L.A. By Night season three

Vampire: The Masquerade - L.A. By Night returns tomorrow, with a month of downtime covered here, a good example of how to adjust the escalation and focus of a conflict, which also quickly introduces some new NPCs, possibly sympathetic members of the other side?

Onward

The next film from Pixar, Onward now has a trailer. Urban fantasy coming from the other direction, about the modern suburbia of a fantasy realm.

Also Chris Pratt doing his Pretend Thor Voice again.

Quantum Leap alternate ending

It looks like the alternate ending for Quantum Leap, leading in to a sixth season, really does exist!

Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge opens

... okay, personal deadline, two years.

The Enemy Within Returns

The Enemy Within, revised for WFRP IV, with companion books for every adventure... including The Horned Rat... and The Empire In Ruins.

Brujah, Malkavian, Toreador, Tremere, Ventrue

The final built-in clan for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been revealed, the Malkavians. I had been expecting Gangrel (although the starting Thinblood powers cover some of their niche) as Malkavians and Nosferatu are the most playstyle-changing of the Camarilla clans.

I have... feelings about Fishmalks, and they come up in the interview with narrative lead Brian Mitsoda above.

Dementation was folded into Dominate in V5, so having it back as its own Discipline is a surprise as well.

Preludes, a V5 draft

Martin Ericsson polished up a draft of a section on Preludes for Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition on his site.

What are the Strix?

Hijack: The Writer’s Guide To The Strix, by Rose Bailey. for Vampire: The Requiem and also advice for anyone wanting a mysterious multiple-choice monster.

Also featuring their origin.

The blood-drinking Victorian Edinburgh medium I had somehow not heard of

Madam Violet. I wonder if the Melissidae in Vampire: The Requiem are based on this?

Thanks to David Hutchison for the link. He notes that a previous post seemed like it might be made up. That would be comforting...

Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. season six

Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. season six and it looks like the season split is happening from episode to episode, as we pursue two stories... light-hearted space adventures and stubbly evil Coulson.

A Trinity D10

Thank you to Roderick for finding and giving me the last of his set!

The Haunted Castle

Something slightly off-topic for Dracula Night - The Haunted Castle, the film F.W. Murnau made just before Nosferatu in 1921. It’s a much more... typical silent movie than Nosferatu, a stagey mystery with a hint of a haunting and some comic relief mixed in.

A still from every other shot could be used as a handout for a classic early 20s Call Of Cthulhu game, though, and the setting of a hunting lodge with everybody stuck inside due to rain could work for that too.

Knights Of The Old Republic

Looks like a Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic film trilogy is in the works...

Presumably Revan et al from the game, not Zayne and the gang from the comic series, but you never know.

So it goes.

And so we move from uncertainty and fear to... uncertainty and fear.

A Brazilian Renault ad brings closure to the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon.

A Brazilian Renault ad brings closure to the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Not a sentence I expected to be typing. Ever.

Annie Leibovitz at The Rise Of Skywalker

Photographer Annie Leibovitz goes on set for Star Wars Episode IX. This is why I own a few issues of Vanity Fair.

Doppelgangers

Fresh from winning the Cameo film quiz on this subject, thanks to Andy and Dawn for letting me join for the night and to there being quite a few SF and horror examples I could help with!

How does one use doppelgangers in an RPG? Replacing the character, mirroring them, or the original omen of impending doom? And if they take the place of a PC, who plays them? (It depends on the open or closed table decisions about secrets, I suppose...)

Pirates Of Pugmire

Pirates Of Pugmire, the first chronicle book for Pugmire and Monarchies Of Mau, live on Kickstarter.

Dogs and cats sailing together! Mass hysteria!

Also lizards and birds. So you can play a parrot, or if you want an owl and a pussycat to go to sea...

Blood & Treasure

Blood & Treasure (trailer) is a new summer TV series from CBS: “A globe-trotting action-adventure drama about a brilliant antiquities expert and a cunning art thief who team up to catch a ruthless terrorist who funds his attacks through stolen treasure.” That could be a pitch for The Trinity Continuum with two of the Allegiances teaming up against another one, and I came up with two thirds of them.

Casting by The Watch House, number ∞

More than ten years after the final session of The Watch House, it’s still quite weird seeing one of the people I cast as one of the player characters as a none-more-English Watcher-y type in the new Charmed. Not least during the episode where he gets chucked through a portal into a monster-hunting TV show.

