CHVRCHES - Get Out

Possibly my next Vampire game theme.

T-Day +1

24 hours in, $80000 passed.

The Trinity Continuum Kickstarter

HERE WE GO.

HOPE. SACRIFICE. UNITY.

Since you’re reading my blog, you may be mildly curious about my part in the books. I’m on the core book, with setting material, Allegiances and Storyguide advice for the contemporary setting.

And funded in 3 1/2 hours.

The first word of mine included, not counting art notes, is Sydney.

Vampires don't get colds. Bastards.

Update: Outsider hopefully starting next week when we are all healthy. Gives me time to plan things, name the major NPCs, that kind of thing, while not full of cold.

Vampire: Outsiders

The game from this post hopefully starts tonight, and now has a title. More details to follow, one hopes.

Transporting your team

Getting ready to play a Marvel SAGA game about the official superteam of Michigan, we find that our protectorate is... a bit larger than the UK. So Chris (hello Chris!) digs into looking for suitable carrier craft that can get a superteam (including a rock monster who probably weighs at least a ton) to non-Detroit issues reasonably promptly.

This is also why so many teams have teleporters these days.

Movement can be an issue once the team arrives as well.

We have four PCs and at least two can fly. I don’t really want to make the rock monster the only one who can’t.

Age Of Heroes

Age of Heroes, an AV Club series on superhero movies year on year, from the author of the action movie series A History of Violence. There’s less material here than in action, but it should be interesting reading. Tonight: Superman.

Compare 4-Color to 35-Millimeter at Tor.

Early Man

Nick Park’s Early Man is in cinemas today. Yay!

The Doomsday Clock

We now sit at two minutes to midnight. Think about what you can do in two minutes.

Orun

New Agenda Publishing have announced their first game, Orun, “a space opera set in the post-Apotheosis.” Sentient species have come together to ascend beyond the physical - but something’s gone wrong, and it’s up to the players’ characters to find out what.

Dialogue saved for later

“How bad is it?”
“It’s bad. They don’t even imagine we can stop them.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

The creative adult is the child who has survived.
Ursula K. Le Guin

Like many, I found Le Guin’s Earthsea books in a school library, in unassuming little paperbacks. I read the original trilogy in a week.

Naming your superhero team

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not great at naming superhero teams.

I often get stuck trying to find something alliterative, even though that’s actually not that common. For US city or regional teams, which superhero games often involve, the logical comparison would be in sports, and the NFL has just four alliterative teams out of thirty-two. More than one in twenty-six, but still not that common. (Only one, the Buffalo Bills, came from the AFL, fact fans. And the XFL had zero out of eight. The World League had four out of seventeen, however, counting either how the New York Knights sound or the Cologne Centurions read.)

Sense Of Right Alliance is an... interesting team but their name is not particularly thematic. Shrek isn’t a particularly righteous guy.

Maybe there just aren’t that many good names out there. It’s why I have stuff about two different properties called the Avengers.

Anti-trope fantasy adventure hooks

As part of RPG.net’s new Creative Open subforum, 101 adventure hooks based on turning D&D standards on their heads.

My own contributions are fairly mild as twists go. Multiple competing parties raiding a newly-opened dungeon would be a smallish change. Although the party moving to stop an evil wizard building a dungeon would be more different.

Coming soon:

Anarchs or Unbound, depending if I run V20 or Requiem Second.

Vampires at the bottom of the ladder, and the people they have more in common with than their supposed peers.

Now to choose a theme song.

I'm in the business of misery

After seeing Paramore I swing back to wanting to run Buffy. (And not just because of the woman with pink hair in the traditional Misery Business singalong.)

January possible GMing update

Games start again tomorrow. I will be there, assuming I can get back from Glasgow after seeing Paramore tonight. (Which in turn assumes I can get to Glasgow tonight. The forecast suggests there may be snow early on.) But I have no particular GMing plans.

I do have Star Wars D6 and Vampire: The Masquerade character sheets ready to go, though. Sure I had Buffy sheets somewhere too...

And one-shots ready to go, though it looks like GEAS isn’t doing them this term.

The Star Wars one-shot is breaking into a giant prison ship...

Supernatural's first list of plot hooks

Ahead of the latest attempt at a spinoff, the creator of Supernatural posted the list of plot hooks he started with thirteen years ago. Some are even still unused! So if you need a random list of urban fantasy or horror ideas...

They never did the Winchester Mystery House?

Pegg! Frost! Ghosts! TV!

Truth Seekers!

If it happens I am so very down for this.

ArtStation goes Beneath The Waves

SF, fantasy and some horror art for aquatic environments, equipment, characters and creatures.

