D[isney] & Dragons

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

Moderator: Moderators

User avatar
Prak
Serious Badass
Posts: 17340
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

D[isney] & Dragons

Post by Prak »

So, if one were to create a campaign setting based on Disney-verse Canon* (which I've occasionally been tempted to do, though I'd really be tempted to add in some Dreamworks and Pixar stuff too), what would the races and classes look like?

*For reference, the official Disney-verse canon is: (a lot...)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Pinocchio (1940)
Fantasia* (1940)
Dumbo (1941)
Bambi (1942)
Saludos Amigos* (1943)
The Three Caballeros* (1945; Often called a sequel to Saludos Amigos, making it the first sequel counted in the canon, which contains four or five sequels altogether depending on whether or not you count Fun and Fancy Free)
Make Mine Music* (1946)
Fun and Fancy Free* (1947; could be seen as a sequel to Pinocchio)
Melody Time* (1948; the film as a whole probably doesn't count as a sequel, but there is one segment that could be seen as a sequel to The Three Caballeros)
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad* (1949)
Cinderella (1950)
Alice in Wonderland (1951)
Peter Pan (1953)
Lady and the Tramp (1955)
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
101 Dalmatians (1961)
The Sword in the Stone (1963; last to be released while Walt was alive)
The Jungle Book (1967; final animated film produced while Walt was alive)
The Aristocats (1970; final film Walt personally greenlit)
Robin Hood (1973)
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh* (1977; Partially made while Walt was alive)
The Rescuers (1977)
The Fox and the Hound (1981)
The Black Cauldron (1985)
The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
Oliver & Company (1988)
The Little Mermaid (1989; The first film of the Disney Renaissance.)
The Rescuers Down Under (1990; The canon's most straightforward example of a sequel and one of only four or five total)
Beauty and the Beast (1991; The only movie of the canon to be nominated for Best Picture so far)
Aladdin (1992)
The Lion King (1994; The highest grossing of the canon.)
Pocahontas (1995)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
Hercules (1997)
Mulan (1998)
Tarzan (1999, The last film of the Disney Renaissance.)
Fantasia 2000* (1999; One of only four or five sequels counted in the Canon)
Dinosaur (2000; First fully CGI movie done without Pixar)
The Emperor's New Groove (2000)
Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
Lilo & Stitch (2002)
Treasure Planet (2002)
Brother Bear (2003)
Home on the Range (2004; Planned as the last 2D animation, reversed in 2009)
Chicken Little (2005)
Meet The Robinsons (2007)
Bolt (2008)
The Princess and the Frog (2009; First 2D film after 2004)
Tangled (2010)

*several short films in one wrapper
That's... an absurd amount of conceptual space for an RPG. You've got dwarves and potion brewing witches with familiars (easy enough), pre-extinction dinosaurs raised by lemurs (weird, and not necessarily interacting with the rest of canon), wish granting fairies (still easy enough, they're just palette swapped solars...)

but also...

Stuffed animals which may or may not come to life (Winnie the Pooh), aliens (Lilo & Stitch), robots, dinosaurs that can talk to and be understood by humans (Meet the Robinsons), flying humpback whales (Fantasia 2000), more aliens (Treasure Planet), Noah in the form of an anthropomorphic duck (Fantasia 2000), and yet more aliens (Chicken Little).

Also, soon, all manner of video game characters (Wreck it Ralph).

Just looking it over, for races you'd have:
Humans
Dwarves
Animals
Anthros
Mermaids
Demi-gods
Satyrs
Demons (Pain, Panic, Chernobog)
Gargoyle (maybe...)
Aliens.

That.... actually isn't that bad, now that I look at it. The oddest things, from a D&D stand point, are the talking animals, anthro animals and aliens, and even those are merely unusual.
Last edited by Prak on Sun Aug 26, 2012 9:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
User avatar
OgreBattle
King
Posts: 6820
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2011 9:33 am

Post by OgreBattle »

RIFTS


that aside, isn't Kingdom Hearts an example of how you can smash together all the disney worlds?
Last edited by OgreBattle on Sun Aug 26, 2012 10:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Prak
Serious Badass
Posts: 17340
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Prak »

I was thinking that you'd want a more coherent system, but yes, Rifts could probably replicate most of Disney canon (I did think about it's mutant animal system for replicating Simba and Mickey with the same race).

