Happy Halloween!

A thing I did on Twitter. Thanks to everybody who took part!

And yes, I spotted the card typo. Curses!

That's the Chicago way.

The Kickstarter for Chicago By Night V5 is up, with much lovely preview art, including - yes! - somebody being thrown off the Sears Tower.

In the event that my chronicle heads that way, I have just the song. (NSFW)

Sometimes your name will lead you places

The New York Public Library presents a brief history of Halloween by Amanda Pagan.

Castlevania season two

Some of these secrets are certainly miserable.

Star Wars Rebels season 4

Star Wars Rebels ends with season 4, which builds on the previous seasons and adds some new wrinkles as well. It went a bit too high Weird Level for me in some ways, though it still delivered some big moments.

The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina

The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina is... quite a thing.

Woe is me

Looks like we’re getting a new player in From The Dust, so I’ll have to redraw my coterie relationships map and not make it a pentacle this time.

How To Make A (D&D) Monster

Wizards are looking for Photoshoppers to give a form to the Terror of the Undermountain, based on a selection of body parts provided by various D&D artists. Even if you don’t want to enter the $5000 contest, its a selection of Guess Who? monster bits you could put to other player-scaring uses. (Also, Jon Hodgson headline art in the article!)

Dialogue saving

“Where are you running to?”
“Away was more the point than to.”

Star Trek: Lower Decks

An animated comedy in the Star Trek setting, from Mike McMahan, the head writer of Rick & Morty and also the creator of the TNG Season 8 spoof Twitter feed and writer of the spinoff book Warped, in which he would team viable A stories with particularly goofy B stories:

Troi guides a dying ensign through his final, emotional journey. Data & Geordi are trapped on a conference room table by a scary dog.

The BloodList

Having mentioned the Blacklist for unmade scripts before, I have just discovered the existence of the BloodList specifically for genre films and pilots.

There seem to be a lot of witches this year...

Who ya gonna call?

Five ways horror stories deal with mobile phones.

No signal is the most shorthand - I’ve never seen a film where somebody tries to get a signal again.

(Mental note: write that short film.)

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Reboots

The idea of a Pirates Of The Caribbean reboot seems... interesting, especially as the last film, Dead Men Tell No Tales, came out last summer, but it has been fifteen years since the original, and given that they’ve already tried a largely standalone sequel (inserting some of the cast into the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides) after ongoing trilogy-ising and swung back to serialisation after that, a clean slate might help, particularly if the plan is to move to a different main character.

I can imagine spinoffs from a clean slate working better as well, if they wanted to make something like a Marvel or Star Wars style annual event planned from the beginning, or something like animated or even live-action series.

Still be nice if we got an RPG, for that matter.

Gaming Shelf update

Lots of RPG stuff, including a Kickstarter roundup featuring Orun and Savage Worlds, at io9 this week.

WWII horror or WWII something else

One of the trailers before Bad Times At The El Royale was for Overlord, the Normandy invasion with added zombies but more expensive than Outpost thing, and Rick asked if I’ve ever considered a Second World War World/Chronicles Of Darkness game. I suggested Blitz Innocents for Dark Eras, and know somebody who ran Stalingrad Vampire, and the WWI-set Fiends Of The Eastern Front was a formative experience for me... but I’d like to do superheroes in the war first.

I still haven’t done Prohibition Vampire, for that matter...

From The Dust update

I failed to get the introductory half-semester plot finished. But everybody wants to keep going.

Bad Times At The El Royale

Bad Times At The El Royale was great, and it could make an interesting basis for a freeform LARP as just about everybody has a reason to want to stay in a hotel on the off season...

From The Dust session notes

Now to work out what to do for an actual Halloween session of Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition.

After finishing the initial block, which has I will freely admit gone a bit Blade.

St. Louis has developed a bit of a theme as well, the Gateway to the West left behind by settlement all the way to the Pacific, and first rail and then road and air travel to get there, is still a waystation for vampires as they have good reasons not to trust planes or trains. It’s an evening’s drive from Chicago and a night’s from New Orleans, so as well as the Kindred that make their haven there others come and go. This picks up a bit from the revived Gallows Post in No Man’s Land, as there are refugees fleeing various bad situations. Safe passage is a valuable service, and the Lamplight starts to feel a little like Rick’s in Casablanca...

Done

It’s away! Link to follow. I hope.

Remind me to uninstall Acrobat before they start charging after the preview I put on so I could add my name in the Properties tab.

Alllllmost...

uPDaTe

wharrgarbl

Update

Formatting done... oh no it isn’t...

Mandy

I think Mandy might work as a Hell 4 Leather setup. Like, really easily.

