The Watch House

Tuesday, 7 June 2022

World Of Darkness, Source Of Light

A feature on By Night Studios blog for Pride, How the World of Darkness has been a Source of Light.

What We Do In The Shadows season 4 trailer

What We Do In The Shadows season 4 trailer (which may give away the resolution of how season 3 ended) along with news confirming 5 and 6.

Monday, 6 June 2022

A vote of no confidence is never a good sign for the voted-at no matter how well they do in it. Which is nice.

Also on Geeked Week

Wednesday, more of Locke & Key and Shadow And Bone, and two different spooky series from Guillermo del Toro and Mike Flanagan.

The Sandman, August 5th

The Sandman on Netflix, with trailer and Geeked Week talk. This could work.

Disney's Strange World trailer

Strange World, a new CG animated feature from Disney and co-directors Don Hall and writer Qui Nguyen, about visiting a... strange world. While the title gives very very little away about how it’s going to go, the retro-pulpy intro has my attention. A little more at Tor.com.

Thanks to King Snarf on RPGnet for the link.

Sunday, 5 June 2022

V5 Orphans visual references

Setting and characters

Spider-Man at 60

Amazing Fantasy 15 came out on this day in 1962, featuring the first appearance of Spider-Man.

One of the first superheroes I knew through the 70s TV series and UK reprint comics. One of the first I have sums him up perfectly, a reprint of Amazing Spider-Man 205 which opens with him staking out a museum in the winter after breaking a window to get in - shivering and joking about catching a cold.

Canon in crossovers

The Queen is canon for James Bond and Paddington, but it does not follow that James Bond and Paddington are canon to each other.

That's the Chicago way

Rewatching The Untouchables for its 35th anniversary... and I may just have an idea for Hunter: The Reckoning.

Saturday, 4 June 2022

The Rookery at Cymera

Inside The Rookery talks writing and GMing at Cymera. I can be heard laughing and clapping.

Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan at 40

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is much admired in retrospect, but The Wrath Of Khan was loved from the outset.

The Next Generation owed more to TMP (from the reuse of the theme music to the two-tone outfits) but Khan was what made Star Trek viable in the 80s.

And for me, the FASA RPG adventures set in this era were important as well - even if the adventure supplements generally ran at more of a TOS speed and planet-of-the-week mode, and we moved on to the then-current TNG era quickly even though FASA lost the licence soon after. But part of me still wants big movie Trek, literary references, and a nice jacket.

Friday, 3 June 2022

The Platinum Jubilee

Nice for her, obviously.

Thursday, 2 June 2022

Note

If you see beacons being lit across the UK tonight, it’s a jubilee thing, Gondor is not calling for aid.

Playing The Untouchables

As noted above, The Untouchables always makes me want to run something in the Prohibition era.

As I mentioned around the end of Peaky Blinders, there have been dedicated RPGs for this at least as far back as GangBusters first edition in 1982 which had rules for playing both sides, as well as reporters and private eyes.

Of course the main 20s-30s RPG has always been Call Of Cthulhu but it doesn’t cover this side of the era, and most others are pulps like Adventure!

Non-SFF-ish gangster gaming is more common with miniature skirmish wargames. Like one called The Chicago Way...

(One thing I would have for this is vehicles, having quite a few Lledo Days Gone toy cars which are about 25mm scale. One of these days I’ll actually do something with them.)

And the main Chicago-centric RPG is Vampire: The Masquerade where Capone was one of the city’s NPCs, so I’ve inevitably thought of doing Prohibition-era Vampire as well, with the gangster side being an obvious connection - I made a fake trailer for one using footage from Boardwalk Empire - but a Great Gatsby style high life game could work too.

The Untouchables

A happy half-platinum-jubilee 35th anniversary to the US premiere of The Untouchables (1987), one of my favourite crime movies.

That's the Chicago way.

A heroic take on the story of Eliot Ness and his team taking down Al Capone, inspired by Ness’s posthumously published book punched up by co-author Oscar Fraley and the TV series that followed, so it’s printing the legend of the legend of the legend. (And another series followed, the legend of...)

It made Kevin Costner a star and got Sean Connery a belated Oscar as well as cementing the cinematic version of Capone with Robert de Niro. It’s probably best known for the steps sequence inspired by The Battleship Potemkin. Spoiled here in a pretty fun A. V. Club location tour.

Of course it makes me want to run a game about super-cool Prohibition era agents and gangsters.

But what kind ...?