And I suppose, but ideally you wouldn't have that jumbled mess (they're fun, yes, but the setting is a complete fucking mess). You'd probably have at least five different periods: Prehuman (Dinosaur/Lion King), Ancient (Hercules, Mulan, Aladdin), Pre-Modern (Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, Pocahontas), Modern (Princess and the Frog, Bolt) and Futuristic (Treasure Planet, Meet the Robinsons).

Then you'd occasionally have games where the IM (Imagineer) said "Ok, the setting is X, but I'll allow one or two character types from Y" (Lilo and Stitch).
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
User avatar
Ted the Flayer
Knight-Baron
Posts: 846
Joined: Tue Jan 31, 2012 3:24 pm

Post by Ted the Flayer »

I'd say that the two Fantasia movies could represent some sort of outer plane. Not is a "great wheel" sort of sense, but maybe the realm from which dreams and creativity come from. It could be the power source to various characters in the real world.
Prak Anima wrote:Um, Frank, I believe you're missing the fact that the game is glorified spank material/foreplay.
Frank Trollman wrote:I don't think that is any excuse for a game to have bad mechanics.
Krusk
Knight-Baron
Posts: 601
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2010 3:56 pm

Post by Krusk »

I'd say you want to work out some sort of timeline to break things out. Then you can divide it up based on the sort of game you want to run, while allowing for the other stuff to exist. I assume meet the robinsons and the sword and the stone are going to be hard to run the same game.

Something like for broad ranges.

Feudal Ages - Cinderella, Hercules Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, Emperors New Groove

Modern World - Tarzan, Aristocats, Atlantis, Lilo and Stitch

Future - Treasure Planet

Then work out how things flowed from one to the next. I personally would order the movies from one to the next literally or possibly indicate if things overlap but that may be more than is needed.

Not super familiar with Disney so i could be off on some of those times.
Username17
Serious Badass
Posts: 29894
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Username17 »

Alice and Peter take place in the Victorian era. The talking animals are really very different in Bambi and the Aristocats from like Robin Hood or the Sorcerer's Apprentice. In the first, you have what are basically regular animals who can secretly talk and have limited tool use. In the latter, you have human sized people who wear clothes and happen to have animal heads. The Rescuers are in between, where they are normal looking animals with secret language and advanced tool use.

The animal people probably have a continent to themselves. Duckburg, Calisota is almost entirely populated with beastmen, and Robin Hood's Sherwood is entirely full of beastmen.

-Username17
Lago PARANOIA
Invincible Overlord
Posts: 10555
Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

If I was doing a Disney RPG, I wouldn't sort the worlds by species or even genre. Disney loves anachronisms and animal/anthromorph/human/alien interaction, so I don't see much of a problem.

Rather, I would arrange things by power level instead. For example:

Hopeless: Winnie the Pooh, Cinderella, Oliver and Company, Toy Story, Rescue Rangers, Brand Spank-My-Ass-New Doug, Rescuers Down Under
Normal: Sleeping Beauty, Princess and the Frog, Gummi Bears, Bonkers, Emperor's New Groove, Ducktales
Superhero: Gargoyles, Robin Hood, Merlin@Sword in the Stone, Hercules, Aladdin the series, Darkwing Duck, Lilo and Stitch

There are of course a few heroes and series that fit uncomfortably between the categories. I'd actually argue that Rescue Rangers is between Hopeless and Normal tier and movie-version Aladdin is between Normal and Superhero. But that's the general idea.

Strange as it sounds, Darkwing Duck and Gargoyles makes a better match than Darkwing Duck and Ducktales even though at least three characters from Ducktales were directly transplanted to Darkwing.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Sun Aug 26, 2012 4:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
User avatar
Chamomile
Prince
Posts: 4632
Joined: Tue May 03, 2011 10:45 am

Post by Chamomile »

Image

No, really. You're going to have to excise the Final Fantasy portions (unless you want those in, too, I guess), but other than that Kingdom Hearts is a readymade universe that contains the entire Disney canon.
Lago PARANOIA
Invincible Overlord
Posts: 10555
Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

I have an inexplicable and shameful love for Kingdom Hearts, but as far as using that as setting, there's three issues with regards to using it to highlight Disney characters.

