So last time we talked about the upcoming Warhammer 40K show, and I gave some opinions on what I think would make a good series. It did get me wondering, however, if there are other wargaming properties that could make for good TV. And I think there are a few between miniatures, RPGs and card games.
Buckle up, folks, this might be a bit of a long one.
So let's start off with a franchise near and dear to my heart.
But Battletech offers up some great storytelling options as well. Between the wide open setting, major events and characters you have a lot of options. As I mentioned talking about the 40K show, I really would prefer a show not just be a straight rehash of a story we can already get somewhere else. And a setting like Battletech does let you expand beyond the things we've already been told. I know people would probably love to see the Grey Death Legion, but they've got their time in the spotlight already.
Battletech also offers two interesting options. You can go live action, in which case I think the focus of the show would be the human element and the politics. Or, you can go animated and still have that while also being able to more easily toss in some bitchin' giant robot slug fests. You could do mech battles in live action, but they'd be pretty costly and probably way more infrequent if that were the case.
Battletech also has all sorts of time periods to cover. You can do stuff in the Succession Wars, you can do the tried and true Clan Invasion, or go earlier and give us a show about the Amaris Coup! I would love to say "go later" and demand a show set during the best Battletech era, the FedCom Civil War, but then you have to explain who the hell the clans are in a way that doesn't feel clunky and I think that would be harder to pull off.
Legend of the Five Rings is one of my all time favorite RPG settings, although I've heard less than favorable things about the latest edition so I'm just going to ignore that for the sake of this discussion. It's 100% weeabo fantasy bullshit, and I can't get enough of it.
This is another one of those settings open enough to offer lots of stories to be told without everything having to be world changing, but also sort of small enough to not feel too overwhelming. Between the court intrigue, political nonsense and cool samurai duels with magic tossed into the mix you can get a pretty varied amount of ideas and eclectic cast of characters without too much effort.
Of course, being inspired by Japanese culture one needs to be careful to not be stupidly offensive. This is absolutely a show where you want Japanese actors, and probably someone on staff to make sure you don't do something dumb and piss off an entire nation or get too deep into wank territory.
Still, I think L5R could be a great setting for a show, and also be fairly cost effective. You don't need a huge effects budget for something like this, although costuming would probably not be cheap.
In all honesty, I don't remember a whole of of Skytear's lore. Not that it was bad, or uninteresting, but I really dove into it before hitting a wall and going into a gaming slump for a while and it just got pushed out in favor of Heavy Gear since I was working on stuff for that at the time.
What I do remember was pretty good. Plenty of characters and story opportunities, and a setting that feels like it's always growing. And with the release of the card game Skytear Horde it seems like that lore was expanded on even more which opens up more doors.
This is absolutely a game that would benefit from the same treatment League of Legends got (considering Skytear is pretty much a tabletop MOBA) with Arcane. Focus on a couple of the characters and their stories, setting them up to become who we see in the game. Give us the story of how Akimo comes to possess the sword that is slowly turning him into a demon. Or maybe something about some of the characters from the Nupten faction with their dope ass mix of classical Greek and Persian styles.
A bright and colorful setting would make for a very visually appealing product, and some well written stories with interesting characters could go a long way.
Carnevale is, first off, a really solid game with a great premise: what if a giant magical hole opened in the sky and drowned most of the world leaving 18th century Venice as one of the last major bastions of mankind? Oh, and also said magical hole unleashed Lovecraftian abominations upon the world.
How is that not a great set up for a TV show? And with the game's focus on movement you can get all sorts of parkour shit in there for some cool scenes of guys running across rooftops in Venice while fighting monsters. Just writing that out gives me all sorts of cool mental pictures.
And Carnevale isn't super character driven, I mean there are some, which means way more creative liberty. And with the variety of factions vying for control of Venice you have a good cast of characters to work with, from lowly street thugs in the Guild to some crazed noble in the Patricians and or a plague doctor who makes animal monsters (yes, that's a faction in the game) all the way to actual god damn knights being sent from the Vatican to eradicate giant fish monsters.
Budget wise you would need to be careful because the costumes, sets and SFX could get out of control. I mean, as cool as it would be to see a scene involving a Morgraur that shit wouldn't be cheap.
Infinity is basically an anime already, why not just go all in and make an anime of it?
Yeah, I suppose you could go live action but I feel like costuming and SFX alone would make it a budgeting nightmare. Animating it might not be the cheapest option, but the moment a TAG or Morats have to be on screen you'll be damn glad you went animated.
