Books You'd Love To See Adapted Into CRPG's

[Kev Inkline]

Imagine taking the gurps ruleset as a basis and making a postapocalyptic rpg with it. Could be quite a game!

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

DUNE

 

[rohand]

First Law

 

[DraQ]

Imagine taking the gurps ruleset as a basis and making a postapocalyptic rpg with it.

And then switching the ruleset for a half-assed substitute when actually starting development.

 

[eggdogg]

 

[majestik12]

Yes please, and more Barker games in general.

 

[laclongquan]

Monster Hunter International is well suited for an Xcom like game.

IT's a fucking turnbased, squadbased, inventory management, recruit management, WW2-modern weapon-porn, this time the laptop guy is the combat accountant (or the hottie sniper) in USA.

The drops will be severely limited because who would pick up loot in America? You get what you can buy or bring from the company arsenal. On the other hand you can buy from lots of gun catalogs.

 

[deuxhero]

You could even have recruit management be an issue even for save scummers by making the game take place over multiple decades, if not a century+, so your star hunters will grow old and stop being amazing (before dying outright from old age). One of the big themes in the series is the importance of learning from your predecessors. This can easily be accomplished with some pretty basic mechanical systems like recruits slowly learning the skills and monster knowledge of mentors during downtime.

 

[Matticus]

Imagine taking the gurps ruleset as a basis and making a postapocalyptic rpg with it.

And then switching the ruleset for a half-assed substitute when actually starting development.

That's not how it actually went down. Tim Cain liked GURPS and the decision to switch was entirely on Steve Jackson Games disapproving of the violence and vault boy graphics . They were legally forced to switch from GURPS to SPECIAL in a single week near the end of development in '97.

 

[Cael]

Imagine taking the gurps ruleset as a basis and making a postapocalyptic rpg with it.

And then switching the ruleset for a half-assed substitute when actually starting development.

That's not how it actually went down. Tim Cain liked GURPS and the decision to switch was entirely on Steve Jackson Games disapproving of the violence and vault boy graphics . They were legally forced to switch from GURPS to SPECIAL in a single week near the end of development in '97.

The SPECIAL system isn't that bad a thing, to be fair. It is certainly better in terms of generic utility than the DnD stat system, which had little effect unless that stat happened to be the one you need for your class. The problem with the Fallout system that makes it difficult to be ported over to a TT type experience is that it has too many dice rolls. Just resolving ONE shot is going to be a headache in a TT game. Still, not a bad effort for 1 week's work.

 

[Shaewaroz]

I'd love to see someone try to make a game based on Robert Holdstock's Ryhope Wood novels, but I think it'd work better as a mystery/puzzle game rather than a CRPG.

 

[Maelflux]

In addition to many of the books mentioned:

Ender's Game
Necroscope
Well of Souls

 

[octavius]

Robert Holdstock's

I "hate" that guy.
He wrote The Dark Wheel, a short story that accompanied the original Elite "The Game of a Lifetime". I wasted so much time trying to find the fabled planet Raxxla...

 

[Talby]

The Turner Diaries.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Lankhmar (or Nehwon if you want the entire world, but I think the city itself is sufficient enough), Hyperborea and Zothique are all nice settings for RPGs. Obviously there are a lot more but pretty much everything that I would like to see get an RPG adaption has already been mentioned here, just chose to emphasize on these three.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove.

 

[MicoSelva]

The main story of Red Rising trilogy would not make a great RPG in itself, but the setting would be a great background for this type of game.

For the uninitiated: it is like a cross between Firefly (humanity colonized the solar system) and Dune (everything is ruled by noble houses) with humanity genetically engineered into color-coded castes (reds are slaves, browns are scientists, golds are rulers, etc.), which would make natural races/classes for an RPG.

 

[Alex]

Imagine taking the gurps ruleset as a basis and making a postapocalyptic rpg with it.

And then switching the ruleset for a half-assed substitute when actually starting development.

That's not how it actually went down. Tim Cain liked GURPS and the decision to switch was entirely on Steve Jackson Games disapproving of the violence and vault boy graphics . They were legally forced to switch from GURPS to SPECIAL in a single week near the end of development in '97.