[*] The metaplot doesn't really intersect with the Disney characters except for the Mickey (especially)/Donald/Goofy trio. There are some minor exceptions like with Beast, but. This wouldn't be a big deal except for the fact that the KH-verse also enforces strict world segregation.
[*] Kingdom Hearts has no regard for interseries balance. Simba is considered an equally viable party member as much as Hercules. Unless you're willing to highly abstract and float the combat system and/or completely ditch fighting as a method of problem solving -- and hey, I don't blame you if you did -- you can't use it as a backdrop.
[*] If you use the KH-verse, people are going to want to be Keyblade masters or Organization XIII people. No way around it. That's not necessarily bad, but I'd reckon that few people would want to play even badasses like Gizmoduck and Goliath when you could play Aqua or Xigbar.


It's not impossible, but, it's seriously like using the Tales-verse to do Dwarf Fortress or setting your gritty street-level crime drama in Metropolis. If you jiggle the setting parameters and excise enough of the metaplot and key features you could technically meet the requirements... but... why?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Lago PARANOIA
Invincible Overlord
Posts: 10555
Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Regardless of how you do your Disneyverse, you HAVE to do something about the power levels. Gadget Hackwrench can help Goliath and Scrooge McDuck solve a murder mystery and vice-versa. Gadget can also fight Ratigan alongside Basil and Piglet. Gadget CAN'T credibly help Kim Possible beat up Maleficent or even Gaston.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
User avatar
Chamomile
Prince
Posts: 4632
Joined: Tue May 03, 2011 10:45 am

Post by Chamomile »

Kingdom Hearts requires mostly two adjustments made to its setting to be workable. First, rip out all Final Fantasy stuff. This basically means that places like Traverse Town look very different, and Hollow Bastion is just Maleficient's sinister fortress now. The majority of the worlds are completely unaffected, and the main difference to the general plot is that Mickey takes Sora's role and Maleficent takes Ansem's (evil Ansem from the first game, because all that name-changing nonsense in the second makes it impossible to keep track of). So that's not even hard.

Second, the people allowed to ditch the prime directive needs to be expanded a bit...Or not, and you can just place the burden of figuring out how the PCs get on the right side of the Masquerade on the GM. There is a readymade explanation for how a bunch of disparate PCs end up in the same place, though. The Heartless ate your home worlds, you survived and showed up in Traverse Town, however that works.

The Heartless themselves can also be refluffed as being Maleficent's sinister creations, which she has only partial control over. They look similar enough to her imp-things that I could easily believe that those were the first Heartless anyway.
FatR
Duke
Posts: 1221
Joined: Tue Dec 16, 2008 7:36 am

Post by FatR »

Chamomile wrote: No, really. You're going to have to excise the Final Fantasy portions (unless you want those in, too, I guess), but other than that Kingdom Hearts is a readymade universe that contains the entire Disney canon.
I love KH, but a good Disney crossover universe it isn't. Not only, as was said above, the worlds are strictly separate with ability to travel between them being a big deal, the verse more or less hinges on a massively complicated (good luck comprehending what the fuck is going on without a series of flowcharts, unless you're willing to play through at least 5 games on 3 different platforms and pay attention in the process) plot, approximately 95% of which is run by original characters,
Last edited by FatR on Sun Aug 26, 2012 10:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Prak
Serious Badass
Posts: 17340
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Prak »

Yeah. KH isn't so much a "Disney Animated Canon RPG" as "an RPG that floats through the Disney worlds and allows the DM to turn his favourite characters into dick extensions." It's like playing Star Wars and every session seeing someone from the movies so you know they're off doing important stuff while you're bullseyeing womp rats.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
User avatar
Chamomile
Prince
Posts: 4632
Joined: Tue May 03, 2011 10:45 am

Post by Chamomile »

You'll probably want to prevent too much bleed through between things, just because once Maleficent turns up in the 101 Dalmations corner of reality, changes will be radical enough as to render plots, settings, and very soon, characters, as unrecognizable. With the sheer volume of different universes kicking around, finding out how they would interact with one another to the point where a stable equilibrium is created would be an absurdly daunting effort. Having a barrier between realities which only main characters are allowed to cross, and only recently at that, is a feature, not a bug.

