The New Mutants

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Film 7 but entry 9, “PG-13” - wow, I have a lot of recent options, but have seen most of them. Mostly 15s here, some 12s.

(I will get to 7 and 8 with streaming trials.)

The New Mutants (2018-20)

Trailer

An X-Men movie-verse spinoff with no recurring characters, mixing its superheroic zapping with a horror-tinged story taken from the comic.

Some newly-empowered mutants who all have tragic backstories are being trained / imprisoned in a dingy old hospital, and now having mostly backstory-related nightmares that start to affect them physically. In the meantime they have some understandable YA issues, do some The Breakfast Club stuff unsurprisingly, and make existing fans wonder why Illyana has Kitty Pryde’s sidekick dragon as a hand puppet and is being so racist.

An outright horror with superhuman characters in danger is an interesting take, but does the tone mix work? Not really, no.

Not helped by some choices like the TV showing Buffy, where this does work, including an episode which draws immediate comparison to a much less scary monster design used here.

The medium: Disney+

Gameability: The trick would be balancing the horror stuff and the heroic stuff so it takes a while to get to the big zappy final battle.

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 28. Devotion

#RPGaDAY 2026

28. Devotion

28. Devotion: Game you have played the most!

GMed - Due to a long history with it and several year-long runs recently probably Vampire: The Masquerade, though Buffy The Vampire Slayer is the longest I’ve run a series, almost six years.

Played - Star Wars is probably up there, mostly the D6 classic but also tried others (and wanted to go back to the D6 classic). Also a lot of the various Star Trek games almost all with one keen GM, up to Star Trek Adventures currently. Longest single games, there’s the four-year Werewolf: The Apocalypse run with that Star Trek GM and about as long with a Silver Age style Marvel SAGA game.

Autocratik - “If you’ve done every day of #RPGaDAY since it began, this is your 400th entry to the challenge. I feel tired just thinking about that!”

Runeslinger

RPGaDAY 2026 18. Directness

#RPGaDAY 2026

18. Directness

18. A fast introduction of a new PC or player?

If I know players are likely to come and go I’ll try to have onboarding options and avoid cliffhangers. Emphasis on try.

Some games and settings are better for this than others, mechanically and narratively.

Overlooking the old “why do we trust this total stranger walking up to us in the middle of a secret mission?” and the magic power of the PC Glow...

D&D style fantasy calls it “West Marches” when every session begins and ends with the PCs in their base and venturing out from it. That cuts off things like multi-session dungeons and heavier ongoing plots unless you use the old un-narrative kludge of teleporting PCs in, but it’s a good idea for an open table.

Star Trek (a setting where characters can just teleport in and out mid adventure) would do this if it were realistic about its Luxury Space Communism and faster-than-light travel. Ha ha. Star Trek Adventures makes you pay player resources to get specialist NPC crew to go on camera, which is the model-the-show way of dealing with this. Star Fleet Battles RPG Prime Directive goes the other way and has a completely different command structure for its variant universe.

Mission: Impossible on TV started with selecting agents with relevant skillsets. I’ve seen someone suggest pregens in dossiers before.

(Note that the films acquire a consistent team as they go along, leading to narrative issues like needing something for both the computer geniuses to do.)

Last academic year I had a large amount of player turnover in Vampire: The Masquerade and that isn’t ideal for it or how I run it. Even then, if I’d known I could have tailored the chronicle setup to PCs being part of a group that could explain PCs coming and going and make sessions less serialised. Not ideal for personal horror or slow unravelling of mysteries but I could give it a go. Hmm.

My most setting-of-the-week one-and-done game is Doctor Who, which also has fast character creation... but following the series model really expects the PCs to be the one point of consistency.

If I want to go full “jump in any session” open table, I might go with a light superhero game like ICONS with a big team. Fast character creation, largely self-contained adventures. I’m sure threads would reappear at some point, but I can juggle and improvise so we don’t end up with too many “this should be a Penguin adventure but Batman’s player isn’t here” situations.

A large kitchen sink also helps if I want to come up with a largely standalone adventure every week.

Hey, Buffy is a light superhero game too! Albeit one that also expects a consistent Scooby Gang.

