brainstorming from a book

I recently read the light fantasy book, "A Night In Lonesome October." I'm not generally a fan of fantasy, especially light fantasy, but the concept intrigued me and it has my mind spinning in game ideas once again. This should be natural, considering the plot.

...Lonesome October details "The Game," a magical event played out everytime a full moon lands on Halloween (fairly infrequent). The players are the standard movie monsters or characters of legends. Jack the Ripper, for instance, is the protagonist. Each player is trying to either keep the world as it is, or open a gate to the Elder Gods (Cthlulu, etc.) and change the world... significantly. Essentially, the Players are divided into the Openers and Closers. This naturally lends itself to board games with a bit of roleplaying. Also, the book has 31 chapters for each day of the month (great for a hard, time-controlled ending).

However, the idea that immediately sprang to life is what the game board would look like, which would be a map of the small 19th century English town the Players reside in. Sort of like Clue. But the map would be surrounded by a circle track of 31 spaces, each space with a picture of one phase of the moon starting with October 1st and ending with a full moon on Oct. 31st . As each turn ended, the marker on that track would advance one space, and game actions would change (but mostly increase in power) depending on the phase. The Game doesn't really get started properly until the new moon, up until then it's merely prep work for the event and all Players work together, regardless of "party politics," but as the days near Halloween and the moon grows larger, the Game naturally gets more frantic and the Players gain more power. Also interesting is the naturally occurring want to not reveal which side you're on. If, for instance, you revealed yourself as an Opener too early in the Game, all Closers would immediately knock you out.

The book practically lays out the player handbook for what sounds like an incredibly fun Clue with inter-player politics and the ability to kill off each other, wrapped in an intriguing world of legendary characters. The only problem is, it's already a book and I have this weird little hang up about adapting other works so directly. However, the mechanics are still worthwhile. Hopefully this will spur on some designs, or even get someone to read the book.

PS. There are many more game mechanics I didn't mention (read the book to discover them all), but here's a short additional list. Players have to figure out who's who, which side their on, and where they live, prep work includes gathering the necessary magical ingredients to open the Gate, all Players also have animal familiars, and Players have to determine where the Gate actually is based where all the Players live (an interesting design challenge to implement elegantly and dynamically every game). At one point in the book, the characters reminice about a long past game where no one could find where the Gate was supposed to be, so they all sat around at dinner and joked about it.

Also, another little tidbit to get you interested. In the book an owl says, "the only thing cats are good for are stringing tennis racket." A little morbid, but the board game version should be as well.