The plot of KH can be ignored almost completely. Ansem, Sora, all of Organization XIII, those guys from the prequel I haven't played yet, etc. etc. don't exist. We excise them with the rest of Square's characters. The important things to take away from Kingdom Hearts is:

1) Maleficent is a super villain leading a coalition of Disney villains for WORLD DOMINATION using an army of minions made of dark magic and negative emotion she only partially controls.

2) There is a border between Disney worlds that prevents the settings from being altered to the point of being unrecognizable. The border is traversible, but the governing body has forbidden traversing it. Now that Maleficent has opened up all the pathways and is going around conquering/destroying worlds on top of it, travel is easy enough to permit main characters to go back and forth between worlds having crazy adventures, but still too difficult to prevent all settings being unrecognizably altered by the time the game begins.

3) Mickey and associates are charged with defending the cosmos. Lately they are not very good at this.

4) Stuff about gummi ships specifically being used to travel between worlds is optional, but unless you have some other idea as to how to get between the world of Snow White and Kim Possible, I don't see any reason not to.

5) Places like Hollow Bastion and Traverse Town have their backstory gutted as a result of the de-Squareification of the universe. Hollow Bastion wasn't once the home of Final Fantasy characters and a dude who ran metaphysical experiments that resulted in the creation of the Heartless and probably a bunch of other stuff from the games I haven't played. If it exists at all, it's just Maleficent's house.

EDIT: Also, you wouldn't want to call this "the Kingdom Hearts RPG." People might seriously not notice it's Kingdom Hearts after you finish removing all the main characters and unique settings and take 2/3s of the plot with them. The important thing here is the KH, especially the very first game, is a pretty decent example of how to make this work.
Last edited by Chamomile on Sun Aug 26, 2012 11:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Lago PARANOIA
Invincible Overlord
Posts: 10555
Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Chamomile wrote:Kingdom Hearts requires mostly two adjustments made to its setting to be workable.
Okay, but that's not the same thing as making it a good setting for a massively multiplayer Disney crossover.

You have not advanced an inch towards describing how adventures and settings should be arranged. And your goal of 'Kill all of the Heartless', aside from being against the metaphysics of the original setting (it's a completely pointless adventure and overly grimdark for a lot of the stories), also does not fit in with a lot or even a minority of original settings.

There's a reason why KH chose for its Disney crossovers to mostly remake the original stories except with a self-insertion character. What the fuck do Peter Pan, Jack Sparrow, and Aladdin do when they're not fighting Heartless? How does their team-up do anything to advance Aladdin's goal of keeping Agrabah safe or find his dad?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
User avatar
Prak
Serious Badass
Posts: 17340
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Prak »

Cham, do you know why Maleficent doesn't show up in the 101 Dalmatians corner? Because Maleficent is an ancient or pre-modern villain, and 101 Dalmatians is modern. If any magic user were to roll into London to help Cruella De Vil with dark powers, it'd be someone like Dr. Facilier, the voodoo bokor from Princess and the Frog, whose power is drastically lower than what Maleficent can do. Like a lot of settings that deal with ancient and modern periods, magic runs rampant prior to the Industrial Revolution, but after it, people using magic are discrete individuals who picked it up from pacts or studying ancient tomes, and you can seriously go through an entire story without anyone throwing a fireball or becoming a dragon. At best, Cruella can get Dr. Facilier to use his shadow minions to steal the puppies. It's still awesomely powerful compared to her normal goons, but it's, well, not turning into a god damned dragon.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
hyzmarca
Prince
Posts: 3909
Joined: Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:07 pm

Post by hyzmarca »

