Contentious real-world action scene locations: an advantage of RPGs

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When Alfred Hitchcock wanted to film the famous action scenes on Mount Rushmore, he was eventually banned from doing so by the indignant American authorities. Hence, he had to take some surreptitious footage and faked the scenes he wanted with special effects.

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That sort of resistance is often even more intense in many quarters these days, so I'm sure there's plenty of awesome action scenes you couldn't get away with in a movie... but no one can stop you in an RPG around your dinner table! I think this might be an underappreciated little advantage of our hobby.

This thought occurred to me today while I was studying the current tallest statue in the world, Unity in India. It would be such an epic location for all sorts of shenanigans, but I doubt Modi's government would grant permission for such usage in a film or video game.



So, what crazy action movie stuff have you staged or would you like to stage in an unlikely real-world location?
 
The advantage of TTRPGs is that you have an infinite special effects budget and are Not At Home to Mr. Copyright. The disadvantage is that TTRPGs are not a visual medium, so it doesn't really matter.
 
Well, I could Plasma Car around the game table while I adjudicate the action. Nice smooth basement floors are keen for plasma car-ing.
 
People knock DC’s New52, but Grifter’s fight on the Eiffel tower was a visual treat I love from that era. Never felt the need to do anything like that in an RPG, though. Unless you count the time my players blew up part of Boston in a Torg session.
 
There's a Cryptworld adventure that has players digging up a dead body at University Falls in Oregon in order to defeat a Wraith. But in general I think the game focuses on generic, non-specific locations.
 
Oh! It's historical, but as a reward to my poor players for putting up with a few months of Scarlet Pimpernel playtesting, I let them take their fantasy characters to 1793 Paris and run amok. They were slaughtering Terrorists left and right, and wound up wiping out half of the National Convention by turning the roof to crystal and shattering it with sonic spells, before launching missiles and fireballs into the screaming horde.
 
Disney would not approve of all we did at the House of Mouse and who we did it to.

Did you sterilize many of the park’s visitors?

if not, you have a lot of catching up to do with Mister Gordons from The Destroyer novels.
 
Did you sterilize many of the park’s visitors?

if not, you have a lot of catching up to do with Mister Gordons from The Destroyer novels.
Thankfully forced sterilization never occured to us.
 
We did a session out in the restricted area of the Hanford Reservation, out with the buried radioactive waste. We had a firefight in a Buddhist monastery outside of Seattle.
 
Is there any way to read these novels as PDFs or other simple universal formats?

They’ve been slowly adding them on Kindle. IBooks has the newer volumes, but not all of them are good, to put it mildly.
 
They’ve been slowly adding them on Kindle. IBooks has the newer volumes, but not all of them are good, to put it mildly.
(nods) Like more than one of those action/adventure series that Pinnacle started (*cough* Executioner *cough*) the early few dozen books were good, the later ones not so much.
 
(nods) Like more than one of those action/adventure series that Pinnacle started (*cough* Executioner *cough*) the early few dozen books were good, the later ones not so much.

I think most of the early Destroyers are awful, and the series didn’t get going until Murray took over as ghostwriter. The first two of the revival are, well, I rambled about them elsewhere on the Pub.

As for Pendleton, I love his first 38 Executioners (not counting the fill-in one, which I never read) and admit there’s a lot of crap among the later books, but there’s just as many I love as much as the originals

Also have to say Linda Pendleton was lovely to talk to the few times we interacted. I understand Don was big on talking to both fans and pros, and she kept up that tradition. I was actually sad when she passed a few months ago.
 
I think most of the early Destroyers are awful, and the series didn’t get going until Murray took over as ghostwriter. The first two of the revival are, well, I rambled about them elsewhere on the Pub.

As for Pendleton, I love his first 38 Executioners (not counting the fill-in one, which I never read) and admit there’s a lot of crap among the later books, but there’s just as many I love as much as the originals

Also have to say Linda Pendleton was lovely to talk to the few times we interacted. I understand Don was big on talking to both fans and pros, and she kept up that tradition. I was actually sad when she passed a few months ago.

Any specific ones on ibooks you'd recommend?
 
As for Pendleton, I love his first 38 Executioners (not counting the fill-in one, which I never read) and admit there’s a lot of crap among the later books, but there’s just as many I love as much as the originals

Also have to say Linda Pendleton was lovely to talk to the few times we interacted. I understand Don was big on talking to both fans and pros, and she kept up that tradition. I was actually sad when she passed a few months ago.

Yeah, I'm a huge fan of the original 38. The first couple thereafter weren't bad -- Pendleton had no hand in any after he sold off to Gold Eagle -- but got very formulaic fast.
 
In 1986 I ran a campaign inspired by having seen the movie Highlander. It had an action scene — well, more of an atrocity — in St Peter's Square on Christmas morning. It was a collect-the-set campaign, and one of the set was the topmost circlet of the Papal Tiara.
 
Yeah, I'm a huge fan of the original 38. The first couple thereafter weren't bad -- Pendleton had no hand in any after he sold off to Gold Eagle -- but got very formulaic fast.

I will always love Leviathan, AKA Mack beats the crap out of Cthulhu-with-the-serial-numbers filed off.
 
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