Character Creaton: The Hidden Isle

Not "aisle," that sounds like where they keep the naughty stuff at Spencer's. 

The Game: The Hidden Isle
The Publisher: Causa Creations
Degree of Familiarity: None, but I'm thinking of putting it up as a possibility for one of my groups
Books Required: Just the one, but also a Tarot deck, and I have one from the same company that I think is mean to accompany the game

The Hidden Isle is a TTRPG built from a board game, I think, which in turn was meant to be a board game using Tarot. Mechanically, it's card-based (Tarot, specifically), but it looks a sight simpler than a lot of Tarot-based mechanics I've seen. The game structure isn't a million miles from a Forged in the Dark game: discrete phases of game play, characters can accrue trauma until they're not longer viable, stuff like that. But what intrigued me most while I was reading was this:

I really love chargen being a kind of mini-game and I don't think it happens enough. So with that in mind, and no preconceptions about what's to come, let's get to it!

First, I am meant to pick a class and get a sheet for said class. Okies, then. Reading through the brief descriptions, there are a few that resonate. I think I'll keep simple today and go with Hunter.

Next, we look at the Core Self section of the sheet and do stuff to determine the past. I'm going to need "vision" cards, what does that mean again? Oh, OK, the Tarot is split into two decks for this game. The "Pip" deck has all the numbered cards (ace through 10), and the "Vision" deck has everything else (that is, the court cards and the Major Arcana). S'cuse me a moment.

Oh, I love this artwork. Also there are three versions of the Lovers, but I'm meant to just pick one. I'll take the three-way one, I think.

OK, having now shuffled the Vision deck, let us draw a card! The High Priestess. And then I consult the character history table in the book. There are three phrases, and I'm meant to choose one to complete the phrase "as a child, I solved problems by...".

Given that I'm a Hunter, I think I'll go with "bringing peace to the confusion." My character is always looking to even things out, take things down a notch, keep things quiet. 

Now I do the same thing for "As an adult, I survived/flourished by...". My card is...The World. Ooh, "sampling the world's wonders," please. Being a gourmand or a bon vivant isn't where I initially thought this would go, but that's fine.

Next we pick a Burden. I could make one up, but I'm liking the cards. I draw Strength, not normally something one would associate with a Burden. What's the table translate that as? Frantic, Bitter, Inflexible, Wild. Ooh, I like Bitter. Something hurt this guy.

Same thing for Ideal. The Devil! One of the choices is "Relishing," and I like that, but I'm going to tweak slightly and say "Savoring." My character might be a gourmand, but he's not a glutton. 

No Virtue or Vice, those happen in play. Next, I pick two Abilities from my class list. Oh, man, these are all dope as fuck. I want Fearsome, which lets me intimidate people but also lets me push myself for a superhuman physical feat. But I'm really torn between Butcher (which lets me kill mooks, but risk Trauma for doing it), Matchlock (once a session I can say that my pals have set up a rifle for me), and Unstoppable (if I'm really hurt I get bonuses to fight). Given that my character has a world-traveler kind of vibe, I'll take Matchlock. 

Skills! I have three points already filled in (1 Skirmish, 2 Unleash). I get two more inspired by my core self and two more of my choice (see, this is inspired by Blades in the Dark). 

Well, going by my core self, I want Soothe and Finesse. And then for the two that can be anything, I know I want a point of Mingle (I want this guy to be socially adept). Ugh. I really should take some Slip, but I want Convince, too. I'll go with Slip, if my guy is doing social stuff it's going to be with Mingle, I think. That also gives me a rating in all three Cups skills, which gives me bonuses in certain situations. 

If I were an Occultist, Illusionist, or Siphoner, or if it made sense for my guy to have some magic experience, I'd take a proficiency, but I'm not and it doesn't, so I'll skip that. 

Fill in name, appearance, and so forth. Erm, OK. This game is set in the sixteenth century. I picture my character as having grown up in forests, so let's say he's from Romania (that is, Transylvania). We're a century off from Vlad the Impaler's reign, but surely the effects of it are still around. My guy's name is Viorel Baciu. He's in his 30s, and he's groomed and put together, but barely - there's something wild about him that's always threatening to come out. 

Next we decide what brought me to Dioscoria (the titular hidden isle). In Viorel's case, I think he was looking for something new to do and some guy sold him a map, and he found it on his own.

Contacts! I get one from my homeland and one from Discoria. In either case I draw three cards and choose one to represent the contact.

So, first, contact from my homeland: Page of Cups, Queen of Wands, King of Cups. Let's go with Queen of Wands. I know a high-ranking soldier in Wallachia named Lacramiomara (yes, she's a high-ranking female soldier, I don't care if it's ahistorical, there's magic in this setting so it's all different anywho). She and I used to play chess on occasion when I was still at home, and she keeps me abreast of the political situation (which, depending on when in the 16th century we're talking about, is interesting). I think we're good friends, but not more than that, so I'll put in 4 segments on the affection clock (I guess when it strikes midnight we smooch?).

Same thing with the Dioscorian contact: Death, the Magician, Page of Wands. Oh, well, since I don't know much about magic, let's say there's an Illusionist named Danyal here who has taken an interest. Danyal is just so sheltered - he's never been off Dioscoria, and here's Viorel who's been all over and experienced so much... Only one Affection for him (so far). 

And that's it! I dig this, I may have to give it a whirl even if we don't pick it for our next game.

 

D&D: Spider Hunt

Here's last time, into the pit!

Actually our heroes were already in a pit. They'd killed a bunch of spiders and freed a hapless dude from being wrapped up in webs, but were then confronted with a huge man-spider. Figuring that this wasn't a fight they'd win (they were all pretty tapped out as far as health and spells), they turn their attention to escaping. Aisling activates the "daylight" power of her driftglobe, and it fills the room with sunlight! The spider-creature hisses and recoils, and the adventurers take that as a pretty good cue.

They flee up the ropes. Zook fires a bolt from his crossbow, but then drops the crossbow trying to climb. Aisling takes an arrow from the thing's longbow, but everyone manages to get up to the surface without further injury. The man - Padraig - collapses and Dara gives him some root to chew to draw the poison.

Padraig says that he was down by a river to the northeast, fishing, and saw a strange circle of earth - and then the circle flipped open and a giant spider grabbed him and yanked him into the tunnels. It bit him and his muscles seized up, and then the spiders wrapped him up in webbing. But instead of killing him, the man-spider thing forced him to chant. He recites the chant it gave him, but he has no idea what it means, and the adventurers don't either (in fact, they don't even recognize the language). 

They help Padraig back to the Plucked Rose, and hear music and merriment as they approach (Clara: "We're about to change the mood in this place"). The step in and the music stops, and the adventurers are given food and drink as they explain what happened. At the end, Burl stands up and asks what they need - the answer, for now, is "sleep." But in the morning, they're going back. Padraig says there are others still alive down there.

And indeed, in the morning, the adventurers, Burl, and about a dozen other farmers and helpers trek out to the pit. They bring oxen and a wagon, and plenty of rope, so as to quickly haul people up. This time, they decide they'll burn out the webbing before anyone lands at the bottom of the pit. Zook tosses down oil and then throws a firebolt, burning up the webs in the central pit, and the adventurers, Burl, and three other men rappel down. They build fires to give everyone a kind of base camp, and Zook casts a spell to summon a familiar - a spectral spider. He sends it down the tunnels to check for people, since it can run on webs without getting stuck, and finds two people still alive, wrapped in silk. 

It takes some doing to get down to them and cut them free without getting tangled, but the heroes manage. The clear the first couple of tunnels...and then one of the farmers collapses with an arrow in his chest! The heroes spot the man-spider lurking just inside one of the tunnels (outside of the driftglobe's sunlight), and nocking another arrow!

Aisling quickly casts a healing word, saving the farmer's life, and yells for the others to get down. Dara casts a moonbeam in front of the tunnel entrance, singing the monster, while Zook throws scorching rays over Burl's head at it ("Let it blaze all right!" yells Burl). Aisling casts a cloud of daggers behind it, forcing it into the room (and thus the light), and it skitters around the wall to another tunnel. It fires arrows at the adventurers, but doesn't manage to do any serious damage and between the moonbeam (which Dara moves to follow it), Zook's magic missiles, and Aisling's dagger-cloud, the monster is driven back into the dark.

The heroes watch the tunnel as they rescue other people, clearing tunnels until the only one left is the one with the man-spider (they do find more living people, wrapped up and chanting), but they also find a tunnel with nothing but dead people). Zook sends his familiar-spider down the last tunnel, and it briefly has time to see the creature firing an arrow before it dies (rather, vanishes back to its own plane of existence). Zook and Aisling talk about whether to just burn the webbing down the tunnel - they aren't sure if there are live people, though the familiar didn't see any - and don't notice an incoming attack before it's too later. Arrows hit Aisling, and Zook responds with fire.

Aisling heals herself and then goes down the tunnel, trying to get an angle on this thing. She picks the wrong side of the tunnel to hug, however, and the monster jumps out and slashes at her with a sword. But Zook is ready - he flings the last of his magic missiles and they curve around Aisling and slam into the monster, and the Clara wall-runs around the bard and kicks the thing in the head! It falls dead, and they drag it out into the central pit.

