On "Reign of Fire"
So I saw "Reign of Fire" last night, relating to my the post-apocalyptic D&D idea that I talked about in a recent post. It was indeed bad, as most people told me. Actually, I should have expected this given that the director went on to the even-more-awful "Elektra". Luckily it was at least able to be laughed at in a B-movie sort of way. I'm thinking about it compared to post-apocalyptic movies I liked, such as "28 Days Later" and "Land of the Dead". I think the key thing is it's total lack of humor -- combined with a simplistic plot and hackneyed characters. Spoilers below if you care (which you shouldn't)...

The basic scenario is pretty similar to how I picture my game, though. Dragons rule the skies, and the humans are forced underground -- bringing families and perhaps orphaned children with them into the lairs. One key difference is that it will be clear from the start that there is no magic bullet to make the apocalypse go away -- like (cough) there being only a single male dragon in the entire world. So in my game, the PCs will be fighting for their local area but won't save the world.

An issue that I have with RoF is the peculiar retro streak. They were very determined to be completely serious and make the dragons as realistic as possible. And, for example, in the first battle scene the fighters wore flame-proof suits to go battle dragons. However, when the heroes went in the end to go after the biggest dragon without any such clothes -- the manlier man being stripped to the waist, in fact. It's a standard genre cliche, but it came out oddly given some of the rest of the film. Natually, the girl soldier had to be suitably femmy and confess in the climax about how scared she is and be reassured. I suppose this is sort of reactionary, compared to the more liberal "Land of the Dead".

So in a way, my campaign could be cast as a reaction to the film. I might call this "Dawn of Fire", say. I did appreciate that RoF took time to portray having and protecting a bunch of children, and that they were important in the decisions of the film. One of the keys to my game will be about how it treats the NPCs who go with the PCs -- more on that in a later post.