Okay, so I recently came across some totally cool artwork by Jeffrey Thomas posted over at Geek Native of Disney Princess characters and other major female characters done as evil, or at least kind of sketchy. I think they're a fantastic revisit of the princesses. Then I thought, hey I could build a whole campaign around them!
Each princess would be the "boss" NPC for a particular region and faction in a world gone all "twisted". The campaign would work around engaging each princess to turn them back to normal, ally with them, or defeat them to turn the world back to normal. Or they could work more as meta-plot figures rather like the iconic faction leaders in 13th Age if you wanted them to be less a direct part of the campaign.
A couple of the portraits immediately gave me some ideas.
Aurora (Sleeping Beauty): instead of the witch queen giving her an apple, she saw what was coming and poisoned the queen first. Now she's Witch-queen Aurora, the Fairest in the Land. She keeps the spirit of the mirror captive in a magic lantern and has a demonic owl familiar.
Jane (Tarzan): Jungle barbarian princess, leader of an army of dire gorillas--and they're all cannibals. They massacred (and ate) the army sent in after them and now there's no one who can stop them.
Tinkerbell (Peter Pan): Shadow fairy princess. She bargained away her sweet seelie fairy wings for dark unseelie powers and became a druidic artificer making weird nature-tech creatures and devices.
Maid Marion (Robin Hood): Kitsune ranger, leader of a clan of forest kitsune terrorizing the human lands around the great forest. She uses her executed lover's powerful magic bow leading her people to avenge him and the many other crimes suffered at the hands of the greedy "bare-skins".
Tiana (Princess and the Frog): Yuan-ti voodoo witch doctor, leader of the swamp creatures. Has a huge dire alligator as a familiar. She and her people don't leave the swamp--but the swamp is expanding.
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To see more of Jeffrey Thomas' work, go to:
http://jeftoon01.deviantart.com/gallery/11344500
http://jeftoonportfolio.blogspot.com/
For the current season of D&D Encounters, I took the twisted Tinker Bell character as inspiration for my character. She is fun to play.
ReplyDeleteFor more twisted inspiration, check out last night's episode of Face Off. The foundation challenge was to make bad ass version of fairy tale characters.
Face Off! I love that show! Thanks for the tip.
ReplyDelete