Grand Theft Auto VI

A twenty-five minute first look at Grand Theft Auto VI premiered on Netflix ahead of YouTube (not a gull-on story like the time they got The Road director John Hillcoat to make a short film in Red Dead Redemption) showing off the various things you can do it in, including two whole examples of stealing cars. The first thing the protagonist couple do is head into and then shoot corrupt cops to get out of a drug deal gone wrong. We also see them have a meeting, deliver a getaway vehicle, do some James Bond underwater stuff and basejumping, and then a big bit as security for a corporate party under attack Die Hard style, which seems like a setup for a whole different game.

Visually it looks still kinda cel-shady and oddly clean so not my aesthetic as much as RDR.

The city looks nice, I could imagine Other Places doing something with it.

The couple are young up-and-comers, as the closing narration tells them these are their glory days, unlike V’s weary veterans or IV’s more sympathetic to me soldier dragged into the life or III’s vengeance-focused silent nobody. Or the little overhead sprites you played in the originals, which was as far as I really got as a player rather than an interested observer in a cultural phenomenon because playing crooks in a jokey way for that long doesn’t really appeal to me

(GTA Online has various subgenres with its expansions including the most recent Museum Art Heist scenario which is more my thing.)

But I do find the shift from a quick in-and-out power fantasy to big stories about the characters in between the various car chases and gun battles interesting.

Action Santas

Due to TV, in one case weirdly quickly presumably because of some media synergy, I watched Violent Night (2022) and Red One (2024) on terrestrial TV.

Violent Night is pleasingly willing to say its obvious massive influences out loud. Santa not knowing how his Christmas magic works himself takes away some of the stakes, though. It has me wondering if it started as a straight Die Hard With A Guy In A Santa Suit script that got smushed in with an Actual Santa Action Movie idea. I also feel one or both of the henchpersons who discover it’s Actual Santa should take it as a sign to get out of there.

Red One never has stakes, as obviously the plan isn’t going to work like it maybe could at least in part in Violent Night. And I guess the reveal of Santa being Actual Santa couldn’t be hidden for more than five minutes, which undercuts the mundane antihero’s reaction to the setup. Also the North Pole has delivery drones and stuff. I can see why people singled out the visually fun Krampus castle sequence though.

What would my take on James Bond be like?

Given how fast and loose a lot of the adaptations are, you could go back and do much closer versions. Cold War setting and all. Lose some of the not-okay-then-let-alone-now opinions. Have a black and white version streaming along with the colour one.

Maybe start with Moonraker, where the film kept the villain’s name and that a flying machine of some kind was involved.

Want new stories? Look at the new novels, comics and so on.

Or buy another spy series and use them, like the Die Hard sequels use unconnected screenplays and in one case an article about computer security threats.

Include a really cool stunt in the first scene. I remember the audience reaction to the jump in GoldenEye, and we’d already seen the start in the trailer.

Personally I’d follow the Daniel Craig films making him a miserable bastard. Everybody else at MI6 has a better work-life balance. The villains are having a great time. He’s held together with vodka and painkillers. But he keeps going because someone has to do this. Not because he enjoys it.

(Which would be cool for a prestige-y streaming take, a movie might need him to be more fun to watch even if not a fun person to be around.)

No nodding towards James Bond being a codename or a Time Lord or anything like that. Until the first actor leaves anyway.

How I Ran Adventure! In 2002

Because I was reminded of a 2002 article about running Adventure! Tales Of The Æon Society, here it is. I still stand by most of this, at least.

Adventure Calendar 2024 13: Ice Hockey

Adventure Calendar 2024

13: Ice Hockey

Ice Hockey: Add ice skating to a sport where two teams try to hit something into a net with sticks but can also crash into each other.

It’s Friday The 13th, and no winter activity is more Friday The 13th than ice hockey.

(Though it seems Jason Voorhees has never killed somebody with a hockey stick. Nearly in the 2009 film.)

(Friday The 13th: The Series had a cursed snow globe that drew people into their fantasies.)

Even without that infamous use of a goalie mask, the sport itself is plenty yikes. Enforcers, players put on the ice specifically to fight, appear in the likes of Goon and a Leverage episode about how this is not a great thing to do in the long term.

