… is it just me or does the movie The Chron­i­cles of Rid­dick have a very sim­i­lar flavour to what this game is aim­ing for? I mean, for a while I had trou­ble work­ing out the flavour, largely because I’m not very well read in this genre and what I’ve read of Conan never really impressed me much, but I rewatched this film recently and it sud­denly struck me: we have a super­nat­ural vil­lain (the Lord Mar­shall), struck down by a pro­tag­o­nist who suc­ceeds due only to the fact that he’s a badass whose pri­or­i­ties lie with look­ing out for him­self and the one or two peo­ple he actu­ally gives a shit about. I sup­pose it helps that the main char­ac­ter is heav­ily inspired by one of Vin Diesel’s D&D char­ac­ters (appar­ently they played a cam­paign while film­ing and Judy Dench was, so the story goes, an excel­lent DM).

But yeah, we have a badass pro­tag­o­nist who looks out for him­self and the cou­ple of peo­ple he actu­ally gives a damn about, a super­nat­ural antag­o­nist whose pow­ers come from some mys­te­ri­ous other uni­verse, and a story where if you replaced the space ships with wooden gal­leys and the guns with swords, you’d be for­given for think­ing it were a Conan movie. Seems Sword and Sor­cery enough to me…

Excel­lent post, hec­tor­grey; many thanks! I have for some time now thought about post­ing about the Rid­dick char­ac­ter and how he and his sto­ries strike me, too, as per­fect Sword & Sor­cery mate­r­ial, even though being scifi. The flavour is indeed spot on.

The main sell­ing point for me is the pro­tag­o­nist. Con­sider: He’s larger-​than-​life, able to go head-​to-​head with the worst badasses of his sto­ries (like the Lord Mar­shall). Morally, he is very close to being a vil­lain him­self and we know that he has done very ques­tion­able, if not out­right evil things, but he has a code he won’t go against, and that’s what turns this almost-​villain into a per­son­age we can iden­tify and sym­pa­thize with. Like most S&S pro­tag­o­nists, he, too, is an out­sider in all his sto­ries, with no firm ties to their respec­tive com­mu­ni­ties, into which he drifts like a roam­ing gun­slinger into a law­less cattle-​town (that’s espe­cially appar­ent in “Chron­i­cles”).

I’d love talk­ing some more about how Rid­dick and his movies fit the S&S mould per­fectly, but I’ll give it a rest now to hear what other peo­ple are think­ing, which would really inter­est me.

Agreed, excel­lent topic!

It got me think­ing about a movie called:



A space­craft crash lands in a large lake in Nor­way, circa 709 AD. From the wreck­age emerges Kainan, a sol­dier, who was trans­port­ing (unknow­ingly aboard the ship) an alien mon­ster, a Moor­wen. After Kainan buries his cap­tain he recov­ers a portable com­puter from the wreck­age and uses it to find that he is on Earth (clas­si­fied by his peo­ple as an “Aban­doned Seed Colony”) and there are no other inter­stel­lar ves­sels detected nearby. Deter­mined to track down the alien, Kainan has the local lan­guage and knowl­edge painfully down­loaded directly into his mind. He also sets a dis­tress bea­con to sig­nal a res­cue ship.

He then removes his dam­aged armour and heads out into the wild to stalk the Moor­wen.

To my mind this is also a very “Blade-​like” film fea­tur­ing a des­per­ately dri­ven pro­tag­o­nist. It also treats the alien mon­ster in a sim­i­lar Blade-​like fash­ion — as a lone antag­o­nist that dom­i­nates the tale.

Great topic!

Phil

I would have to say that Out­lander qual­i­fies to my mind as only fit­ting the Sword & Sor­cery bill in part, nice, enter­tain­ing, rous­ing popcorn-​fantasy-​action-​cinema that it is.

We cer­tainly have the swords in the guise of the action and we have the sor­cery in the guise of the mon­ster, which is also as supremely men­ac­ing and cen­tral to the plot in the way which the super­nat­ural should fig­ure in S&S sto­ries, and the hero is both an out­sider with no ties to the com­mu­nity where the story takes place and of a prowess that eas­ily puts him on par with the most out­stand­ing other char­ac­ters of the tale. All those ele­ments are nicely in place.

What in my opin­ion doesn’t fit is the out­look of the pro­tag­o­nist, Kainan. It is sim­ply too altru­is­tic. It starts out as purely self­ish: Get back home. But this fades almost imme­di­ately to be replaced by: Kill the mon­ster. Now some might argue that this is a self­ish vengeance motive, as Kainan does indeed have rea­sons to exact revenge on the mon­ster – but they would be wrong. If he wants to kill the mon­ster to take revenge, he just needs to hide and wait a few days for his bud­dies from the stars to arrive to pick him up, and then he and they can exter­mi­nate the mon­ster with­out any risk to him­self; easy-​peasy. No, he wants to kill the mon­ster right now because he wants to pro­tect the local com­mu­nity from it, which is a purely altru­is­tic rea­son.

