The Crow

Looks like another attempt at a remake of The Crow has fizzled, this one just a few weeks before shooting. As it’s over 24 years since the first film I would be okay with a new version - even if the sequels were more or less remakes anyway.

That said, I was never sold on Jason Momoa to star... because I don’t believe that what kills the character in the first place would hurt him. :D

Meanwhile, Hollywood has no trouble making variations on The Punisher - the next one stars Jennifer Garner, and the trailer features Exhumed by Zola Jesus. Which you’d think could fit The Crow...

Solo: A Star Wars Story

So... unlike Rogue One, Solo has an opening crawl (though it comes in three captions and doesn’t crawl) and it uses the poster logo and A Star Wars Story subtitle.

Han starts in a black shirt and white vest.

Qi’ra sounds a bit posh for a Corellian scrumrat.

More GUMSHOE at Bundle Of Holding

2018 GUMSHOE core books and accessories, and GUMSHOE 2 sourcebooks and accessories.

A first time GM's story

Gita Jackson on Kotaku talks about her first time running a game.

“This weekend I DMed my first tabletop RPG. I was really nervous about it, but it was actually way easier than I thought it would be.”

The game in question is The Sprawl, a PBTA cyberpunk RPG.

Snarky dialogue note for future reference

“It’s okay, you killed my good mood before it could do any lasting damage.”

The Blade screening game

Looks like plans for the escape room style game to go with the anniversary screening of Blade got dialled back a bit on the night. The human, vampire, hunter and familiar teams didn’t seem to go ahead.

The first puzzle was a sliding block game on a touchscreen, which since there were a couple hundred people in the audience could have usefully had more than one available. (It tied in to some nice computer graphics and imitation news and adverts playing on projector walls.) The second puzzle was doable by a larger group, but could have also been available in more than one place.

The third, based on Pearl from the film, was a right laugh. More of this kind of thing!

The screening itself also featured bits of theatre, lighting and smoke. It probably wasn’t the ideal way to see the film for the first time.

The Night In Question And Answer

Matthew Webb of Jackalope LARP talks The Night In Question among other things (like how to run a Sabbat game in general) with 25 Years Of Vampire: The Masquerade.

"The Lead Belt"

A BBC site article about RPGs actually mentions more than just D&D.

OnTableTop

OnTableTop is the new and bigger identity for Beasts Of War, the wargaming news site.

Solo concept art

A preview of the art of Solo, featuring a much more different early Millennium Falcon, a scruffy-looking Lando and... Highland cows?

Update: thirty more alternative early Falcons.

CHVRCHES: Love Is Dead

Almost four months after dropping Get Out as a single at the end of January, CHVRCHES launch Love Is Dead, with lyrics filled with morbid, romantic and religious woe.

Graffiti
Get Out
Deliverance
My Enemy
Forever
Never Say Die
Miracle
Graves
Heaven/Hell
God’s Plan
Really Gone
ii
Wonderland

Thinking of using some of these lyrics as quotes for Chronicles Of Darkness game pitches...

Ask me no questions, I will tell you no lies
Careful what you wish for
We’re lookin’ for angels in the darkest of skies
Sayin’ that we wanted more...

Oh baby you can look away
While they’re dancing on our graves
But I will stop at nothing
Oh, I will stop at nothing

Something could probably be done with spooky piano instrumental ii as well.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

More in a week. In the meantime, Leverage would be a better game for it than Edge Of The Empire.

Cavaliers Of Mars

Cavaliers Of Mars is out to Kickstarter backers. Return now to dying Mars in its last age of glory!

And oh Hell yes, I got in the Special Thanks!

Fetch Quest

The Pugmire collaborative family card game is now on Kickstarter! I love the multiple-punning title.

Would watch

By Stephen Byrne after the new toony Thundercats Roar announcement.

A botch I didn't even roll

Just had a Windows 10 update take half an hour, go from 51% to 45% on the timeline, require me to go into the command prompt to get the internet back online and I just had to remind it I have a UK keyboard.

Warhammer Adventures

Warhammer novels for the 8-12 bracket, for Age of Sigmar but also Warhammer 40,000, which seems more of a stretch to me because AoS has, you know, good guys in it.

Good to see non-white and female main characters in both series, and a disabled character in the 40K book.

And all of the 40K kids are heretics.

Thanks to Tumbleweed on RPG.net for the news.

