Pulp Adventure Bundle Of Holding

For two weeks only, a Bundle Of Holding sale featuring Adventure!, Amazing Adventures, Warbirds and Heroes Of Rura-Tonga, with low-threshold add-ons for AA, Slipstream and Pulp Egypt, all on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

How does the moon cross the sky?

Lunette, an animated short by Phoebe Warries, thanks the one responsible.

(Also featuring samples from Tabletop Audio!)

The moon and sun being pushed or pulled appears in various myths. In a game with a high enough Weird Level it could be true. (See Alan Moore and Rick Veitch’s 1963: Horus, Lord Of Light for an adventure where the sun is endangered and the hero has to save it.)

The ghost of Quarter Bin

A snapshot from a few months before the end of over-a-decade-gone comics opinion site Quarter Bin still lingers - just Opinion and Profiles, which is still over a hundred essays including the great Comics Reality Check series, but losing the Recycling Bin section such as the Marvel Silver Age Model essay that I was introduced to first.

(More irksome still, Internet Archive does not host quarterbin.net itself due to spiders but does have the archive I linked to! Including additional bits of it like the Recycling Bin series of which this is the last, some way before that Marvel Silver Age one I mentioned above which have fallen off that saved snapshot. So if you want to read them you can just adjust the individual numbers, because the overview page doesn’t work...)

(Update: Internet Archive now has it! Including The Marvel Silver Age Model, the first article I saw, as a result of, hey, an RPG.)

Slavic Monsters

This article’s title may not be accurate for you. It wasn’t for me when I got the link thanks to Graeme Davis, who was indirectly responsible for me knowing half of them through Something Rotten In Kislev for Warhammer... But some of them are new to me.

Alien Vs. Predator: Pedantry

The Alien is an alien and a predator. The Predator is an alien who is actually hunting for sport.

(Okay, yes, the Alien is more concerned about parasitism, but definitely takes bites out of people. The Predator cleans a victim’s skull with a laser and doesn’t even lick his fingers afterwards.)

Happy International Dracula Day

(And birthdays for Peter Cushing today, and Christopher Lee and Vincent Price tomorrow!)

The first hour of the recent Big Finish adaptation, starring Mark Gatiss.

A Russian supersoldier idea

Found after years, I still like this. So putting it here among mental notes for possible superhero game...

It is said that the People’s Soldier died fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but there are many who believe that he still lives, quietly working for the advancement of world socialism. There are some who believe that he was never really one man to begin with, but a cadre of enhanced commandos wore the mask of the red star.

Hammer and Sickle, the only publicly-known survivors of the Miracle Workers, deny this whenever interviewed. Their daughter, nicknamed the Tsarina by the Russian popular press, refused to work with the current administration and now lives in the expat community in London, where her inherited strength and agility are rarely tested by a life of partying.

And, of course, there are always rumours of the Kremlin seeking to revive the People’s Soldier Program. Some claim they have already managed to do so, while keeping their new enhanciles out of the public eye. Certainly, some of the leading members and supporters of the administration have bodyguards whose lean and athletic look does not fit the traditional “wall of muscle” style, and there are stories of Russian agents displaying unusual abilities in a variety of recent conflicts.

More comic news, and...

Right, that’s it, I'm writing a comic.

Better find an artist, I guess.

The Band Played On

Looks like the new Black Canary is one of the casualties of DC Rebirth, which makes me grumpy. To be more positive, check out how far they went with the hook of the comic being about a band, resulting in the Black Canary EP.

Check out the original A Buffy Season run to see how much I’ve rambled on about a game starring a band. Which is quite a bit.

I blame early exposure to The Monkees.

And that’s just a game that happens to be about a band where it becomes important sometimes, rather than a game focusing on touring, perhaps with performance rather than combat as the big mechanical feature that resolves the session. (I know someone working on this.)

Bands work as PC groups because they tend to be the right kind of size, and spend a lot of time hanging out together. And possibly on the road, coming to unfamiliar towns where they might get in trouble. See Green Room for a more horror-y current example.

I should also note that it’s a great series setup but while it provides some plot hooks and excuses to travel in a van it doesn’t add as much easy plot logic as a group focused on the main action of the setting. My most successful Buffy as about active trainee monster hunters, and my band games tend not to last. Most games tend not to last but the setup doesn’t make it much easier.

And it would be nice to have a PC who wants the band to do well, and for that not to conflict with the monster hunting which is a sideline for the characters while being a band is a sideline for the players. I still want to get past season one with it, but I acknowledge that it’s a great idea for a showbut not as good as something directly related to the action for a game.

The reverse of an escape room...

... is a room you have an hour to break into.

Small Time Criminals, a puzzle room not-quite-LARP in Melbourne that lets you test that old adage about Shadowrun players planning heists for so long that they might as well start robbing banks for real. (Although not the other adage about how all that planning goes out the window as soon as they see a security guard and everybody starts shooting...)

Thanks to Patrick O’Duffy for the link.

Where is Star Trek Beyond going?

