A week or so ago, I watched the 1960 version of “The Time Machine” for the first time in decades. So I got to thinking about some of my other fantastic influences that predated my exposure to D&D.
I spent A LOT of weekends at my grandparents place in the late 1970s & early 1980s. Usually there would be several movies on WPIX (Channel 11) and WWOR (Channel 9) on the weekend afternoons that filled my young brain with all sorts of stuff.
Old Westerns, WWII movies, Godzilla, biblical epics, Planet of the Apes, crime dramas, cheesy sci-fi… just about anything you could think of.
And of course “adventures.” Robin Hood, The 3 Musketeers, Tarzan, Zorro, Treasure Island, etc.
A subcategory of the adventures was the “lost world/ prehistoric/ dinosaurs” movies. Stuff like “The Lost World,” “The Land that Time Forgot,” “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” etc.
So I got an impulse to start making up a sort of RPG setting for adventures in the “lost world” style. I know it has been done several times by others, but I’ve never tried it myself.
Also, I’d like to mix in some more science-fantasy elements in the tone of “Yor The Hunter from the Future,” “Thundarr the Barbarian” and similar influences.
So first I needed a name to call it, so “Island in the Hidden Sea of Fire” – an island in a sea of lava in a vast underground cavern. I’ve started making up a list of things to include that are basically tropes of the genre. Will post again when I have something more concrete to show.