Musical Inspiration Challenge: Part 13: The Final Complication

 The First Man on Earth by Ayreon.

Well, that’s definitely a complication. Holy shit.

Well, the lyrics..

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In fields of green, vast as the oceans
Is this a dream, is it evermore?
A million years, fast as a notion
I stand alone here on the silent shore

I'm after prey in the fields
Shelter in a cave from the cold and lonely nights
And now it all seems so real
Warming at the fireside beneath the pale moonlight

This is the dawn of time
I am the first to stand
Looking through the eyes of the primal man
This is the dawn of time
Witnessing the birth
I am the first man on earth

The skies of blue reach to the heavens
They go on and on forevermore
No avenues, no city sidewalks
Planet Mars is but ancient lore

This place has all that I need
No computers glowing screens, no industrial machines
Somehow it all seems surreal
Memories of days gone by, a slowly fading scene

No one here to blame me
No one here to hurt
So much space here to occupy my mind
I can breathe the breath of virgin land

The firefly at nighttime
The sounds of nothing known
And I belong here like I never have before
The wandering child returning home

When twilight falls, red is the sunset
Planets appear across the colored sky
No prison walls, no war, no bloodshed
Hard to believe this new world will die

I wish that I could stay for a while
In the dream world that the sequencer creates
And though it all seems so real
Now I fear the time is gone, I feel its heavy weight

Hold on to this moment in time
Savor a life how it used to be
Hold on to the world in its prime
Breathe in the air, feel the energy

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This one requires unpacking. See, this song is part of a larger metal rock-opera composed by Ayreon. You might remember I mentioned more of that in the earlier post about the other Ayreon song that my iPod “randomly” selected out of two thousand other options.  

In this case, a fellow is reliving past lives and discovers that he was the first man on earth. Currently though, the poor schlub is slowly asphyxiating in a tube on a decrepit Martian colony, following an apocalyptic war (he’s also the last man alive, you see).

Now I’ve never been a fan of Ayreon’s seeming love affair with Rousseau or the ‘bucolic ideal,’ but I can still like the music in general.

However, this represents a complication. And in that, it serves wonderfully. It complicates the living hell out of the nice, tight narrative I’ve been developing. And this, you see, is why I put this one at the end. It forces me to have to adjust, perhaps disastrously so, to the new required change.

As I stated, this complication’s function though is: “This is the one for oddities and weirdness encountered on the adventure.”

Certain adventure locales have histories and elements to them that exist for revisiting, or to allow the PCs to acknowledge a larger history of the world that surrounds them. For Pathfinder, this is usually the Aztlanti, and the aboleth. Those two forces hang high in the meta history of the core Pathfinder setting.

So what if our pirate ruin contains some ancient archives down in the flooded, treasure filled tunnels, since repurposed by buccaneers and hellknights, that harkens to an ancient set of runes or tales, stone tablets, which if observed and taken to the right person can open up new vistas for exploration, or dread.

Alternatively, the party may have discovered an ancient tunnel below the structure, and contained within a primitive man in odd dress that seems strangely out of place with the technologically advanced container he's in. A man out of time, who wants to restore the world that he's lost.

Its weak, but I like the idea of our complication forming a leaping off point. If I do this again, I might just rename this category the leaping off point.

Next in this series, I’ll try to summarize our adventure outline.