Ballet Idea - Neko Nabe

So I had this idea for a slice-of-life ballet set in a restaurant where a human waitstaff serves cat customers. All the romance and visual euphemism and innuendo of traditional ballet is converted to the romance between the cats and their meals. I call it Neko Nabe.
 

Nabeneko San from Neko Atsume

 
Act 1

1st dance (solo) - The curtain opens on a darkened restaurant. The backdrop is a city scene viewed through the restaurant's windows. The Host enters and dances while setting up the restaurant for the day - turning on the lights, sweeping, taking the chairs off the tables, etc. The stage lights create a sunrise in the background.

 2nd dance (group) - One by one, three Waiters arrive and get ready for work - neatening their uniforms, tying on aprons, putting out glasses and silverware, etc. They dance solo, in duets with the Host, and with each other. This dance emphasizes the camaraderie of the staff and the easygoing environment of their workplace. of A bell rings every time someone opens the door.

3rd dance (group) - The Postmaster Cat arrives to deliver the mail to to dance with each of the Waiters and the Host. This is a quick piece, and demonstrates the familiarity the staff has with their regular visitors.
 

Ekicho San from Neko Atsume

 
4th dance (solo) - The first Cat Customer (a human in a cat costume) arrives and orders a meal. This is a dance of hunger and longing, as the customer communicates its desire for food.

5th dance (group) - One by one, the three Waiters bring out Fish (either humans in fish costumes or 5' tall cutouts of fish) and present them to the Cat Customer. Each waiter tries to convince the customer to select this fish, then the three dance together to conclude the presentation. The dance concludes as the customer selects a fish, and the other two are returned to the kitchen. One waiter seems disappointed their dish wasn't chosen. The waiters and host sit to watch the next dance.

6th dance (duet) - The Cat Customer dances with the chosen Fish. This is a very romantic dance, incorporating all the tropes of courtship and consummation. At the end of the dance, the fish disappears offstage, and the customer takes a seat near the kitchen.
 

Kafe San from Neko Atsume

 
7th dance (group) - A second Cat Customer arrives. This customer is a realistic cat puppet that immediately hops up on a table. The three Waiters bring out dishes on large silver trays covered with cloches. Again, each waiter competes with the other two to give the most tempting and hospitable presentation to the customer. This is really the waiters' time to shine, and ideally includes some tap dancing along with the traditional ballet. The customer appears thoughtful, then selects a dish. The frustrated waiter is again disappointed not to be chosen, this time in a more exaggerated and comical way. Again, the waiters retreat to watch alongside the host and first customer.

8th dance (solo) - The Cat Customer puppet performs a solo dance with a plush toy of a fish as a prop. The puppet imitates traditional ballet moves. Some are very impressive (and would be physically impossible for someone who isn't a puppet, such as jumps with incredible air time), others include humorous slips and pratfalls. The waiters, host, and other customer all clap and act very impressed, but this should be played for comedy for the real audience.

That seems like a showstopper, so let's go ahead and stop the show and have an INTERMISSION after that!

Bisutoro San from Neko Atsume

 
Act 2

9th dance (group) - The curtain reopens, and a new customer comes in, a Cat Parent (a human dancer in a cat costume) and numerous Cat Children (child dancers in costume). The puppet customer remains seated on a table near the kitchen. The parent dances with the children, and the children dance around the stage, exploring the restaurant.

10th dance (group) - The Waiters hand out fish to the Cat Children (some are simple paper cutouts, at least one fish pinwheel and one fish kite). The children dance with their fish while their parent takes a seat, but eventually, the kids entice the Cat Parent to stand up and dance with them and their fish.

11th dance (duet) - The Postmaster Cat returns after work, dances around the children, and dances a duet with the Cat Parent. They are a couple, but theirs is an established, familiar relationship, and they are both tired after a long day. They dance support and reassurance to each other, with each taking a turn to do more of the work. The Cat Children sit to watch their two parents dance. Halfway through, the Waiters serve two fish (large paper cutouts) to the parents, and they continue their duet with the fish props. At the end of the dance, the children stand up and join the postmaster, while their original parent takes a seat near the kitchen.
 

Sebasu San from Neko Atsume

 
12th dance (duet) - An elderly Cat Couple enters the restaurant and dances a duet with each other. They have been in love a long time, and although they are not as athletic as they used to be, they have a tender, romantic duet.

13th dance (group) - The three Waiters present the Cat Couple with dessert options. This dance has the feeling of a contest between the waiters, and the frustrated waiter has a brief solo after each of the other two. After pulling out all the stops, the couple selects the frustrated waiter's desert, and the waiter is comically triumphant.

