Thursday, 31 March 2022

A GM and a plotter

Greg Stolze listened to a lot of spooky mystery story podcasts and came up with an idea to game them by having a player in the role of the exposition-dropping researcher who creates mystery elements separate from the GM, which the GM can then include or exclude or adjust to fit during or between sessions.

It’s a variant of co-GMing, which of course requires trust. I’ve done a little bit of this here and there with players in “show lead” roles who are usually GMs for other games too so can throw in extra exposition and possible plot points, but never formalised it or done it to this extent.

Various players did a lot of Plotting And Scheming in The Watch House but not generally at the table, though it would be a good fit for Watchers in a classic Buffy game. Time Lord players in Doctor Who games have done some of it too.

Games like Remember Tomorrow have everybody introducing factions and other setting elements with most available for use by all at the table, but here it’s just one player doing that.

Morbius addendum

The screenwriters of Morbius previously did Dracula Untold. Which is some hefty typecasting but good for them.
Have a good Transgender Day of Visibility.

Channel 5 at 5x5

Channel 5 launched 25 years ago tonight. Home to Hercules and Xena, the CSIs and NCISes, and some homegrown shows apparently.

And now the weather

Snow, because why not I guess.

A very merry International Pencil Day!

Moon Knight 1.01

Marvel’s Moon Knight
1.01: The Goldfish Problem

Moon Knight isn’t going for WandaVision levels of “Whaaat?” although it could have, but that’s okay. With an unfamiliar character it’s probably for the best to start a little lower on the Weird Level.

Thankfully the accent isn’t as bad as it sounded in the trailers.

In my experience people who work in galleries and museums are generally nicer than Donna.

Monday, 28 March 2022

The Dark Universe Bride Of Frankenstein

Writer David Koepp discusses the unmade DARK UNIVERSE film of The Bride Of Frankenstein, which was due three years ago, and it sounds pretty fun. But I thought The Mummy was pretty fun in places too, so... and the division between origin and awakening sounds a bit like it.

Galaxy's Greatest - 2000 A.D. at 45

The online convention for 2000 A.D.’s 45th anniversary is now all up on Youtube. Some great insights across the board, and in particular note the games panel and Dread: Dredd AP.

Sunday, 27 March 2022

Nocturne 1.20

Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne
1.20

Making sure that the mystical NPCs can’t solve everything also let me have them not get on. The PCs will have to do some of the looking. And are they alone in that?

Oscars 2022

As I mostly use the Oscars as title lists for plot hooks, with a few ideas related to the event itself, here we are again. (Not what the ceremony will be remembered for this year, but never mind.)

Best Picture titles, in both referencing the plot and trying to ignore what I actually know about the names style:

Belfast
The title very much suggests the memoir, doesn’t it?
But the city has history going back millennia, including the time Robert the Bruce sent his brother Edward to attack English forces in Ireland and he tried to take the crown.

CODA
Growing up in an unusual subculture.
Or a winding-down session, maybe dealing with a problem called up by the end of the previous adventure. (Also a sisterhood of assassins in WildStorm Comics.)

Don’t Look Up
Getting people in authority to listen.
A horror plot about a stellar conjunction? Possibly blinding people like Day Of The Triffids. As well as metaphorically blinding them to a threat.

Drive My Car
A big conflicted interpersonal drama.
An escort mission, across a great distance, possibly involving a very fancy car and/or a Beatles song.

Dune
Okay, this one has its own RPGs.
But putting that to one side, dune buggy chase!

King Richard
A sports drama with family conflict.
A fair historical look at Richard the Lionheart and the various issues he raised.

Licorice Pizza
The title means a vinyl record, so a hymn to record stores and indie music.
But it sounds like a really gross food experiment in a lighthearted kids’ adventure story.

Nightmare Alley
The PCs as part of a travelling fair, with or without real powers presented as trickery.
A slice of life Film Noir about one night in a bad part of town, starting with a murder and going downhill from there.

The Power Of The Dog
A moody Western.
Dogboy! With the hearing and smell of a dog!

West Side Story
Having seen both films of this, hmm. Romeo and Juliet converted to your current milieu.
An urban travelogue, getting through unfamiliar territory in One Crazy Night.

Saturday, 26 March 2022

Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser as a game

Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser is, as well as a two-day resort, a kind of game. LARP-adjacent but personal rather than using the large player base.

Taylor Hawkins

Taylor Hawkins, best known as the drummer for Foo Fighters, has died aged 50. I last saw him playing himself in Studio 666.

