KiwiRPG Week coverage

Sam Brooks at Aotearoa culture site The Spinoff covers KiwiRPG Week.

Beltane

Happy Beltane for those who celebrate. Here in Edinburgh we have a fire festival atop Calton Hill with hundreds of participants and thousands of spectators, not all of whom are there to see the nakie people.

Seconds

What would you do if you could go back and correct a mistake? And could you stop?

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World creator Bryan Lee O'Malley's Seconds is hopefully on the way to cinemas, with the adaptation co-written by Pilgrim director Edgar Wright and to be directed by Blake Lively. It concerns time travel, specifically to change one decision at a time. And the temptation not to stop...

Neal Adams

Neal Adams, comics artist and writer who helped take Batman out of the Adam West era and worked on pivotal series like Green Arrow / Green Lantern, has died. He also helped reinstate creator credits for Superman, a step towards proper crediting of writers and artists.

The Northman

Just out of The Northman. My second film of the year! Would have been first but I was late with Spider-Man.

A look at how vengeance ruins lives which is also full of HELL YEAH fight scenes.

Having gone in with pretty much just the trailer and familiarity with director Robert Eggers’ work, I got to be surprised by some of it.

Terry Pratchett Day

Raise a glass.

“Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.”

Snuff

Onyx Path Virtual Convention, June 10-12 2022

Onyx Path celebrates ten years with the return of the Virtual Convention, now looking for Storytellers, Storyguides and GMs.

Bloodhunt

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt launches today, after early access, on PC and PS5.

It doesn’t reflect the kind of Vampire games I run, and I’m terrible at it, but I do enjoy the style. See the concept vision trailer and narrative launch trailer, which both make the conflict with the Second Inquisition more central, though the second does also show vampires whaling on each other, as well as the Battle Pass trailer which show off some of the looks available including some Katana And Trenchcoat action.

Moon Knight 1.05

Marvel’s Moon Knight

1.05: Asylum

Managing a satisfying ending with one episode to go will be an impressive feat. But that was certainly a satisfying episode, sprinkling light comedy in with particularly heavy drama. (Taweret’s cue cards and flappy ears!) Content warning for abusive parenting.

Objective-centric battles

Another thought about Avengers at ten: it contains a prime example of Joss Whedon’s preferred end-of-season final battle, a clear objective marker that the heroes have to either attack or defend.

It could get repetitive, but on the whole this is not a complaint, as I’ve done a whole lot of big battles like this too. A clear target for the PCs makes for a big fight that isn’t just about numbers. There are a few of the subset of needing to kill a specific enemy too.

(And obviously not unique to him - see the Death Star exhaust port or throwing the Ring into Mount Doom - but definitely a thing in his work.)

a|state pre|orders

Pre-order a|state second edition physical and get a free PDF. PDF also sold separately.

Avengers at ten

Marvel’s The Avengers came out here ten years ago.

Tom Breihan’s Age Of Heroes retrospective. Sophie Butcher at Empire.

My favourite detail is that every member of the team gets to smack Loki down in their own way.

Hill interrupts his escape, Steve joins the man ruining his BS speech, Thor shows his motivations are warped, Fury throws his threats back at him, Natasha tricks the god of lies, Coulson dismisses his chances while dying, Tony casually explains his plan is doomed over a drink, Clint blows him up mid gloat about catching his arrow, Selvig builds a failsafe despite mind control and Bruce...

... well, you know.

It’s one of the film’s many delights on its own merits, as well as a key part of the all-conquering Marvel Cinematic Universe. (This week is also the anniversary of Age Of Ultron, Infinity War and Endgame.)

I remember when we weren’t sure this would work.

By then Marvel and Jon Favreau had made Iron Man a surprise hit and a lot of fun, and made Captain America work by having The Rocketeer director Joe Johnston making another circa-WWII pulp superhero adventure, and Kenneth Branagh’s Thor was a fun fantasy romance and gave us a great villain into the mix, so the big three were set up, but there were still doubts, especially as Iron Man 2 and The Incredible Hulk hadn’t been as well received.