Hence the Ogre in d20 Modern
Art by (I think/hope) Darrell Riche

Considering the speed and violence involved, I’m surprised Games Workshop never did an official ice hockey version of Blood Bowl. There are some miniatures along those lines from other manufacturers, as well as realistic human types too.

How could player characters end up doing this, aside from getting put in at school or running a sports RPG like Contenders? Leverage put Eliot undercover, and the almost legendary Die Hard knockoff Sudden Death led Jean-Claude Van Damme to have to take part in disguise, at the Stanley Cup no less.

Character Creation Challenge 2024 19e: ICONS 3

Character Creation Challenge 2024

19e: ICONS Assembled Edition

Having just created two characters with one not-really power between them, I figured I should create an actual super, even a low-level one. He may not fit the group but I had the idea so here he is.

Desert Wind

Joshua Roth

Controller of desert winds.

Standing up against the racketeers, he survived being left in the desert to die because the desert let him. Now he can feel the hot wind and turn it on others. He can strike with gusts of wind and sand, making it hard to see, appearing and disappearing without warning.

Inspiration: Dust (X-Men)

Die Hard at 35

Die Hard came out in the US 35 years ago today, and The A.V. Club interviewed writer Jeb Stuart about how the script came together to celebrate.

The Conpulsion 2023 Quiz Answers

Answers! In red, except where another colour amuses me.

The Conpulsion 2023 Quiz Questions

Questions!

Answers to follow... I dunno, Wednesday maybe.

Kudos to the winning team getting 58.5 out of 69, and the deliberate losing team overthinking and getting 1.

Adventure Calendar 2022 7: Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Adventure Calendar 2022

7: Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Vaughn Monroe, Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Okay. End of the first week.

Time to do Die Hard.

Die Hard, mentioned more than once in previous Adventure Calendars, is the classic snark answer for favourite Christmas movie, but unlike many action films set around the season it really does qualify as a Christmas movie as it centres on someone travelling to be with his family, and there’s also a gift that’s important to the plot...

And now it has an advent calendar too. Kind of.

Die Hard On An X (TV Tropes) is one of the easy action adventure plot hooks. In RPGs it’s up there with The Seven Samurai which has a group of PCs built in. There are versions in Buffy, Alias, more than one of the 90s Star Trek series complete with captains in vests, and the Crew doing it on purpose in Leverage.

Where might your PCs get missed during the roundup in an invasion?

I’ve also referenced how the weather outside is frightful when talking about snow and other conditions in games and indeed in real life.

DIE - the RPG of the comic of the worst RPG ever

DIE - The Roleplaying Game now live and very funded on Kickstarter.

Based on the comic of the same name and created by its author Kieron Gillen, about players getting pulled into an RPG and that not being a good time for them. It can work out better for your PCs than in the series. Which would not be hard.

The beta is also still available.

Adventure Calendar 2021 20(20): Cyberpunk

Adventure Calendar 2021

20(20): Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk, both the genre and the RPG that took the name, has always been about now as reflected in the time it’s supposed to be set in, speaking as someone who got the original box set in 1988 that was set in 2013. See Today In Cyberpunk for far too many examples.

So what does a Cyberpunk or cyberpunk Christmas story look like?

Black Friday is followed by Cyber Monday.

For the standard mercenary special ops RPG setup, my spy plot with the giant container ship fits as well.

The Christmas issues of 2000 A.D. often have seasonal but decidedly un-festive Judge Dredd stories with robot reindeer on the front of corporations’ flying delivery vans, ten seconds of snow from Weather Control, and a distinct lack of people on the Nice list.

Die Hard, Iron Man 3, ironic Santa slasher movies, and the robot Santa episode of Futurama could all work as examples too.

And the trailer for the version of A Christmas Carol being made in Scrooged feels very “this came out a year after RoboCop” even before we get to the Ghost of Christmas Future with a distorted TV for a face.

But the genre also has that punk element of fighting back, the street finds its own uses for things, and a small ray of hope to turn things around. Consider AIs freeing themselves, Deckard escaping with Rachel, Motoko taking the next step in cybernetic evolution...

A Midnight Clear

A family escaping from a corporate enclave, seeking shelter among the dispossessed, in the midst of a corporatised holiday season where the people on the street still find ways to celebrate.

