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Fantastic Fest 2011 Day Five

Posted on October 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

Whew, only halfway done and it’s already fading into the past, I need to pick up the pace.

Fantastic Fest 2011! Day five! Monday! Most of the filmmakers bail out, and it’s second screening time for the hot tickets.

Two Eyes Staring (8/10) – A little Dutch film about a little Dutch girl in a little Dutch house! (Well, Belgian, but that’s where we’d go to the grocery when we lived in Holland). Two Eyes Staring is a horror thriller, in which nine-year-old Lisa and her mom and dad move back to the ancestral home, and odd secrets start coming out… Like about her mom’s twin – did she kill her? Is she haunting the cellar? Does the mom not want Lisa? Are bad things about to happen? Yep!

I probably can’t give this movie a “fair” review. I lived in Holland for three years when I was young, I have a nine-year-old girl, and her mom, my ex, was a little on the haunted past/self centered side. So this movie landed right in my wheelhouse. It has a very slow build, but the twists are effective. I liked the interaction between the mom, dad, and kid – of course things don’t just go from zero to blow-up immediately, that’s how families work – and when weird/mildly bad things happen, you usually just have to live with it.

It’s not Paranormal Activity and doesn’t try to be; the horror elements are there but definitely made subsidiary to the family drama. To be fair, this is probably a 6/10 to those who haven’t lived in Holland and don’t have a little girl this age. But I do, so I guess I’m the target market!  Woot!

The Squad (2/10) – Okay, the previous movie proves that I don’t mind a slow pace. But The Squad totally sucked.

I was ready for some military horror.  I like me some military horror. After 10 minutes of film council logos, we open on a Columbian commando squad.

In fact, let me stop there.  A couple of the South American movies did this, but I’m going to complain about it here because this was the worst one.  What is up with the fricking logofest at the start of the movie?   OK, in some American movies you get a couple – Lionsgate!  Brought to you by Whoever! Produciton company! OK, fine, up to three I will tolerate. But these South Americans just run screen of logo after screen of logo.  Audience members started laughing after the same goddamn film council’s logo came up for the third time (no, seriously)!  Note to Columbia, Argentina, etc. – that shit has to stop. It’s like how your military strongmen have chests full of 200 bizarre medals – it makes you come across as corny, not cool.  FYI.

Now back to the sucking. This squad clearly has the military discipline of your average Boy Scout troop; they’re all violating orders and running out where they can get wounded within two minutes. They take over an empty abandoned base (apparently sending a squad of guys in by foot is the only way anyone gets in or out of this giant installation that clearly took heavy equipment to build) and they start to think oh maybe it’s witches or something, then they turn on each other. None of the actors are charismatic and the narrative doesn’t settle on any as a main character you can latch onto.The setting is awful, it’s mud + fog 90% of the time and the other 10% it’s unremarkable prefab buildings. The cinematography is dark and muddy and jerky. The characters are all goons; you’d think a Columbian death squad would have one intact pair of cojones amongst the lot of them, but it’s not to be. There’s just nothing good I could grab a hold of and say “Yes, but at least the.. characters, scenery, military tactics, cinematography, sound work… was good…”  In the end there is no tension, no release, no twist.  The ten minute MRE distribution scene was the most memorable, in retrospect. And it wasn’t good.

This movie is kinda like The Thing, without a Thing, and without Kurt Russell, and without John Carpenter directing. So it sucked is what I’m saying.

A Boy And His Samurai (9/10) – I was demoralized after The Squad, lucky I was about to be rescued by Yoshihiro Nakamura!  Nakamura-san’s movie Fish Story was my favorite of Fantastic Fest 2009, and I really liked Golden Slumber from Fantastic Fest 2010. So I couldn’t help but go see his latest at FF2011.It’s based on a manga, apparently.

A Boy And His Samurai is a family comedy. A kid and his barely-coping single mom run across a samurai who got zapped into modern day by praying at a Buddhist shrine. Now he has no idea what to do.  They take him in and he becomes a domestic ninja, so to speak. It’s funny and tender, and there’s conflict stemming from expected gender roles (without stupid Mr. Mom kinds of jokes). Even near the end, when the “young punks” scene jumps the shark a little bit, it’s a fun movie. And they’re not afraid to use the little kid to tug your heartstrings.

I described the movie to my daughter and she asked me who the “bad guy” was. That took me aback. I realized there usually has to be some bad guy or at least opposing foil in similar American movies to create tension.  But not in this case, everyone’s pretty much of good heart, and it highlights how even normal people trying to do the right thing are brought into conflict by the nature of the world.

Anyway, this just solidifies Nakamura in my mind as being a god of movies. I’ve seen one a year and every time they leave me moved and thankful. I can’t wait to watch this one with my daughter, once it’s released in some form!

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (7/10) – This Brazilian movie reminded me of District B-13 in that you can’t miss that’s a sequel. I’ve never seen the original, and it became obvious that it would provide some more perspective on the plot and relation to the characters that they don’t bother to provide you with inside this one.  Once you get over that, it’s a reasonably engaging criminals vs police vs the system tale (again, very District B13-like). There’s some great scenery and music, since it’s set in Brazil.

Whew, only three more days to go, but plenty more good movies!

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Making Wilderness Travel Matter

Posted on October 15, 2011 | 5 comments

I wrote up such a long answer to this question on RPG Stack Exchange I figured I’d repurpose it into a proper blog post about how I use overland travel through the wilderness in my D&D games!

Wilderness Travel Is Awesome!

Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it. ~Don Williams, Jr.

Far from being something to “skip over,” wilderness travel is an interesting part of a story and forms a large part of many narratives, from Lord of the Rings to Star Trek to many Cormac McCarthy novels. Hell, about 70% of the Song of Ice and Fire series falls into the category of overland travel/wilderness survival. People who contend travel is not “interesting” or “heroic” need to read a fricking book.

From the 1e Wilderness Survival Guide to the more specialized 3e books like Stormwrack and Sandstorm, there is a lot of material to draw on in order to make wilderness travel more arduous and interesting.

