Conpulsion games

Conpulsion 2025 scheduled game list.

V5 Empire 2.07

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade - Empire, the PCs found that the vampire working with hunters was doing it for moral reasons, which undercut their arguments somewhat.

Conpulsion update

Two weeks to Conpulsion and I have most of the quiz but not a write-in round.

Summer?

British Summer Time my ass, you ain’t barely spring and you sure ain’t seven months long.

IMHO

Quantum Leap 2022

Quantum Leap (2022) is now on Channel 5’s catchup service here in the UK. Both seasons. It’s a fun wee show.

No PCs means no need to be normal

Idly considering having a clan with no PCs be deeply weird in my next Vampire game.

Delta Green bundle

Delta Green bundle in aid of defence and aid in Ukraine.

Project Ghostlight: The Top Shelf

Alexander Ward and Joey Rassool launch the Ghostlight podcast with their history with Vampire: The Masquerade.

It does make me want to do a Big Team superhero game again...

Hrm

Oh, so no Marvels. :(

Well, it probably isn’t everybody, right...?

Avengers: Doomsday

The Avengers: Doomsday cast reveal video is strange enough that it’s probably good I haven’t found a convenient meme blank for the actor chairs.

“They’re bringing back Runaways?”

“Didn’t they recast her? Twice?”

“Cary Grant?”

“... Oswald the Lucky Rabbit?”

Faith Erin Hicks's The Mummy

Writer and artist Faith Erin Hicks has adapted The Mummy for Universal, issue one out now! Interview and preview here. And we see more gore in one panel than the original film!

Daredevil: Born Again 1.05-06

Strange to find myself thinking an episode of Daredevil was delightful, but here we are.

A classic setup, clever use of powers, and a surprising and fun guest star. (In an episode with some violence and language they would never be near in their home stories.)

So I suppose it being so standalone explains the double bill with a heavy arc episode.

It's gone. It's done.

On 25 March of the 3019th year of the Third Age, the Ruling Ring was dissolved in the flames of the Crack of Doom, and Sauron was defeated.

Private Nightmares 1.02

“There’s a common idea amongst humans that the night is a different world...”

Also the anniversary of Disney+ launching in the UK. The last year has had some great Marvel, some fun Star Wars, OMITB and a few other things.

Happy birthday Cat!

V5 Empire 2.06

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade - Empire there was a frank exchange of views, and not punches or bullets.

Can’t have everything.

Dreamed of a gang of vampire children trying to get into a hunter compound.

Five years again

Five years since lockdown measures came in, with another three days to ignore them.

V5 Empire update

Have now reached the not inevitable but quite common phase in Vampire: The Masquerade chronicle planning where Johnny Cash goes on the playlist.

Bloodlines 2 update

A merry Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 announcement anniversary to all who celebrate! It has just been rated Mature by ESRB, indicating there is enough to show the ratings board.

The Bourne Identity

The Bourne Identity and following series could be due another adaptation from another studio (per Empire).

For those about to rage about reboots, the Matt Damon films started with the second adaptation of Identity, just fourteen years after the first.

Tom Breihan retrospective as part of A History Of Violence

PCs with amnesia is one of the classic one-shot RPG setups, and the Damon series built up a world of agency brainwashing and the need to break out to become a better person. This factored somewhat into Vampire for me, as scary outsiders with secrets will.

The fast, brutal style of the action did a lot to update spy movies and spread into action overall, before shakycam became too choppy in other hands.

Damon did a lot to ground it, with Bourne taking smart shortcuts as well as scared fight-or-flight reactions, and I remember my sympathetic reaction to his panic, not yet thirty myself and thinking “he’s just a kid...” as so many people sent into war are.

This future sucks

Delighted (not delighted) to discover I am in LibGen due to the Trinity Continuum core rulebook.

Spring Equinox

Spring Equinox. Doesn’t feel like it.

Sigil

D&D VTT Sigil has been cancelled, likely staying as a D&D Beyond accessory but getting no further development, with most staff fired.

Knutepunkt 2025

Knutepunkt Nordic LARP conference 2025 has publiched its annual essay book and linked to its panel video, with individual videos to follow.

The Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser essay comparing it to blockbuster LARPs is a lot more positive than some, partially reflecting a late visit with a lot of the technical issues ironed out.

Other features and games played at the event include pieces written in response to current events including the attacks on Gaza and news censorship in Russia.

A GMing first

I have had sessions summarised by GIFs before, but never a cartoon reenactment on TikTok.

Final Destination at 25

Final Destination premiered on this day in 2000. Cowriter and director James Wong talks to Bloody Disgusting about twenty-five years on borrowed time.

I talk about this series now and then, including the time I ran a play-by-post game where the second death was by runaway gravestone.

St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick’s Day as applicable!

V5 Empire 2.05

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade, a divisive moral question led to, shall we say, heated disagreement.

Beauty And The Beast (1987)

Rewatching Terminator 2 led to finding Beauty And The Beast streaming and rewatching it for the first time since it was on.

The first third of season one are mostly solid versions of obvious ideas based on the premise, with at least one “kiss him, you fool!” moment each.

KISS HIM YOU FOOL!

Pilot which sets up the high concept premise in the first half and the District Attorney procedural part in the second, Vincent as urban legend and frightening to Catherine, Vincent gets Catherine’s help with a surface problem / Catherine dates someone else, Vincent trapped in the world above, Halloween dance when Vincent can show his face in public, someone from the World Below is now unwelcome, someone captures Vincent, Father’s backstory.

The most obvious hook not touched is Vincent’s origin, which the show keeps back and never answers directly.

