Mage: The Ascension - Sunrise City

We concluded the Victorian Age time travel miniseries and normal service may resume shortly.

It was touch and go but Cara managed to avoid having to become Queen of California.

Malignant

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

“Not so imaginary friend” and someone else checking the list on Bluesky reminded me of this:

6.

Malignant (2021)

Trailer

First ten minutes

James Wan broke out with Saw but is best known for mostly grounded gloomy-house jumpscare-y horrors like The Conjuring (boo) and Insidious, and with its ominous (but in this case actually relevant!) single-word title this seemed like it might be more of the same. But after some Fast & Furiousees and between the Aquaman films he felt like something a little different. Did it work?

That opening scene is a clear indicator of the tone he’s going for - the hospital that looks like the one from House On Haunted Hill 1999, the melodramatic straight-to-camera delivery of “It’s time to cut out the cancer!” He’s trying for something more Sam Raimi or Joe Dante. But then the second scene introducing our hero Madison (Annabelle Wallis, again demonstrating she would have been a great lynchpin of the Dark Universe if it had gotten past The Mummy 2017) establishes a familiar gloomy old house and a grimly realistic starting setup for her. So are we in for a fun ride or not?

And the film pretty much stays like this. The villain Gabriel is purposely absurd but when he’s not in action things stop being heightened enough to fit, and the result is just... odd.

The medium: Prime

Gameability: The setup of someone seeing murders as they happen and trying to deal with that is a great hook. Just choose a tone.

The Tell-Tale Heart (2008)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

The fourth prompt is “A-lister’s early horror role” and yes I’m going to slightly cheat again, going for an early short from a writer and director who is still in the fold.

4.

The Tell-Tale Heart (2008)

Official site

A short film by Robert Eggers, seven years before The VVitch, and he’s already very recognisably himself. An adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story, almost a silent film most of the way through, some scenes warmed by candle and firelight but otherwise nearly black and white. The most early-work-is-different is the old man being a puppet, which doesn’t work for me at all but I do admire the can-do spirit.

Also not the strangest adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart I’ve seen thanks to the sorta-animated short narrated by James Mason.

The medium: Vimeo

Gameability: low.

Witchboard (2024)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Day two is Bad Remake. And I’m not planning to watch a bad remake on purpose. So I noticed this is free on YouTube and heard the originals aren’t great (with a reminder on the RPGnet thread) and remembered the trailer looked like goofy fun so...

2.

Witchboard (2024)

Trailer

Film

Is it a good remake? Couldn’t tell you. Is it good on its own merits? No. Is it fun? At times very much so.

Director and co-writer Chuck Russell previously made the 1988 remake of The Blob, which is really good but eclipsed by the classic original, and which worked because it was focused. This is... not.

A pendulum board (not a Ouija board - the film spends some time establishing that this is Serious Business and Ouija boards aren’t, after the original was about a Ouija board but they now have their own official movies) made by a 17th century witch is stolen from a New Orleans museum on the orders of an occultist wannabe supervillain, gets lost and finds its way to our heroine after she follows a cat in the woods. After her boyfriend’s fortunately well-informed ex explains it, she tries it at the pre-opening party for the boyfriend’s restaurant and it’s interrupted by a burning crow coming down the chimney.

This is not enough to put her off testing it, and the next thing it does kills one of their friends. The cat returns and steals his severed hand. This cat is horrible, he’s great, no notes.

Various other bad things happen, starting as low-rent Final Destination ish coincidences and segueing into nightmares and the like. And then our heroine starts being sorta evil herself, which at least leads to the cat killing her former drug dealer. (Seriously, love this cat.)

So the ex suggests consulting an occult expert and oops it’s the supervillain. This goes badly, in a way that’s normally the final twist of a movie but here hits an hour in, which I really liked.

It avoids my pet hate of having witch hunts be justified by actual evil superpowered witches by making the witch take a turn to superpowered evil after being hunted and persecuted, then later has the ex assure the boyfriend that Wicca is cool and the supervillain’s friends are good witches, which the audiience already know they’re not. The fact that his minions look like a Vampire LARP could qualify as a hint.

So the board does a whole slew of supernatural bad stuff without picking a lane, Madison Iseman as the heroine (who should know better than to mess with magic boardgames after the Jumanji sequels) and Antonia Desplat as the villainess both get to show acting range and Jamie Campbell Bower as the villain gets to show off his lack of same.

The effects people are very busy, this would make a good film to put on the background of a Halloween party except that guests would sometimes pause to go “what the fuck” at some of the images. At one point a hallucination looks like the Pitch Meeting video essay thumbnails, which makes me wonder if this was an attempt to get one made. And there’s a related moment which is a reminder that Russell also directed The Mask.

