Sir Ian Livingstone

As of the New Year Honours, I believe Sir Ian Livingstone is the only knight I am on nodding acquaintance with.

Betty White

Sliced bread was the best thing since Betty White.

Happy Hogmanay!

And a plot hook for the road, for something that has faeries and the like, from Pendragon to Changeling to Buffy:

Resolve

Due to a faerie not quite getting the idea, everyone in town who makes a New Year’s resolution around dawn is stuck with it like a geas. Which is fine if it’s something like “quit smoking” but a problem if it’s something like “kill the king”.

2021 review

Not even going to try to talk about the world situation, although vaccinations were a highlight.

Film of the year: The Green Knight

TV series of the year (new) : Only Murders In The Building

TV series of the year (returning) : What We Do In The Shadows

Album of the year: Halsey, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power

RPG of the year: Due to things like Kickstarter what qualifies? Let’s say They Came From Beyond The Grave!

2021 TWH tag review

999 for RPGs!

Adventure Calendar Bonus 31: Adventure!

Adventure Calendar

Bonus 31: Trinity Continuum: Adventure!

As well as fitting the general Trinity Continuum and supers ideas, and maybe spies, and optionally 1920s-30s holidays traditions that have fallen by the wayside as in Call Of Cthulhu...

Adventure! is home to two-fisted pulp action all year round!

So what is an Æon Society Christmas or New Year party in the 20s or 30s like?

Let It Snow

The founding members of the Æon Society enjoy a winter skiing retreat and compete for the most interesting gifts - but their celebrations are interrupted by assassins wielding ice axes!

Adventure Calendar Bonus 30: Aberrant

Adventure Calendar

Bonus 30: Trinity Continuum: Aberrant

It’s part of the Trinity Continuum, and also supers though a Santa crossover wouldn’t quite fit, but Aberrant is also social science fiction about the effect that superhumans might have on the world and a skewed look at celebrity culture.

What would you do for Christmas with the power of a god?

The N! Network Holiday Spectacular

As active public superhumans, a group of Novas get to experience being the holiday season’s must-have toy, appear in parades and the like. The more eloquent are asked to give holiday messages to camera, and they might all be asked about the implications of their miraculous rebirth as well as whether they know Santa Claus personally.

Meanwhile, anti-Nova fringe religious groups like the Church of Michael Archangel want to put a stop to this kind of idolatry...

Happy birthday mum!

Actual Christmas episodes 2021

Shaun The Sheep got the BBC One Christmas idents as well as a half-hour special which was very classic Looney Tunes in many ways. (Also a literal Raiders Of The Lost Ark hat tip.)

A Ghost Story For Christmas: The Mezzotint expanded a decidedly short story nicely.

Leverage Redemption: The Bucket Job was less festive than The Ho Ho Ho Job, but that’s a high bar for festivity. Still lovely, made me a bit emotional at one point.

Adventure Calendar Bonus 29: Victoriana

Adventure Calendar

Bonus 29: Victoriana

Since the modern idea of Christmas starts with Victoria and Albert and Charles Dickens, something 19th Century would seem apt. There are straight-up Victorian RPGs, Westerns, games about the fiction of the time, gaslamp fantasy like Castle Falkenstein and Victoriana, Steampunk, period settings for horror games, and so on. How many of them look at the social concerns of the time and the present as Dickens did?

O Christmas Tree

Christmas trees are very much in fashion, and supply isn’t meeting demand. Certain enterprising individuals take it upon themselves to find trees for some of the town’s most willing to pay. This also gives these artful types a chance to see how the lucky few live, and where the best ways in are.

As Trojan horse heist props go, a massive Christmas tree is certainly unusual.

The Book Of Boba Fett 1.01

The Book Of Boba Fett

1.01: Stranger In A Strange Land

It was lots of fun, set things up nicely, and went with a very obvious answer to a very obvious question. Not that that’s a bad thing.

Comparisons to The Mandalorian are inevitable, that skewed away from expectations and introduced a similar but new character who could go in different directions. Compare the end themes - Book’s (inspired by Swedish folk including an adaptation of Ronja The Robber’s Daughter) has a choral and percussive base and bridge instead of the big hero brass and strings fanfare Din gets.

Also featuring a very very Ray Harryhausen monster and...

Adventure Calendar Bonus 28: Stargate

Adventure Calendar

Bonus 28: Stargate

Stargate (which had a nearly published D6 RPG, had a d20 Boom one and now has another, because as noted in the first it’s a perfect RPG setup with a PC-sized party going to another planet without even needing a spaceship) never did a Christmas episode, though SG-1 were shown celebrating at least once while stuck in a time warp. The series shut down talk of Christianity as a Goa’uld religion, but did have explanations for ghosts, elves, immortal people, and flying vehicles that could easily be sledge-shaped.

Joy To The Worlds

The team’s Christmas preparations have to be put on hold when Stargate Command receives a call for aid from a planet under attack by... Romans? Romans are just a bit late for the System Lords, aren’t they?

14 Vampire hooks from Hayley Williams's Flowers For Vases

For Hayley Williams’s birthday, using song titles from Flowers For Vases / descansos as Vampire plot hooks (Masquerade or Requiem) as they skew rather dark, physical or emotional.

First Thing To Go

A vampire finds a reminder of someone long lost, the sound of someone’s voice bringing back memories from years past. What will she do to hear that voice again?

My Limb

Waking at nightfall, a vampire finds one of his legs is stuck in rigor mortis below the knee.

Asystole

A loved one is dying, with unfinished business likely to see them die without rest.

Trigger

A gang war intensifies, and one of the Kindred takes a bullet and has to act like it bothers him a lot more than it really does.

Over Those Hills

The next city half a night’s drive away has fallen silent. Somebody has to go and look.

Good Grief

You can’t go to your last living relative’s funeral, but at least you can drop in briefly at the wake.

Wait On

An elder in torpor shows signs of stirring, and her descendants including one of the coterie have to prepare for her return.

KYRH

(Keep You Right Here)

One of the city’s older vampires takes an interest in a coterie member’s mortal Touchstones. Is this just to mess with the younger Kindred, or worse?

Inordinary

One of the coterie wakes in the morning. They’re alive.

HYD

(How you doing?)