Friday, 25 March 2022

Tolkien Reading Day

To celebrate Tolkien Reading Day, Andy Serkis reading a certain section from Lord Of The Rings.

Brodie the Polar Bear

The Highland Wildlife Park’s newborn polar bear has now been named Brodie, meaning second son.

Earth Hour, this time tomorrow

Earth Hour to turn off the lights, the 16th annual event.

Time Team

Time Team the archaeology documentary returns online with new digs shared on YouTube after Patreon fundraising.

Thanks to Belor on RPGnet for the news.

The classic Channel 4 version ran from 1994 to 2014 and encouraged this history nerd in many ways, as well as being comfort repeat viewing more recently. Hence the in-character appearance when we sent up the Doctor Who classic The Daemons in The Watch House season seven.

Nowadays Channel 4 has the similar The Great British Dig though it doesn’t get the Sunday teatime slot despite being similar family-friendly and educational.

Thursday, 24 March 2022

Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound Humble Bundle

Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound Humble Bundle with a whole lot of PDFs, supporting Children’s Health Ireland, including a tier to get the starter set and intro adventure miniseries for 76p.

Disney+ 2022

Today is also the second anniversary of Disney+ launching in the UK. Of course it would have been nice to get Moon Knight a week early to celebrate. Especially with Oscar Isaac ruling the press junket.

March 24th

Me and mine have stayed safe so far.

Wednesday, 23 March 2022

RollVsEvil

RollVsEvil

Chris and Rita Birch, co-founders of Modiphius have launched a non-for-profit called RollvsEvil which aims to bring the tabletop gaming community together to fight real world evils.
Organising and arranging donation-matching for gamers putting money in for good causes. Starting with an event on Saturday, including a live stream AP.

Journeys Through The Radiant Citadel

Journeys Through The Radiant Citadel is the next adventure book for Dungeons & Dragons, coming in June, introducing a vibrant city across realities, kind of like a much nicer Sigil, created by a diverse team of POC writers and artists. Gizmodo takes a deep look with some of the project leaders, revealing hooks for three of the thirteen main adventures and talking about their real-world inspirations. D&D video interview with project co-developers Ajit George and Wes Schneider.

March 23rd

Today marks two years since the announcement of lockdown, tomorrow two years since the start. It hasn’t been easy. Sharing entertainment and events like online conventions have helped a lot.

Gaming wise I’ve gotten used to running games by video call, but not really comfortable with it, hence not GMing at online cons which makes me feel like I’m letting the side down but there’s only so much I can do.

Everything I’ve run has a contemporary setting, but I decided early on not to address current conditions too closely, to keep the escapism escapist. I hope I’ve helped. Having friendly faces on this screen for a few hours a week has definitely helped me.

Tuesday, 22 March 2022

Historical fantasy dialogue thought

The heroes trudge through the rain to the standing stone to meet the wise woman, and find her in a bad mood.

“This new god has palaces, and they’re still trying to figure out how to seed crops with faerie shit.”

“You’ve read their book?”
“I wouldn’t be much of a wise woman if I couldn’t read, would I?”

Monday, 21 March 2022

Saturnalia Vampire LARP

Saturnalia at VampireLarp dot com. Quite impressed by getting that domain name. :D

A big out-in-the-city Nordic-style Vampire: The Masquerade LARP in New Orleans in November, by the main designer of World Of Darkness Berlin’s similar game Enlightenment In Blood and promoting Mind’s Eye Theatre’s Nordic style book War Of Ages.

And while a lot, the biggest ticket is still 1/5 the price of a room for two days at that Star Wars hotel.

Reginald The Vampire

Jacob Batalon, Ned in the MCU, to star in the title role in Reginald The Vampire, a horror comedy series based on a series of novels I’d never heard of.
Imagine a world populated by beautiful, fit and vain vampires. Reginald tumbles headlong into it as an unlikely hero who will have to navigate every kind of obstacle–the girl he loves but can’t be with, a bully manager at work and the vampire chieftain who wants him dead. Fortunately, Reginald discovers he has a few unrecognized powers of his own. A new show with a lot of heart and just enough blood, Reginald the Vampire proves the undead life is just as complicated as life itself.
Sounds like it could be fun.

Rarely seen Tolkien paintings

An update to the Tolkien estate site, shared by Smithsonian. News thanks to Conrad.