And we had an unknown to me new actor as the Hulk. Mark Ruffalo turned out to be great, him being pretty big normally is an interesting change too. And there’s a great chilling moment where, in a reverse of the TV series classic bit where Banner’s eyes go constricted and bright green as he starts to change, we see his eyes are still human as the change takes over. And then we get Hulk versus Black Widow and Natasha makes it pretty even.

Okay, I had a reasonable amount of confidence in Joss Whedon back then as a Buffy fan so I got to be a hipster about it, which was nice.

I love it. I just watched it again and I know a big chunk of it by heart. Give me an anniversary screening and I’ll be there.

Twitter had its moments.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful...

Judging by how much the boiler’s doing, Merry Fifth Christmas!

Happier Than Misery Business

Billie Eilish at Coachella featuring Hayley Williams. (And Hayley Williams as the Tenth Doctor.)

Nocturne 1.23

Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne

1.23

In general, the younger vampires in the city were less comfortable with the revelation of who killed the ghost and why than the elders. The nice Hecata was very uncomfortable but helped. And I got to needle drop Dead Can Dance.

St. George's Day

Slain any dragons lately?

V5 PBP setting outline

Further to my Vampire: The Masquerade play-by-post offer, when I asked about setting preferences the first player vote was for a fictional city, specifically a shadow of its former self, so...

The city of St. Charles sits on the wide Charles River, surrounded by misty hills and deep pine forests. Once financed by lumber, mining and manufacturing, the city has suffered in recent years, although some of the old warehouses now see use as spaces for tech companies and startups, event spaces, and in some cases squats.

Home to almost five million people and around fifty vampires, it sits close enough to Anarch domains that the Camarilla court watches the Rack and blood banks closely. The Princes of cities to the east pledge their support, but this has never been tested.

The Ventrue Prince, Michael Dean, was an importer before his Embrace, and took the throne forty years ago after his sire died fighting a rival.

Dean is supported by a Primogen containing a Ventrue Sheriff and Rack Host, Malkavian Seneschal, Toreador Keeper and Herald, Tremere Oracle and Nosferatu Eye, as well as other agents including couriers and a branch of the blood-supplying Circulatory System.

The Prince has recently moved to make the city more hospitable to neonates, encouraging loyalty to the Camarilla. He is also said to have agents in the Anarch domain of Lawrence two nights’ drive away. But the Lawrence Anarchs are also said to have agents in St. Charles...

And St. Charles is also the last stop before the domain of Spencer City a night’s drive to the north, recently abandoned and now an open frontier. So you have somewhere to run if this all breaks down...

(There’s a real St. Charles in Illinois. It’s pretty small.)

Earth Day 2022

Earth Day

GreaterGood

A Google Doodle showing receding once permanent ice and bleaching coral makes its point effectively.

I always remember the well-meaning terribleness of the Earth Day Special in 1990.

World Of Darkness Unbound

A community creator program for World Of Darkness computer games to be hosted on itch.io, following the Vampire Jam and the model of the Storytellers Vault.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Also announced at D&D Direct, the new film is subtitled Honor Among Thieves, due March 3rd 2023, and set on the Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms.

Dragonlance and Spelljammer return

D&D 2022-3 line announcements. Dragonlance returns with a wargame, an adventure book, and a trailer narrated by Shoreh Aghdashloo, while Spelljammer comes with an adventure book and a monster book containing actual Giant Space Hamsters this time. Also a $19.99 starter set.

Happy anniversary, Antonio Bay!

The Fog shows how not to celebrate a civic anniversary. Though the late night ghost story show would be fun.

In another universe, something like The Fog could have been Halloween 2, starting the anthology format right away instead of letting Michael Myers come back once more and ruin that plan.