An old friend of a young vampire drops in unexpectedly and wants to catch up.

No Use I Just Do

A vampire falls in love. Everyone advises against it, but it still happens.

Find Me Here

A rival or enemy asks to meet in Elysium to discuss... what, exactly?

Descansos

Someone is leaving roadside memorials where a specific local vampire feeds.

Just A Lover

Two vampires start to get close. Does it mean as much for both of them...?

Some personal history

When I was little, one of these was among our Christmas decorations, powered up to look out of the living room front window, and like the lights on the tree he got a plug all to himself. I suppose that explains his sure-of-himself expression. But not the yellow glowing beard effect.

Adventure Calendar Bonus 27: Ravenloft

Adventure Calendar

Bonus 27: Ravenloft

A dread land of mists and storms where it seems to be October most of the time anyway. But something like Jadis or Krampus commanding a realm of ice and snow?

Frosty Wind Made Moan

It should be a cheery harvest so where did this blizzard come from?

Around The World In 80 Days

Around The World In 80 Days starring David Tennant as Phileas Fogg, Ibrahim Koma as Passepartout and Leonie Benesch as Abigail Fortescue / Fix, is genuinely international as the title card of several broadcasters shows despite the deeply BBC feeling of Tennant fronting something about slightly uncomfortable Victorians with a ticking clock title sequence.

Tennant describes it as a romp and it mostly is, a lighthearted adventure with a problem of the week in each of its eight episodes, but it does have some weirdly serious elements and sequences that don’t quite fit.

I kept looking for a Michael Palin cameo in the Reform Club scenes.

The story would work as a game hook - the Jackie Chan and Steve Coogan film adds more fight scenes and stunts, and of course the cartoon version where Fogg is an anthropomorphic lion has the biggest use of the running villain trying to sabotage the attempt.

Nellie Bly went on to do it for real, in 72 days.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was one of the real ones.

“I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of human rights.”

Adventure Calendar 2021 Bonus 26: Primeval

The advent calendar stops on the 24th or 25th, but...

26: Primeval

Primeval never got a Christmas special, dinosaurs not being very Christmassy - although the anomalies look rather like Christmas decorations.

But if it had, I imagine we could get something winter-related. The Abominable Snowman?

The Door To Winter

Late summer, and an anomaly opens inside a building - opening onto the depths of the Ice Age. And it just keeps getting bigger, and colder.

Giant penguins optional.

Relevant gifts!

Thanks to mum, an impending trip to Spider-Man: No Way Home and a return to the Ray Harryhausen exhibition, and chocolate.

Thanks to Thursday folk and wishlist, Star Trek: Discovery season 3, Once & Future book one, The Omen (which I realise now would have been less ironic as a birthday suggestion) and the Quatermass serials.

The James Webb space telescope

A Christmas Day launch for the James Webb telescope, the successor to Hubble.

Adventure Calendar 2021 25a: Bonus Round

Adventure Calendar 2021

25a: Bonus Round

And for the big day, a bonus helping thanks to Aegypto and others at RPG.net!

Adventure Calendar 2021 25: The Watch House

Adventure Calendar 2021

25: The Watch House

Post 5,555 give or take!

We started this calendar with Buffy, and we return home for the big chocolate behind the window for Christmas.

I kept The Watch House Christmas episodes pretty low-key, with more real celebrations around the time, including making custom action figures over a couple years and editing the first title sequence video for another.

From Cat, Christmas 2004

I also didn’t want to compete with Amends for heartache and resisting the temptation to go full Santa or Scrooge. I put them up against killer snowmen in a short story one year, as you do.

Separate from the magic weather attack that got an actually played episode. And the one riffing on The Wicker Man for an equinox... which we played on Valentine’s Day, now I think about missed seasonal references. And the season finale where Matthew tried to stop the others interfering with his rise to magical power by giving them everything they ever wanted.

And as noted, a bunch of other ideas I’ve mentioned could fit as well, including supers, monster hunters, and the M. R. James homage.

So something character-specific.

One suggestion from a player was A Christmas Carol with Travers as the spirit of Watcher past, Giles as Watcher present and one of the PCs as Watcher future.

The Closing Of The Year

The Watchers have a number of duties they have to fulfil regularly or there will be Dire Consequences, and this year one of the things that must be done every Christmas has fallen to the Cambridge Prentices after the Watchers that were supposed to do it got food poisoning at a pub lunch on the way.

“Nothing complicated, just have to make sure the King of the Winter Court doesn’t forget that his reign isn’t all year round.”

“That sounds complicated.”

“Oh, nothing to worry about. Deliver some mulled wine, bit of ritual combat with a frost giant. You’ll be back in time to pull crackers, if you survive.”

“Sorry, did you just say - ”

“Best of luck! Best wishes to the family!”

“...”

Happy Holidays!

As applicable.

To quote Richard Osman: Have a lovely Christmas. If Christmas is a hard time for you, have a peaceful one.

Encanto

Disney’s Encanto (A.V. Club review with trailer links) stars a magical family where everyone has a unique power. Well... almost.

Feeling like the odd child out makes for clear identification and some very understandable angst.

(Being able to extemporise musical numbers as written by Lin-Manuel Miranda is not a magic power in-universe.)

With a large and not all heavily featured cast and relatively small stakes, I imagine more stories might follow.

Like a Wizard School, and due to the unique powers a bit X-Men, the family dynamic gives it a different feel. I’ve thought about doing something similar in a game but never gone for it as it would require a bit of extra player buy-in.

Thea Gilmore, That'll Be Christmas

Rain fallin’ and a chance of snow

Jona Lewie on the radio

French beer and mistletoe

That’ll Be Christmas

Adventure Calendar 2021 24: There Is No Spoon

Adventure Calendar 2021

24: There Is No Spoon

The Matrix Resurrections is in cinemas, and while it plays more like Breaking The Ice than There Is No Spoon, it’s still a story about the return of a saviour, heralded by the hopes of wise beings and the power of love and self-belief. With evil computer programs getting kicked in the face.

Unto Us A Child Is Born

Zion is a jumble of “modern” and future beliefs, with enough that escapees from the Matrix celebrate Christmas among other festivals, while in the Matrix itself the rush for gifts and time with family keep the people distracted from the wonder of children and hope for a miracle. And tonight, a child is born, and the Agents are coming to stop her...

