Welcome to Against the ’70s!

Let’s do the time warp again.

This guy should’ve defended himself against the ’70s

Hello, and again, welcome!

What exactly is Against the ’70s? Well, it’s not just one thing — it’s three things.

Every Friday, I’ll be posting a review — or at least, a consideration — of a ’70s movie (usually genre, but not always). Then I’ll pull some element from the movie — a monster, a character, a story element, even a mood or a vibe — and quantify it for the Cypher System role-playing game. Thirdly, Against the ’70s the name of the rpg book I’m working towards, where I take all the concepts I’ve developed in the newsletter and create an original game world out of it. (It may also be a floor wax and a dessert topping. Stay tuned.) ¹

The book won’t be ready for some time. (The newsletter is like an R&D lab for the book.) But I’m imagining a game where players can form a team consisting of characters that are like, for example, Thomas J. Newton (The Man Who Fell to Earth), Foxy Brown (Foxy Brown, natch), Regan MacNeil (The Exorcist) and Jonathan E (Rollerball). These characters would then go out and solve mysteries and confront Bigfoot, aliens, vampires and the like. Basically, I want all of the ’70s cinema mixed together, existing in the same world, banging up against each other like toy figures wielded by a sugar-high kid. Why? There’s potentially a lot of answers there, but for now, the most obvious: because it sounds like a lot of fun.

An army of Tony Manero clones. I can’t steal this idea, but you can.

Two books inspired this project. The first is Damnation Decade by Robert J. Toth. This was a sourcebook for the True20 rpg system, published in 2006, that detailed a game world that took place in a wild alternate 1976, where Bigfoot and Richard Nixon and Futureworld-style androids and Hugh Hefner all rubbed shoulders. In other words, this book did it first. A 1970s-focused book had never been written in the rpg space, and even now its existence seems like a minor miracle — who was this for, other than me? I plan to publish a detailed review of it in the future, but know that the my goal for an Against the ’70s book is to crawl out from Damnation Decade’s long dark shadow.

The cover of the version I own.

The second book is Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula from 1992. This tremendous novel tells the story of what happens if Dracula had won at the end of Bram Stoker’s story. It’s a great hook, and Newman capitalizes on every aspect of it by utilizing his near-encyclopedic knowledge of history, literature, film and television, using not only characters from Dracula, but from the Sherlock Holmes mythos, Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box, Murnau’s Nosferatu, and far too many more to name. (Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen could also be counted as similar inspiration.) I doubt that Newman’s work was the first to do this, but it was the first one I encountered, and sometimes that’s all that matters.

My hope is that if you came here for the movie stuff, you’ll also read the game stuff and maybe I can make a ttrpg-er (tabletop role-playing gamer) out of you. And if you came here for the game stuff, maybe I can make a cinephile out of you. Regardless, I hope you find it all entertaining enough to stick around.

Thanks,

Kent

P.S. If you’re unfamiliar with the Cypher System (it’s pretty new, so that’s likely), I’ll be posting next week about what it is, how it works, and why I chose it.

(originally posted 11/4/21 on Substack)