As for the rest – yes, we get a bit jaded of teenage rebellion once we get old, and age, and put on a few years and a couple of decades under the belt, and did I mention get older? Just sayin’

Lyrically: someone pointed out many years back something similar about about french chansons: they sound fantastic because they are in french. When you translate the lyrics, what the songs are actually about is pretty banal and silly. (cf how “talkies” ruined Rudolph Valentino movies). Perhaps thats why the escape into poetic-style lyrics.

PS: Where is Mastodon in this list? Oh well – I suppose he can’t include everything.

Therion – Son of the Staves of Time
Nightwish – Nemo

And if you’re feeling brave and have a spare 13 minutes (c’mon, it’s symphonic, it should be long! ) try
Therion – Adulruna Redivivia

It’s a weird sort of deconstruction of RPG plots. I like the idea of shifting the theme elsewhere. I wouldn’t touch 50 Shades of Gray with a 50ft pole, but some Comedy of Manners-style game would be good. Especially if the central conceit was you retelling the story of how you met your husband to your friend (Scheherazade-style) and them continually interrupting the story and getting you to justify some plot point (leading to the fractal approach).

David’s comments got me thinking about framing the central fractal gameplay as a time-travelling conceit. Or maybe as an Inception-style cyberpunk mind-hacker game where you know a guy up to today, and you want him to think he’s at some point in the future, so you jump into his brain and implant memories. It has to hang together coherently for the target to believe the story.

The problem is if you defeat lesser boss #2, then go back and change the past so that you no longer got the itrem that defeated lesser boss #2, then the game would have to be able to say ok, since you did that lesser boss #2 is now no longer defeated.

As you always wind up facing the lord of doom, you can’t make this a combat game where the character dies. A text adventure is more the thing.

Saaaaay – how about aiming it at the ladies? Making it a romance novel? The Lord of Doom is actually Christian Grey, and the goal is to engineer a personal history that means you aren’t sucked into his madness, but are both sexy and submissive enough to attract him, while also being a strong enough woman to marry and divorce his ass and take half his stuff?

Part of the game involves telling the correct lies to eliminate the other girls, so that you are the one that he picks for a fling.

I’ve tried a couple of RPGs that mess with time lines and non-linear progression with varying degrees of success. From a player’s perspective it looked like a lot of work for the writer/GM to either cover all the bases in advance or be able to ad-lib well enough to avoid introducing inconsistencies.

The known start point and end point concepts strikes me as similar to a game I played back with MURPS (Monash Uni Roleplayers) which a friend of mine wrote in the vein of Men in Black. The story started out fairly normally, but all of a sudden you were thrust into the conclusion with no memory of what had happened in between. Most of the adventure was an investigation into what you’d actually done, but forgotten.

I suppose what I’m getting at is that the fact that I remember this game 10 years on is testament to the fact that a novel concept and good execution can produce something really special. So if someone does make a game like this, sign me up too.