V5: From The Dust

(provisional title)

The Lamppost diner already has a swear jar. And possibly a Masquerade Breach jar.

Doors Open

Doors Open Days, where buildings let the public look behind the scenes, can provide a lot of insight into the establishments that take part.

Possibly coming soon to a VTM game near you...

An evening of shared brainstorming is a delightful thing. (Hello Rick!)

Spoiler tag as I may use some of the results...

How epic is your scale?

Mice: A Small Story takes a look at The Lord Of The Rings, specifically the films imitating their dramatic slow-mo and closeups, as a story of a group of CG cartoon mice trying to get away with a ringpull.

Mediaeval doodle war rabbit miniatures

From the makers of the Triumph Of Death skeleton army comes a stranger art-based miniatures line still - the war rabbits of mediaeval manuscript side doodles!

The rabbit riding a giant snail is a stretch goal. Fingers crossed.

Judge Dredd And The Worlds Of 2000 A.D.

The new RPG for Dredd, with more settings to follow, is now up on Kickstarter and funded in nine minutes. It uses the WOIN system (What’s Old Is New) based on D6 dice pools. The launch includes an adventure book, The Robot Wars, by contributing writer Andrew Peregrine.

Having not actually run a Dredd game since the Games Workshop original that was a precursor to WFRP, I am cautiously interested.

Elsewhere University

That university troubled by Fair Folk comic has become a recurring thing in a text-centric way with at least one more comic.

Theme tune update

Frontrunner is Veka by Zola Jesus, because this here VTM game has a vampire charged with watching over Kindred sleeping away the centuries in torpor, another newly arisen from that, and one who was Embraced to preserve her in her prime.

“Who will find you when all you are, all you are is dust? Who will find you in centuries?”

Character sheets copied, dice bagged...

And now to try to get some sleep before game pitch day.

And maybe decide on a theme song.

Sunless Skies: Skyfarer

Skyfarer is a twenty-page tabletop RPG for Sunless Skies, a spin-off from the mordant comedy steampunk online game Fallen London.

Telltale

Telltale, makers of story-choice-centric video games, are on hiatus, cancelling titles and probably closing down. My thoughts are with those suddenly out of work.

Chronicles Of Darkness sale

75% off PDFs for Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken and Mage: The Awakening.

The Predator

I very much appreciate The Predator addressing the fact that the Predators are really sport hunters above all.

(Although since it wasn’t an Alien Vs. Predator film it didn’t address that they’re both aliens and that the Aliens show more predation than the Predators.)

Buffy at BOOM!

A day after The Reckoning, BOOM! Studios drops a first teaser for their new Buffy comics line, expected to start in 2019.

And it’s pretty old school. As in Sunnydale High.

After more than ten years of post-TV seasons at Dark Horse (following about as much stuff during and around the TV seasons, and DH doing a run of The High School Years one-shots in recent years) it makes sense to do something different, and going back to the classic era at launch is a sound choice. That might be the central monthly title, or one of a line, with separate graphic novels and miniseries planned as well.

That teaser image also gives Buffy a decidedly modern-looking phone. This could be artistic licence, a hint that we shouldn’t expect a late 90s period piece, or just a goof...

Ascension Night: a V5 intro adventure

Ascension Night, a free unofficial Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition quickstart from Darker Days Radio.

So, what to do on Sunday...

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Reckoning

The fourth and final issue of The Reckoning, the final miniseries season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer at Dark Horse Comics, came out today.

I’m fine.

It’s been quite a ride since the first issue twenty years ago, and especially the post-TV canon seasons and related books like Tales Of The Slayers and particularly Fray which The Reckoning also serves as a sequel to. Season Eight went too comic-book-y for a lot of tastes, with the unlimited special effects budget overshadowing the human side of the story. Nine and Ten went somewhat smaller, Eleven a bit bigger again, and Twelve / The Reckoning went all-out but it’s a finale so it deserves to.

What’s next? Who knows? I’ll be there.

Phew

Okay, managed to get away with not GMing on Wednesdays so far.

Talk Like A Pirate Day

Has Talk Like A Pirate Day gotten too commercialised?

Captain Marvel teaser trailer

“I’m not what you think I am.”

Fury with two eyes and hair. Weird.

Your Unknown Armies idea is probably not too weird.

Spiders blamed after broken siren played creepy nursery rhymes randomly at night to UK townsfolk.

(Warning: report features spiders on CCTV cameras. And creepy nursery rhyme.)

Battlestar Galactica

Happy 40th anniversary to Battlestar Galactica.