It’s an absolute mess full of half-baked ideas that could have worked. Recommended if you feel like being perplexed and occasionally amused, sometimes deliberately.

The medium: YouTube

Gameability: This already feels like a horror game that went totally off the rails. I could grab several of its barely-used setups for something World Of Darkness and some get accidentally Buffy-ish.

I also liked the villain’s backup plan for dealing with the heroine’s boyfriend:

Jim Henson at 90

And still baffling studio people.

Adapting a property that may not adapt

The Pod Universe and the creators’ predecessor Are You Afraid Of The Dark Universe? look at cinematic universes, constructing settings for lots of stories, so the same kinda thing as an RPG setting and series / campaign planning.

And as we know some settings make better big settings than others.

Have you ever considered a setting and decided it really wasn’t viable?

Have you ever decided to go all in on that?

This week, a guest pitch for the Eraserhead Cinematic Universe.

Labelled The Worst Idea We Could Come Up With

With a chapter heading Why Eraserhead? Dear God, why?

“We are gonna try and do our best job with this terrible idea.”

Kinda makes me wanna...

Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF

Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF

A puppet-heavy drinky history of the occult by Australian comedian Cassie Workman. Hail Satan!

Episode one, Aleister Crowley halfasses multiple attempts to contact the divine. Special guests include Shirley Manson explaining the pre-Crowley history of the house by Loch Ness.

Ill-Starred

Going back to a previous weird thought due to an unrelated game (Hunter) joked that my next Star Trek character will be a witch.

“Analysis?”

“Nothing on sensors, Captain.”

“Sycorax?”

(sound of bones rattling) “They’re here, alright.”

(And this was before seeing the Strange New Worlds episode trailer for the magic planet follow-up.)

Edit: posting this on BlueSky got a character sheet made.

Fun facts about Violetta Rossellini

Going a bit broad on Violetta for Hunter: The Reckoning, spent lunchtime coming up with weird backstory details to drop in casually.

(This is a favourite bit for suitable games, dropping the kind of thing that would be the subject of an adventure in backstory, dating back to a retired Watcher in a Buffy game assuring a new slayer she wasn’t doing as badly as the one who destroyed the world. See also the time I stopped myself doing it in Vampire.)

My family moved to Portland for work when I was five. I went St. Sophia’s Academy. As such I did not get a prom. But I have attended some formal dances and have an invitation to the city debutante ball in three months’ time.

I have at least been to a few slumber parties. And the other girls didn’t always ask me to perform a séance.

I do not currently have a boyfriend. My mother keeps introducing me to young men from good families who she reckons will be healthy. I suspect that this is because I manifested my sight younger than she did and she hopes a grandchild will be more powerful still.

I was raised Catholic, which made it a little awkward when I saw the afterlife. Turns out the ancient Egyptians were right. Just for their time and place, but still.

I believe that death should bring release from pain. I can do something about that, so I will.

As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. (off looks) Apparently it comes from some Victorian politician before Spider-Man.

I have a fake ID, and also there’s one club where they never card me. (off looks) Yes it’s The Coffin.

So far as I know I have met five vampires. One of them is my great-grandfather.

There are a number of doctors in my family and I would like to follow their lead, but am more likely to end up in academia.

My favourite Taylor Swift song is Shake It Off. I know, people expect it to be Bad Blood or Look What You Made Me Do, but come on.

I once met the Devil. (She pauses and looks at one of the others.) So have you.

It was on a book tour.

What would freak out a superhero?

Just saw a retrospective of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, mostly about the first two of course, but little bits from 3 including the shot where Spidey punches through the Sandman. I always thought he should have freaked out and gone “Oh God, are you okay?!”

RPGaDAY 2026 30. Pride

#RPGaDAY 2026

30. Pride

30. A game event that you are still proud of.

Some of the high concept episodes of The Watch House, notably the time two of the PCs found themselves behind the scenes of the TV series they were in the cast of, the time Natalie became a fairytale princess, the flashforward to a hellish possible future. You can trace where I swiped and adapted from, gotta know your classics. (And see how many Supernatural did after us.)

And some the players brought in that caught me by surprise as well, like the Milli and Ziggy bodyswap, Andy the werewolf getting split into human and superwerewolf with his player stepping up to play both, and Matthew’s player dropping the spell to make Natalie see her possible new boyfriend in a negative light going wrong as he grumbled jealously about how cool he was...

And some of the developments in season arcs as well, like a villain reveal, a starting Big Bad being written out, heel and face turns and more.

