RPG Crosstalk

Episode

This episode will drop at 4am on 12/23/11, PT.

64 minutes in: Le Gasp! Devons holds back his awesome battle cry? This is madness ;).

When you guys were talking about making inanimate objects the villian, my first thought was Lord Of The Rings. In the book/movie, the main villian wasn't Sauron himself, it was the ring. Everyone wanted to commit great acts of evil with it and if that ring was not present, you would  have a much different story.

What I'm getting at is many stories have used inanimate objects as a villian, but they were mainly tools of power that corrupted people. The item itself had no power, but the characters twisted themselves into doing horrable acts to obtain it.

Good point, Alex. Although, I'm not sure I've seen a lot of stories where the villain was an object. Besides LoTR, what stories can you remember that do that?

Christine by Stephen King is a book/movie about a car with a mind of it's own. Wargames is about a computer with it's own artifical inteligence, wreaking havoc. Lastly, Child's Play where a killer's spirit possesses the body of a doll and tries to take over a child to become human again. Those are what immediately come to mind when thinking about the literal meaning behind inanimate villians.

The abstract thought I was talking was something like Comic Book Villians where greed overwhelms a group of people into stealing and killing for a comic book collection worth millions (you might want to watch that movie, I like it quite a bit).

Ot the concept of a single building housing the potential for great evil. Think the movie Saw or Thirteen Ghosts. Without those rooms, the potential for evil is gone and horible things wouldn't have happened to those characters. There are other titles I could bring up, but that should be enough for you to catch my drift. Plus, I starting to run out of movies where inanimate objects were the cause of villianry.

I remember an awesome video game from the late late 90's where you played a haunted house that was trying to get rid of it's intruders. Don't remember what it was called, though. But the inanimate object was definitely the enemy there.

Listening to this episode, I was reminded of a D&D campaign that my brother ran. I was playing a conjurer that found an intelligent and very powerful staff. The only problem was that it was a psychopathic murderer that wouldn't let him get rid of it. To makes things even worse, I was playing a power-hungry wizard and wouldn't have gotten rid of it even if I could.

I ended up working with my brother to manipulate the party into killing random people by making them think they were evil and such.

Good fun.