Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Mutant Chronicles the movie

Mutant Chronicles the movie is loosely based on the roleplaying game with same title. If I recall there's also a collectible card game called Doom Troopers. I haven't played Mutant Chronicles RPG but I do remember owning some cards of the franchise. I cannot say how loosely the movie is based on the RPG though..

Anyways. About the movie and some roleplaying thoughts.

Mutant Chronicles is set in the future where four factions rule the world and are in a war. In the battlefield during an attack ancient horror - The Machine - is revealed. Mutants with right hand as a sword type of appendix appear and drag wounded soldiers into the depths of The Machine to be transformed into mutants.
The end of the world is at the beginning.

Old faction wars are soon forgotten as humankind has a new enemy. People are evacuated off the Earth but there's no space for everyone.

Luckily one religious order has an answer for the apocalypse. They have an ancient artifact what is supposed to destroy The Machine. And they also have a nifty ol' book tutorial to do it. Ron Perlman as brother Samuel naturally agrees to take the task and the rest of the adventurers hop aboard as they get free tickets to give for their family for example. For their quest brother Samuel has the book and the party has the artifact to destroy The Machine and swords that are supposed to be effective against the mutants.

The journey begins in the depths of The Machine to destroy it. This is where the action starts as they shoot and fight their way down there. And people die too.

Also one is transformed into a mutant and another halfway transformed. He looks a little twisted then and acts aggressively, otherwise he is okay.

I liked the movie. There was adventure, action and a cool story. And The Machine was awesome! Take  Silent Hill and Kult roleplaying game's Metropolis and that's what The Machine looks like.

The mutants are tough but the swords are supposed to kill them faster, so let the swords have lots of damage against the mutants (or penalty to AC if mutants' HP isn't that high).

Drawing the maps should be easy. Give players sweet maps (look at Zak Smith's work for example) and some pages of the book to use in the game and as a prop. Let them fight their way down, survive, find a right path, see some horrors and finally try to figure out how to place the artifact in the core of the machine to destroy it (SPOILER: It flies away instead of blowing up as it is a spacecraft).

I think Savage Worlds could be great for the pulp style (not too familiar with SW though) but probably Mutant Future (Gamma World 1e or 2e) could work well too as the rules are simple and player characters have more HP in the beginning than in other D&D versions and clones (in MF hit die x CON).

I think Mutant Chronicle the movie could be converted into a really cool adventure. And the movie wasn't bad either. It wasn't perfect but I enjoyed it a lot. Worth 4 stars for me!

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