D&D does dystopian children's fantasy: Looking for some ideas
Hey ho, so I'm taking over running one of my existing D&D groups. I have a campaign in my pocket that I have run part of before, A dystopian Narnia. If somehow my players meet just the right overlaps of nerd and techness to have ended up here. Leave now .
But it's really a set up for a longer campaign that I hope bridges into more worlds. I have the Narnian World really fleshed out, but if somebody feels particularly passionate and has ideas, please let me know. I can provide any detail folks would like into being asked a tricky question just helps me World build so please go for it.
The general gist is that our adventurers are pulled by a much weakened aslan from faerun or whatever default world we start from into Narnia. There they find it has been a thousand years of winter and rule by The White Witch. I'm familiar enough with the lore that if they decide to leave the country of Narnia or seek out another witch as an ally I have some options. Hopefully they save the day and free Narnia from Christmas-less winter. (I'm leaning hard into all the broad references to mythology in Narnia, Dionysus and the Maenads, the River God
If they do, they will receive a set of the magic rings used in The magician's nephew to allow people to pop between Narnia and the wood between the worlds. Allowing them to hop into other stories that have been similarly messed up.
I am looking for One Big Idea But also some other suggestions
-
The suggestions I'm looking for are other stories from about the same realm of stories that could be similarly messed up, ideas I had included Dinotopia, Wrinkle in Time, The Rats of NIMH, maybe one of the Discworld stories (I feel like half of those characters would be self aware) particularly thinking middle grade books with a dip towards children's or younger YA stuff, particularly fantasy stories, particularly those with some nostalgia for my fellow millennial PCs. I don't want to touch Harry Potter.
-
My idea for the reason why the story went wrong is that someone is rewriting it, possibly due to hating children or hating happy endings or something. I wanted a BBEG but I can't think of one. Umbridge is out for the Harry Potter reasons, but who else would go to the trouble? I am planning on the villain having acquired "magical book mcguffin" (that I also need to figure out) that's letting them do this. I like the idea of a villain who gets a lot of power but uses it in such a petty way, to rewrite children's stories
It'll take a long time to get out of Narnia, we don't play very often, and we may not continue depending on how players feel but as someone who's worked this idea over and over in their head for a while, I would love to get past these things.
Off the top of my head, Guardians of Ga'hoole might be a neat world to visit. It already has themes of fighting against a dystopian society. Also, never read it, but I know there's a lot of nostalgia around the Warriors books. (Going to assume you're okay with animal-based worlds since you had the Rats of NIMH.) Eragon is another contender that could work well.
As for the villain, if you're going for existing characters, I feel like some classic fairy tale villain might fit the bill. Someone who was denied their happy ending, and wants to ruin other stories. Alternatively, I wonder if there's some bit character you could pull from a book, like an early villain who's annoyed that they lost so easily. Could also go for a twist where it's a friend of a hero who dies early in their story, but instead got transported to another world and learned they're all fictional and went... Well, a little crazy.
Personally, I think I'd go for an original villain from the "real" world who got taken into a story world, and was bitter at realizing how unattainable happy endings were for themselves compared to others. Or heck, maybe the BBEG is a kid who finds happy endings boring and the final battle is against Smaug who's directly under their control. The Hobbit is a children's novel after all.
I read Guardians but it might be out of my players' realm of reference (similarly I'm of the age where eragon was.... Not appreciated. ) but I'm tentatively wanting to throw a bunch of different "pools" into the Wood between the Worlds and see what sticks, I'll just have to do more research and reading for ones I don't already know well. Ty for the ideas!
I appreciate the villain ideas, I don't think the players will have quite enough backstory to pull from, as they're immediately getting isekai'd right in. But I like the idea of someone smaller.
Here's a few largely unconnected ideas off the top of my head
Take a look at Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series. It's premise is looking at what happens to the kids in portal fantasies after they come back home.
Other classic options in portal fantasies are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz.
The political situation in Oz is explored more in Wicked (the books mainly since the musical doesn't really have the time to spend on the specifics).
Some fantasy books from that time period that I remember fondly (in no particular order) are Eragon, the Bartimaeus Trilogy, Animorphs, The Edge Chronicles, His Dark Materials (Daemons for PCs could be a fun RP exercise)
My first thought for the BBEG would be to embrace the fact that you're playing with the fourth wall and have them be a publishing exec who is meddling in order to keep the stories going. I have no idea how the party can construct a plan and then execute it when someone from a larger reality can read everything that's going on as they do it.
I did a fiction hopping arc for our homebrew game back in the day and it was all pop culture cross overs. Went all in on the fan-service. Had pokeballs to capture kaiju. Uncle Iroh and Primarch Vulcan comparing notes over tea. Leon Kennedy rescuing Princess Leia from the USG Ishimura. We joked that it was my IO3 phase.
