Stand By Me

That was a very nice touch, one of several in fact, like the sermon and the converted electric Jaguar.

Crusader Kings: The Boardgame

Paradox Interactive has announced a move into boardgames as well as RPGs, with Free League adapting Crusader Kings. It’s a big one - 70 miniatures, 306 tokens, 289 cards, 10 family and 5 dynasty boards as well as the main board. The Kickstarter page includes a link to the rules beta.

Best of luck

Royal Wedding related plot hooks on the Whoblog, from the last one.

Did this just become a LARP?

The Edinburgh International Film Festival screening of Blade plus opening scene style rave seems to have acquired an attached immersive game, with rules and sides and all.

To be in with a chance to take home a replica of Blade’s Sword, you can take part in the venue-wide interactive game, decoding ancient vampire scrolls and Escape Room-style puzzles. Trust no one.

Not my fault, I swear!

This is not helpful.

The new data protection thing just killed the Cubicle 7 forum. So yeah.

WFRP IV design

A look at basic and Dramatic Tests.

Casting by The Watch House, 2018 edition

Yes, that’s William from my Buffy game about young Watchers playing the tweedy English adviser to a group of chosen ones in the reboot of Charmed ten years later. When I typecast, I typecast HARD.

Masquerade violation in the magazine aisle

Hitting on Twitter, flagged up by Justin Achilli and Steve Dee among others, a reminder that we take some very high Weird Level for granted.

Revealed! When Ghost Hunts Go Wrong

Ten O’clock Monster update

... The last blog post is now number three on a Google search for the phrase, behind two different meanings and above one of the articles I was referring to. I may have overestimated its ubiquity.

A few more hits with 10 instead of Ten, but not that many.

Time For The Ten O'clock Monster

I’m really surprised that there doesn’t seem to be a LARP book, blog or podcast called Ten O’clock Monster.

It’s a common phrase which I’ve heard from gamers and seen in MET and Nordic LARP essays and elsewhere, though I wonder where it originated. It’s pretty self-explanatory - something plot-related comes in and possibly starts a fight a little after halfway through a session where not much else is happening. A plot development engineered with NPCs works as well.

It’s something I was thinking about for the Storytellers Vault MET section - a look at ways to use external threats and different options to liven up a slow game. As a tabletop GM I can use Chandler’s Law whenever I like, but LARPs need people to play the guys coming through the door with guns in their hands, and unless the GM’s doing it they’ll need to be briefed ahead of time.

Next, on Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. ...

Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. is go for a half-length sixth season. Having run three and then two mini-seasons in the last two years, they can do this.

The bigger issue may be fallout from Avengers: Infinity War...

And Coulson will be getting a boost when he appears in the (at least partially) 1990s set Captain Marvel.

And now a joke.

Feel the sting

A new favourite detail from rewatching Infinity War:

(Spoiler for about four minutes in...)

A brief glimpse of how my brain works: Universal Of Darkness

Black Chantry revealed the art for a VTES character card and the near black and white palette, the look, the stare and the outfit reminded me of Boris Karloff in the 1932 version of The Mummy. And since the 2017 version of The Mummy was meant to launch the Dark Universe updating the Universal monsters for the present, I wondered about the reverse, a World Of Darkness type game about various monsters in the 1930s.

I’ve set WoD and CofD games in the 30s and 40s before, but leaning on the hardboiled and noir traditions rather than the horror of the time...

No Man's Land 1.04

... will hopefully be next week, after over a month of catching up and some planning where to go next!

Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. 100

People need hope.

Keep the Eurovision spirit alive at the table

A Eurovision Song Contest board game just came out!

But based on the Googlewhack I just got back, nobody has done Eurovision miniatures. Not even Lordi officially, though I did find a few conversions.

World Of Darkness: Eurovision

Since Lordi in 2006 there’s been a Eurovision Song Contest entry pretty much every year about monsters, so Darker Days suggested picking character types live.

So I did.

First rule: don’t say Malkavians for everything.
Second rule: don’t say Daughters Of Cacophony for everything.

And so...

3000 posts in labels

For my 3000th post here, a look back.

The winner by quite some way, perhaps not exactly startlingly, is RPGs with 612 entries.

Next, with 547, is Events. Which covers both the news and things I’ve gone to.

SF gets 484, because I sort of count Star Wars and Star Trek and Doctor Who in there as well as in their own categories. Fantasy gets a mere 370, behind Urban Fantasy at 427 and Horror at 390, and the super-helpful Genres at 159.

Vampire at 473 includes Masquerade, Requiem, and other stuff with vampires in it. The World Of Darkness more specifically gets 384. Chronicles Of Darkness gets 56, though numbers are distorted by Chronicles having also been World until 2015.

Weird Level clocks in at 440, just ahead of TV at 432 and Films at 430, Comics at 300 and Books at 281.

Campaign Development hits 393, ahead of GMing at 285 and Playing at, er, 41.

The biggest particular setting is, shock, Buffy at 266.

Local heroes (China edition)

Marvel has linked up with Chinese tech company NetEase to launch two new superhero series, Warriors Of Three Sovereigns and Cyclone.

Where in the World Of Darkness did that come from?

A year on from the announcement of the Storytellers Vault, idly considering a book for it looking at World Of Darkness inspirational media. It works better for Vampire: The Masquerade than any of the other core games, though, since the Kindred are basically any and all vampire types while the Garou in Werewolf: the Apocalypse aren’t much like pop culture werewolves at all, for example. And starting in the 90s I’d have to start including things influenced by the setting in turn.