Important news

World Pizza Day on Super Bowl Sunday. Hmm. Time to get... something. Popcorn maybe?

Plotting And Scheming

Met one of my current V5 players today...

Conpulsion seeks GMs!

Game submission form up now!

Magic: The Gathering movie(s)?

Hasbro and Legendary spinning up Magic: The Gathering for a cinematic universe with movies and possibly TV. News at Empire.

What does that have to do with the price of eggs?

100,000 organic eggs worth $40,000 stolen in Maryland.

National Werewolf Day

National Werewolf Day, as I discovered last year due to Film4 dedicating their showing of Werewolves Within. Marked since 2016, but I am not clear which nation is supposed to be celebrating.

Play? Time?

Really shouldn’t offer a new game for the five people asking at GEAS right now. As they may not all be together, may not all be interested, and I already have nine players on Sunday evening in the event everybody actually came.

The Fantastic 4: First Steps

First Steps trailer and talk at Empire. Retro 60s scifi world!

A Buffy revival pilot?

A Buffy The Vampire Slayer revival pilot possibly moving with script from Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Poker Face co-executive producers Nora and Lilla Zuckerman, with Chloé Zhao (Eternals) to direct, and I say revival because Sarah Michelle Gellar is in! Probably as the Giles to a new slayer. We shall see. Hopefully.

Final Destination: Bloodlines trailer

Final Destination is BACK baby! Discussion at Empire. More of a clip than a trailer, starring Richard Harmon, Murphy from The 100, as a similarly unfortunate type. On the red band side.

V5 Empire 1.13

Note to self: look up how this Vampire: The Masquerade canon character died officially now that I’ve killed him in my game.

February

Made it. Feels weird.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 Roundup

Character Creation Challenge 2025

Roundup

Starting a day late and going with an idea that means using one system I can do stats for in four seconds, I hope I still made for entertaining reading.

It’s given me several ideas I’m tempted to run, a blues versus Cthulhu idea I want to make as a TV series or something, and some lovely reactions on RPGnet and elsewhere:

Rich Stokes, creator of Umläut

Seeing this made my day!

Seeing people occasionally still having fun with Umläut 15 years later is wonderful.

Thanks for enjoying it!

Xeni Giardiniera of Velvet Generation

Statting Velvet Generation as a band/character from Ümlaüt is my favorite kind of deranged.

Also managed to only reuse one artist when providing a song every day. (And failed to include Garbage. Hmm. Could edit something...)

Thanks to TardisCaptain for the challenge and everybody who took part or cheered us on.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 Collection

Character Creation Challenge 2025

TardisCaptain introduction and after action report

RPGnet thread

BEHOLD!

Umläut: Game Of Metal

0: Ideas, aka why I started late

1: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

2: Vampire: The Masquerade

3: Dungeons & Dragons & Such

4: Call Of Cthulhu and family

5: Cyberpunk / Cybergeneration

6: Trinity Continuum

7: Adventure! Tales Of The Aeon Society

8: Aberrant

9: Aeon

10: Superheroes

11: Masks: A New Generation

12: Monsterhearts

13: Horror One-Shots

14: Starchildren: Velvet Generation

15: Doctor Who

16: Star Wars

17: Star Trek

18: Kids On Bikes

19: Meddling Kids

20: Action Comedy

21: Westerns

22: Ancient Settings

23: Surrealist Drama and 23a: Quieter Weirdness

24: WAR

25: TOON

26: Storybook Story Games

27: Spies And Cons And Capers

28: Underworld City Games

29: Post-Apocalypse

30: Big Bands

31: Umläut: Game Of Metal

Encore

Roundup

Character Creation Challenge 2025 Encore

Character Creation Challenge 2025

Encore: Adventures And Series About Bands

And now, finally, a thought on RPGs and other stories about bands.

There are two extremes, one where it’s all about the story of the band, and one where a band is an excuse for the characters to be together and for some music in the show. In the middle are a lot of series which mix stories about the music with the old “you’re on the way to a show when the adventure happens” setup.

Umläut models the first kind, designed for one-shots that generate the history of a band, the kind of story that gets told in Behind The Music.

I’ve mostly aimed for the middle this month, wanting the band setup to bring at least some adventure hooks and drama for a spin on a setting.

The other extreme would be something like The Monkees, a post A Hard Day’s Night sitcom that happens to star a prefab band and their day job rarely mattered to plots like the first example I saw of a will requiring would-be inheritors to spend the night in a haunted house.

