Dream City Knights: Our Creative Touchstones

Dream City Knights: Our Creative Touchstones

Ideas tend to come from all over the place, even if, admittedly, it is rare having a contemporary TTRPG draw inspiration from a silent 1920s movie. And yet, it was indeed Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis that set the stage and mindset about a city where everything would need to be contained, and whose sole purpose would be unending growth and evolution; even at the expense of its inhabitants. This urban concept still sits at the core of Dream City Knights. 

As the initial idea grew, we quickly moved on from a very physical, very real world city to a one consisting of dreams. We began imagining a place that somehow contained something as malleable as the dreamworld itself. We started thinking of a Dream City, which, quite indirectly, led us to establishing the main aspects of the game itself: our protagonists / player-characters should be teenagers, there should be something adolescent and rebellious in the gameplay itself, and balancing the experience between the real and the dream world should form an integral part of the experience. 

As it is, Dream City Knights has taken inspiration from multiple sources, be it other Role-playing games, TV series, music albums, comic books, movies or even paintings. Below you will find a decidedly incomplete list of said inspirations to hopefully both give you an idea of what to expect from DCK, and to inspire you in your own creative endeavors. 

Role-playing games

• Kids on Bikes by Hunters Entertainment
• Tales from the Loop by Free League Publishing
• Ultraviolet Grasslands by Luka Rejek
• Lasers & Feelings by John Harper
• Electric Bastionland by Bastionland Press

TV Series

• Stranger Things by the Duffer brothers
• Chilling Adventures of Sabrina by Robert Aguirre-Sacasa
• Riverdale by Robert Aguirre-Sacasa
• Twin Peaks by David Lynch

Comic Books & Graphic Novels

• Locke and Key by Joe Hill
• Sandman by Neil Gaiman
• La fièvre d’Urbicande by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters

Music Albums & Singles

• Appetite For Destruction by Guns n Roses 
• Nevermind by Nirvana
• Let go by Avril Lavigne
• American Idiot by Green Day
• Stay Hungry by Twisted Sister 
• Killing in the Name Of by Rage Against the Machine
• Americana by Offspring

Movies

• The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus by Terry Gilliam
• Big Fish by Tim Burton
• Arizona Dream by Emir Kusturica
• Fast time at Ridgemont High by Amy Heckerling
• Breakfast Club by John Hughes
• Dazed and Confused by Richard Linklater
• Mean Girls by Mark Waters
• Stand By Me by Rob Reiner
• Dark City by Alex Proyas
• A Goofy Movie by Kevin Lima
• Jumanji by Joe Johnston
• The Craft by Andrew Fleming
• Metropolis by Fritz Lang

Paintings

• Stone Islands by Zdzisław Beksiński
• Friedrich Kuhn by H.R. Giger
• Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

Books

• It by Stephen King
• A Dreamer’s Tale by Lord Dunsany
• Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini
• Piranesi by Susanna Clark
• Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
• Stand by me by Stephen King
• The Dark Tower by Stephen King
• H.P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle by H.P.Lovecraft
• Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities by Konstantinos Dimopoulos