14th dance (group) - The Cat Couple begins to repeat their romantic duet. They are joined by a personification of their Dessert (a human dancer in a costume). Over the course of the dance, we see the couple remembering their life together. At one point they are joined by two Cat Children playing tag. Later we see a younger version of the Cat Couple dancing a courtship. Later we see a Cat Couple in wedding clothes. Costume details (including both the cat coloration and the color and style of their clothes) help establish continuity. The elderly couple continues dancing alone, and are joined by the other two desserts, the three Waiters, and the Owner.

Again, that seems like a showstopper, so let's go ahead and stop the show right there and let all the dancers take their bows. The three Waiters and the Owner tidy up the restaurant while everyone else is bowing, reversing what the owner did to open the shop at the beginning of the show.
 

Manzoku from Neko Atsume

 
The music should be light and happy. I don't know enough about the classical canon to pick a good soundtrack. The idea came to me while listening to the instrumental dance break in the song "King of New York" in the Newsies musical, which sounds to me like very good music for presenting cats with silver cloches of food.

As a concluding thought though, here's "Kuroneko No Tango" as performed by Pink Martini & the Von Trapps.
 

   

My Fifth Edition Fantasies

I'd eventually like to try running a D&D 5e game, although in the mean time, I'm somewhat torn about what campaign I'd like to use 5e for. I have three main campaign ideas, so I'm going to write about each one to help me think about them.

Another time, I'll try to set out exactly what kind of game I think the 5e rules are really good for. For now, suffice it to say that I think 5e characters are most interesting when they're pursuing either personal quests or faction missions, and that the best combats in 5e are "boss fights" with powerful enemies whose defeat is directly related to the characters accomplishing their goals.


Option 1 - The Nutcracker Princess Campaign

In this campaign, the player characters are human children from our world, on the cusp of young-adulthood, who are swept away to a frozen wonderland, where they're the only ones who can broker the peace between once-allied, now-distant kingdoms that face the threat of an invading conqueror. (You know, now that I write that out, this sounds a lot like the plot of the new She-Ra show. That wasn't intentional, I'm okay with it. It might be better, actually, than the campaign would be without that second touchstone.) 

Like human children in Narnia or, well, "The Nutcracker," the player characters are basically considered foreign royalty. Their initial contact is probably with the Mouse-Elf Queen or the Nutcracker King, both of whom want to build a new alliance among the old kingdoms, raise an army of Toy Soldiers, and repel the advances of the Rat King and his terrible army.

The neighboring kingdoms should be familiar to Tchaikovsky fans, the Sugarplum Faeries, Swan Princesses, various lands of candy and pastry. The players missions would likely be to serve as emissaries to the old kingdoms, participating in courtly intrigue, solving problems to win allies, recovering lost regiments of Toy Soldiers, defeating incursions by the Rat King's armies, building a coalition to drive them back to their own distant shore.

Picture everyone in Regency Era and Napoleonic fashion, picture lots of anthropomorphic foodstuffs and objects like in Adventure Time or Beauty & the Beast, imagine navigating strict rules for manners and decorum to arrive at fleeting moments of emotional honesty, imagine lots of ballet dancing, and listen to music tracks on quiet repeat to set the ambiance for each area the players enter.

(If I ran this as something other than 5e, I2TO is tempting for its mass combat rules and its novice-friendly simplicity, while Numenera might make it relatively easy for every princess to have a unique superpower.)

Human children become royalty and recruit Toy Soldiers
image from The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

Royal court in the Flower Kingdom
image from Ballet West and photographer Luke Isley

Lots of princesses
image from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

Lots and lots and lots of princesses
image from Wreck-It Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet

Option 2 - The Vaults of Azurth

If good artists borrow and great artists steal, then surely the greatest artists of all copy two different things and mash them up. In this campaign, the idea would be to remix Trey Causey's Land of Azurth and Jeff Reints' Vaults of Vyzor. (When you consider that Azurth is Trey's own fanciful take on Oz, and Vyzor is a tribute to the funhouse dungeon's of yore, it's clear that there are also several more layers of borrowing going on here. That also means that I could mix in new ideas based on the same original sources that inspired Trey and Jeff.)

Above ground, the Azurth's World's Fair 189Z is starting to be assembled. Each of the realms of Azurth is converting an abandoned building fairgrounds into an exhibition space, and the fairgrounds are starting to fill with vendors of all stripes. Below ground ... well, who know's what's down there? An adventurer who's brave and resourceful could find out, and potentially earn the favor of the World Emperor in the invitation-only Azure-Windowed Palace at the center of the fair, or catch the attention of one of the fair's other patrons, such as The Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes or Princess In Another Castle.