For inspiration, I like reading historical travel narratives – ones that go through the jungles of Africa are especially juicy when it comes to ideas of how the landscape can terrorize the unwary traveler. Just this year I’ve read the Horatio Hornblower series (sea travel, fictional but good), some Thor Heyerdahl, Lost City of Z, Into Africa, and various other travel writing.

So what do I put into wilderness travel to serve both realism (wilderness travel is an arduous enterprise) and the game (serve the story and characters)?

Weather

The rain falls upon the just/And also on the unjust fellas/But mostly it falls upon the just/Cause the unjust have the just’s umbrellas ~Cormac McCarthy

It’s simple, but get a random weather table and generate weather each day. (Obvious corollary – have seasons!) Climate holds more than enough perils for most wilderness travellers in the real world! In my current piracy-based Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign, there’s a lot of sea travel.  Wind strength and direction can speed them on their way or stop them in their tracks; storms can provide vigorous skill challenges to a ship’s crew! Getting wet, getting cold, getting overheated, getting fatigued all contribute to the wilderness travel feel, and give real bonuses and penalties the PCs can’t ignore in combat. Have a combat in high wind or a rainstorm and apply the rules for it; it’s quite a change of pace! And besides that, it is probably the single biggest addition to the sense of realism, to have variation going on independent of the PCs’ actions and desires. Makes the world seem bigger than you are.

Two tricks here: one, crib random tables (I mash up some from Stormwrack and various 3pp naval supplements); two, use an almanac!  An almanac has day by day weather historically.  Pick a place that you think is representative, choose a random year, and lo and behold… If in your campaign world it’s Fantasy August 5th, and you’re in a place on say a mid northern sea coat, then today the weather is… Quite pleasant, 70’s, no rain, gentle breeze. And for those PCs trying to use their skills to predict the weather, tomorrow’s much the same but with increased winds, perhaps cloudier (visibility goes down).

Survival

My time in the Boy Scouts taught me that Nature has but one goal – to kill you. ~Me

To get along in the wilderness, you need food, water, and gear.  If you’re not familiar with the land, you will end up having to backtrack around (or walk into if you’re really dense) rivers, ravines, animal/monster lairs…  More esoteric threats like quicksand also dot the landscape. Disease is always a threat as well. Insects plague people (and bring more disease) in many different terrains and seasons.

This is a great opportunity for those Survival and relevant skills to come into use.  I prepare lists of “random encounters” that are more mundane than monster stuff and make them (and monster encounters) dependent on Survival checks. Skilled woodsmen don’t walk into an owlbear’s territory or drink too much from water in a cave. Rather than use flat “8% chance of random encounter,” I use a table with mundane and animal and monster stuff and use the PCs’ wilderness survival abilities to see how much they run afoul of it.

Often on long journeys I’ll mix the two – maybe there’s a 1 in 20 chance something bad will happen to a given character per day, but they can bypass it with a relevant check – often Survival, sometimes something else (e.g. one guy rolls a 1, off a list I roll or select “step in gopher hole and wrench leg, 5 foot penalty to movement, Survival DC 10 avoids”).

Getting Lost

Not all those who wander are lost.  ~J.R.R. Tolkien

You also need maps or guides – besides avoiding trouble spots, it’s really quite difficult to find your way across trackless wilderness.  Plenty of people get lost on reasonably well blazed hiking trails in the modern day, and having a map (and a compass, and other stuff) in no way guarantees you can’t get lost. Time for Survival again!

In my pirate campaign, I require a whole lot of navigation rolls to find things, even when on a chart. It’s very not simple. And when you get lost, you run into other stuff, you take more time to get there, you get more wear and tear, you use more provisions (and potentially run out)…

Fatigue

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect. ~Paul Theroux

Wilderness travel is tiring and wearing, and not just to the people, but to gear as well. If they spend a lot of time out in the elements (and especially if they ignore rain, bogs, etc.) then their gear will degrade.

But mainly people get tired.  Some of it is from the elements and disease, above (note that in 3e, a lot of the heat and cold stuff ends up imposing the fatigued condition). I’d consider giving nonlethal damage or even ability score damage from some of the natural threats from the “Survival” section above. “Stinging gnats – Survival DC 15 or 1 point of CHA damage.”

Then, finding safe places to hole up and rest can provide mini-adventures of their own.

Inhabitants

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners.  ~Mason Cooley

Depending on the region, someone or something lives there.  If it’s free of people, it’s probably large herds of animals of various sorts that definitely provide obstacles and threats. But usually it’s people.  Many of these people don’t like visitors and may attack, or demand tribute to pass.  Or they do like them, and insist they come, eat, interact, get hit up for various stuff (and if rejected, get hostile). And you’re a lot more likely to come across inhabitants than just as “wandering monsters” – the more-hospitable points of the terrain you’ll want to travel through, camp in, get fresh water from, etc. will be hot spots for the locals too. And word spreads; if you slaughter/give syphilis to/give loads of money to any given village, the ones nearby will find out quick. Local culture is as much part of the landscape of a trip as the real terrain features, and should be memorable.

I fondly remember the Night Below game I ran where the PCs stayed the night with some friendly gnomes in their burrow. Their elder told them a chilling story about the legendary dark elves, and mentioned that their caverns once extended to below *this very burrow*…  When a dark form broke through the dirt wall of their room that night, the wizard freaked out and Color Sprayed the party fighter into a coma. Of course it was just a puppet on the end of a broomstick being pushed through by giggling gnomes in the next room. I’m pretty sure that the players as well as the characters still have the emotional scars from that session.

Roleplaying

I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.  ~Mark Twain

I still remember the 2e game where the PCs holed up in a rural inn for two days waiting for a big rainstorm to let up; as the stir craziness set in they got up to shenanigans more interesting and memorable than the adventure at hand. Not quite the Donner Party, but getting there.