More here, including writer Cavan Scott talking about starting the 40K line.

Drop-in settings

MMM suggests this:

Something I would love to see more of on #DMsGuild is locations that I can drop into a campaign. Local village, remote monastery, abandoned fortress, mining camp, farmers market, etc. Describe the location, add in half a dozen interesting NPCs, & a handful of story hooks, done.

I’ve been thinking about something similar for Storytellers Vault. D&D parties typically travel around more than Vampire: The Masquerade coteries, but there are plenty of classic locations like the dingy Rack nightclub, the police station, and the Tremere chantry.

Animated game maps

Dynamic Dungeons and other similar systems look fantastic if you have a screen on your table.

Chosen

The final episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer first aired fifteen years ago.

Stand By Me

That was a very nice touch, one of several in fact, like the sermon and the converted electric Jaguar.

Crusader Kings: The Boardgame

Paradox Interactive has announced a move into boardgames as well as RPGs, with Free League adapting Crusader Kings. It’s a big one - 70 miniatures, 306 tokens, 289 cards, 10 family and 5 dynasty boards as well as the main board. The Kickstarter page includes a link to the rules beta.

Best of luck

Royal Wedding related plot hooks on the Whoblog, from the last one.

Did this just become a LARP?

The Edinburgh International Film Festival screening of Blade plus opening scene style rave seems to have acquired an attached immersive game, with rules and sides and all.

To be in with a chance to take home a replica of Blade’s Sword, you can take part in the venue-wide interactive game, decoding ancient vampire scrolls and Escape Room-style puzzles. Trust no one.

Not my fault, I swear!

This is not helpful.

The new data protection thing just killed the Cubicle 7 forum. So yeah.

WFRP IV design

A look at basic and Dramatic Tests.

Casting by The Watch House, 2018 edition

Yes, that’s William from my Buffy game about young Watchers playing the tweedy English adviser to a group of chosen ones in the reboot of Charmed ten years later. When I typecast, I typecast HARD.

Masquerade violation in the magazine aisle

Hitting on Twitter, flagged up by Justin Achilli and Steve Dee among others, a reminder that we take some very high Weird Level for granted.

Revealed! When Ghost Hunts Go Wrong

Ten O’clock Monster update

... The last blog post is now number three on a Google search for the phrase, behind two different meanings and above one of the articles I was referring to. I may have overestimated its ubiquity.

A few more hits with 10 instead of Ten, but not that many.

Time For The Ten O'clock Monster

I’m really surprised that there doesn’t seem to be a LARP book, blog or podcast called Ten O’clock Monster.

It’s a common phrase which I’ve heard from gamers and seen in MET and Nordic LARP essays and elsewhere, though I wonder where it originated. It’s pretty self-explanatory - something plot-related comes in and possibly starts a fight a little after halfway through a session where not much else is happening. A plot development engineered with NPCs works as well.

It’s something I was thinking about for the Storytellers Vault MET section - a look at ways to use external threats and different options to liven up a slow game. As a tabletop GM I can use Chandler’s Law whenever I like, but LARPs need people to play the guys coming through the door with guns in their hands, and unless the GM’s doing it they’ll need to be briefed ahead of time.

Next, on Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. ...

Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. is go for a half-length sixth season. Having run three and then two mini-seasons in the last two years, they can do this.

The bigger issue may be fallout from Avengers: Infinity War...

And Coulson will be getting a boost when he appears in the (at least partially) 1990s set Captain Marvel.

And now a joke.

Feel the sting

A new favourite detail from rewatching Infinity War:

(Spoiler for about four minutes in...)

A brief glimpse of how my brain works: Universal Of Darkness

Black Chantry revealed the art for a VTES character card and the near black and white palette, the look, the stare and the outfit reminded me of Boris Karloff in the 1932 version of The Mummy. And since the 2017 version of The Mummy was meant to launch the Dark Universe updating the Universal monsters for the present, I wondered about the reverse, a World Of Darkness type game about various monsters in the 1930s.

I’ve set WoD and CofD games in the 30s and 40s before, but leaning on the hardboiled and noir traditions rather than the horror of the time...

No Man's Land 1.04

... will hopefully be next week, after over a month of catching up and some planning where to go next!

Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. 100

People need hope.

Keep the Eurovision spirit alive at the table

A Eurovision Song Contest board game just came out!