It began as a blatant Star Wars ripoff - the pilot was called Saga Of A Star World and they got Ralph McQuarrie in to do concept art and design sketches and John Dykstra to head the model photography - with a twist borrowed from a classic episode of The Twilight Zone. But the nature of TV at the time had it veer more towards a Star Trek planet-of-the-week show almost immediately. (It also had female Viper pilots, putting it ahead of the original trilogy... though everybody involved seemed really reluctant about it.)

And then another creative team did something very different with the core concept in 2004. And they had a plan. Well, sort of. Originally intended to be fairly episodic as well, it became much more serialised, as well as much more grounded (with a few sometimes jarring exceptions) as a series focused on one consistent threat, and thematically about how people deal with life in a state of war.

Along the way, it’s inspired gaming directly and indirectly like an official RPG for the 2004 revival and a hit board game balancing resource management and guessing who’s really a Cylon, and a blockbuster LARP first played on an actual naval ship.

I binged it while planning my own military-SF-about-one-threat game The Stars On Fire, for example. I also stole bits of the percussive Bear McCreary soundtrack for the revival for game trailer videos, and if I ever do one for Vampire: The Dark Ages I’ll go for one of the mad bagpipes bits...

Sanguis Minibus

My biggest tag is RPGs and it just hit...

Nobody tell BADD.

Tabletop Scotland 2019 - August 24th and 25th

Just announced, Tabletop Scotland will be back in 2019. It’s moving up a bit to late August, which might let them take advantage of all the geeky Edinburgh Festival stuff next time. Hopefully I won’t be struck down with Book Festival con crud that weekend.

Wednesday and Sunday

At GEAS we have two organised game days, Wednesday evening and Sunday with afternoon and evening slots. Generally Sunday gets more non-student players and GMs, being more convenient. Sunday evening is when I usually offer to run something big - it was the home slot of The Watch House.

Apparently there’s quite a lot of interest in Wednesday evening games. My experience running Wednesday games has been... not good. So something straightforward that I can do for one half-term block and then look at options? D6 Star Wars, probably in the Rebellion era, or once again try Buffy, this time with a solid reason for the group to hang together?

For Sunday... I can source a physical copy of V5. Though I’d prefer to vet players for something like that, I can do a relatively low-impact version if the big push means new people are interested.

Red Panda Day

Happy International Red Panda Day! Help red pandas today!

Batman Day

Surely Batman should have a night and Superman have a day?

L.A. By Night

Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition, starting tonight on Geek & Sundry. Non-live video link as available.

(Update: currently being replayed during spaces in the G&S schedule along with other series like Callisto 6, as well as on-demand at Alpha - hopefully it’ll be freely available after a while, like Shield Of Tomorrow which comes on Youtube about three months after the live play.)

(Update update: rebroadcast schedule PDF for the weekend, including Sunday evening and Monday morning here.)

BIG World Of Darkness PDF sale

Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Mage: The Ascension books at 75% off this week at DriveThruRPG. Also 25% off Storytellers Vault releases.

Magic and monsters in Oxbridge, you say?

The Radio Times has a preview of the first episode of A Discovery Of Witches before it starts on Sky tonight.

And yes, it has a cast member in common with The Watch House...

And yes, vampires use the term “sire”.

Take care

Take care through the run of hurricanes and other extreme weather.

Dialogue for later

(Riffing on a scene in True Blood season six.)

“Is that your blood or somebody else’s?... Or everybody else’s?”

Horror hook: haunting memorabilia

Between the open and grey market trade in serial killer memorabilia, and things like Haunted Collector, a horror setting could mix the two, with people tracking down and selling haunted or cursed items.

Cursed or magical items for sale have shown up in adventures for Call Of Cthulhu and an auction featured in an episode of Angel (so I’ve done it in TWH as well) and was sort of the premise for Friday The 13th: The Series, but who sources them?

I’m thinking about this after watching 8mm again recently, so imagining a dangerous underground trade where the supposedly cursed items aren’t the biggest risk to life and limb.

Doodling NPCs

I’ve started doodling NPCs for a Vampire game. Even though I plan to go and find photos rather than relying on my art, it’s nice to let my pen wander, and can help in making “casting” decisions. (First decision: borrowing the Nosferatu style vampire with the deeply split lips from Penny Dreadful.)

I tend to go with art in games that I feel fit an illustration style rather than imagining the “live-action” TV or film version, like superheroes or big fantasy. (Although equally I would seriously consider running a Vampire game where all my visuals come from Tim Bradstreet or less obviously Annie Wu...)

It's a sign

Okay, new academic year game prep is getting serious.

I’ve bought a notebook.

Player styles

Jason Carl and Juhana Pettersson talk to Hat Of Many Things about play styles, table social constructs, PVP and more. (And it turns out one of the hosts was at the Nationals this year.)

