An Idea Has Been Eating My Brain

I came across this comment by the Trollgod himself via Grognardia:

Yes. My conception of the T&T world was based on The Lord of The Rings as it would have been done by Marvel Comics in 1974 with Conan, Elric, the Gray Mouser and a host of badguys thrown in.

Original Source

I think this could be the basis of a second alchemical proposal with three ingredients:

Rules: Pick a core rules set. You can use any game but only the core rules. Then add a single supplement for any game, not necessarily the one you are using.

Setting Inspiration:Pick the core book of your favorite fantasy setting. You may pick any setting but go for the core book/books. If you want Valdemar you get the original Heralds trilogy. For Pern, you get Dragonflight and Dragonquest. For Narnia you would get the four books with the Pevensie children. However, you're not directly taking the setting but using it as an outlines: geography, character types, magic style, etc. You can also get characters and broad setting plot lines (wars, etc) from here.

Imagery and story types: Use one entire year's output of your favorite comic company. From these get your imagery to describe fights, plots and motivations for NPCs, and even NPCs outright. Where the fantasy books provided your macro scale outline the comics provide your micro scale inspiration. For me it would probably be either 1977 DC or 1984 DC (I was always more of a DC fan), but you could do some minor or even indie company. The reason I say pick a year at a company over the run of one comic is there is more likely to be a distinct flavor to a given year than to a given comic, especially at the two majors.

For example, imagine your next Microlite20 supplemented with Testament game built using Narina (as above) with the DC 1984 run. Or imagine a Mutant Future game supplemented with Palladium's After the Bomb that took its broad outline from Farmer's Dark Is the Sun and the 1971 DC run (which brings in all of Kirby's Fourth World among other things).

I think Jeff's proposal was a brilliant idea. I think mine is pretty good, but I'd love to see others of you post formulas that you've used or just think would be interesting. Limited pallet is a powerful creative force. A sense of direction is as well.