(Granted I suggested him because I’d seen him in Hellboy so I knew I could get footage for the credits video, so it was not I who typecast him... though he played an American in it.)

The Phantom Menace at twenty

Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out twenty years ago. It was... well, I’ll let Pablo Hidalgo talk positively about what it was, from his Twitter which erases tweets after a month or so:

Vengeance, Incorporated Cinematic Universe?

Remember Atlas/Seaboard Comics? Apparently a stakeholder just signed a development deal with Paramount “to bring the iconic Atlas comic book library to the big screen.”

News thanks to Johanna Koljonen

Personally I think the best story from Atlas Comics, by far, is the story of Atlas Comics.

What We Do In The Shadows

What We Do In The Shadows, the series, starts tonight on BBC Two!

... I will be out running Vampire.

All hail iPlayer!

(And the joke about LARP... nice to see them waving back at us.)

Eurovision 2019

No Eurovision for me this year. Apparently not as Goth as last year anyway.

Star Trek: Picard

... is to be called Star Trek: Picard.

Critical Role for Comic Relief

Critical Role DM Matthew Mercer to run an adventure for Stephen Colbert for Red Nose Day US, and donors get to influence the game!

John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum

I found John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum fun, but not great fun. It carries on a lot of what was built in Chapter 2, without really taking it further.

(The original is still essentially self-contained, the worldbuilding just there for fun. The sequels run with it.)

The fights are cool, obviously (though the best of them are at the start, I think, including the big audience groan moment of the film) but for something called a chapter in a larger story it feels like the story hardly advanced.

Urban Fantasy, Caught In The MIddle

Answering this RPG.net thread about urban fantasy RPG premises:

I’ve always wanted to do something about mediators between different supernatural sects. People who have to go in and broker peace between werewolf street gangs, serve as the jury for vampire trials, and oversee efforts to preserve the secret.

Perhaps normal humans who due to a rare genetic quirk are immune to direct magical effects, so their neutrality is accepted and even protected because of its usefulness. (Like the cop in the Arkham Nights PBP who was immune to the Yellow Sign because he’s colour blind.)

Not that this will stop various kinds of supernatural thing trying to mess with them, whether to gain advantage in a current situation or to strike against the overall authority or in the case of something like ghosts because they just don’t understand the trouble they’re causing for the other monsters around.

So the mediators might have to work with some supernatural beings on a given problem, which would then result in arguments about jurisdiction and influence, so for example they might be assigned a vampire who isn’t happy about it to offset working with their friendly werewolf on a vampire-werewolf conflict.

And like detectives (as Harry Dresden as the genre example) it means they can get called in anywhere, on any level of the supernatural sphere.

Black Dog Blues

Martin Ericsson has moved on from White Wolf, to consulting and freelancing, launching a personal site for news and ideas, as well as starting a Vampire: The Masquerade 5 Actual Play podcast about characters starting with the Second Inquisition. The first episode starts out with an interview about where V5 came from, going into the session zero after about eighteen minutes.

The Crow

Today is the 25th anniversary of the US release of The Crow. It still works, I think, and it still hurts seeing Brandon Lee as Eric.

(Content note: it uses sexual violence as a plot point for revenge, but it never depicts it except some glimpses from the victim’s perspective.)

Of course it’s also a foundational style piece for The World Of Darkness, and a soundtrack too. Even before the film, the original comic series had that sometimes painterly, sometimes grainy black and white look, and the tendency to break things up with a Joy Division lyric.

(The timing means I was actually out playing Enlightenment In Blood on the 23rd anniversary, playing an undead monster coincidentally wearing a Hangman’s Joke T-shirt.)

Since then there have been comic and film sequels, usually about different revenants, as well as a TV series where Mark Dacascos took over the role of Eric.

And of these... well, City Of Angels is a wonky remake of a sequel but I liked the music (Graeme Revell came back for the score and Courtney Love chose the bands) and Vincent Perez and Mia Kirshner as the lead couple and Iggy Pop as the main henchman, and I wonder what the longer never-released director’s cut would be like.

And Salvation took an interesting twist from the tie-in novel The Lazarus Heart by Poppy Z. Brite (while replacing the gay hero with a straight one) with an innocent man returning after being sent to the electric chair to find those who framed him.