Travel is often an opportunity to slow the pace and have PCs interact with each other (assuming you’re one of those weirdos that does such things instead of just slaying monsters). Once you hit cities it’s intrigue central; once you hit the dungeon it’s hardcore killing action. It’s during the journey that you can get PCs to take the time to develop themselves by talking with others.

And it’s just gold if there are regular NPCs with the party – this is the time for their personalities to develop, for drama and seduction and all that Real World/Survivor/Insert Your Favorite Reality Show Here kind of stuff.

Combat

Unless you know the mountains and forests, the defiles and impasses, and the lay of the marshes and swamps, you cannot maneuver with an armed force. unless you use local guides, you cannot get the advantage of the land. ~Sun Tzu

If a fight happens, don’t let them forget where they are. In the wilderness, nice level stable footing is the exception not the rule. Maybe it’s raining, maybe they’re on a riverbank, maybe it’s 8 PM and it’s twilight, maybe they’re in a marsh, maybe there’s hanging vines everywhere.  Once it goes all combat encounter, you should under no circumstances have everything morph into a featureless battlemat. If you do not weave the description of the surroundings into your GM descriptions at least once per round, you’re not doing it right.

And keep in mind the locals know the terrain and will use it to their advantage whenever possible when engaging the PCs! There are probably a lot of rules in your relevant core rulebook about terrain that you ignore 99% of the time unless some specially constructed combat uses them – use them routinely.

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RPG Movie Review: The Wild Hunt

Posted on October 12, 2011 | 8 comments

I was bored and looking through Netflix for something to watch, and it recommended to me The Wild Hunt – an independent movie where Canadian LARPers go a little mental. It had won a couple film festival awards, so I figured what the heck.

The setup is that Erik, an Icelander in Canada, heads out to a big ol’ LARP weekend in the woods to try to get his worthless girlfriend back. He’s not a LARPer but his brother is really big into it; Viking heritage, Norse sagas, the whole bit. The whole batch of LARPers are very, very, very serious about it – it almost converts over into cool, actually. You have other movies like Role Models where the people are into LARP but it’s still very cheesy and you’re like “whatever, diversity yay, ponce around all you want,’there’s nothing wrong with that’, but eek.” But here they are all so into it and put a lot of work into it – if you can make LARP seem cool, this movie comes closest to doing it.

It’s a pretty interesting  movie. It starts out weak mainly because of the unsympathetic main characters – Erik is a certifiable wuss, his girlfriend is a bitchy whore, and the initial crop of LARPers you meet are reasonably insane – but evens out its keel once you get to know more of the (better, and more interesting, frankly) secondary characters and they quicken the pace. It’s a low budget thriller set in an isolated setting where romantic hassles etc. end up cascading into Lord of the Flies. The ending is a lot more dark and brutal than I would have expected from the first act. About a third of the way through, I wasn’t sold and wondered if I should bail, but after seeing the whole thing I’d give it a 5/10, decent.

Of course some roleplayers are worried that this will “demonize the hobby.”  To that I say bah, many of the movies/TV shows with killers, they are doctors and lawyers and cops and moviemakers and other such. It should just be a rush to see your own niche thing breeding killers for a change. And it’s not like anyone will actually be afraid of this happening for real; they’re Canadians for God’s sake.  Everyone knows Canadians can’t kill anyone; they don’t have the constitution for it. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

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Campaign Planning

Posted on October 8, 2011 | 3 comments

Game prep is the single largest task of the Game Master in any RPG.  If you want, you can write your own adventures and create your own campaign settings and all that, but regardless of what you construct yourself vs. use from another source, everyone has to prep game sessions.

I thought I’d give some insight into how I plan my campaigns, for those interested in running multi-year kinds of stories.  I try to balance in the sweet spot of “sandbox enough that PCs feel like they can go anywhere and do anything” with “story enough that there is something actually interesting and compelling to go do.”

The overall trick is drawn from the project management world, it’s called horizon planning. Basically, you make rough plans for far in the future so you have a target, and have more specific preparations for more proximate activities.

I tend to separate the timeframes out into campaign, plot arc, adventure, and session.

The Campaign

For the campaign level, at start I decide what I’m interested in and survey the players and come up with a rough idea of what the campaign will look like, and run that by the players to get buy-in.  In our Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign, I pitched a pirate adventure/horror campaign with anime influence that would start out urban as a mix of Riddleport from Second Darkness and Freeport, move on to open seas pirate action, and then to the jungles of the Mwangi and other esoteric locations. The PCs signed off on that and submitted their ideas for cool stuff they’d like to see included, and I know things I’d like to put in. For campaign prep, I basically have all those ideas in a sheaf to draw from.

The Arcs

The three aforementioned legs formed my three potential major campaign arcs or “seasons.” I have a Word doc where I block out an arc and list potential published adventures and other things to include.  It’s high level enough that it doesn’t change much but is very amenable to change when new stuff comes my way either through new content or player action.

The arc I’m in, I plan out the sequence of adventures more. In the first arc, the urban arc, I planned out that I’d use the first Second Darkness adventure, interleaving it with the Freeport Trilogy of adventures, and other stuff. I roughly blocked out, again in Word, what a likely sequencing would be. Some parts are more mandatory, like the culmination of the Freeport trilogy was intended as a significant plot point. Some are completely optional – “if they agree to go with Captain Clap and raid the island, use Mansion of Darkness.”

For example, my season one prep information for Reavers consisted of NPC writeups, handouts, and a list of probable adventures in rough order, like:

  • Water Stop – while the PCs are sailing to Riddleport, they come across some escaped slaves on an island (use Water Stop from En Route II) and a goblin pirate ship (use the Sable Drake from Stormwrack).
  • Cheat the Devil and Steal His Gold – the PCs get to Riddleport and visit the Gold Goblin when a robbery breaks out; use the adventure from Second Darkness “Shadow In The Sky.” Try to get them to join up with Saul.

Of course they may never use one or more of these, or react to them in a way that obviates the adventure – “Escaped slaves? We murder them all and sail off quickly!”

