Quatermass!

Hammer and Legendary looking to bring back Quatermass, with David Farr (Hanna, The Night Manager) writing.

Thanks to Paul Cornell for the news!

Comics Will Break Your Heart

A preview of the new novel by Faith Erin Hicks, Comics Will Break Your Heart, explaining the Jack Kirby quoting title.

Playing With Fyre

A Detroit LARP group has announced plans to host a Fyre Festival LARP. Following the real fiasco in 2017, now the subject of two feature-length documentaries and counting, I joked that it would make a great basis for a game... either horror or comedy...

Thanks to Matt M. McElroy for the link!

To See The Invisible Man

The Dark Universe has been tabled. Not a huge surprise, but as someone who thought The Mummy (2017) was patchily fun, kind of a bummer.

Instead, it looks like the side plan to get horror-centric studio Blumhouse to make smaller movies in between big ones will go ahead, with Leigh Whannell (Saw) making a new unconnected version of The Invisible Man.

As Variety put it:
Johnny Depp was previously attached to "The Invisible Man," but sources say he will not appear in this film

(rimshot)

From The Dust 15

Is this a face you can trust?

I suppose it depends what you’re trusting her to do.

Timeskips

What would I do for a Stranger Things style Kids On Bikes game? Maybe timeskips. And not just back to the 80s...

The Curse Of Griffith Park

L.A. By Night brings up some haunted history. Thanks to Dragonchrome on G&S Twitch for the link.

Welcome! Everything is -

I think you could run a game in the style of The Good Place, but changing the setting radically every five or six sessions might be tricky.

Taking games to the poles

Games played by polar explorers - and about polar explorers - a century ago. Something for the long cold nights ahead...

Buffy The Vampire Slayer, BOOM! 1

The first issue of the BOOM! Studios Buffy The Vampire Slayer Ultimate style reboot series is out.

I’m certainly curious. The art is nice, the dialogue has some fun, and the setup has some intriguing differences.

Issue one alone is not really enough to judge beyond the dialogue and the art, as it’s about the equivalent of ten minutes of show. (Looks like the first four issues will be the first story arc so that scans.) But so far it’s not as different a reboot as oh, let’s say, the movie to the show. Or even less far, the script for the movie to the show.

We have Buffy, Willow, Xander, Giles, Sunnydale High, Joyce, bumpy vampires, patrolling in cemeteries...

It's horrible, I love it... what is it?

The Colour Out Of Space. H.P. Lovecraft. Nicolas Cage. Richard Stanley!

I know Mr. Stanley through my brother, and vividly remember the time he helped bring a deer carcass full of fireworks one Beltane.

Rogue One in Star Wars: Legion

Jyn Erso and a support group of Rebel Pathfinders, and Krennic and Death Troopers, coming soon to Star Wars: Legion. That’s the 32mm skirmish miniatures game, which makes sense for the final battle, but not the 28mm game Imperial Assault, even though the rest of Rogue One was about a small team assaulting an Imperial facility...

Wakanda For Oscars!

Good Omens trailer

Very Crowley and Aziraphale -y.

Stone Age superheroes?

As well as Marvel introducing the stone age Avengers, DC and Funko has Primal Age, Masters Of The Universe style DC Superheroes, and a big companion comic, with the main story written by Marv Wolfman.

It would probably work as a one-off, light on history and high on fantasy.

Age of Sigmar RPG news

News from Cubicle 7 reveals that the Age of Sigmar RPG will be using a new system based on D6 dice pools, totally separate from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. It will be based around pick-up-and-play Archetypes, focusing on the forces of Order to begin with.

I think that going with a different system is definitely a good call, and D6 dice pools will be familiar to players of the wargame.

From The Dust 14

St. Louis, in its role as Gateway City for travelling vampires, welcomes a group of refugees from something called... the Sabbat?

Never heard of it.

Still, I’m sure the new arrivals won’t be any trouble.

And another Star Wars CRPG gets cancelled before release.

Short Treks

Before Star Trek: Discovery starts tonight in the US and later today on Netflix, they now have the Short Treks.

John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum

To right the unrightable wrong

Biker gangs versus horse! Attack dogs! Book in the mouth! Ballerina!

Looks like a Vampire game that just went full katana.

Warren Ellis on the hope in dystopia

Warren Ellis on the hope in dystopia.

Welcome to once upon right f***ing now.

Changeling: The Lost Second Edition is now out for PDF and POD.

Warhammer IV

I have the WFRP IV rulebook. Granted, I never got as far as running II...

The Drunk History Of Frankenstein

Drunk History takes on Frankenstein and its writing, with Evan Rachel Wood as Mary and Elijah Wood as Shelley miming to Rich Fulcher trying to explain the plot, and Will Ferrell and Seth Rogen as the monster and Frankenstein respectively acting the basics out.

Spider-Man: Far From Home

Spider-Man: Far From Home first trailer. It seems a shame that it wasn’t in front of Into The Spider-Verse. Interesting that it isn’t even addressing the Infinity War timeline issue.

Favourite little bit, the timing of the shift in music cue.

Trinity and Aberrant 1E Bundles

Trinity and Aberrant first edition at Bundle Of Holding,

The sale is raising money for the Bodhana Group, which “advocates the use of tabletop gaming as a directed therapeutic and clinical practice that can benefit personal growth as well as enhance social and educational services to individuals and families.”

Unimpressive mythical beasts

Street and garden level gryphons, for example.

Elysium is a Good Place

Watching a load of The Good Place since the last session of From The Dust has definitely affected how I portray the catty socialite Toreador NPC.

Though Tahani might also be a Ventrue. Excessive privilege and seeking or expecting to be admired are common in both clans.