This article feels fairly spoilery in small specific ways, so I’ll lift out some relevant quotes:

“We liked the idea of, on the 50th anniversary, looking at Gene Roddenberry’s vision and questioning it,” Simon Pegg said. “The whole notion of the Federation and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. How productive is inclusivity? What is the true cost of expansion? That kind of stuff. So we went in with some big, philosophical questions to ask.”

New director Justin Lin agrees. “I feel like it’s important to try to deconstruct why Federation, Starfleet, and Star Trek is special,” he said. “And, hopefully, at the end of it, we can reaffirm why it’s been around [so] long and we can keep it going.”

Two great tastes that don't necessarily taste great together

A post on the Future Wars section of Lead Adventure labelled “Classified information released!” turned out not to be about SF games featuring spies. But it accidentally sparked a terrible idea:

Delta Green Miniatures.

Use something like Black Ops from Osprey and add a massively debilitating sanity loss system in amongst the dingy and claustrophobic maps, and enemy miniatures that nobody wants to look at appearing in small numbers without warning and most opponents being pitiful and broken themselves.

This is why I don’t do miniatures much.

RPG Blog Carnival: Apocalypse Not Now

Having lost track since the RPG Blogger Network went down, I see the RPG Blog Carnival is still going strong! And this month, Rising Phoenix Games suggested At World’s End - write about the (or an) apocalypse. So...

Apocalypse Not Now
How to present something that could be the end of the world but actually can’t be in the middle of a game

The Watch House started as the title of a six year and seven season Buffy The Vampire Slayer RPG series, in which the PCs averted an apocalypse or at least a pretty disastrous supernatural event at least at the end of every season, like Buffy and the Scooby Gang did and Angel Investigations sometimes did too. Since the game was intended to be ongoing until Season Seven, and to tie in with the Buffyverse, obviously the world wasn’t really gonna end. So how to make a non-starter apocalypse still feel interesting?

Stakes besides everything ending
The obvious place to start is to set up some smaller stakes that can happen while the PCs are saving the day. Will they all survive? Will they lose allies? Will their enemies gain in power? Perhaps setting elements like the availability of magic could change as well.

In Memoriam
The big final fight should be a tough one, and it could well see some PCs and NPC losing their lives or taking grievous injuries. PCs died at the ends of TWH seasons two, four, and seven - and only one of them got better. It should be noted that these were player calls at jumping-off points, as PC death in Buffy is essentially optional, but a game with a less player-chosen body count can still ramp it up for a big finale. (Check out Our Last Best Hope, a storytelling game about stopping apocalypses where a well-placed PC death is a key tactic!)

Nothing will ever be the same
The PCs save the world, but not 100%. Smaller changes in the setting can show the impact of their actions and those of their enemies. Say the PCs stopped the Red King killing the sun god, but he still managed to conquer one PC’s homeland and oust another’s queen from her throne, and now his Red Orcs hunt the Free People through the land - the next run of adventures should feel different.

Choose what you lose
Maybe the PCs can save the world but can’t do everything on the way so they have to prioritise - do you save Kingdom X or Kingdom Y? Villains love making heroes do this - and of course players love finding a way to achieve both. But a change that the players will find interesting (and I’d discuss in advance) could become unavoidable, or something might arise from the PCs’ actions.

So, the world ends... and, uh... what next...?
Then again, in a setting with a high enough Weird Level, the apocalypse can happen mid-game. It could continue in a hellish future where everything sucks, if that’s fun for the players - it might not be if everybody the PCs liked is dead and it’s their fault! Alternatively, the PCs could find a way to travel back in time to undo the destruction. Good if you establish this possibility at least in passing in advance, less so if you drop it in abruptly after the players mess up the apocalypse-stopping adventure. You can also have your cake and eat it by running a Days Of Future Past adventure where someone flashes forwards to after an apocalypse somewhere in the PCs’ future, gaining a clue about how to stop it in the process. Yeah, I did that one in TWH as well...

Powers

Powers (the TV series) is based on Powers (the comic) about cops dealing with Powers (the type of people) who have powers (the... powers). Clear?

It played in the US on the Playstation but here it’s on a TV channel, and one I get no less.

It’s pretty closely based on the first run of the comics, though it’s a hybrid of a couple of the first stories. This is surprising as the original run felt like it could translate to TV pretty much head-on, although the end of the first story might be a bit deus ex machina away from the splash page. One substantial change is moving a big reveal up to the very start.

The basic setup also makes for a pretty workable game - non-superhuman police dealing with mostly-low-end superhumans. (Mutant City Blues has you covered for an investigative game about working out who did what with which superpower.)

Speedsters

I’m currently catching up with the new TV version of The Flash. (See what I did there?) Nice, fun, lightish show, especially watching it back to back with Arrow. Being a solo TV show about a superhero with one easy-to-grasp power, the writing team are doing their best to show interesting and fun uses for super-speed. It’s one of those powers that you think about as a kid, so it can provide a lot of ideas.

