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.