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Monday Mashup #29: Hard Boiled

One tough cop. One tough killer. Ten thousand mashups.

Hard Boiled.

Gotta be one of the best action movies of all time. Tequila is the cop who accidentally killed an undercover cop and is wracked with guilt. Tony is another undercover cop who is torn between honor and duty. They team up to take down a gunrunner. Action sequences of rare and surpassing excitement, many of them set in a hospital, ensue.

Before I get into my concoction, a free offer (sounds better than a request): if you have subjects you’d like to see mashed up, by all means email me or post ‘em here. My choices are always shaped by my preferences and prejudices, which hardly seems fair. Confound and delight me.

I’m going to use Providence for this, not because I want to use the oddball concept (fantasy superheroes inside a Dyson sphere), but because it’s a fun oddball concept which deserves more attention. I mean, come on: it’s fantasy superheroes. Inside a Dyson sphere.

It’s a campaign for a small group. Ideal would be two players; three players would be workable. The social contract for the campaign specifies lots of solo activity, perhaps with players taking up NPC roles often so as to avoid boredom. The campaign driver is the tension between players; this is not your father’s adventuring party.

The PCs might as well be low-end superheroes. Think Checkmate and Birds of Prey, not JLA or Avengers. These guys are street level. Tough, but they have to worry about thugs in groups. The plot centers around an evil cleric who’s making cursed weapons by the score. They’re subtle things; they bring great power, but slowly corrupt the user. Sort of like Stormblade, but on a smaller scale.

One of the PCs is inside the cleric’s organization; one is a rank and file guard member. Events start out along the lines of Hard Boiled, diverging as necessary.

11 Comments

  1. Gah! I still haven’t done last week’s, and now I’ve got this one, which is another one where I haven’t seen the movie.

    I’ll have to send you some suggestions.

  2. Yay! I was hoping you would.

  3. t. rev t. rev

    You’re thinking of the tagline from The Killer.

    I am unable to suggest a mashup here. I think there are three reasons for this.

    First, Feng Shui has already done this mashup eight different ways.

    Second, Hard Boiled is so bloody over the top that I can’t imagine any way to twist it further than it already is.

    Third, Feng Shui.

  4. t. rev t. rev

    Okay, I thought of one.

    Now, Hard Boiled is the Best Movie Ever, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect(*). It lacks one ingredient, one simple addition that would perfect it.

    Nazis.

    That’s right, in this mashup I pay homage to the other Coolest Movie Ever:

    Casablanca II: Noir Boiled

    Here, the (entirely mythical) wartime Casablanca of the movie takes the place of Hong Kong, and fits the role pretty well. PCs can be secret agents, two-fisted expatriates, or sympathetic gendarmes. Bad guys are, of course, Nazis. You have the plain old thugs, delivering beatings that the PCs don’t dare fight back against (at first); you have Gestapo inspectors whose attention the PCs must avoid; but most of all, you have the semi-rogue Nazi smuggling ring, shipping looted mystical treasures from Darkest Africa to the Fatherland, hiding out in the lost tunnels beneath an ancient fortress…that now houses an orphanage.

    Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. KA-CHINK!

    (*) It also lacks Jackie Chan and/or a monkey, of course, but that would take us far afield.

  5. My first attempt. Hong Kong Action? Or Ars Magica Quaestors versus Infernal magi?

    Doug.

  6. Ars Magica! That rules.

  7. You know, I’d kind of like to see the world exhibited in Douglas Adam’s Bureaucracy game (published by infocom, and on some of those “masterpieces of interactive fiction” CDs) mashed up.

    I’m not sure how you’d do it, though, since the whole point of the game is to drive the player mad.

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