They spend some time hauling the bodies of the dead up the pit so that they can be properly buried, and the farmers recognize some by their clothes (their bodies are pretty badly desiccated). They also haul the monster up the pit to examine it, and Dara is horrified to realize that its features are elven - the pointed ears, the slight but strong build. The skin tone is wrong, though. She's used to elves being...well, normal skin colors. This thing is a sickly grey. She does take its longsword and longbow, though - Zook notes that its bow is a mixture of wood and bone, stained black. Also its shirt is made of a material that none of them recognize.

In the end, they all find it strange that they keep running into monsters that no one's ever heard of. Burl points out that they're adventurers, they're supposed to see weird shit, but they all feel this is another level. They decapitate the spider-monster and preserve the head in alcohol to take with them to Cian. Maybe someone there knows something. 

Zook also transcribes the chant as best he can, just in case he can find a way to translate it.

Chill: SAVE Forestry Division

Yesterday we finished up a Chill case. Here's last time.

The envoys are having a tough time of it. Well, two of them are. Britt Lepus and Amelia Rostov are in the hotel bar and asleep, respectively. Someone runs up to Britt and tells her to come along, quickly. Britt, with a sinking feeling, follows. 

Britt is led outside, and sees Nicholas Failor leaning against a wall, shell-shocked. She sees the bodies of Leslie Gaytan and her boyfriend, and a crowd of people around Mercy Williams. There's an argument going on about whether to move her; Britt points out that she'll freeze if they don't, and someone runs to get a stretcher. Britt asks Mercy what happened, but doesn't get much (Mercy is in a lot of pain and has lost a lot of blood). She tries to talk Nicholas down a little, but then just leads him inside and gives him tea. She also texts Amelia and wakes her up.

Mercy is taken to the hotel infirmary and someone on staff with EMT training gives her painkillers and calls for help. The weather has cleared, so a helicopter can land. In the meanwhile, Nicholas focuses enough that he can explain to Britt and Amelia what happened, including that Roger just up and vanished. A life-flight arrives and Mercy is taken off to Seward for medical care, and police arrive shortly thereafter. Amelia gives a statement to the police and lets Nicholas and Britt get some sleep (Nicholas takes a bottle of whiskey to bed with him), since it's going to be a while before they're released.

Nicholas dreams. In his dream, he's walking through a forest, one that feels familiar. He can hear the ocean in the distance. He stops in front of an immense tree, and sees that the bark is moving - it's trying to communicate. He sees the tree's roots stretching out into the soil, wrapping around his ankles. He walks away, but knows that under some condition, the tree could pull him back. 

Some hours later, Amelia wakes them both up and tells them to go and talk to the cops. The envoys tell the truth, for the most part: They came out here to find Roger at Granny Beth's behest, weather conditions or mechanical error forced their plane down, the murders happened, none of them can confirm that Roger was the killer, but it looked like him. An APB has been put out on Roger, and Amelia and the others talk about what happens now.

They still aren't sure to what extent the Unknown is involved. Is Roger possessed? Did the Unknown push him until he snapped? Is that someone wearing a Roger suit? Any of these are possible...but it's also possible that Roger started killing people on his own and the Unknown is just responding to that. Amelia calls Granny Beth and updates her (Granny Beth says that cops are already there looking for Roger). She asks Amelia to try and save Roger if they can, but gives her blessing to do what's necessary. 

The envoys fly back to Seward, and pick up Mercy from the hospital. The stab wound was deep, but didn't hit her kidney or nick an artery (I suspect that it's not entirely realistic for her to be discharged this quickly, but I wanted her player to be involved in the case). They get together at Mercy's apartment and pool what they know, and Nicholas tells them about the dream. They remember that Roger was doing art at Fort McGilvray before all this started, and they look through his photo references and find some shots of a big, imposing-look tree. It's the same one as in the painting in his apartment, in fact.

Mercy does some research, and finds an interesting story from the 1970s: A man named Rupert Sherman robbed a bank in Anchorage and shot two people (a teller and a cop). He was arrested later that day in the parking lot of Fort McGilvray, and while it's not impossible for him to have made that drive, the fact remains that he just disappeared from the area near the bank. Also, reports indicate that there was no reason for him to shoot the teller; she was cooperating. Sherman was executed via the gas chamber, and as he was dying he was heard to scream "bring me back!"

With that as a jumping-off point, Amelia looks into the lore of the area and hits the jackpot. There are stories about evil spirits that live in trees that might offer a deal to a person wandering near them: if they kill someone, they will be instantly transported back to the tree. What happens then depends on the story; in some versions the tree eats them, in others the spirit jumps into their body and rides them around, and in others they just get away with the kill. The stories sometimes depict villagers learning the truth and burning or cutting down the tree, but just as often no one ever figures it out.

Amelia calls Granny Beth to ask if she's heard these stories, and she has: she refers to it as "the mooring tree." The envoys decide they're going to find this tree and kill it, and Granny Beth sends along Kenny and Dave, two brothers who aren't terribly bright but are quite handy and don't ask questions. Nicholas goes out to a logging camp and borrows some gear (chainsaw bibs, chainsaws) and everyone heads to Fort McGilvray.

Mercy, Britt, and Amelia walk along the path, using Roger's photos as reference. They leave Mercy at a picnic table (not wanting her to get too close to the tree, since she's injured). As they approach the tree, Britt's mind wanders to Las Vegas, and the man who summoned up the awful sand ghouls that killed some folks. She idly thinks that she could kill that guy, and maybe...

Amelia notices Britt muttering to herself and uses Disrupt. Britt's thoughts clear, and she explains that the tree doesn't really talk to you, it just puts thoughts into your head. Much more insidious than they realized. Amelia draws a Line of Defense around them while they wait for the boys.

Nicholas, Kenny, and Dave show up, fire up the saws, and cut down the tree. The tree tries to put thoughts into their heads, but Amelia is watchful and protects them. The tree eventually falls with an immense crack, and Nicholas stares into the rings. They move, rhythmically, like the ocean...

The others snap him out of it and they all flee. Roger, they find, has been arrested, but he knows enough to shut up until he talks to a lawyer. The police can't make a case against him for the murders - after all, Leslie Gaytan was killed this morning, the place was locked down, there was no possible way he could have made it back to Seward, which is where he was arrested. The killer, therefore, is assumed to be someone who looked a lot like Roger, and the police continue searching around the resort, but of course find no trace.

Movie #850: Nurse Betty

Nurse Betty is a black comedy starring Renée Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Greg Kinnear, Tia Texada, Aaron Eckhart, Allison Janney, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and Crispin Glover.

Betty (Zellweger) is a waitress with aspirations of going to nursing school, but unfortunately is married to Del, a sleazy used car salesman (Eckhart) who is involved in shadier shit on the side. On Betty's birthday, her plans fall through so she's at home watching A Reason to Love, her favorite soap, starring George McCord (Kinnear) as the handsome doctor David Ravell. Del gets a visit from Charlie (Freeman) and Wesley (Rock), ostensibly here to talk about a car, but actually a pair of hitmen looking for the drugs Del stole. While Betty watches from another room, they torture and murder him, and Betty just kind of breaks.

Believing herself to be "Nurse Betty," David Ravell's former fiancée, she writes Del a "Dear John" letter, packs a suitcase, and sets off across the country to Los Angeles to find him. Charlie and Wesley realize that she's a) a witness and b) carrying the drugs they were sent to retrieve in the trunk of her car, so set off in pursuit. Along the way, Charlie develops a weird crush/obsession with her.

Betty gets to LA and through a series of wacky coincidences winds up getting a job as a pharmacy assistant at a hospital while she looks for "David Ravell." She winds up living with Rosa, a very nice young woman (Texada) who learns that "Ravell" is a TV character and, assuming that Betty is fucking with her, arranges for them to attend a dinner where the cast of the soap are going to be. Betty talks to Ravell, who assumes that she's a method actress and is taken with her, and eventually arranges for her to act on the show...whereupon Betty is shocked back to reality. Charlie and Wesley show up just as she's packing to go home, gunplay ensues, both hitmen die, and Betty winds up as a recurring character on the show as the soap cashes in on her newfound celebrity.

Weird little movie, this, but I like it. It's definitely influenced by the crime/comedy/thrillers that Tarantino helped popularize in the late 90s (this movie came out in 2000), what with the emphasis on dialog, the kind of over-the-top violence, and the sort of comedy-of-errors plotlines. Zellweger does a nice job of letting Betty be unflappable in her delusion, just kind of ignoring or laughing off any suggestion that she's in love with a character on TV, and likewise, Kinnear's McCord remains believably wrapped up in himself and in the actor's paradigm enough that he doesn't recognize what's going on with Betty until she breaks down.

It's weird seeing Morgan Freeman in this kind of role, because he's usually cast in a "wise old man" sort of way and that's how Charlie is initially presented, but it becomes pretty obvious that he's just as deluded as she is, in a way. Wesley (who it turns out is his son, and I didn't catch that until the reveal at the end the first time I watched this, but it's really obvious if you note the dynamic between them) has a clearer picture of what's happening, but he has his own issues - anger and misogyny for a start - and never manages to talk his father into facing facts. To wit: Betty is neither a calculating mastermind nor a perfect princess, she's a traumatized woman in a fugue state. 

