Solo procedural SF wargames

Coming soon: a new edition of Five Parsecs From Home, an SF skirmish wargame where the book provides the opponent, with a section on GMing as an option as well. 

And Stargrave: Dead Or Alive, a free supplement for solo bounty hunting mini adventures downloadable here. 

Also known to GMs as adventure generators.

Trans Day Of Visibility

Trans rights are human rights.

Lego steal a -

French police tailing an international gang of Lego thieves.

Scion TV

Jenkins and Tate Entertainment Announce development deal for live-action TV series based on the Scion role-playing game by Onyx Path Publishing

V5: No Man's Land 119

The more Camarilla-adjacent members of the coterie attend a Winter Solstice ball. Almost everyone is a little tense.

Don’t you know too much already?

I’ll only hurt you if you let me

Call me friend but keep me closer (call me back)

And I’ll call you when the party’s over

Hours

Okay people, we lost an hour tonight. But we get it back on October 31st.

That’s right, Hallowe’en will be 25 hours long!

The Ever Given is a gift to all.

The Last Starfighters

A concept art sizzle reel for a sequel to The Last Starfighter. Art by a Rogue One concept artist working from a script co-written by one of its writers. Would this work? Sure, the fantasy of a kid from Earth becoming a X-Wing pilot still sings. Would a decades-later sequel with that same kid as a dad work? Hmm.

(I say this as someone who once jokingly pitched doing a reboot as a series a la Buffy with space monsters.)

The Falcon And The Winter Soldier 2: The Star-Spangled Man

The Falcon And The Winter Soldier

2: The Star-Spangled Man

The Star-Spangled Man is a reminder of the outrageous lack of an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song for Captain America: The First Avenger.

There were two nominees!

TWO!

That’s a really mean thing to do to the team behind the song that lost.

Anyway, the episode. In which the Falcon and the Winter Soldier meet, unlike the first episode!

Trinity Continuum: Adventure!

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! now live on Kickstarter! and I’m one of the first fifty backers! and funded in three and a half hours!

Greece bicentennial

Today marks the 200th anniversary of Greek independence.

The Owls, a dark super family

Where do my ideas come from? In this case, I think they come from reading the RPGnet random superhero ideas thread after watching The Old Mill on Disney+...

There are a lot of superhero families out there, some created together as a unit like the Fantastic Four but others growing over years like the Superman and Batman families. And Batman’s family really wasn’t part of his original and often returned to grim dark dark grim “I work alone” bit.

So... a deliberately designed Batmanly family of vigilantes. A brooding hero who had kids, maybe even starting with the child of the original brooding hero and their family. Using similar costumes and fighting styles so the city’s criminals can’t be sure just how many of them are out there.

The choice of owls refers back to Batman’s evil mirror universe counterpart Owlman, Nite Owl from Watchmen, and the Court of Owls, a recent-ish addition to Gotham as a conspiracy of powerful families and their Talon enhanced assassins keeping the city the way they like it. As well as the occasional in-universe theories about how Batman can’t possibly be one guy. And also the Owl from Marvel. And also the Strix from Vampire: The Requiem. And possibly also the Brownies.

But also, there are lots of kinds of owl.

So the father figure can be Eagle Owl, the rebellious teen Screech Owl, the “person in the chair” running comms Barn Owl, the much mourned victim of heroic death by backstory Grey Owl.

New Buffy and Angel action figures

One of Buffy and one of Angel that is. 1/15th scale, unlike the previous run of 1/12th scale across several companies, but such is life.

Unpainted prototypes:

Colour renders: 

 

The blue-purple Gothic script box art background as seen on the RPG and other vintage items like the Easter eggs got me all nostalgic. 

Hoping Angel looks less startled in reality.

Happy birthday CT!

An unused Warhammer pun

The word Exquisitor exists and it hasn’t been used in the Slaanesh armies for Warhammer.

Knutepunkt 2021

Articles from Knutepunkt 2021 at Nordic LARP look at community and the power of ritual and story.

I was ahead of things. It has been a year again.

Star Wars Resistance

With Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2D Clone Wars, the Ewoks movies and the animated Good Bit of the Star Wars Holiday Special coming to Disney+ for Easter, the 3D The Clone Wars season seven there and spinoff The Bad Batch starting on May the Fourth, Star Wars Resistance is all up now (apart from the minute-or-so shorts from season one) as well.

