Making RPG stuff from a mostly-forgotten film: Krull

I’ve been working on my submission to the Cepheus Journal fanzine. My plan is to create an adaptation of the 1983 science fantasy movie Krull (Wikipedia / YouTube Trailer) for both the Sword of Cepheus & Barbaric! games.

Krull itself was a fairly unsuccessful movie, creatively and financially, with some nice visuals. However, the basic idea of Krull – an alien force invading a fantasy world with a magic fortress that moves once per day across the land, is a pretty good one. Also, the creature design of the Beast and his Slayers was quite well done, and was actually my principal inspiration for using Krull in the first place.

The original movie didn’t have a great amount of useful detail about the world, so I’ve been trying to pull ideas from other ancillary works based on the movie. I was hoping for some small details about the Beast and Slayers that I could use.

I picked up the novelization by Alan Dean Foster (He did all of the movie novelizations back in the day), but there wasn’t much there beyond a retelling of the movie itself.

Marvel put out a comic book tie-in, but it was a little rushed, and also didn’t have any useful background material.

Parker Brothers released a Krull board game (here’s a review). The contents are available on the Internet Archive. It doesn’t look particularly fun, but apparently, it came with collectible figures for Prince Colwyn and the Beast. The Glaive dice look particularly interesting as well. Again, no useful lore.

There was a Krull video game released in the same year as the movie. You can actually play the MAME version at the Internet Archive.

Finally, there’s one Krull fan fiction story over at Archive of Our Own. It’s a Krull/Star Wars mashup. Interesting, but not helpful for my purposes.

Conclusion

When you’re adapting a corner of pop culture as limited as Krull, you’re pretty much on your own. For my Cepheus Journal article, I was just planning on describing the Beast himself, and his various minions, so they can be dropped into any fantasy setting.

I’ll be filling in most of details on my own: What are those laser guns the Slayers use? What does the Beast want?

In retrospect, I should have probably started that way, instead of spending hours researching all of these obscure movie tie-in products. Though it was fun.

I’ll probably post a preview of the article later this week.