That is not what Steve Jackson says.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Also Discworld.

 

[lophiaspis]

The Bylina of Ilya Muromets is absolutely perfect material for a videogame. In fact, more so than a film. I honestly think the Bogatyr concept can only be done justice with a AAA third person Witcher 3-style open world action RPG. When you read these myths it's as if the bards of the 11th century were anticipating the game designers of the 21st century.

Ilya Muromets was famously a cripple in arms and legs and laid on the oven his whole life, before being miraculously cured at the age of 33. I think it's better for the game if rather than being a cripple from birth, Ilya is born healthy, but gets mysteriously cursed with quadriplegy as a young boy. This lets you set up the family relationships more easily, and lets you impart more of a sense of loss from being crippled. So: the game should start in Ilya's village near Murom. It's a sweet summer day, you are young Ilya, and you are playing with wooden swords down by the river. (This could come seamlessly after an introduction sequence that shows the mythic history of Rus, with giants walking the Earth, Vagyars sailing down the river, etc.) Your mother calls you from the hut: "Ilya!" Ilya's mother, Evfrosinya Yakovlevna, represents Mother Russia. She is a blonde woman of great beauty and tenderness for her child but is also secretly harried by the struggles and worries of life, although she puts up a strong front for her family. You carry out some short quests for your mother, and then the season will move to winter to show the passage of time. (The introduction sequence should be short and to the point.) In the winter youth sequence, Ilya is sent out by his father or mother into the dark and scary winter night to fetch something. The shadows and trees are very creepy. But as he is walking in the snow outside his hut, Ilya is struck by a curse, leaving him paralyzed in arms and legs. At this point you can call for your father or mother, who will come out and pick you up and put you on the stove to heat you up. As the crippled boy Ilya lies on the stove, his mother sings him a lullaby which flows into and becomes the game's main orchestral theme as the camera pans up and out of their peasant hut and focuses on the vast Rus landscape. The season changes from winter to spring, signalling the passage of years, and the camera pans back down into the hut. Ilya is now 33 years old, and still a cripple laying on the stove. All this time he has been a burden on his family.

While Ilya's family is gone to work, there is a knock on the door. It's the three travelling psalm-singers. They ask for water. The player should again feel the humiliation of being a useless cripple: You can only say, "sorry, I'm a cripple" in different ways. But then the psalm singers tell you to walk, and you can miraculously walk. After the muzhiks come home, the psalm singers do their performance, and you can see the muzhik's devout faces as they listen to the psalm singers: this is the greatest entertainment in the poor peasant's life. If you want, you can now go down to where your family is working and do their work in record time with your new strength. But the psalm singers also told you that you have to go to the Holy Mountains to find Svyatogor the Giant. So you say your goodbyes to your family and head out.

You head up into the Holy Mountains to find Svyatogor, and this area sees you trekking across snowy peaks, thick with white clouds, like in a fairytale. After some trekking you see Svyatogor's hut, although the giant is nowhere to be seen, so you sneak into the hut. Sneaking through and exploring Svyatogor's hut with all its oversized furniture, you hear the thundering footsteps of the giant coming home. I think Svyatogor should be much bigger than how he is usually presented. He should be huge, 15-20 meters tall, and he lives in a shack that is appropriately oversized, made from huge trees. Then you can react to this situation in a freeform way. You can choose to hide in a basket and watch through a crack as the giant enters, or you can choose to bravely confront the giant head on. In the end, it makes no difference what you do in this segment, as Svyatogor merely picks you up, places you on his table, brushes off your pathetic attacks if any, and starts questioning you.

This leads into the first proper gameplay section, where you go adventuring with your new friend, Svyatogor the Giant. But after a while, the adventures end in tragedy as Svyatogor falls into a coffin and Ilya cannot help him, all his attacks merely denting the metal of the coffin. Knowing that this is his doom, with his dying breath Svyatogor gives his giant strength to Ilya. It's a sad moment, losing your friend and companion, but it's also the moment where Ilya gains his heroic powers.