Maleficent is also immortal and makes appearances in House of Mouse, which is most definitely modern. But the bigger problem is the total lack of anthropormophic animals in 101 Dalmations and so many other movies that are intended to take place in the modern real world. You can't just handwave that. 101 Dalmations most certainly takes place in a universe where anthros do not exist and Robin Hood one where they do.
User avatar
Chamomile
Prince
Posts: 4632
Joined: Tue May 03, 2011 10:45 am

Post by Chamomile »

Prak_Anima wrote:Because Maleficent is an ancient or pre-modern villain, and 101 Dalmatians is modern.
So for exactly the same reason as in my version: Because there is an impassable barrier between the two of them. Except that in mine, the barrier is permeable enough that some people can still pass through, whereas yours prevents any interaction between any pre-industrial setting and any post-industrial setting from ever happening, thus cordoning off about half the Disney canon from each other. A Robin Hood/Treasure Planet crossover can't happen, even though that sounds like a perfectly reasonable adventure, just because? Why is that preferable to a setting where that can happen?

Lago, an adventure for the setting is completely trivial to work out. Kingdom Hearts could easily do original plots if they wanted, it's just easier to insert Sora and some Heartless into an existing plot and have the two cancel each other out.

How about: Scar gets an army on loan from Maleficent to help take over the Pridelands. As part of this plot, they need Beast's rose to use as a magical MacGuffin to help large armies cross worlds, so they head there and steal that, and probably abduct Belle in the process. In order to get there in the first place, they need a ship with a longer range than Maleficent's magic, so they head to Lilo and Stitch's world to steal Stitch's ship and magic it up into being usable for cosmological travel, drawing the attention of Cobra Bubbles, who calls in his contacts Fa Mulan and Robin Hood, who he had previously worked with during a team-up between the one big grey alien guy, Shan Yu, and Prince John to capture Stitch in exchange for a cache of laser weapons to help take over China/burn down Sherwood and find that ruddy fox. Hercules, who has encountered Scar before due to a team-up between him and Hades not long ago, tracks him down to the Pridelands to go do his hero thing. Cobra Bubbles pressures Aurora into contacting Kuzco, who has gained alchemical powers when the three fairies mucked about with Yzma's potions during an earlier team-up between Yzma and Maleficent, and Kuzco is eventually persuaded to join the team as well.

Result:

Image
Last edited by Chamomile on Mon Aug 27, 2012 2:08 am, edited 2 times in total.
User avatar
Aryxbez
Duke
Posts: 1036
Joined: Fri Oct 15, 2010 9:41 pm

Post by Aryxbez »

On the racial list, couldn't Satyr's fall under Anthros (maybe the mermaid as well), and Gargoyles under Demons? Since alone, the Satyr at least, doesn't sound all that compelling of a race.

Oh, and I didn't know RIFTS was playable, mostly just it makes for a good read.
Last edited by Aryxbez on Mon Aug 27, 2012 3:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
What I find wrong w/ 4th edition: "I want to stab dragons the size of a small keep with skin like supple adamantine and command over time and space to death with my longsword in head to head combat, but I want to be totally within realistic capabilities of a real human being!" --Caedrus mocking 4rries

"the thing about being Mister Cavern [DM], you don't blame players for how they play. That's like blaming the weather. Weather just is. You adapt to it. -Ancient History
User avatar
Prak
Serious Badass
Posts: 17340
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Prak »

Chamomile wrote:
Prak_Anima wrote:Because Maleficent is an ancient or pre-modern villain, and 101 Dalmatians is modern.
So for exactly the same reason as in my version: Because there is an impassable barrier between the two of them. Except that in mine, the barrier is permeable enough that some people can still pass through, whereas yours prevents any interaction between any pre-industrial setting and any post-industrial setting from ever happening, thus cordoning off about half the Disney canon from each other. A Robin Hood/Treasure Planet crossover can't happen, even though that sounds like a perfectly reasonable adventure, just because? Why is that preferable to a setting where that can happen?
First, as someone noted, Maleficent is immortal, so if you really, really want Maleficent in your modern era DAC game, you can handwave it by saying "powerful magic/sealed evil in a can/a wizard did it."

However, a Robin Hood/Treasure Planet game sounds stupid. What the fuck is a fox archer going to do against Space Pirates?
Lago, an adventure for the setting is completely trivial to work out. Kingdom Hearts could easily do original plots if they wanted, it's just easier to insert Sora and some Heartless into an existing plot and have the two cancel each other out.

