Knutepunkt 2021

Articles from Knutepunkt 2021 at Nordic LARP look at community and the power of ritual and story.

I was ahead of things. It has been a year again.

Star Wars Resistance

With Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2D Clone Wars, the Ewoks movies and the animated Good Bit of the Star Wars Holiday Special coming to Disney+ for Easter, the 3D The Clone Wars season seven there and spinoff The Bad Batch starting on May the Fourth, Star Wars Resistance is all up now (apart from the minute-or-so shorts from season one) as well.

As is traditional with a new Star Wars animated series the new art style takes some getting used to. It’s bright and colourful, and the backdrops in particular Ghibli-ish with some Akira-y station details, though the human characters mostly look a bit too blank for me.

It’s very much for kids. The humour tends towards slapstick with the main character Kazuda Xiono being comically inept, and trades on audience affection for BB-8 by sending him in to help Kaz on his mission with Poe Dameron looking in every few episodes.

Unlike The Clone Wars and Rebels it doesn’t use a snippet of classic Star Wars fanfare for its theme tune, and the theme sounds oddly like Back To The Future to me, which does fit its comedy teen hero.

The basic setup has a giant fuel station turned freeport in neutral space, with the Resistance, the First Order and other factions all having spies there. It’s like a space Casablanca, a series hook I’ve always wanted to do, but it’s been noted that Kaz is more a teen detective protagonist rather than one of the central figures there. Add the racer element for extra action.

The neutral space plays up the early difference between the Rebellion and Resistance eras, and it’s a very game-friendly premise for an ongoing series with a central location.

It starts before The Force Awakens with the Resistance quietly spying on the First Order as it slowly builds to make its first big strike, closer to the level where Rebels starts. It moves past The Last Jedi as the second season progresses and it shifts in tone quite heavily with more space battles and the like. Its second season ran from autumn 2019 to winter 2020 but doesn’t go all the way to The Rise Of Skywalker. An epilogue set after that finale could have been a nice capper, but it ends pretty solidly.

More spoilery thoughts, even though it’s been over a year...

V5: No Man's Land 118

The coterie adds something up and gets a Hecata to swear.

The Olympics

The 2020 Olympics is still happening in Tokyo... in 2021. The latest news is that people aren’t going to be allowed to fly in to see them.

The Olympics have always been a bit weird compared to “regular” world athletics events (not least in 1924) what with the various political actions, the Bond villain cheating at fencing, the bizarre opening ceremonies, so holding the one predicted in Akira despite a fantastic excuse not to seems about right.

Spring, So, Summer

It is spring. So, naturally, thinking what to run in the summer. Buffy, Star Wars, Vampire, Trinity, Aeon...

Red Nose Day 2021

The new non-plastic noses are lighter than the previous big rubbery ones, but fairly hard and still not very comfortable.

Daniel Craig’s James Bond meets Catherine Tate’s Nan.

Staged brushes up on its Shakespeare.

2020: The Movie Trailer features Jodie Whittaker and Mandip Gill crossing over with a more regular doctor show.

The cast of Derry Girls are not their characters.

I can see why they got Jayde Adams in for the barely rehearsed Nessun Dorma performance but Caroline Quentin is a surprise as well.

The Falcon And The Winter Soldier: 1: New World Order

The Falcon And The Winter Soldier

1: New World Order

As Empire puts it in its new cover feature, “after the weirdness of WandaVision, regular service is resuming”...

I’ve avoided trailers so I didn’t know about [redacted] or [redacted].

Things found in a modern wizard's study

Specifically a Tremere chantry in Vampire: The Masquerade from a Facebook group prompt, but somewhat suitable for any sketchy urban fantasy magic user...

The big bare concrete basement for rituals, with the remains of an arcane symbol in blood surrounded by a circle of salt which has clearly been broken, and a blast shadow on one of the walls.

There are multiple locks on every door, hundreds of locks in the building, from the original latch and bolt locks to modern deadbolts. And every one of them is broken open.

A modern security centre showing the cameras all over the building, and the outside... and tapped into cameras outside the city’s Elysium... and the subway stations... and...

A severed head in a dusty jar that looks a lot like a local vampire that the PCs saw earlier tonight.

A full Time-Life “Enchanted World” Mysteries of the Unknown book series.

V20+10

Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition was announced ten years ago today.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to Irish and connected readers!

King Arthur and the stamps of the Round Table

Today sees a set on First Day Cover stamps based on the legend of King Arthur, illustrated by The Last Jedi and Destiny concept artist Jaime Jones. A grounded and realistic take, with no portrait of Arthur himself, only Merlin and Galahad.

Stargrave rules and miniatures previews

First look at crew creation rules and the first plastic miniatures kits for Osprey’s post-collapse space opera SF skirmish game Stargrave.

The galaxy is a rough place. Most of the once-powerful planets have been reduced to rubble, their populations decimated. Even the smaller colonies that were left untouched by the war have seen their economies collapse as necessary trade dried up. Vast pirate fleets roam between the stars, taking what they want and enforcing their own brand of law and justice. Plagues have run unchecked through many systems. Famine has turned others into wastelands. Raiding, border skirmishes, and other low-level warfare is rife.

It is against this background that the ‘independent crews’ operate. Generally consisting of a single ship and a small crew, these small bands travel between the systems, keeping to the shadows and out-of-sight of the pirate fleets.

As I thought on first hearing about it. it’s looking very Ashen Stars, although even more beat-up.

And the reason for the collapse is a war as befits a wargame, rather than a mystery as befits a mystery game:

The 28mm miniatures are humanoid (and all masculine, with feminine sprues to follow) and pretty Rogue Trader chunky rather than the slim realistic true scale style made increasingly popular with 3D printing, more obviously so than Frostgrave. I expect that you can switch bits and pieces around with Frostgrave so you can create melee armoured types and wild-haired space warriors, use Wizard parts to make mystics, and Demon heads to make a crew full of Star Wars Devaronians and other cantina aliens, as well as using the small number of uplifted animal heads to Pugmire up your Frostgrave armies.

Keep on running

Beginning plans for summer RPGs.

It has been a year.

Anarchs

Part of the appeal of Vampire: The Masquerade is that as the anarchs you can stick it to The Man and The Man will actually notice.

The Kindred Wheelchair

Kindred-tailored wheelchairs for Vampire: The Masquerade from Lore By Night.

WandaVision - bring the fun home!

Could something like WandaVision work in an RPG?

I’d say yes, though compared to the very RPG-friendly regular MCU and associated series, not easily.

Firstly you have a shifting background that moves between styles, and genres. That would take some effort, deciding what changes and what doesn’t.

Then there’s the reveal that the world is a construct, and the initial mystery of who’s been messing up everything.

This could be done in a “reality isn’t real” RPG - I statted out a TV hero starting to wonder about the world she’s in for Over The Edge, for example - so there’s precedent there.

Do you want to drop this into an ongoing game, or start a new one?

Having existing characters find themselves stuck in a different world is easy enough, if it fits your game’s standard Weird Level...

WandaVision

WandaVision is complete, including the Assembled making of documentary. So...

Outriders

Outriders is a new Destiny-ish computer game starting with a vestige of humanity arriving on a new planet after, as the opening captaion puts it, “Earth is dead.” The player is a leader in a scouting unit on the new world, like a less YA version of The 100. It apparently doesn’t stay with that premise for long though, with the new world getting mired in conflict and the addition of superhuman powers. So more like Khantze Lu Ge, the wartorn planet from Trinity Continuum: Aeon.