Bonus fun fact: the ship in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is a reference to The Fog and not a more on-point reference to Dracula.

Moon Knight 1.04

Marvel’s Moon Knight

1.04: The Tomb

So yes a bit more Mummy business there.

Two characters in search of a series

An RPGnet ICONS PBP idea thread appeared and disappeared overnight, meaning the two ideas I didn’t have time to post have nowhere to go, which is a bummer. The idea was a 1980s TV supers game with budget-friendly powers. The characters were a bulletproof former soldier as a frontline fighter and a Molly Ringwald lookalike telepath if an investigation and support character would work instead.

Zola Jesus, Desire

Zola Jesus, Desire, from her forthcoming album Arkhon

Stereogum news.

Thor: Love And Thunder teaser

“I need to figure out exactly who I am."

io9 analysis by Germain Lussier

Coming July 8th!

Maps of the world

Wooden 3D relief maps, from a Ukrainian art company.

Nocturne 1.22

Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne

1.22

Tonight, the coterie did their nails. (I believe this may be “squad goals”.)

And two of them expressed romantic interest in the Prince. Who I must say I didn’t create with this in mind.

They also found out who killed the Risen hunting the city’s vampires, but priorities.

Tonight’s needle drop: Put The Blame On Mame.

Happy Easter if applicable!

Daily bunny no.1646 goes in search of adventure

Will Quinn Art on Twitter

See also Easter adventures.

The series of your one-shot

Seeing the recent Twilight Zone revival and thinking about the threads of converting series into anthology episodes, how much did it go the other way? Which episodes could be the premise of a series?

I know Battlestar Galactica bears more than a passing resemblance to a Twilight Zone episode, among others.

The mysterious salesman who might be the Devil pops up a few times, though not played the same. A bunch of the space episodes could make Star Trek hooks with the addition of a way out of the problem. I could see Mirror Image becoming a series about pursuing your doppelganger in the style of The Invaders.

RPGnet interviews Rose Bailey

Rose Bailey talks development and game creation at RPGnet.

Bunnies!

Bunnies, bunnies, it must be bunnies! in genre fiction at Tor.

Vampires by post

I have just offered to run a Vampire: The Masquerade 5 PBP. Oh.

(And it seems my attempt to get a Buffy game as a player didn’t pan out. :/ )

Many happy returns to Sarah Michelle Gellar, Peter Capaldi, Dave Gibbons...

The Cabin In The Woods

Tonight marks the tenth anniversary of the release of The Cabin In The Woods. If you like horror and horror-comedy in particular, haven’t seen it and somehow haven’t been spoiled, it’s well worth checking out. Germain Lussier looks back at io9, noting that co-writer Joss Whedon’s involvement is now a potential issue for viewers.

Moon Knight 1.03

Marvel’s Moon Knight

1.03: The Friendly Type

I figured that wouldn’t work, but wow.

And the big supernatural effects are very Darkness family Mummy, narrow powers that scale up to world-shaking levels.

Another moment also reminded me of Hammer’s version of The Mummy, with the famous behind-the-scenes anecdote of rigging up the bit where Peter Cushing puts a spear through Christopher Lee on the day because the poster had a torch beam going through the mummy and the film had nothing remotely like it.

The Adam Project

The Adam Project is a pretty small-scale comedy action take on Back To The Future with a couple of emotionally resonant sequences, one of which hit me like a ton of bricks.

(Though the phlebotinum of tech DNA coding not working when injured seems like a huge design flaw.)

Happy birthday Rick, and John!

Aardman at 50

A very happy 50th anniversary to Aardman Animations, home of Morph, Wallace & Gromit, Shaun The Sheep and so much more.

Marvel Multiverse RPG preview

A preview of the Marvel Mutiverse RPG playtest, including a character sheet for Spider-Man. Looks like not really my kind of game.