Sunday, 20 March 2022

Kiwi RPG

Kiwi RPG:

KiwiRPG Week Is Coming! From Sunday 1 to Sunday 8 May 2022 we will be celebrating and showcasing Tabletop Role-Playing Games design and play from Aotearoa New Zealand.

News via Morgue, who is involved and adminning.

Compartmentalise!

I need to get back to running Buffy. My Vampire: The Masquerade NPCs are starting to get arch and my current plot features an angry ghost.

Nocturne 1.19

Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne
1.19

After a night of inter-coterie emotional discomfort, some coming down and some bonding, and some preparing, and a little plot weaving to explain why the NPC grownups haven’t dealt with the threat.

Spring

Today is the spring equinox. Next week is the start of British Summer Time. (Which lasts for seven months, unlike summer.) For the next six months or so we have more day than night. To celebrate I only two thirds filled my hot weater bottle.

If your setting has seasons (climate rather than TV) how do characters mark them?

Saturday, 19 March 2022

Friday, 18 March 2022

Darth Maul dies well, and often

Darth Maul was cut from Obi-wan Kenobi, having been established as not so dead in Solo after dying in The Phantom Menace, coming back in The Clone Wars, and dying again, really well, five years ago today in Rebels. (Solo is set earlier, and I know people who didn’t follow the animated series and were puzzled by his not-dead-ness.) Would he have gotten a third good death scene?

D&D film and Kate Beaton series news

The D&D movie sounds like a good tone mix and Hark! A Vagrant creator Kate Beaton has a kid-friendly animated series about a young adventurer and her sidekick Pinecone & Pony!

Comic Relief 2022

Red Nose Day for Comic Relief is tonight, I have a red nose adding to the collection, and the one-off event raffles include Glastonbury, an electric vintage Beetle, and a two-day D&D break on a remote island.

Edit: best bit, lack of bits. The opera challenge is not up yet. Could have done without the reminder of JoKeR. But I appreciate the Goes Wrong bit going wrong.

Thursday, 17 March 2022

St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick’s Day if applicable!


I’ve never used Ireland as a setting, having never been there myself (though an Irish con is on my wishlist) and having had a number of local players so it seems a bit presumptuous. Of course I can point to fiction from Irish creators, with Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Carmilla for starters.

Wednesday, 16 March 2022

The Defenders

The former Netflix Marvel shows are now on Disney+ here, along with Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the US though it has been here for quite a while. Daredevil and Jessica Jones get banners on the front page.

It always makes me curious about the unmade 2010s Buffy film reboot as its writer Whit Anderson wrote for and was story editor on Daredevil S2 with showrunner and Buffy series writing veteran Doug Petrie.

Tuesday, 15 March 2022

Cavaliers Of Mars sale

Cavaliers Of Mars sale, 90% off PDFs and 50% off books from IPR and Studio 2. Get it. Do. Bias note: playtester.

Into Every Generation A Slayer Is Born

Author Evan Ross Katz talks about his new book, a deep dive into the making and legacy of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with interviews before and after recent revelations.

Ms. Marvel teaser

Ms. Marvel starts June 8th on Disney+ and looks like a whole lot of fun.

The Cellar

The Cellar is an adaptation and expansion of director Brendan Muldowney’s fantastic 2004 short The Ten Steps. I’m not sure if that will work as The Ten Steps was a wonderfully macabre little thing, but I have to see.

Monday, 14 March 2022

Doctors Without Borders bundles

Four big charity bundles at DriveThruRPG where all proceeds benefit Doctors Without Borders helping in Ukraine.

Two years on

Take care.

Looking back at those first few weeks as lockdown went from advice to requirement, I am moved to remember all the generosity of people sharing free books and games, posting art and music and engaging with others, ScaledCon being organised online in a couple of weeks, and more.

Pi Day

A pun getting its own day.

Sunday, 13 March 2022

The Greatest Gamer and sharing player reactions

A different way to feel like the star of Queen’s Gambit, an RPG played over a boardgame, by Kieron Gillen. One of you is the world’s greatest player of the game you’re playing and everybody else is assigned different ways to be defeated.

Designer notes include a reference to Cat talking about players helping each other feel like your fictional role, a good point to reinforce.

Evil Dead II at 35

Well, yes, I watched Evil Dead II too young. It may have affected me.

Warhammer 40,000 at 35

Warhammer 40,000 was announced in 1987, and apparently that shares an anniversary with Evil Dead II. Both have d(a)emons and chainsaws. It was that kind of day.

