Population: One: Monday Mashup #7: Shogun
If I was going to boil Shogun down to a sentence of summation, I?d say it was about a man plunged into a culture he considers barbaric, and how he learns to understand it.
Since I’ve never seen it or read it, I’ll have to take Bryant at his word.
Okay, let’s keep this one quick and dirty.
System: Supers (dealer’s choice)
Setting: Earth
PCs: Metahumans, largely of Extraterrestrial origin.
Through cataclysmic engine failure, a dimensional-warp mixup, or wormhole accident, the PCs (natives of a pleasant, perfect, civilized world that they have little to no hope of ever returning to) are dumped on Earth which, to put it nicely, it a festering pile of immoral politicians and citizens who richly deserve them.
This Busiek-style game would focus to a large extent on the group’s initial attempts to “lead by example” as they try to get the world to pull itself up to their high standards, then a more hands-on approach as they (perhaps) try to create a Utopia somewhere on (or above) Earth that hearkens back to their homeworld, and perhaps finally the gradual realization of the Good Things that are there to be found in the world if one looks hard enough.
The final evolution of this would be their own society finally ‘rescuing’ them and, in the process, deciding to bring Earth into the ever-growing “Enlightened Galactic Republic” that the PCs might now realize would stifle the beauty of individual societies, no matter how backward. The PCs would then be put in a position of trying to stop their own ‘home world’ from steamrolling Earth (and, were the campaign to continue, to keep them from doing the same to other worlds).
I’d probably call it something like “God is in the Details”.
An interesting idea — though not really Shogunlike.
Actually, though, you could do a Shogun-alike story with Supers (low-powered, perhaps) and modern society (lots of spycrafty stuff) and have it come out pretty close to the original. Hell, you could probably just file off the serial numbers and make it work.
Hmmmm. Not that I’d do it, of course. Too much work. But … hmmmmm …
Yeah. Since I’d never read it or seen it, I just stuck with ‘guy from supposedly superior culture learns to appreciate backwards, foreign place.’
Actually, the only “superior” part that the gaijin had was (a) being able to sail there in the first place, (b) guns, and (c) thinking differently. Most of the rest of the book/series has to do with recognizing that “different” doesn’t necessarily mean “superior” (though it can mean “strategically advantageous”). All of which would be easily translate into a visitor-from-a-distant-planet type of supers campaign.
Yeah, were I to do something of this nature, I’d definitely want to read up on the book itself.
Took me a couple weeks even to come up with this much of a mash-up idea, though, since I’m so unfamiliar with the work.