Josie And The Pussycats is also a helpful demonstration here, with the movie being a satire about the band making it big and the effect it has on them with a mystery to solve, the cartoon being a Scooby-Doo thing with added songs, and the comics often being a mix of comedy, light band drama and “on the way to a show when..." stories.

Band stories in comics often go this way, from Scott Pilgrim via various Pussycats runs through Band Vs. Band. Exaggerations of the ups and downs of bands’ lives, often involving action scenes.

(Not always of course, see Love And Rockets.)

Josie And The Pussycats

JOIN THE ARMY

“I’m a punk rock prom queen”

Concept

A small time band with big time dreams and a way of getting in trouble everywhere they go.

Members

Josie, vocals and guitar, really wants this to be a thing

Val, bass, here to support her friends

Melody, drums, what were we talking about

Statistics

Hope 1

Ego 1

Fanbase 1

Cash 0

Performance Traits

Technique 2

Power 4

Stagecraft 1

They can turn their hands to anything so they never Showboat, how dare you

Character Creation Challenge 2025 31: Umläut: Game Of Metal

Character Creation Challenge 2025

31: Umläut: Game Of Metal

YES.

And finally... (Except that of course there’s an encore.)

Umläut has a random band naming system. Draw two cards, first is band type by suit (Classic, Thrash, Glam, Death) and first word by value, second is second word by value.

Spades is Thrash, 3 of Spades is Agony and then a Queen is Kingdom:

Agony Kingdom

“I love rock ‘n roll!”

Concept

Thrash Metal classicists, although unusually their logo is legible

Members

Doug, lead vocals and rhythm guitar, not his natural hair colour (or anyone’s)

Josh, lead guitar, can also play keyboards

Mike, bass, most likely to wear a hat

Carl, drums, also van driving

Statistics

Hope 1

Ego 1

Fanbase 1

Cash 0

Performance Traits

Technique 3

Power 3

Stagecraft 1

Dare they try a Face Melter?

The Galactic Starcruiser lands

Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser, the theme park hotel LARP faux-cruise, is now to be converted to office space for Disney park imagineers, so they can be surrounded by reminders of a massive failure.

Wolf Man

Wolf Man (2025), co-writer and director Leigh Whannell’s follow-up to The Invisible Man (2020) and another Universal monster modernisation, has some great suspense sequences (a couple reminiscent of the first two Jurassic Park films) and good practical effects although the look says Orc more than Wolf Man, one really wince-inducing moment, an interesting take on superhuman senses, and some bits where it will be too dark to see outside of cinemas.

It leans into the doomed aspect of werewolf stories and doesn’t bring much fun along the way, or a twist as good as The Invisible Man had. Worth it for some of the suspense, but it’s grim stuff. I can imagine the abandoned Daaaark Universe version would have been more amusing.

The really wince-inducing moment, behind the More.

Character Creation Challenge 2025 30: Big Bands

Character Creation Challenge 2025

30: Big Bands

And now a kind of game that’s about a band rather than a band in a kind of game.

A standard band is the same kind of size as a PC party. For a big band or an orchestra, or a festival with multiple acts playing, you might have to megagame or LARP it.

Live (Action Roleplay) for one night only

Games with large players base, like LARPs or megagames or chats, often cope with this by splitting them into factions. In a festival that’s various bands, but in something like an orchestra it could be sections like brass and woodwind, who should be able to play together but fiction about them often has backstabbing second chair musicians and the like. They’re all trying to push their own agendas, in a one-shot possibly rated for points. And somebody has to play the organisers, promoters, conductors and the like trying to get everybody playing the same tune.

In a smaller group, every player could control a band as in Umläut or a section of an orchestra.

(This game idea in no way influenced by my experience of working arts events.)

Throw in a murder mystery if you really want to get everybody talking.

The Miskatonic University Orchestra

“It’s not over tonight”

Concept

An orchestra with a mix of dedicated musicians, hopeful amateurs and absolute weirdoes

Character Creation Challenge 2025 29: Post-Apocalypse

Character Creation Challenge 2025

29: Post-Apocalypse

Post-apocalypse settings are often more like Westerns than anything else, sometimes war stories if the PCs have enough gear and there are clear enough sides.

The aftermath of a realistic nuclear war would be rather less adventurous, but nowadays we have other ways to destroy civilisation with a few more survivors. (Yay...)

Looking like GWAR do already is optional.

And then there’s Gamma World which due to its cartoony mutations would let you play the Bremen Town Musicians again.

WITNESS

Witness Coma the Doof Warrior

Minimum Safe Distance

“Born into the Age of Panic”

Content warning for violent news and documentary imagery

Concept

Possibly the last band in the world. Nice boys really.