Mortal Kombat
First, I have to admit that I may have made a mistake. Back in August when I said I’d have to tone things down with the writing, I did that during a real dark moment. Bad things were happening and I didn’t have my head on straight. This resulted in me putting away all my notebooks, but I also threw something out. Don’t worry. The title will be explained shortly.
For nearly a year, there has been a hat sitting on the floor. Inside, I had a box full of my old RPG dice and pieces of paper with character names on it. On top of the hat was a set of six papers that were empty tournament brackets. This was all to set up a series that I wanted to do that I’ve always called ‘The Ninja Never Wins’. The basic concept is that each book is about a tournament that acts as a spoof of fighting games. I came up with the title when I saw that the character Scorpion in Mortal Kombat could win the game and still lose in the ending cut scene. Honestly, these types of games love killing ninjas. Anyway, the method to this was that I would draw names from the hat to set the brackets and then use the dice to roll up winners. So, I would never know the match ups or winners beforehand, which was kind of fun. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to make this anything other than fight after fight after fight. Became a real problem during the final volume that had 30+ combatants. It’s always been a challenge and I ended up tossing the papers into the garbage during my frantic crash.
Yet, the idea remains in my head. So, I was wondering if down the road, it would be a worthwhile bi-weekly. This wouldn’t be until some time next year when I have things settled in my life. Since I’m writing this in September, it would be nice to know that my life has already settled instead of getting worse. That aside, I would make one post revealing the combatants and let people talk about what they think will happen. No voting because then people would either know the winner or I’d anger those that think I purposely went for the loser of the poll. I’d use my dice and then write out the fight scene at another point in the week. Maybe I could do the intro in the morning and the fight at night too. Just spit-balling ideas here to help keep the blog entertaining while I get things together.
If people are interested then I might make another post about this. I could even make it one tournament a year to cover the 6 stories, but this does mean there won’t be any side stuff. I mean, the alternative is that I use ‘Ninja Never Wins’ as a weekly think like I plan on doing with Ichabod Brooks. It could even be that I use ‘Ninja Never Wins’ and ‘Bedlam’ on the blog while I slowly build up another Ichabod Brooks collection to officially release, which is another option. Between writing this post and it going live, I think I’ll rebuild the brackets and name papers. That way, I can start it fairly quickly if people like the idea. Again, it would just be fights with some banter and the ‘character bios’ in the morning would be where you learn about them. Be great if I had pictures for these characters, but I can’t draw to save my life.
Just to give an overview, the tournaments I had were:
- Regular tournament with no special rules.
- Each competitor has a token or gem that you can steal to get the win.
- Death match with weapons.
- Women Only (All dead characters have been perfectly cloned with full memories. How else do you explain Mortal Kombat?)
- Two-person teams.
- Grand Battle
I’ll admit that I’m a little iffy on #2 even now, but I can’t think of another fun addition. I do remember a few fighting games that had special gems. Anyway, this is an idea and I figure I’ll share it and get a response. If anything, I might start it up mid to late spring or early summer next year if I can. Again, I’m just throwing all ideas at the ether and seeing what survives.
Legends of Windemere 