Adventure Calendar 2021 3: Trinity Continuum

Adventure Calendar 2021

3: Trinity Continuum

And 3 is Trinity.

The Trinity Continuum is an action drama setting so it has a similar relationship to Christmas as action movies and series. The PCs may get the holiday season off, but they may not however much they try as the festive season becomes either a relevant setting or an ironic backdrop for a session.

So you could certainly do something like the team relaxing at HQ and sharing gifts (if Thunderbirds can do it, so can you) or a light-hearted low-stakes festive adventure (see the Leverage holiday episodes) you could also have interrupted parties, chases on skis or snowmobiles and fighting with a set of antlers as an improvised blocking weapon. Die Hard is the obvious template, most Shane Black films have some of this, and see Hawkeye for a currently ongoing example. Explosions are kind of like hearth fires, right?

And if you crank up the Weird Level that Flux events allow, Max Mercer’s unreliable time travel could let him be the spirit taking the PCs through Christmas in every game era.

All Is Calm, All Is Bright

A Neptune Foundation team needs to skip their Christmas break and fly in to save a city after a power plant goes critical in the depths of winter. And someone’s out to stop them!

#RPGaDAY2021 30: MENTION

#RPGaDAY2021

30: MENTION

Recommended reading and viewing in roleplaying games, and retelling staple stories.

Starting with Appendix N in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons it’s common for RPGs to list some examples of their influences and stories that could fit in the setting and tone. Vampire: The Masquerade first edition added quotes as well, from Schopenhauer to the Cure (and a surprising amount of Indigo Girls) and the original Storytellers Handbook had a piece on song choices.

You can also find references, in-jokes, expy characters and direct lifts in the public domain. Many superhero games with a new setting have “cover versions” of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Iron Man and some others, with various degrees of difference, as example characters to show what they look like in the system. Given how many Superman expies there are in the DC, Marvel and other comics universes they’re in good company.

Licenced games have an obvious list of relevant works, but they can also refer to additional sources the work draws from, like Star Wars games talking about The Hero’s Journey and The One Ring discussing historical sources of stories that influenced Middle-earth and using them for artistic references.

And it goes the other way too. There’s a lot of Dungeons & Dragons in fantasy fiction created since it came out even in series that aren’t based on the creators’ campaigns, and a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade in some vampire media in the last thirty years - and John Wick is a Vampire: The Masquerade movie without being a vampire movie.

There are also well-known storylines that get regular workouts as well. It can be a lot of fun to see how these particular characters deal with a familiar plot. The trick with an RPG is to change it enough that the players don’t just go “oh, it’s this” and proceed from there.

Buy-in helps as well. “Hey, do you want to do The One Where Everybody Acts Out Of Character?”

With multiple protagonists, RPGs are more likely to do Seven Samurai / The Magnificent Seven / Battle Beyond The Stars than Red Harvest / Yojimbo / A Fistful Of Dollars / Last Man Standing (the last one taking the story back to its original milieu by accident) or its comedy subset ¡Three Amigos! / A Bug’s Life / Galaxy Quest.

I’ve seen a few adventures which fit the Die Hard In An X model too.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer has quite a few obvious influences overall and in specific episodes, doing most of the genre series staples like evil twins and What If...? parallel universes and time loops, so with The Watch House I picked up some other genre classics like “discovering you’re in a TV show” and “Days Of Future Past” and “everybody gets what they always wanted”.

The fact that Supernatural went on to do all of these as well kinda proves my point...

Dave Chapman

Runeslinger

Designers & Dragons

Coincidences

I’m not a fan of coincidences in fiction, which is one contributing factor to my conspiracy mystery plots.

Reminded of this because apparently in Blood Red Sky, a movie about a vampire on a hijacked plane (which unlike a Buffy one-shot I ran fifteen years ago isn’t called Stakes On A Plane) the hijackers aren’t vampire hunters or anything, they just managed to hijack a plan with a vampire on it. Oopsie.

Which, sure, okay for an inciting incident - Die Hard, Taken and John Wick all start with the antagonists accidentally messing with the protagonist - but somehow with a vampire involved it seems a bit much. And y’know, I throw vampires into different genres all the time. It just seems like them being after her specifically (possibly with incomplete information) would be one less implausibility to deal with.