Winter Paralympics 2022

All the best to those going home from the Paralympics, and to Ukraine as some of them cannot.

Saturday, 12 March 2022

I can has PBP?

I have pinged RPGnet Play By Post about wanting to play Buffy or something like it, two weeks ahead of the second anniversary of Sounds Like Hell starting.

Not sure what I’d play. Some kind of Hero, maybe a Slayer, or a classic White Hat. Obviously I have ideas lying around. Mostly I want to be snarky and fight monsters.

I was the accidental lead Slayer in a post-Chosen game as the first PBP I played starting soon after the subforum opened. I had a doggy. Plots included being turned to kids, flung back in time, and dealing with multiple claimants on the Watchers’ Council succession. This might be the one where Ethan Rayne turned up as a faux Watcher for a rival Slayer at one point, which was a great hook.

They Came From The West End Of Princes Street!

I have now delivered the second copy of They Came From Beyond The Grave! to my Twins Of Evil shipping partner Phil, who has run They Came From Beneath The Sea! for actual people. Cue photos posing with the book in front of Gothic architecture.

Friday, 11 March 2022

Being the second thing in a setting

Tonight sees the TV premiere of Sister Boniface Mysteries, a spinoff from loosely-Chesterton-based super-cosy mystery series Father Brown. Comparing the two leads to some general thoughts on being the second or subsequent thing in an established setting. What do you keep, and what do you change?

Father Brown often uses the classic amateur sleuth setup of discovering a murder while doing something else. Sister B. is on secondment to the local police as a forensic advisor, so gets called in. It follows that the local police don’t always complain about her turning up and interfering unlike with the parent show. The disapproving authority figure roles go to the Mother Superior and a disapproving landlady. It rings a few more changes with the idyllic little town having the rather more on-the-nose name Great Slaughter, one of its more playing-with-convention notes like Sister B. imagining crimes in the style of silent movies.

Licenced settings often work by making the game an imagined spinoff. Players brought in by the licence generally want it to keep close for that fan fun, so what kind of changes do you ring?

Inevitable The Watch House talk!

It wasn’t the most straight to Buffy The Vampire Slayer pitch I had when starting, but it goes for the growing up stories in a college setting and its metaphorical bit is about what to do with expectations placed upon you by family and other circumstances. It also had the example of Angel as a different setup in the same universe, and I knocked it back a few years from the then present to avoid a major status quo change at the end of Buffy... which I then had to deal with when the game ran for seven seasons as well. One major imagined-third-series pointer was to avoid some of the classic genre staples that one or both of the TV series had done, while gleefully raiding supers and other sources for ones they missed.

They Came From - Double Feature!

They Came From the Cyclops’s Cave and They Came From [CLASSIFIED]! - fantasy and superspies rulebooks for the tropier side of Storypath, now on Kickstarter.

Turning Red

Co-writer (with Julia Cho) and director Domee Shi’s first feature, from Pixar, Turning Red premieres on Disney+ and a very limited cinema run today. (A.V. Club article)

It’s the second Pixar film directed by a woman after Brave by Brenda Chapman until she was replaced by Mark Andrews. They both also focus on adolescent mother-daughter relationships - and people turning into bears. So that’s kind of niche. although Turning Red is set in 2002 Toronto rather than Vaguely Medieval Scotland.

(The setting didn’t make me feel super old. The Twilight joke is a few years early, but hey.)

It’s funny and sweet with a bit of Pixar heartache, and the power of friendship given as much room as family, and it rings some changes on the Pixar formula. I’d say it’s totally kid-friendly like most Pixar films, unless you plan to avoid the talk about periods for a while.

There are some anime and comic stylings (extreme closeup!) mixed in with the typically confident Pixar style, and maybe I’m projecting but I see some Aardman particularly in Mei’s wide mouth and particularly chunky teeth, due to their being 3D unlike the Ghibli influences. Meanwhile 4*Town look like Animoji avatars in their round-faced doe-eyed perfection.


Toronto resident MightyGodKing notes that while universal, the specifics of the boy band plot may also have their roots in city history with the Backstreet Boys’ star-making 1990s MuchMusic concert. Billie Eilish and FINNEAS wrote the songs making 4*Town a more affectionate takeoff of the style than the likes of DuJour in Josie And The Pussycats, while Ludwig Göransson provides the score.

Closest resemblance I can think of is the original Teen Wolf, but a lot less slapdash.

