Monday, January 21, 2013

RPG Wish List: Equilibrium

Movies, Games and Books I wish were available as Roleplaying Games
This 2002 film is one of my favourite guilty pleasures. It is a little uneven and was critically trounced, but I think it got an unfair rap. Besides, it has a pre-Batman Christian Bale, a surprisingly creepy Taye Diggs and the always watchable (and always underused) Sean Bean... who by this time is a walking Spoiler Alert.

The whole film is incredibly stylized and fun to watch with much less CG and Wire-Fu than you'd imaging. These are real guys doing real stunts, and one stunt guy doing a back flip off a moving motorcycle beats an entire planet of cg smurf-people doing a Fern Gully riff any day.

A quick summary from Wikipedia:
"The film follows John Preston (Bale), a warrior-priest and enforcement officer in a future dystopia where both feelings and artistic expression are outlawed and citizens take daily injections of drugs to suppress their emotions. After accidentally missing a dose, Preston begins to experience emotions which make him question his own morality and moderate his actions, while attempting to remain undetected by the suspicious society in which he lives. Ultimately, he aids a resistance movement using advanced martial arts, which he was taught serving the very regime he is to help overthrow."

But really, this movie is all about the Gun Fu (properly known as Gun Kata), an invented martial art that mixes traditional martial arts with guns. Specifically by memorizing the most likely locations and trajectories of all incoming and outgoing bullets, one can move into ideal locations to avoid being hit, and to know where your targets are without aiming in a traditional sense. 
Suggested Supplement
Grammaton Clerics. The Underground. A Guide to the Nether. The State of Libria.

Suggested Systems
The city state of Libria (or version thereof) could easily be inserted into any post-apok, sci-fi game or even a fantasy kingdom that removes the emotions of its people by magic (and defended by some seriously bad-ass clerics). But if you were to run a straight Equilibrium game with Clerics and the Underground, then the only game for replicating Gun Kata would be Feng Shui.

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