It's hard making dark subject matter funny, and I think Nurse Betty threads that needle. It's also probably the least creepy role I've ever seen Crispin Glover (the local reporter who tracks Betty down and then falls in love with Rosa) play. 

My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium-high

Next up: The Seven Percent Solution

Wildsea: Ghost vs. Spiders

We missed a month because of illness (been a rough spring), but back at it yesterday! Here's last time.

The wildsailors take some time to rest up - Tztik lures spiders with roach parts to assimilate into their hive, Chambersson gets Charness' help to mix up a soap with some algae to scrub off the oil that got dumped on him, and Kazera chops up some metal bits to replenish her rivet swarm. Rozek, however, gets right to work. She draws a blood sample from the Stonebark inhabitant they captured and makes what she thinks is an antidote for the roach venom. Come morning, they bring out their captive and she pours some down his throat. Moments later, he becomes lucid again.

There are some side effects - he's dizzy and can't really find "up" - but he's able to speak and not constantly hallucinating that people are going to eat him. He apologizes to Chambersson for stabbing him, and the undercrew takes him to the infirmary to rest up. The crew decides to wait a little before making more; they want to know if this is temporary, if the side effects get worse, and so on.

That night, while most of the crew sleeps, Kazera stands on the deck and watches the spit in the distance. She sees a soft glow in the thrash, and gets over to the front of the ship just in time to see it vanish underneath the hull. Reasoning that discretion is the better part of valor, she rings the alarm bells and wakes everyone up, and informs the others. She didn't really get a look at what it was, though, so maybe nothing harmful? After what they've experienced, though, the wildsailors don't want to take that chance.

Kazera, as the only one in the crew with any real ability to wavewalk, takes a few of the undercrew with her and slides down ropes to the thrash. The pull their way under the ship, and Kazera notes that the voltaic runners that propel the ship are screwing with her magnetic fields, which could be a problem if she needs to use her abilities. Ignoring that for the moment, they push their way underneath the ship, and see what looks like a humanoid figure.

Kazera calls out to it, and it turns. It's definitely human-looking, and from its clothes an inhabitant of Stonebark. But it's translucent and luminous - the figure reminds Kazera of Jakesta, the navigator. Before Kazera has much time to do more assessment than that, the being opens its mouth to an inhumanly wide degree, and lets out an unearthly scream!

The undercrew panics and runs. Kazera does likewise - she has no desire to fight whatever this is underneath the ship, in the thrash, this close to the runners. She pushes her way back to the ropes and the others haul the four of them up to the deck. The undercrew are babbling about ghosts, and Kazera confirms this person did indeed look spectral.

The sailors discuss, but they don't have long to wait. The figure appears on the side of the ship. The wildsailors look over the side, and the ghost looks hostile anyway, but when it sees Tztik - composed as they are of bugs - it screams in horror and flings daggers at them! 

Tztik swarms backwards and the daggers miss them. Rokko looks over the side and yells "Keru!" in recognition, and the others remember that Keru was the first person on Stonebark to be infected with the roach venom (he killed his sister and then was cast out into the wildsea). Keru responds by flinging more glowing knives, and Rokko falls with two in his chest. Rozek rushes to him and calls Charness for help, and the two of them manage to stabilize Rokko, but Keru floats upwards to face the crew.

Kazera tries to talk him down, and Chambersson helps - they point out that Tztik is made of spiders, not roaches. This helps momentarily, but Tztik, operating mostly on vicious instinct, strikes at the spirit with a tarnished letter opener they found somewhere. The spirit howls in...pain? rage?...and the letter opener rusts away and crumbles. Tztik feels their hive-mind start to de-cohere. 

Since diplomacy seems to have failed, Kazera hits it with her rivet swarm, but the ghost absorbs this violence, and Kazera feels the magnetism holding her together weaken as well. Tztik swarms over the ghost and bites, and Chambersson grabs Tztik, wrapping their arms around the cloak, and pulls them back. Tztik falls back on the "flight" part of fight-or-flight, dissolves into spiders and flees into dark corners.

Chambersson pulls out a metal disc that he found some time back and uses it to channel his electrical powers at the ghost. Rozek, still working with Charness on Rokko's wounds, speaks, using a Whisper: "I remain." The ghost grows slightly more solid and lands on the railing of the ship with the thump. The crew finally manages to get its attention, and Keru talks to him, if briefly.

It listens when Rozek tells it that she has a cure for the venom, and some part of Keru that still wants to protect his people hears. It breaks off the attack and drops into the wildsea, the glow fading as it moves away from the ship. 

The crew spends the rest of the night in contemplation and rest, and in the morning they check their patient. The venom still isn't affecting him, and his balance has returned. Rozek has the roach they caught bite him, just to see if the cure has immunized him, and while the bite tingles a bit he doesn't suffer the hallucinations or paranoia. Success!

Now all they have to do is figure out how to get the spit's other inhabitants to take it...

Character Creation: Lordsworn

One o' these dirty hippie GM-less games, I says!

The Game: Lordsworn
The Publisher: Marren's Musings
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one

Lordsworn is kinda in the same vein as The Skeletons; it's a very focused GM-less game with enough pre-written content to make it cool and playable. It's not for anything past a one-shot, it's playable solo (something I don't have a lot of use for personally, but I appreciate), and it looks like the system is intricate enough to matter but not enough to baffle someone who prefers story games. Let's make a Lordsworn!

Or rather, let's make three. See, the premise of the game is that the God that we all ("we all" being the titular Lordsworn) worshiped is dead, and we are trying to make it home. We might do so, though not all of us will. If a given Lordsworn gets two Wounds, they're out, perhaps dead, perhaps just lost, whatever, but that's why everyone has three characters. Don't worry, they're not hard to make. Just need some d4s and a deck of cards.

So, I actually do have to do some world-building, here, but it's not hard. With a few d4 rolls, I discover that my Company was sworn to Mavos the Mighty, Goddess of Strength, Warfare, Wisdom, and Fire.

Then we roll 3d4 to determine our god's values: I get 1, 3, 1. I use these to answer three questions: What was Mavos' motive for going to war? What effect has Mavos' death had upon the world? What Mark, the result of proximity to Mavos, now blesses our bodies? Each of these has four listed answers, and I pick one for each corresponding to one of my rolls. Respectively, I pick:

I know that the first two seem a little contradictory, but I like the idea that Mavos' death has led to the worst parts of her becoming rampant.

Right, next, same thing, but for Home: 4, 2, 2. This determines our home's Name, a unique geographical feature, and what home was known for. I shall put one of the 2s into Name, which means our Home is called Trufast. The other two get the 4 and the 2, respectively, which means:

So now I roll to see about my Captain (also dead). Said captain is Fearsome, which means I roll 3d4 on the "Fearsome" tables. And doing so...I get straight 4s. OK, that'll make this easy. Our symbol is a howling wolf, our colors are yellow and red, and our motto is "Strength & Might."

Right, so now we actually make the Lordsworns, which requires the spades and hearts of a deck of cards. 'Scuse me a moment. I draw the 3, 2, and 7 of Spades (I am heartless). This gives me the Ancient Ascetic, the Crestfallen Hero, and the Eagle-Eye Sharpshooter.

So for each of these, I roll 3d4 and assign one value to each of the three columns, and then do the basic name n' description thingie. Let's go ahead and do that, and that'll basically put me done because there's no sheet to upload.

Th'rok the Deeprooted, the Ancient Ascetic: Th'rok is one the berserkers, the men whose rage and connection to Mavos runs so close the the surface that it required magical intervention. He is covered in tattoos from head to toe, some as protectives, some as calming measures, some as warnings to others, and he doesn't wear much else so as to show them. Th'rok carries three things always: A curved blade, a jug of water, and a small defensive charm given to him by his one-time apprentice. His apprentice did not survive the War. Th'rok does not remember his name.

Aeylon the Fool, the Crestfallen Hero: Aeylon used to be call the Hope. When he set out from the Collegium, he wore the Crown of Mavos' Chosen. It floated above his head like a dire halo. He rode into war carrying the Dragon-Piercer Spear, and everyone expected great things of him. But no more so than Daihmon, his paramour. Daihmon rode into battle as well, but with a different battalion, and they swore they would survive for each other or that their last breath would be the other's name. Aeylon does not know what Daihmon's last word was. He was too far away, losing the battle, watching Mavos die, like a fool.

Alisdair the Blessed Thunder, the Eagle-Eyed Sharpshooter: Alisdair came from wealth and power. His family were among those that built the Collegium, or so they say. They forged the Dragon-Piercer Spear and from the first slain dragon, took the leathers that now make up Alisdair's boots and vest (or so they say). He carries a golden locket, inside a picture of a paramour sworn to wait for him (or so he says). The truth is that Alisdair might be lying about literally everything, save this: What he aims at with his long, slender-barrel rifle, dies.

