The Sandman coming to TV?

Neil Gaiman to executive produce a series for Netflix. (Also David Goyer.)

Darker Days In Manchester

Chris Handley talks to Visit Manchester about GMing, podcasting, and Fan Boy Three hosting an outside (very outside!) event for Gen Con.

The game (sport) of your game

Today I went to see jousting at Linlithgow Palace.

Not pictured, the thunderstorm that started after the second bout

It’s a new group doing it since I last went, who play up the panto / wrestling style characters more in between tests of skill and the tilts themselves. This inevitably got me thinking about wrestling and other sport RPGs, as well as jousting in Pendragon, A Knight’s Tale, and so on.

I’ve talked about big sports and other events as plot points before, and in passing about games centring on them as well as other kinds of entertainment like bands. Which settings suit them? Can you add a “forced to fight in gladiatoral combat” adventure to your series? What else works?

The event had sideshows and demonstrations as well - crafts, falconry, jesters - which could add variety to such a setup.

AP special news

The Wondercon episode of L.A. By Night is now up as a podcast.

It’s lovely hearing a happy audience.

If you ever did a special episode at a con, what would it involve?

In related news, CR to do a Call Of Cthulhu special, with Taliesin as Keeper and Erika among the investigators, ahead of the release of Berlin: The Wicked City (although not using it).

Mouse Guard, the screenplay

A screenplay and demo presentation for the Mouse Guard movie are online after news that it has shut down.

Deep Space Nine: What We Left Behind

What We Left Behind: Looking Back At Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is very much for the fans, starting with a gag, then another gag, then a high-def remake of a space battle interrupted by another gag. Presented by showrunner Ira Steven Behr, it ranges over the history of the series, reminiscences from cast and crew, and features a writers’ room reunion breaking how to start a new season now. Which, hey, I would watch. And would have also read the graphic novel version which was suggested but not taken up.

(I thought the montage of social issues the series reflected was lovely, though I wish it hadn’t included a certain political figure I want to forget exists as soon as possible.)

It gets its above-PG rating with an F-bomb from Andy Robinson describing Garak’s opinion of Bashir.

It's my birthday

So naturally I am starting the year watching Buffy and wanting to run some.

(Current having stuff update: the book accompanying The Planets series, and a second copy of The Gutter Prayer to avoid spine damage to the signed one.)

Osprey RPGs

Osprey has been doing some near-RPG skirmish wargames for a while now, and has now announced two RPGs, Arthurian and Stone Age fantasy adventures. Going up against Pendragon is an... interesting choice, we’ll have to see what it brings to the round table. Stone Age fantasy is a more open field.

Via Tim Knight at HeroPress.

Jon Hodgson map tiles

Now on Kickstarter.

The Marvel Drama Club Universe

Marvel has announced plans to release official one-act plays, starring Ms. Marvel, Thor and Loki, and Squirrel Girl.

Taika Waititi to make an animated Flash Gordon movie?

Writing? Directing? Producing? Voicing? We’ll see. And I look forward to finding out.

A system for John Wick

The setting sketched in for John Wick and then foregrounded in the sequels really suggests a World Of Darkness style setup, but for the first film itself, take Hell 4 Leather and have the hunter left for dead instead of actually dead, and using new guns and contacting allies instead of gaining powers as they go.

Who left this concrete pentagram in Holyrood Park?

And where did said pentagram then go?

A story I was not expecting to see on the Edinburgh Evening News cover today.

And thanks to Teacup Darth responding to Ian Rankin on Twitter... an Amazon sale link that looks like a possible match.

Hello, L.A...

The L.A. By Night archive is now available in podcast format. On Podbean, Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.

The Wondercon episode will be podcast exclusively due to issues with the video recording. Link when it goes up.

Vertigo

DC Comics has shut down Vertigo, running since 1993 as a base for its Mature Readers books and quickly becoming a major part of the industry and my own pull list. Home to imports like The Sandman and Hellblazer, and Transmetropolitan after the brief Helix imprint, its trade marker was a sign of something worth checking out. Founding editor Karen Berger now has her own imprint at Dark Horse.

DC is also shutting Zoom and Ink, to move to age advisory labels with a children and young adult focus featuring a lot of superhero-adjacent stuff - including new Amethyst, and... young Johnny Constantine?

Lately plenty of Vertigo-ish titles have been coming from DC without the label. So hopefully this is the end of a chapter, not the story.

Midsummer

This is the longest day.

It’s actually sort of sunny, even.

How does your game mark the turn of the seasons? Bit of human sacrifice, maybe?

More a thing in settings with strong seasonal variation and no central heating, probably. Also for vampires, for whom the length of the night is important.

The World Ender

The World Ender by Lord Huron, basically The Crow in the 1950s in four and a half minutes.

Thanks to Eric the .5b, in the Music Videos That Should Be RPGs thread.

(Hell 4 Leather anyone?)

Endgame bonus rerelease?

As Avengers: Endgame passes a month in cinemas and approaches the biggest box office of all time, a plan to add bonus footage after the end for the final run. Will it happen here? I want to go.

Birthday plans forming...

Birthday plans forming because What We Left Behind, the documentary on the making and legacy of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, is in cinemas on that night only.

Six Word Horror

“Unexpected item in the summoning circle.”

Origins Awards 2019

Origins Awards 2019 results. I should play Root, I guess. (I already play V5...)

Powers going haywire

Grimm season three, currently in a long-dark-night-of-the-soul run on Freeview, just got to the point of a supernatural pregnancy, complete with the mother using telekinesis while having contractions.

Ever had some wild power use caused by unusual circumstances?

Make it so.

