Cardboard Hollywood

Dear Hollywood: turn these 10 Tabletop RPGs into TV Shows

D&D is Overrated

A few years ago there was excited talk of movies based on Magic: the Gahtering, D&D, and even Monsterpocalypse, which gamers barely knew about. Asmodee, Games Workshop, and other publishers announced plans to bring their properties to TV and film around the same time. Gamers speculated wildly about how close they’d stick to the source material.

Then nothing.

Cyberpunk is getting a Netflix show, but it’s not really based on the RPG. It’s based on the Cyberpunk 2077 computer game. A 40K show is in the works, but the central character — Eisenhorn — originated in the novels instead of a tabletop game. Neither of these count as real tabletop game adaptations in my book.

Hollywood is missing the boat. There are a shit-ton of amazing stories and settings in the tabletop RPG space. Any of the following RPGs would make just as good source material as Cyberpunk or 40K. And WAY better than D&D.

(Note to gamers: I left out oWod, nWod, CofD, MET, etc. because I didn’t want to explain all the nonsense surrounding that brand to the mundanes.)

Power Outage

Ben 10 meets The Venture Bros.

Lighthearted superhero adventure. Full of bizarre characters with cheesy gimmicks and punny names. Heroes are awesome but not “cool” (SuburbanKnight). Villains are sometimes powerful but neither awesome OR cool (The BolsheFist).

Power Outage takes place on the island of Outage, Alaska. Don’t bother looking for it on a map. It doesn’t exist. The island’s terrain is varied, to say the least. There’s a futuristic metropolis, a cheesy-noir city, and a mysterious jungle full of strange artifacts. It’s basically a playground optimized for super-powered shenanigans.

Power Outage features puzzles and exploration as much as action. It could easily be the next big family adventure show.

Hollywood, make make a Power Outage TV show! The world needs a gonzo family-friendly superhero adventure.

Lancer

Firefly meets Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Described as mud-and-lasers sci-fi. Knight/cowboy/ace pilots, called lancers, bring justice to the space wild west with custom super-mechs. Every mech is unique, and range from super-cool to utterly bizarre. Clarke’s Third Law is often cited when explaining how they can levitate enemies or turn invisible.

The year is 5016. The galaxy-wide civilization, The Union, has the typical sci-fi earmarks. Blink Gates (not-stargates), Omninet (internet but in space), 3d printers that rival Star Trek’s replicators, etc.

Hollywood, make a Lancer TV show! The world needs a live action mecha series. Lancer’s publisher is waiting for your DM.

iHunt

The Witcher meets Uber.

A super-cynical horror comedy about Millennials hunting monsters as gig work. The game is based on a series of novels from the same publisher.

There is no deep lore about the monsters. They go bump in the night and have to be put down. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc. The REAL horror is the protagonists’ personal, financial, and emotional issues.

iHunt is subversive. Supplements cover everything from hooking up with monsters to hunting during mass protests. iHunt espouses racial and gender diversity, and VERY progressive economic politics. A lot of iHunt’s plot addresses poverty, being uninsured, etc.

Hollywood, make an iHunt TV show! The world needs more shows about the horrors of the crony-hypercapitalism and having no social safety net.

Nobilis

American Gods meets The Good Place, dialed to 11.

Nobilis is about demigods — Powers — fighting a supernatural war against invaders from outside reality — Excrucians. Every Power is the master of some aspect of reality: Crime, Knives, Art, the Sky, Clocks, etc.

Good and evil is muddled in Nobilis. Dark and Demonic Powers are on equal footing with Light and Angelic ones. They’re all in this together against the Excrucians. Because the Excrucians aren’t just invading reality. They want to erase it. No matter how “bad” a Power is, they don’t want reality to stop existing. Where’s the fun in that?

Nobilis is known for three things: disgustingly good art in the 2nd edition book, tons of in-universe fiction, and being immensely philosophical. The metaplot is one big excuse for cosmic thought experiments. You could blow an FX budget on a dinner party scene.

Hollywood, make a Nobilis TV show! The world needs a self-aware mythic fantasy about the Powers of Masks, Hording, and Remote Working.

Eclipse Phase

The Expanse meets Fringe.

Transhuman survival-horror/conspiracy sci-fi. People regularly upload their minds into new bodies. Some animals are “uplifted” to human-level intelligence. People make digital clones of themselves, called “Forks”, to network for them.