It’s a shame none of the films gave us a female lead - one of the comic sequels did, and there have been a few here and there as well as a second female revenant in the TV series. Other than Eric all the leads were white too. I think the most interesting comics spinoff is Curare, in which the revenant is a little girl haunting the detective who tried to solve her murder. (Deeply grim in places.)

For gamers there are various totally not Eric miniatures out there, two official board games with standees rather than minis, and there was a City Of Angels video game (a hand-to-hand fighting game with easy character death, which really doesn’t seem like the best fit) and plans for a separate game that never came to pass.

And a new film version has been planned for years now, with an insane list of stars attached as well as a few directors. It’s a story that can certainly be retold... the usual problem with the follow-ups is that that’s most of what they do.

From The Dust 29

This week’s session of Vampire: The Masquerade was...

... nice.

Two Years After Laughter

Happy second anniversary to After Laughter from Paramore, inspiration for this Buffy plot hook post.

Can't stop the signal

Via Whedonesque, the music for the unreleased Firefly Online by David Joseph Wesley.

It feels like coming home.

Warhammer 40,000 Action Figures

Plans have been revealed for Warhammer 40,000 action figures, starting with a Primaris Marine standing 7” tall - so 6” scale if they keep to scale with unenhanced humans. A sensible start as the Space Marine is the icon of the setting and it’s going to be easy to release variants.

Also chibi 40K figurines.

Relics is funded

Relics is fully funded, and hit several stretch goals, ending a thousand dollars short of mine after a nice last-day bounce.

Relics reminder

Reminder: under 24 hours on the Relics rulebook Kickstarter. We’re nearing the stretch goal before me writing an adventure for it!

A John Wick video game

(John Wick the series, not John Wick the RPG creator)

John Wick Hex, the title seemingly referring to grid-based strategic combat and not to John having to fight a witch. With this series, one can never be too sure.

A source for costume ideas. And possibly monsters.

The Met Gala this year wasn’t as good for NPC portraits as the Catholic imagery and armour last year, but Ezra Miller was amusingly close to something that happened in From The Dust on Sunday...

This is not Endgame canon

Sometime during Endgame...

Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer

The Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer starts with Tom Holland saying not to watch if you haven’t seen Avengers: Endgame yet.

From The Dust 28

A big party in Elysium. Which means a lot of NPCs...

May the Fourth

Quite a few Star Wars book announcements today for some reason....

And FFG announced a new board game recently, with more news on the First, Outer Rim.

Peter Mayhew

Peter Mayhew, best known for playing Chewbacca, has died. I met him once, I believe at Gen Con UK in the mid 90s, and he was friendly, happy to chat with all who came to say hello, a gentleman.

Avengers: Endgame spoilers

Apparently the Russo Brothers think next Monday (the Monday after the second weekend) is when this is okay, which is a fair cutoff. But I just saw that after putting this up, so, eh. Also, this is my gaming blog, it’s kind of a geeky space.

Iron Man

Iron Man came out eleven years ago today. It was a fun little power armour action movie that didn’t really hint at what was to come, until the end where Tony put down the index cards and said “I am Iron Man.” It was a real surprise, knocking out one of the usual conflicts in the superhero genre.

And then the post-credits, which as I recall we knew about but it was still a bit of a thrill to actually see it.

We already knew that Marvel had the rights to some of their own characters, that The Incredible Hulk was on the way and they had plans for Thor and Captain America... and that, yes, that was a good starting line-up for The Avengers... but it all came from this fun little power armour action movie.

Starting with Iron Man was a good call too, with a Weird Level just a little above a straight action movie. The Hulk is weirder, but people know the Hulk. Thor and Cap were more of a test. And by then, we were in for the ride. And what a ride it’s been.

Shadowrun Sixth World

Shadowrun Sixth World, aka Sixth Edition, was revealed today, with a beginner box due in June and the rulebook to launch at GenCon in August. About as close as you can get to a secret release when you need to let game stores and distributors know.

It’s supposed to be simpler than Fifth, but sounds like not to the level of Anarchy.

I like that the beginner box literally states that it includes “handfuls of dice!”

May

Summoned by fire and drums, Beltane turns to May Day. Hopefully the weather will improve.