Adventure Calendar 2021 14: Ghostbusters

Adventure Calendar 2021

14: Ghostbusters

A spooky but not so scary end to spooky week.

Ghostbusters II is about the emotional charge of New Year’s. The Real Ghostbusters cartoon had the team accidentally trap the ghosts from A Christmas Carol and have to reset the timeline after Scrooge took over the holiday season.

Cartoon Action Hour has a similar adventure, free!

Ghostbusters was I think the first game I ran a Christmas special for. I based my Christmas adventure on Sleigh Wars, the White Dwarf boardgame about four very different Santas fighting to deliver gifts. (Ravensburger recently released a similar game, Santa’s Rooftop Scramble, though the Santas are all classic Santa instead of evil, militaristic or worried about being up to date.)

Our heroes had to team up with classic Santa to defeat Anti-Claus (the Krampus wasn’t well known at the time) and prevent Arkham’s worst Christmas ever.

And there’s plenty of room for satirising the stranger and creepier bits of Christmas culture, and blasting them with proton packs. Many would also work with the likes of Buffy, but the direct approach that Ghostbusters can take should make it feel quite different.

Elves On Shelves

A small figurine said to be watching on behalf of Santa to see who’s naughty or nice.

But who are these things really spying for?

And how many of them can a fully-grown Ghostbuster fight off if they go on the attack?

Pitch the action somewhere around Small Soldiers and stand well back.

Henry Cavill, Primarch

Well, yes, of course Henry Cavill wants to make a Warhammer 40,000 movie. And wants to give Age Of Sigmar a shot.

Black List 2021

The Black List 2021 (roundup at the A. V. Club) collects the most popular unmade screenplays of the year, the usual cross-section of genres, including the highlighted biopics of scum, but more importantly for our purposes...

Genre stuff summarised at plot hook length.

Experimental musician versus endless maddening sound from space!

Something glimpsed in the back of a video call walking back from a party!

Graffiti tag battle escapes into the real world!

Time loop art theft!

(Also redistributive art theft, yay Les Fantômes! And checking, the thief is actually called the Ghost...)

Assassin versus witches! (Did someone have the same thought I did about the John Wick: Hex game?)

Spec ops team on a recovery mission into the afterlife!

Alien invasion interrupting a bad first date!

Adventure Calendar 2021 13: A Ghost Story For Christmas

Adventure Calendar 2021

13: A Ghost Story For Christmas

A recurring theme.

There are plenty of horror games built for one-shots and plenty of one-shot-able adventures for others, but which fit the right kind of “a ghost story for Christmas” mood?

The M. R. James Gumshoe RPG Casting The Runes deserves a mention here. It takes its name from James’s most well-known and RPG-friendly story, which has a distinct villain and a solution based on the protagonists being active. (See also film versions including Jacque Tourneur’s Night Of The Demon, and the basic setup reappears in the Ring series.)

My first non-review article in an RPG magazine was about the James stories, and how their lack of a general “mythos” made them most suitable for one-shots.

(His time running King’s College Cambridge is also why The Watch House is set there.)

James’s stories are generally thought of as quite genteel, but this is mostly because the children with Lost Hearts and victims of Count Magnus’s face-sucking familiar are only described in passing. Visualise the former on TV or the latter in comics and they play a bit differently.

One option looking for a plot is his essay Stories I Have Tried To Write:

Then there was quite a long one about two undergraduates spending Christmas in a country house that belonged to one of them. An uncle, next heir to the estate, lived near. Plausible and learned Roman priest, living with the uncle, makes himself agreeable to the young men. Dark walks home at night after dining with the uncle. Curious disturbances as they pass through the shrubberies. Strange, shapeless tracks in the snow round the house, observed in the morning. Efforts to lure away the companion and isolate the proprietor and get him to come out after dark. Ultimate defeat and death of the priest, upon whom the Familiar, baulked of another victim, turns.

(I would say lose the specificity of the sketchy priest.)

