Tabletop News

Tabletop News, a weekly news show with familiar faces from the Actual Play - o - sphere, coming soon to Kickstarter for launch funding.

The Aurora Borealis

I have never seen the Aurora Borealis and they look like a rather unconvincing special effect when recorded.

V5 Last Dance 1.07

I’m going to have to decide on a motif for the Nosferatu in the chronicle. And I already used a basic “emerge from the dark and the PCs notice rats everywhere” intro for a Gangrel.

The Films Of Lost Tales

Warner Bros. has decided we need more Middle-earth movies. I feel we could have done with one and a half fewer from The Hobbit already.

CHVRCHES, Over

I feel nothing, I feel everything

One year ago today, Russia invaded Ukraine. Help the people of Ukraine.

Glass Onion commentary

Glass Onion now has a commentary track with writer and director Rian Johnson on Netflix.

The Bad Batch 2.10

Star Wars: The Bad Batch

2.10: Retrieval

“Attempting to recover a stolen asset, the Batch must learn to trust a thief.”

26 minutes plus credits.

So, when last we left our heroes, a masked thief had stolen their ship...

Shrove Tuesday

Pancake Day here, Mardi Gras elsewhere. (See Free Tours By Foot - New Orleans on the city’s Mardi Gras Krewes.)

BAFTAs

All Quiet On the Western Front did well. A reminder that I’ve never really done the Great War as a setting, due in part to how grim it was as this depicts.

V5 Last Dance 1.06

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade, the band went to a gig. The duo playing (based on Witch Of The Vale) were so Goth that a lot of vampires were there, and felt momentarily understood.

Kieron Gillen at Into The Rookery

The Wicked + The Design

Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania

Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania is an example of taking characters out of their milieu, which can end up not feeling like their kind of story. In this case it feels like a Guardians Of The Galaxy. Better than Volume 2 at least.

(It doesn’t help that I don’t have much interest in Kang or that Jonathan Majors always looks sad to me.)

And that title is an argument in favour of a clean reboot.

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On is a story about childhood, more or less a children’s story but not only that, with some universal emotional notes. It expands on online shorts starting here in a very meta way. It also presents a world where tiny beings live mostly out of sight but nobody seems particularly surprised by them.

The Phantom

The Phantom by Lee Falk debuted on this day in 1936.

How To Remake Your Dragon

A live-action version of How To Train Your Dragon seems like a silly idea, as the animated trilogy is well liked and the dragons would still have to animated anyway. But here we are, with the animated trilogy drector returning, so what the Hell do I know?

Oh dear.

Politics here are about to go into Interesting Times.

The Bad Batch 2.09

Star Wars: The Bad Batch

2.09 The Crossing

“The team tackles a risky mission on a hostile world.”

27 minutes plus credits.

Animation showoff bit: lots of moving light and shadow.

Well, that episode description is certainly an episode description for The Bad Batch.

A change of pace, a little action but more emotional reaction to the end of Truth & Consequences.

Rest in peace, Chris Baylis.

Aid for Turkiye RPG bundle

Via DriveThryRPG:

Organized by AAW Games, the Aid for Türkiye bundle offers more than $570 in RPG PDFs for only $33 with the proceeds benefiting Médecins Sans Frontières / MSF (Doctors Without Borders) and their ongoing relief efforts.

Super Bowl trailers, ads and Halftime Show

Trailers including Indiana Jones, Guardians Of The Galaxy and Dungeons & Dragons (which just got a new trailer recently) at Empire.

Advertising highlights at A.V. Club.

Rihanna with the Halftime Show at Stereogum.

Valentines

Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, but if you need plans this is already too late. Though compared to Halloween and Christmas its not much of a time for our kind of stories. See my few posts mentioning it, at least two of which are actually mentioning Eddie Valentine in The Rocketeer.

My ultimate gamers-not-caring-much note is that the prototype for Propulsion, 24 hours of gaming for charity, was that weekend that year. One of the TWH group there (Derek) had to go early as he actually had something couple-y to do.

The Super Bowl 2023

Sadly my current Vampire: The Masquerade game isn’t set in Philadelphia. And I’ve never set a game in Kansas City. Hmm.

Expect trailer and advert roundups in due course.

Infinite (2021)

Channel 4 premiered Infinite tonight, and, well, it’s certainly my second favourite genre action film about fighting immortals from the early 20202s starring Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Serial immortals aren’t as easy to keep in a group as regular immortals as they sometimes die and become unavailable for a couple of decades, if as here they can’t jump into available adult bodies, and melee weapons aren’t that good against guns in this case, so Infinite gives some of them The Force as well.