And people rarely die. Most of transhumanity have black boxes — Cortical Stacks — in their skulls. When they die, the stack can be recovered and the installed in a new body and its memories uploaded.

Earth is deserted. Multiple variations of Skynet rose up and nuked everyone. Humanity now colonizes Mars, Venus, Jupiter’s moons, and some space stations. Plus some exoplanets because humans stumbled on some not-Stargates.

Eclipse Phase is about the members of a secret society called Firewall. Firewall tries to keep humanity from complete extinction. Because space is crawling with extra-galactic AIs, posthuman terrorists, and self-replicating nanobot swarms, this is hard.

Hollywood, make an Eclipse Phase TV show! The world needs a hard sci-fi series staring talking cyborg octopi.

MÖRK BORG

Lord of the Rings meets Metalocalypse, minus all the comedy.

Blackened artpunk fantasy. This is how most 80s parents imaged D&D. Bloody, violent, and dark. MÖRK BORG’s main shtick is that the world WILL end. Every campaign revolves around how and when the end comes. There is no stopping it.

MÖRK BORG was meticulously designed to integrate the disturbing artwork with the text. Any adaptation must also be visually bizarre.

Hollywood, make a MÖRK BORG TV show! Believe it or not, the world needs a grimdark, nihilistic fantasy adventure.

Mothership

American Horror Story in space.

Mothership is a straight-up industrial sci-fi horror. Jump scares, body horror, psychos, and bad decisions. Built with one-shots and anthologies in mind. The typical crew is a mix of Teamsters, Scientists, Marines, and Androids doing SOMETHING dangerous, shady, or both. Then something bad happens.

Mothership works because it’s fairly high concept. Stories can easily be “Saw” in space, “The Grudge” in space, “Us” in space, etc.

Hollywood, make a Mothership TV show! The world needs a horror anthology about working class astronauts and cosmic terrors.

Paranoia

1984 meets Catch 22.

Dark sci-fi comedy. Everyone lives in a domed city called Alpha Complex. Alpha Complex is a strictly regimented society with lots of drugs to smooth out the rough edges. It’s all run by Friend Computer, a mashup of Big Brother, HAL, and Janice from The Good Place. The Computer is your friend. The Computer hates Commies, Traitors, Mutants, and Secret Societies. The Computer is utterly insane.

Assigned to take care of the threats to Alpha Complex are the Troubleshooters. They go find trouble, and then they shoot it. But things shoot back. Troubleshooters die a lot. That’s OK because every citizen of Alpha Complex has multiple clones. If they die, a clone is activated and picks up where the previous clone left off. The clones are very necessary because life is cheap and death is constant.

Complicating this shitshow is a system of clearances. Because of the Computer’s paranoia, troubleshooters are forced to take on missions they can’t handle because they’re not allowed to know certain details or have certain gear.

On top of all that, Alpha Complex is crawling with Secret Society members and Mutants. Literally. Everyone is a member of a Secret Society AND is a mutant, and thus a traitor, but no one has figured that out.

Hollywood, make a Paranoia TV show! The world needs to laugh at a completely dysfunctional government.

Rifts

A grimdark mashup of Samurai Jack, Sucker Punch, and the MCU.

A global nuclear war tears open long-dormant ley lines of magical energy all over the world. Aliens, monsters, and whatnot climb through and make World War III ever worse. After a few hundred years, humanity crawls out of its bunkers and caves to find the world completely changed.

Rifts has everything. Power armor, psychics, mutant dogs, dragons, super-soldiers, cyborgs, and on and on and on. It’s all about the Rule of Cool. The setting is notorious in the gamer community. Even if they’ve never played, more gamers know what Rifts is and want to see it on screen.

Hollywood, make a Rifts TV show! The world needs a show about an alien wizard fighting vampire hordes in a mech suit.

Dream Askew

The Road meets Queer as Folk.

Dream Askew is the story of a enclave of queer people building their own society. It’s the beginning of the apocalypse. As resources dwindle, society turns its back on those who don’t belong.

Just as important as the characters are the setting elements. Resources are scarce. There are outlying gangs to contend with. The partially-functional digital realm is both feared and mythologized. And there’s still the very intact society that may never experience the apocalypse.

On top of that, the enclave has internal issues to sort out. Gender abolition, racial identity, hedonism, food justice, and a dozen other issues must be hashed out as the outcasts try to build a new life from scratch.

Hollywood, make a Dream Askew TV show! The world needs more stories about queer folks belonging.