Nocturne 1.09

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne, the coterie’s best fighter had to be prevented from eating (a) one of the people the group was trying to protect and (b) another PC. The plan still worked... mostly...

Trinity Continuum OpCast

OpCast - Arms Around the Trinity Continuum, hosted by Josh Heath and Scott Cuban. Episode 1 guest, Ian A. A. Watson.

Adventure Calendar 2021 12: The anti-festive horror one-shot

Adventure Calendar 2021

12: The anti-festive horror one-shot

Using Christmas iconography ironically. I’m thinking Black Christmas, Krampus and the like here. Gizmodo reckons there are twice as many horror movies for Christmas as for Halloween.

Dead Of Night has something suitable already. EPOCH has several options, PWYW for charity. (Hello Morgue!)

Straight-up killer Santas are the easiest option, but we can go weirder, right? Maybe not Mari Lwyd weird, but a bit weird.

Snowfall

An unexpected cold front has come out of nowhere, cutting off a small town. And there’s something moving out there. And who made all these snowmen?

And why do they have sharp ice teeth?

Anne Rice

Anne Rice has died, aged 80.

Interview With The Vampire changed the symbol and its meaning as much as Dracula, making the vampire “the outsider in all of us, and the outcast in all of us” as she puts it in the introduction to the film, something we could sympathise with as well as fear in ourselves. Without her there might be no Vampire family of games, as many of its direct influences are her indirect ones.

Adventure Calendar 2021 11: Changeling

Adventure Calendar 2021

11: Changeling: The Lost

Changeling: The Lost runs with the scary side of fairy tales more than Changeling: The Dreaming, though both have the seasons matter.

Borrowing from Sir Terry Pratchett in Hogfather putting the boot into the story of The Little Match Girl...

Matches

One of the Gentry wants a festive story to go just so, and that involves someone suffering and dying, not caring that the story was meant as a parable. Can you make this ending happy?

The Monkees

Thanks to weekend repeats of the series, The Monkees were a big part of my early musical and comedy learning, presented as live-action cartoons not unlike The Goodies to a less actively surreal extent. (I didn’t see Head until decades later.)

The Lord Of The Rings films at 20

The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring premiered in London twenty years ago today, on general release nine days later.

Empire retrospective

Long imagined, we never quite believed we’d see it. And yet see it we did, and then more of it on discs before The Two Towers a year later and Return Of The King after that.

(My brother took our parents and I to see each of them as a shared Christmas present, which meant not having to think of any other ideas for three years, tricksy devil.)

There are various features that fans of the books take issue with, more in the second and third films than in Fellowship, but the wonder of it all swept us along and holds us now. I remember my mother saying “Splendid...” at that panning shot of the hall in Moria.

And as of 2010 I have literally been there and back again.

Adventure Calendar 2021 10: Wraith

Adventure Calendar 2021

10: Wraith: The Oblivion

Many ghost stories connect to Christmas, why not one starring ghosts?

The restless dead of Wraith: The Oblivion and Orpheus, and Geist: The Sin-Eaters, do a lot of rattling chains (the Wraith cover is made up of them with a central lock, while Geist is depicted with keys) and can appear to humans in dreams or in reality, so if they felt so inclined they could give someone the Scrooge treatment.

Marley Was Dead, To Begin With

The Shroud is thinnest at Halloween but can get a tad patchy around Christmas as well, giving the ghosts a chance to communicate with a Fetter or other important person. (And the living who can commune with the dead can lay some groundwork for it.) And what can they tell them? Can they scare a sinner into a better life, or bring back warm memories of better times?

Halo: TV series trailer

Halo trailer, also at the Game Awards. I suppose game relatd trailers at a game show, even an awards show, makes more sense than movie trailers at ta football game.

Halo armour designs and previous live action adverts were among the things I stole from various media for The Stars On Fire. Lack of much familiarity with the source material and liking the toys was a factor, but enough to make me curious.

