Pen’s Tip at Sword’s Edge

So, I’m way behind on my podcast listening. Part of the reason is this new MP3 player that my wife bought me for my birthday. It’s the SanDisk Sans e270. I’ve had it for a couple of weeks and so far, I’m loving it. Thing is, it’s 6 gigs, meaning not only has it got podcasts, it has a huge chunk of my music library on there. What’s happened recently is I’ll get a hankering to listen to a tune, and after a podcast finishes, I check out the tune, thinking I’ll move on to another podcast once I’m done. Then I get caught up in the music and the podcast listening suffers.

One off-shoot of this is an even greater abundance of writing ideas than usual. Here’s how it works. I’ll use this morning as an example. After listening to another great Nuketown Radio Active episode, I was thinking of listening to an episode of This Week in Geek, when I got a hankering to listen to 3 Kilos by the Prodigy. So I did. It’s an instrumental, so I was thinking about writing in general, how I plan on approaching my writing, what will I do about game writing, etc. I was on the 2nd leg of my commute when “3 Kilos” ended, and rather than go back to podcasts, I switched to Climbatize by the same artist.

That’s when it hit me. It was a kind of movie trailer in my head. The idea began as a simple vision of Greek-style soldiers, maybe hoplites, with breastplate, greaves, and the Corinthian helmet (rather than the Corinthian leather). There was small group in the midst of battle, and their moves were straight out of wuxia, or perhaps Brotherhood of the Wolf. Slowly, as the song continued, I formed a story in my head.

It started out as five survivors of the Trojan War, lost–much like Ulysses–on their way home. The song finished with the story only half finished in my head, so I played it again. The story shifted. There were three friends, survivors of the Trojan War, whose ship was caught in a storm and capsized. The three survived, awaking on a shore. Each of the characters had a particular fighting style. There was the standard hoplite, with spear and sword; a peltast, but with sling and two long knives rather than javelins; and finally a huge bear of a man–maybe a wrestler–which no breastplate would fit, but whose skin could not be pierced (perhaps inspired by Luke Cage?).

The three run across a woman and a man beset by four minotaurs. The man is known only as the Latin, and is dressed like a legionnaire. Yes, completely a-historical. Did you notice the minotaurs? Of course, the three join in the scrap, help save the two, and find out that the woman is a kind of elementalist-sorcerer and the Latin is mute. The Latin is the elementalist’s bodyguard. I figure later in the story we learn that he can speak, but he just doesn’t want to, for whatever reason.

That’s as coherent as the story got in my head by the time I got to work. Some great visuals of hoplite-wuxia combat. That’s the kind of thing that I doubt I could ever replicate on the page or in a game. Still, I like the concept and might try to do something with it.

Just so you know, in my head, the Latin was played by Michael Wincott, the hoplite by Sean Bean, the peltast by Patrick Bergin, the elementalist by Jennifer Connelly (all early 1990s representations of). I didn’t have a firm concept of the wrestler, though thinking of it now, Michael Clarke Duncan would suit the role admirably.

Anyone want to finance this movie?