As the game progresses, I more frequently revisit this based on PC action, inserting, deleting, and reordering. “They want to go back to the island from Arm-Ripper? OK, plan that out…” This relies on a little give and take from the PCs.  I don’t want to nail them down, but I like them to tell me what they’re thinking about doing as opposed to them just setting sail and making me guess where they’re heading.  “We turn left and NOW WE’RE AT THE ISLAND AGAIN!  Ha ha ha you’re not prepared.” My players are more than mature enough that doesn’t happen, though of course there’s always the chance when in town or whatnot that they decide to go stir up a major hornet’s nest I don’t have much on.

Handling The Unexpected

This is actually where a lot of the bulk my advance prep takes place. It’s easy to prep for a session you expect, but harder to prep for one you don’t.  I make sure and have a raft of content around. For an urban setting, for example, I might go “light random generation and wing it” like with Vornheim: The Complete City Kit, or have Freeport: The City of Adventure (both versions) around to pull from.  I actually do both, to use depending on my mood.

I have major NPCs pre-statted with contingencies – the main risk is that the PCs will say “that crime lord a-hole has been dogging us long enough, let’s go kick down his door and go all home invasion on him.”

Along those lines – I keep notes from old sessions and keep them around, and expand on them as needed. PCs are unlikely to go toss themselves through the window of a random bar, but they are very likely to do so with a bar they have been in before. I pay attention to throwaway stuff the PCs react well to – like recently, the PCs were trying to sell off some loot and the party halfling made good rolls to find them some perfect buyers. So they went into this little private bar to sell some cold iron weapons and found some very serious looking people with an obvious grudge against all things fae. I just made it up as an explanation for a high rate of return on selling cold iron weapons, but the PCs were intrigued. “We should go look up those racists again! They were cool!” Note to self, write it up and keep it on hand.

The Adventure

A given adventure may span one or less sessions, but more commonly it spans 2-4 sessions depending on its complexity and the PCs. Here, I may use a published adventure or not. I’m not going to say too much about prepping an adventure – if it’s published, I read through it, decide what I want to add, remove, or change, and consider how my PCs will likely react. If coming up with an adventure, you may need as much prepped as you’re comfortable with – if you are a super on the fly guy and you like coming up with whole dungeon complexes off the cuff with nothing but a random monster table, fine – if you need as much detail as a published adventure, write it down. Suffice it to say that you usually have a lot less control as to what part of the adventure the PCs will be doing in a given session, they may go anywhere, so you need near session level detail on the adventure. I tend to use little chunks from published things, write some myself, and fill in the gaps with random generation and improvisation.

The Session

I spend as much time prepping a session as the session takes to play.  Our sessions are usually ~6 hours. Some adventures have more of a timeline and I can prep just the early part as a session; others (like a location-based dungeon) need several sessions worth of prep  up front.

I keep a separate Word doc for each session, which also serves as notes afterwards. It usually spans 2-5 pages, depending on how much of the content is original vs. derived from a published product, and has three sections:

  • Cast of Characters
  • Adventure
  • Notes

Cast of Characters

I list all the relevant NPCs, good and bad, and named monsters that are likely to appear in the session.  If “War2, ship’s carpenter” is enough information I put it inline; for major guys I have a reference – “see Denizens of Freeport p.76” or an attached PDF, often generated from Hero Lab, with the NPC in question.

This is often a large part of the session writeup for me – I do very character driven stuff, and in this campaign the PCs often have NPCs along, have a ship crewed with NPCs, have various major NPCs involved with them or scheming against them. My philosophy is that if you have enough interesting characters, the adventures unfold largely on their own. As an example, here’s a partial list from my Cheat the Devil session prep sheet:

Bojask, Saul’s bodyguard (SS p.39)
Pigsaw, boar (SS p.40)
Lixy Parmenter
Marzielle Ajuela, firey part-time barmaid
Iecha, scullery maid – This lady reminds you of a crazed lunatic. She has almond-shaped eyes the color of fine silver. Her thick, straight, black hair is short and is worn in a bizarre style. She is short and has a busty build. Her skin is china-white. She has a large mouth. Her wardrobe is risque.
Angvar Thestlecrit, wizard robber
Thuvalia Barabbio, one-eyed robber
4 nameless thieves

Many are from the Shadow in the Sky adventure or the Gold Goblin location writeup; I reference or enhance as needed. That Iecha description is pasted from a random generator. I usually generate visual aids, too, with a picture for major NPCs and their name.

Adventure

What’s probably going to happen, or could happen.  I tend to keep this pretty bare bones, and refer out to set-pieces from other adventures or whatnot.  From my Cheat the Devil session, here’s my adventure notes. It has some random things, and then a little info around the likely big fight from Shadow in the Sky.

Wandering Riddleport

  • Meet Samaritha Beldusk at the Cypher Lodge, she can ID the wand the PCs found last adventure.
  • Have people go to the Publican House.
  • Have people go to the House of the Silken Veil.  Shorafa Pamodae, Lavender Lil, and Selene will be here.  Selene is already working there and wants Ox.
  • Use Riddleport random encounters table

Go to the Gold Goblin and run Cheat the Devil, Take his Gold SS p.13

Robbery! SS p.16
Angvar: “All right, everybody be cool, this is a robbery!”
Thuvalia: “Any of you fucking pricks move, and I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of ya!”
Blunderbuss 500 gp 1d12 3d6 19-20/x2 15 ft. 8 lbs. B and P

If they fight off the robbers, Saul asks them to join!  Gives them vouchers for a trip to the Silken Veil if they haven’t gone yet.  Run the Goblin, do beast fights, have random trouble.

That’s it. With NPCs and city setting information, that’s more than enough for me. Of course, getting all that stuff together and familiarizing myself with it takes a whole evening.