Ever used a random object as a toy spaceship?

Freelance artist Eric Geusz takes that tendency one step further. I first saw his can opener carrier in the ILM ArtStation Star Wars challenge, and he also draws and paints spaceships that aren’t based on household objects among other cool things.

Dystopia Rising Evolution open call

Dystopia Rising Evolution Needs YOU!

JJ Abrams' Demimonde

Demimonde, a new SF series from JJ Abrams, in the offering pilot script to broadcasters phase. About:

a family - consisting of a mother who works as a scientist, her husband and their young daughter - who all get into a terrible car crash. After the mother winds up in a coma, her daughter begins digging through her experiments in the basement and winds up transporting to another land amid a world’s battle against a monstrous, oppressive force. Her father then follows her into this new world.

Portal SF or portal fantasy? (Fantasy suggested by another land rather than another world.)

Could be fun!

Since it sounds like Abrams wrote the first episode, I would expect mystery, but considering his last couple jobs I would also expect space and monsters and such. The father-daughter dynamic is an interesting choice too.

From the description, the show I’d create would be a lot like Joel and Ellie from The Last Of Us thrown into FarScape instead of a zombie apocalypse. Fairly light-hearted familial bickering in a spaceship. The feel depends on the daughter’s age and her and her parents’ casting, of course - a college-age-plus daughter and an older mentor-y dad would play differently again.

The boardgame renaissance has really arrived...

... because people are making and selling counterfeit boardgames. An unwitting buyer compares fake and real copies of Pandemic Legacy. Given that bootleg toys are often made with substandard and unsafe materials, this is a rather worrying development.

Thanks to Steve Dee for the link.

Trinity and Æon art

Three more pieces in the Onyx Path Monday Meeting post. The top piece is from Æon, showing the Æsculapian Order in action. The next pieces are from the Trinity core, and the first is called Planning A Heist, and I may have squeed audibly.

Star Wars matters

It’s been said before, but it does.

When I was a kid we had Star Wars wallpaper. Just now, thanks to Kiersten White on Twitter, I saw a link to a kids’ bedspread set with Rey wielding her lightsaber, Poe running with BB-8, and Finn with Rose, and I got a bit happy cry. These will be kids’ heroes growing up.

Time for new games...?

GEAS starts again next week. That feels a week late, but never mind. No idea what to do really, if anything.

I seem to be thinking a lot about superheroes, though. The revival of a Marvel SAGA game from many years back may have spurred that. Probably back to the ICONS idea where the PCs are the Big Team and the rest of the universe follows.

I also kind of want to do another Vampire game, after the last one went... away from my idea. And Buffy for the same reason.

The Avengers (ITV's, not Marvel's)

Shane Black is spearheading a revival of the Steed and Peel Avengers, set in 60s Britain as the original show was... sort of. Depends on casting and other writing and so on, of course, as the basic premise is “spy show with a rather high Weird Level” and they might not get to keep the name.

Back in the day I thought ITV should bring it back to go up against Doctor Who. (And I would have called Colin Firth about playing Steed, pre The King’s Speech when he became too big and very pre Kingsman when he basically did that.)

How to get a city you've never visited right

The A. V. Club looks at The Chi and other TV series set in Chicago, nominally or otherwise.

My own experience of Chicago can be summed up by adding “By Night” to the city’s name - and based on later reading, the classic Vampire: The Masquerade setting isn’t a very accurate representation either, though it does have nice historical touches like the Brujah being representatives of generations of radicals. You could lift a lot of it out and put it in another city like New York pretty easily - use CBGB’s for the Succubus Club and a lot of it fits.

That time Snoopy joined the Apollo mission

Charles Schulz allowed NASA to use Snoopy as their safety program mascot, which resulted in silver Snoopy pins going into space and being given to flight safety staff for exceptional service.

I find this befuddling but lovely.

Dystopia Rising: Evolution

The next Storypath game, to be developed by Eddy Webb, Dystopia Rising: Evolution brings the post-apocalypse horror LARP setting to the tabletop.

A long look at The Last Jedi

The Lucasfilm Story Group in a half-hour special Star Wars Show.

Shall we play a game, Captain?

Modiphius have published official Star Trek Adventures stats for the original series and Next Generation crews and their Enterprises, and it looks like they’re in the starting character range. This is nice, for reasons I have ranted about before. Especially because starting STA characters feel pretty competent.

The new Critical Role ongoing campaign starts tonight. Might be interesting.

Giles gets a spinoff comic

CBR talks to Joss Whedon and co-writer Erika Alexander about the forthcoming Giles miniseries, which factors into the various things that have happened to the OG Watcher in the comic seasons.

