Tuesday 14 December 2010

TV Shows that didn't get an RPG Tie-in: Ultraviolet

Cast: from L to R:

Idris Elba - "Vaughan Rice" a soldier
Jack Davenport - Det. Sgt. Mike Colefield
Susannah Harker - Dr. Angela March
Philip Quast - Father Pearse J. Harman
I was left considering a comment from Emmett on Reality Refracted's Running a Cop Game - Part 1 and was reminded of the excellent Channel 4 six part drama "Ultraviolet" which was aired in 1998 (gosh is it that long ago!!)

The show featured a cop "Mike" (played by Jack Davenport) whose partner gets turned into a vampire and disappears.  Mike tries to find out what's happened to him and discovers that he's been turned into a vampire and then because he's poking about, gets recruited by a clandestine government organisation responsible for dealing with the emerging vampire menace.  Throughout the series they never said the vampire word instead they refer to them as Code 5's (Roman numeral V, gettit?)

It was a superb show which dealt with vampires in an intelligent and thoroughly "modern" way, had the production values of shows like "Spooks" and top quality acting from some of the UK's finest.  The material was so well put together I thought at the time it would make an excellent RPG.  I'm not aware of any published RPG tie-in or as a sourcebook for CoC or other modern Horror RPG (Blogosphere: show me I'm wrong).  Rather than me do an episode guide, here's the obligatory link to IMDB

My favourite episode was entitled "Terra Incognita" which features a man suffering from sickle cell anemia being flown to the UK from Brazil.  Accompanying the man on the flight are several coffin shaped military style flight cases with time locks set to open after sundown...

3 comments:

  1. Modus Operandi has a nice Ultraviolet to Spycraft conversion. http://www.modus-operandi.co.uk/?p=342

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  2. Ultraviolet is excellent as it takes it source material seriously and logically works out what it means in their world. I wish more shows/ movies would take the same level of care that Ultraviolet's writers took.

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  3. I never thought of adapting Ultraviolet as a role-playing campaign frame, but it would work really, really well. Good call!

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