So, planetary romance. How come it isn't more common in roleplaying games?

So, planetary romance. How come it isn't more common in roleplaying games?

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Imagine a big scale tabletop game or video game of Barsoom
That would be fucking God tier
I really enjoyed the movie, it only flopped because dumb critics called it a rip off of Star Wars despite vice versa being the truth since Barsoom series was written long before Star Wars
Wish a sequel would happen

Didn't help that the movie had an incredibly bland title. I had no idea what it was until I saw a review for it after it had left theatres.
>>John Carter? What is this, a biography?

Modiphius is working on one right now. There's also a retroclone called Warriors of Mars, IIRC. Kind of a "what if D&D had been based on John Carter rather than Conan". There's the Revelations of Mars expansion for Hollow Earth Expedition, Space 1889, then there're a bunch of other games like Tales of the Space Princess or even Carcosa, in a sense. Amazing Warriors of Hyperborea, or whatever it's called. Technically, it's that, since it takes place on another planet (or maybe on a very, very far future Earth).

They're there if you look them up.

Movie was overedited shit. I still liked it, but it's a solid example of bad filmmaking.

birthmoviesdeath.com/2012/04/08/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulk-vs-the-john-carter-script

Because John Norman ruined it for everyone.

Because Encounter Critical was less commercially successful than Dungeon & Dragons.

>implying Gor is even known outside of BDSM circles

More like Star Wars killed it by being so popular it absorbed the whole genre into itself.

His fans aren't great either. I asked three different fans what Gor was and they reacted like I asked "So how painful was your mother's death by anal infection?".

The subculture may not be known, but the books sold well enough, particularly for being smut, that they're very associated with the same kind of Sword and Planet fiction that John Carter is.

I wouldn't say they're synonymous with the genre, but I'd say that if you say "planetary romance" or "sword and planet" to someone and if they actually know what you mean, then they'll think of John Carter first, then maybe Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and those old sci-fi magazines, but after that their mind will inevitably turn to Gor.

I'd say Star Wars is a later evolution of the genre, that people don't really classify Star Wars into the same genre as any of the earlier planetary romance works.

Same. I'm actually a big fan of the books, but when I saw the name on a marquee, the first thing I thought was they had made a movie of Dr. John Carter from ER. One of the most confusing marketing choices I've seen.

Here, because it's inevitable.

Meh, I think John Carter of Mars, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon show up like way, waaay before Gor in a situation like that. Like, If 1 in 50 people may know those three names, then maybe only 1 in 3 of those will also know Gor. It only feels well known in places like Veeky Forums, we're really not representative of the wider population or even the general nerd community.

Looked it up, looks mean
Top tier character models

Eh, I'd prefer if no one fucks my planet in the first place.

...

Planetary Romance, broadly speaking, is divided into three sub-sub-subgenres.

One is the "I Can't Believe It's Not Sword And Sorcery" subgenre, where you've basically got Conan being Conan except the front cover has three moons in it to show its on another planet. Otherwise it's the usual assortment of sorcerers, monsters and swordfights.

The second is the "Everything is Atomic" subgenre, representing a slightly later point in the history of the literature. It is characterized by spaceships that look like chromed rockets and people in retarded shiny space clothes and finned helmets shooting each other with rayguns. More likely to include mad scientists and robots than sorcerers and monsters.

The third is Star Wars. It's characterized by being Star Wars.

Going by that definition, Cubicle 7's Rocket Age definitely fits.

I'd argue there's also fourth subgenre that is space westerns and those seem to be relatively alive compared to weird tales they evolved from.

That first one really exists due to the fact that writers had a hard time selling fantasy when the old Great Wheel of Genre Reincarnation was on the science fiction side. Editors wouldn't take 'em, but you could quickly fix up a rejected fantasy story and sell it to one of the magazines just by putting it on a distant planet.
Some authors have talked about this being an explicit request made by editors, back in the day. I think Poul Anderson did it a few times.

I would say John Carter stuff that gave birth to the genre was pretty much honest sci-fi adventure. It's just that it's science hasn't aged well. Not that what you say couldn't be true.

Yeah, but Poul Anderson also did stuff like Three Hearts and Three Lions. It's people like Howard who were probably more alike this, insisting that their fantasy stories just happened "on other planets" or "in the distant past".

It depends a lot on when it's written and how big the name was doing the writing. But my point stands: in a decade when SF was ascendant, editors just wouldn't buy fantasy stories, and vice versa.