Guns. Lots of guns. Ho ho ho.

Charly Bliss provide the song of the season

Deck the halls and snowflakes fall

But I’m not feeling glad at all

It’s Christmas And I Fucking Miss You

(NSFW lyrics, perhaps unsurprisingly)

Adventure Calendar 2021 23: TOON

Adventure Calendar 2021

23: TOON

A Steve Jackson Games production for day 23, and I wanted to do a straight-up Santa plot too, so here we are.

Something along the lines of Prep & Landing fits here, although they’re more basically competent than the TOON standard. (There’s a dedicated game for this subgenre, Santa’s Soldiers, which I haven’t read.)

Jingle Get Away

Santa is missing! Who will deliver all these presents?

You lot?

Really?

Choosing a series title

A future game probably in the Vampire family with some strong emotional ties, called Love Dares You.

(... to care for the people on the edge of the night...)

A title is part of a plan. For example, Nocturne is a pretty generic Vampire game name but knowing I’d have a lounge singer among the PCs helped swing it. And yes, I like to go super pretentious sometimes.

A Cthulhoid present

You’ve heard of Elf on a Shelf... leads to a batch of rhyming titled Cthulhu plot hooks from Gar Hanrahan via Pelgrane:

“For Christmas, I got you the stupidest idea for a 3,000-word Cthulhu article ever.”

Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness teaser

Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness teaser As seen after Spider-Man: No Way Home, where as we know from trailers he starts this problem.

Also featuring Wanda, Wong, Mordo and America Chavez.

And looks like Rachel McAdams as Christine marrying someone else. Maybe not a time traveller?!

Adventure Calendar 2021 22: Velvet Generation

Adventure Calendar 2021

22: Starchildren: Velvet Generation

The Christmas Number One is one of Britain’s weird side bits of the festive season, and lately a recurring battlefield for resistance against TV talent/reality shows.

So an RPG about music as the vehicle of rebellion against oppression, with added aliens and robots...

Currently waiting on a new version Velvet Generation with a playtest available for a couple of years, the game concerns humanoid aliens arriving a century late for the glam rock era.

Jingle Bell Rock

Christmas 2073, and the legally accepted background sound of the festive season is to be decided by a carefully screened mass vote, unless our heroes can bring back a real Christmas song. They might have to find some creative ways to bootleg it like pressing records on X-rays but they can make it happen. But which song to choose?

Hawkeye: So This Is Christmas?

Hawkeye

1.06: So This Is Christmas?

MCU TV sticks the landing.

Ghosts in RPGs

Making ghosts interesting in RPGs, where the definition might be narrowed by multiple monster types.

Dark World Problems

This week’s What We Do In The Shadows had a cliffhanger. So I watched the next one. It had a cliffhanger. So I watched the next one. I have now run out. Send more.

1/18th of 40,000

Warhammer 40,000 action figures in Star Wars scale from JoyToy.

Adventure Calendar 2021 21: Pendragon

Adventure Calendar 2021

21: King Arthur Pendragon 

Pendragon runs through the span of King Arthur’s reign by having many sessions cover a year if no big adventure comes along. It divides the year by seasons, with the winter phase being a quiet time. But the closeness of pagan midwinter and Christian Christmas can come through and touch it as well.

And of course one of the most famous Arthurian stories begins one Christmas and ends the next. The Green Knight film released this year has its own RPG as well, designed for one-shots, with honour as the core mechanic.

So the knights might attend Arthur’s great feast and enjoy Camelot’s friendly hearths, but adventure awaits in the cold outside their hospitable halls.

The Adventure of the Stolen Sun

The winter strikes early, cold and bitter, and it almost seems like the sun is missing. What terrible being has the power to shroud the world in such cold? And where does one begin on a quest to return the light?

A small midwinter Relics tease

One of my entries in Treasures On Earth for Relics is a scrap of the Cailleach’s plaid.

Midwinter

Low the tide, low the light

Comes the sun again

Thea Gilmore, Sol Invictus

The Northman trailer

The Northman, a Viking revenge movie from Robert Eggers, starring Alexander Skarsgård (aka Eric Northman) as Prince Amleth (aka Hamlet) and Anya Taylor-Joy as possibly a VVitch.

Adventure Calendar 2021 20(20): Cyberpunk

Adventure Calendar 2021

20(20): Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk, both the genre and the RPG that took the name, has always been about now as reflected in the time it’s supposed to be set in, speaking as someone who got the original box set in 1988 that was set in 2013. See Today In Cyberpunk for far too many examples.

So what does a Cyberpunk or cyberpunk Christmas story look like?

Black Friday is followed by Cyber Monday.

For the standard mercenary special ops RPG setup, my spy plot with the giant container ship fits as well.

The Christmas issues of 2000 A.D. often have seasonal but decidedly un-festive Judge Dredd stories with robot reindeer on the front of corporations’ flying delivery vans, ten seconds of snow from Weather Control, and a distinct lack of people on the Nice list.

Die Hard, Iron Man 3, ironic Santa slasher movies, and the robot Santa episode of Futurama could all work as examples too.

And the trailer for the version of A Christmas Carol being made in Scrooged feels very “this came out a year after RoboCop” even before we get to the Ghost of Christmas Future with a distorted TV for a face.

But the genre also has that punk element of fighting back, the street finds its own uses for things, and a small ray of hope to turn things around. Consider AIs freeing themselves, Deckard escaping with Rachel, Motoko taking the next step in cybernetic evolution...

A Midnight Clear

A family escaping from a corporate enclave, seeking shelter among the dispossessed, in the midst of a corporatised holiday season where the people on the street still find ways to celebrate.

2021 Hugo Awards

The 2021 Hugo Awards and nominees, at Tor. Including Best Video Game for the first time.

The four year run by The Good Place for Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) is nice but odd, and I could state opinions about the Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) this year, but hey.

Pardoning the victims of witch trials

Three hundred years on, Scottish witch trial victims are to be pardoned.

Nocturne 1.10

“How did tonight's game go?”

“I played a Johnny Cash song at the end.”

“Ah.”

Well, you’re my friend

And can you see

Many times, we’ve been out drinkin’

Many times we shared our thoughts

But did you ever, ever notice

The kind of thoughts I got?

