1: The Snow Queen
The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen
As the example I cited in the intro post this seems as good a place to start as any. Scottish Ballet is doing it this year and The Ice Tower is currently in cinemas about an actress playing the queen and a fan getting caught up in the world.
It was also the starting point for Frozen though the result is pretty different - see early designs here that are more like a blue Cruella before making Elsa a beloved superhero.
The Snow Queen isn’t a traditional story, it was published in 1844 in a book literally called New Fairy Tales, but it’s familiar enough now.
It starts with the Devil creating a mirror that shows only the worst in everything and breaking it in an attempt to invade Heaven and that’s just the prologue. One of the splinters goes into a boy named Kai’s eye and this makes him a target for the Snow Queen, so his friend Gerda sets off to rescue him. On the way she has various side adventures and is helped and hindered by royalty, talking animals and the like.
It’s very much the kind of story you might get from playing Once Upon A Time. So for RPGs it would be an easy adaptation to kitchen-sinky fantasy, while the motley assortment of heroes trying to rescue someone from a sinister powerful type’s fortress is one of the most basic story outlines we could take.
The Devil’s mirror could be a plot hook all on its own - I could drop it into Relics or some World Of Darkness games with ease.
Cold-tinted glasses
A pair of antique spectacles made with glass from the Devil’s mirror, allowing a user to see the flaws in everything. Useful for engineering and proofreading and the like, but likely to leave you with a negative view of the world.
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