Trey's Azurth has four lands with different themes - boy's-own-adventure in Sang, girl's-own-adventure in Virid, fairy tales in Nox, and tall tales in Yanth, plus Sapphire City, which I don't know much about. Jeff's Vyzor had color-coded underground vaults with exciting random cultural exhibitions happening on the surface. The vaults were tricky to navigate, but also full of set-piece attractions that made finding the way through worth it. The vaults were also interconnected by secret doors, and finding those interconnections was a goal in itself, and that connectivity is definitely something I'd want to imitate.

(If I ran this one as something other than 5e, the campaign might benefit from the gozo character concepts that are possible in DCC, or GLOG, or why not, even Pathfinder.)

Azurth adventuring party by Steve LeCuilliard

Azurth monsters by Jeff Call

Player's map of Vyzor by Jeff Reints

Judge's map of Vyzor by Jeff Reints

Option 3 - Alchemical Planetary Romance

I'll admit, I've had the seed of this idea ever since reading Dungeon of Sign's review of Twilight Calling. A ring of planets orbits a central castle. Each planet is mis-ruled by a dinosaur tyrant; if the tyrant can be defeated (or persuaded to abdicate, by providing them with their heart's desire) then the planet will be freed, and the revolutionaries will be awarded a prize. With the rewards from all 7 planets - Venus, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Sun, and Mercury - the player characters can finally enter the last castle and confront (or join!) the court of the dinosaur overlords.

The villagers on each planet have a problem caused by the tyrant, and removing the tyrant solves the problem and transforms the landscape, as in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Each planet probably has only a couple villages, a handful of adventure sites, plus a lieutenant's fortress and the tyrant's castle, just as in Mario 3. Each tyrant also has some influence on the other worlds, so the next world in the sequence becomes safer after the previous tyrant is overthrown, like in Mega Man X. The shops in each village start out fairly bare, but trade flows between freed cities, making more cool stuff available to purchase. Each planet is also defined by alchemical correspondences between metal, color, and astrology.

So Venus, for example, is the Green Planet, the Copper Star; it is an over-tended garden, stifled and choked, but if its Brontosaurus Empress is removed, the jungle will will run riot over the land. Mars is the Red Planet, the Iron Star. It's a barren desert with only a few dry canals running through it. If the Icthyosaurus Lich is defeated, the ice caps melt and the desert becomes the seafloor once again and all the tower-cities are revealed to be islands.

In Mystic Quest, the first boss is a Tyrannosaurus skeleton,
and when you beat him, the dying forest you started the game in suddenly turns green. 

 

I like the juxtaposition of pixel art and concept art.

 

My all-time favorite concept art is artist Yoshitaka Amano's designs for Final Fantasy VI.

 

My vision of each planet's surface is a pointcrawl that resembles Mario 3.

 

Defeating the tyrants transforms each planet and removes hazards from neighboring worlds,
like in Mega Man X where defeating one boss makes another stage safer to navigate.

The problem with all these ideas is that they probably take too much preparatory work to set up. The Nutcracker Princess Campaign probably needs the least, just enough of an idea about what each kingdom and court is like, and a better concept on my part of what actually happens during a game session in this campaign. The Vaults of Azurth would be next; it would take quite a bit of map drawing to get started, and at least the start of the random tables that would populate the exhibition spaces and vendor stalls.

The Alchemical Planetary Romance would be a real labor of love. Doing it right would mean having adventuring sites and dungeons at least one of the planets, a notion of what the tyrant wants that would persuade them to abdicate rather being forced to fight to overthrow them, and plans for the interconnections between planets. Really, that's one that if I could ever do it right, I'd want to be sure to put it into a book, or perhaps a boxed set with cardboard playing mats to represent the planets and the villages and the castles. It would need art, and lots of it, images of each planet before and after it transformed, 16-bit pixel art and hand-drawn "concept art" to depict each world and monster and boss. It's such an oversized idea that it's absurd even to consider it, and yet I hope it's something I could have the time and resources to put together someday.

In the meantime, the Nutcracker Princess Campaign would probably benefit from a consistent player base, while the Vaults of Azurth would likely be the most fun in an open-table setting where different groups of players could compete to find the coolest stuff. It'd be fun to do something set in space, even if my current inspiration is a non-starter. Writing this was helpful, because it lets me see some commonalities across my current ideas. However, if these three are my only ideas for 5e gaming, then I might need to go back to the drawing board...