As is traditional with a new Star Wars animated series the new art style takes some getting used to. It’s bright and colourful, and the backdrops in particular Ghibli-ish with some Akira-y station details, though the human characters mostly look a bit too blank for me.

It’s very much for kids. The humour tends towards slapstick with the main character Kazuda Xiono being comically inept, and trades on audience affection for BB-8 by sending him in to help Kaz on his mission with Poe Dameron looking in every few episodes.

Unlike The Clone Wars and Rebels it doesn’t use a snippet of classic Star Wars fanfare for its theme tune, and the theme sounds oddly like Back To The Future to me, which does fit its comedy teen hero.

The basic setup has a giant fuel station turned freeport in neutral space, with the Resistance, the First Order and other factions all having spies there. It’s like a space Casablanca, a series hook I’ve always wanted to do, but it’s been noted that Kaz is more a teen detective protagonist rather than one of the central figures there. Add the racer element for extra action.

The neutral space plays up the early difference between the Rebellion and Resistance eras, and it’s a very game-friendly premise for an ongoing series with a central location.

It starts before The Force Awakens with the Resistance quietly spying on the First Order as it slowly builds to make its first big strike, closer to the level where Rebels starts. It moves past The Last Jedi as the second season progresses and it shifts in tone quite heavily with more space battles and the like. Its second season ran from autumn 2019 to winter 2020 but doesn’t go all the way to The Rise Of Skywalker. An epilogue set after that finale could have been a nice capper, but it ends pretty solidly.

More spoilery thoughts, even though it’s been over a year...

V5: No Man's Land 118

The coterie adds something up and gets a Hecata to swear.

The Olympics

The 2020 Olympics is still happening in Tokyo... in 2021. The latest news is that people aren’t going to be allowed to fly in to see them.

The Olympics have always been a bit weird compared to “regular” world athletics events (not least in 1924) what with the various political actions, the Bond villain cheating at fencing, the bizarre opening ceremonies, so holding the one predicted in Akira despite a fantastic excuse not to seems about right.

Spring, So, Summer

It is spring. So, naturally, thinking what to run in the summer. Buffy, Star Wars, Vampire, Trinity, Aeon...

Red Nose Day 2021

The new non-plastic noses are lighter than the previous big rubbery ones, but fairly hard and still not very comfortable.

Daniel Craig’s James Bond meets Catherine Tate’s Nan.

Staged brushes up on its Shakespeare.

2020: The Movie Trailer features Jodie Whittaker and Mandip Gill crossing over with a more regular doctor show.

The cast of Derry Girls are not their characters.

I can see why they got Jayde Adams in for the barely rehearsed Nessun Dorma performance but Caroline Quentin is a surprise as well.

The Falcon And The Winter Soldier: 1: New World Order

The Falcon And The Winter Soldier

1: New World Order

As Empire puts it in its new cover feature, “after the weirdness of WandaVision, regular service is resuming”...

I’ve avoided trailers so I didn’t know about [redacted] or [redacted].

Things found in a modern wizard's study

Specifically a Tremere chantry in Vampire: The Masquerade from a Facebook group prompt, but somewhat suitable for any sketchy urban fantasy magic user...

The big bare concrete basement for rituals, with the remains of an arcane symbol in blood surrounded by a circle of salt which has clearly been broken, and a blast shadow on one of the walls.

There are multiple locks on every door, hundreds of locks in the building, from the original latch and bolt locks to modern deadbolts. And every one of them is broken open.

A modern security centre showing the cameras all over the building, and the outside... and tapped into cameras outside the city’s Elysium... and the subway stations... and...

A severed head in a dusty jar that looks a lot like a local vampire that the PCs saw earlier tonight.

A full Time-Life “Enchanted World” Mysteries of the Unknown book series.

V20+10

Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition was announced ten years ago today.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to Irish and connected readers!

King Arthur and the stamps of the Round Table

Today sees a set on First Day Cover stamps based on the legend of King Arthur, illustrated by The Last Jedi and Destiny concept artist Jaime Jones. A grounded and realistic take, with no portrait of Arthur himself, only Merlin and Galahad.

Stargrave rules and miniatures previews

First look at crew creation rules and the first plastic miniatures kits for Osprey’s post-collapse space opera SF skirmish game Stargrave.