Like the other IPs I've talked about, Infinity is open enough to give you some wiggle room. You can do a straight action series, you can go all philosophical or even campy and it'll all fit the tone of Infinity. And while many of the characters in the game are either clones of famous people or references to Reign of Fire of all fucking things, a series following the adventures of Mirage Team 5 would be pretty spectacular. I mean, it's a human woman and a giant werewolf being a special operations team. What about that isn't awesome?
The only issue I could really see with doing an Infinity series is that because it draws so much inspiration from so many anime series (Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell being the two big ones), it might feel slightly derivative. It would require a really solid story and writing to get people to see beyond the homages littered throughout the setting. It can be done, but it would be tricky.
Sticking to sci-fi skirmish games, I think MERCS would offer up a great chance to do some gritty sci-fi fun.
The setting is near future enough that it's not as outlandish as Infinity, while also offering a closer look at mankind and the issues that can arise when corporations are left unchecked. Do a show about a FCC cell working to take down one of the megacons, or focus on a MERCS team from one of the megacons fighting against another megacon. Hell, give us a show about someone in the GCC, the court system of the setting, working to uncover the corruption that was exposed by Sefadu.
The setting offers up not only action set pieces with cool armor designs and gunfights, but also political intrigue and suspense. And considering there's an entire boardgame in the setting about storming an office building you have a great season or series finale baked right in with a team of MERCS duking it out in an office building and giving us fond memories of the lobby scene from the Matrix.
And by being near future the budget doesn't need to be obscene to make it happen. Some CGI would be needed for air transports and the likes, and I imagine if a USCR Behemoth made an appearance that would be CGI because them bastards are big, but a lot of the armor and weapons can be done entirely practically.
Mainly I just want to see a GCC Tribunal smash shit with his giant hammer on my TV screen.
I may not talk about them much, but I do really quite enjoy a good card game. Problem is, most good card games are, in my experience, ruined by hyper competitive assholes who start stupid arms races until you can't even play a casual game without dropping a grand on a single deck.
That being said, one game I really like but never get to play anymore is Flesh and Blood. Mechanically solid, and the setting and art are pretty god damn great.
Flesh and Blood, much like Skytear, would benefit from an Arcane style show. Since the characters mostly just have small blurbs on the cards or short fiction pieces on the game's website there's some room to work with them without things feeling like a "oh god, we know already!" Set the show in the techno-fantasy city of Metrix, make my main girl Dash the lead character, weave in some other characters coming from other locales and bam, you go yourself a solid little series that can mix the magical with the technological in a fun way.
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| If you don't love Dash, you're a monster. |
It would offer up high octane action, while still being able to do character drama. And having a ninja show up in this high tech city and fight someone in an exo-suit with a katana would be eight kinds of awesome and you know it.
There is perhaps a chance of people calling it an Arcane knock-off, which is a risk you run, but it's just right there waiting to be written. Get a good crew behind it and you could have a hit.
We're going to close out this hypothetical ramble by discussing Malifaux, if you don't mind.
Malifaux has an amazing setting, with plenty of depth and interesting stuff to see. It could work as either animated or live action, but I think live action might actually work better despite being more expensive because the SFX budget would need to be pretty high. You can a great blend of wild west with supernatural elements like redneck goblins, giant ice golems and literal demons.
The thing to avoid with Malifaux is focusing too much on already established characters. Their stories have been playing out, and you don't want to either just retread those or get in the way of those. Thankfully, Malifaux is open enough to lend itself to new stories and characters with big names from the game making cameos.
Plus, this blend of old west and horror fantasy hasn't ever, to my knowledge, really been done on TV before. It would be fresh in an of itself, and while the western may not be a popular film genre these days (god knows why, some of them are a blast) the extra fantastical stuff would really help to make it stand out. Plus the style is still well loved, with people in dusters blasting away with colt revolvers, only now there's also Oni and and steam robots hunting people down.
It would be one of the trickier to do well and right, seeing how the game is very character driven, but I think a Malifaux show would be quite the spectacle.
And those are the various tabletop properties I think would make good silver screen series. I'm sure there are others. D&D has enough different settings to give you a billion options (and a Spelljammer show would be amazing), you could maybe swap Malifaux for Deadlands, some Magic: The Gathering settings (OG Ravnica, Lorwyn, Theros, Innistrad) could be fun if the writers can resist the urge to masturbate about planeswalkers for five bloody minutes. Will any of these happen? Probably not. Even if the 40K show does really well, few other game studios can probably negotiate the type of deal that GW can, or have so ardent a supporter as 40K does in Henry Cavil to get it the clout it needs.
Sorry for the long one, but I figured doing three posts about tabletop TV shows would feel a little cheeky. Hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you around.
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