And that's pretty much it! Like I said, no sheet. I'd give this a whirl, I think.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians: The Exciting Conculsion

Well, we weren't necessarily planning to end the game last night, but it came to a satisfying finale and that's what matters. Let me blather about the mechanics a little before we get into the story.

The game wound up being a lot less horny than I was expecting, given our palette during session 0, but I know from long years of experience that a game's vibe isn't going to be 100% what was said/decided during the session 0 and/or chargen phase, particularly when there's a month between sessions. And honestly, much of the palette wound up getting very much used:

Scrivener ftw

The playbooks each have their own mechanical bits, much like in Masks, and in general I think they work, but I found people falling back on those mechanics less often than, say, their playbook moves. It also varied from playbook to playbook, though I think that was as much a function of the events of the story as anything.

Also, I don't think the game would have made it much longer than this even if we had continued - every character can have six Advances before they have to either switch to a new playbook or live happily ever after, and at the end of this session I think everyone had gotten either four or five Advances. But that's fine; not every game needs to be a years-long affair. I think it worked just great for what it was. 

I do wish there were a little more diversity in basic moves (we wound up doing defy disaster a lot), but I also know that it's hard to strike the balance between a fun number of moves and just too fuckin' many to keep track of. So overall I think Thirsty Sword Lesbians works just fine - you need the right group, but then you pretty much do no matter what you're playing.

So with all of that said, here's the previous session.

Our heroes were in a spot of bother! Izzy had been left alone on the main deck of the ship, and was feeling pretty sorry for herself. Hedera was imprisoned in a tank of salt water, but was in the process of breaking it. Esme had agreed to trade herself for Hedera and was riding a lift up to the main bridge of the ship, and Cleo, who up until recently had been largely liquid (the phrase "cat juice" was used more than once, and then we had a brief digression into ALF, because not everyone at my table is a Gen Xer and they needed to know). 

Cleo assumed human(ish) form, and was all ready to burst out of the tube with Esme and start a riot! Esme, however, grabbed her furry little head and said "I am pretending to be a bad guy so I can get close to Tranquility, and then I am going to free Hedera." 

"Ohhhh," says Cleo. They stop and let Cleo out on G-Deck, and she stands there shaking her fist and yelling "BETRAYER!" at Esme in what she hopes is a convincing way.

Hedera, meanwhile, has cracked the tank and the scientists in the room have no desire to have her break out, so one of them hits the PURGE button. The bottom of the tank opens and Hedera is dumped unceremoniously (I just realized I use that verb/adverb combo a lot; can you be dumped ceremoniously?) into a huge room beneath. Lights kick on and she realizes a couple of things. First, the room is lined, floor to walls to ceiling, with strange plates, about three foot square. Second, there is something very large on the other side of the room, just out of sight. It makes a loud BRAWWWT kind of noise.

Hedera approaches, and discovers to her delight that it's a toad the size of a bulldozer. It's got lumpy, warty skin, but a purple caste to it. Hedera immediately makes this toad a wild friend, and the toad agrees not to eat her. It's clearly stressed, though, and then as Hedera talks to it, it suddenly looks worried and afraid. Hedera hears a muffled bzzt, and the toad leaps over her, and lands with a loud boom! She also notices the toad giving off coruscating electrical sparkles when it lands. "Are they zapping you?" she demands. The toad sadly confirms this. 

Meanwhile, on the bridge, Esme exits the elevator and sees the control room of this ship. Tranquility is sitting at the end of the room in her throne, and Esme notices Vi is one of the Loyalists in the room. Esme steps forward and says that she's willing to join up...if Tranquility lets the others go. Tranquility shows her Hedera in the toad-room (but the footage is from a couple of minutes ago, so Esme doesn't see the toad), and holds up her weird quicksilver gauntlet. It produces a ring, and Tranquility holds it out. Esme tries to play cool, to keep her position, but she fails to defy disaster and slips the ring on. She feels the loyalty and camaraderie from all around her, and oh, dear, it feels so good to be part of something like this again! She allows the feeling to take her, and Vi leads to her to a seat at the controls to start her training.

(This, by the way, was Esme losing herself in escapism to clear Hopeless.)

On G-Deck, Cleo looks around for some trouble to get into. She opens a random door and finds herself in a barracks, full of Lunar Loyalists! She very politely asks where the stairs are, and the Loyalist she's talking to, perhaps a little taken aback, points her in the right direction. Cleo has a few seconds to run before the "hey, waitaminute" kicks in and they start chasing her.

She runs down the hall and dips into another random door, and this time she turns and sees a woman with a cropped haircut and a severe expression at a desk. Behind her, there are cages and pens, all containing prisoners - including a couple of Cleo's people! Cleo, not the most subtle of kittycats at the best of times, assumes cat form and leaps on the woman, biting and clawing! She gets the woman's wristband away and tosses it to the other cat-person, and tells her to "free everyone!" And then she gets back to biting! The brig-warden is defeated, but she manages to hit an alarm in the chaos!

Down on the main deck, Izzy is having something of a crisis of faith in herself. She texts Eizos, the bartender from waaaay back here - "u up?" Eizos responds, and the two of them talk a bit. Izzy pulls herself together and looks at her reflection in the door, and reminds herself that her friends need and dammit, she's gonna get up there and be heroic! She enters the elevator, it goes up, the doors open...and she finds herself face-to-face with the Loyalists who were chasing Cleo. 

"Well?" she says. "Tranquility ordered us to take care of...that thing that's happening!" As usual, if you say something confidently enough, people accept it. It doesn't help that right then, the alarm goes off!

Up on the bridge, Vi shows Esme how to, for example, look in on this room with the giant toad. The toad lets off an enormous electrical charge when it hops, and they use that to charge the ship. She shows Esme how to control the plates, and while she does, she allows Helix (Hedera's tiny pet blobtopus) to slip out of her gauntlet and into Esme's shirt. Esme manages to shake off the feelings of Lunar Loyalty, and changes the settings in the toad room, but screws it up and sends a jolt through the whole room.

Hedera summons up some grass for the toad to land on, but is too close to the blast radius and is blown backwards. Esme corrects her mistake and opens the plates, allowing the toad access to the outside, and Hedera climbs on the toad's back! (This fulfills another of Hedera's trials, "ride a fantastical beast.") They leap clear, as the alarms start going off!

The Loyalists, led by Izzy, close in on the brig! The brig door opens and Cleo, leading the army of prisoners, charges out into the hall! And at that moment, one of the guards pulls up her helmet and says "IZZY?!" 

Izzy turns, and remembers that she spent some, um, passionate time with this lady (she does after all have one in every port) but cannot recall her name. The woman draws a sword and closes ("you could have texted me back!"), but Izzy does not draw hers. Instead she steps forward and agrees that she was insensitive, and asks that even if she can't forgive Izzy, to accept that she's trying to be more responsible and respectful. The entice works, and the woman kisses her. (The woman's name is Donna, for the record, but Izzy never remembers it.)

The battle rages around them, with Cleo's people chewing up Lunar Loyalists. Chaos ensues, and Esme rips off the ring and turns to confront Tranquility. Tranquility hits a button and the bridge of the ship detaches, and starts to ascend - clearly she intends to take Esme out into space, away from her friends!

But Hedera murmurs something to the toad, and the toad leaps into the air and lands squarely on the now-detached bridge! The EMP from the toad's landing shorts the bridge, and it goes crashing to Earth (well, to Kieron), breaking into a thousand chunks.

The characters are now strewn across the landscape, uniforms probably artfully ripped. Izzy and her new paramour have escaped in an emergency tube ("We should probably have nicknames for each other, in case we get captured. What should I call you?" "...Daphne?") Hedera and her toad-friend land, and the toad goes hopping off to chase Loyalists around. Tranquility stands up out of the wreckage and summons her blade, the tip touching Vi's throat.

Esme approaches, drops her wicked, barbed sword, and surrenders, keeping Tranquility's attention - which allows Izzy to rush in, her rose-quartz blade at the ready! She attacks Tranquility with blade and word, and disarms her! Now armed with two swords, she divests Tranquility of her crown, and tells her maybe not to be such a try-hard, pick-me bitch for like two goddamn seconds. 

Tranquility will have none of it, though. She hits a button on her belt and gravity flexes, blowing everyone back. Vi lands near Hedera, and the two of them happily reunite...but then Vi tries to stand and realizes that Esme's barbed sword is been driving through her thigh!

Hedera awakens the wild to try and patch the wound, but Tranquility approaches her from behind, holding a sword she's picked up from the wreckage, and lunges! Hedera is ready, though, she blocks the strike and lashes out with her own weapon. She hits Tranquility's gravity-belt and blows her back, up into the air.

The toad glances at Hedera, and Hedera nods. The toad's tongue flicks out...and Tranquility is gone.

The heroes stand blinking for a second. "Well," says Esme, "I had hoped maybe to talk her down, but that works too." 

"EMPRESS OF THE MOON SHOTGUN!" says Izzy, donning the crown.

"What the hell is going on here?" Malfi and Sarina appear, having gotten out of the Garden on their own. 