Well, you know I have a love

A love for everyone I know

And you know I have the drive

To live, I won’t let go

But can you see its opposition

Comes rising up sometimes?

That its dreadful imposition

Comes blacking in my mind?

And that I see a darkness

And that I see a darkness

And that I see a darkness

And that I see a darkness

Did you know how much I love you?

Here’s a hope that somehow you

Can save me from this darkness

I See A Darkness

Adventure Calendar 2021 19: The One Ring

Adventure Calendar 2021

19: The One Ring

Middle-earth doesn’t have Christmas (unlike Narnia) but J. R. R. Tolkien also wrote and illustrated the Letters from Father Christmas for his children, and between the goblin attacks and the heroic but troublesome North Polar Bear they have some points in common.

A game of The One Ring could take a week off to play an adventure drawn from the Letters, as well as other options in the setting like a celebration of Yule in the Shire or Rohan. The Lord Of The Rings Online version maybe goes overboard in sounding like a particularly active Christmas market.

The Message

The travellers are entrusted with a vital message which must reach Rivendell before midwinter. Not a time to be out travelling lightly, with the winter wind and driving snow, and with someone shadowing their steps...

Happy 75th birthday to Steven Spielberg!

The consummate storyteller of my lifetime.

“I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go.”

Indiana Jones, patron saint of player characters, Raiders Of The Lost Ark

Moderna-ed

That was not a particularly fun four and three-quarter hours, but at least I was indoors in the clinic after two and a half, and even got to sit down for the last half-hour or so, as I was the next walk-in in line when they shifted to the backlog of appointments.

A certain determination and camaraderie developed.

When asked if I wanted to come in, I may have said “Oh good God yes!”

And me mum got me a lollipop.

Adventure Calendar 2021 18: Warhammer

Adventure Calendar 2021

18: Warhammer

The Old World of Warhammer Fantasy is not our history, so its holidays are not our historical holidays. But they also sort of are.

Not quite as much as Hogswatch Night on Discworld is, but in that ballpark.

The winter solstice has fires to ward off wolves as well as gift-giving and keeping a log burning. (Some of this is established in its titular not-so-festive adventure.) And New Year’s Eve is also basically Halloween.

The proprietor of Black Lion Games has a legendary Warhammer one-shot about Pie Week as well, as a band of furious heroes take action against the vendor responsible for giving them food poisoning on the first day.

So we have mangled and mashed-up holidays as well as room for real traditions long abandoned. And a suitable place for warped fairytales in time for panto season too. The Nutcracker has a living toy fighting a seven-headed mouse king, for example.

The Princess And The Pirate

A great solstice feast in Delberz is interrupted when the daughter of the region’s Elector runs away from an arranged marriage. Will the adventurers return her for a hefty bag of coin, or actually do the right thing and help her escape? May feature: Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...

To Bundle-ly Go

A big Star Trek Adventures bundle for a good cause.

Adventure Calendar 2021 17: Superheroes

Adventure Calendar 2021

17: Superheroes

Superheroes covers a wide range from Shazam to the Punisher, so a lot of the plots above can work like the Buffy, Trinity and spy ideas.

Batman Returns, Iron Man 3 and Hawkeye mostly use the season as ironic counterpoints, but include plot details like a high society party for Bruce Wayne to attend and Clint Barton wanting to get back to his family as a ticking clock.

Do your heroes take part in the city’s Thanksgiving parade or New Year’s Eve party broadcast, have dinner with the mayor, help make sure Toys For Tots runs smoothly, or spend the holidays saving the day like any other?

From the Batman Adventures Holiday Special (1994)

The first time I remember seeing suggestions for Christmas session ideas was an article by Alison Brooks in Fantazia magazine for superhero games, which talked about low-key sessions about holiday preparations and celebrations, Nativity and Santa based adventures, a Christmas truce, ideas based on pantomimes, fairy tales and ghost stories, and other options based on how weird the series normally goes and optionally raising the Weird Level a click or two for the season. Other holiday celebrations could provide ideas as well.

Santa is superhuman and heroic, therefore...

He’s appeared in the big superhero universes and could be called on in a Crisis.

Superman's Christmas Adventure (1940)

Our heroes might also face other festive issues. Want to kick Krampus back to the Pole?

Mutants & Masterminds has Crisis On Christmas, a free short where the idea of Christmas itself is in danger.

ICONS has a Santa adventure and one about a holiday-themed heist ready to go too.

Winter Wonder

Christmas Eve, night falls, and snow starts to fall with it. Weather reports indicate this wasn’t expected... and it seems to only be falling on the city. Who’s behind this? Do the team have a cold-powered enemy - or ally? Has the Snow Queen come to town?

The Lost City

The Lost City - hey, they made a new Romancing The Stone only spoofier?

Adventure Calendar 2021 16: Leverage

Adventure Calendar 2021

16: Leverage

Shorthand for the con and heist genre, as the best dedicated game I know for it.

(Trinity Continuum works with Les Fantômes and the Dramatic Editing flashback rules also featured in Assassins, but I trust you know that.)

And also because Leverage is about using cons and heists for good, fighting injustice through trickery.

The show has some Christmas-adjacent episodes involving saving a church and stopping an evil toymaker as well as full-on Christmas episodes in season three (where they go all-in on A Christmas Carol and Santa) and five, and Leverage: Redemption season one. (And the original series finale premiered on Christmas Day, a week after the S5 Christmas episode, while very much not being festive at all.)

There’s also the option to go all the way and apply heist story rules to Christmas with the Santa break-in subgenre, as seen with the Prep & Landing animated specials where elves scout houses to deliver presents to in the style of Mission: Impossible.

Delivering a present without being seen seems sort of apt, so might happen as an aside.

I also considered a “winter wonderland” park scam, but that wrote up as kind of a downer. (The crew could arrange an event as the scammers promised, but it would have to be for a smallish target audience to get everybody affected.)

But anyway, we’re here for heroic thieves. And since it’s Christmas, keeping things light and relatively low stakes. Relatively.

The Three Wise Men Job

The manager of a small town’s Christmas club investments thought this was on the up-and-up, it wasn’t a suspiciously large payout. But now a couple dozen families are going to have nothing for the season and a financier has made off with the money. He’d been doing some sketchy things throughout his career but decided this was the year to cash in. And the crew find five more towns he did this to. This distinct lack of holiday spirit must be addressed.

