Beardcrumbs – Chernobyl In Grey Part 2
Morning!
Another little foray into my thought processes, picking up where we left off with:
Chernobyl In Grey – Adapting the Zone for Sleepwalkers
So we know that the two settings do have a potential merging point- the Stalker scenario can be played out in the Fringe, an otherworldly place which is the setting of Sleepwalkers.
The details required some fine tuning, but I actually found several points of convergence. I suspect most will find the sane when combining settings with a similar vibe- there are always crossovers, even if they are just places where the archetypal story types meet (heroes, villains, forbidden knowledge, ninja pirates).
Listed, they look like this:
| STALKER | SLEEPWALKERS |
| The Zone A lawless nuclear wasteland with strange things happening and monsters abound. |
The Fringe A lawless spiritual frontier with strangeness and monsters abound. Basically, the same but fantasy. |
| The Wish Granter At the centre of the zone stands Chernobyl NPP, the source of the disaster. The Wish Granter calls out to Stalkers, promising them their deepest desires. |
The Wish Granter There is no direct parallel in Sleepwalkers, so it has to be brought in- details later. Chernobyl is still the location, so that can be moved over lock stock and barrel, with the plant still being the centre. |
| Stalkers People who explore the Zone, shamanic types (in terms of reverence for the natural system) who risk the Zone’s dangers and mood swings in order to find out more about it, get wealthy or reach the Wish Granter. |
Sleepwalkers People who explore the Fringe, also shamanic (in a more direct sense, travelling to the spirit world). Sleepwalkers are the new Stalkers for this setting, exploring the Zone’s Fringe counterpart for much the same reasons.
|
| Duty A group of Stalkers dedicated to policing the Zone, keeping it safe- and under their firm control. |
The Gatekeepers A group of Sleepwalkers who act like police. The Gatekeepers in the broader setting are somewhat more like the protectors of the Fringe; I simply tweaked them to be rather more obsessive and brutal in their methods, more interested in control. |
| Freedom A group of Stalkers dedicated to making the Zone free for all. Likened to terrorists, they want no faction to have total control of what they see as a natural wonder (but their motives may be selfish once the Wish Granter is factored in). |
The Nobodies A group of Sleepwalkers who form small, localised gangs. They act much like bikers or mid-level criminals, for safety in numbers. They were tweaked to be the ones wanting the Fringe to be free from control, so that locals could police it themselves. |
| Anomalies Places where the Zone’s physics have become tortured, unnatural traps. |
Landslides These are parts of the Fringe that differ from the normal world, where emotions and events have warped the land. The whole Zone is a landslide! For this setting, this includes anomalies, as they are integral to the atmosphere of the Fringe. They are explained as the Fringe’s confused reaction to the pockets of radiation around Chernobyl. |
| Artefacts Items with unnatural properties produced by the same effects as anomalies. |
Artefacts Same again but with emotions and events. No conversion necessary. |
Clearly it didn’t take much to get Sleepwalkers to conform to Stalker. I was particularly pleased with the inclusion of the Gatekeepers and Nobodies as parallels to Duty and Freedom- they play important roles in the themes of the story and plugged perfectly into what I chose to drive the story and make it pop from science fiction to contemporary fantasy.
More on that next time!
[sociable]
