In the spirit of Neel Krishnaswami’s recent post on sports games, today’s mashup is Hoosiers. It could be any sports movie, but I happen to like basketball a lot. I guess if you’re a football fan or something it’s OK to break away from the pack and do Any Given Sunday; the Mashup Ninjas will not pay you a visit. This once only.
Hoosiers is a nice simple story. Washed up coach comes to small town with a basketball team and teaches them how to win a championship. (Mostly discipline.) He alienates people with his fancy coaching ways but it turns out that in Indiana, winning is more important than anything else. He also finds love and redeems the town drunk.
I’m gonna keep the framework, the time period, and the sport intact. The system is Unknown Armies. I’ll move the setting to Boston, because I like Boston a lot and there was a period when this town was just as fanatical about basketball as Indiana. The high school is in Roxbury, and the tournament is some sort of concocted Boston vs. New York thing. Of course, everyone knows New York City basketball players can beat the crap out of Boston basketball players.
The PCs are the team — probably the starters. The conflict stays focused on the basketball, although the coach is a dipsomancer and there’s maybe a cabal behind the scenes trying to push the team to win for some magickal purpose. One of the questions is going to be whether or not the team accepts magickal support. Maybe they want to win at all costs, but maybe they want to win on their own.
Start at the beginning of the season, and work towards the big tournament. Note that the players are going to know that their team will make the tournament. This doesn’t make suspense impossible — see Vincent’s 3/22/04 observation on tension.
5 Comments
I went for a very cynical Fading Suns take on the whole thing.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/xiombarg/541027.html
I just like the idea of a bunch of foppish nobles on bleachers watching scantily-clad athletic women play basketball.
I’ve given this a Dark Sun spin… though my lack of sports knowledge is appalling.
So there’s something that I think of about once a week, and really think you ought to do a Monday Mashup with it: the NYC subway. Or, really, any big city’s subway system.
I commute to New York once a week, and it’s still a sufficiently foreign experience for me that I find myself wondering at the other subway cars we pull up alongside and then pass in the dark. Or at the wide spots we pull through that could be abandoned stations.
Or at what a shadowrun-universe NYC would post instead of this sign. (every time I pass the sign like that that’s by the 59th street exit to the Columbus Circle stop, I wonder what other shapes could be photoshopped in – I’ll have to remember my digital camera sometime, though at this point most of those signs on my commute have already been graffittied)
That’s superb. I’m going to use it.
Last week’s mashup, which I inexplicably missed, was Hoosiers….