I still haven't researched any gambits- I'd open up TV Tropes right now, but TV Tropes once entered is not a trap that one gets out of anytime soon. It's true. Says so in the Bible. (Because if it's true, it must be in the Bible somewhere.)
I really should get on that, though. I'm afraid even to open it up in a separate tab and try to ignore it...
The purpose of the writing time is to go at it, chug along, just write what you know and fill in all that pesky research later. There may be a lot that I need to look up, but I do have plenty of things that I already know about. How compelling a story I can make out of those things... Well, I'm here for an hour, and I'm here to write- may as well write down a list of things I need to do research on; I'd say that counts for my time quite nicely.
- Laser tripwires- how would those work supernaturally? Are there steampunky 1800's wire tripwires that we could use? How about laser eyeballs? Do we even need laser tripwires? They're not really a real thing, or at least, if they are the beams aren't visible like that...
- The thorny issue of the Illuminati in all of this- do they exist? How powerful are they? Are they in on it, or are they depicted as bumbling fools? If they are depicted as bumbling fools, is that just an obfuscating facade and they actually turn out to be extremely dangerous?
- Gambits! Batman gambit, Indiana Jones gambit, Xanatos (sp?) gambit...
- Neater creatures of the night besides the stock horror monsters- Japanese Youkai are always pretty nice...
- The thorny issue of vampires- vampires have somehow become a "political" issue of sorts, having books be about them I mean, and how original or unoriginal they're considered. Vampires have always been one of my favorites, but having books about them kind of seems cliche-- and yet they must be. So how do we play them here? are they deconstructed? reconstructed? played completely straight? lampshaded? Our modern conception of vampires is quite different from how they were done in "Dracula"-- much like how our perception on werewolves changing because of the full moon comes from the film Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, from 1943! Vampires can go around during the day, it doesn't need to be a wooden stake that impales them through the heart as long as they get impaled at all-- and, vampires can sometimes be vegetables. Literally squashes and stuff. We occasionally remember vampires' compulsive need to count things... and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. The need to have permission to cross a threshold, yeah. ...I'm totally okay with vampires that refract and everything, but I want my vampires to be totally unapologetically vampiric.
- While we're on traditional depictions of supernatural creatures, how about ghouls and zombies? Zombies of course totally different, and "ghoul" has been used to mean so many things-- do we go all out on the Arabic cosmology if we open up that can of worms? There are some cans of worms I'd rather not open, but- djinn, there's another one that's totally unlike the public perception. Not all myths and legends and folktales are true here of course, but, eh.
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