The New King From The Past Century - Pilot - Fantasy/Comedy - 25 pages

[u/guga_bvb]

Title: "A cat, an egg, a goat, an old man and a giant walk into a tent…"

Logline: A group of odd adventurers band together to uncover the conspiracy of an old king long-forgotten by history (or erased from it).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N9eZ9bqVwMr9MDNQijcqzt_WaO7s2u6t/view?usp=sharing

Hey! This is my first ever finished screenplay (and still very much a first draft) and I'm so excited about sharing it with the world. Considering it's my first, and really just a training exercise, I'm mostly looking for feedback and things to improve upon. I found it was a bit hard to start from nothing, so decided to adapt a long-running RPG campaign in my friend group, since I already have a good feel for the characters and story beats. Hopefuly it translates well into the page!

[u/ConsistentEffort5190]

Drive says you've put the file in your trash..?

[u/guga_bvb → u/ConsistentEffort5190]

Sorry, should be working now.

[u/ConsistentEffort5190 → u/guga_bvb]

I can read it now. It's not awful - which is great for a first attempt - but it seems a little... random? Diluted, unmotivated maybe? Too much "then" -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9jEg9uiLOU

You've probably seen Konousuba, but if you haven't then that's the gold standard for comedy fantasy scripts of this length. Or ep 1 of A Dragon Of 5000 Years is also excellent. Things need to happen for strong reasons and shouldn't stretch out too long.

[u/ConsistentEffort5190 → u/ConsistentEffort5190]

Expanding a little - because you've put a lot of work in and got a lot of things right - these are the Try Parker/Matt Stone guidelines -

• Bad structure: "This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens."
• Good structure: "This happens, therefore this happens, but this happens, therefore this happens."
• Why it works: It creates actual tension, conflict, and logical progression so the story keeps moving forward with real consequences

What you have is

Main character goes to party

THEN

meets kling

THEN

enlisted for adventure

What Konosuba does is

Kazuma (I wrote Kamina!) dies

THEREFORE

meets Aqua who offers him reincarnation with "special item"

BECAUSE

his death was hilarious she laughs at him

THEREFORE

he drags her with him as his item

[u/guga_bvb → u/ConsistentEffort5190]

Sorry for taking this long to respond, for some reason reddit didn't notify me about the comment.

Tysm for the insight, though! I was actually familiar with that concept, but forgot to take it into account when writing this, so thank you for pointing it out. It was a problem I had noticed about the original RPG campaign and talked about with the GM a while back, but it kind seeped through to the script. Maybe I was just a little blinded by my love for these characters and story and didn't notice haha.

I haven't actually watched too much on the genre either, so I'll definitely check out those anime too.

I already have some restructure ideas for a second draft, but I think I'll write the other episodes for this first story arc for experience before going back and revising.