Being the second thing in a setting

Tonight sees the TV premiere of Sister Boniface Mysteries, a spinoff from loosely-Chesterton-based super-cosy mystery series Father Brown. Comparing the two leads to some general thoughts on being the second or subsequent thing in an established setting. What do you keep, and what do you change?

Father Brown often uses the classic amateur sleuth setup of discovering a murder while doing something else. Sister B. is on secondment to the local police as a forensic advisor, so gets called in. It follows that the local police don’t always complain about her turning up and interfering unlike with the parent show. The disapproving authority figure roles go to the Mother Superior and a disapproving landlady. It rings a few more changes with the idyllic little town having the rather more on-the-nose name Great Slaughter, one of its more playing-with-convention notes like Sister B. imagining crimes in the style of silent movies.

Licenced settings often work by making the game an imagined spinoff. Players brought in by the licence generally want it to keep close for that fan fun, so what kind of changes do you ring?

Inevitable The Watch House talk!

It wasn’t the most straight to Buffy The Vampire Slayer pitch I had when starting, but it goes for the growing up stories in a college setting and its metaphorical bit is about what to do with expectations placed upon you by family and other circumstances. It also had the example of Angel as a different setup in the same universe, and I knocked it back a few years from the then present to avoid a major status quo change at the end of Buffy... which I then had to deal with when the game ran for seven seasons as well. One major imagined-third-series pointer was to avoid some of the classic genre staples that one or both of the TV series had done, while gleefully raiding supers and other sources for ones they missed.