Bloodlines 2 soundtrack

A nice big dev diary with audio and video for the Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 soundtrack. Featuring noir-but-maybe-a-bit-Western theme, crunchy guitars, sad cello, and shovels, from the new team and the return of BL1 composer Rik Schaffer.

New tablet

Who this?

No snow here. Yet.

Women Of Action

Caroline Siede has a new column at the AV Club, about women-led action movies, starting with Sarah Connor in The Terminator 1 and 2 and featuring the likes of take-the-power-back Enough and Wonder Woman striding into No Man’s Land in WWI and on screen a century later.

Robin Of Sherwood - nothing's forgotten

Producer Esta Charkham and Marian Judy Trott look back at one of my formative fantasy-ish media.

V5 Empire 1.08

As is traditional for the Vampire: The Masquerade session closest to the Bloodlines anniversary I took inspiration for a plot from one of its features.

And I couldn’t fairly do the haunted hotel with the ghost expert PC not there for the session, or the creepy hospital without the two PCs that work in a hospital.

So that’s why the PCs are on their way to the isolated lair of a supposedly dead Malkavian apocalypse cult leader.

Heh heh heh.

The first frost

It was the first frost, so we can play some winter songs. And Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) is an always.

V5: The Windy City

First chance to play Vampire: The Masquerade V5 around an actual table!

Many character options, so due to relatively inexperienced group otherwise going with a fairly basic idea who can be a ‘grown-up’ if necessary.

Rejigging Paris, maybe closer to the original possible leader than she ended up in City of Angels due to other players there being more confident.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines came out twenty years ago tonight. Delayed but also rushed, it arrived after the original World Of Darkness ended and the new later Chronicles version came out, and also needed a day one patch to get out of one level.

But fans still love its mood and feel (at least until Chinatown) and its variety of options (until the endgame) - and especially highlights like the discomfort it creates around your accidental ghoul and the single location ghost story of the Ocean House Hotel.

Predator: Badlands

The Predator and especially That Crossover We Do Not Mention movies have been heading towards the Predator as protagonist for a while now, but if anybody can actually make that work the Prey team can.

Bluesky

I was on Bluesky already, so nyer.

The Onion won the war against info, on its behalf.

FiveEvil: Wakefield House

Morgan Davie runs a short demo version of one of the FiveEvil adventures.

Star Trek modelmaker Bill Krause

Star Trek 3D starship designer and modelmaker Bill Krause (Picard, the Ships Of The Line art books) now on Bluesky, posted his recreation of the FASA Baker class.

And this is a little model for him with no lights

Thanks to TardisCaptain for reposting his work.

Star Trek: Lower Decks

I started on Star Trek: Lower Decks as the first two seasons are on Prime after an STA session and after seeing Strange New Worlds: Those Old Scientists. It helped finally getting past that opening scene of Mariner drunkenly maiming Boimler with a Klingon bat’leth, to meet the more immediately likeable Tendi and Rutherford. Mariner remains a lot throughout the first two seasons. As each season is about four hours, progress is quite fast.

I laughed a fair bit, could have done without some other stuff. I also appreciated that the command staff foils are mostly heroic Trek types with some foibles.

Favourite episode so far, We’ll Always Have Tom Paris, which rolls with the kinds of problems Trek tech and people woudn’t really have but we would have with that level of technology which still requires human(oid) oversight.

Favourite little side joke, the Andorian called Jennifer.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning trailer and talk at Empire. Previously Dead Reckoning part two...

V5 Empire 1.07

Picked up and used some SPCs Jason Carl was kind enough to leave in the toybox.

The Malkavian fortune teller is working on seducing the leader of the anarch thugs, which I was not expecting.

Tony Todd

I got to meet Tony Todd at our local horror festival Dead By Dawn, where he was presenting a short film he was proud of working on and a feature that, as he put it, we should have fun with. At one point I was alone at the bar and he came in, and due to my smile at this that I should be laughing nervously to be alone with Candyman we got to talking about Goodfellas and gangster movies, so I got to see him enthuse about one of his favourite genres.

Terminator Zero

Terminator Zero might not have been the best relaxing watch. Kind of interesting but ohhh so much philosophising.

Star Wars Episode ?!

Simon Kinberg (writer of X-Men: Dark Phoenix, but also some of Rebels) is developing a new Star Wars trilogy. Well, so am I, and mine is more likely to happen.