Your horse has also gained giant strength, giving it the power to make enormous flying leaps. With your horse you can leap off the Holy Mountains and straight into the greater Rus open world. When you fly on your horse it should look fairly realistic, sort of like the view from an airplane. Maybe, to make it more exciting, you could drop the ensuing Murom part from the folktale and go straight back to your village, where your whole tribe and family has been captured by the Tatars, Fallout 2 style, and you have to follow the tracks. Or maybe it's better to keep it more similar to the folktale, I'm not sure. In any case, you should be sent in the direction of the Great City of Kyiv, and on your way to Kyiv, you should encounter the city of Chernigov, which is under siege by a Tatar army. (In Bogatyr, instead of a Quest Arrow, you should have the Light of God shining down from the heavens upon your next main objective.)

Chernigov is the first major battle of the game, which showcases the massive battle simulation system. Ilya Muromets single-handedly breaks the siege of Chernigov by destroying the whole Tatar army. In most games, at this point you would still be fighting three bandits and a dog, but in Bogatyr you fight an army of thousands. All those thousands of enemy soldiers should be fully simulated in the world. One of the main draws of this game would precisely be the absurd numbers of enemies you vanquish. (And later on you should be the hero of your army in the middle of a fully simulated battle between thousands of soldiers on both sides.) Instead of this trend towards fewer and fewer enemies with more polygons, why not have thousands of enemies with fewer polygons? Read these excerpts and tell me this wasn't made for a game:

When he drew near to Chernigof, there stood a great host of Tatars,-three Tzareviches, each with forty thousand men. The cloud of steam from the horses was so great, that the fair red sun was not seen by day, nor the bright moon by night. The gray hare could not course, nor the clear falcon fly, about that host, so vast was it. When Ilya saw that, he dismounted, and falling down before good Cloudfall's right foot, he entreated him: "Help me, my shaggy bay!" So Cloudfall soared like a falcon clear, and Ilya plucked up a damp, ringbarked oak from the damp earth, from amid the stones and roots, and bound it to his left stirrup, grasped another in his right hand, and began to brandish it. "Every man may take a vow," quoth he, "but not every man can fulfil it." Where he waved the damp oak, a street appeared; where he drew it back, a lane. Great as was the number that he slew, yet twice that number did his good steed trample under foot: not one was spared to continue their race.
...As the clear falcon swoopeth down upon the geese and swans, and small gray migratory ducks, so swooped the Holy Russian hero upon that Tatar horde, and began to trample the host under his horse's hoofs, and to lay them low, as a mower cutteth down the grass.

...Then he heard a voice from heaven say, "Lift up thy hands, Ilya." So he lifted them, and smote off Tzar Kalin's turbulent head, and going forth from the pavilion, he began to destroy the Tatars; and none opposed him. But he perceived that the task was not small, and so seized a Tatar by the heels, and began to beat the Tatars with a Tatar. "This Tatar is stout," quoth Ilya, "he breaketh not; he is tough, and teareth not."

The way all this would be handled is obviously with a strong physics engine. The game should allow you to uproot any tree or pick up any boulder and use them as weapons, smashing dozens of Tatars in one swing or boulder toss. You should also be able to grab enemies and use them to beat other enemies, or just fling them around like ragdolls. All this is straight from the bylina! And if you use normal weapons, like a mace, the enemies should go flying as if you're Sauron in the beginning of the LOTR movie. If you use a sword you should slash through the enemy army like a meat mincer, with heads and body parts flying everywhere. Ilya Muromets is a killing machine unlike any previous video game protagonist. He can make steak tartare out of a thousands strong army in a matter of minutes. When is the last time a game let you personally massacre a whole army? And this would just be the beginning of Bogatyr.

In terms of mechanics and setting design, the designers would have to purge anything resembling Dungeons & Dragons. It should be based entirely on myth and fairytales. I don't think this game should have any explicit stats or skills or levels at all. In that regard it should be more like GTA or Red Dead Redemption. But it should still have C&C, along with more immersive and natural forms of character progression. Itemization should also be very light. Instead of getting a new sword with +2 to damage every few minutes, you should occasionally get stuff like "twelve saddlecloths, twelve felts, and upon them a metal-bound Cherkessian saddle. The silken girths were twelve in number - not for youthful vanity but for heroic strength; the stirrups were of damascened steel from beyond the seas, the buckles of bronze which rusteth not, weareth not, the silk from Samarcand, which chafeth not, teareth not." - and the game effects of all this should stay under the hood. Everything should work together to create an ethereal, mythical feeling rather than that of a bean-counting mechanical RPG.