The heroes decide to go their separate ways for a bit. Izzy goes back to her ship with Daphne, where Maisie (remember her?) is waiting. They all make it work. Actually Maisie and Daphne hit it off; they bond over the fact that Izzy is a lot. The three of them take over the Loyalists. Maise and Daphne really run things, while Izzy makes a superb figurehead.

Hedera takes the toad (she names him "Teddy") and returns him to his home planet. Vi accompanies her.

Cleo stays on Kieron with her army of newly freed prisoners, to help everyone get settled and figure out what to do next.

Esme takes Sarina and Malfi back to Nero, per their contract.

And our closing credits scene is the wedding of Sarina and Malfi (they were already married, but never had a wedding), with everyone there - Izzy surrounded by her regiments of Loyalists, Hedera arm-in-arm with Vi, Teddy in the back wearing a little bow tie, Cleo sitting up smartly with her army of freedom-fighters, and Esme watching it all, figuring maybe at the reception she can find someone to dance with her. 

FIN

Movie #849: The Mist

The Mist is a horror movie based on the novella by Stephen King and starring Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Garden, Jeffery DeMunn, Andre Braugher, Toby Jones, Laurie Holden, William Sadler, Frances Sternhagen, Sam Witwer, and Nathan Gamble.

David Drayton (Jane), his wife Steph (Kelly Collins Lintz), and their son Billy (Gamble) go to their basement as a massive storm ravages the area, and in the morning discover everything's pretty wrecked. David goes to the supermarket, taking Billy and their neighbor Norton (Braugher), and don't think much of the weird mist rolling in off the lake. 

But after just a few minutes in the store, a man called Dan (DeMunn) comes running in, bleeding and screaming about "things" in the mist. And from there it becomes worse; a big tentacled horror drags off a bag boy (Chris Owen), but not enough people see it and Norton leads a contingent of idiots out into the mist. They are, we assume, promptly devoured. 

The survivors very quickly rally around Mrs. Carmody, an evangelical Christian and terrible person (but I repeat myself), who convinces her "flock" that the monsters can only be sated by blood sacrifice. Eventually David leads a small group of people out of the store to his car. Several are killed en route, leaving only David, Billy, Dan, old teacher Irene (Sternhagen) and newly hired teacher Amanda (Holden). They keep driving for a while...

...and here's where the only major point of divergence from the source material happens, and it's a doozy. In the book, Drayton and company catch a fragmented radio broadcast, and make out one word: "Hartford." And so they set out, because that's the only hope they have. 

In the movie, Drayton's car runs out of gas and they're still in the mist, hearing horrible noises. They all agree that a quick death is better than being eaten, so Drayton shoots them all including his son, and then, out of bullets, gets out of the car to await death...only to see the Army roll up and the mist clearing as soldiers torch any monsters they find. In a really nice "fuck you, and also no really fuck you" moment, a young woman (Melissa McBride) who left the store early on to get home to her kids is right there on a truck with other refugees. 

(There are other changes, too, of course; in the book Drayton and Amanda bang in an office in the store, and it makes sense in context but it would have been really out of place in the movie. One of the soldiers stuck in the store (Witwer) gives a half-assed explanation for how all this happened. Stuff like that. Nothing too important, though; it's really a very faithful adaptation.)

So the question is: Does that rather extreme ending work, and does the rest of the movie work up to that change? I think the latter is definitely a "yes." The creatures are a little too CGI in places, but for the most part it holds up and the design does a nice job of giving us something that's almost recognizable as an animal but then tweaking the horror a little (my favorite is the tentacles with awful black spines). The action/horror sequences are well done, but they also include what I would call the main theme of the movie: to wit, people do fucked up shit in survival situations and no one is as cool as they think they would be. The survivors come up with plans, but when they don't work and awful shit happens, they fall apart and latch onto the first person with a solution. Unfortunately that's Mrs. Carmody, and Harden does an amazing job of making her hateful but also vulnerable at times. 

That theme carries through to the end. It's easy to think David and company are doing what makes sense in the moment, but the truth of the matter is that they don't think it through at all. They're just so traumatized and beaten down by that point, having seen people get eaten by monsters and other people get stabbed, shot, burned, and beaten either by accident or very much on purpose that they choose to die. I think the ending makes sense, and I think it's fair given the rest of the movie. Is it a better ending than the book? I don't know. I think if they'd kept the book ending but kept the ambiguity (in the book Drayton isn't even 100% sure he heard "Hartford," and either way he doesn't know if the context is "come to Hartford, we have cookies and monkey butlers" or "stay the fuck away from Hartford, there's a giant crocosquirrel eating everyone"), it would have worked just fine. I don't think the bleak ending doesn't work, though, it's just a matter of how dark you like your coffee, as it were.

My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium-low

Next up: Nurse Betty

Character Creation: Cryptid Creeks

What I really need to do today is reread Wearing the Cape, since we're doing chargen tomorrow, but I've got time for this first.

The Game: Cryptid Creeks
The Publisher: Hatchlings Games
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one

Cryptid Creeks is a Carved From Brindlewood game (named for Brindlewood Bay), and as such shares DNA with PbtA and Forged in the Dark games. You're playing River Scouts, kids who stumbled on the ghosts of the original River Scouts from the 60s and have taken on the mantle and the task of investigating the eerie truths of the town of Clawfoot. Shades of Scooby-Doo, sure, but Hot Fuzz is also listed as an inspiration and I thought that was pretty cool.

As with Brindlewood Bay, there's an overarching threat. It's pretty well-defined, here, and I think the game strikes a nice balance between the "find clues, ask the questions, solve the mystery but also decide what the answer is" play style of Brindlewood and giving the game a bit of structure. It'd be fun to give it a try, especially with a group that doesn't groove on aspects of Brindlewood Bay as much. Let's make a River Scout! 

As with Brindlewood, chargen is at the end of the book in the Pilot Episode section.

First step is actually to pick a playbook; these steps are after everyone's looked at the playbooks and picked which one they like. I think I'll pick...the Sailor (my other choice was the Misfit, but I really do love water-stuff in RPGs. Maybe it's because I get seasick in real life, I dunno).

I shall name my sailor Jetsam Stafford (yes, his real name is "Jetsam," yes, his father was a bit of a dick, yes, he goes by "Jet," yes, he has a sister named "Flotsam" who goes by "Flo," let's move on). His Style is grease monkey - jeans, t-shirt, overalls sometimes, tools in pockets, grease stains on face. I think he's got red-brown hair (always dirty), a button nose and a determined face.

I add one to an Ability. Let's see. Most of the moves you roll with whatever's appropriate, so I don't need to shore up any one particular Ability. Let's boost Smart, then.

I get a playbook move, and obviously I want just needs a tune-up. Also, I have to look at Watcher's Gift move. I can summon The Eye of the Storm, a spectral boat, so that's pretty awesome. But, I have to choose situations in which it can't manifest. Let's say it can't appear in stormy weather, and it can't appear when Jetsam and Flotsam are together (obviously I wouldn't do that if another player were going to play her). 

Mark two end-of-episode questions...I'll take did you display doubt toward the supernatural, despite everything? and did you place your trust in the abilities of a fellow Scout? I see Jet being kind of a skeptic where supernatural shit is concerned. I also think that wouldn't last long, but it might just get more focused ("OK, those spirits exist, but that doesn't mean that there's a bigfoot!"). 

And that'll do it!

Movie #848: Minority Report

Minority Report is an action/sci-fi/noir movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, Max von Sydow, Samantha Morton, Colin Farrell, Peter Stormare, Neal McDonough, Mike Binder, and Lois Smith.

It's the future (2054, specifically)! Murder in the Washington D.C. has been eradicated, thanks to the pre-crime unit. This special police division makes use of three "precogs," floating endless in liquid, kept in a liminal state between deep sleep and wake, who can see murders (and only murders) before they happen. Premeditated murder is basically stamped out, because they can always catch that, but spontaneous crimes of passion produce a "red ball" and get pre-crime officers like John Anderton (Cruise) on the case!

Offenders are arrested and "haloed", which completely immobilizes them, and put into containment apparently without a trial (if they get one, we never see it). Since their guilt was foreseen and since the precogs are never wrong, it's a neat little system. It's actually about to go national, and Department of Justice Danny Witwer (Farrell) is inspecting it all to see how it works.

Anderton, however, gets named an offender when the precogs produce a "brown ball" (premeditated murder); he's going to kill some dude he never even met (Binder). He flees, kidnaps the lead precog Agatha (Morton), and tries to see if there's a "minority report" - that is, an alternate future in which he doesn't kill this dude, which apparently happens very occasionally.

Important note: Anderton's son was kidnapped from a public pool some years back and was never seen again. It turns out that the dude he's supposed to kill, when circumstances lead him to the scene of the crime, confesses to killing his son, and Anderton winds up shooting him (but not on purpose). 

Anyway, it turns out that Anderton's boss and mentor Lamar Burgess (von Sydow) is the one orchestrating all of this to cover up a murder he did years ago. Anderton confronts him, he shoots himself rather than Anderton (which is what the precogs predicated), the system is dismantled which is good because it's fucking insane, and all is more or less well.