A slightly less brief history of Halloween

Okay, gap in Halloween Night filled, including little bits of interest to Dark Ages and Victorian Age games.

Now to figure out how to format it.

Chuck Wendig

Today would be a good day to buy something by Chuck Wendig. Maybe some of his original fiction, writing advice, comics, or World or Chronicles Of Darkness material.

Greg Stafford, 1948-2018

Greg Stafford was one of the pioneers of RPGs, from RuneQuest to Pendragon to Ghostbusters and on, my condolences to his family and friends, and to my fellow fans.

The art of Timothy Truman

Searching for suggestions for a thread looking for art for a modern Western horror game reminded me that some day I want to run a game based on the art of Timothy Truman. Grimjack was a formative read for me, Tim Bradstreet worked with him, and look at, for example, this illustration for the Grateful Dead.

Cavaliers Of Mars

My Cavaliers Of Mars rulebook and screen have arrived!

Goya's Ghostly Vision

News to me: a painting by Goya, thought lost for ninety years, is now on display in the Museo of Zaragoza.

And like so much of Goya’s work, it’s pretty damn creepy.

Not his creepiest work, but still.

Thanks to Jess Nevins for the news, via Twitter.

Storytellers Vault Chronicles Of Darkness

Announced today, coming soon, with Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken and Mage: The Awakening to begin with, as well as the blue book and mortal characters, always a bigger option in Chronicles than World. I might have to come up with something for that...

Pugmire: Homeward Bound

Pugmire: Homeward Bound, coming soon to the Saving Throw Twitch channel, and hopefully soon after to on-demand.

Favourite touch: the NPC dogs are based on real, currently adoptable dogs.

Anyone who can raise a storyteller and loves a bad pun is good by me.

Sometimes bad guys make the best good guys

Oh, and I also hope to find a timeslot to run Leverage as well. Yay for answering questions about the games I’ve never had a chance to run!

Everyone hail to the pumpkin song

Halloween Night, hopefully coming soon to the Storytellers Vault!

Hopefully sharing soon...

We have art for From The Dust. Of two kinds already. Yay!

Finality

Finality, a murder mystery from Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran, free on Webtoons every Friday.

Ultimate Buffy

The creative team for the BOOM! Studios Buffy The Vampire Slayer comic has been announced, along with a cover reveal and a description of the premise.

It’s an Ultimate Marvel style reboot, with Buffy arriving at Sunnydale High in 2019 - “writer Jordie Bellaire (Redlands, and owner of a cat called Buffy) and artist Dan Mora (Klaus) are working with creator and story consultant Joss Whedon to reboot the entire Buffy concept from day one.”

(Well, day two really - the announcement shows it keeps versions of the TV setting and cast, making it more like the show than the show was like the movie.)

Unlike the new live-action series which is set in the original Buffyverse, it’s running with the name, and judging by the main cover and the Kevin Wada variant going with a likeness for Sarah Michelle Gellar when she was starting in the role. (Though who is that other apparent slayer represented on the Royal Dunlap variant cover?)

In RPG terms, it’s like someone picking up a classic sourcebook and doing a new version.

And hey, Ultimate Spider-Man was the basis for a few animated series. Just saying.

Black Lion at twenty

Congratulations to Liam and the crew at Black Lion Games for twenty years!

Hurricane relief

A Hurricane Florence relief bundle at RPGnow containing over $170 in RPG PDFs for $25.

Vampire: The Masquerade Humble Bundle

A lot of PDFs for not much, across the first three editions, in aid of UNHCR.

The Mandalorian

Jon Favreau has revealed the title and premise of the first live-action Star Wars TV series.

After the stories of Jango and Boba Fett, another warrior emerges in the Star Wars universe. The Mandalorian is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order. We follow the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic....

Update: a first photo (still anonymous) and news that the first episode will be directed by Rebels showrunner Dave Filoni, followed by directors including Taika Waititi, Bruce Dallas Howard, Rick Famuyiwa and Deborah Chow. So that’s... a good lineup of directors, certainly.

The Chronicles Of Narniagain

Netflix is planning films and series based on The Chronicles Of Narnia. What are the odds that they get past The Silver Chair this time?

Harry Potter And The Large Open Setting

Looks like we’re getting an open world Harry Potter computer game, about a Hogwarts student (naturally) having various adventures around the school and beyond.

Night Of The Living Dead

Night Of The Living Dead premiered fifty years ago tonight.

Black Mirror Goes Interactive

Black Mirror to return to Netflix... including taking advantage of its online location to include an interactive choose-your-own-misadventure episode.

Hopefully not involving choices on the level of The National Anthem. Ahem.

Carlos Ezquerra

Carlos Ezquerra, co-creator of Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and so much more, has died.