But based on the Googlewhack I just got back, nobody has done Eurovision miniatures. Not even Lordi officially, though I did find a few conversions.

World Of Darkness: Eurovision

Since Lordi in 2006 there’s been a Eurovision Song Contest entry pretty much every year about monsters, so Darker Days suggested picking character types live.

So I did.

First rule: don’t say Malkavians for everything.
Second rule: don’t say Daughters Of Cacophony for everything.

And so...

3000 posts in labels

For my 3000th post here, a look back.

The winner by quite some way, perhaps not exactly startlingly, is RPGs with 612 entries.

Next, with 547, is Events. Which covers both the news and things I’ve gone to.

SF gets 484, because I sort of count Star Wars and Star Trek and Doctor Who in there as well as in their own categories. Fantasy gets a mere 370, behind Urban Fantasy at 427 and Horror at 390, and the super-helpful Genres at 159.

Vampire at 473 includes Masquerade, Requiem, and other stuff with vampires in it. The World Of Darkness more specifically gets 384. Chronicles Of Darkness gets 56, though numbers are distorted by Chronicles having also been World until 2015.

Weird Level clocks in at 440, just ahead of TV at 432 and Films at 430, Comics at 300 and Books at 281.

Campaign Development hits 393, ahead of GMing at 285 and Playing at, er, 41.

The biggest particular setting is, shock, Buffy at 266.

Local heroes (China edition)

Marvel has linked up with Chinese tech company NetEase to launch two new superhero series, Warriors Of Three Sovereigns and Cyclone.

Where in the World Of Darkness did that come from?

A year on from the announcement of the Storytellers Vault, idly considering a book for it looking at World Of Darkness inspirational media. It works better for Vampire: The Masquerade than any of the other core games, though, since the Kindred are basically any and all vampire types while the Garou in Werewolf: the Apocalypse aren’t much like pop culture werewolves at all, for example. And starting in the 90s I’d have to start including things influenced by the setting in turn.

Berlin

World Of Darkness Berlin began a year ago. It was quite the weekend. More please!

Storytellers Vault: Mind's Eye Theatre

The Storytellers Vault expands to include Mind’s Eye Theatre LARP resources, starting with in-character advice books and a ready-to-run adventure. From my scant experience in the field, I know some people who could come up with one-shot adventures that would work live...

The 100 Season Five

The 100 is back, and to celebrate E4 showed three minutes in the middle of it twice. Derp.

After the season four conclusion which felt to me more like a final wink to the audience than a real setup, tonight we got it expanded to a real setup. A time jump brings a new status quo on Earth and a new threat, a lot of the same problems in space, and underground... oh dear.

On the whole, the Weird Level feels a bit lower than the last two years.

The full-on Mad Max desert apocalypse sequence taking up most of the first half of the episode was a real highlight of the series.

World Of Darkness Challenge 2018

Thirty days (starting on the ninth as it was revived tonight) and thirty questions.

1: How did you get started?
Vampire: The Masquerade wasn’t even out yet (and didn’t have its subtitle) and I saw an ad in an RPG magazine. I wrote about it here.

Yes, I’m old.

Bill & Ted Face The Music

EXCELLENT!

Lost In Space (2018)

This is something of a placeholder post, as I intend to get to the new Lost In Space in due course (I haven’t finished Jessica Jones season two yet) but dang the licence holders for a Mass Effect show must be annoyed.

Although it may also be noted that blue uniforms, grey T-shirts and buzzcuts and holographic starmaps were a thing in the 1998 film before that...

The core concept of Space Family Robinson, plus pilot, shifty doctor and Robot remains intact. The dynamic of parents and kids really makes it stand out from other long-term SF concepts. (And as I have noted before, such family connections can make for tricky roleplaying. Everything else would work with an exploration-centric space opera setting.)

Yeah, that's a botch

This post typed on a brand new keyboard following the Milkshake Incident.

The new keyboard features spill protection. From what I can see this means it has little holes in the base.

Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season five part two

Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns after no hiatus at all here due to starting late and we’re back to regular Earth with regular problems like alien technology, buried secret plans and black ops agents hunting the team down. As Mac notes as soon as a potential apocalypse is announced, “Yeah, we’re back...”

Patrick Warburton (The Tick, A Series Of Unfortunate Events) joins us as the affable interactive instruction manual for a doosmday bunker, while Dove Cameron (Hairspray) plays very much against type as a surly teenage assassin.