In games, it can get a bit tricky. How you determine initiative, multiple actions and the like, when one of the PCs can run at the speed of sound, or even faster? Celerity in Vampire is enough trouble, and that only makes a PC two or three times faster than usual! How do you stop a PC from going X-movies-Quicksilver on a room full of people before the other PCs get a single action - fun on screen, maybe not at the table.

The TV version gives him super speed but only intermittently super reflexes, so he still has “lag” when reacting to things - he’d only have improved initiative when powered up, and can’t go at full speed all the time.

Star Trek 2017 has... a logo!

As part of a decidedly vague teaser.

And that teaser will probably make anti-Abrams people freak out with its resemblance to the closing credits of his Star Trek films...

New crews, plural...

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

I have now watched all of The Clone Wars, all hundred-odd twenty-minute episodes. (As opposed to Clone Wars, all two hours.)

And I never did warm to the big wooden puppet head characters, but it worked well when moving away to them, to long shots, crowds and space battles.

Person Of Interest season four

Person Of Interest season four has how finished running here, just in time for season five to start in the US... with no sign of it showing here...

The setup of the show has changed... quite a bit.

The blood of patriots and tyrants

Turns out the Vampire PCs will trust the haunted tree over the local vampires...

Yes, admittedly, the local vampires are vampires...

Henry VI (Shakespeare version)

Or the Prequel Trilogy for Richard III.

Pretty much everybody wants to be the king, expect the king, who wants to be a hermit.

For the non-Shakespeare version, Henry VI was by all accounts someone whose temperament was better suited to the role of hermit than king. Unfortunately it was a mostly hereditary position with occasional usurpation (which is how his grandfather got there, replacing another king depicted as insufficiently murderous for the gig) so just about everyone around him was after it, and being nobles they were also massively entitled and quick to take slight.

Most of the characters who come out of the Shakespeare version looking good are trying to keep the peace and keep the country stable, and they’re usually stabbed for their troubles.

As a rule, player like to have their characters depose bad kings and maybe follow good ones if they can’t get the job themselves. How would they deal with multiple would-be bad kings?

Agent Carter

Well, damn. Agent Carter gets two seasons and done. (As well as being buried on some obscure Sky derivative over here, meaning I only saw season one by DVD, as Channel 4 did not pick it up along with Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. despite its enormous Britishness...)

And now... a pun.

Secret Intelligence Gathering, Monitoring And Research protects the Empire from the cult of Chaos. They are...

Agents of SIGMAR

... I’ll get my coat.

(Seriously, an espionage game like Night’s Black Agents about fighting Chaos cultists... okay, going...)

Warhammer Quest returns

The new version The Silver Tower features the Age of Sigmar stuff but also has something pretty cool, a non-white non-Germanic priest of Sigmar. (And the elf means we have a female character in the core box as well. Not that you can really tell from the picture, admittedly.)

I will not be at Gen Con...

... I can still admire the Gen Con event schedule from afar.

The Black Lion

For Black Lion Games head honcho Liam’s birthday on the 4th I custom painted... a Black Lion.

Upstart Crow

Tonight sees the first episode of Upstart Crow, a sitcom about Shakespeare and his family by Ben Elton and starring David Mitchell. The title comes from a diss aimed at the Bard by playwright Robert Greene. Even though he may be the first professional author in British history, when was the last time you saw a Robert Greene play?

Short of wanting to run an Elizabethan game away from courts and battlefields, it could be a good pointer for a historical or time travel game that the PCs meet a famous figure from history and nobody at the time seems all that impressed.

We have the technology

Greetings from my desktop. It has been over an hour now and the new power supply has not yet exploded.

Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Civil War is now out in the US, so this spoiled European can talk about it more freely.

Overall, liked it, didn’t love it.

It is, quite naturally, very much Winter Soldier part two with a chunk of post-Sokovia Avengers fallout mixed in - a mix that mostly works, but the fairly grounded political thriller with bigger than average stunts doesn’t quite mesh with the craziest super action. Bucky’s story is a Bourne movie that Cap doesn’t quite fit into, let alone some of the others.

It balances most guest stories well, although Ant-Man is largely a fun cameo. Spider-Man (the most important) is the one who really feels tacked on, though, especially compared to how much is done with the other new arrival Black Panther. Still, can't win ’em all.

May the Sixth be with you

Alden Ehrenreich is the young Han Solo. As thankless tasks go, I wish him all the best.

Ever taken over a much-loved main character? Me neither.

Middle-Earth

The original map of Middle-Earth annotated by Tolkien, at the Bodleian and online.

The Force Awakens beginner box RPG

Apparently a beginner box set due this autumn from FFG, an introduction to the line rather than a new TFA book. New expansions for X-Wing too - no sign of an Imperial Assault style minis game though, sadly.

A key step in preparing a game

I have a new notebook.

Have now bought Icons Assembled...

The Top Tier

Considering a superhero game. Prooooobably influenced by The Avengers with the PCs as the premier heroes of the setting. (So a few more points in chargen...)

Happy May Day. Please enjoy your rights.