Reminder:

Josie And The Pussycats is the best movie ever join the army

Conpulsion videos

The Masks: A New Generation stream

Squaring The Circle: designing a|state Second Edition

Inter National Connections in TTRPGs: Scotland and the world

Cymera 2022, June 3-5

Cymera programme is now online, for the 2022 hybrid version of the Edinburgh genre literature con. (for my 500th Books tag!) Events this year include live and recorded panels (with recorded ones free online including the quiz, awards, and the John Scalzi talk) and a new theatre adaptation of Dracula co-written by a local 48 Hour Film person.

Conpulsion Lite

And here we go. Stream tonight, panels tomorrow, games Sunday.

Darker Days Radio 200

Darker Days Radio reaches its 200th episode! That’s a lot of ideas and discussion for World Of Darkness and Chronicles Of Darkness, as well as sides like Warhammer and real-world folklore.

2022 Hugo Finalists

The 2022 Hugo Award finalists for genre fiction and nonfiction across multiple media. I’m six for six on Dramatic Presentation Long, and zero for six on Novel. :/

Vampire as the elite

A Guardian preview of Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong looks at how the game works, mental health representation, and starts with a not about how much influence the Kindred have on this crappy world.

Moon Knight 1.02

Marvel’s Moon Knight

1.02: Summon The Suit

After the intro, the issues and stakes now seem pretty clear a third of the way in. (We’ll see if that’s actually the case.)

Lentil soup! But possibly also child murder.

The Mr. Knight three-piece suit makes its appearance. And a superhero landing... nearly.

And a good urban fantasy Masquerade effect looking back at the CCTV and showing outside perspectives of the jackal.

If scanned, the QR code on the storage locker door takes you to a website with a free comic.

Beowulf: The Trials Of The Twin Seas

The Trials Of The Twin Seas is a collection of Beowulf one-on-one adventures, including The Triple Serpent by Gar Hanrahan and Seven Stones by Elaine Lithgow.

Star Trek: First Contact Day 2022

One of the annual celebrations of Star Trek, First Contact Day brings the Mission Chicago convention at the weekend, a Strange New Worlds trailer and character introductions, the premiere of the Director’s Edition restoration of The Motion Picture, and some Picard news...

Peaky Blinders

1920s Birmingham gangster series Peaky Blinders concluded last night with a film sequel announced already.

I also saw an advert for the interpretive dance adaptation, which I was not expecting.

I watched it early and enjoyed the grit, occasional poetry and the odd fun anachronism in the music.

It has official board, card and video games with a VR game on the way, as well as trivia quizzes and less than traditionally family-friendly versions of Monopoly and Top Trumps.

No miniatures game... not yet anyway. (Though there are action figures coming too.) 1920s-30s gangsters are well represented in miniatures, of course.

Of course the era is very gameable - modern enough to be familiar while still having room for PC-friendly levels of chaos. It’s the home turf of Call Of Cthulhu and its thousand young, and fighting the Mythos secretly with Army surplus weapons is a popular playstyle.

Dziobak planned a big inspired-by LARP to be played in one of its filming locations as well, due to the combined appeal of gang wars and nice outfits.

My own 1920s gangster interests tend towards the distance of the USA due to early influences like The Untouchables. I never did run that Prohibition-era Vampire game, though my first V5 game had a former bootlegger Prince and a flapper-style Harpy in a modern city

Dead By Daylight: the board game

Slasher-versus-group video game Dead By Daylight gets a board game, with cards and dice and chits and miniatures.

It has nice-looking 35mm-ish miniatures of the survivors and killers, possible sources for urban fantasy hero and monster types if the scale works for you. Although the survivors do look rather funny stuck on hooks still in their action poses. Especially the guy doing Gun Fingers. Adding slumped casualty figures would help.

It being a licenced thing itself, it doesn’t have any of the licenced survivors and killers from the likes of Halloween, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Evil Dead, and less in-genre-ly Stranger Things. (Having original characters with no narrative expectations of victory helps the regular game.) No doubt someone will house rule them, but I always welcome more Ash miniatures.