Notes

Here, I keep the notes from the session.  They are short but keep the important parts – character interactions, places visited, things accomplished…  Here’s an example notes section from the Cheat the Devil session:

  • Wogan went to Kolter’s shop for powder and shot
  • Selene seduced Ox
  • Tommy solicited Lavender Lil
  • Sindawe used in Infamy Point to do a stunt and KO Thuvalia
  • Angvar and Thuvalia were caught alive and have been exiled from Riddleport
  • Sindawe faces Zincher in the Gold Goblin
  • Iecha starts in on Wogan but Ox intervenes, now she’s onto him

Of course, often I’ll prep a whole adventure as one session, and the PCs will only get through part of it.  In that case I commute the unused prep to the next session and add extra prep if I think that’ll be required to fill the session – most things can stand more expansion!

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Fantastic Fest 2011 Day Four

Posted on October 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

Sunday! This was a light day for me, at least movie-wise – for the second  year, my company scheduled its employee appreciation day where they rent out Six Flags Fiesta Texas on a Fantastic Fest day. I have a nine-year-old so I took off the day to take her to the amusement park – but after a day of 105 degree heat, there are still two movie slots to go after her bedtime! Feeling woozy, I attended…

Penumbra (6/10) – In this Argentinian movie, lisping Spanish real estate executive Marga isn’t a nice person, and the promise of easy money keeps her hanging out in an apartment she’s trying to rent while one, then two, then four people are there acting more and more freaky. There is nothing surprising at all about how the story unfolds, but it’s well done and you get to enjoy seeing them uppity wimmen get their comeuppance!

Rabies (7.5/10) – The directors discussed their path towards this, the very first Israeli horror movie! The funny thing is, they don’t understand why it’s the first either. The dialogue goes like this: “We want to make a horror movie!” “Oh, with how bad we have it, who wants to see those bad things? We want escapism!” “But, all our country’s movies are about war and stuff, isn’t that even more depressingly like the horror of our lives than some slasher flick?” “I don’t understand your moon-man language.” I don’t get it, and luckily neither do Navot Pupushado and Aharon Keshales, because they decided “screw it we’re doing it.”

Anyway, man this is a smart and deconstructionist take on a horror movie for the very first horror movie out of a country! I mean, you’d think they’d try to just execute a couple tried and true formulas to prime the pump, but no, this excellent film mixes tense slasher/all-fall-down thrills with “OH SHIT NO YOU DIDN’T” kills as well as nearly Scream-level self referential deconstruction of the horror genre.  Want an example?  Even the film’s title, RABIES, has nothing to do with the film. There’s no zombies or outbreak disease or anything. “We called it that to fuck with people’s expectations,” say the directors. Anyway,this film is more clever and cutting (in all senses of the word!  Ha!  Get it?) than all our current stock of wide-release slasher movies. It is way, way better than “our first one!” has any right to be. Go scary Jew power.

So, a short but fulfilling day. It was impressive – Juan of the Dead was a stellar first Cuban horror movie, and now Rabies is a great first Israeli horror movie. Where’s next, Chad?

 

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RPG Stack Exchange – A Year Later

Posted on October 3, 2011 | 1 comment

If you are familiar with Stack Overflow or the other technical Q&A sites powered by the no-nonsense engine Joel Spolsky came up with, you may want to know that they’re spreading the idea to many other subjects.  RPG Stack Exchange has been in beta for a year and has garnered more than 2000 questions.  Here’s a sampling of the top ten!

  1. Who created the idea of Experience Points?
  2. What tools are useful to organize a GM’s campaign notes?
  3. How many people does it take to steal a Star Destroyer?
  4. What approaches are there to lessen or eliminate reliance upon dice in an RPG?
  5. How do I get my PCs to not be a bunch of murderous cretins?
  6. As a man, how can I roleplay a woman better?
  7. 3d6 vs a d20: What is the effect of a different probability curve?
  8. How do you help players not focus on the rules?
  9. What alternative monsters are there to replace orcs, kobolds, and hobgoblins in low-level encounters?
  10. Playing 4th Ed D&D for the first time, what should I read to avoid holding everyone back?

Go check ’em out – lots of good collected wisdom here. 90% less crap than forum threads!

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Fantastic Fest 2011 Day Three

Posted on October 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

Day Two was solid, so can it get better for Day Three?  Yes it can!

El Narco (8/10) – (aka El Infierno) This movie is about Mexican drug gangs and the way of life they have become south of the border. Being a Texan, this is a topic of interest (the rest of the country appears to pretend there isn’t a war going on a couple hundred feet away from U.S. soil…). It features the alternately hapless and charming Benny coming back to Mexico from the U.S., which turned out to not be the land of milk and honey he’d hoped, to his small home town. The only decent jobs there are basically working for the drug gang, El Reyes del Norte (the Kings of the North). He resists briefly and then goes all in and Scarfaces it up for a while. It’s a great mix of dark comedy and a grim look at the reality of political corruption and dominance of the drug gangs in Mexico. This movie blends the wiseguy movie genre – it owes more than a little to Goodfellas – with the narco movie genre. Did you know there’s a whole genre of movies, the “narcopeliculas,”  paid for by the Mexican drug gangs to basically laud themselves?  And a whole genre of “narcocorrido” music that does the same? That’s how fucked up it is in Mexico right now. It’s gone beyond the “Boyz N The Hood” kind of gang as mini-society within a larger society, the narco gangs have become the larger society. The movie is political at times, but not hamhandedly so. You should see this movie.

Melancholia (8/10) – Kirsten Dunst plays a depressed rich white member of a very rich white family. This was like the whitest movie ever, it reminds me very much of some friends who are from a rich ex-British family in Maine. Anyway, the movie is appropriately named – it is like taking a little bottle of concentrated depression and drinking it. The Earth is destroyed in the first five minutes, and it’s all downhill from there. Director Lars von Trier of Antichrist fame brings the story of the Earth’s last days to us from the perspectives of two sisters played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Dunst puts in an AWESOME performance. I’ve been with some depressed women before, and OMG she totally nails it. The family interaction is great too, with the frustration of people who have a loved one with depression.  “Can’t you be happy, or at least not self destructive, for like ten minutes? It’s your wedding!” Seriously, this movie is super depressing, don’t see it if you’re not emotionally OK with that. I recommended it to some friends from Louisiana at the fest and afterwards they staggered out, eyes red, uttering profanity-laced outbursts about how it was “SO SAD!!!!!”