And the urban fantasy tag for the origin, ancient magic proving to be an... inconvenience.

The making-of feature Embrace The Panda adds a lot too.

Two years since the before times

Tonight marks two years since my last face-to-face game before lockdown, and my last burrito from my favourite eating place Illegal Jack’s.

I’ve had some sessions back recently, though not with the same people although I have been in a room with some of them at least.

And I still have a loyalty card in my wallet though the restaurant became something else over a year ago, which adding insult to injury has never even opened.

While I have a lot of the playlist in my music folder here, the first song I think of is The Wombats, Let’s Dance To Joy Division.

Thursday, 10 March 2022

Buffy The Vampire Slayer at 25 plot hooks

Buffy The Vampire Slayer is very easy to come up with plot hooks for, and has been a recurring feature in the “plot hooks based on this list of random-ish titles” idea for RPG plots that started with song titles.

So to be recursive, there are twenty-four songs in the US and UK releases of the Radio Sunnydale soundtrack album. Close enough, though it includes two versions of the Buffy theme, making it twenty-two. Which is the number of a full season, but I want three more.

So to boost up, Four Star Mary provided songs for Oz’s band Dingoes Ate My Baby, with their three song set from Dead Man’s Party.


The Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You
Nikka Costa - Everybody Got Their Something
Christophe Beck - Dead Guys With Bombs
Devics - Key
Lunatic Calm - Sound Of the Revolution
Dashboard Prophets - Ballad For Dead Friends
Angie Hart - Blue
Aimee Mann - Pavlov’s Bell
Alison Krauss - That Kind Of Love
Aberdeen - Sink Or Float
Patty Medina - Still Life
Laika - Black Cat Bone
Man of the Year - Just as Nice
Melanie Doane - I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You
Fonda - The Sun Keeps Shining On Me
Halo Friendlies - Run Away
Emiliana Torrini - Summerbreeze
Cibo Matto - Sugar Water
Robert Duncan - The Final Fight

Joey Ramone - Stop Thinking About It
Blur - There’s No Other Way
Sarah McLachlan - Prayer Of Saint Francis

Four Star Mary - Never Mind
Four Star Mary - Pain
Four Star Mary - Sway

Putting the US and Four Star Mary additions after three UK tracks with one bump to put The Final Fight at the end.

Let’s assume a classic Slayer and Scoobies setup...

Buffy The Vampire Slayer at 25 in RPGs

Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a natural fit for RPGs.


Demo at the BBC Cult TV page, which shows most of the system including most of the Drama Points

Urban fantasy plainclothes supers in a world where a whole lot of weird things can happen.

There have been modern-ish monster and monster hunting games before and since and the Buffyverse is a nice big kitchen sink. I often come up with absurd episode hooks on the way to sessions and the setting can take them.

Musical! Silent movie! Turn a hero into a puppet - twice!

And the genre savvy snark you find at gaming tables is part of the show and a natural to bring in character!

See my Buffy Season series like this one and this one and my enormous number of random-title-list plot hook threads.


Indeed, I started trying to cobble together a Buffy game before the licence was announced.

And we were lucky enough to get a good official system for it. Cinematic Unisystem is pretty simple, and the addition of Drama Points makes the balancing of Heroes and White Hats kind of viable and fun.

I quibble with things like granular Life Points and the single D10 (the Vortex system for Doctor Who learned a lot from CU and has 2D6) and I’ve previously house ruled Sorcery as it replicates Willow’s rise from first spell to extinction-level event in four seasons in a game-breaky way, but I could and do run it RAW.

Some of my Buffy love is naturally bolstered by The Watch House, the biggest game I’ve ever run and my favourite, but that started with my existing enthusiasm to run a Buffy game and most of the players’ keenness to run with it.


I made friends through the series, as well as through Buffy in general and in gaming.

And thanks to Steve D for letting me steal his Watchers at university series hook!

I’ve run quite a few Buffy games since, and would cheerfully do so again.

I made the Urban Fantasy category at the Nationals happen so I could run it there.

I even got to play it for a few weeks once! As well in play-by-posts going back to their launch on RPG.net, and I’m running one there now.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer at 25

Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the series, premiered in the USA twenty-five years ago tonight.

It started for me with the BBC Two premiere, December 30th 1998, having been alerted that this show was better than expected by genre magazines. So it’s been with me half my life.

I talk about it quite a lot. Like so on RPGnet.

The TV logo caught up with the merchandising after season two.