How about: Scar gets an army on loan from Maleficent to help take over the Pridelands. As part of this plot, they need Beast's rose to use as a magical MacGuffin to help large armies cross worlds, so they head there and steal that, and probably abduct Belle in the process. In order to get there in the first place, they need a ship with a longer range than Maleficent's magic, so they head to Lilo and Stitch's world to steal Stitch's ship and magic it up into being usable for cosmological travel, drawing the attention of Cobra Bubbles, who calls in his contacts Fa Mulan and Robin Hood, who he had previously worked with during a team-up between the one big grey alien guy, Shan Yu, and Prince John to capture Stitch in exchange for a cache of laser weapons to help take over China/burn down Sherwood and find that ruddy fox. Hercules, who has encountered Scar before due to a team-up between him and Hades not long ago, tracks him down to the Pridelands to go do his hero thing. Cobra Bubbles pressures Aurora into contacting Kuzco, who has gained alchemical powers when the three fairies mucked about with Yzma's potions during an earlier team-up between Yzma and Maleficent, and Kuzco is eventually persuaded to join the team as well.

Result:

Image
Doable. It's honestly much better to just seed the disney stuff around a quasi-real earth map in various time periods, with perhaps a "World Inn" type House of Mouse for all your "Maleficent and Hades team up and put Gantu in charge of hyenas on loan from Scar magiced up to be hero level threats" plots, because as cool as KH is as a video game, as a TTBPG, it'd be a mess. (also, why the fuck is Kuzco Iron Man?
Aryxbez wrote:On the racial list, couldn't Satyr's fall under Anthros (maybe the mermaid as well), and Gargoyles under Demons? Since alone, the Satyr at least, doesn't sound all that compelling of a race.
I'm hesitant to put gargoyles as demons, though they could both be put under a larger umbrella of, I don't know, "Mythics" that is basically the ancient/pre-modern equivalent of "Aliens" and both are designed to be a "pick features from each column" set up with some pregens. Mythics would of course also include satyrs, merfolk, nymphs, etc, and could possibly allow nemian lions and shit. Talking animals should probably just be a subset of Anthro Animals, or vice versa, and talking animals and anthro animals tend to be geographically segregated.
Last edited by Prak on Mon Aug 27, 2012 6:29 am, edited 2 times in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
User avatar
Chamomile
Prince
Posts: 4632
Joined: Tue May 03, 2011 10:45 am

Post by Chamomile »

Prak_Anima wrote:However, a Robin Hood/Treasure Planet game sounds stupid. What the fuck is a fox archer going to do against Space Pirates?
lolwut? He's going to shoot them in the face with his bow. They aren't exactly wearing super space armor and their laser weapons aren't all that awesome because they spend more time grokking 17th century aesthetics than actually being effective. There are a ton of Disney movies from different eras that are at the same power level because Disney loves its anachronisms and their villains don't typically have access to the cutting edge of military technology anyway. Cruella de Ville might be a solid two hundred years in the future of the Beast, but the latter could still tear the former and all her minions to pieces and it wouldn't even be hard.

The fundamental point of using the basic KH cosmology is that it not only makes all worlds generally reachable to one another, but it prevents regular schmoes from reaching worlds just by walking there, which is kind of important to stop Maleficent from irreversibly screwing up every setting within reach with her very nearly unmatched sorcerous power and army of weird goblin minions.

Neither the evil queen from Snow White nor the Seven Dwarves are anywhere near a match for someone who can conjure thorns and fire on a whim. The frying pans from Tangled are going to prove less effective than normal against a dragon. The armies of Prince John/King Richard might not even be a fair match for the horde of minions on their own, and they certainly have no answer for Maleficent's magic. Merlin from the Sword in the Stone is going to be way too busy being the only person on the planet who can possibly hope to match Maleficent's sorcerous power to be teaching an ungrateful brat about science. The titular MacGuffin from the Black Cauldron effectively reproduces one of Maleficent's demonstrated magical powers. Whether or not Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or the Little Mermaid survive is dependent solely upon whether or not they count as within Maleficent's timeframe. Hercules and Mulan should be okay, though. The former has gods and heroes watching their back, while the latter is a country where an army isn't anything to write home about unless it has literally millions of soldiers.

