Last Unicorn Part 2

I love building a big magical world. This one in a funny way reminded me of the prep for Wizard of Oz. And thinking back that far made me reflect on how my approach has changed over the years. In a lot of ways my prep has gotten much more efficient. Back then I didn't really know how the show worked and I just kind of designed a world for them to play in without much sense of how it could play out. I put too much detail into spaces they were unlikely to visit simply because I was having a fun time imagining. Now I probably build more overall, but I'm much more fractal with my approach. I really sketch out the things that I need to know, what is unique and important about a place/person/event and I add detail to my thinking as that place/person/event starts to come more into view. At first I was just kind of imagining in the dark. It's hard now not to focus on how much I ended up loving the cave of dragons, but there were just as many other cool corners of that world that I giggled over the possibility of them seeing and they never did. That's a fine approach for someone who loves drawing maps, but probably not a good approach to make this show regular and sustainable for years. I still do love drawing maps though.

Another thing I've been thinking about recently is how to keep the movie alive within our movie. I'm the team purist in terms of putting the group in a big world and letting them go wherever they want. The downside of this approach is of course that the sense of the original movie can be lost if none of the events from the original happen. To an extent we usually have the characters grounding us back in our collective memory of the actual film, but in a long campaign the characters themselves may change significantly, and the players' interpretations of them may drift. To solve that, recently I've been trying to think through some mandatory aspects of the structure or tone of the film that we need to preserve no matter how far off the rails we go. For instance, in Last Unicorn I wanted to make sure we kept that sense of slightly elevated whimsy which is so distinct in the movie. And I knew that we would keep the narrative structure of distinct magical encounters, each of which can lead to a new party member joining the unicorn. I think being mindful and choosing a few Film Anchors really helps preserve the feel of the movie no matter how much our version ends up differing.

Anyway, that's all for now. This was a fun one. We're interrupting Last Unicorn now for a Halloween movie which will be Beetlejuice. We'll be back with more Last Unicorn after that!