I have not read the Philip K. Dick story this is based on; I'm sure it diverges pretty heavily (they usually do). I appreciate that they managed to make "running" a thematic element of the movie, since we know how much Tom Cruise likes to scamper around in his movies. But more seriously, it's a solid sci-fi action movie and has enough of the fun dystopian elements we associate with Dick's work to make it a fun watch. There are some weird details (the "spiders" that infiltrate a building and scan people's eyes are cool, but why do they chirp at each other?), but generally you can kind of see how the tech displayed in the movie is an extrapolation of the tech that existed at the time (the movie came out in 2002). In particular, targeted advertisement that scans your eyeballs and then out loud offers you shit that you might like is a little uncomfortably on the nose, and is frankly my idea of hell.

The supporting cast in this movie is fantastic, too. We've got Tim Blake Nelson as the jailer of the folks who have been haloed, playing the organ and slowly going mad. Peter Stormare has an amazing turn as a surgeon who replaces Anderton's eyes, and while he's got him helpless reminds him that Anderton was responsible for sending him to jail and destroying his plastic surgery practice (don't feel too bad for him, he was setting his patients on fire for fun). Daniel London has a good role as the guy taking care of the precogs, talking to Agatha while he brushes her teeth about his life and veering over the line into creepy-but-obviously-concerned-for-their-welfare. 

Do the metaphysics line up? Eh. When you're dealing with time travel or perception everything gets screwy anyway, so I think it works well enough. Actually, thinking about it, one of the reasons I like this movie is because it's one of the less Cruise-y movies in Tom Cruise's career - sure, he's there being all heroic and running around, but the rest of the cast, the effects, and the direction makes the movie memorable on its own.

My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium-high

Next up: The Mist

Character Creation: Omen

Seeing as how I'm running this game tomorrow...

The Game: Omen
The Publisher: Gila RPGs
Degree of Familiarity: None yet, but the book is literally 16 pages
Books Required: Just the one

Omen is an RPG from the creator of NOVA and the related games, and it has a similarly strategic or tactical vibe to it. Not in a combat sense, but just in the sense of resource management. In Omen, you're playing characters who could, in theory, stop the end of the world. There are two clocks, Doom and Defy, that determine what happens with regards to said apocalypse, depending on which fills first. 

I debated whether it was appropriate to include this game on the chargen list; when I exclude games it's generally because they're games like Fiasco where character creation is not only hard-baked into play but actually requires other players. I don't think that's the case in Omen, and there are a few sample scenarios that I can use. There's also not that much to chargen, so this isn't gonna take long in any event.

There are five really brief doomsday scenarios in the book, so let's just roll a d5 and pick one.

Yep, that'll work. In order to make a character, I set aside eight d6s (I'm not actually going to do that because I don't need them for chargen). And then I can take Omens, which are little ways to influence the system. I can take one and then get a ninth d6, or two and stick with eight.

In context: You roll all your d6s at the beginning of the game. When a challenge comes up in play, the GM tells you the difficulty, and you pick a die to apply it. That means that you know if you're going to succeed or fail, but why would you fail? Well, sometimes you don't have a choice. Sometimes you want to save your good rolls for later. Some Omens give you good things if you deliberately fail rolls. Like I said, there's some strategy.

(Coincidentally, curse the darkness had something like this going on because your visible, active card in a given stat meant that you knew what kind of success you could apply at any given them, and I think it worked just fine there.)

Right! So! I think I'm going to finish character creation before I pick Omens. If I have a complaint about this game, it's that Omens don't have any flavor text or names attached, so picking them is a matter of game strategy rather than storytelling. 

"Finishing the character" is mostly a matter of pure concept. The game does give me some questions, however:

OK, let's say that my character is Teddy Andrews. Teddy has the distinction of being the first person to make contact with the invading aliens. He was out camping in a national park (I think which one we could leave open depending on what other players did) when the aliens arrived.

The aliens sent a scouting party ahead, not to learn about the planet per se (they'd been doing that for years) but to obtain current samples and acclimate their invasion force to the Earth's climate. They did that by taking samples from Teddy, not just tissue, blood, and so forth, but mental ones - engrams, brainscans, CSF. Teddy stumbled out of the park not really knowing what happened, but in the weeks to come as the aliens did a full-on invasion, he figured it out.

But Teddy being the one to make contact also gives him advantages in dealing with the aliens - their technology has a blind spot for him because he's essentially the baseline that their data is derived from. Is that going to make the difference? It might.

Teddy is in his 40s, single (he was engaged once, it didn't work out, and frankly he's not interested in that kind of relationship). He's fit, bearded (usually keeps it neat and trimmed but that's not what's been on his mind lately). Got a bunch of outdoorsy gear in his garage.

OK, so back to Omens. I think I'm just gonna take one, and I'm gonna take this one:

I think that's a good representation of him using his "invisibility" to the aliens' tech to take a big swing (note too that you can get more Omens in play).

And that's it, actually. Let's end the world!

D&D: A Giant Spider Caught Me In Its Web

If ya know ya know. Here's last time.

Our heroes head north, leaving the Enclave of Thorns, passing by the city of Fiadh, up into central Abhaile, moving away from the dense forests of the south. After some travel, they find themselves in the farmlands of the middle of the country, a few days out from the capital city of Cian. 

Moving down a dirt road, they hear music up ahed - a roadside tavern! Zook points out that the concept of "roadside tavern" has kind of soured after the whole experience with the doppelgangers, but what are the odds of that happening again? The tavern is called the "Plucked Rose," and they can tell as they approach that it's much livelier than the Shiny Belles, which is good.

They enter the tavern and there's a rousing chorus of welcome from the patrons. Said patrons look to be mainly farmers, from their garb and general appearance, but there are also some ladies plying trade here, if you will. A large, bearded man waves them over and confirms that they are, in fact, adventurers, and then orders a round for them. They notice him pass the proprietor a coin, which is unusual - much of Abhaile runs on barter rather than currency (but then, they are getting close to Cian, where such things are more common). 

The man introduces himself as Burl, and welcomes them warmly to the Rose. Sitting next to Burl is a smaller man, and said man is extremely drunk. The adventurers chat with Burl and get the lay of the land, and at some point the drunk man, Angus, pipes up and says that he saw something horrible - a spider the size of a horse with a man halfway down its gullet!

Burl gently reminds him that spiders don't have gullets. Aisling thinks about whether she's ever heard of such a thing, and while she's definitely heard of giant spiders, she's never heard of one capable of swallowing a man whole. But Angus is clearly freaked out about something, and the heroes decide maybe they'd better have a look. Not tonight, though; there doesn't seem to be an immediate threat to life and limb, and they don't want to go poking around in the dark.

Burl offers them a place to stay for the night (the Rose does not offer overnight accommodation), and has Dara help him get Angus onto the back of a donkey. The head west a ways to Burl's farm, and on the way he has the heroes tell him of their exploits - the doppelgangers, the owlbear, the strange gnolls ("what's a gnoll?"). He mentions that the worst they've had around here was an infestation of kobolds some years back, the adventurers mention they've dealt with those, too. Burl reaffirms his commitment to not being an adventurer as they arrive at his farm.

He opens the barn for them (a long-haired cow lows at them disinterestedly) and says they're welcome to stay, though he's going to be up early to deal with the cows. The heroes bed down (Zook casts an Alarm spell, of course).

In the morning, Burl wakes them getting the cows out, and the heroes pack up and start heading back along the road to the east. Burl doesn't have much to give them in the way of food, but does give them a bundle of carrots and suchlike. They stop at the Rose on the way and have some breakfast (salt pork, mashed potatoes with peppers, warm peach cider), and Aisling gives the proprietor, Niall, some coin (he mentions that he'd love to give them what he has, but he can't afford to, which of course they understand).

They ask Niall if he's aware of any disappearances, human or livestock, in the area, especially east of her. He's not, but notes that Lira, one of the girls, has family that way, so they ask her. Lira tells them that one of the hands on her farm, a young man named Domhnall, went south about a week ago to trade for tools and whatnot from one of the towns in the forests, but hasn't returned yet. She just assumed that weather or something was delaying him...

They get a description of Domhnall, and get back on the road. They head east into the hills, and Dara casts a spell to locate animals. She focuses on giant spiders, and her senses spread out from her body, zooming in on every little spider in the fields, over them, and then down between some hills. She finds a pit in the ground and her senses go down 30 feet, at which point the pit's walls are covered in webs. She sees spiders the size of dogs emerge from the webbing and skitter by, and she comes out of the spell, shuddering.

The heroes find the pit, and Aisling activates her driftglobe to get a bit of extra light. She looks down the pit but can only see darkness; Dara can see a little further and notes that the floor is covered in webs, too. There's brief discussion of just burning the webs, but on the off chance that Domhnall (or anyone else) is still alive, they decide they'd better just go down and investigate. Zook auguries that course of action, and, predictably, it's likely to bring good and bad results. 

Clara anchors her pitons in the bedrock near the pit, ties off the ropes, and she and Aisling start to descend. They get about halfway down when Aisling slips and the two of them collide - they don't fall, but Aisling drops her driftglobe. It falls to the webbed ground below and sits there, glowing. 

