The Dragonmeet event booklet is out and there I am... I should really get the character sheets done.

Roots

The Guide To Glorantha is well and truly Kickstarted already, but still time to get in. And if you're not interested in Runequest, the page his a video interview with Mark Rein-Hagen about its influence on his work as well as interviews with Glorantha creator Greg Stafford.

Jimmy's End

A new half-hour film by Alan Moore. Probably not gameable, but perhaps of interest anyway.

Cambridge centre for killer A.I. and rogue biotech studies

A.I., climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology will all be studied.

At least one of the characters from The Watch House expected to take part.

(500th post here, making an obscure gag about the game I named the blog after. Go me!)

Great Googly Moogly

This is not the way to honour your inspirations.

The Island That Wasn't There

R'lyeh anyone?

WtI 2

Following the previous post... Wraith: The Iconoclasm has apparently stuck as a title.

There's been a murder...

Via Gregor Hutton:  

Fiasco recently reached our FLGS, and now there's a Tartan Noir playset.

TSR casts Resurrection?

Via Bailey and Abranson:

The Gygax family bring back TSR, and a print magazine called Gygax. Which seems maybe a legacy reference too far, but still - a print magazine! A magazine in print!

(No idea what's in it though...)

Wraith: The ICONography

Bruce Baugh has been looking at ICONS lately. I made observations about its random chargen, approximate power level of the characters it makes, and how much damage attacks do versus how much damage characters can generally take, and he thanked me and checked that out and agreed. Which was nice. :)

And then he converted Wraith: The Oblivion to it. Which I was not expecting. 8o

The Aspect conversion of Passions and Fetters certainly works, emphasising their importance with a big place on the sheet for a game with less stats and skills. The different ghostly powers are largely covered, but there are gaps. And of course, how to play the Shadow is still a question...

(Wraith: The Iconostasis? Wraith: The Iconoclasm?)

(Edit: Iconoclasm)

Overheard through a dungeon door...

"Dammit, nearly forgot to reset the trap! ... there, that's it. Now let's get clear!"

Inevitably some answers to this idea session are more amusing than atmospheric.

"But why do the humans hate us so much?"
"I blames lack of cultural exposure, me. If we just sat down an' talked, really TALKED? I think they'd see we're pretty much the same. You gonna finish that?"
"MY FOOD! MINE! DIE YOU MOTHERF-!"
(Sounds of conflict)

- Greg Stolze

V20: Hunters Hunted 2

Available for your perusal in its entirety in near-final edit text form along with the outline for Anarchs Unbound.

Journey's End

Today I saw the end of not one, but two shipbound SF series from the SciFi (SyFy!!!1one) Channel.

Stargate Universe ended quietly with a “the journey goes on...” pause before a third season that never came, but provided a kind of closure in its continuity.

SGU was pretty openly influenced by Battlestar Galactica, which provided such an ending in case the 2009 Writers’ Strike went on too long, but then came back for a final flourish complete with half an hour of quiet, bittersweet LOTR style codas and a final WTF moment following on from the season three cliffhanger WTF moment. I know it outraged some people, but compared to the end of, say, LOST, it was pretty good at tying together some wildly disparate threads (several of which I was less than keen on, but never mind) so my only real issue with it was one of staging which I found rather distractingly amusing.

There’s a lot to be said for having your characters ride off into the sunset - just as there’s a lot to be said for a clear finale.

I find the most reliable method is somewhere in between, a lesson taken from Buffy. (Many of my lessons come from Buffy.) Every year they provided and completed a seasonal arc, in case the players didn’t come back the show was cancelled, before a really really final one when they decided to go out on a high. Which has since been followed by a season and a half so far of comics, but hey.

Ten Episodes That Every Sci-Fi Show Must Have

Ten Episodes That Every Sci-Fi Show Must Have (if they last long enough).

Like the Six Staples or the other genre standard, but SFX’s Jayne Nelson takes it a bit further. Some overlap (although there’s no ascending to a higher plane) and some are likely to happen in any show that goes on long enough regardless of genre, but it’s still something to look at.

Good and bad examples are considered equally. There’s a lot to be said for trying at least one bad example.

Christmas
Alternate Universe
Someone Dies
Hallowe’en
Flashback
Crossover
The Quirky Self-Aware Episode
Outsider’s POV
Good Guy Goes Bad
Groundhog Day

Cloaking Device!

Well, not yet. But apparently viable.

If Onyx Path released a tenth anniversary edition of Demon: The Fallen, it would be called D10.

And what kind of dice does it use?

Whoa.

DriveThruRPG now has a donation and donation-sale page up and running.

I will be running Doctor Who at Dragonmeet. Wish me luck!

Bram Stoker's Birthday

Happy 165th birthday to Bram Stoker.

One of very few people to have an RPG named for his authorship, and even fewer if you don't count the RPG writers who did that.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour!

Why am I just hearing about this now?

And why am I not able to actually hear it?

“A recent show introduced the Algonquin Four; basically, Dorothy Parker’s coterie if they’d been bombarded with space radiation and turned into superheroic freaks, a la the Fantastic Four.”

Want to play Primeval? As a PBP?

Here - in RPGnet's PBP forums, so only registered forum users can see it.

About a year since my last PBP died ignominiously, as most of them do, and here I am offering to GM for someone who just joined RPGnet. Wish me luck!

Currently with one, maybe two players, so I would welcome a couple more...

Looper

The follow-up to the follow-up to Brick, Looper sees Rian Johnson stray out of writing and directing thrillers into a half-thriller half-thoughtful SF movie. Still plenty of slang and inappropriate machismo, but then it slows in pace dramatically, some of the worldbuilding pays off, and it becomes sort of a thinking person’s (time-travel action movie redacted as spoiler).

The worldbuilding is a nice balance of the totally necessary and the there just for style, and while you can make some educated guesses you might not spot which is which to begin with.

The mechanics of time travel (rare and a closed shop, and it affects memories as well as retro-affecting bodies) are interesting and consistent, even if some of them seem a stretch to my way of thinking how it “could” work.

You too can interview Gar Hanrahan!

Via Dan Davenport: #rpgnet welcomes Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan (Doctor Who, The One Ring, Laundry Files, Primeval) 11/5 19:00 CST / 11/6 01:00 GMT!

To join #rpgnet chat: go to http://www.magicstar.net/chat2/ , select your nick, log in, and type "/join #rpgnet"."

As Gar himself puts it:

I'm doing a chat on the rpgnet channel this evening. Well, this unearthly hour of the night, more accurately. Come ask me questions and/or watch me fall asleep on Mr. Keyboard.

Edit: the link did not work for me, so I missed it. The log is here.

Hurricane relief download bundle

Red Cross Hurricane Sandy relief RPG bundle on Drivethru.

$20 for $438.64 of downloads. Complete list and link in the RPGnet thread which also links to direct donations and other charities DriveThru supports.

Adventures, sourcebooks, novels, floorplans, map packs, and entire RPGs.

Contains three things I’ve actually heard of, and (ew) a game by Postmortem, but I’m sure we can find something useful or interesting in there. Among other things, four adventure-hook-y planets for Traveller and two horror adventures illustrated by Storn Cook.

Also available: a smaller bundle from Point Of Insanity Games.