(Short version: he died, and got better, but a bit wrong.)

“When we’re out of that phase we think we remember it, but the physical and mental taffy-stretching-machine of adolescence is something you have to be feeling to truly understand. We make it an origin story after the fact: how I came to be me. During... well, it is an origin story, but it’s the falling-in-a-vat-of-radioactive-acid kind.”

And the interview ends with the perennial ache of a Ripper TV miniseries mention.

New Gamemaster Month!

New Gamemaster Month

Granted, if you’re reading this blog you’re probably not a potential new GM... but you might know someone who could be interested!

Even if not, the suggested games - Trail Of Cthulhu, Unknown Armies and Numenera - may be new to you, and have some interesting tricks for the best way to run them.

We Could Be Heroes (What do you say?)

Cycling back to superheroes, and idly including Ziggy Stardust in the list of previous heroes in a setting, running with this idea again as well as the Bowieverse running with something similar...

Many have speculated on the identity of the trickster hero Ziggy Stardust. Some claim he was lost British astronaut Major Tom, transformed by some cosmic power when he found life on Mars. No-one knows for sure, as the musician and master of disguise vanished after two of the five years he often spoke about.

Aladdin Sane looked very much like him, but claimed to be a different person entirely and evidenced different powers as a finder of lost things. In time he, too, vanished.

Some say that The Thin White Duke was another recipient of the same power, the “emotionless superman” using it to build a criminal empire before his ultimate defeat by Glass Spider.

Stardust’s legacy was taken up by heroes like the Scary Monsters, Tin Machine, Spaceboy and Earthling. And some say he returned as the wise but unpredictable Blackstar, last seen trying to save the prisoners of a cult in the villa of Orman...

Long-term (superhero) campaign advice

15 points based on 150 sessions of a superhero game. Featuring two systems, pitch resets, genre conventions, vanishing plot threads, and Doom Squid.

I recognise some of these lessons from The Watch House, like point 3 about personal screentime and group numbers - it very much depended on how entertaining the rest of the group found the shenanigans, and fortunately the group generally had a lot of time for it.

New Agenda Publishing

New Agenda Publishing: coming soon from some of the best names in RPGs.

Make your monsters scarier than your traps

A belated idea for a line when threatening a D&D boss monster after a dungeon of easy fights and near-deadly traps:

“We’ve been right through your temple and the only things that gave us any trouble were the doors. And you don’t look like a door.”

What was Blackbeard reading?

Or at least stuffing pages of into his cannons? Seagoing travelogues, apparently. Makes sense.

Routine

Burritos return. All is well.

What routines do your characters have? Favourite foods, places they like to hang out even when not picking up adventure hooks?

"I only make eyes..."

A genetic cure for blindness, at just... $425,000 per eye.

I’m sure organleggers can compete with that.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine began twenty-five years ago today, a new series for a new year.

The third live-action Trek show, and the first to come on while another was running, DS9 also moved away from the planet-of-the-week, literally, with the titular station sitting in orbit of one planet - while having a handy wormhole nearby to make it a waystation for aliens to come and go. This helped to mainstream heavily serialised genre TV, alongside the even-more-serialised other space station show Babylon 5.

It also went pretty dark pretty quickly, certainly by Trek standards and sometimes by regular TV standards. This started as early as Duet in season one, but really got going with the Dominion war and key episodes like In The Pale Moonlight. But it also delivered Far Beyond The Stars, about the power of hope for the future.

Please Stand By

My new Australian calendar notes that this is a New Zealand holiday called... Day After New Year’s Day. That about sums it up really.

The Bicentenary Of Frankenstein

Frankenstein was first published two hundred years ago today.

(Among other things, this demonstrates that the Christmas book market wasn’t up and running yet. Jane Austen’s final novel Persuasion got its first limited print run out by December 17th 1817.)

The metaphorical weight of Frankenstein gave a catchy name to Mad Science, Science Gone Wrong, Messing With The Natural Order and a bunch of other ideas like it - though also failing to take responsibility for one’s mistakes, which is the real sin.

The last century of its fame was helped in no small part by Boris Karloff in James Whale’s film, but by that point it was already over a century old.

And it’s still running. The Dark Universe might not be getting a new version of The Bride Of Frankenstein next year, but in the last decade we’ve seen The Frankenstein Chronicles, Second Chance aka The Frankenstein Code,I, Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s Army, Frankenweenie, The National Theatre’s adaptation directed by Danny Boyle, Dark Harvest: Legacy Of Frankenstein, and the second edition of Promethean: The Created...

Happy New Year

Toast the new year
Bid farewell to the old

And we go on. Take care out there.