The two of them land, and find themselves fighting to avoid getting caught up in webs. Zook slides down the rope, and Dara casts a spiderclimb spell and just moves down the wall, but ironically when she hits the webs about 10 feet from the ground she gets tangled. Zook, not wanting that to happen to him, tosses a firebolt to burn off some of the webs, but misjudges the aim and winds up catching Aisling in the fire ("DAMMIT ZOOK").

Zook lands, and not a moment later the spiders emerge. Four of them, the size of large dogs, flattening themselves before the pounce. The heroes ready weapons.

Aisling throws a cloud of daggers in front of her, while Clara charges at a spider...but immediately gets caught in the webs. Zook hurls fire and burns off more webs, and Dara, still stuck on the wall, unleashes a thunderwave. She notes that while the wave rattles the spider a bit, it also weakens the webs...

One of the spiders, smarting from Zook's fiery attack, leaps at Aisling and winds up jumping straight into the cloud of daggers. Legs and goop go flying. Meanwhile Dara casts thunderwave again, freeing herself from the webs and knocking the spider to the floor. The spiders rally, though, closing in on the adventurers and biting. Clara, still stuck fast and unable to fight as effectively as usual, strikes with her quarterstaff and beats the spider, but winds up with some bites (fortunately she is more resistant to poison than the others). Aisling sustains multiple bites and winds up retreating to heal, but the webs impede her movement (though she does wind up on the other side of the dagger-cloud, at least). One of the spiders closes on Zook and bites him, and he falls to the ground, paralyzed by the venom. The spider leaps on him and starts wrapping him in silk.

Dara, meanwhile, has cast a flame blade and singed a spider. Aisling yells for Clara to help Zook, and she runs over (if slowly) and strikes the spider wrapping him. The heroes manage to kill the remaining arachnids without further casualties, and Dara casts a healing spell to revive Zook. He comes to, groggily, and the heroes regroup bit.

They hear muffled cries from a tunnel, and Clara and Dara investigate. They find a man wrapped in silk, wriggling, and Dara cuts him loose. He starts chanting in the language they don't know, and when they try to pull him out, he screams. They note multiple bite wounds on his arms.

Back in the central room, Aisling sees a pair of spider legs emerge from another passageway, but these are much bigger - that spider must be the size of a horse! It's much worse than that, though. As it emerges, she sees that it's a man's top half, with the body and legs of a spider. He still has multiple eyes, though, and his skin has a grey and sticky look to it.

He advances from the tunnel and hisses something in a strange language. The heroes back away, trying to get to the ropes. They're injured and depleted, and have no idea if they can best this strange monster.

Movie #847: Key Largo

Key Largo is a film noir starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor, Thomas Gomez, Harry Lewis, John Rodney, and Monte Blue.

Frank McCloud (Bogart) is a drifter and WWII vet who comes to Key Largo to look in on Nora (Bacall), the widow of a war buddy. She and her father James (Barrymore) run a hotel on the Key. It's closed for the season, but when Frank arrives he finds a group of people - several tough-looking men and a really drunk woman (Trevor), who are, in a word, hostile. Eventually James finds him and he sits down and talks with him and Nora, and that's all fine...but then the phone rings and one of the tough men, Curly (Gomez) answers and claims neither James nor Nora is there. When Frank protests, the men hold them all at gunpoint.

Turns out those toughs work for Johnny Rocco (Robinson), a Chicago gangster who was deported and recently returned to the States. They're waiting on a "shipment" from another gangster, but then a couple of complications arise: For one thing, the sheriff (Blue) and his hunky deputy (Rodney) are looking for a pair of Seminole brothers (Jay Silverheels and Rodd Redwing) on the run from the law. For another, there's a goddamn hurricane bearing down on them. 

The rest of the movie is the tension building between Rocco and his gangsters, James and Nora, and Frank trying to avoid following his instinct to protect people (and get shot for his trouble). Deputy Sawyer gets shot and dumped in the ocean, but washes up in the swamp and the Sheriff winds up shooting the two fugitives dead because he knows nothing of the situation. Frank winds up going out on a boat with the gangsters, ostensibly to Cuba, but manages to get the jump on them and kill them all before heading back.

The best part of the movie is absolutely the middle; we get to see Robinson trying to be the big tough gangster, used to getting whatever he wants and intimidating everyone around him, utterly unravel in the face of something he can do nothing about (that would the hurricane). Likewise, Claire Trevor's portrayal of Gaye as the alcoholic moll trying to stand up to Rocco but failing because she's getting the shakes is heartbreaking (and she won an Oscar, so that's cool). And, of course, Bogie and Bacall are always gifted performers and their chemistry is fantastic. 

If I have a complaint, it's that the ending (Frank killing the gangsters and heading back to Florida with only a minor case of "getting shot") seems out of step with the rest of the movie. I don't object to him killing the gangsters, but even him calling in for help and then fixing the wheel to keep him pointed back toward Florida and then leaving his fate uncertain would have been more in-tone than the triumphant ending we did get. In the scheme of things it's a minor issue, though. It's good noir, reminds me a little of Albino Alligator, actually (that's much darker, of course).

My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium

Next up: Minority Report

Movie #846: Detective Dee & The Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Detective Dee & The Mystery of the Phantom Flame is a Chinese detective/action flick starring Andy Lau, Carina Lau, Li Bingbing, Deng Chao, and Tony Leung Ka-fai. Lots of other people, too, and I hope I get their roles right.

In the 7th century CE, Wu Zetian (Carina Lau) is about to become Empress. There's a huge statue of the Empress being built right outside the palace, and while it's being shown to a visiting ambassador (Michel), the inspector (Yan Qin) bursts into flames. And then it happens to a general (Jinshan Liu) a few minutes later! Nothing for it but to call the titular Detective Dee (Andy Lau), who is in prison for treason, so that's awkward.

Dee starts working the case, accompanied by the Empress' right-hand woman Shangguan Jing'er (Bingbing) and a Supreme Court enforcer Pei Donglai (Chao). Mystical shenanigans ensue, but also political ones, and eventually it turns out that the whole thing was orchestrated by Shatuo (Leung Ka-fai), a loyalist to the previous Emperor. Pei and Jing'er wind up dead, Dee winds up with the poison in his system that will cause him to burn in sunlight, the Empress promises to stop doing secret murders to her subjects. 

So, it's a cool movie and the action scenes are awesome. My only issues with the movie aren't with the movie, they're that I'm not Chinese, and the pacing of it feels odd to me because I'm not used to it. I was also expecting something...less tragic, I guess? I'm not sure why, as I think about it, because murder mysteries do tend to have some death and loss (obviously, else they wouldn't be murder mysteries), but this had Constantine levels of supporting character death. 

I like the movie more as I sit with it; may have to check out a couple of the prequels at some point.

My Grade: B
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: Key Largo

Movie #845: Blithe Spirit (2020)

Blithe Spirit is a cinematic adaptation of the play by Nöel Coward, starring Dan Stevens, Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, and Judi Dench. It's...not great.

In 1937 England, crime writer Charles Condomine (Stevens) has had a bit of dry spell. Rather, he's had a dry spell of seven years, ever since his wife Elvira (Mann) died in an accident. He's since remarried to Ruth (Fisher), the wealthy daughter of the film producer (Simon Kunz) who wants to make a film out of Condomine's most successful book.

But then they go to see the "psychic" Madame Arcati (Dench), and Charles gets the idea to incorporate the occult into his story (maybe having the detective be a ghost who solves his own murder with the help of a medium, which is amusing to me because it's basically the plot of the video game Murdered: Soul Suspect). He has Madame Arcati come over for a seance, but in the process summons Elvira back, and here's where it gets weird.

In the play, you see (which takes place entirely in the Condomines' living room) Charles is pretty much horrified to see Elvira, and, while he does become civil and tries to cope with both his wives being in the house, he never for a moment admits to summoning her up (because he didn't, but we'll get to that). In the movie, Charles winds up having an affair with his dead wife (it's implied he bangs her next to Ruth while she's sleeping). In both, Elvira attempts to kill Charles by sabotaging his car, but winds up killing Ruth instead, and then in an attempt to exorcise Elvira, Madame Arcati manifests Ruth instead. 

And here we have our other major points of divergence. In the movie, Charles takes the screenplay that Elvira actually wrote (because she wrote all of his books) and sells it, and as it's being filmed, Hedda Hopper (Georgina Rich) shows up and reveals that all of his books were plagiarized! And then Ruth runs him down with a car and kills him, and Elvira and Ruth drive off Thelma and Louise style, leaving Charles in the dust, as a ghost!

In the play, Madame Arcati tries vainly to banish the spirits, but eventually figures out that it's Edith the maid (played in the movie by Aimee Ffion-Edwards) is a psychic and inadvertently manifested both ghosts. Arcati hypnotizes her and banishes the ghosts, sort of; they're still there and capable of affecting the environment but Charles can no longer see or hear them. But by this point they all hate each other and Charles has a final monologue in which he tells them both off and then fucks off to South America (I actually did that monologue for an acting class when I was in college). 

