#RPGaDAY2025 day one east of here

My semi-traditional RPGaDAY post on RPGnet ahead of August starting here in a few hours.

Gen Con 2025

I hope nobody gets gulaged.

Frankenstein comes

Interviews and photos from Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein at Vanity Fair, including a first partial look at Jacob Elordi as the creature.

Hayley Williams drops seventeen new songs

Here if you get a code from Good Dye Young. And as of Friday on streaming places.

“I’ll never do the right thing again”

Kill Me goes on the Buffy playlist

True Believer about “Christian” Nationalism

Plenty of wistful slow guitar songs like her previous solo releases, some like Glum and Negative Self Talk sound like Poe but that might just be me

Mirtazapine, a love song to an antidepressant and anti-anxiety drug that sounds like Garbage circa Bleed Like Me

Lo!

And the angel said: “Be not afraid. This is just a test of the alert system.”

Tom Lehrer

Comic song writer (and mathematician and more) Tom Lehrer has died, aged 97. In 2022 he put his songs in the public domain.

#RPGaDAY2025 introduction

David and Anthony discuss RPGaDAY and the 2025 prompts.

Star Trek news

From Comic-Con:

Starfleet Academy looks cool. Holly Hunter as the captain! Paul Giamatti as the big bad!

Khan audio drama, with Naveen Andrews as KHAAAAAAAAN!

Strange New Worlds speedrunning Buffy and Angel gimmick episodes. You can make normal episodes, guys!

Paris 2024

A year on: that was a fun day.

MEA CULPA!

No idea what to run next academic year now.

itch.io payment processor attack

Adult, sensitive and, of course, LGBTQ+ content delisted at itch.io due to some creeps.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is great fun. Like Captain America with World War II it uses its sorta-period setting well which was the best solution for this most 1960s of teams, everyone is great, it’s reliably familiar with at least one straight-up Avengers beat but has a few surprises mostly in the all-in worldbuilding, and Michael Giacchino’s score has a hummable theme which not enough MCU movies do.

Stretching still looks goofy.

Lovely touch - getting the 1995 unreleased Four to cameo and at the premiere.

A new V5 book

Based on previews for Tattered Facade I have no intention of buying it and I’m not sure I want to run Vampire again. We’ll see what happens with the new WW hires, I guess.

New Buffy and Angel comics

New Buffy and Angel comics from Dynamite, written by Kelly Thompson. They look to be set in the classic era. (I imagine a revival era comic will appear if the revival era hits.)

Buffy table read

From Sarah Michelle Gellar Prinze on Instagram:

Baby steps.

Your PCs are rich. What do?

From discussion about a Resources-heavy group in a World Of Darkness game, monsters should rarely have money problems, but Resources can be seen as a chance to solve every problem by throwing money at it.

Being able to hire NPCs to go on adventures for you seems like a cutoff point for a lot of adventures.

If you want to run a game about rich people, what kind of gameable things do they get up to? Courtly politicking is still an option - I could run Vampire about fancy elitist pastimes, sure. But something all like that, Succession style?

ITV classics

The Prisoner. Some of Sapphire And Steel. Thunderbirds! At least some Ivor The Engine! Some of Press Gang! On YouTube free. Dunno if it works outside the UK.

Vive Chapter Nine

Vampire: The Masquerade and our revolutionary band met mages, and their spokesman did not make a good impression. I punched him in the face and at least some of us are planning to kill them all.

Sancta Civitas

Another Proms thought. Am I a bad person for wanting to use Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sancta Civitas (The Holy City) as an Alien or other cosmic horror game soundtrack? Because some of it sounds like an influence (also on Destiny and maybe Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Black Hole?) and it’s overall kind of terrifying.

Drokk!

If you told me Taika Waititi was planning on directing Sinister Dexter or Robo-Hunter I’d be quite confident. But Dredd...?

Superman (2025)

Good Lois and Lex movie. Great Mr. Terrific movie. Okay Superman movie.

Definitely taking advantage of the familiarity of weird colourful superhero movies nowadays, it doesn’t have to be a grounded take and this one really isn’t. Which helps starting a new take on the universe from the jump compared to last time DC tried.

Lack of origin, and development of origin, do take away from it though.

He sure does seem to kill a bunch of folks though.

What happened 300 years ago? Tell me!