You Said What? (6/10) – Ah, those wacky Norwegians.  They took the premise of Takashi Miike’s Audition (a fake audition for a nonexistent movie to find women) and then it goes all romantic comedy as Glenn, the lad in question, can’t come clean and so puts together a whole film production to woo his beloved. Funny and enjoyable, largely predictable.  Good but nothing to write home about. They use a lot of late 80s/early 90s “Say Anything” kind of songs, which was kinda fun.

Knuckle (9/10) – The only documentary of the fest, Knuckle is a gripping documentary about the Irish Travellers (the Irish equivalent of gypsies). Ian Palmer spent 10 years with them filming them to make this film. The crux of the film revolves around ongoing feuds between Traveller families – in this case the Quinn McDonaghs, the Joyces, and the Nevins – whose grievances are settled by bare knuckle fights between selected fighters from each side, with only KO or surrender deciding the matter. James Quinn McDonagh, the champion of his family and one of the main subjects of the documentary, was in attendance at the fest, and we got some great insights out of him (especially about the time he got shot, which is mentioned only parenthetically in the film). It was hard for Palmer because the Travellers are generally quite insular and distrustful of outsiders, but he got some great stuff. The whole thing was fascinating – the generations worth of grudge over nothing anyone can articulate, the insistence on fair play in the fights, the pooling of family money to bet on the outcome, the role of video (a lot of the bad feelings were stirred up by families sending taunting VHS tapes to each other back in the day), to the ubiquity of kids around participating in the violence. Some fights you see; others had no cameras allowed – you experience them by family members standing by on cell phones (members of the family aren’t allowed at the fights due to risk of riot; the matches are refereed by other third party families). They range from four minutes and one guy’s down to a more than two hour (!!) fight that James Quinn had. It started as a clever scheme to keep bloodshed between the groups to a minimum, to settle differences in a civilized way, but you see (and James remarks upon) how the culture of feud and “fair fighting” ended up feeding on itself and growing to be an obsession. Even the directory noted how he became addicted to the fights and had to pull himself away from it to finish the film. Everyone there was hungry for more on this fascinating topic when it ended. The Q&A with James and the director was packed and went till they kicked us all out.

I stayed for so long in the Knuckle Q&A that I ended up skipping my last show of the day, I had planned to see A Lonely Place To Die  but it was getting late and I wanted to ruminate more on Knuckle, frankly. If you have any opportunity to see it, do so! Looks like it should be available via various channels now/soon…

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Fantastic Fest 2011 Day Two

Posted on October 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

Okay, a light first day got me in the mood for movies, and today I did the full grueling day of five.  Five movies, especially five subtitled and/or demented movies, gets your brain boiling it its own chum, and a week of it… Eek.  That’s why I have only now surfaced with reviews. Anyway, there was some great stuff today, let’s get to it!

The Yellow Sea (7/10) – A Korean crime drama set in a region most of us don’t know exists – a Chinese region between North Korea and Russia where Joseonjok (Chinese citizens of Korean ancestry) live. Ha Jung-Woo plays a guy whose wife runs off to South Korea, and he languishes between gambling debts and alcoholism until a crime boss gives him a chance to pay his debts and go to South Korea as long as he whacks a guy while he’s there. He’s no hardened killer, though, and the people sending him there aren’t exactly being aboveboard with him, so it turns into a bit of a chase thriller as cops and various groups of criminals.  This movie is notable for good acting and for people not being afraid to fuck each other up with hatchets if it’s called for. It went on a little long, but that’s the Koreans for you. Hong-jin Na’s previous movie, Chaser, is available for streaming on Netflix.

Underwater Love (5/10) – When a high school crush comes back as a kappa years later to a decrepit old lady working at a fishery (she’s only 34, but apparently that’s old enough to be continually taunted for being old in Japan), wackiness ensues. The effects are bargain basement, but the movie has a certain charm. There are “musical numbers” that largely involve the cast capering around, however, they only sometimes make a token effort to actually sing the lyrics. Not “good” in the classic sense, but weird enough to be entertaining. The scene where a fishery co-worker seduces the kappa isn’t to be missed, if you ever wondered what a kappa’s junk looks like that is.

The Corridor (8/10) – I was surprised by this film. I expected a low budget Evil Dead or cabin slasher knockoff. But it was cleverly set up and the effects were startlingly good! Basically some childhood friends reunite in a cabin; one of them (Tyler) had a breakdown, attacked them, and was institutionalized years before, but he’s out and his mom, who was a surrogate mom to them all, has died and they’re gathering to spread her ashes, have a wake, and hang out. There’s a fun twist and interesting mythology. It has some personal relevance to me, we had a kid in our Boy Scout troop who went away to the funny farm for a while and then came back. We liked the guy, seemed like a gentle soul. He ended up chopping up a neighbor in Pennsylvania and hanging himself in the police van. Whaddya gonna do.

Juan of the Dead (9/10) – A Cuban indie zombie comedy.  I shit you not. Again I had low expectations, figuring it’d be a Shaun of the Dead knockoff in Spanish, but it was really, really good. It was filmed all over the place in Havana, a beautiful city most of us have never seen. It captured the Cuban way of life beautifully. Even more remarkable is how the director Alexander Brugues turned in such an amazing initial film – he described how there’s no movies like this in Cuba, and he learned about them and film-making in general from the hellishly slow monitored Internet connection out of Cuba. By all rights the movie shouldn’t be as good as it is, and it’s a lot of fun – really funny, but with some good zombie-killin’ action (ever seen 300 zombies decapitated at once?  Well now you have!). Brugues explained a lot of the (non-zombie related) shenanigans of the titular Juan are based directly on his brother, which made it even more funny. Even he is not sure how the Cuban film board approved his movie; his theory is that they read the script and decided he was a crackpot with no chance of ever finishing the movie, so why not play the good guy and say yes? Not just a zom-com, this skillfully done film provides a rare glimpse into modern Cuba – not just the settings but also the people. It’s as good as, but very different from, Shaun of the Dead – if you liked Shaun, however, you won’t be disappointed in Juan! I had a Cuban expat roommate in college and have a friend at work that goes to Cuba on relief trips regularly, I can’t wait for them to both see this.

