I rather liked this one, and thought there would be a cool game in there somewhere…

The Twisted World of Oz

Thoughts on Thor, X-men: First Class and Super 8 below.

Thor (7/10)

I wasn’t expecting to like this, but I found it oddly endearing.  Thor was a douche, but the humor of him on Earth was fun. I did find it a little hard to swallow that he’d go from utterly self-absorbed to world class hero in one day, but that’s the movies for you. I also found the romance utterly unbelievable.

X-Men: First Class (8.5/10)

I love the X-Men. For some reason mutant superheros have always appealed. It was great to see the franchise back on form. I liked the setting of the 60s and thought that the acting chops on display was very impressive for such a big budget franchise. James McAvoy as Charles Xavier is just great. A really solid and enjoyable X-Men movie, and loved the chemistry between Charles and Erik.

Super 8 (7.5/10)

I didn’t really know anything about this before I went in, which I think is a good thing. It’s a fun story of kids and aliens. I can see the homage to E.T. though thankfully this was much darker and a whole lot less sickly sweet. Also made me want to run a game with kids as the main characters.

I’m hoping to see Green Lantern soon, so will give some brief impressions when I do.

In June of 1832, the 57 Irish migrant workers arrived at the docks of Philadelphia. Their job was to lance a flat path for the track through steep, hilly terrain. In railroad parlance, this is known as a ‘cut’ and thereafter that stretch of track would be known as Duffy’s Cut. Six weeks later, they would all be dead. History would blame cholera for their deaths, but history is always written by the winners, and the winners—in this case the railroad company and the landed gentry of Chester County—would be best served by such an explanation. But in fact there is a lot about the historical record that doesn’t add up.

It’s a really interesting article of cover up, death, big business exploiting the workers and people doing each other over for profit. Not to mention ghosts. Lots and lots of ghosts.

A nice atmospheric quote from the full article.

A dark shadow looms over the valley at Duffy’s Cut, dubbed Dead Horse Hollow because the carcasses of dead horses were allegedly dumped there back in the day. Some say it’s cursed, other say it’s haunted. But for the 178 years since the 57 Irishmen died there, the valley has remained untouched by development or, for that matter, any manifestation of modernity.

Something tells me I’ll be using this in a one off at some point.

Read the full article over at the Philadelphia Weekly.

Last night the mystery project was revealedto be a new web series called Dragon Age: Redemption. That’s right, EA/Bioware have asked her to do to Dragon Age what she’s unofficially done to World of War craft. Make it cool and bring it to a different kind of audience. Details are a little thin on the ground but USA Today had the scoop and also did a nice little Gamer Profile on Day.

She has also blogged a little about the project, but no doubt the best place to get more info as it happens is to follow @FeliciaDay on twitter. She tweets a lot.

So info dump aside, what do I think? I think this is super cool. I’m not a huge Guild fan, but think that it’s pretty impressive that it’s been going for 4 whole seasons, and was bank rolled for the first season by fan donations. Day also then managed to keep total creative control when she signed a distribution deal with Microsoft. Also Felicia Day is a real gamer, she plays games, loves games and understands why the rest of us do. A quick quote from the USA Today article:

A life-long game player, Day is fully aware they have a poor track record when it comes to adaptation. “I am an organic gamer and I love games, and I particularly love this franchise,” she says. “I put every single effort into making this something that gamers will be proud of. Even though we were constrained a lot as a Web series, none of the people who were involved took that as a constraint. They took that as a challenge.”

So yeah, I look forward to seeing this when it comes out. I doubt it will be at the same time as Dragon Age 2, but hopefully not too long after.

It was meant to be part of a series, The Slayer Chronicles, but I haven’t quite got round to writing the others yet.

No editors cast their eyes over this one, and it’s basically the spruced up game notes so if you see any glaring errors please let me know!

Enjoy!

