Hawkeye: Partners, Am I Right?

Hawkeye

1.04: Partners, Am I Right?

And already at the end of the second act sad bit.

Loved Eleanor being so diplomatically protective, the party, Clint coming clean...

What We Do In The Shadows 3.06

I find the understatement of this Radio Times review of our heroes’ actions in What We Do In The Shadows 3.06 quite charming.

Pearl Harbour

The attack on Pearl Harbour happened 80 years ago today.

Adventure Calendar 2021 007: Spies

Adventure Calendar 2021

007: Spies

A bonus for the end of the first week.

With the tradition of big movies showing on TV at Christmas, there’s a lot of Bond in the mix.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the only Bond film set at Christmas and the time is basically used for a skiing holiday with world conquest side plot, but we see quite a bit of winter in the films from then on, right up to No Time To Die starting at the edge of a frozen lake.

My Trinity Continuum suggestions mostly apply here, ski and snowmobile chases and all. But going with a somewhat topical adventure theme...

I Saw Three Gunships Come Swooping In

Almost all the goods for the festive season in the UK arrive on massive container ships. Some years, just one - in 2006 it was the maiden voyage of the biggest ship in the world, “quarter of a mile long, 200ft-high (61 metre) behemoth, that is as wide as a motorway and is powered by the largest diesel engine ever built”...

How do you stop it if it gets hijacked and aimed at our busiest port?

(In reality several ships arrive in September or October most years, but the dramatic irony of the lights already being up so put it around mid to late November for Black Friday overstock.)

Adventure Calendar 2021 7: Star Trek

Adventure Calendar 2021

7: Star Trek

Star Trek still has a lot of familiar traditions in the 23rd and 24th centuries. Memory Alpha notes references to Christmas throughout the timeline. Despite being a couple of centuries further forward than Trinity Continuum: Aeon, Generations has a very Victorian Christmas as Picard’s dream life, which seems like a nod to Sir Patrick Stewart’s love for A Christmas Carol as much as anything.

And it also has stars to follow, and an occasional tendency to reveal mythological figures as existing in some form or another, though the series pitch episode about meeting a Jesus figure before his crucifixion never made it to film.

But maybe dip into the general Nativity rather than the specifics...

No Room At The Inn

Refugees from a planetary occupation send a distress call. Can Starfleet send aid? Miraculous pregnancy optional.

Change one thing in your plot

Sometimes you can take a basic plot hook and change one thing to freshen it up by thinking through how that affects it. For example, the seventy million dollar stolen antiquities seizure is a very basic Relics, Trinity or Leverage plot hook made different by being absurdly huge. Thanks to Conrad Hubbard for the link.

Fear No Evil

Fear No Evil is a teenage Antichrist movie from 1981 that I had never heard of until Horror Queers devoted their latest episode to it -

- and What The Hell that soundtrack - The Ramones, The Boomtown Rats, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and the Sex Pistols’ “I am an Antichrist, and I am an anarchist!” being literalised and played over the trailer.

Life can be so surprising.

Being (kind of) on the side of the Antichrist is an interesting stance. Damien: Omen II considered it for like one scene a few years earlier in 1978, before Good Omens ran amok with the idea. And on TV Reaper had several options on top of its “crappy first job metaphor Buffy with slacker guys doing Brimstone” setup.

An orchestra RPG and someone wants to play a barbarian

Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 for brass, woodwind, strings, and warhammer.

With thanks to mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton on Twitter.

Adventure Calendar 2021 6: Star Wars

Adventure Calendar 2021

6: Star Wars

Star Wars doesn’t have Christmas, but like many fictional settings it has festivals that look a bit like it, Life Day first appeared in The Star Wars Holiday Special but hasn’t been thrown out despite this, being referenced in The Mandalorian, and in The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special it happens to look a lot like Christmas. Life Day in the original Special is a decidedly nebulous mystical thing which is probably something to do with the Force, but let’s not poke at that. Star Wars already has a miraculous birth in the desert, robed Magi, and plenty of stars to follow.

The basics of gathering with family stay the same, which in this setting can involve interstellar travel and blockade running in most eras. So follow the “trying to get home” model used in Han and Chewie’s little adventure and exemplified in Planes, Trains And Automobiles.

I’ll Be Home

Even in the depths of the war against the Empire, Rebels celebrate these small, familiar traditions to keep up morale. And the team is charged with getting a diplomat to an Outer Rim planet to lead Life Day celebrations and show that Imperial propaganda about her isn’t true. But it’s not going to be an easy journey. The diplomat’s ship has drive problems, a smuggler they know isn’t answering their calls, they might have to get a commercial flight, those are all booked up...

It’s a Life Day miracle!

Nocturne 1.08

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne, party planning with potential life or death repercussions. And some vampires still politicking about the guest list.

Adventure Calendar 2021 5: Doctor Who

Adventure Calendar 2021

5: Doctor Who

With its history of Christmas specials since 2005, I’ve talked about Doctor Who and Christmas before quite a bit, but here we are. (The Christmas truce is an obvious idea so I’m not surprised the show actually did it later.)