Far Beyond The Stars

The classic Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode Far Beyond The Stars premiered twenty-five years ago today. A uniquely sad and angry take on the idea of characters discovering they’re fictional, something most people (including me) run for fun.

Spider-Man Noir: not a live-action series I was expecting

But these days, you never know.

Paramore, This Is Why

Paramore, This Is Why, ten tracks in order. Some rocking, some popping, some ballading.

Turns out I’m living in a horror film where I’m both the killer and the final girl

You First

Kids On Brooms

This is a good time to buy Kids On Brooms. Just saying.

1408

Stephen King’s 1408 is probably not gameable... except perhaps as an escape room. But a one-room haunting could work for a horror adventure.

Paramore: This Is Why interview

Paramore sit down with Zane Lowe for an hour to talk the whys and wherefores of This Is Why.

Running Out Of Time audio

Big Man, Little Dignity audio

The Bad Batch 2.08

Star Wars: The Bad Batch

2.08: Truth & Consequences

“Brought into a risky mission, the Batch must use stealth to survive.”

27 1/2 minutes plus credits, the longest this season so far.

These two bring us to the halfway point of the season.

And this follows straight from The Clone Conspiracy.

The Bad Batch 2.07

Star Wars: The Bad Batch

2.07: The Clone Conspiracy

“A conspiracy begins to unravel.”

26 minutes plus credits. Part one of a mid-season double bill this week, and this one doesn’t feature the Batch.

Highlander and The Crow RPGs, sort of.

Due to a licencing agreement with a studio, d20 Modern modernisation Everyday Heroes is starting to produce sourcebooks for a variety of settings, including Highlander and launch books Escape From New York and The Crow. So we finally get an official Eric Draven miniature. Even I could probably do a decent job painting that. (Highlander already has miniatures from a card-based duelling game.)

Ashley addenda

A place to put additional character pictures and such.

Starting with Ashleys dad, Joe Cameron. Played by Tom Welling. Slight stunt casting but The Winchesters did it first.

As our hero tries to convince him she can go out.

And fails.

Ashley The Vampire Slayer

Ashley Cameron, Vampire Slayer. Basically as was, but without the Slayer Contacts as that might force a plot point (so she’s the only one in town, at least for now, and doesn’t necessarily know if there are more) so give her more Hard To Kill. And still not taking Teenager, as she can generally sneak out when necessary.

Decisions, decisions...

Having inspired a Buffy PBP, I now have to decide who to play. I was offered dibs on a slayer or other central hero, and it’s a classic style game, so I’ll go for it.

V5 Last Dance 1.05

A new player, an investigation, and making sure to feature people as well as vampires.

V5 Players Guide

The Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition Players Guide is now available for preorder. The RenegadeCon World Of Darkness talk confirmed a lot, including updated writeups for all clans in the one book.

Balloons

 I must admit I have a hard time taking a diplomatic incident about a balloon seriously. I am not alone in this.

A little bit better

In my Trinity Continuum headcanon some miscarriages od justice never happened. The outcry about Oscar Wilde’s sentence led to a change in the law around homosexuality, and one knock-on effect of that was that Alan Turing lived a longer and happier life.

Paranormal Wellington

Paranormal Wellington, now available in POD and PDF!

Groundhog Day

Again.

The Bad Batch 2.06

Star Wars: The Bad Batch

2.06: Tribe

“The Bad Batch helps bring a new friend home.”

25 minutes plus credits.

Warning: spidery things, not very spidery visually but spidery in action.

Countdown (2019)

Countdown, a 2019 horror comedy about an app that tells you when you’re going to die.

Trailer, apparently before they changed the alert tone

It looks like it might go Final Destination but then goes a lot more Buffy. The attempted prevented deaths are played as monster attacks, and a couple of the supporting characters are played totally for laughs - I particularly like the demonology expert priest who is SO STOKED to get to deal with an actual demon.

How to reboot a universe

James Gunn and Peter Safran have revealed their opening moves for a new DC cinema and TV universe. And, well, not all what I would have done. For one I would have quietly dropped The Flash movie.

(I also remember the last time a cinematic universe was launched with a reference to gods and monsters...)

So what would I do?

I would have kept the essentials, the big three. And hey, we can have a separate The Batman continuity. And a separate Superman one too, and Wonder Woman, and...

Going with some surprise choices is good, even if the ones they’re going with aren’t ones I would have gone with. (And I would happily make Creature Commandos a thing but I’m surprised to see that animated series on the list.)

Happy new month!