You run into similar problems with Treasure Planet vs. Lilo and Stitch (if those two spacefaring civilizations are interacting with one another, how come there's no apparent exchange of ideas or technology?) and probably some others I haven't thought of.

Putting a barrier that is impassable on a large scale between as many different canons as possible (or else making the event that drags all the worlds together a very recent one) is the only way to stop certain settings from destroying others.
User avatar
Prak
Serious Badass
Posts: 17340
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Prak »

Except that all the KH model does is prevent the heroes from being where they're needed because Maleficent can basically pass the boundaries at a whim, like she did, and apparently the highest power in the land is literally essentially a halfling wizard10 who has a weapon he can use without penalty an always active divine favour/power effect and can't beat her on his own, so he has to call in a chosen hero. KH makes it so that you explicitly can only have maleficent wrecking up the place.
Last edited by Prak on Tue Aug 28, 2012 1:17 am, edited 2 times in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Username17
Serious Badass
Posts: 29894
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Username17 »

Maleficent really isn't all that. She can teleport, shoot fire, put a whole castle to sleep, and turn into a dragon. But so what? Ursula can do pretty much any of that, and her monster form is so badass that they had to crash an actual galleon into her to make her go down. Further, Maleficent is herself canonically slain by Prince Phillip wielding a magic sword and shield. I'm sure those are very nice magic items and all, but we're seriously talking a Level 10 BBEG here.

The important thing is that you want people to go to Duckburg and also to be able to run around in what is essentially normal London where the animals have a language that they can talk in. As I see it, your big question is whether the anthros are from another world where you travel through portals to get there, or whether the Anthros are merely from a different area of the world. I think it's important to note that in classic Disney pieces there are normal humans in Duckburg and also that Mickey Mouse sometimes runs around in cities with familiar names that are ostensibly full of humans. So either way, you have to acknowledge that travel between the areas where anthros are from and areas where normal humans are from is fairly commonplace and in no way secret.

Overall power level doesn't seem to be much of a concern. The biggest boss I can even think of is Ursula, and she's what? CR 15?

-Username17
User avatar
Chamomile
Prince
Posts: 4632
Joined: Tue May 03, 2011 10:45 am

Post by Chamomile »

Yes, Frank, the power level of the Disney canon is way lower than that of D&D. What's your point? Maleficent might be peanuts next to a balor, but there are no balors in Disney canon. She is still capable of rendering multiple settings, characters, and plotlines obsolete on her own. Setting an RPG in Disney means your power level doesn't really go above level 10, and you have multiple films whose BBEG is like a level 3 Rogue.

Urusula gets killed by one totally normal dude who rams a ship into her, and this after she received her mega-power up. Prior to that, she's shown to be able to scry and enforce magical contracts. Maleficent gets killed by some guy with really sweet magic items and probably a few levels in Fighter or Ranger or maybe Paladin, since he's got that mount. It's been mentioned before that Aladdin is a really good fit for a Rogue of I think level 7, and Jafar's CR goes up to something around 11, tops.

Also, why is it a problem that Maleficent can personally pass boundaries on a whim when the heroes can do the exact same thing?
Last edited by Chamomile on Tue Aug 28, 2012 2:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Prak
Serious Badass
Posts: 17340
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Prak »

Chamomile wrote:Yes, Frank, the power level of the Disney canon is way lower than that of D&D. What's your point? Maleficent might be peanuts next to a balor, but there are no balors in Disney canon.
Um...
Image
Also, why is it a problem that Maleficent can personally pass boundaries on a whim when the heroes can do the exact same thing?
Um, because they can't. Maleficent is a powerful sorceress who can basically plane shift. Hercules can't plane shift unless you say it's possible to punch a hole between the planes. Simba can't plane shift... at all. You might be able to say that Mama Odie can, and Merlin probably can, given that he can time travel. But generally speaking, the heroes cannot plane shift, only find portals that exceedingly rare.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Post Reply