Not at all influenced by a particular new Robin Hood trailer...

One advantage Robin Hood has over other classic characters is that when a new adaptation is dismissed as “in name only” it shortens to RHINO.

Nosferatu underworlds: a ramble

A post on the biggest Vampire: The Masquerade Facebook group got me thinking about why Nosferatu often have underworld lairs linked to sewers.

It started pretty early in the line’s history, when the clans were starting to develop archetypes and stereotypes and this extended to typical backdrops and areas of the city they might have domain over.

It also received some coverage in both Clanbooks while other clan-specific locations like Tremere chantries didn’t get as much, so it got the official seal of approval as something Nosferatu vampires do.

The association doesn’t come from Nosferatu itself as it follows Dracula with the vampire in a ruined castle. It might have come in through The Phantom Of The Opera, who is a closer match for how the clan developed than Orlok himself with his fear of being rejected for his appearance and his hidden underworld lair. (Both Clanbooks also feature full-page illustrations of boating on underground rivers Phantom-style. This is the Revised edition.)

The 1980s TV version of Beauty And The Beast might have been an influence as well, with its friendly secret culture protected by a kind monster prone to riding to the rescue on top of subway cars. It’s certainly affected how I think about the clan.

Human(oid) monsters in the sewers and underground appear in the likes of C.H.U.D., Escape From New York, and to an extent the Morlocks from X-Men, themselves a reference to H.G. Wells, so there was plenty of precedent for them to borrow. A little later Batman Returns really ran with it, with the Penguin as a deathly pale mastermind using what gets flushed into the sewer as blackmail material - he even gets quotes in both of the Clanbooks.

Urban legends about sewers like mutant alligators are folded in with the idea that ghoul animals sometimes grow to monstrous sizes.

There could be a gaming influence as well, since sewer levels full of giant animals and hidden traps are pretty dungeon-crawl-ish.

And while the other clan-specific backdrops tended to fade out, more got written about the Nosferatu underworld which helped make it the norm perhaps because it’s a more fantastical location than, say, a Ventrue boardroom or a Brujah biker bar. The Succubus Club is the only building that ever got its own sourcebook, but it was pretty special.

Easy access to a lot of the city without being seen is certainly helpful. As noted in the second episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, “Vampires really jam on sewer systems. You can get anywhere in the entire town without catching any rays.” (Although Sunnydale vamps largely skip the sewers in favour of crypts and caves, while Angel uses them a lot more in Los Angeles, so maybe Buffy was basing her information on her time slaying back home.)

For my part, I’ve usually steered away from it. There might be vampires and other things skulking in subways and sewers, but they won’t necessarily be Nosferatu. My last major Nosferatu NPC was a deliberate throwback to Orlok, all elegant black coats and creepy stares and appearing from the shadows in Elysium, and I imagined his haven as a big old house with large enough grounds for privacy...

The Da Vinci Encoding

3,500 occult manuscripts to be scanned and released free online, thanks to a €300,000 donation by Dan Brown.

As long as none of them contain the demon Moloch that’s very nice.

Thanks to Monica Valentinelli for the link.

Free Comic Book Day

As is traditional, I will be eBaying for the 2000 A.D. special.

Karl Marx was born two hundred years ago today. The ideas he put forth - and some spectacular misinterpretations thereof - have had a huge effect on history, especially in the last century.

Dialogue note for future reference

“I can tell I’m making an expression. I may be cringing. Sorry if it’s not the most appropriate one but I’m mostly trying not to scream.”

The 4th of May be with you!

Avengers: Infinity War

Greetings from last week!

Thanos works great, the Black Order are pretty fun bad guys, the fights are cool, it was somewhat bitty, but really we’re here to talk about the end.

Into The Dark

Blumhouse to release a new movie... or movie-length thing... every month?

The AI still works...

Iron Man has aged really well in the ten years since it c-HE JUST REFERENCED MYSPACE

And on the subject of other hero teams... Austrian Superheroes

Austrian Superheroes

Thanks to Tambourine on RPG.net for the link.

Summer Is A-Comin' In

And Crooked Dice celebrate May with a Kickstarter for folk horror miniatures. Spirits, cult leaders, fox hunters, Morris dancers, animal-masked countryfolk, crows, scarecrows, and, yes, a Wicker Man. No nervous Edward Woodward lookalike policemen though. And certainly no Nicolas Cage in a bear costume.