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1939. Hollywood. A film starring Judy Garland and featuring a rousing musical accompaniment including 'Over the Rainbow' and 'Follow the Yellow Brick Road' is released into theaters and does unexceptional business for the time. Once television starts broadcasting the film its reputation soars; it is now one of the most well-known films ever made, with great critical and popular acclaim.
So why am I talking about a movie everyone reading this is familiar with? Because the world of Oz is a perfect one to set an RPG - or more than one. Certainly The Wizard of Oz (film) is based on the book 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,' and by itself contains enough to twist into a game format. But 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' was but the first of an enormous series written prior to World War II, with the original author L. Frank Baum writing 13 more books and his successor Ruth Plumly Thompson writing another 19, plus the illustrator of those 32 books (excepting the original) John R. Neill writing another 3. Counting a few more by additional authors in the late 40's plus sundry other materials published later, that amounts to a massive source of inspiration for scriptwriters.
A few of the oddball characters from the books that never made it into the films include: the Hungry Tiger, with a predeliction toward eating fat babies but a conscience to prevent him ever acting upon this; the Patchwork Girl, made of quilts and stuffing but given life with a bit too much whimsy in the process; the Glass Cat, made entirely of glass but also brought to life (proud of proclaiming that one can watch her brain work); and Professor H.E. Wogglebug, Highly Magnified (someone looked at a wogglebug using a magnifier and forgot to turn it off, so the Highly Magnified insect walked off at human size). Zaniness is a major theme of the Oz stories.
One thing that would have to be altered for Oz to work in an RPG is the tone. The books were written for children, and in one book Ozma (for those not in the know, the ruler of Oz after the second book) out-and-out refuses to fight upon imminent invasion until Dorothy comes up with an alternate plan. The ingredients are present to fashion an RPG however, and altering the tone to reduce the whimsically zany in favor of something more serious is aided by precedent: 'Return to Oz' already did it in 1985. The sequel to 'The Wizard of Oz' is much darker than that film, and shows just how easy it would be to strip the amusing veneer from the books' elements. The Gnome King of that movie showed up in seven subsequent Oz books, but was never taken all that seriously as a villain, nor were most of the other unpleasant inhabitants of Oz and its surrounding fairy lands. Change that and the material is present for a lengthy list of titles. Whether they would be good is impossible to judge, yet the imaginative foundation exists.
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