In the art design, too, they would have to throw the whole trashy fantasy heritage overboard and go back to artists like Bilibin and Vasnetsov for inspiration. The starting point in terms of games should be the sublime sense of immersion from Witcher 3 and its expansions. Anywhere you turn in this game it should look like a Vasnetsov painting. And we have seen dynamic day/night effects, but how about dynamic seasons? If the beautiful Rus landscape shifts from summer to fall to winter and back to spring as you play, this would give you a mythical sense of the passing of years, it being implied that centuries pass in "real" history while Ilya Muromets is adventuring and fighting for Holy Russia.

You destroy the Tatars besieging Chernigov, and are hailed as a hero by the city. And it's here that you get your next quest: You must get to the city of Great Kyiv and offer your services to Prince Vladimir. But there are some obstacles in your way: The great swamp, and the monster Solovey. In the story Ilya would fling trees into the swamp and leapfrog across: this is obviously a simple physics puzzle. Then you have to deal with the game's first great monster boss: Solovey the robber. The closer you get to Solovey, the more ominous the surroundings become, increasingly littered with uprooted trees and rusted equipment and bones of failed adventurers and armies. Solovey should not be this funny little man hiding in a tree that he is sometimes depicted as, but a true monster, a giant quasi humanoid bird with an appearance taken more from the eeriness of fairytales than some cliché fantasy creature. Solovey should taunt Ilya from his nest on top of seven oaks, and then start his infamous whistling. When Solovey whistles it should be like a nuclear bomb. The shock wave tosses around trees and boulders using the physics engine, and even Ilya with his giant strength has to steel himself and shout at his horse and whip it hard to keep it from running away. (Your trusty whip works as well on humans as on horses.) You can defeat Solovey by whispering to your arrow: "Strike true!" and shooting it in his eye. (Whispering such oaths to your arrows might give you a homing arrow or a slow-motion aiming scene.) If you kill Solovey, then you might have broken your optional quest which was to refrain from spilling blood until you reached Kyiv. But that should not mean a game over, it just means the tale becomes different. The game should not strictly follow the plot beats of the story, since they are not originally set in stone anyway. In such folktales there is a lot of wiggle room with the details while remaining true to the spirit of the tale - again, perfect for a nonlinear game. And as you play and make choices, the Bylina, aka your Quest Log, should record them in a folktale format, including choices that are not strictly related to quest C&C. For instance if you chose to destroy the tatars with your mace, the bylina should record that. If you killed them by throwing boulders, it should record that. And so on. In the end you would get a personalized mythic chronicle of your choices throughout the adventure.

After reaching Kyiv and entering the service of Prince Vladimir, Dobrynya Nikitich should become a kind of mentor/questgiver/companion for Ilya. They will ride on adventures together, and on the trips you will have conversations that acquaint you with their personalities. Whereas Ilya Muromets is the warrior with a childlike heart of gold, who is easily moved by the sufferings of the common people and can explode in titanic rage when his people are threatened, the older bogatyr Dobrynya Nikitich is a picture of cold-blooded and iron-willed dedication to duty. He teaches Ilya about his unique philosophy, which combines belief in the complete rigidness of fate, with a belief in the duty to struggle with all your strength even if your preordained fate should be to not succeed.

Kyiv is the main quest hub for the game, and from here you go on many epic adventures, defeating unforgettable villains like Tugarin or Idolishche. You could also travel to the dark and ominous evil forest to meet Baba Yaga. It would obviously be silly to make Baba Yaga some kind of boss you have to defeat. Instead she should be a quest giver that represents the old gods and wild spirits that are yet untamed in this land. I think the only studios with the resources to realize this concept are CDPR and 4A Games, and 4A games might be preferable because of their cultural background as well as their technical background. If in STALKER you had Alife simulations of bandit gangs and mutants, in Bogatyr you would have Alife simulations of roving Tatar armies and monsters.