I could have lost the Irish politics from the Halloween dance episode, and the overly stylised gang from the “Vincent trapped in the world above” episode, and from later in the first season the Voodoo episode, and the Chinatown episode is now a fascinating artefact of something hopefully extinct, with a lot of cast in common with Big Trouble In Little China who helped stomp it. But the Poor Children Forced To Steal By Modern Fagin Episode is better than the Batman: The Animated Series one.

The secret tunnel community might have influenced the Nosferatu warrens in Vampire: The Masquerade, secret entrances and all, though maybe not as directly as the Morlocks in X-Men. (Did they influence this? Quite possibly.)

Amused by how Vincent has to live in secret based on how people react to his appearance with alarm and then... mostly immediately get over it.

The Hearth Magazine

The Hearth Magazine issue one is out now, bi-monthly RPG articles and minigames. Ko-fi link to get a PDF.

Lockdown

Five years after lockdown. I went out to shop and I still feel wary about doing that.

V5: City Of Angels study beats

Soundtrack for typing up Tuesday’s Vampire session based on what was happening in each scene:

Cosy restaurant ambience and soft music

Terminator 2 soundtrack

Los Angeles nighttime ambience

1960s cocktail music

ALT BLK ERA

It's what my character would do

And sometimes that is okay.

Fear Itself - Shattered Veil Edition

Fear Itself - Shattered Veil Edition - a new expanded full-colour hardback version of Fear Itself, with the addition of a expansion, The Ocean Game, also available separately as part of the campaign.

Mind how you go.

Mind how you go.

Sir Terry Pratchett, 1948-2015

Shortly before he died, Terry Pratchett assured me that, if there is an afterlife, he would give me a ring and let me know. That was ten years ago - and still no call. 

 

From which, incidentally, I draw no firm conclusions. What if there was an afterlife, but with no phone signal? 

 

But of course there is one place where Terry indisputably lives on: in the pages of his books and in the minds of the millions of readers around the world who turn those pages and continue to find them funny and true. 

 

For, while his words live on, so does Terry, and that will be the case, no question, not just for this one decade so quickly gone, but for many further decades to come. 

 

So let me join Lyn and Rhianna in raising a glass today to the magical persistence of books and to Sir Terry; gone but still so very firmly with us.

 

Rob Wilkins

V5: City Of Angels 1.30

Tonight’s Vampire session means I’ll have to think about how to avoid playing depressed next time. That’s entirely in keeping but not enjoyable, something that comes up sometimes when playing a monster trying to stay human, and can be dramatic in small doses but a bleed-through downer at length.

Lockdown

Five years to the day since my last face-to-face game before lockdown, and my last meal from my favourite restaurant, just a few days before it became enforced, which was a good three weeks later than it should have been.

I was lucky not to lose anyone close, and lucky to have somewhere to withdraw to and ride it out until the vaccines became available, but the fear and the anger will never leave me.

Happy Buffyversary

We were first welcomed to the Hellmouth on March 10th 1997.

V5 Empire 2.04

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade - Empire, one of the PCs having a Touchstone who might be working with a vampire hunter could prove to be a divisive issue.

Absolute DC

Always interested in the whys and wherefores of a new take on a setting.

Absolute DC seems a bit looser from the start than Ultimate Marvel, hence why Batman and Wonder Woman have giant melee weapons. But not everybody?

(Compare the New 52 thirteen years ago.)

Apparently it’s Darkseid’s fault that it’s more fighty overall.

I appreciate their use of “AU” to refer to it.

Now waiting for Malibu to do Complete And Utter Ultraverse.

V5 Private Nightmares

Vampire: The Masquerade - Private Nightmares from Project Ghostlight (episode one) - NY By Night troupe members as Thin-bloods in LA with Alexander Ward as a prowling Storyteller.

IWD

Have a good International Women’s Day.

New pictures from the Moon

Well done Blue Ghost lunar lander team.

World Book Day

Read a book!

Daredevil: Born Again

Daredevil: Born Again starts here on Ash Wednesday, with an hour-long episode called Heaven’s Half Hour.

So far it leaves me feeling bummed out.

Tradition!

Thanks to Mum, Pancake Day tradition of only day for pancakes upheld!

Pancake mix and lemon

Pancake one of about nine

Cold City Hot War

Cold City Hot War Second Edition Kickstarter Campaign.

And funded in six minutes.

Oh where are you coming from, soldier, fine soldier?

GM's Day

GM Appreciation Day is upon us once more. Time to put a rules lawyer in the wicker d20.

60s Fantasy Film Club

Tyler Dean introduces 80s Fantasy Fi;m Club at Reactor, with Dragonslayer.

I got to make the first comment, and shared my anecdote about missing the first five minutes and not knowing someone was meant to be in disguise.

Or other niche superhero team

Just read, watched and listened to a podcast about niche superhero teams sufficiently close together to start getting niche superhero team TTRPG thoughts.

After being reminded of the time Thunderbolts was about a whole new team and it wasn’t the characters on the covers for some reason.

X-Books

The X-Men are doing a back to basics story returning them to the relatively normal Marvel Universe after a long run of isolated transhumanist SF, and just gearing up to a crossover with their teams working together or not.

And two largely new teams as well.

(We also have the demon-possessed son of Wolverine with a Ghost Rider style flaming head, but never mind.)

This lets them look more like the other media X-Men like the revived cartoon and presumably movies bringing them into the MCU.

But anyway, what’s your X-team like?

V5 Empire 2.03

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade - Empire, the players narrowed down which lead to follow.

Sessions can’t all produce amusing pithy descriptions.

Skype

Microsoft is shutting down Skype and boosting Teams. Skype was the free video call thing we used for gaming before lockdown but which gave way to Discord and the like, and one feels sort of sorry for it as a result.

March

A perfectly cromulent month as months go.