World Rat Day

A very happy world Rat Day! Dedicated to Scratch and Lilith.

Nocturne 1.21

Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne

1.21

Tonight a Brujah realised that a Ventrue might not be on the up and up.

Lane regretfully informs Hope, and Nessa gleefully confirms, than Fergal is full of shit prone to doublespeak.

The Quest on Disney+

The Quest, a hyper-LARP fantasy adventure reality contest show with producers from both The Amazing Race and Lord Of The Rings, coming to Disney+ in May, with teens instead of a previous version with adult contestants (including Bonnie Gordon of Library Bards). It looks a tad fancier than Knightmare.

My money’s on the girls who already have a sword and a bow.

With a team, eliminations and outdoors challenges it’s probably closer to Children’s BBC series Raven with a much heftier effects budget.

Looks like it would be fun. Apart from the rope climbing bit.

Superman & Lois season one

Superman & Lois season one concluded here tonight. Like a lot of the later Arrowverse shows it’s highly serialised, with more episodes ending on cliffhangers than not. (Including the finale, after a nice and pretty long celebratory ending sequence. A cliffhanger that looks a lot like the one for Supergirl season one.)

Its recurring solution to challenging Superman is giving people Kryptonian powers. More disasters to avert would have been nice, along with more chances for Clark to be amiable, which he does really well. Lois gets the investigative challenges and parental conflicts, and they share parenting ones. Smallville as a recession-hit dead end town rather than the Norman Rockwell idyll gets some good early showing but later gets a bit lost in the shuffle. But on the whole the mix of supers and soap works, helped by Jonathan and Jordan and their peers being interesting and sometimes fun characters as well. Jordan’s mental health issues, mostly touched on lightly, added a lot.

Geek And Sundry

Geek And Sundry started ten years ago. It did a lot to bring Actual Play to video, with TableTop at launch and then most notably Critical Role. Tabletop Day started there too.

Here we Crow again

The umpteenth attempt to remake The Crow is a go, with director Rupert Sanders (Snow White And The Huntsman, Ghost In The Shell) and star Bill Skarsgård (It).

Judging by the director’s work, I expect it to be big and CGI spectacular rather than small and grounded. Judging by the star’s, he will wear white face paint with lines over the eyes WAIT A MINUTE

Anyway, he’s a different way to go than last serious attempt Jason Momoa.

Oh, really?

Screenshot with Ellen E. Jones and Mark Kermode looks at hoaxes in film and TV, including Mark Gatiss on GhostWatch (where I knew too much before it started because I’d seen the Radio Times cover) and a big bit of Orson Welles following The War Of The Worlds with his film about fraud F For Fake, where I was primed for this going in as well and when Welles started by saying everything in the next hour was true I noted that it’s an hour and a half long.

Time travel movies rated for logic and fun

Time travel movies rated by device used, rules established and followed, stakes set and entertainment value by Joe George at Tor. It only features one of the instances where Rachel McAdams dated or married a time traveller, but refers to another in passing.

40K announcement

Lovely work. Ah, but the timing...

Update: maybe really? One model at least. (But thanks to modern mini design, he has pretty similar proportions to a human from the first edition lines, or indeed Stargrave.)

One Malkavian PC idea per decade

I realise this may feel like an April Fool’s but I just statted out a Vampire: The Masquerade V5 Malkavian I genuinely think I could play.

Okay, she’d also work as a Toreador, but still.

And her clan flaw (borrowed from Angel) isn’t a mental illness.

And she needs a house rule for it.

And wouldn’t as a Mekhet in Requiem 2.

But anyway.

Colette Forbes

Clan: Malkavian

Concept: Hippy turned Harpy

Having COVID-19

Better now than earlier.

Question everything you see online

And not just today.