The galaxy is a rough place. Most of the once-powerful planets have been reduced to rubble, their populations decimated. Even the smaller colonies that were left untouched by the war have seen their economies collapse as necessary trade dried up. Vast pirate fleets roam between the stars, taking what they want and enforcing their own brand of law and justice. Plagues have run unchecked through many systems. Famine has turned others into wastelands. Raiding, border skirmishes, and other low-level warfare is rife.

It is against this background that the ‘independent crews’ operate. Generally consisting of a single ship and a small crew, these small bands travel between the systems, keeping to the shadows and out-of-sight of the pirate fleets.

As I thought on first hearing about it. it’s looking very Ashen Stars, although even more beat-up.

And the reason for the collapse is a war as befits a wargame, rather than a mystery as befits a mystery game:

The 28mm miniatures are humanoid (and all masculine, with feminine sprues to follow) and pretty Rogue Trader chunky rather than the slim realistic true scale style made increasingly popular with 3D printing, more obviously so than Frostgrave. I expect that you can switch bits and pieces around with Frostgrave so you can create melee armoured types and wild-haired space warriors, use Wizard parts to make mystics, and Demon heads to make a crew full of Star Wars Devaronians and other cantina aliens, as well as using the small number of uplifted animal heads to Pugmire up your Frostgrave armies.

Keep on running

Beginning plans for summer RPGs.

It has been a year.

Anarchs

Part of the appeal of Vampire: The Masquerade is that as the anarchs you can stick it to The Man and The Man will actually notice.

The Kindred Wheelchair

Kindred-tailored wheelchairs for Vampire: The Masquerade from Lore By Night.

WandaVision - bring the fun home!

Could something like WandaVision work in an RPG?

I’d say yes, though compared to the very RPG-friendly regular MCU and associated series, not easily.

Firstly you have a shifting background that moves between styles, and genres. That would take some effort, deciding what changes and what doesn’t.

Then there’s the reveal that the world is a construct, and the initial mystery of who’s been messing up everything.

This could be done in a “reality isn’t real” RPG - I statted out a TV hero starting to wonder about the world she’s in for Over The Edge, for example - so there’s precedent there.

Do you want to drop this into an ongoing game, or start a new one?

Having existing characters find themselves stuck in a different world is easy enough, if it fits your game’s standard Weird Level...

WandaVision

WandaVision is complete, including the Assembled making of documentary. So...

Outriders

Outriders is a new Destiny-ish computer game starting with a vestige of humanity arriving on a new planet after, as the opening captaion puts it, “Earth is dead.” The player is a leader in a scouting unit on the new world, like a less YA version of The 100. It apparently doesn’t stay with that premise for long though, with the new world getting mired in conflict and the addition of superhuman powers. So more like Khantze Lu Ge, the wartorn planet from Trinity Continuum: Aeon.

Robin Hood in art

Andrew Wyeth’s father N.C. Wyeth illustrated a version of Robin Hood in 1917.

You could put that on to cover of an RPG book today and it would sell it. (The same holds true for his King Arthur illustrations that would work for Pendragon.)

He was a student of Howard Pyle, who wrote and illustrated The Merry Adventures Of Robin Hood, published in 1883 and still in print, a key “adaptation distillation” of the character that codified several tropes along with the likes of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, ahead of the films of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn.

And this could fit into a WFRP book...

I learned about Wyeth’s work through a French documentary on Sky Arts this morning, and now I am telling you.

Tonight is a year since my last face to face session. (And also since I last had my favourite food.) Tiny things compared to many, I know.

Minds Eye Vampire: The Masquerade SRD

MET VTM LARP SRD for short. Enough information to play the current Minds Eye Theatre Vampire: The Masquerade free online. Things I like include varying flaw levels for things like clan weakness severity. 

This also includes rules and developments from the recent update nudging it partialy towards V5, where characters still have Blood Points but now follow V5 in skill and Discipline assignment, and the Tremere weakness models it.

THX 1138 at 50

Before Star Wars, before American Graffiti, George Lucas’s first feature film as director was THX 1138, released on March 11th 1971. It followed an earlier version he made at film school, Electronic Labyrinth.

It’s a chilly dystopian science fiction film - with love at its core.

The blank settings, constant surveillance including confessionals, and characters with ID codes for names and actively repressed sexuality owe a lot to the likes of 1984 and Brave New World.