Key story NPCs would be better handled in the GTA style where you can't see or attack them in the open world mode, rather than a true open world where you can kill anyone. However, there is no need to stop the player from going berserk and killing civilian NPCs, since GTA style rampages are fully supported by the lore. Ilya Muromets would regularly demolish buildings and massacre citizens when angry, like if the Prince didn't pay him proper respect. If you start killing civilians, then they should simply run for cover and scream 'Ilya Muromets is angry!' As for the sanctity of human life - well, this is Russia after all.

In one quest you could randomly find a little girl like Alyonushka in the wilderness. She is all alone and her family has been taken by the Tatars. There is nothing you can do other than bring her on your flying horse to Kyiv where she will serve Christ in a convent, the hegumen of which you have befriended while in Kyiv. Some things even Bogatyrs are powerless to change.

There should also be a sidequest where some mythological being invites you to a game of chess. To beat this quest you have to beat him in a real game of chess, with a pretty strong chess AI. You could see players inviting their friends who are better at chess to beat this quest.

At the end of the game, the dragonlike Tsar Kalin of the Tatars has built up his enormous host to destroy Kyiv, and you have to ride out with all the other Russian Heroes to fight the host. But I think there could be a subversive twist ending where there is no good ending. Just as he is about to lead the Russian Heroes into the final battle, Ilya Muromets is struck down by the curse like when he was a child. You blackout, time passes, and as it happened in history, the Mongols burn Kyiv to the ground, smashing Rus to pieces with the help of dragons like Zmey Gorynych, splitting Rus into the three nations of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. You wake up, and the game ends as you walk amid the charred ruins and the corpses of everyone you came to befriend in your adventures. Remember, as Dobrynya said, your fate may be to not succeed. And then maybe Ilya Muromets rides north to meet with Alexander Nevsky and defend what remains of Rus from the Germans in the sequel? Does that sound too depressing? Well, perhaps, to get the extremely rare good ending where Kyiv is not destroyed, there can be a sidequest where you have to find and destroy Koshchei's immortal soul. Because let's say that Koshchei is the one that originally cursed Ilya, and to get the good ending you must travel to the magic island of Buyan and locate his soul inside the egg inside the box, etc. Anyway, this is just me brainstorming the details of the plot, and I think you can see that the broad strokes of the game are clear already.

Isn't it almost a patriotic duty for 4A Games to make such a Bogatyr game? I think they have both the technical and artistic skills. It could be their breakthrough hit like Witcher 3 was for CDPR, and if done right, it would certainly be a milestone in gaming and art history, ensuring their glory would live forever. Doesn't 'Skyrim/Witcher meets GTA' sound like a pitch that would make every publisher wet their pants? Instead 4A keep slaving on the same old depressing linear sci-fi shooter, year after year with mediocre sales. Sad! Reach for the stars, tovarishch!

 

[vazha]

lophiaspis May I inquire whom did you vote for in the last Russian elections (if indeed they can be called that)?

 

[RNGsus]

Ilya Muromets is angry!

 

[octavius]

Defender of the Crown?

I believe that's a Robin Hood game still. By Ivanhoe I meant a game about Ivanhoe, with book characters and all.

You can play both Wilfred of Ivanhoe and Cedric of Rotherwood, and probably some of the Norman lords in the book as well.
Robin Hood is just an advisor or ally in the game IIRC.

But you are right in that the game does not revolve about the character of Ivanhoe.

 

[Ysaye]

If you were making games based on themes on poems, Samuel Coldridge Taylor's Christobel and the "What the Thunder Said" section from TS Eliot's The Wasteland always had some interest and themes that you could work with both literally and metaphorically into an RPG. The later of these could really play off the fusion of apocalyptic combined with the Indian themes. Obviously the Ancient Mariner of Rime has already had a game made on the themes of that poem.

The Terry Brooks Shannara Chronicles always appealed to me as something that you could make a good computer game about, and it would get away a little from the typical Tolkein style fantasy tropes. Ursula La Guin has already been mentioned, but the Tombs of Atuan would make a good setting for a single character dungeon crawler, and I think they could weave in the very tribal viking themes that La Guin as a point of difference from generic fantasy RPG material.

 

[Mikeal]

I have new idea, adventure game based on works of Edward Allan Poe.