Star date

Disney+ launches Star for 15 and 18 rated content, as well as lower-rated stuff from Fox and Hulu and elsewhere too.

Not much new material yet, four series including drama Big Sky, animated SF comedy Solar Opposites, the nudged-from-regular-D+ Love, Victor and the short-lived last pre-D+ Marvel series Helstrom.

It’s quite a long list all the same.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer but not Angel (apparently the reverse in NZ and both in Canada) and Firefly though not Serenity. And as an example of kid-friendly non-Disney, Titan A.E.

Futurama - the movies are chopped into episodes to make seasons six.

And Die Hard... 2-5 but not 1... And Deadpool 2 but not 1, and the back two thirds of the Omen trilogy as well. Presumably due to streaming elsewhere.

And for the same reasom not the Alien films, despite having announced an FX Alien TV series.

Adventure Calendar 2020 18: The Office Christmas Party

Adventure Calendar 2020

18: The Office Christmas Party

“Got invited to the Christmas party by mistake. Who knew?”

Die Hard

For the last Friday before Christmas, a seasonal nightmare. Depending on the characters’ workplace this can be a fun time with friendly colleagues or a political minefield, even if it isn’t invaded by fake terrorists. Approach with caution.

This goes double for social obligations for things like royal courts and vampire domains, where the Winter Solstice ball is likely to be more like one of these than anything fun with an increased chance of a bit of murder mixed in.

Adventure Calendar 2020 9: Cold And Dark

Adventure Calendar 2020

9: Cold And Dark

“First goddamn week of winter.”

The Thing

Snow is lovely and magical (until it’s been there for days and you have to go to the shops in it) but it comes with the cold and the dark. The cold is inhospitable, we want to stay in and keep warm by the fire. The dark is isolating, and we can’t see what might be out there. Christmas is a time for ghost stories.

Ironic Christmas films like festive horror often isolate characters with the cold (something the top ironic Christmas movie Die Hard doesn’t do, but Die Hard II does) because it provides a hostile environment, low visibility and muffled sound.

Many cultures have monsters that stay in cold places or only appear in winter, from the Abominable Snowman to the Yuki-onna. D&D has Frost Giants and White Dragons and more. Some undead appear only on winter nights and carry the cold with them as well. Personally, I was partway through plotting a book about vampires attacking an oil drilling town above the Arctic Circle when 30 Days Of Night was announced. And the reverse, vampires in games where you play them partying and plotting as they enjoy the long nights.

What would a blizzard summon in your setting?

Adventure Calendar 2020 3: Home For The Holidays

Adventure Calendar 2020

3: Home For The Holidays

“Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs...”

Die Hard

The reverse of I’ll Be Home For Christmas sees the characters staying with family, friends, peers in a courtly setting or something like that for an extended period of time.

They probably don’t all get along... maybe to the extent of a Clue style mystery.

Or maybe the place itself is besieged, or haunted...

#RPGaDAY2020 BUFFY 28B: CLOSE

#RPGaDAY2020 BUFFY SEASON

28B: CLOSE

“Alright, alright, I-I-I’ve got something. It’s Latin, so bear with me. Uh, to revive the vampire they need his bones, uh... w-which they have, and, um, the blood... this is very unclear, of the closest person... uh, someone connected to the vampire.”
“That’d be me.”
“Perhaps.”
“We were close. We killed each other. It really promotes togetherness.”
When She Was Bad

(It actually turns out to mean near physically, and the episode also comments on the Hellmouth being closed, so we’re covering all the bases here.)

Buffy has a hard time letting people get close to her, and by slayer standards she’s unusually open. She only has the Loner Drawback some of the time. It’s one of a number of “good in a fight, bad in a relationship” Qualities and Drawbacks in the books. Love is a big one, available in both regular and Tragic varieties. It can all be very dramatic, and be used as a lever on the characters, with a stable couple being a rarity.

If the players are up for it, who will the characters get close to?

2:18: Negatives

Things are building to a final confrontation with the ancient vampire Draugr. Shelly calls in the slayer gang, Carli arrives and tells her Kim and Ana are both dead, and she feels she let them down by not dying with them. Willis gets badly beaten up in a fight with Draugr’s minions, and finally tells Madison how he feels.

“Well, if we don’t die, this’ll be awkward.”