D&D Gnome

Some ideas are tough to translate into Windemere, but an odd idea clicks to suddenly fit them in.  At least if I feel like stepping away from the world-shaking adventures and do something a little more contained.  That’s where Lords of Hyperscape shows up and I’m still not really sure where to go with it.

The original idea was stemmed from me getting into .hack//sign and thinking about a video game system where the player is mentally put into the machine.  Not too farfetched, so I went with it being a futuristic competition where there are teams.  The focus was on a new team of misfits that were out to prove that they could take the top spot and make the game fun again.  There were a series of adventures and odd romances in there.  One of the main characters was a homeless teen who was a natural and lived in an abandoned arcade that another character helps him fix up.  Each team had their own announcer too, which was fun.

Now the game was set up with a hub world where real-world based games were played like sports, city building, and other non-violent stuff.  Then there were other worlds like military, RPG, science fiction, platform/jumping, fighting, and maybe a few others.  I don’t remember where my notes are on this.  I based each world off a popular game genre and the contests happened in one world.  Each player has a different avatar for each world, so I got to have multiple personalities for each character.  It was going to be a lot of fun, but then I moved it to Windemere and got stumped.

That is until I shifted away from humans running the show.  I was looking over other races and realized that the gnomes could pull this off.  They work with technology and are master illusionists, so they can create a special arena to replicate vast worlds.  Each player will have an item that covers them in an illusion that they can manipulate to imitate various powers and abilities.  It’s rather simplistic, but I can see this as a fun book or short series . . . that is if I can figure out an actual plot.

Before I had plans for rogue AI referees, people trapped in the game, corporate espionage, and other things that went with being mentally put into a technological game.  That doesn’t work as well with illusions, which operate entirely differently.  They can trick the mind, but you can escape be dispelling them.  I could make it that someone messes with the fail safes in one book, but there won’t be a rogue AI.  So I’ll be focusing more on the games, which might mean this is one book and more focused on characters than the events.  After all, I can’t have as big a variety of worlds since Windemere doesn’t have the same scope of imagination as Earth.

This really doesn’t explain much as far as characters and stories, so one could say this is a really vague idea.  Still well in its infancy.