Early Man

Nick Park’s Early Man is in cinemas today. Yay!

The Doomsday Clock

We now sit at two minutes to midnight. Think about what you can do in two minutes.

Orun

New Agenda Publishing have announced their first game, Orun, “a space opera set in the post-Apotheosis.” Sentient species have come together to ascend beyond the physical - but something’s gone wrong, and it’s up to the players’ characters to find out what.

Dialogue saved for later

“How bad is it?”
“It’s bad. They don’t even imagine we can stop them.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

The creative adult is the child who has survived.
Ursula K. Le Guin

Like many, I found Le Guin’s Earthsea books in a school library, in unassuming little paperbacks. I read the original trilogy in a week.

Naming your superhero team

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not great at naming superhero teams.

I often get stuck trying to find something alliterative, even though that’s actually not that common. For US city or regional teams, which superhero games often involve, the logical comparison would be in sports, and the NFL has just four alliterative teams out of thirty-two. More than one in twenty-six, but still not that common. (Only one, the Buffalo Bills, came from the AFL, fact fans. And the XFL had zero out of eight. The World League had four out of seventeen, however, counting either how the New York Knights sound or the Cologne Centurions read.)

Sense Of Right Alliance is an... interesting team but their name is not particularly thematic. Shrek isn’t a particularly righteous guy.

Maybe there just aren’t that many good names out there. It’s why I have stuff about two different properties called the Avengers.

Anti-trope fantasy adventure hooks

As part of RPG.net’s new Creative Open subforum, 101 adventure hooks based on turning D&D standards on their heads.

My own contributions are fairly mild as twists go. Multiple competing parties raiding a newly-opened dungeon would be a smallish change. Although the party moving to stop an evil wizard building a dungeon would be more different.

Coming soon:

Anarchs or Unbound, depending if I run V20 or Requiem Second.

Vampires at the bottom of the ladder, and the people they have more in common with than their supposed peers.

Now to choose a theme song.

I'm in the business of misery

After seeing Paramore I swing back to wanting to run Buffy. (And not just because of the woman with pink hair in the traditional Misery Business singalong.)

January possible GMing update

Games start again tomorrow. I will be there, assuming I can get back from Glasgow after seeing Paramore tonight. (Which in turn assumes I can get to Glasgow tonight. The forecast suggests there may be snow early on.) But I have no particular GMing plans.

I do have Star Wars D6 and Vampire: The Masquerade character sheets ready to go, though. Sure I had Buffy sheets somewhere too...

And one-shots ready to go, though it looks like GEAS isn’t doing them this term.

The Star Wars one-shot is breaking into a giant prison ship...

Supernatural's first list of plot hooks

Ahead of the latest attempt at a spinoff, the creator of Supernatural posted the list of plot hooks he started with thirteen years ago. Some are even still unused! So if you need a random list of urban fantasy or horror ideas...

They never did the Winchester Mystery House?

Pegg! Frost! Ghosts! TV!

Truth Seekers!

If it happens I am so very down for this.

ArtStation goes Beneath The Waves

SF, fantasy and some horror art for aquatic environments, equipment, characters and creatures.

Ever used a random object as a toy spaceship?

Freelance artist Eric Geusz takes that tendency one step further. I first saw his can opener carrier in the ILM ArtStation Star Wars challenge, and he also draws and paints spaceships that aren’t based on household objects among other cool things.

Dystopia Rising Evolution open call

Dystopia Rising Evolution Needs YOU!

JJ Abrams' Demimonde

Demimonde, a new SF series from JJ Abrams, in the offering pilot script to broadcasters phase. About:

a family - consisting of a mother who works as a scientist, her husband and their young daughter - who all get into a terrible car crash. After the mother winds up in a coma, her daughter begins digging through her experiments in the basement and winds up transporting to another land amid a world’s battle against a monstrous, oppressive force. Her father then follows her into this new world.

Portal SF or portal fantasy? (Fantasy suggested by another land rather than another world.)

Could be fun!

Since it sounds like Abrams wrote the first episode, I would expect mystery, but considering his last couple jobs I would also expect space and monsters and such. The father-daughter dynamic is an interesting choice too.

From the description, the show I’d create would be a lot like Joel and Ellie from The Last Of Us thrown into FarScape instead of a zombie apocalypse. Fairly light-hearted familial bickering in a spaceship. The feel depends on the daughter’s age and her and her parents’ casting, of course - a college-age-plus daughter and an older mentor-y dad would play differently again.

The boardgame renaissance has really arrived...

... because people are making and selling counterfeit boardgames. An unwitting buyer compares fake and real copies of Pandemic Legacy. Given that bootleg toys are often made with substandard and unsafe materials, this is a rather worrying development.

Thanks to Steve Dee for the link.

Trinity and Æon art

Three more pieces in the Onyx Path Monday Meeting post. The top piece is from Æon, showing the Æsculapian Order in action. The next pieces are from the Trinity core, and the first is called Planning A Heist, and I may have squeed audibly.

Star Wars matters

It’s been said before, but it does.

When I was a kid we had Star Wars wallpaper. Just now, thanks to Kiersten White on Twitter, I saw a link to a kids’ bedspread set with Rey wielding her lightsaber, Poe running with BB-8, and Finn with Rose, and I got a bit happy cry. These will be kids’ heroes growing up.

Time for new games...?

GEAS starts again next week. That feels a week late, but never mind. No idea what to do really, if anything.

I seem to be thinking a lot about superheroes, though. The revival of a Marvel SAGA game from many years back may have spurred that. Probably back to the ICONS idea where the PCs are the Big Team and the rest of the universe follows.

I also kind of want to do another Vampire game, after the last one went... away from my idea. And Buffy for the same reason.