“Let’s go steal a Christmas village.”

The Demolished Man movie? The Dying Earth stream?

A Miniseries For Lieobowiz? David Afranoff looks at some possible, likely and implausible SF classics to adapt for film and TV at Tor, now that some unfilmable books have sort of made it. Also contains succinct pitches of the books in question, some new to me and some rife for plot hooking.

Spider-Man: No Way Home

Spider-Man: No Way Home is the least just plain fun of the trilogy but still a lot of fun in places. Especially if you’ve seen the other post-2000 live-action Spider-Man movies. Which if you’re reading this you probably have, though maybe not lately.

Adventure Calendar 2021 15: Relics

Adventure Calendar 2021

15: Relics

With so many stories attached to Christmas like Santa and Scrooge, you have plenty of material to avoid the Nativity if you don’t want to reckon with it or risk offence. But Relics is a game about angels which starts with God closing the Gates of Heaven and features a bunch of Biblical and apocryphal figures on stage as well as beings from various other mythologies with the option to play some, so this seems like a good game to look at Bible stories as inspiration.

And The Angel Came In Unto Her

The Band experience their first Christmas since the Gates closed, and the surprising ways that people celebrate a major intervention millennia ago, especially when they know more than most about the specifics - because some of them were there.

“So, I get Saint Nicholas going from giving gold to some specific people to giving gifts to everybody, like the celebration becomes a second birthday, but where did the flying reindeer come in? I mean, yes, we can make reindeer fly, but...”

Can they save a mother-to-be, bring peace to a battlefield, and figure out how to wrap a present?

Hawkeye: Ronin

Hawkeye

1.05: Ronin

The penultimate episode of Hawkeye doesn’t have a mid credits scene, but there is a new thing in the last shot at the end of the animated credits.

(And a certain guest star is adorkable while also very threatening.)

Touching the sun

NASA has sent a probe into the corona of the sun, the first human-made object to breach it.

Michelle Yeoh saves the multiverse

Everything Everywhere All At Once sees Michelle Yeoh as put-upon laundromat manager Evelyn Wang - but also every other version of Evelyn in the multiverse as she accesses their knowledge and skills to save it.

Adventure Calendar 2021 14: Ghostbusters

Adventure Calendar 2021

14: Ghostbusters

A spooky but not so scary end to spooky week.

Ghostbusters II is about the emotional charge of New Year’s. The Real Ghostbusters cartoon had the team accidentally trap the ghosts from A Christmas Carol and have to reset the timeline after Scrooge took over the holiday season.

Cartoon Action Hour has a similar adventure, free!

Ghostbusters was I think the first game I ran a Christmas special for. I based my Christmas adventure on Sleigh Wars, the White Dwarf boardgame about four very different Santas fighting to deliver gifts. (Ravensburger recently released a similar game, Santa’s Rooftop Scramble, though the Santas are all classic Santa instead of evil, militaristic or worried about being up to date.)

Our heroes had to team up with classic Santa to defeat Anti-Claus (the Krampus wasn’t well known at the time) and prevent Arkham’s worst Christmas ever.

And there’s plenty of room for satirising the stranger and creepier bits of Christmas culture, and blasting them with proton packs. Many would also work with the likes of Buffy, but the direct approach that Ghostbusters can take should make it feel quite different.

Elves On Shelves

A small figurine said to be watching on behalf of Santa to see who’s naughty or nice.

But who are these things really spying for?

And how many of them can a fully-grown Ghostbuster fight off if they go on the attack?

Pitch the action somewhere around Small Soldiers and stand well back.

Henry Cavill, Primarch

Well, yes, of course Henry Cavill wants to make a Warhammer 40,000 movie. And wants to give Age Of Sigmar a shot.

Black List 2021

The Black List 2021 (roundup at the A. V. Club) collects the most popular unmade screenplays of the year, the usual cross-section of genres, including the highlighted biopics of scum, but more importantly for our purposes...

Genre stuff summarised at plot hook length.

Experimental musician versus endless maddening sound from space!

Something glimpsed in the back of a video call walking back from a party!

Graffiti tag battle escapes into the real world!

Time loop art theft!

(Also redistributive art theft, yay Les Fantômes! And checking, the thief is actually called the Ghost...)

Assassin versus witches! (Did someone have the same thought I did about the John Wick: Hex game?)

Spec ops team on a recovery mission into the afterlife!

Alien invasion interrupting a bad first date!

Adventure Calendar 2021 13: A Ghost Story For Christmas

Adventure Calendar 2021

13: A Ghost Story For Christmas

A recurring theme.

There are plenty of horror games built for one-shots and plenty of one-shot-able adventures for others, but which fit the right kind of “a ghost story for Christmas” mood?

The M. R. James Gumshoe RPG Casting The Runes deserves a mention here. It takes its name from James’s most well-known and RPG-friendly story, which has a distinct villain and a solution based on the protagonists being active. (See also film versions including Jacque Tourneur’s Night Of The Demon, and the basic setup reappears in the Ring series.)

My first non-review article in an RPG magazine was about the James stories, and how their lack of a general “mythos” made them most suitable for one-shots.

(His time running King’s College Cambridge is also why The Watch House is set there.)

James’s stories are generally thought of as quite genteel, but this is mostly because the children with Lost Hearts and victims of Count Magnus’s face-sucking familiar are only described in passing. Visualise the former on TV or the latter in comics and they play a bit differently.

One option looking for a plot is his essay Stories I Have Tried To Write:

Then there was quite a long one about two undergraduates spending Christmas in a country house that belonged to one of them. An uncle, next heir to the estate, lived near. Plausible and learned Roman priest, living with the uncle, makes himself agreeable to the young men. Dark walks home at night after dining with the uncle. Curious disturbances as they pass through the shrubberies. Strange, shapeless tracks in the snow round the house, observed in the morning. Efforts to lure away the companion and isolate the proprietor and get him to come out after dark. Ultimate defeat and death of the priest, upon whom the Familiar, baulked of another victim, turns.

(I would say lose the specificity of the sketchy priest.)