It’s set up is pretty simple. You get 5 people in a room (sense of humor and ability to poke fun essential). One person will GM the other 4 will be two groups of best friends, one supernatural and the other human. Add a large dash of angsty teenage romance, shake vigorously and serve.

It’s important to note that you don’t actually need to have read the source material to get this game. Watched Buffy and seen the drama of Buffy’s relationship with Angel, or Willow’s with Oz? Ever heard of this small book series called Twilight? Then you’ll get the game. Find your inner teen, ramp them up 10 fold and make them as self obsessed as possible and you’ll be all good. The author obviously does know the source material well though, so if you want to get in the right frame of mind check out the Recommended Reading and Recommended Viewing section of the Appendix.

SKMTFM is elegant in it’s simplicity, which is actually really refreshing in a pick up game. Many other games I’ve read that are meant to be easy to just jump into generally aren’t and get bogged down by too many rules and game design discussion. It’s a small book (40 pages), but covers everything you need to know about running the game, hand outs and character sheets. There is even an intro scenario to help you out if you find the idea of making it all up on the fly a bit daunting. It’s also been very well designed, which is a plus.

I would recommend going through the whole process though, as that is a large part of the fun. Deciding on your supernaturals, who the characters are and what their secret agendas are is hugely entertaining. I’ve played it three times, twice as the supernatural love interest (a goddess of fire and a were-panther) and once as the human best friend.

Over all this is a hugely fun game for when you have players not show up, you need a break from killing orcs or want to run something at a convention. If this sounds like you then pop over to Lulu or RPGNow and grab a copy!

(Disclaimer: I know the author well, game with her regularly and was given a review copy of the game.)

This quote from the article sums up a number of feelings I have on the matter quite well.

Over the same period, the fashion of literary fiction writers borrowing ideas from SF has continued. Putting aside concerns that novels such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go lag more than two decades behind in their treatment of cloning and genetics, for the Booker judges to consider SF ideas when recycled by literary authors, but to ignore the source of those ideas, only highlights the narrowness of the award’s perspective.

Well worth a read if you have a few minutes, not to mention that it has a very good list of forward thinking speculative fiction books that people should read.

Is speculative fiction poised to break into the literary canon? – The Guardian, Wednesday February 2nd 2011

I say rashly because at the time I had played in exactly 3 LARPs, one of which was an experience I really didn’t enjoy. However it seemed like a challange and I liked the theme, so I said what the hell!

Al Shir-Ma, as we named our 1001 Arabian Nights themed game, ended up being an interweaving tale of magic, loss, revenge and forgiveness for 66 players. Big themes for a 3 hour game, but judging from some of the write ups I’ve read people seemed to not only get it but have a great time. Though I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t really been searching out creative criticism. It’s still a bit close.

I could go into detail about what the year was like, but I think that Dale (one of my co-writers) says it as well as I ever could. Suffice to say that I am hugely thankful that the two people who were on this journey with me. Dale and Ellen just got it. There were times when ideas didn’t quite work but we managed to work through it all, and I’m hugely proud of what we achieved.

Normally in my KapCon write ups I go into detail about the other games I ran or was in, but to be honest everything else paled in comparison to running the LARP. I spent countless hours thinking, writing, meeting, talking and emailing about this game. I dreamt about it. I stayed up till 1am rewriting a whole faction after one meeting because I couldn’t let it go. Dale said it became my baby, and it’s a good analogy because after 9 months or so, it came to life in a blinged up Wellington High School.

So I all I really need to say is thank you. Thanks to everyone who played, thanks to Dale and Ellen for the crazy ride and for making me a better writer. Thanks to Bryn and Jackie and Scott for their awesome set dressing help. Thanks to KapCon for existing.

Next year though, I think I’m just going to turn up and play.

My fellow GMs and I looking exhausted.

As soon as I have a computer which isn’t a netbook running Ubuntu I’ll be heading to GoG and spending way too much money on games almost 20 years old.