It surprised a lot of people by being funny, dramatic, exciting, surprising and moving - often in the same scene.

I love this show.

Ian from SlayerFest 98 has a retrospective on the retrospective at GQ, talking about what it means to him and how it belongs to the world and not just its creator.

Going to tune into the Buffering The Vampire Slayer watch party tomorrow. Sadly not actually at Torrance High!


“So that’s everything, huh? No weapons, no friends... No hope. Take all that away, and what’s left?”
“Me.”

I rewatch the series on the regular and specific episodes when they line up with dates or events - I have three options for Halloween but there are also birthdays, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and any time I get a cold. And when I need a laugh, or a good cry, or comfort, or strength.

Rewatches at the A. V. Club, Tor dot com, and Morgue for the high school years.

Some other elements haven’t aged well (the Roma magic thing for one) but I think in the main it holds up.

Having been running on E4 and 4Music nightly for about two years, the whole show and Angel are all on Disney+ now.

And stuff keeps coming out. There was a spinoff novel starting a series in January and another on the way, and the alternate-universe comics from Boom! Studios has an anniversary special and launched a spinoff post-apocalypse miniseries yesterday.

And in the gaming realm there are official miniatures for Buffy, Angel, Willow and Spike with the Unmatched minis duelling game, Jasco have a board game and expansion on shelves now, and the published Buffy and Angel RPG books are still available in PDFs (demo) - and a Bundle Of Holding is currently running for the anniversary.

Not much word on the planned reboot in a while. But one never knows.

A comics page I did, oh, a while ago. 15 years is a while. right?

This story saved my world a lot.

And of course I got very into Buffy RPGs...

Wednesday, 9 March 2022

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Bundle Of Holding

Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel RPG PDFs at Bundle Of Holding.

From now till the 26th, celebrating the show’s 25th anniversary tomorrow.

10% of payment goes to Direct Relief helping care workers.

Thanks to Dave Chapman and TWHer Jamie for the alerts.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds teaser trailer and news at Tor. Anson Mount as Captain Pike, Ethan Peck as Spock and Rebecca Romijn as Number One were a highlight of Discovery season two, so I will happily take more. (As and when it shows here.)

Obi-Wan Kenobi

Obi-Wan Kenobi teaser trailer, news at Star Wars dot com, with some familiar music motifs and some Inquisitors as seen in Star Wars Rebels.

Endurance

Scientists have found and filmed one of the greatest ever undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank.


Thanks to Tim Knight for the news.


Tuesday, 8 March 2022

Nebula Award finalists

Nebula Award finalists, including tabletop RPGs in the Game Writing category.

Monday, 7 March 2022

Gregor Hutton and Morgan Davie on a|State

Squaring The Circle, Gregor and Morgue on the new edition of a|State at Conpulsion Lite, April 9th.

The Batman

Just in time for the 100th anniversary of Nosferatu, The Batman is fairly low on Expressionist styling compared to the Burton movies but there’s still a bit here and there.

Mostly low-key very Se7en mystery in gloomy buildings, but then Big Superhero Movie ending, which didn’t really work but was at least a different step.

(The Zodiac killer was cited as an influence on the unassuming cypher-loving villain - and of course David Fincher made Zodiac after Se7en.)

Really liked Michael Giacchino’s bom-bom-BOM-bom motif, which thanks to the late release I knew from trailers, as well as the Elfman callback Catwoman motif.

Nirvana’s Something In The Way is deployed not once but twice. DARKNESS! NO PARENTS! is not.

Edinburgher joke about Glasgow being a nightmarish urban hellscape here.

Colin Farrell’s makeup worked, though the scar across his cheek to conceal the fake jaw was a giveaway.

The Iceberg Lounge as a thumping techno club (with a jazzy mob hangout VIP area) seemed a bit off for Penguin though.

TWH connection: TNW star Rupert Penry-Jones as the Mayor. Don’t get attached.

One F-bomb. Not from a main character.


Not an origin! But an origin of a bit.

Sunday, 6 March 2022

Nocturne 1.18

Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne
1.18

“How was tonight’s Vampire game?”
“Well...”

On please, don’t ask me how I’ve been, don’t make me play pretend
Paramore, Fake Happy

Saturday, 5 March 2022

What is Jumanji's motivation?

Jumanji, the game, which is happy to shift from board game to video game as needed, seems like it wants players to Learn A Valuable Lesson. But it also seems like it’s happy to let some players sit and wait for twenty years to do so. And it also definitely seems like it’s not unwilling to kill them. Though that may just be a carefully tuned difficulty level.