BBC Proms 2025

The BBC Proms summer mostly classical concert series starts tonight, with among other things Sibelius’s Violin F Yeah Concerto, and The Elements by Errollyn Wallen, which started like a heist soundtrack before the sweeping string and brass bits

Normal relevant show of the year: John Williams. Weird relevant show of the year: The Traitors.

Stranger Things 5

Stranger Things 5 coming in November, then Christmas, then the finale on New Year’s Eve for maximum antisocial.

STEVE HAS A CHAINSAW

Critical Role at Edinburgh Castle

The Critical Role tour is coming to Edinburgh next July. Specifically to the temporary arena at Edinburgh Castle. Not their biggest stop, only about 8800 seats, but still...

Cosmic Lighthouse

Paul Cornell has launched a comics company, Cosmic Lighthouse, starting with SFF literature appeal, the first announched book being Adrian Tchaikovsky writing a Final Architecture spinoff illustrated by Mike Collins.

The questgiver's perspective

Grimm, the urban fantasy TV show very obviously from some of the makers of Angel, has the monster hunting hero’s police captain also the boss of the local not-all-evil monster society. So he has to juggle sending a monster hunter to stop renegade monsters (and political rivals and more) and keeping some sketchy allies safe when without him the two sides would probably kill each other, because he needs both sides much as he might not want to. How he deals with this is a major recurring subplot.

See also Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines where the Prince is straight up trying to get you killed with the missions he sends you on.

Why is the questgiver giving you these quests?

Texas Flood Relief bundle

RPGs, comics and more for flood relief at DTRPG.

Tabletop Scotland update

New RPG slots now open and going fast!

Next?

Due to a sunny-day-using meetup and gamer talk, what next?

RPG publishers seeking to get seized stock back

Near-monopoly comic and game store distributors Diamond Comics have gone bankrupt, and seek to hold and sell off the stock they had stored.

Green Ronin has a GoFundMe for legal defence to get their stock back.

Superman (2025)

How to launch a new take on a known setting? Do you do the origin? If you don’t do the origin, how do you establish what your take is like? A flying doggo helps. Don’t like the colour grading. More next week.

White Wolf has a new Creative Director, WOTC veteran Jess Lanzillo.

She spoke here a year ago about D&D 2024 and Magic: The Gathering as well as media partnerships and interests including social LARP and wanting to make something like Interview With The Vampire.

Duster seemed fun.

Tabletop Scotland update

Sounds like Tabletop Scotland wants more GMs? Makes sense having filled every pre-book space in days.

#RPGaDAY2025

#RPGaDAY2025 launches August 1st, and the prompt graphic is out now.

Introductory post by David F. Chapman, including a text prompt list

Explanatory post by Runelinger, including an audio interview with David and Anthony

UK and Ireland version boosting UK Tabletop Information Network

Back to single-word prompts, with a randomiser for adding context.

Ironheart

Never trust an otherwise normally dressed guy who wears a cloak.

Let alone indoors.

Vive Chapter Eight

Helping the Tremere for the moment.

ENnie 2025 nominations

The ENnie nominations are always a reminder of how little I actually know about some sections of the RPG hobby, especially the d20 ones ENworld focuses on. I properly know a couple of the nominees.

City Of Angels 2025

July 4th is also the anniversary of Vampire: The Masquerade, and of City Of Angels.

Photo credit to Andre Benz at Unsplash

To be followed by actual art as soon as the new computer and scanner get along.

July 4th

Take care of yourselves, and each other.

Michael Madsen

“Are you gonna bark all day little doggie, or are you gonna bite?”

Michael Madsen had a long and prominent career as an actor and writer, but sometimes it only takes about ten minutes on screen to make a legend.

Not the big team

Having done the Big Team of a superhero setting, I’d like to try putting the PCs in as a counterpoint, fitting a different niche. Not necessarily antagonistic but possibly. It’s common in an existing setting - I’ve played members of several DIY Marvel teams but never an Avengers type - but far less in a DIY one.

How many teams in your world? could determine how much they might interact with the Big Team.

Inspired by Van Helsing as the Punisher in Are You Afraid Of The Dark Universe? and then the Fireflies from Rob Zombie’s films as its Suicide Squad.

I did a bit in Sounds Like Hell with a pair of slayers rolling into town and meeting the slayer-less PC group, but not the actual Scoobies or anything like that... so far.

July

Happy Canada Day where applicable!