Nocturne 1.09

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne, the coterie’s best fighter had to be prevented from eating (a) one of the people the group was trying to protect and (b) another PC. The plan still worked... mostly...

Trinity Continuum OpCast

OpCast - Arms Around the Trinity Continuum, hosted by Josh Heath and Scott Cuban. Episode 1 guest, Ian A. A. Watson.

Adventure Calendar 2021 12: The anti-festive horror one-shot

Adventure Calendar 2021

12: The anti-festive horror one-shot

Using Christmas iconography ironically. I’m thinking Black Christmas, Krampus and the like here. Gizmodo reckons there are twice as many horror movies for Christmas as for Halloween.

Dead Of Night has something suitable already. EPOCH has several options, PWYW for charity. (Hello Morgue!)

Straight-up killer Santas are the easiest option, but we can go weirder, right? Maybe not Mari Lwyd weird, but a bit weird.

Snowfall

An unexpected cold front has come out of nowhere, cutting off a small town. And there’s something moving out there. And who made all these snowmen?

And why do they have sharp ice teeth?

Anne Rice

Anne Rice has died, aged 80.

Interview With The Vampire changed the symbol and its meaning as much as Dracula, making the vampire “the outsider in all of us, and the outcast in all of us” as she puts it in the introduction to the film, something we could sympathise with as well as fear in ourselves. Without her there might be no Vampire family of games, as many of its direct influences are her indirect ones.

Adventure Calendar 2021 11: Changeling

Adventure Calendar 2021

11: Changeling: The Lost

Changeling: The Lost runs with the scary side of fairy tales more than Changeling: The Dreaming, though both have the seasons matter.

Borrowing from Sir Terry Pratchett in Hogfather putting the boot into the story of The Little Match Girl...

Matches

One of the Gentry wants a festive story to go just so, and that involves someone suffering and dying, not caring that the story was meant as a parable. Can you make this ending happy?

The Monkees

Thanks to weekend repeats of the series, The Monkees were a big part of my early musical and comedy learning, presented as live-action cartoons not unlike The Goodies to a less actively surreal extent. (I didn’t see Head until decades later.)

The Lord Of The Rings films at 20

The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring premiered in London twenty years ago today, on general release nine days later.

Empire retrospective

Long imagined, we never quite believed we’d see it. And yet see it we did, and then more of it on discs before The Two Towers a year later and Return Of The King after that.

(My brother took our parents and I to see each of them as a shared Christmas present, which meant not having to think of any other ideas for three years, tricksy devil.)

There are various features that fans of the books take issue with, more in the second and third films than in Fellowship, but the wonder of it all swept us along and holds us now. I remember my mother saying “Splendid...” at that panning shot of the hall in Moria.

And as of 2010 I have literally been there and back again.

Adventure Calendar 2021 10: Wraith

Adventure Calendar 2021

10: Wraith: The Oblivion

Many ghost stories connect to Christmas, why not one starring ghosts?

The restless dead of Wraith: The Oblivion and Orpheus, and Geist: The Sin-Eaters, do a lot of rattling chains (the Wraith cover is made up of them with a central lock, while Geist is depicted with keys) and can appear to humans in dreams or in reality, so if they felt so inclined they could give someone the Scrooge treatment.

Marley Was Dead, To Begin With

The Shroud is thinnest at Halloween but can get a tad patchy around Christmas as well, giving the ghosts a chance to communicate with a Fetter or other important person. (And the living who can commune with the dead can lay some groundwork for it.) And what can they tell them? Can they scare a sinner into a better life, or bring back warm memories of better times?

Halo: TV series trailer

Halo trailer, also at the Game Awards. I suppose game relatd trailers at a game show, even an awards show, makes more sense than movie trailers at ta football game.

Halo armour designs and previous live action adverts were among the things I stole from various media for The Stars On Fire. Lack of much familiarity with the source material and liking the toys was a factor, but enough to make me curious.

Other video game news

A Wonder Woman game, a new Space Marine, Alan Wake II, and portal-jumping gaslamp fantasy Nightingale announced at the Game Awards.

Star Trek: Resurgence

Star Trek: Resurgence is a narrative game from Telltale gamebook-y-game veterans, set on a new ship in the post Next Generation era (though with Original Series style logos and Discovery music). The one example decision in the trailer is both very Telltale and very Trek and also rather Mass Effect naturally.

Star Wars Eclipse

Star Wars Eclipse, a branching narrative video game, is reportedly set in the High Republic era. (From a company called Quantic Dream, who seem to have a less than sterling reputation.) From the trailer alone I would have guessed circa Episode I as we see Yoda in the Council chamber, an uncovered 3PO and the Neimoidians and their ships. But the High Republic gives more wiggle room to the story. Also apparently kodo drummers! Always a bonus. And Anomids, why not?

Netflix Marvel look back

Daredevil and Kingpin from the Netflix Marvel series are on their way to the MCU. So I figured time to finish watching the remaining shows in that subset. Having already watched all of Daredevil and Defenders:

Luke Cage season 2 ends on a big sucky cliffhanger. But no ninjas at least.

Iron Fist season 2 gives Colleen a lot more to do and notes the various ways Danny is a bozo in character so this is an improvement generally, though it still put the white guy martial artist superhero in the middle of a Chinatown Triad war story.

Punisher season 2 gives Frank a pretty fun sidekick, across two stories that basically have nothing else to do with each other except they happen around the same time.

Jessica Jones season 3 is my least favourite season of the three by a good long way, featuring a villain type I’m very, very over. It does at least address something that wouldn’t be addressed otherwise from the other final seasons.

Vampire: Auld Sanguine

Auld Sanguine is a free Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition adventure with pregens by Eddy Webb, about not having a very happy New Year.

Adventure Calendar 2021 9: Call Of Cthulhu

Adventure Calendar 2021

9: Call Of Cthulhu

H. P. Lovecraft actually seemed to like Christmas judging by his verse on the subject, but there’s a lot of ironically Christmassy Mythos stuff out there, including two albums of warped carols by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society which get regular play at Black Lion Games around the festive season, as well as seasonal adventures like this new one from Allison Cybe.

The classic 1920s setting allows for some familiar traditions and some that have fallen by the wayside, and plenty of opportunities to get stranded in the snow with no GPS on your phone to get help.

