Has anyone else seen this movie yet? Parts of it are very Planescapy, particularly the "Troll Market" scene, which is a wonderfully inspiring model for a market in Sigil. The unique portal the goblin smith opens and the climactic battle on the giant clockwork would be excellent Planescape set pieces as well.
It was an engaging movie, too. I liked it much better than the first one. It helped that they got rid of the "rookie" viewer-surrogate and concentrated on the freaks.
I want to go see this now.
I agree it has great potential as a mine for Planescape.
The troll market makes a good extraplanar bazaar, the creatures could be ripped off for any number of things. This was the Fair Folk done right. Sidhe that become ivory statues at death, tooth fairies, glamour as a plot point. The golden army itself could be a very interesting bit of Planescape and might fit into any number of potential plots. The overall plot of the Fair Folk making war upon mundane races who broke an ancient pact and drove them to near extinction.
You could make entire campaigns from material pulled out of the movie.
I see I wasn't the only one thinking "Mechanus" during the clockwork battle. I also thought Hellboy and Liz should take a honeymoon in Sigil and rent an elemental suite at Chirper's. But, then, I realized that Hellboy's bound to get into a fight and throw somebody through a shop window, and then the Hardheads show up. Not good.
I've always wondered why the BPRD brings along those "Muggle" FBI agents during missions. I mean, when your job is to fight ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties, why do you show up for work in a suit armed with a 9mm? If you're going to face a swarm of tooth fairies, you need a couple of scrolls of antilife shell, a scroll of cloudkill, and a necklace of adaptation.
[I've always wondered why the BPRD brings along those "Muggle" FBI agents during missions.]
"Everybody, meet ensign... I mean AGENT Ricky. He will be accompanying you on your missions to let the audience see the bad guys in action without letting them harm you. Show these men some respect. Their job is to die to make you look cool."
I heard they had to include that guy in the first movie because the studio figured the audience couldn't relate to a demon king, a fish-man, and a mentally unstable pyrokineticist. I'm glad that this movie was the Hellboy movie as it should have been. It was flat-out awesome.
The fey-versus-humans thread inspired me to write a campaign based around that for regular D&D (with the PCs as the fey agents, for a twist). But, I think that everyone's too inundated with magical beings in Planescape for it to work in that setting.
The imagery was erally great and I agree of the planescapey assessment. I didn't think about that during the film though oddly enough. Rather, I thought of The Man Slayer with the elf prince (wiki Birthright if you need to know more).
Edit: I don't know what the deal with that link on manslayer. What's up with that as I didn't intend that to happen?
A CamelCase configuration in our wiki system was being triggered. It thought you were trying to show a link to our wiki. I've turned that off.
I saw it and enjoyed it. I hadn't thought about the Planescape parallels, but I agree. The Troll Market would be a good approximation of entering a bazaar in Sigil, but I would picture Sigil as bigger and more wide-open. The Troll Market seems more cramped, which isn't surprising for someplace underground. And yes, everything after the meeting with the goblin smith could be borrowed nearly wholesale and dropped into a Planescape adventure. Nice catch!