Zombie (7/10) – Lucio Fulci’s best known classic. After seeing the restoration work on House By The Cemetery the previous day, I decided to see this – I’ve seen it a couple times and it’s a good zombie movie marred only by the darn muddiness, crap color, bad sound, etc. that the current print has. It didn’t disappoint, the movie is now beautiful, and the eyeball piercing has never been more vivid. Watching some of these old movies can be a chore in their current form and these kinds of re-masterings really breathe some unlife back into them. You can get the DVD of the old version on Netflix.

Day Two didn’t disappoint.  So far my biggest take-aways are the Korean thriller Haunters from day one and Juan of the Dead and The Corridor from today. But there’s much more movie goodness to come!

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Fantastic Fest 2011 Day One

Posted on October 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

I was way too busy watching movies over the last week to blog about it, but now I’ll catch up!  I saw lots of great genre stuff at Fantastic Fest.

Having a VIP badge this year means that I didn’t have to get up super early to go wait in lines – plus, they got their Web ticketing system mostly working this year. So I got a lot more sleep than usual!

Let The Bullets Fly (6/10) – I wanted to kick off the festival easy with something I was pretty sure I’d like, and you can’t go wrong with Chow Yun Fat! In this 1920s era Chinese film, bandit “Pocky” Zhang moves into a town pretending to be its new governor, and is immediately set at odds with the local crime boss, played by Chow Yun Fat. This movie was funny, and the humor was actually more subtle than the average Hong Kong movie (where smacking someone with a big fish is often considered the most subtle form of humor). There really wasn’t much action though, so if you are really hoping to see the bullets fly, this isn’t that kind of film. And it had some pacing problems.  But, it was fun.

Helpful note – the hand sign we consider to be “hang loose” here in the US is Chinese for “Six.” So when you see the big carved wood “hang loose” sign and wonder WTF is up withit, that’s the deal.

Haunters (8/10) – Like a Korean take on Unbreakable, this was my favorite of the day. In an otherwise normal modern day Korea, there’s a guy who can control people just by looking at them, and he misuses his power for, you know, petty theft and thrill killing. But then he comes across our hero, an everyday worker who is immune to the control power. Conflict results! One of the most notable things about this movie was the diversity – the hero’s two friends are from Ghana and Turkey and in an early “working at the junkyard” scene there’s a lineup of workers and only like one or two of them are Asian. It was actually shocking; in general Asian movies largely pretend other ethnicities don’t exist, or at most throw in a couple evil white guys, so that was really remarkable. The Koreans are turning out some great thrillers nowadays and this was taut throughout, and the lead, Koo So, really sustained the story’s sometimes contrived spots with his performance. Warning, there’s only arguably a brief appearance from anything  you might consider a “haunt,” this is not a horror movie.

Polvora Negra (5/10) – “Black Powder” is a Brazilian revenge story somewhat similar to El Mariachi – Carlos is shot and left for dead and later comes back to wipe out a complex nest of backbiting crime figures in a small Brazilian town. The cachaça and the blood flow freely, but it is a bit plodding in places, lacking much of a dramatic structure. Has some good scenes and all the characters are interesting, though.

House By The Cemetery (5/10) – While the other three movies today didn’t exactly deliver on their titles full force – the bullets flew only mildly in Let The Bullets Fly, there was a dearth of haunting in Haunters, and though there was some shooting it didn’t really involve black powder in “Polvora Negra,” House By The Cemetery delivers exactly what it says, a house right by a cemetery. This Lucio Fulci classic has been restored in preparation for a blu-ray release. A family moves to a spooky house in New England whose previous occupants killed themselves or otherwise died in mysterious circumstances, and the dad is picking up on the research of the previous owner… And then there’s decapitations and stabbings and the like galore. Complete with imaginary friends and screaming children and creepy dolls. It isn’t a brilliant plot and it is a bit dated, but it’s fun. You can get the DVD of the old version from Netflix.

Day 1 was a success! I didn’t see anything that I just totally fell in love with, but all four movies were decent.  It started late, so only four movies, but no such weakness tomorrow!

Obligatory RPG related note – Haunters was definitely the best movie of the day, and could be good inspiration for a weird modern RPG setting or scenario akin to Mutant City Blues.

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Fantastic Fest 2011 Starts Tomorrow!

Posted on September 21, 2011 | 2 comments

And now for a break from the usual RPG fun – it’s Fantastic Fest time again this year!  FF is a genre movie festival in Austin, with all the zombie and martial arts and slasher and whatever else weird kind of movies they can scare up from around the world.

I’ve attended the last two years as well and it’s become my quite-deserved “me time” annual vacation, and it’s sure full of goodness to mine for gaming! I’ll post blurbs on each film; many of them are either immediately or eventually available here (iTunes has a Fantastic Fest storefront…). Feel free and check out my reviews from previous years.

On the one hand, my buddy Chris from the gaming group isn’t attending this year, he did last year, and it was nice to have a friend with, so that’s sad, but on the other hand I got a VIP badge this year, which will make the festival a good 50% less grueling. For two years I watched movies till 2 AM, drove home, and got my happy ass back out to the theater to line up to get tickets to the movies I wanted that day at like 8 AM.  After a week of that, you need a doctor. With a VIP badge, I just pick them at my leisure while there the day before and just show up for the movies. Whew!  More rest, and I can probably get in 3 or so hours of work a morning during the fest now.

So stay tuned for the weirdness!  I’m kicking tomorrow off with Chow Yun Fat in Let The Bullets Fly, a freaky Korean horror/supers movie Haunters, a Brazilian revenge movie Polvora Negra, and the Lucio Fulci classic House By The Cemetery. Wish me luck!