On On They Send, On Without End

With the Miskatonic students mostly home for the holidays, Arkham settles in for a quiet Christmas season. But who is ringing the old church bells at one in the morning...?

Adventure Calendar 2021 8: Chronicles Of Darkness

Adventure Calendar 2021

8: Chronicles Of Darkness

Second week, spooky week.

A Christmas Carol is a seasonal story about as big as the nativity, and the tradition of ghost stories championed by M. R. James and the BBC adapting his work goes back at least as far as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Having already done Buffy where the supernatural is there for thumping, and Vampire where the PCs are the spooky things themselves although my most notable example involved outside supernatural issues, something more investigative.

Starting with Chronicles Of Darkness as it connects to various gamelines and supernatural types but the toolkit approach means that players shouldn’t have strong expectations of what’s behind the door. This would also work with DIY-mythos games like Fear Itself or Dead Of Night. World Of Darkness could also work, particularly with mortal groups like Hunters Hunted or Ghost Hunters, but players familiar with the other game lines might be expecting something Vampire-specific or Wraithlike.

So no God Machine this time. Or is there?

Do Not Open

The characters are all connected to a specific building (student housing, university campus, business) which will be totally or largely closed for the holiday season, and which they’re staying at (maybe vacationing in a Cabin In The Woods) or coming in to check on the place, switch the lights on and off, and so on.

So they’re alone in a normally busy location.

But it turns out they’re not alone.

Being snowed in optional. Being isolated some way definitely recommended.

Hawkeye: Partners, Am I Right?

Hawkeye

1.04: Partners, Am I Right?

And already at the end of the second act sad bit.

Loved Eleanor being so diplomatically protective, the party, Clint coming clean...

What We Do In The Shadows 3.06

I find the understatement of this Radio Times review of our heroes’ actions in What We Do In The Shadows 3.06 quite charming.

Pearl Harbour

The attack on Pearl Harbour happened 80 years ago today.

Adventure Calendar 2021 007: Spies

Adventure Calendar 2021

007: Spies

A bonus for the end of the first week.

With the tradition of big movies showing on TV at Christmas, there’s a lot of Bond in the mix.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the only Bond film set at Christmas and the time is basically used for a skiing holiday with world conquest side plot, but we see quite a bit of winter in the films from then on, right up to No Time To Die starting at the edge of a frozen lake.

My Trinity Continuum suggestions mostly apply here, ski and snowmobile chases and all. But going with a somewhat topical adventure theme...

I Saw Three Gunships Come Swooping In

Almost all the goods for the festive season in the UK arrive on massive container ships. Some years, just one - in 2006 it was the maiden voyage of the biggest ship in the world, “quarter of a mile long, 200ft-high (61 metre) behemoth, that is as wide as a motorway and is powered by the largest diesel engine ever built”...

How do you stop it if it gets hijacked and aimed at our busiest port?

(In reality several ships arrive in September or October most years, but the dramatic irony of the lights already being up so put it around mid to late November for Black Friday overstock.)

Adventure Calendar 2021 7: Star Trek

Adventure Calendar 2021

7: Star Trek

Star Trek still has a lot of familiar traditions in the 23rd and 24th centuries. Memory Alpha notes references to Christmas throughout the timeline. Despite being a couple of centuries further forward than Trinity Continuum: Aeon, Generations has a very Victorian Christmas as Picard’s dream life, which seems like a nod to Sir Patrick Stewart’s love for A Christmas Carol as much as anything.

And it also has stars to follow, and an occasional tendency to reveal mythological figures as existing in some form or another, though the series pitch episode about meeting a Jesus figure before his crucifixion never made it to film.

But maybe dip into the general Nativity rather than the specifics...

No Room At The Inn

Refugees from a planetary occupation send a distress call. Can Starfleet send aid? Miraculous pregnancy optional.

Change one thing in your plot

Sometimes you can take a basic plot hook and change one thing to freshen it up by thinking through how that affects it. For example, the seventy million dollar stolen antiquities seizure is a very basic Relics, Trinity or Leverage plot hook made different by being absurdly huge. Thanks to Conrad Hubbard for the link.

Fear No Evil

Fear No Evil is a teenage Antichrist movie from 1981 that I had never heard of until Horror Queers devoted their latest episode to it -

- and What The Hell that soundtrack - The Ramones, The Boomtown Rats, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and the Sex Pistols’ “I am an Antichrist, and I am an anarchist!” being literalised and played over the trailer.

Life can be so surprising.

Being (kind of) on the side of the Antichrist is an interesting stance. Damien: Omen II considered it for like one scene a few years earlier in 1978, before Good Omens ran amok with the idea. And on TV Reaper had several options on top of its “crappy first job metaphor Buffy with slacker guys doing Brimstone” setup.

An orchestra RPG and someone wants to play a barbarian

Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 for brass, woodwind, strings, and warhammer.

With thanks to mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton on Twitter.

Adventure Calendar 2021 6: Star Wars

Adventure Calendar 2021

6: Star Wars

Star Wars doesn’t have Christmas, but like many fictional settings it has festivals that look a bit like it, Life Day first appeared in The Star Wars Holiday Special but hasn’t been thrown out despite this, being referenced in The Mandalorian, and in The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special it happens to look a lot like Christmas. Life Day in the original Special is a decidedly nebulous mystical thing which is probably something to do with the Force, but let’s not poke at that. Star Wars already has a miraculous birth in the desert, robed Magi, and plenty of stars to follow.

The basics of gathering with family stay the same, which in this setting can involve interstellar travel and blockade running in most eras. So follow the “trying to get home” model used in Han and Chewie’s little adventure and exemplified in Planes, Trains And Automobiles.

I’ll Be Home

Even in the depths of the war against the Empire, Rebels celebrate these small, familiar traditions to keep up morale. And the team is charged with getting a diplomat to an Outer Rim planet to lead Life Day celebrations and show that Imperial propaganda about her isn’t true. But it’s not going to be an easy journey. The diplomat’s ship has drive problems, a smuggler they know isn’t answering their calls, they might have to get a commercial flight, those are all booked up...

It’s a Life Day miracle!

Nocturne 1.08

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne, party planning with potential life or death repercussions. And some vampires still politicking about the guest list.