Big bad was a parasite that fell off an elder god, latched itself to the metaphor of The Blank Canvas and it would spew out gold as it drained the life from everything creative. Naturally a corporate cult developed to feed it. It would manifest itself as the quality drops in media like horrific cash grabs or adaptations. This was around the time of a bad Silent Hill movie and I used the town as a gateway into the nightmare dimension of "The creative industrial complex". Completely shattered the fourth wall when my players were expected to go against a squad of fodder grunts with unreasonably inflated stats. So they had grind for the next six months or they could just pay about $5 each for 20000 crowns and they could use 19000 to rent a Baneblade tank. The money was for lunch anyway but for a spit second all my friends intended to murder me.
I adore this series. I'll probably make use of some of the "oh that's actually not all great is it" aspects of the portal worlds. I don't think my players are familiar though.
Wonderland is definitely an idea, though "dark Wonderland" has been plumbed a lot more lately. I'll poke at it! If I did Oz I'd go a different direction from Wicked, much like Narnia theres a lot of original material and everyone only ever plays with the first book. Plus I could make the Wheelers absolutely the worst thing ever.
I thought about this. Neverafter in Dimension 20 toyed a bit with it. I I do like the concept of the stories being edited, it would be fun if a fictional villain actually turned out to be the publisher Scooby doo style (reskinning Tiamat as a corporate stooge is a wild idea!)
Another series that might be good is The Chronicles of Prydain (The books that inspired the film The Black Cauldron). It's been many years since I've read it, so I don't think I could give a solid synopsis. But IIRC it fits the same sort of mold as Narnia.
Also I feel obligated to mention The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, as it's one of my all time favorite YA series (and where I got my username! :D). I'm not really sure it fits the dystopian angle though, as it is much more tongue-in-cheek in its approach to traditional fantasy concepts.
I think it'll be harder to pull series that are more genre aware into this, but just taking something like that and going super serious might work.
I am sort of realizing I jumped from Narnia to LotR to books by Asimov and Anthony (ick) (and Butler and Carey and Douglass) and missed a lot of the childhood fantasy series. As I haven't read Prydain or enchanted treehouse
Ty for the ideas!
An evil giving tree is wild and I love it. I'm wondering about even having it in the Wood itself. Ty I'm saving this
My mind immediately jumped to The Neverending Story, and not the film version. The film is pretty great, but it only covers the first part of the book, and kind of misses the point of the book as a whole. Broadly, it's a story about a child escaping real world hardship into a fantasy world. Very similar to Narnia in a lot of ways. But where Narnia seems to have natural exit points once children are there a while (sometimes a long while granted), the world of The Neverending Story is designed to suck you in and make you forget.
I don't have any solid ideas for big bad, but keeping with the theme of Neverending Story.... the big bad could actually be the protagonist from that book which has used his wishes to gain the power to rewrite stories, but forgotten his humanity in the process. Might be an interesting twist to not only defeat the big bad, but potentially "bring him back to the light" 🤷♂️
Neverending story is a GREAT one. I could blend book and movie for nostalgia benefits, and everyone will want to ride a Falcor
(｡♡‿♡｡)
Bastion (same name in book, I don't recall) could be an excellent villain. He at least could be the "big bad" of his story.
The podcast The Film Reroll did a really great run of Wizard of Oz basically doing what you are talking about. It’s a fun podcast in general, GURPS in movies youve seen, but that one was particularly fleshed out in interesting ways.
I am in fact quite a big fan. But to give them all the credit, they vaguely intend to play out the movie the way it is supposed to be. I'm intending to break my world before they get there (the Pevensies were summoned but were... Unsuccessful.)
And Paolo is really good at pulling things together on the fly, or way overpreparing. Like there are dragons in Oz but none quite like what Dorothy finds. I maybe still say "bear hug: arms and legs!"
I do really think using some of the lesser known Oz material could make a very interesting story though!
Consider taking a look at the Otherland Series by Tad Williams. Although the genre is different, the similarities in the plot might offer some inspiration. I read the series many, many years ago and, although some of the details are hazy, I remember enjoying the books a lot.
Another alternative is from the Library at Mount Char (thanks, u/boxer-dogs-dance), which had a subplot of a kind of war in heaven. The applicability to your story would be that the devastation wrought on these worlds is simply a casualty of a struggle for power between unfathomably powerful beings fought across these universes.
I read at least some of Otherland a long time ago, I'd have to go back and those books are chonky iirc. But I'll have to poke at both for some ideas.
My first thought was the Bartimeus Trilogy, as /u/Bonooru has already suggested.
How about Coraline, though? (I recently watched the 15th anniversary re-master, so it's still fresh on my mind.) That book already has an element of world-hopping in it, plus a trapped baddie at the end that probably still wants to reopen the connection to its own world. The Other Mother is fairly powerful, but also petty enough to cheat a bit at a game she plays with a child. Maybe here she "cheats" by messing up the expected endings?