As well as THX being the name for Lucas’s cinema sound company and 1138 and other references being scattered around the Star Wars films, the Geonosis factory birthplace of the Clone Troopers is a particularly clear callback to this antiseptic clean room of a world.

And a lot of its defining ideas (among others) are played for laughs in Paranoia, so Greg Costikyan and West End Games made an unofficial parody RPG for it before Star Wars. As far as I know they never made an American Graffiti RPG though...

Tales Of The Æon Society!

Tales Of The Æon Society! Audio Archive

The complete audio Adventture! for your listening pleasure.

Your go to adventure formula

What is your go to adventure formula?

Mine:

Someone or something has committed a genre-appropriate crime. There are, let’s say, three useful witnesses, and an opportunity to use powers of detection. The PCs have to investigate rather than go to the authorities because (they are the authorities, there are no authorities, the authorities suspect them, etc.) and they have to keep it quiet in case the culprit tries to (escape, attack, do something else) and the authorities if any take interest.

It has room for sneaking around the scene to look for clues, being threatened by someone who doesn’t want the crime solved, and a chase or fight at the end. Can work with elegant country houses, inner city mean streets, dingy space stations...

Buffy at 24

And I watched Once More With Feeling on Star.

Player Character Conditional

An observation from Gar Hanrahan on Twitter:

Roleplaying games need a special tense, the player character conditional. 

"The kingdom is doomed to fall into ruin" vs "the kingdom is doomed to fall into ruin (unless the player characters do something about it)".

Happy International Women's Day

Coming soon, the video of the GEAS workshop on and with women GMs, much of it about gender in TTRPG groups.

Highlander

Highlander premiered 35 years ago, showing immortals among us fighting for the Prize.

It spawned sequels (one of which we do not speak of) and TV series, and still gets games and toys now, despite its very one-and-done ending, as well as making Katanas & Trenchcoats an urban fantasy aesthetic.

(Also check out Incarnate. I am partially responsible.)

And it mostly still stands up, thanks to some performances happy to throw everything in, not being too rooted in the 80s, and the weirdness of its international casting having been weird from the very beginning.

The immortal feeling lost in the modern world and trying not to get involved, the handful of friends he can never really be close to, the flashbacks to the pain of leaving his mortal life behind, it all comes together nicely.

And the sketched-in background with no good answers to why this is happening gave just enough to work, while making people want more. It was inevitably followed by several different answers and none of them good, but that doesn’t mean more stories in a world like this couldn’t work.

V5 Nobody's Home 1.16 needle drop

When you have a nightclub where Iggy Pop once played, and add a ghost...

Although I am horribly proud of also using Dancing On My Own by Robyn.

I’m in the corner, watching you kiss her

I’m right over here, why can’t you see me?

The Barbarian And The Troll

The Barbarian and the Troll Is the Kid-Friendly Red Sonja With Puppets You Didn’t Know You Needed

A warrior hero and her annoying bard sidekick... but puppets, via Nickelodeon.

WandaVision: The Series Finale

No really, it’s called The Series Finale.

Watch the credits. And keep watching.

GM's Day

March Fourth! Celebrate GMs! Take advantage of the sale at DriveThru! Roll a Notice check!

The Sequelisers

Having not checked in for a while, The Sequelisers took on The Crow: City Of Angels and therefore assorted Crow sequels and a lot of fantasy casting, Prometheus and Alien prequels, and it really took them until season seven to do Queen Of The Damned, without doing the tag team multiple sequel versions from the early years.

Dialogue save, probably for Vampire

This life wants to make you a monster. Will you let it?

World Of Darkness Stories

What is World Of Darkness Stories? I can make some guesses.

Edit: And I was nearly right.

It’s an ongoing collection of short stories and hooks, on social media starting with Facebook and Instagram. And for no-account types, Tumblr.

Also, a developer blog from Justin Achilli on the Vampire clans.

ALIENS: Fireteam

Another demonstration that ALIEN and ALIENS play differently, a new ALIENS game! ALIENS: Fireteam is a co-op shooter with marines invading a hive decades after ALIENS.

International Wheelchair Day

Today is International Wheelchair Day, and Hero Forge chose a good day to introduce wheelchairs, with three customisable options. ANVL was ahead there as well as having regular chair options which HF still doesn’t. Still, this is good.

St. David's Day

A very dashing dragon for the St. David’s Day Google Doodle.