Adventure Calendar 2021 5: Doctor Who

Adventure Calendar 2021

5: Doctor Who

With its history of Christmas specials since 2005, I’ve talked about Doctor Who and Christmas before quite a bit, but here we are. (The Christmas truce is an obvious idea so I’m not surprised the show actually did it later.)

The show’s annual special shifted to New Year’s Day with the current run, which is apt for a show about time travel and also meant that the statement of no classic monsters in 2018 was technically accurate by a few hours, but it’s really a very Christmassy kind of show.

Secret Santa

One of the travellers gets back to modern Earth just in time for her flat’s Christmas party, everybody’s glad to see them and rather curious about the strange person she’s brought along. And the Doctor realises that one of the gifts is for them. But how, from whom, and is it safe to open with human beings in the same room/building/mile/hemisphere/universe?

Across The Spider-Verse Part 1

First teaser scenes for Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse Part 1. Part 1, you say...

Superman & Lois

Superman & Lois started this evening on BBC One. (A. V. Club pilot review) It’s a largely separate aside to the Arrowverse (as far as I can tell) which has been on Sky and latterly free channels since it started. And a BBC One Saturday evening airing for a US TV series is unusual anyway these days.

The title gives less equal billing than Lois & Clark did, but so far at least Lois (Bitsie Tulloch) gets about as much to do as Clark (Tyler Hoechilin) apart from when he goes off to save the world, fairly often.

Set largely in Smallville due to two unrelated reasons that happen within a minute of each other when one would have done, there’s a lot of golden hour photography like the series set there started with. (But we get Superman suited up in the first couple of minutes.)

The mysterious masked villain is a very Arrowverse move.

And it’s a sequel of sorts to where the usually are, as Lois and Clark are married and have two teenage sons. Nudging them almost twenty years up from their regular happily ever after opens up some different possibilities. (Not sure if either of these sons is the new Superman from the comics.)

Adventure Calendar 2021 4: Aeon

Adventure Calendar 2021

4: Trinity Continuum: Aeon

And what will the holidays be like in a hundred years? Hard to tell really, but Trinity Continuum: Aeon is close enough that some traditions could be familiar.

Following Yonder Star

A distant world, now back in contact after the first exploration faltered, allowing some home comforts after long harsh conditions, allowing a celebration around midwinter. If your scouting team can get through!

Adventure Calendar 2021 3: Trinity Continuum

Adventure Calendar 2021

3: Trinity Continuum

And 3 is Trinity.

The Trinity Continuum is an action drama setting so it has a similar relationship to Christmas as action movies and series. The PCs may get the holiday season off, but they may not however much they try as the festive season becomes either a relevant setting or an ironic backdrop for a session.

So you could certainly do something like the team relaxing at HQ and sharing gifts (if Thunderbirds can do it, so can you) or a light-hearted low-stakes festive adventure (see the Leverage holiday episodes) you could also have interrupted parties, chases on skis or snowmobiles and fighting with a set of antlers as an improvised blocking weapon. Die Hard is the obvious template, most Shane Black films have some of this, and see Hawkeye for a currently ongoing example. Explosions are kind of like hearth fires, right?

And if you crank up the Weird Level that Flux events allow, Max Mercer’s unreliable time travel could let him be the spirit taking the PCs through Christmas in every game era.

All Is Calm, All Is Bright

A Neptune Foundation team needs to skip their Christmas break and fly in to save a city after a power plant goes critical in the depths of winter. And someone’s out to stop them!

Adventure Calendar 2021 2: Vampire

Adventure Calendar 2021

2: Vampire: The Masquerade

I’ve written a book for this, which I swear I will put on the Storytellers Vault one of these years.

And at the table I’ve infamously done this with one of the PCs crossing paths with an elder who’s out hunting a pregnant woman as his “Christmas dinner” (also the session where the Malkavian PC saw an angel in human form trying to help at a shelter and since nobody else noticed wrote it off as a hallucination) and less harshly last year the players had their PCs take a night off to try and cheer up the newly Embraced Nosferatu spending her first holiday season as a vampire without her loved ones.

So there’s room for a variety of stories around Christmas for vampires, for Masquerade or Requiem.

The northern hemisphere will have the longest night of the year four days earlier, and with connections to nightclubs we have the big New Year’s Eve parties as well.

And as the big moment for Christianity, which also places great importance on family, it can be a hard time for the lonely Damned.

Midnight Mass

The coterie see an elder vampire going into the city’s cathedral for the midnight service. Is he hunting, meeting someone... or praying?

Trinity Continuum: Assassins

Trinity Continuum: Assassins comes to pre-order with chapter previews, through DriveThruRPG as the Anima Kickstarter continues.

Adventure Calendar 2021 1: Buffy

December! Time once more for my gift to you of festive adventure ideas. Having done this two years running (2019, 2020) I’ve gone through most of the obvious ideas for seasonal plot hooks, and some pretty odd ones as well. So this year, maybe... hooks for specific games and settings.

1: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Well, obviously.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a single perfect Christmas special in season 3’s Amends, a ghost story full of heartbreak and a seasonal miracle, so going with something else entirely. I’ve done some “the PCs have a relatively quiet holiday” episodes of The Watch House near the end of actual term, as well as a killer snowman short story. And the Buffyverse can easily fit rescuing Santa from Krampus, Ethan Rayne creating a toy craze as seen in the comics, talking animals, or a ton of other Funny Magic Episode ideas. And Angel season three was about the birth of a Miracle Child. So we have options...

Deck The Halls

The holidays are on their way and the gang aren’t really feeling it. One of them has been dumped and the gift they already got the dumper is sitting on top of their pile of unwrapped presents.

And then they stop a gang of goblins attacking a man in green, who says they have to fetch a sprig of holly from a tree in the depths of the forest or the sun won’t rise. Because, sure, okay?

So we have a weird forest, a mysterious elf guy, goblins, emotional fallout, and an optional snowball fight.

Hawkeye: Echoes

Hawkeye

1.03: Echoes

An introduction that makes Maya highly sympathetic and introduces Zahn McClarnon as her father.

December

This year’s version of All I Want For Christmas Is You is bouncy pop punk from Charly Bliss.

I could see this working at the Bronze, not least because I first heard them with a song where the video is an homage to Doublemeat Palace.