The play is so much better than this movie. A lot of Coward's dialog remains in one form or another, but the movie adds a good hour of unrelated, unnecessary stuff - Arcati going to the Psychic Association offices, Arcati summoning up her dead husband (Tam Williams), the entire filmmaker plotline - and it just bloats and distorts the story. It's a farce, the strength of it is the dialog, and so much of Coward's skill involves being able to see people respond to each other, which you can't do if you're just pointing the camera at one person the whole time.

It's too bad, because the cast is great, but I just wish they'd been allowed to perform Blithe Spirit instead of Blithe Spirit: The Hollywood Version. 

My Grade: D+
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: Detective Dee & The Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Character Creation: Psionics

I can kill you with my brain.

The Game: Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution
The Publisher: End Transmission Games; out of business, but you can still buy this game on DTRPG
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one

Psionics has some weird history, most of which I'm not going to go into because it falls very quickly into the land of internet drama. So let's stick to the facts: Psionics was Kickstarted in 2014 and raised a meager $10K (but at the time, that wasn't bad for an indie RPG, honestly). It funded, they published it in Juneish 2015. I got my backer copy at Origins, one of a few signed and numbered copies (not something I generally care about). They had it for sale at GenCon 2015 and here's where it gets a little weird. 

They shelled out for advertising at GenCon. Like, there were huge posters on pillars. I think there was even a hanging banner or sign in the dealer's room, and I think they had their own booth. (Maybe this was 2016, I actually don't remember and my blog write-ups on the subject are no help.) Anyway, I also thought it was interesting; there was probably more money dumped into promoting the game than the Kickstarter brought in.

But what is the game? It's a sci-fi game in which you play "Espers" - people with psychic powers - on the run from a government agency (or rather, a glom of several agencies) that is trying to capture you and do evil things to you. There's actually a lot of detail about the agency and the "truth" of the setting that I didn't really read because I wanted to actually make a character and that stuff isn't relevant to chargen. The book also has an amount of interstitial fiction that would make a 90s White Wolf book blush, but on the plus side, it's not terrible fiction. Some of it I actually lost track of time reading. 

Game-system wise...eh. It's nothing special, and I know if I tried to pitch this to my table they'd stare blankly. Roll some d6s, you're trying to roll low except when you're trying to roll high except when you're just rolling 1d6 vs. another player's/GM's d6. It's not the smoother peanut butter, is what I'm saying. If I were going to run Psionics, I would probably port it into Fate or SWADE or something (although I'm nearly 100% sure there are similar games in both settings). 

I dunno. After reading/making characters for some of the company's other games (Anathema, Phantasm, SPLINTER) I was expecting to dislike this game, and as it is I think it's kind of cool. It's probably not something I'd be champing at the bit to play, and there are some truly wanky bits of writing (not least of which is the intro that starts off telling us to Google what an "RPG" is, but then doing a full fucking book report on Firestarter), but it's not a bad game.  

Right, enough blather, let's make an Esper. 

Two separate boxes

razzum frazzum

Name n' concept, huh? Well, for the third time in a row I don't have a particular concept in mind, and none of the the various types of psi powers call to me more than the others (that is to say, I think they'd all be fun to play), so let's randomly pick a theme song! 

That's "Blackbird" by the Beatles, which is actually a pretty appropriate song for this game. Not because the song is about psychic powers, of course, but because it was inspired by the Civil Rights movement. 

Well, I think I'll just lean in an try and make a character who can fly (it's possible as a telekinetic, but I don't remember if starting characters can take right levels; guess we'll find out). Delbert (please call him "Del") Farrell graduated high school a year early, and was kinda trying to figure out what he was going to do with his life - he's hella smart, but socially awkward and he's only 17 so not exactly mature. And then he figured out he could move things with his mind.

Del has been dreaming of flying since he was a little kid - not exactly an uncommon dream, of course, but Del dreams about it almost every night. He's always felt it was possible, in some weird way, even when he knew that physics don't really allow people to fly under their own power. But then he could, and he probably would have been happy just flying for fun forever. But then the Shop tracked him down (probably someone spotted him flying), and his parents, who were very much of the "the government is not to be trusted" school of thought, refused to give him up and immediately started calling lawyers and press. And the agents shot them both dead, grabbed Del, and threw him in a van. 

There, that's appropriate tragic for the setting, I think. So now we spend some Attribute points. We've got four Attributes (Strength, Speed, Wits, Will; the game makes a point of telling us that there's no Charisma or Wisdom because that makes this game so much smarter than D&D; I'm paraphrasing snarkily, ignore me). I've got 30 points to split up, minimum 1, and they're one-for-one until you crest 6, at which point they cost more. Let's see. 

Well, I want Del to have a high Wits rating because he's a smart cookie. I don't know that Will is necessarily high or low because of concept, but I happen to know that Will is kinda the god-stat in this game. I think that means I'm gonna have to keep Strength and Speed on the lower end, right? 

Wait, hang on. Human average is three. I could put all four stats at 6 - described as "Best (Real human peak" on the "realistic" scale of things and "very good" on the cinematic side of things, and I'd still have six points left. (Right? Yeah, 4*6=24.) So...sure, let's so that. And then I'll bump Wits to 8 and Will to 7. That's 6+6+8+10, which is indeed 30.  

Next I can roll a d6 to determine how attractive I am. I mean...why's this here? It's optional, and I guess I see the intent, but it's just weird to include this after this whole big long thing about how they're not included a social stat. Whatever, I'm not going to bother.

Derived traits. OK, I'll do 'em now, but there better not be any way to change our Attributes later!

Health is Strength x 6, so 36 for me. Initiative is...weird. Oh, I get it, it's 2d6 + twice your speed, but there must be a way to change that number of dice because it's blank on the sheet. Anyway, for Del it's 2d6 + 12. Defense is Wits + 3 (11), and KO Threshold is 10-Will (3). I get (Will x 6) Power Points, so 42, and Overflow Gauge is the same thing. Death Threshold is 0 - Strength (weird), so -6. 

Right, so. Skill Picks! The system here isn't a million miles from Chill, actually. Skills are either Trained or not, and then they can be increased to Apprentice, Expert, and Master levels. Those levels cost 1, 3, and 5 Skill Picks, respectively, and I get twice my Wits in Skill Picks (so 16), and then I get a number of skills in which I'm trained equal to my Wits. So if you're keep track, that's 16 Skill Picks and 8 Trained Skills. OK, cool. Again, seems like a lot for a teenager, but then again, I like when characters are competent. How ridiculously granular is the Skill list? 

It's...not the worst I've seen, and it does mention that making your own Skills is simple enough. OK, let's just go through the list and figure out what Del should know how to do and then figure out the levels afterwards:

Awareness
Bike (I assume this means "bicycle" since it's based on Speed, while Drive is based on Wits)
Blades/Brawling (I dunno, I think I want some combat skill, but I'm not sure what makes the most sense)
Calculus (quick, when was the last time you roll on a math-based Skill in an RPG?)
Chemistry
Drive
Spanish (fun fact, Spanish is not actually on this list. German is, but if every language is its own Skill, why not just say "Language?")
Hacking
Stealth
Subterfuge
Thrown Weapons (to be paired with TK eventually, I think)

That's 11 Skills. I...suspect I will need to find more. OK, let's go top-down. Has Del mastered any of these Skills? You know what, fuck it. He's mastered Calculus. I'll put 5 Picks there, taking me to 11. I'll say he's Expert in Awareness, Spanish and Chemistry (taking me to 2), and then I'll be Apprentice in Bike and Stealth. And then I'm Trained in Drive, Hacking, Subterfuge, Thrown Weapons, Blades, Brawling, Climbing, and...let's invent a Skill called Gen Ed to cover shit that a recent high school grad would know.

One starting combat Technique. I'll take Bull's Eye, since I've been watching Daredevil: Born Again and I think the possibilities of what a TK could accomplish with thrown weapons are endless.

Finally, the good stuff! I get 1 + [Wits/2) Psi Talent Picks, which for me means 5...no, hang on. The chargen chart up there says 1 + etc, but the book says 2 + etc. I think the book is right. That gives me 6 Picks. Unlike Skill Picks, though, these are just assigned 1-for-1, and there's not an upper limit, meaning if I wanted 5 levels in Telekinesis I could do that (I don't know that I do). What do I need to fly? I need Telekinesis 4. Suits me. Would I like to put points into either Psychokinesis or Pyrokinesis, or take Telekineses Talents? 

I think I'll take a level of Biofeedback (RAW, it doesn't let you do this, but I think that would allow me to survive on less oxygen, which is useful for flying) and a level of Necrokinesis (allowing me to touch people and damage them, and I think Del is complete unaware he can do this yet). 

And then the last bits are about shopping and picking weapons, and eh. I think I'll skip it. 

So! Del is 17. He's tall and skinny, he's got brown eyes and red hair, and fewer freckles than he used to. I think his view of Telekinesis is largely focused on transporting his own self around, which is neat inversion of how telekinetics usually roll. 

That's it! I'm just gonna upload the first page of the character sheet because the second page doesn't have much on it, other than the psionic stuff, which is important, but it's still not got much there (it's good sheet design, though, I think in play it'd be pretty easy to navigate).