and who might have a special attack in which she coughs on you), Pagliacco (no special weapon, he's a clown and clowns are scary), and Fafnir (the dragon from Wagner's Ring cycle), who, depending on whether or not you defeated your previous opponent quickly, might be a dragon, or a big bald guy in the bottom half of a dragon suit (the dragon breathes fire and can knock you down with its wings; the bald guy in the suit can jump up and stomp you with mighty dragon feet). There might be secret battles, when you go in the wrong door and have to fight the director, or snobby opera patrons, or the Phantom of the Opera, and so on.
  
• The Jazz Funeral Flaunt - this is a Samhain/Halloween entertainment, which requires a ton of people, a cardboard coffin, and a jazz band. Never could find anything that we really wanted to do it about, though. Not to mention the jazz band.
  
• The Awards Ceremony Flaunt - we get a little red wagon full of trophies and medals, engraved for various odd achievements, and wander through highly populated areas trying to give them away and get people to make acceptance speeches.
  
• The Post-Apocalyptic Alien Warfare Campaign Setting That Explains Much of Religious and Cultural History- I had crazy notes for this, somewhere. The plot was something to the effect that humanity was built as an experiment by some birdlike alien species, to serve as soldiers in their ongoing war against another alien species that were something like snakes. They start the species, they get busy and are away for several thousand years. Later, the project gets cut, and they come back to wipe us out. The apocalypse occurs, and some humans survive in small, hidden clusters. Thousands of years after *that*, people emerge again on the planet to find that a) many of them have inbred in their small communities to the point that they are not much like base human stock anymore, and b) in their absence, both the bird-aliens and the snake-aliens have done some further seeding of species on this planet, so the world is full of weird things. The bird-aliens and the snake-aliens also threaten to re-appear at any time. Danger! Anyway, the really fun part of this story was how the bird/snake war manifested in human culture up to the time of the apocalypse and then again afterwards. It had angel and demon stories, the Garuda and the Naga, the Mexican flag, the Nazi eagle, Orson Scott Card and just about everything in between in it. Also, it posited that a science fiction convention, isolated and left to its own devices over many generations would eventually produce gnomes.
  

Comments

[auraseer.livejournal.com]

Also, it posited that a science fiction convention, isolated and left to its own devices over many generations would eventually produce gnomes.
That is the most awesome background detail evar. But if these are like D&D gnomes, how do you explain their heightened sense of smell? Wouldn't the con environment cause them to evolve anosmia as a survival trait? :)

The Opera Game sounds like it'd be a lot of fun to make. Let me know if you ever want to try building it. We have the technology!

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Heh. Unlike D&D gnomes, not so much with the smelling, for the very reason you mention. The thing that was most notable about them, aside from small stature, high intelligence, and a profound desire to tinker with things, was that they were extremely gifted with fine motor skills, having evolved a second 'thumb' from the 'pinky' finger, over generations of choosing mates based on speed and accuracy of video game play and text messaging.
Stupid, but unreasonably funny at the time.

Also, I'm always in for stupid projects. I have no programming whatsoever at all, though, so I'm only useful in the 'making up crap to go in the game' section of the work. (That, though, I can do for days...)

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

These are some fun ideas
Opera Game - I'd like to see a variant with a stage hand having to deal with various forms of theatre royalty ("Jonathan Limeyborn the Third who always speaks with an inflection despite having lived in America for over thirty years", "Cokey-Mcgo-go the hyperactive Lead" and "Lady McPeter O'Toole Queen of all drunken actors")

Jazz Funeral - I had similar thoughts believe or not when I first heard Morphine's Miles Davis' Funeral

AwardsThat just sound fun. I know some 'guerilla performance' types who'd love to go around handing out awards... don't throw that one away!

PAAWC - You can probably tweak this a bit and do a wonderful Fortean Post Apocalyptic story line.

Wow, if this is what you throw out then I need to work a little harder:)

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Any of that stuff you want to play with, you are welcome to have.

Re: opera game, yeah, that was in my brain, that the characters would all be theatre stereotypes, too, and that would be reflected in their look, and the backgrounds, and the way they moved. (Also, I've worked with two of your three archetypes -- funny how those get around...)

And don't sell yourself short -- I constantly generate stuff that I never do anything with. You'll notice that you rarely see any documentation of a project that I actually put any work into... I'm the king of the creative lazy people. :)

[dramaticaddict.livejournal.com]

I LOVE ALL OF THOSE!!!