adopting settings from books/movies etc

[namada]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

We're big on setting inspired by fiction but rarely adapted. It kind of stifles the creativity of the GM to work within the framework of someone else's story. We have recently played a cool game based on a French TV series called Black Spot. The GM simply didn't announce the source and he changed enough parts of the story to keep it fresh.

This is what I do too, though I usually tell the players where my inspiration comes from, for any given campaign or adventure - which is usually the book or series I just finished reading. I generally do a fantasy campaign, one or more standalone adventures, to cover the other genre novels I've read alongside some fantasy series, then go back to a fantasy campaign - rinse & repeat...
I prefer inspiration to adaptation to avoid the know-it-all type player who knows more than I do about the setting, but primarily to avoid having to absorb the thousand Star Trek books, comics, shows (etc.), just because I want to run something like Star Trek for a little while. I don't like homework with my fun.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by namada

I prefer inspiration to adaptation to avoid the know-it-all type player who knows more than I do about the setting, but primarily to avoid having to absorb the thousand Star Trek books, comics, shows (etc.), just because I want to run something like Star Trek for a little while. I don't like homework with my fun.

That's never been a problem for me, partly because I don't tend to choose series with all that sort of backup material. I've used Uplift, back when it was three books; Atlas Shrugged; the Zimiamvia trilogy; the Lord of the Rings (books only!); the Vorkosigan novels; the Laundry Files—all fairly limited in extent. The Rick Brant novels were a long series, but there has been NO secondary material for them.

There's also the advantage that one or two of these are fairly obscure. I wouldn't call Atlas Shrugged obscure, but it's not widely read by gamers.

But beyond that, with the better known series, such as Lord of the Rings and Discworld and the Buffyverse, I had no hesitation in saying that the source material was (in both these cases) the novels, and nothing in any secondary source such as movies, TV series, or games had any claim to canonical status. And my players had no problem going along with that. If they need to think of my setting as an alternate universe, they're welcome to, but my basic view is that what's in, for example, the LotR movies or the Buffy graphic novels is the alternate universe. . . .

[(E)]

I used the game of thrones setting for 3 different campaigns. I tried to keep to the cannon of the novels as much as possible, after all why waste all the reading my players had done. But I did shift the dates back a century* so I could still use the world while having some creative freedom.

*technically 2 centuries back, then 1 century back, then the last campaign was set one generation later or 75 years before the books.

[dcarson]

I did a Stargate campaign where the open was the PCs being the dig that found the gate in 1928 and the first arc was them realizing that a German dig had found another artifact (the dialer) with the same symbols in 1906 and finding a way to get the German museum to give it to them.

I did a Batman Continues campaign where batman first appeared in 1939 and the PC are the third generation in the 1980s. Lots of picking and choosing of continuity for that.

So lots of background but changed enough to keep it from being the original.

[Luke Bunyip]

On a total tangent, I'm sure Birmo would be stoked to know that you're basing a TTRPG on a setting of his.