Along those lines, do they have to be specifically books? If movies are an option, some of the Studio Ghibli worlds could provide nice touchstones that are likely to be familiar to a millennial audience. Think of crossing over again to the Spirited Away world.
Riffing on that, Howl's Moving Castle is loosely based on the novel of the same name by Dianna Wynne Jones. She might be a little more obscure now, but her stories are written for about the same middle grade audience you're look for. Her Chrestomanci series involves a multiverse, and the first book of hers that I ever read, Witch Week, directly involves trying to fix a world that's gone wrong.
I never got into D&D, so I'm responding as reader. Ymmv.
Lots of other good suggestions in other comments. I want to reiterate @carsonc 's plug for The Library at Mt Char. A deliciously weird and dark book.
If Mt Char strikes a chord, another deliciously weird one is Vita Nostra by
Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko
I think Lev Grossman's Magicians series is usually billed as "darker Narnia". I honestly can't remember much about it, but I think my feelings about it were medium at best.
There's Naomi Novik's Scholomance books, which seems almost built for a D&D campaign anyway. Lots of very explicitly described, rule-oriented world building.
It's not really YA, but Alex Bledsoe's Tufa series (fairies living in modern Appalachia) has that worlds crossing thing going on.
I realize these are all newer series. I didn't read much fantasy (other than Tolkien and Chronicles of Narnia) as a kid, but my memory of fantasy people were talking about in that era is mostly things like Wheel of Time, the Belgariad, etc. But they don't seem suitable.
After I wrote the last paragraph, I had this kind of wild idea: I think it would be really interesting to think about the magician's rings from Narnia in the context of the rings of power from LOTR, or vice versa. Maybe the white witch is one of the elves dislocated from her world too. I can see a lot of similarity between the WW and Galadriel, for example.
I don't know what people think about bringing Tolkien into D&D (I can see it feeling overdone), but it intrigues me.
I read Vita Nostra and I still have no idea what was going on in that book!
I'll check out The Library at Mount Char and Tufa
I don't hate bringing Tolkien into it, I considered the Hobbit in particular, with the rest of the lore providing a backdrop (might have to switch to the LotR ttrpg if we did) but I think it hesitance has been that probably at least one of my players will know the world way better than me. In the same way that Star Wars fans can be the worst enemy of Star Wars fans, I'm mildly more intimidated by someone who knows the Silmarillion very well even as someone who's read LotR many times. I like the idea of tying the rings into each other though there's definitely an idea there.
Scholomance is excellent, I'd probably enjoy running that even if everyone else didn't know it. But I sort of want to run it straight with the Dimension 20 Kids on Brooms modifications. (I apologize this probably doesnt make a ton of sense if you don't play or watch those shows, but in short, a non-D&D system) Actually this makes me wonder about doing Temeraire. Everyone loves dragons. If they don't want Dinotopia that might be a good alternative. Less kids involved.
I think I'm going to have to present a bunch of options and/or casually survey my group early about similar worlds they're emotionally connected to because it could be a much wider range than even I think. We have several months between games so I'd have tons of prep time.
This is the absolute truth! Sometimes I enjoy something that isn't so neatly laid out.
Same, but I think that one crossed a line even for me, I may have to go read a summary or something and see what I missed
This might be too obscure or too elder millenial, borderline late Gen-X, but I seem to recall the Teddy Ruxpin "universe" being this slightly creepy fantasy world somewhat akin to a mix of Winnie the Poo and Alice in Wonderland. It's been literal decades since I've looked at any of the books, but just browsing the wiki's cover art yields some neat kid-fantasy artwork:
https://teddyruxpin.fandom.com/wiki/Tweeg_and_the_Bounders
https://teddyruxpin.fandom.com/wiki/Teddy_and_the_Mudblups
https://teddyruxpin.fandom.com/wiki/The_Wooly_What%27s-It_(Adventure_Series)
https://teddyruxpin.fandom.com/wiki/The_Medicine_Wagon
https://teddyruxpin.fandom.com/wiki/The_Mushroom_Forest_(Adventure_Series)
https://teddyruxpin.fandom.com/wiki/Tweeg_Gets_the_Tweezles
I forgot Teddy Ruxpin had a world (elder millennial with one Gen X is indeed my audience.) I've also just thought about Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite.
That would take me firmly out of the realm of literature which is not necessarily a problem, just require me to pivot a bit. I'm absolutely sure I had some of those Teddy Ruxpin books though. Ty for the flashback!
something about this made me think of Inkheart series Basically, the main character and her father have the ability to bring characters from the books they read into the real world....for a price. For everyone who comes out of the books, someone from the real world goes into the books. iirc, the real world people who get pulled into the book world become part of the story, so it changes as its being read, and ofc bringing people with magic powers into the real world causes all kinds of havoc.
Hmm I never read those, but they do seem to fit in quite well.
It also made me think of Indian in the Cupboard some. But it may be too closely tied to the real world. Hmmm. Ty!