Happy Father’s Day if appropriate!

Happy Captain Picard Day otherwise!

James Whitbrook at io9 discusses why Captain Picard matters.

“The fact that he’s so humble about it all, even a little embarrassed as he is in “The Pegasus,” is part of the charm. Because to Captain Picard, everything he does is just what any good person should do, not the action of a lofty hero or role model. It’s just... the right thing.”

The cosmology of DOOM

There are angels in DOOM Eternal? I believe the series has, until now, only ever presented the forces of Hell in a dimensional-portal kind of way, as something humanity is left to deal with alone without much spiritual aid as in a lot of horror (not least Evil Dead II, its chainsaw and shotgun forebear) so this trailer rather surprised me.

Free RPG Day

It’s Free RPG Day!

I have no idea what might be available. Try here.

Chosen first quote

“Best to be overprepared, though. A prepared Watcher is — well, frequently still a dead Watcher. But at least a well-armed, thoroughly knowledgeable corpse.”

Kiersten White, from CHOSEN, the sequel to SLAYER

You Are Not Alone

YANA

You Are Not Alone

Your journey begins here. Further pages will be revealed in the coming days.

No, I don’t know what this is. I have some guesses, but I don’t know.

Tender talk

Night Mind looks into Tender and interviews writer Joshua Alan Doetsch about it and the buildup to Bloodlines 2.

James Mathe

A tribute to James Mathe, founder of RPGNow, from Steve Wieck.

Avengers Resemble

The Avengers game trailer (with voice acting by Critical Role stars Travis Willingham and Laura Bailey among others) has me thinking about familiarity, as it’s not the MCU Avengers but it’s Cap, Tony, Thor, Natasha and Hulk and looking rather like them. And then revealing a very different story, showing why they went this way.

Should they have gone more comic-y, or with another more different look or lineup like the PS4 Spider-Man?

Bloodlines 2 gameplay

Extended gameplay trailer for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2

The new trailer shows that Dale, the schlubby vampire, will have less hair in the game than in the original trailer. And that the Nosferatu type is a Thinblood. Which is harsh as we see an actual Nosferatu who looks less Nosferatu than he does.

Update: full mission demo. It shows that Slugg is a Nosferatu Thinblood. I expect that the final game will have more models for goons. Most importantly: BAD DANCING CONFIRMED.

Update again: more mission demos, including this one with commentary from RPS showing a different solution.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077... releasing in April 2020, the year the second edition was set... now with added Keanu Reeves.

I believe the appropriate response is... “Whoa.”

(Although I remember Johnny Silverhand looking more like Simon Le Bon...)

Agents Of S.T.O.N.E.D.

Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. goes even more full Guardians Of The Galaxy in its light space opera half of season six, as our heroes eat what looks like Space Tortelloni and end up space opera-ed out.

"Flick"

Favourite tiny in-joke in the in-joke storm of the What We Do In The Shadows Vampiric Council: they kept the True Blood flick sound as Evan bares her fangs.

Donald Duck

Happy 85th birthday to Donald Duck, the breakout star of European Disney licensed comics.

The Dust Settles

No session tonight, no session next week... tempted to have time pass in-game as well.

Anomaly Detected

Got to Cymera and got Gar Hanrahan to autograph my copy of The Gutter Prayer and... the Primeval rulebook.

How to make a game movie?

The Sequelisers takes a look at video game movies, and why video game movies rarely work. Basically, so many of the narrative-centric ones that get adapted are often like existing films and stories but interactive, and main characters are often purposefully vague.

They mention the original Tomb Raider movies but not the reboot, which I think works, because it’s based on a very story-centric reboot game. (And the Weird Level is a lot lower, too.)

By comparison, board game movies have a much higher hit rate, because there are like two, and while Battleship is decidedly meh, Clue is fantastic.

And of course then there’s the question of RPG movies. The big RPGs are often mashups of genres, and are even more lacking in central protagonists because that’s pretty much the point of RPGs.

Fringe 2019

The Edinburgh Fringe brochure is out, and the results are as follows:

Hamlet 1, Macbeth 3.

D-Day

D-Day was seventy-five years ago today. One of the defining battles of the Western Front. A story often retold, and always worth retelling.

Scion 2 is out in the World

Scion second edition, launch for the Storypath System, is now in POD and PDF. (Also with fiction by DIE creator Kieron Gillen.)

DIE RPG

An open beta of the RPG for DIE, the comic about getting pulled into an RPG, by creator Kieron Gillen.

Coteries Of New York

Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York is a newly announced computer game, which looks to be a CYOA style thing, due this autumn.

Magic: The Gathering Animated

Coming sometime soon, a Magic: The Gathering animated series, executive produced by the Russo brothers.

According to Polygon: “writers Henry Gilroy (Star Wars Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars) and Jose Molina (The Tick, Jordan Peele’s Weird City) serving as showrunners. Yoriaki Mochizuki (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) is on board as supervising director and co-executive producer.”

That’s a good roster.

What We Do In The Shadows

What We Do In The Shadows, the series, has reached the halfway point in its BBC 2 premiere, so I can now say...

BAT!

Holst's The Planets

We just watched Holst’s The Planets With Professor Brian Cox, recorded on the centenary of its first performance and shown tonight due to his big science series also called The Planets.

And wow, there is a lot of it in the Star Wars score. And a bit in Alien, and a moment of the end of Jupiter in Raiders Of The Lost Ark as the open the Well of Souls. And...

Need a creepy folk song?

Need a theme tune for a folk horror game or something? Via Warren Ellis, Watching You by Sproatly Smith.

June

Happy birth month to me. Happy Pride month! Happy Tabletop Day!