Eleanor would be a classic Brujah, angry at the world for a mixture of totally legitimate reasons related to flaws in the system and tiny little personal grudges.

Chidi would be... a Salubri, too caught up in ethical thought to act on it.

Jianyu is a spoiler for those just starting on E4.

From The Dust Returns

Back to Vampire: The Masquerade, as I reminded my players:

One player was unable to join us, stuck in Amsterdam due to delayed flights caused by storms... storms rising from nowhere, as if at the command of some dreadful supernatural power...

Now let's tell a vampire story.

L.A. By Night is back. Now with filmed sections, among other new developments.

Well, this would never have happened with Ib here.

Onyx Path 2019 news

New book announcements from Midwinter:

The Cthulhu Mythos for Scion, with Chris Spivey (Harlem Unbound)
Cults Of The Blood Gods for Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition, featuring the Hecata as well as the Bahari and the Church of Caine
Scion: Demigod and... Dragon.

SMASH.

Age Of Heroes at the AV Club with a reminder that The Avengers is great.

An old supervillain idea thread

Revived by a new member, an RPGnet thread of supervillain ideas which is old enough to get married.

It includes me suggesting the Avengers movie as relevant... the 1998 Avengers movie with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman as Steed and Peel.

Horror Noire

A history of black roles in front of behind the camera in horror films, the first documentary feature from Shudder.

Playing again

Back to playing. And back to reminding myself that having one really useful card suit out of the five in Marvel SAGA is not a good call in strategic gameplay terms, but oh well.

Slayer is out!

In the US anyway. Here in February. :/ In the meantime, an interview with Kiersten White at Hypable.

Star Trek: Discovery season two

Star Trek: Discovery is back in ten days (17/01!) and... I just checked if Netflix has the Short Treks and it doesn’t. Huh.

(Update: it does now have them, in with the trailers.)

In the meantime, I will say again that it would be nice if Star Trek Adventures supported it. Sure, it has a somewhat different serialisation style than even Deep Space Nine or Enterprise, and having a distant and suspect captain like Lorca who might well work better as an NPC would mean different GMing advice, and I presume there would be licensing money involved, but it’s not so wildly different that it wouldn’t work at all. Also I want a Saru miniature.

Impending cliffhanger resolution

Okay, a week till the return of From The Dust. I better decide who was sitting in the diner when the PCs got back.

Buffy: Stake Your Destiny

Recently discovered the existence of Stake Your Destiny, a run of four Buffy Choose Your Own Adventure style gamebooks (fewer longer sections than the Fighting Fantasy style and no game system) from 2005.

I mail-ordered the first for 40p plus postage and, okay, breezed through it in twenty minutes, flipping back twice to avoid sudden death endings. The most interesting part is that there are two basically good endings, and at least one sort-of-okay one, as well as the traditional bunch of bad ones. The bad ones take up a lot more page count than I feel they should, some going to two or three pages, because really, who reads those? Especially since the first is by far the shortest - 160 pages versus two at 256 and the final double it at 320.

They’re set in The High School Years, specifically the first half of Season Two, for the classic “High School Is Hell, but Buffy has friends to help deal with it” setup. Basically the same place the BOOM! reboot comics seems to be setting up shop, complete with Spike and Dru being around instead of the Master.

The plots are perfectly viable episode / adventure setups, though I doubt the first one would get past Standards And Practices. The second is probably the best, Nancy Holder did a lot of consistent work in Buffy book land starting with the very first novel after the adaptation of Welcome To The Hellmouth. Though it also doesn’t have many actual branching decisions.

V5: Make Blood Boil

A second Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition adventure from Darker Days Radio, Make Blood Boil, following Ascension Night.

To the far side of the Moon

China’s Chang’e 4 probe touches down on the far side of the Moon in a first for space exploration.

Nationals 2019 planning begins

And the Great Work begins once more. No confirmation yet what I’ll be running, so working on the assumption I will get to do Buffy in Urban Fantasy this time, after a year of not.

I already have the gang for Sounds Like Hell printed out from last year, having run them on and off since 2011. But what are they going to do?

Apart from fight vampires and attempt to play music and have awkwardness, obviously.

I’ve nodded at Nationals themes before. Last year was Film so I set my game in L.A. and featured a Hollywood party in one scene - I could have easily taken it further.

This year’s theme is Mad Science, which doesn’t particularly jump out at me for Urban Fantasy. There are obviously categories where it fits more snugly like, say, Sci-Fi and Steampunk. And indeed its own specific category. Hrm.

There’s certainly room for mad science in the Buffyverse, but that room is mostly called Season Four and the occasional Monster Of The Week episode. It could be done, but I wouldn’t want to shove it in as an unfamiliar player’s primary contact with the game as they might wonder where the fantasy and vampires got to.

See what the other theoretical GMs in this theoretical category are doing with it.

Honestly, I’m prooooobably gonna have them fight vampires and attempt to play music and have awkwardness. But, y’know, what else?

New Year New Game

Some very nice offers at DriveThruRPG including Pugmire and Star Trek Adventures.

2019

Plans for the year so far include going to Conpulsion, the Nationals and Dead By Dawn... all in April. A quarter of the year away.

In between, run a game, play a game, write some Vault pieces, get that art project going, maybe AP transcript something, read things - the Slayer book and the Buffy reboot comic are on their way in the next few weeks, along with The Gutter Prayer by Gar Hanrahan - and wait for Captain Marvel... and let winter grind through to spring.

Happy New Year

And things that make you smile are important. Do something that makes you smile this week. You deserve it. Hold on tight. Here we go again.
Warren Ellis, October 2018