I may have sworn when I saw this ad.

Infamously delayed game referencing being over a decade in development in its ad copy like that’s a good thing in this case.

No ICE in Minnesota bundle

$5000 worth of indie games for $10 including some tabletop stuff.

Super Bowl trailers

Great year for halftime show, bad year for adverts, fine year for trailers with more for The Mandalorian And Grogu (featuring halftime show guest Pedro Pascal) and Disclosure Day.

Winter Olympics nerdiness update

Amber Glenn, figure skater and Magic: The Gathering player

A murder of vampires

One of my Sunday afternoon Vampire players is now in a second game, mostly with members of the Murder Mystery Society, which is not a LARP society, really. Will this lead to a new Vampire LARP in the city? Possibly.

Star Trek: Ariel 1.03

Star Trek: Ariel

1.03

Watching all of Lower Decks in a few months may have made me nicer to the Orion pirates than intended.

Winter Olympics 2026

The Winter Olympics is here, and doing that weird thing where they have some stuff before the Opening Ceremony tonight.

A more low-key opening ceremony than the big but bitty (but masked torchbearer and Gojira) Paris summer 2024, the main tricky bit being the two city location for the athlete parade so there was regular cutting and probably some delays for teams coming in, but not huge ones. The now standard floating Olympic rings. An Italian astronaut. Nessun Dorma. A bit that had a slop sheen followed by Prisencolinensinainciusol making it better.

And many calls for peace and harmony and nice things like that, with the Ukraine team getting a big cheer. Strange to think it’s been four years.

Questions

And yes, once again, maybe for the last time... the Conpulsion Quiz.

Resident Evil Requiem live trailer

Resident Evil Requiem live trailer starring Maika Monroe. If I could get Maika Monroe to star in a three minute live-action film to advertise my horror game I would too.

It's The Muppet Show with our very special guest stars...

I wouldn’t put every PC group in The Muppet Show, but certainly some.

TOON, yes. Puppetland, no.

But as the token live-action people.

Buffy is too obvious. After all, they had episodes where demon hunters get turned into puppets in Buffy’s first season and Angel’s last.

If this game does this it's worth cover price

I know saying “kill the players” when you mean the player characters is an easy slip (that happens to make you sound like a sociopath) but still worth checking. I just saw an ad for a game about playing in the afterlife with the tagline:

A TTRPG (system redacted) to play after all the players have died

V5: Stolen 2.01

Vampire: The Masquerade

Stolen

2.01

Signs And Wonders

Beck

Robin

Vince

Beck manages to return safely as the pursuers turn on each other. He recognises Darvell, the Sheriff, at the back of the Camarilla group.

As they drive back to his haven, the girl introduces herself as Alice, and he can hear her heart pounding in fear. She’s alive.

“You’re a Thin-blood?”

“My father was.”

“You mean your sire?”

“No.”

Groundhog Day 2026

Considering the weather the US has had this week you’d think they’d have tried harder to stop the groundhog seeing its shadow.

The Thunder Perfect Mind

The Thunder Perfect Mind, an occult action thriller RPG from Tanya Floaker, now on Kickstarter and funded.

Return from the dead. Roll lots of d10s. Possible splatbooks.

February

We have a Friday the 13th this month and as it’s not a leap year there’s another one next month.

Character Creation Challenge 2026 Roundup

Character Creation Challenge 2026

Roundup

I came up with the idea to create parties for different systems than I’d default to at about 10:30 pm on New Year’s Day, a bit of a spin on previous years generating groups but different enough to run with, after drawing a blank for quite a while. ICONS and d6 Star Wars are the only games I used that I’ve actually played or run, so I still tried something new.

The characters I chose to build do mean that only the Elegy PCs are actually my creations, being adapted from an RPG rather than outside media. Maybe I should have done more there. Or less! But familiarity meant readers could get an idea of the system from how the characters were interpreted.

As noted when introducing the Fellowship I considered a couple other options, maybe for all nine, before the size of the epilogue in Stranger Things 5 reminded me of the film of The Return Of The King.

I also thought about using something like ALIEN or Mothership for Star Trek because if I ever ran Trek it would probably end up like that if not the zappy action side.

I considered Sinners with either a horror one-shot game or Hunter: The Reckoning.

And I came pretty close to doing the MCU Avengers with Angel to flip the Buffy with supers system but that felt too easy.

It was really good to have something to focus on daily this January.

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

Dedicated to SteveD

Character Creation Challenge 2026 Collection

Character Creation Challenge 2026

TardisCaptain introduction and after action report

RPGnet thread

0: PC groups for games I would do with different systems

Buffy The Vampire Slayer with ICONS Assembled Edition

1a: Buffy Summers

2a: Rupert Giles, Watcher

3a: Willow Rosenberg, witch

4a: Xander Harris, Scooby

5a: Cordelia Chase, Mean Girl

6a: Daniel “Oz” Osbourne, werewolf

7a: Angel, vampire with a soul

Leverage with The Score

8b: Leverage Inc.

Vampire: The Masquerade with Elegy

9c: Matthieu Lasalle

10c: Adamas lineage - Armistead

11c: Cassandra linage: Colette

12c: Deimos lineage: Piotr

13c: Kerberois lineage - Walker

14c: Narcissus lineage - Paris

Star Wars with Black Star

15d: Rey

16d: Finn

17d: Poe

18d: Rose

19d: BB-8

20d: Chewbacca

John Wick with Hell 4 Leather

21e: John Wick et al.

The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes first edition

22f: Frodo

23f: Sam

24f: Merry

25f: Pippin

26f: Gandalf

Star Trek 2009 with Star Wars 1987

27g: Kirk

28g: Spock

29g: McCoy

30g: Uhura

31g: Scotty

Roundup

Character Creation Challenge 2026 31g: Star Trek 2009 with Star Wars 1987 - Scotty

Character Creation Challenge 2026

PC groups for games I would do with different systems

31g: Star Trek 2009 with Star Wars 1987 - Scotty

And ending with a national treasure.

Actually using one of the templates as is. Though I could fiddle with the numbers, as Scotty is more socially adept than the default here. 

Montgomery Scott

Tongue-Tied Engineer

Character Creation Challenge 2026 30g: Star Trek 2009 with Star Wars 1987 - Uhura

Character Creation Challenge 2026

PC groups for games I would do with different systems

30g: Star Trek 2009 with Star Wars 1987 - Uhura

The Kelvin timeline version of Uhura emphasises her linguistic expertise and confidence in alien contact, so the closest template is Young Senatorial. And like McCoy giving her more of a boost to her core skill than a starting character should have.

Nyota Uhura

Young Senatorial, switching Strength and Technical

Character Creation Challenge 2026 29g: Star Trek 2009 with Star Wars 1987 - McCoy

Character Creation Challenge 2026

PC groups for games I would do with different systems

29g: Star Trek 2009 with Star Wars 1987 - McCoy

As with science there isn’t a medic type in the d6 Star Wars templates, so based on his being the older grumpier member of the team, as long as he has a good Technical score for the Medicine skill.

Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy

Retired Republic Captain, switch Mechanical and Technical. And give him slightly more Medicine than he should have