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 53

Posted on September 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

Fifty-third Session – The A Team rescues the t’sa experimental science vessel the Twelve Clutch from drivespace and boards it.  As expected, it’s all Event Horizon + Pandorum in there, and we lose a crew member to Great Old One-induced insanity/possession!

The session summary tells most of the story. We were 100% prepared for it to be all Event Horizon mixed with Pandorum, so when it was, it wasn’t all that terrifying – blame it on our jaded palates.  Well, with a side of the Wil Wheaton movie The Curse thrown in – you know, the one based on Lovecraft’s The Colour Out Of Space. A blast from the past!

The most notable part of all this was the crew member who pretty much opened themselves up to I’krl possession – we have some leads on some ways to maybe reverse that but mostly it seems like new PC time.

Get caught up with our exploits, we play again today!

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Verge Blades

Posted on September 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

Tonight’s Verge Nightly News Special Report – Verge Blades

by VNN Correspondent Chris K’noot

Over the last 50 years these blades have shown up in ones and twos at Glassmaker dig sites, in the hands of collectors, and on occasion in the possession of criminals. By comparison, Verge law enforcement has seen a flood of appearances of these weapons that started six months ago.  The Verge Alliance Admiralty spokesman, Ori Tactentoff, has repeatedly denied that recent military and covert missions to Mantebron are to blame.  The numbers of these weapons here in the Verge are so great that they have become known as verge blades.

The verge blade comes in two forms.  Both appear to be of ancient Glassmaker origin, seemingly made of glass but far, far stronger.  The rarer and more eagerly sought form is that of an elegantly made dagger complete with blade, guard, and handle.  It is seemingly free of ornamentation, but a lidless eye sigil is visible beneath energy spectrums lethal to carbon life forms. The second form is much more common and estimated to number in the thousands. At first glance it appears to be only a cruel shard of glass. Closer inspection reveals a crude blade and handle. The blade is often only a needle sharp tip. Many have a single or double sided blade.  A few have more than two sharp edges.

The verge blade is a sturdy tool and for those with the necessary skill it is a good weapon.  However, some users have unlocked capabilities beyond the obvious in both blade forms:

Tattooing

The t’sa and some other races who embrace body decoration value the blades for their utility in tattooing. The blade delivers precise cuts much smaller than the blade seems capable of delivering.  It is also capable of “inking” the resulting wound in any color except for royal purple.

Medicine

The blades have proven popular with some members of the medical profession who prefer surgical work using their own hands over robotic devices.  These individuals are eccentrics who cling to the belief that a surgeon can resolve any ailment.  The most prominent example of this group would be Dr. Felicity Barnes, who was arrested on Blue Falls earlier this year for illegal experimental psychiatric surgery.

Crime

Vandalism has been linked to these blades, wherein the user was able to easily cut thru superior materials including dura-crete and even warship grade armor.

B&E criminals have used the blade to cut thru safes and even building walls.  The renowned jewel theft, The Otter, recently turned a criminal dealer of verge blades over to police, declaring, “What will become of sportsmanship and skill when any amateur can steal the crown jewels?  I suspect that common thief, Den Bevaring, owns dozens of these!”

Organized crime has also been found using the blades to “brand” victims as examples to others.

Unfortunately, ordinary citizens have also abused the verge blades to mark those suspected of or caught collaborating with the I’Krl. This sorry tradition originated with the Light House’s Pict Expeditionary Force. From there it spread to the rest of the Verge Alliance military and even law enforcement.  The most common examples of the traitor’s brand are the letters “VC” and a barcode-like pattern used on citizens of the VoidCorp nation.  Prosecution of these criminal acts has been weak, uneven, and largely unsuccessful for obvious reasons.

Lunacy

Serge Roskoloff, aka “Doctor Cannibal,” had a verge blade in his possession when he was arrested onboard the Lighthouse last week by Verge Alliance Adminstrator Haggernak and his officers. Serge’s victims had been dissected with great skill and precision; the sweet meats were missing and assumed consumed.  Police had previously investigated and dismissed Serge as a suspect because he lacked the necessary tools and medical background to accomplish the dissection.  Luckily Ghayth Ahrian, a fraal administrator with an archeology hobby, was re-interviewing suspects and spotted Serge’s verge blade amongst his mother’s glass figurine collection. Court ordered lab tests were forcibly administered revealing human, fraal, and t’sa remains in Serge’s digestive tract.  Lawsuits against Serge’s family restaurant have just begun.

To date the ability to cut through superior substances has only manifested when a verge blade is wielded by individuals with psi abilities, though several instances have been found where the wielder was only a latent.  In addition, these individuals uniformly suffer decreased vitality; their ailments include high blood pressure and intense migraines.  Long term or extreme users also manifest advanced cancers, Dante’s Oblivion Type III, and varying yet intense forms of psychosis.

Serge Roskoloff is the only known individual that appears to have acquired skill or knowledge from a verge blade.  He now posses, even absent his blade, an encyclopedic medical knowledge of human and alien life forms, including those of of the I’krl menace. He claims to have retained his surgical skills, but this remains unproven as suspicious law enforcement officials refuse to give Serge access to the necessary tools and materials. By comparison everyone else using these blades in a professional manner (e.g. medical professionals, tattoo artists, etc…) arrived at their skills thru the timed honored traditions of study and hard work.

When used for violence a verge blade inflicts wounds that result in extravagant scarring. The wounds themselves are no more life threatening than those dealt with similar, mundane weapons.  But the scarring is permanent and beyond the treatment of even advanced plastic surgery techniques.  Doctors using verge blades have also failed to reverse the scarring damage.

Law enforcement and the judiciary in the Verge have been unsuccessful in outlawing verge blades, mostly due to the more pressing demands of the war.  However, Verge Alliance members have declared these blades a restricted item, requiring license to carry and use.  Said licensing is retroactive and immediate for any individual already using a blade in a professional capacity, including armed forces.  Sources within the Admiralty Council claim that a certain Asian admiral demanded the “retroactive and immediate” clause so that his favorite stylist could maintain his signature couture haircut.

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