Autocratik

Runeslinger

Cassie Workman is Witchy AF

Cassie Workman is Witchy AF trailer, via EP Lilly Wachowski

A puppet-heavy drinky history of the occult by Australian comedian Cassie Workman, starting September 16th. Hail Satan!

Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma

Jane Schoenbrun follows We’re All Going To The World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow with Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, in a which a young indie filmmaker with a longstanding interest in horror gets to make a bigger studio picture reviving a slasher franchise and it all goes a bit sideways. Funny, weird, deeply meta, gory, much more interested in the sexuality of the slashers than the slashers themselves. My favourite little trick is the soundtrack which gets all horror for various false alarms and then doesn’t for the massacre scene recreation.

The Pod Universe expands on Insidious

Guest pitch by writer and artist Kendra Wells turns Insidious upside down, gives it a good shake, with makes for a great example of brainstorming a setting from a handful of disparate elements. It overlaps somewhat with the Dark Universe version of The Exorcist in the improvised expansions as a horror setting looks at a confirmed scary afterlife and how religions might deal with it, which is an idea worth another look. Maybe it fits here better than there?

Marvel and Star Wars news

From D23, because Disney has its own Comic Con thank you.

Doomsday special look trailer

VisionQuest trailer marking it as a sequel to WandaVision and Agatha All Along

Ahsoka season two trailer

More of the MCU X-Men casting, for the film due May 5 2028. Empire news. Dealing with the fact that Professor X is eleven years younger than me. Inde Navarrette as Rogue means now I want a Rogue movie.

Exalted at 25

Exalted, White Wolf’s epic superheroic fantasy and very quickly not the prehistory of World Of Darkness, first came out on this day in 2001. Not my kind of thing but I admired the big swing, and the stepping back from that suggested connection.

Clive Barker's Underworld

Clive Barker’s Underworld (1985) original trailer for the Arrow 4K rerlease

I once edited together a mood trailer for New Wave Requiem, the 1980s Vampire sourcebook. If I’d known this existed I could have used... basically all of it.

Lore and unreliable narrators

Jesse Heinig on untrustworthy lore in settings, with Vampire: The Masquerade as a prime example.

One of the great joys of running a Vampire chronicle for people who have never played Vampire before is tossing them into a stew of contradictory conspiracies. Vampires love to present themselves as erudite and sophisticated, but they have very little evidence about their own supernatural world.

So far my group has heard...

* Three different creation myths about vampires

* Two different theoretical ways out of the curse

* About the existence of bloodlines, but not specifics

* About the existence of the Sabbat, with some (useless) history

* About werewolves and ghosts

They also heard about wizards ("they died out in the Middle Ages") shortly before meeting a mage, and about unaligned clans ("mostly weirdos who have very limited power") before running afoul of a Follower of Set/Ministry vampire.

They met a vampire who can survive sunlight at dawn

They met a mortal who can just see through Obfuscate. No idea why

They ran away from mortal hunters wearing FBI jackets, who were obviously not real agents

They have failed several gambits to get blood, and are coming to grips with the fact that they will have to do some questionable things

They discovered that animal blood is not very satisfying, then met a Kindred who feeds on animals exclusively

They heard that the Prince is Malkavian, then met her and the coterie's Malkavian immediately clocked that she is not

The Malkavian learned to aura read and has no idea how to interpret it

Everyone seems to be having a great time. It's a World of Darkness where there is lore, there is history, there are societies, but a rule is only a rule until it's broken. Supernatural things work the way they do because of magic, and symbols, and metaphors, not because of science.

Soon they'll get introduced to Gehenna, the End Times, Gehenna cults, and the mythology of the turning of the age. Probably hand-in-hand with crossing paths with actual Sabbat, an Anarch Revolt in their city, and thin-bloods looking for a place to survive.

The huge, sprawling metaplot of the World of Darkness causes some players to pursue setting mastery, to have full fundamental knowledge of the "truth" of the world, so I've made it pretty clear through events that "truth" is highly subjective and context-driven.

Everyone's got goals and agendas, but at the end of the night, it really comes down to, what will you do to survive? How are you going to make it happen? Where are you going to get blood? And who's going to pay the price for your sins?

The Pod Universe phase two

Slate reveal featuring space horror, space murder, superhero musicals, and an animated family adventure which is a prequel to the space horror.

Mage: The Ascension - Sunrise City

So for a summer special the PCs have been thrown back to the 1880s. I did this in The Watch House once so I suppose I deserve it :D

AP by Tanith

An action figure of Cara like this would be tricky. Porcelain doll yes, figure no...