Dream Warriors of Lantern Cove

That was the original working title of this game/podcast/awesome excuse for having fun with my friends. I quickly changed it to just ‘Lantern Cove,’ as the original was a bit too clunky and also made me think too much of that one Nightmare on Elm Street movie.

But it’s a great title for this particular entry, wherein we talk about the characters and their alter egos. So sit back, grab a mug of the hot beverage of your choice, and let’s have that talk.

The idea for having each character be empowered by their favourite media characters did not come from that one Nightmare on Elm Street movie, but was part of one of the brainstorming sessions I had with my partner about the game. There’s a running undercurrent to the game about the power and importance of consciousness, and that was the sort of mental space I was in. I got to thinking about teenagers and their developing sense of self, and how we use role models, both real and fictional, to empower us to grow into the people we want to be. The idea of the characters becoming some form of their role models from media just sort of jumped at me at that point, because not only did it fit, it meant that each character could be tackling the difficulties of the dream from a totally different paradigm, and that sounded interesting to me from a storytelling standpoint.

So when I went into setting up character creation for my players I had them pick some world of media and an empowered character in that setting that they felt a connection with. I then set back and waited for the ideas to roll in, having no idea what wildness I was going to get. And did I ever get some good ones!

From Olive, the otaku, I was expecting some wild super-powered anime character, but I got Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing. I’ve only seen Much Ado once (the Joss Whedon version, for those curious,) and I barely remembered it, so I had to dive into research about the character to find how best to express what was special about her.

With Clark, I was expecting a comic book hero, and I wasn’t disappointed there. It did make me wary, though, since the character picked is such a popular media figure in comics, television, and movies. When it comes down to it, the players aren’t playing these characters, they’re playing teenagers who look up to these characters in their dreams, but even so I got worried about putting out a podcast where it could be misinterpreted that my player was playing a familiar friendly neighbourhood wall crawler, so I did the (possibly silly) compromise of calling him Arachno-Guy, “An original creation, just like Rickey Rouse or Monald Muck!”

Atticus also gave me a famous comic book character, but this one was easy to modify, as I couldn’t see Atticus identifying with America, so he became Captain Anarchism (as Marvel already has a character with the easier-to-say name of Captain Anarchy that came to mind first.) He still has a cool shield but otherwise there’s not much resemblance to the character, so it didn’t give me the worries that Arachno-Guy did.

Freyja gave me Frankenstein’s Monster, a character long since bestowed into the public domain, so that was an easy one. My biggest challenge was letting go of all the strange adaptations of the character I’ve seen in my life and to go back to the original story, which is where Freyja would be seeing the character from.

With Chris, the popular sports kid, I was at a loss as to what I was going to get. I thought maybe a big pro wrestling character, or something from a mainstream movie series like The Fast and the Furious or something. A character from a fighting video game certainly never occurred to me, but that’s what I got. Not one I’d played either, so I got to do a little dive into Tekken lore to learn what I could about King. Fortunately, there are an abundance of websites detailing his story and abilities, which made it easy for me.

And finally Gus. I don’t know what I expected from Gus, but a magical aunt from Sabrina the Teenage Witch certainly never entered my mind. With Aunt Zelda I had a problem, and that was, to imitate the power of this character is to hand my player the ability to do essentially whatever they want, and what would that do to my ability to guide the story, and would that sort of inequality of power amongst the players even work? In the end I went with letting the character have these massive, reality-bending powers in the dreams, and just focused a bit more on making the formats and goals of the dreams be things that aren’t necessarily matters of power, but of understanding and communication. I think that has worked out pretty well so far.

Sera