The God-Machine Is Upon Us

The free 104-page rules update as well as The Chronicle book.

Happy 20th birthday, World Wide Web!

Thanks Tim!

Kev Goblinmaster Adams, legendary GW monster maker, is in need.

Iron Man Three

Iron Man Three (as it appears on screen) - rollicking good fun, very Shane Black in many ways (not least Tony Snark) does have the scaling issue of coming after The Avengers but was always gonna, is partly Warren Ellis's story Extremis but a big chunk of another biggish recentish Iron Man story, and of course stay through the credits. For comparison, this is a season opener (following a season finale) and IM2 is one of those middling monster-of-the-week episodes. 3D's no great shakes.

Trailers: Star Trek, Man Of Steel, Pacific Rim (eeee!)

It sounds like...

Via Jamie Wheeler: a Kickstarter for atmospheric sound effect tracks for dungeons, medieval cities, pirate ships, space battles, that kind of thing...

Man builds six-legged robot

Mm-hmm. Clearly this is one of those afternoons.

LARP Terminator armour

Yes, I said LARP Terminator armour. As in 40K.

Not the fleetest of foot, but... jinkies.

USS Vengeance

... sounds a bit hardcore and looks a bit like Serenity cunningly disguised as a Starfleet vessel...

Thou Shalt Not Cross The Streams

... is just one of the options in SFX's Ten Commandments of Sci-Fi voting form. But there are more pressing ones to vote for, like "Thou shalt not subject your female characters to rape because you are too lazy to characterise them properly, just 'to give them something to overcome'."

Happy 75th birthday, superhero comics!

There were precursors like the Phantom, as well as the pulp heroes, but Action Comics 1 came out 75 years ago today.

(The original Action Comics 1, obviously, not the one I picked up a year and a half ago for £2.20. The renumbering has meant this milestone has rather lacked hoo-ha. Well, apart from the trailer for the gigabudget movie version coming out this summer, obviously.)

Justin Achilli: "I think this is a golden age for tabletop gaming"

Justin Achilli talks the modern Classic World Of Darkness at The Oculus. “Now the world’s conspiracies are much more out in the open and they attack you if you call them out on their presence, and Vampire has inherited that world.”

Stew Wilson goes Beyond... the call of duty

Conpulsion attendees who contact our guest get a free copy of the laid-out PDF of his ghost mini-RPG Beyond.

The Conpulsion Closing Ceremony Video

... is online.

If you want to go specifically to me not thanking nearly enough people but also not swearing like a crazy homeless person, start at 6.30 and play till about 11.10.

(My 650th post here...)

Conpulsion 2013

Thank you to all who helped and GMed and played at Conpulsion.

And I can confirm that I was not expecting the Banquo Award as Spirit Of Scottish Gaming. As you'll see when Nearly Enough Dice upload that bit of video. (This is the last winner's Banquo bio, it's Paul Bourne!)

And special thanks I didn't include in my terrible rambling mini speech: thanks to all the gamers I've played with, from around age eleven to that afternoon. Because gaming can be awesome.

More coherent thoughts later.

Planes, Trains And Automobiles. And Boats.

Ships, aircraft, and to a lesser extent trains are all great isolated locations that you can't easily leave, perfect for both sieges and enemies within:

putting a smallish number of people with little in common into a plot like a disaster, or a mystery, or a smallish freeform. Fully mappable, controllable cast of NPCs, likely to attract attention from hostiles, smugglers wanting to transport something, people fleeing the country (or city or planet) and those pursuing them, and going a bit too fast and/or through hostile environments to easily get off.

Ships in RPGs often mean pirates, but if not then they mean monsters, up from the depths or lurking on board.

This is why there are Call Of Cthulhu adventures set on the Orient Express and the Mauretania, GURPS Horror shares Flight 13 with GURPS Space, the second adventure for the Ravenloft setting was Ship Of Horror, and Star Wars has Riders Of The Maelstrom attack a luxury space liner the Rebels are travelling on in secret...

101 things to find while exploring Star Trek style

Racing towards 101 due to the OP's enthusiasm, among others.

Mysterious stone structure under Sea of Galilee

Via Justin Achilli:

Atlantean embassy?

Apparently Mark Rein-Hagen is going to be at the UK Games Expo. As is Mummy: The Curse developer CA Suleiman. Oh well, I wasn't doing anything with that money anyway. :)

Abandoned mansions and castles which are not haunted at all

Nope. Definitely not.

Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.

... is the new title. Takes a bit longer to say, but if it helps sell, all power to it.

Our hero “puts together a small, highly trained, team of Agents to tackle the cases that haven’t been classified yet, the new, the strange and the unknown... Prepare for an epic adventure that showcases the hope and wonder of the human spirit. This is a world of Super Heroes, aliens and the unusual – of action, spectacle and world spanning stories. The show will speak to the human condition through the lens of our very human, non-powered S.H.I.E.L.D agents – that together we are greater than we are apart, and that we can make a difference in the world.”

Origins Award Nominees

Collected here at Flames Rising

Including Primeval and the Doctor Who card game among other things I would give a thumbs up to.

Carmine Infantino - a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

Carmine Infantino has died. He will be best remembered for co-creating the 60s Flash and Batgirl, but his Star Wars comics are among the earliest stories I remember, and still remember fondly.

So this isn't an all depressing week, check out those stories. Space pirates and sea dragons! Treacherous barons and gladiatorial battles! Diving into gas giants! Cyborg bounty hunters! Princess Leia sabotaging a factory planet! The schemes of Darth Vader! Years of classic space opera that the Expanded Universe has run with ever since.

Also yesterday, Jane Henson (widow of Jim and the second Muppeteer) has died.

I hope to provide less gloomy content sometime this week.

Iain Banks

Damn it.

Use the Force - inventively.

Lightsabre fight fanfilm with many lens flare gags but also smart tricky uses of other Jedi/Sith powers which you know PCs would try even though they never do in the films.

Conpulsion RPGs

Five slots, two days, 46 games with hopefully more to be confirmed.

I would draw particular attention to the Airship Pirates and Werewolf 20 auction games on Sunday, by the games' developers, as well as non-auctioned games by Stew Wilson, Phil Masters, Simon Burley, Gregor Hutton...