The show’s annual special shifted to New Year’s Day with the current run, which is apt for a show about time travel and also meant that the statement of no classic monsters in 2018 was technically accurate by a few hours, but it’s really a very Christmassy kind of show.

Secret Santa

One of the travellers gets back to modern Earth just in time for her flat’s Christmas party, everybody’s glad to see them and rather curious about the strange person she’s brought along. And the Doctor realises that one of the gifts is for them. But how, from whom, and is it safe to open with human beings in the same room/building/mile/hemisphere/universe?

Across The Spider-Verse Part 1

First teaser scenes for Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse Part 1. Part 1, you say...

Superman & Lois

Superman & Lois started this evening on BBC One. (A. V. Club pilot review) It’s a largely separate aside to the Arrowverse (as far as I can tell) which has been on Sky and latterly free channels since it started. And a BBC One Saturday evening airing for a US TV series is unusual anyway these days.

The title gives less equal billing than Lois & Clark did, but so far at least Lois (Bitsie Tulloch) gets about as much to do as Clark (Tyler Hoechilin) apart from when he goes off to save the world, fairly often.

Set largely in Smallville due to two unrelated reasons that happen within a minute of each other when one would have done, there’s a lot of golden hour photography like the series set there started with. (But we get Superman suited up in the first couple of minutes.)

The mysterious masked villain is a very Arrowverse move.

And it’s a sequel of sorts to where the usually are, as Lois and Clark are married and have two teenage sons. Nudging them almost twenty years up from their regular happily ever after opens up some different possibilities. (Not sure if either of these sons is the new Superman from the comics.)

Adventure Calendar 2021 4: Aeon

Adventure Calendar 2021

4: Trinity Continuum: Aeon

And what will the holidays be like in a hundred years? Hard to tell really, but Trinity Continuum: Aeon is close enough that some traditions could be familiar.

Following Yonder Star

A distant world, now back in contact after the first exploration faltered, allowing some home comforts after long harsh conditions, allowing a celebration around midwinter. If your scouting team can get through!

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!

Adventure Calendar 2021 2: Vampire

Adventure Calendar 2021

2: Vampire: The Masquerade

I’ve written a book for this, which I swear I will put on the Storytellers Vault one of these years.

And at the table I’ve infamously done this with one of the PCs crossing paths with an elder who’s out hunting a pregnant woman as his “Christmas dinner” (also the session where the Malkavian PC saw an angel in human form trying to help at a shelter and since nobody else noticed wrote it off as a hallucination) and less harshly last year the players had their PCs take a night off to try and cheer up the newly Embraced Nosferatu spending her first holiday season as a vampire without her loved ones.

So there’s room for a variety of stories around Christmas for vampires, for Masquerade or Requiem.

The northern hemisphere will have the longest night of the year four days earlier, and with connections to nightclubs we have the big New Year’s Eve parties as well.

And as the big moment for Christianity, which also places great importance on family, it can be a hard time for the lonely Damned.

Midnight Mass

The coterie see an elder vampire going into the city’s cathedral for the midnight service. Is he hunting, meeting someone... or praying?

Trinity Continuum: Assassins

Trinity Continuum: Assassins comes to pre-order with chapter previews, through DriveThruRPG as the Anima Kickstarter continues.

Adventure Calendar 2021 1: Buffy

December! Time once more for my gift to you of festive adventure ideas. Having done this two years running (2019, 2020) I’ve gone through most of the obvious ideas for seasonal plot hooks, and some pretty odd ones as well. So this year, maybe... hooks for specific games and settings.

1: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Well, obviously.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a single perfect Christmas special in season 3’s Amends, a ghost story full of heartbreak and a seasonal miracle, so going with something else entirely. I’ve done some “the PCs have a relatively quiet holiday” episodes of The Watch House near the end of actual term, as well as a killer snowman short story. And the Buffyverse can easily fit rescuing Santa from Krampus, Ethan Rayne creating a toy craze as seen in the comics, talking animals, or a ton of other Funny Magic Episode ideas. And Angel season three was about the birth of a Miracle Child. So we have options...

Deck The Halls

The holidays are on their way and the gang aren’t really feeling it. One of them has been dumped and the gift they already got the dumper is sitting on top of their pile of unwrapped presents.

And then they stop a gang of goblins attacking a man in green, who says they have to fetch a sprig of holly from a tree in the depths of the forest or the sun won’t rise. Because, sure, okay?

So we have a weird forest, a mysterious elf guy, goblins, emotional fallout, and an optional snowball fight.

Hawkeye: Echoes

Hawkeye

1.03: Echoes

An introduction that makes Maya highly sympathetic and introduces Zahn McClarnon as her father.

December

This year’s version of All I Want For Christmas Is You is bouncy pop punk from Charly Bliss.

I could see this working at the Bronze, not least because I first heard them with a song where the video is an homage to Doublemeat Palace.