So far as I know, none of the media have addressed where this cursed thing comes from.

Friday, 4 March 2022

Cavaliers Of Mars Pathcast

Rose Bailey visits the Onyx Patchcast to discuss Cavaliers of Mars, Vampire: The Requiem and her current games.

Hunter: The Reckoning V5 preorder

Hunter: The Reckoning is back (though about a variety of hunters called to action, not the Imbued per se) with Desperation Dice for rising stress and a flame motif.

Rulebook preview PDF, showing one of the Creeds and a monster.

And a creepypasta preview which has a very Chronicles Of Darkness feel of eerie mystery, if with a very odd central threat.

Renegade Con panel discussing this as well as new V5 books - Players Guide with the non-core clans and updates and advice, journal with player prompts, starter box set with adventure and pregens, a Blood Sorcery and Thin-Blood Alchemy book and a Miami sourcebook.

Nosferatu in the Worlds Of Darkness

Nosferatu is the source of one of the most direct references in Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem, with a clan named after it and modelled on its monstrous vampire.


The clan went on to borrow as much from The Phantom Of The Opera and its secret underground labyrinths and rivers, Beauty And The Beast and the 1980s TV version in particular with a heroic and sympathetic monster as guardian of a hidden underground community under the streets of New York, and other sources to create a group more physically twisted by vampirism than others and often presented as among the most empathic due to their suffering when not revelling in their monstrosity.

I had an idea for one (totally swiping from Beauty And The Beast) before the game came out but have never played him as he would be suited for adventures, mysteries and tragic romance but not for hanging out in nightclubs or other common interactions with humanity. Maybe some night.

His distance from humanity comes from the clan weakness being one of the harshest in the first four editions, where they’re clearly monstrous and walking breaches of the Masquerade. Appearance is an Attribute and they can’t have it at all. This has made them a rarity at a lot of tables.

In Vampire: The Requiem the Nosferatu might be hideous, or look human but still be somehow unnerving. The first Nosferatu PC I ever had in a chronicle was in Requiem, even though he went all-in on being repulsive.

“What do you look like?”
“Monstrous. But I wear slacks.”

I had one in a V20 game from a brand new player who wanted a deep dive on the tragedy. One in over twenty years.

V5 has balanced the weakness so that they don’t have to be clearly inhuman, having a penalty to interaction that varies with Bane severity, which has perhaps helped. I’ve seen a couple of Nosferatu PCs since. Though they’ve all been horrific and tragic, at least they could go out sometimes.

While rare at the tabletop in my experience, Nosferatu always been popular in Vampire LARP with players who tend to like makeup effects and costuming, and their stealth playstyle and very different look works in computer games as well, to the extent that Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt launched with them as one of the three playable clans.

Andreas at Convention of Thorns,
also featured in the World Of Darkness documentary

I also include a representative Nosferatu SPC in my chronicles. These vary in style and ways to be creepy. Jonas in my longest V20 game harked back to Orlok, a gentleman with excellent manners, a great chess game, a liking for nice dark coats and a bald head covered in dark veins. I used a Reaper from Blade II as a reference.

Is he watching you right now?

Mara in my first V5 game ran with the varying Bane so that she appeared like a sickly human on lower Hunger and like a drowned corpse when higher. I borrowed Mia’s changing look in the 2013 Evil Dead as a basis. You can choose whether to look that up.

Likewise Lydia in my recent V5 game Nobody’s Home, an Anarch activist with a look taken from Kimberly in Fear The Walking Dead.

Mason in my current chronicle borrows from Omnis in Bloodhunt, a hooded and near-silent figure you never see the face of.

Omnis welcomes you.

Fun fact: Alexander Ward, famous the Nosferatu Jasper in L.A. By Night, has also played Nosferatu in Spongebob Squarepants.

Jasper

Dracula and Dracula both exist in the Vampire settings, Nosferatu may or may not, being too close to reality in Masquerade, but seems to as of V5. Florence Stoker’s attempt to have the film destroyed could be brought in as a plot point...

Nosferatu

Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror premiered 100 years ago tonight.

Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror, 1922


A knockoff of Dracula, it barely escaped an attempt by Bram Stoker’s widow Florence to have every print detroyed.