Other video game news

A Wonder Woman game, a new Space Marine, Alan Wake II, and portal-jumping gaslamp fantasy Nightingale announced at the Game Awards.

Star Trek: Resurgence

Star Trek: Resurgence is a narrative game from Telltale gamebook-y-game veterans, set on a new ship in the post Next Generation era (though with Original Series style logos and Discovery music). The one example decision in the trailer is both very Telltale and very Trek and also rather Mass Effect naturally.

Star Wars Eclipse

Star Wars Eclipse, a branching narrative video game, is reportedly set in the High Republic era. (From a company called Quantic Dream, who seem to have a less than sterling reputation.) From the trailer alone I would have guessed circa Episode I as we see Yoda in the Council chamber, an uncovered 3PO and the Neimoidians and their ships. But the High Republic gives more wiggle room to the story. Also apparently kodo drummers! Always a bonus. And Anomids, why not?

Netflix Marvel look back

Daredevil and Kingpin from the Netflix Marvel series are on their way to the MCU. So I figured time to finish watching the remaining shows in that subset. Having already watched all of Daredevil and Defenders:

Luke Cage season 2 ends on a big sucky cliffhanger. But no ninjas at least.

Iron Fist season 2 gives Colleen a lot more to do and notes the various ways Danny is a bozo in character so this is an improvement generally, though it still put the white guy martial artist superhero in the middle of a Chinatown Triad war story.

Punisher season 2 gives Frank a pretty fun sidekick, across two stories that basically have nothing else to do with each other except they happen around the same time.

Jessica Jones season 3 is my least favourite season of the three by a good long way, featuring a villain type I’m very, very over. It does at least address something that wouldn’t be addressed otherwise from the other final seasons.

Vampire: Auld Sanguine

Auld Sanguine is a free Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition adventure with pregens by Eddy Webb, about not having a very happy New Year.

Adventure Calendar 2021 9: Call Of Cthulhu

Adventure Calendar 2021

9: Call Of Cthulhu

H. P. Lovecraft actually seemed to like Christmas judging by his verse on the subject, but there’s a lot of ironically Christmassy Mythos stuff out there, including two albums of warped carols by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society which get regular play at Black Lion Games around the festive season, as well as seasonal adventures like this new one from Allison Cybe.

The classic 1920s setting allows for some familiar traditions and some that have fallen by the wayside, and plenty of opportunities to get stranded in the snow with no GPS on your phone to get help.

On On They Send, On Without End

With the Miskatonic students mostly home for the holidays, Arkham settles in for a quiet Christmas season. But who is ringing the old church bells at one in the morning...?

Adventure Calendar 2021 8: Chronicles Of Darkness

Adventure Calendar 2021

8: Chronicles Of Darkness

Second week, spooky week.

A Christmas Carol is a seasonal story about as big as the nativity, and the tradition of ghost stories championed by M. R. James and the BBC adapting his work goes back at least as far as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Having already done Buffy where the supernatural is there for thumping, and Vampire where the PCs are the spooky things themselves although my most notable example involved outside supernatural issues, something more investigative.

Starting with Chronicles Of Darkness as it connects to various gamelines and supernatural types but the toolkit approach means that players shouldn’t have strong expectations of what’s behind the door. This would also work with DIY-mythos games like Fear Itself or Dead Of Night. World Of Darkness could also work, particularly with mortal groups like Hunters Hunted or Ghost Hunters, but players familiar with the other game lines might be expecting something Vampire-specific or Wraithlike.

So no God Machine this time. Or is there?

Do Not Open

The characters are all connected to a specific building (student housing, university campus, business) which will be totally or largely closed for the holiday season, and which they’re staying at (maybe vacationing in a Cabin In The Woods) or coming in to check on the place, switch the lights on and off, and so on.

So they’re alone in a normally busy location.

But it turns out they’re not alone.

Being snowed in optional. Being isolated some way definitely recommended.