"Your pizza place is a gateway to Hell."

Chance the Rapper made a movie of one of my Buffy games. :D

(Trailer contains swears and blood.)

(Update: a day after this article wondering about the delay in releasing the film, it went up on streaming and The AV Club reviewed it here.)

25 Years Of The X Files

The X Files first broadcast 10th September 1993. Since then we’ve had classic episodes, variably successful films, a revival, a spinoff show, books, comics, games...

DIE, from Kieron Gillen

DIE - a new comic series written by Kieron Gillen, which looks to be about the old “RPG players pulled into the game” hook played dark. An interview confirms that the characters are a partial call-back to the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon...

Secret Castle Game Room

A board game found in a secret room in a mediaeval Russian castle. Possibly anyway, it looks like a Mill board.

Assassin's Creed History

A fan is fact-checking and annotating the Assassin’s Creed games, noting where history was altered to allow a meeting to happen or introduce a plot twist or in some cases an aesthetic choice like a more interesting fight location. This follows the addition of Discovery Mode to Assassin’s Creed Origins which showed the historical basis for various landmarks and characters.

Life is a great big gang-up

I would, on the whole, like to borrow a PS4 and be playing Spider-Man at the moment, mostly due to the little touches like the music reacting to how action-y your current activity is, the dialogue also changing whether Peter is at rest or swinging, Pride flags among the Easter eggs in the landscape...

Celebrity Skin

Celebrity Skin by Hole came out twenty years ago. Yeah, not making me feel old at all there.

Star Trek at 52

Star Trek is in a better place than it was for its fiftieth anniversary, I think. Discovery is up and running, and we can look forward to a new series focusing on Picard - and maybe more - and hopefully a fourth Kelvin timeline film as well. The Geek & Sundry Star Trek Adventures AP series Shield Of Tomorrow just wrapped, too, with Modiphius announcing a miniatures set for it as part of its busy production schedule.

Poppy

Thanks to Howard Ingham for the news of Poppy. I had seen her in passing before but have I been wiped again?

True Blood tenth anniversary

True Blood was always fairly odd, a sexy Southern Gothic comedy-horror murder mystery about a telepathic waitress in a small town that just got its first vampire after they “came out of the coffin” a couple years earlier.

And it cranked up the Weird Level very quickly. I remember watching season one on TV, then seeing season two on a long-haul flight when I was already a bit sleep-deprived and having to go back to it later to confirm that, yes, the big bad did actually turn into a vibrating minotaur.

Comfort food for the soul

I have a doctor’s appointment in the morning, which is thankfully rare for me. As is traditional when I have a cold, which is not rare for me, watching Buffy 2.18 Killed By Death, in which Buffy gets the flu and fights a monster preying on sick kids. Everyone is brave and resourceful and smart and funny, and it always makes me feel a little better.

(Update: Cysts. Not fun.)

Burt Reynolds

Burt Reynolds has died. Best known for Smokey And The Bandit, The Cannonball Run, and Deliverance, and for promoting and celebrating the craft of stunt performers.

22 Vampire: The Requiem plots from garbage Version 2.0

For the Version 2.0 twentieth anniversary and because garbage lyrics fit so readily into Vampire. Expect troubled relationships, broken hearts, unwise blood drinking and a small war.

Coming soon

12 Vampire: The Requiem adventure hooks based on song titles from Version 2.0 by garbage. (Or maybe 22 based on the anniversary edition.)

Protect our museums

Brazil’s national museum burned last night, and we don’t yet know how much has been lost.

Avengers: Infinity War

Out on disc today.

We Will Deep Fry Your Kebab.

Blood On The Thames

Blood On The Thames, a Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition stream game on Twitch, features some interesting characters (a sensitive artistic Malkavian, a twitchy conspiratorial Nosferatu, a standoffish aloof Gangrel, an activist scientific Tremere - they could all shuffle into a different clan easily) and the beginnings of an intriguing setup as shown on the relationship map.

The recording of the first session was sabotaged by the Inquisition went wrong, so they provided an in-character recap. (Edit: the first recorded session is now on Youtube.)

Like a number of streaming AP games, there’s more performance involved than a lot of games at the table and some costuming as well, giving it a not-quite-LARP feel.

Tabletop Scotland

I hear Tabletop Scotland went well! (I had a cold. :( )

Art should be surprising, but...

... maybe not like these five examples from The Modern Rogue. The Hole In The Floor is in there, and I don’t even think it’s the worst.

(TMR is often a good source for weird crime stories, too.)

Frasiercards

A print and play card game to simulate the disastrous attempts to host dinner parties in Frasier. The first game I know to have Accidental Drive To Canada among the cards.