But it changed a lot of the subtext if not the plot, with Graf Orlok as a clearly inhuman monster, a walking plague - and this was just a couple of years after the influenza epidemic that followed the Great War. It also introduced the vampire being burned to death by sunlight, which has become more common than not since.

I first saw Nosferatu in 1993 as the opening film for the first Dead By Dawn horror festival, with live piano accompaniment - he got a huge laugh when stopped abruptly at the shot of everybody at the inn turning when Hutter/Harker announced he was going to the castle. By that time I already knew the look from my early curiosity about vampires and horror in general. Now I own the BFI restoration disc with a score by Hammer Dracula composer James Bernard, but have gone to see it with live accompaniment more than once since, most recently in the 2017 Fringe in a chapel with music by an Australian piano and percussion duo.

We see the lineage of Orlok in the remakes by Werner Herzog and others (with more on the way) and Shadow Of The Vampire, as well as in other not-so-pretty vampires like Barlow in the original ’Salem’s Lot miniseries, the Reapers in Blade II, the Master in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the Strigoi in The Strain, various elders in What We Do In The Shadows and in the forthcoming Morbius, and other monsters like the Gentlemen in Buffy and the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth and the Remans in Star Trek: Nemesis, while Batman Returns has both a clammy Caligari-ish Penguin and Christopher Walken as a villainous businessman called Max S(c)hreck. See also Total Eclipse Of The Heart, which was written for musical adaptation.

In gaming, Nosferatu inspired variant vampires and other monsters in various settings, and most notably White Wolf lifted the look and name for one of the original clans in Vampire: The Masquerade. Tim Bradstreet referenced Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s version in his chapter frontispiece, and worked on Blade II in turn.

Tim Bradstreet for Vampire: The Masquerade
Rose Bailey modelled for V20.

Nosferatu. Does this word not sound like the midnight call of the Bird of Death?

Winter Paralympics 2022

Strange the things that hit. I felt myself welling up seeing the team from Ukraine at the Winter Paralympic opening ceremony.

GM's Day

March the Fourth be with you!

A great deal from Pelgrane for a good cause.

And a suggestion from gamer Sam Comerford:

A word of advice/a plea:

If you’re a player and you like the game your GM/DM runs, PLEASE TELL THEM.

Impostor syndrome is real and it sucks. Hearing those words of encouragement from the people we try to make happy is an amazing feeling.

Thursday, 3 March 2022

Buffy in New Orleans

I’m hardly the first person to think of doing urban fantasy in New Orleans (see Cloak & Dagger, The Originals and the relevant-due-to-writers American Horror Story: Coven for three examples) but I just checked and according to the wiki it was mentioned in the world Buffy The Vampire Slayer once in the comic seasons, so there’s space for that...

Still not wanting to lean too much on the Anne Rice routine or misrepresent voodoo, but there’s still plenty of weird stuff around besides those obvious examples, along with the fun vibe of the city.

No Way Home again

So the night before The Batman, naturally time for another look at Spider-Man: No Way Home in its last evening showing after eleven weeks.

Call Of Cthulhu for Ukraine

Does Love Forgive? a book of two one-on-one Call Of Cthulhu adventures focused on emotional connections and originally published in Polish, is currently pat-what-you-want with an encouragement to give to charities supporting people seeking safety from the confluct in Ukraine.

Ash Wednesday

The less fun follow-up to Mardi Gras and the beginning of Lent. (I just looked up Easter in New Orleans. Of course there are parades.)

Tuesday, 1 March 2022

Wrecked, coming to BBC Three

BBC Three, home of Being Human and Hootcrowd recently returned to TV, is getting back in the genre biz with Wrecked, a slasher / mystery / comedy set on a cruise ship, which is a nice restrictive location.

Yellowstone National Park

And a happy 150th anniversary to Yellowstone National Park! I was there as a child and it’s a fantastic place.

Defenders+

The formerly Netflix Marvel shows are coming to Disney+ on March 16th, along with Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the US which has been here since opening, and with new parental controls so it might be the start of a Star style separate bit for grownups over there.

March

Happy Pancake Day! Mardi Gras! Carnival! (Unrelated) St. David’s Day! March!

Pancake Day is the one I’ve celebrated most myself... often the only day we have pancakes in this household.

Update: achieved! Thanks Mum.


Mardi Gras makes me miss New Orleans, ten years since I was last there for a Grand Masquerade. Parades are back on this year in limited form with vaccine requirements, after cancellation last year led to inventive responses including Yardi Gras.

St. David’s Day, of course, has dragons.