Autocratik

Runeslinger

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.

RPGaDAY 2026 5. Burden

#RPGaDAY 2026

5. Burden

5. What burden is a character willing to carry until the end?

With great power comes great responsibility.

With that phrase of that idea, Stan Lee defined Spider-Man, why superheroes are heroes and not just super, and a valuable life lesson.

Player characters are often marked out by their power or the opportunity to act when no-one else can. They may not be the only group in the setting doing PC-ish things, but they are the ones that get the focus. Who else is going to save the day?

Some of my more serious character moments are about taking on a burden alone, and why this may not be a good call.

Of course if you really went to get to me emotionally, have someone pitch in to help.

“I can’t carry it for you. But I can carry you!”

Sam in one of the bits that makes me cry in Return Of The King

See also the first episode of Superman: The Animated Series, where Kal-El’s family help to make sure he gets away from Krypton even if they don’t as a result. It’s the only version of the story that gets to me.

Autocratik

Runeslinger

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.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

I got Spider-Man versus the Hulk in live action, which I’ve wanted since I was about five, and it exceeded my expectations.

And also a fun Spider-Man movie, if kinda busy here and there. The bodily changes didn’t really do much except set up that it was possible for we could get another example.

I saw it in 3D because apparently that’s a thing again? The soaring used it nicely, as that’s one of the things it does.

MCU update

Ryan Coogler (SINNERS) back on Black Panther III with David Jonsson (Alien Romulus) as T’Challa’s son.

Shawn Levy (Night At The Museum, Stranger Things) on Ghost Rider, not III, with Ryan Gosling (Barbie) as not Nicolas Cage.

Both of those could guest star Blade. But GR is more rebootable based on previous quality.

Batman: Caped Crusader

The nice people at DC (and I’m sure there are some nice people at Amazon Prime too) are putting up at least some of Batman: Caped Crusader season one on YouTube, starting here.

Inevitable comparisons to Batman: The Animated Series aside (Hamish Linklater eases up on the Kevin Conroy impression a little as he goes along) it’s a good time.

BLADE

How hard is it to make Blade? Come on!

Tacit acknowledgment that they just can’t find the current equivalent of that New Order Pump Panel remix.

Justin Achilli

I'd be curious to know what people remember from Blade that isn't Blade in black leather killing vampires

Kyle Marquis

Avengers Doomsday trailer

Behold. Doom is full clunky.

Buffy and Angel comics interview

kelly Thompson talks to Fangoria about the initial arc and further plans, with a little new interior art too.

Princess Of The Universe 3 live draft

Rose Bailey and divers hands at RPGnet look at Princess Of The Universe and a new update.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer

The MCU is old enough to vote, and has finally delivered the thing my Spider-Man and Hulk comic childhood self always wanted: Spider-Man versus the Hulk.

Bat Story Points

On seeing someone respond to this on Bluesky:

Okay. You have unfortunately been hit with the curse that makes you adapt a work you liked as a kid into a ttrpg.

What thing are you adapting?

Gar Hanrahan imagined GMless Knightmare.

I needed a moment to consider beloved childhood things we don’t already have RPGs for.

And I considered fairytales overall but I’ve looked at them here often enough around Christmas,

But the one I jumped to was:

Batman 1966, which needs a Story Point mechanic with a way to get them by getting caught in traps and making puns and use them to have just the right Bat-gadget.

And SpringtingOwl approved!

Really good gameflow! Needing to do the comedy to get through the action setpieces deeply understands the soul of Batman '66.

The Punisher: One Last Kill

The Punisher: One Last Kill is a special of two halves, starting with Frank breaking down and then doing The Raid for fifteen minutes. The first part is really well done but obvious not as much fun as the second

Iron Man

Iron Man premiered in April but the wide release was eighteen years ago today. The MCU is old enough to vote.

The Buffy RPG history

Rascal looks at the history of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer RPG, some of which I heard through the same recent source but some also news to me.

Thanks to David Chapman. “As someone who worked for Eden, and worked on the Buffy RPG, there is a heap of info in the article even I didn't know. Really fantastic read.” And to Gar Hanrahan for reupping the link.