Sunday, June 13, 2010

Lost?

Well, TV has now ended - Lost, Heroes, Flashforward, all consigned to the great DVD box set in the sky. Even Big Brother is about to end, although that's mercifully outside the remit of this blog.

Anyways, I, like many right thinking people, was disappointed by the resolution of Lost - i.e. there was no resolution, just a break for a spin off that will never happen and more questions.

So, I've been thinking about how I would have ended it, which tailed into how would I run a Lost game.

I'd always presumed that the World of Darkness / Storytelling System would work well, and stand by that presumption, however recently I started thinking about about using Changeling: The Lost the run a Lost type game.

Obvious puns aside, it kind of works. The player characters find themselves in a strange woodland environment, which could easily be an island, following a disaster / accident.
The Jacob / Man in Black (smoke monster) cold war works well in the context of two Fae beings engaged in an endless contest governed by strict rules, manipulating the players as pawns in their struggle.
The Man in Black (smoke monster) works especially well as a Fae, with Jacob kind of being a bit too benevolent (although he does display a fairly cavalier attitude towards the lives of the survivors, so he works ok).
The time delay and circuitous means of entering and exiting the island / hedge work within the setting, as do any bizarre electro-magnetic disturbances, walking dead people, misplaced animals and anomalous statues.

I'm less sure how to include the time travel and people like Desmond. I guess the hedge could allow for some degree of temporal dislocation, or the illusion of time travel.
I'll have to think more about it.

The major incongruity between Lost and Changeling: The Lost is that the survivors in Lost are human, and the player characters in C:TL are not human. You could use human PCs in the setting, but they'd die very quickly if you use the canon rules and antagonists. That's easily fudged though.

I think i'd like to do it, and see how it turns out. I do believe that the writers of Lost pretty much made up the lower level detail as they went along - I mean, it's kind of telling that they created the character of Hurley because they liked the actor, and Hurley became the 'new' Jacob at the end - so I think that a GM should be able to wing the individual sessions as long as they adhered to a main story arc.