Kainan is a bona fide phil­an­thropist if you com­pare him to how Rid­dick refuses to lift a fin­ger to pro­tect an entire planet from exter­mi­na­tion by the Necros because he has no per­sonal stake in this con­flict. The self­ish­ness, which is a promi­nent trait of S&S pro­tag­o­nists, is almost absent in Kainan, but Rid­dick has it in spades. The S&S pro­tag­o­nist risks his hide when it prof­its him, not oth­ers, unless those oth­ers are very close asso­ciates of his. How Rid­dick, in “Chron­i­cles”, tells his fel­low prison break­ers that they may come with him, but that he is not going to make any allowance for their pres­ence, that’s S&S. How (after a very telling moment of hes­i­ta­tion!) he does risk his hide to save the one per­son he feels respon­si­ble for from being burned to a cin­der dur­ing that prison break, that’s also S&S.

hec­tor­grey wrote:
I hadn’t heard about that, but if the story is true, it fig­ures. Any­body as well schooled in clas­si­cal plot struc­ture as Dench should have an excel­lent instinct for drama, plot arc, and story.

Michael wrote:
LOL, you bring up ele­ments in the movie I haven’t recalled in years! Yes, from the moment he decided to “help” he shifted the focus of the film towards a more con­ven­tional story, so I’ll mod­ify this exam­ple to one of pri­mar­ily giv­ing a nod to the S&S pre­sen­ta­tion of the Mor­wen mon­ster.

Good Stuff!

Hmm…thinking out loud…its tougher than I thought for me to come up with movie char­ac­ters as hard as Rid­dick. Per­haps the Snake Plissken char­ac­ter in Escape from New York, or Blondie from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Quite pos­si­bly The Man With No Name from the tril­ogy as a whole, though I haven’t watched A Fist­ful of Dol­lars in a long time. Of course, the West­ern as a genre is full of that kind of pro­tag­o­nist — often just a lone man with the will and the tool to get things done. On occa­sion he’ll have a soft spot for the under­dog, but don’t mis­take him for a nice person.

hec­tor­grey wrote:
That’s an excel­lent def­i­n­i­tion of not just a cer­tain type of West­ern pro­tag­o­nist, but of pretty much any Sword & Sor­cery pro­tag­o­nist at all. Very per­cep­tive, and sim­ply excel­lent!

Great thread, and I will tell you why;
I am down to only one player at the moment, I could try to find more, but, if we start a Blade game, why bother.
So my player is a very intel­li­gent IT, com­puter GURU, but I don’t think has ever read a Fic­tion book in his life (30 odd).
So I have a chal­lenge when gam­ing for him to rec­og­nize hooks and other tra­di­tional gam­ing events. Read­ing the rules would full under fic­tion also… although he will if we get a game going.
He invested in Blade so has his own copy, signed no less. I am try­ing to get him to find his email with the codes for some soft back books so we can use that at the table, but he may have lost the email. I know I had some but my com­puter crashed.
So any way, (its quiet tonight at home so I am ram­bling).
He can watch movies, to help get him in the right frame of mind. So I just men­tioned CoR in this thread, to him on the phone, but are there any oth­ers, besides the Conan titles?
Thanks
Allan

Allan wrote:
To stay true to the title of the thread I am going to start out with a movie I embar­rass­ingly saw a few months ago: The Man with the Iron Fists

You really have to turn off your brain — all of it — watch­ing this movie, but if you do, you actu­ally can enjoy it (I know I guiltily did so). While it is set in an not only fanat­sized but palinly absurd ver­sion of late 19^th cen­tury China, it is choc-​a-​bloc with char­ac­ters who just scream Sword & Sor­cery, espe­cially Rus­sell Crowe’s char­ac­ter. The lusty, gusty, and gutsy stranger com­ing to town with an unknown agenda would be equally at home in S & S. RZA’s char­ac­ter is prob­a­bly the type of S & S pro­tag­o­nist who is fur­thes along the pos­i­tive moral axis, whereas David Bautista’s char­ac­ter rep­re­sents the pro­tag­o­nist who has gone too far, whom one can­not iden­tify with any more. If he had just one or two redeeem­ing fea­tures, like maybe true love for the whore, he would still be a “playable” PC.

Another movie which has always struck me as rather S & S in nature is Django Unchained. Dr. King Schultz and Django him­self are hardly nice men, but they are on a mis­sion, and they, to quote hec­tor­grey, have the will and the tool to get things done. What they do or at least accpet to attain this goal (e.g. almost encour­ag­ing to have some­body torn to pieces by dogs) or to just make a liv­ing (e.g. shoot­ing a man before his son’s eyes) are the type of morally quite deplorable things that also pro­tag­o­nists of S & S fre­quently do, but, just like those pro­tag­o­nists, they have a good (free­ing a loved one) to at least accept­able (the men killed were killers them­selves) rea­son to per­pre­trate the evil they per­pe­trate, and they have a line they won’t cross. Leonardo DiCaprio’s char­ac­ter has none such redeemable fea­tures — and that’s what makes heroes of Dr. Schultz and Django and a vil­lain of his character.