Bryan, you seem to be trying to cherry pick ideas and tropes that appeal to you without understanding how they work. The best analogy that I can come up with to describe your behavior is like trying to make a house out of Lego Bricks, Megablocks, Lincoln Logs, Erector Set pieces, Play Dough, and some Stoffer's Chocolate Cake Mix.
Although they have some similarities between each product, they are in no way designed to work together, nor are they good building material for what you are trying to make. They each work well enough with their own pieces to form some object or story arc, but, again, they cannot interface with each other.
Expanding on my analogy, Lego Bricks and Megablocks are the two most similar products, but they are completely different scale and will not connect to each other. The best you can hope to get is to have a bunch of Lego's jammed on one of the Megablocks and hope nothing will break apart at the seams.
Next, we try to shoehorn the Lincoln Logs on. uh. well. Ok, maybe we can jam it on top of the Megablocks? No, that barely fits on there, so you have to basically balance your Logs on the Bricks/Blocks structure and hope it doesn't tip over.
Now you try to put on the nice spinny do-dads from the Erector set, but you've already added too much to the structure and they won't fit, so instead of the machine screws and nuts normally used to hold it together, you resort to using a power drill to force in some wood screws. Thus damagaing the Bricks, Blocks, and/or Logs that you're trying to attach the Erector set to.
Ah, but the structure is still a bit wobbly an the Logs keep trying to fall off, so you mash some Play Dough that you had in the little plastic cans for over a decade to try to glue the Logs back on, but the Dough is too dry and won't stay put and so you try mixing some white glue in with the Dough to make it sticky again. Which, seems to work but you can't use the Dough for anything else now.
Finally, to try to make the entire thing appealing you buy a new box of Cake mix, throw in all the ingredient of the mix, swish it around a bit with a fork and put it in the fridge (completely ignoring the fine instructions on the back on how to make the cake), and then decide to toss it in the freezer to try to make a cake pop-sickle thing before finally placing your previously made Chimera of a house on top of the cake pop-sickle which promptly defrosts and leaves a suspiciously looking mud.
Right. So.
The point I've tried to make here is that you are damaging the franchises and stories that you are trying to idolize with your clumsy footsteps to whatever it is you're trying to make.
Now, what you should be doing is making up a story that uses the themes and tropes from your sources, not trying to incorporate them entirely. You can have characters and settings
similar to your sources, but you can't have them
exactly the same character otherwise you have to bring in all the constraints and existing story line of the source setting.
Simply placing the events of your story in the far future or distant past is not acceptable!In fact, what I recommend is that you try to make a short story of a few paragraphs that describes what you want to portray in your campaign. Here's a few key points:
- As with any story, you need at least one protagonist, at least one antagonist, and most importantly a conflict between them.
- Protagonists and Antagonists may be individual characters, groups, or factions, in increasing size of scale.
- The player's character(s) are always a protagonist of the story, even if they turn out to be the bad guy or anti-hero.
- The story starts off with an introduction, which will introduce the setting of the conflict, the main protagonists, and the main antagonists, in any order.
- Next, the body of the story progresses through the conflict, with an gradual increase in tension and intensity between the protagonists and antagonists up until the climax, at which point the protagonist prevails over the antagonist in some way or another.
- Finally, the story is wrapped up in the summary. Followers of the antagonists are becoming less of a threat to the protagonists, and the protagonists start to divert their attention to something else.