The Lost Boys is a 1987 vampire flick directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Jason Patrick, Kiefer Sutherland, Barnard Hughes, Dianne Wiest, Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, Jamison Newlander, Jami Gertz, Chance Michael Corbitt, Alex Winter, Edward Hermann, and I could seriously keep going.
Michael (Patrick) and Sam (Haim) move to Santa Carla, CA with their mother Lucy (Wiest) following her divorce, to live with their grandfather (Hughes). They immediately discover that Santa Carla is weird; there are a lot of missing people. Michael meets Star (Gertz) and falls in deep smit, but Star is apparently attached to David (Sutherland) and his gang. They take Michael in and give him "wine", which turns him into a half-vampire; he starts craving blood and going feral. Oh, and flying.
His brother Sam enlists the help of the Frog brothers, Edgar and Allen (Feldman and Newlander, respectively), and together they slay the vampires, including the head vampire Max (Hermann), whom Lucy has been dating. Michael, Star, and Laddie (Corbitt), a little boy who got turned into a half-vampire somewhere along the way, all return to normal. The end!
I love this movie. I had forgotten how much. There was a time when I could have started doing the dialog and probably gone through the whole film. It's not quite that bad anymore, but I'm definitely still very familiar with the beats, and it's fun to watch Sutherland and the other vampires defer to Max (their "father") before you get that reveal. I did feel that having Max asked to be invited in was a little bit of a giveaway, but I've watched it with enough people who weren't aware of that particular bit of vampire lore that I have to admit it was effectively.
Anyway. The hairstyles have aged, but the effects hold up pretty well. You don't see the vampires fly, instead you get the camera POV flying through the air and closeups on terrified victims, which works nicely. And the movie is actually not terribly gory; there's the massacre at the bonfire, but apart from a couple of shots of people getting bitten it's pretty understated.
I have not seen the sequels, and y'know, I think maybe I won't. Why screw with perfectly good material?
Happy Halloweekend! It's late October, the crows are singing, the leaves are falling, the kicks are starting, and I feel like making a character. Nothing too strenuous, though; it's late and I'm old. But I want to do a horror game every day this weekend (plus Monday), so I figure I'll probably stick to systems I know. To wit:
The Game:tremulus The Publisher:Reality Blurs Degree of Familiarity: Some with the general genre and some with the underling system, but none with this particular game. Books Required: Just the one.
tremulus (I'll forgive them the deliberately lower-casing, obviously) is billed as "a storytelling game of Lovecraftian horror," but it's not really about Cthulhu specifically. It looks like it focuses more on the "slow creeping drive-you-mad horror" than the tentacles, and I like that. I backed this game on Kickstarter a long while ago, and (like most of the games I buy) it's sat on the shelf waiting for me to have a good reason to pick it up. As I'm reading it, though, it looks pretty accessible, so it might find its way to my table someday.
Anyway, my first task here is to pick a playbook. I would pick Alienist, but I made one of those already. "Heir" is listed as "everyman who comes into a windfall," and I like that; there's some fish out of water potential. 'Scuse me while I print this out (eeek!).
So, chargen. Step one is choose a playbook, which I have. Step two is Choose a name. There's a list on the playbook, or I could make one up. But the very first name is "Samuel Hale" and I kinda like it. Not a plosive sound in it; it sounds kind of lyrical and yielding. I think he winces when someone calls him "Mr. Hale."
Next step is the look, which, like a lot PbtA games (including the one I'm writing!) involves choosing some things from lists. So: I'm a man. My clothes are "worn suit" (it used to be kind of smart, back when it was new, but Samuel never saw it then). His face is friendly, his eyes are almond (I kinda like it; weird twist) and his build is lithe.
Next we do attributes. I pick a set. Hmm. I think I'll take Reason +1, Passion +1, Might -1, Luck +2, and Affinity 0. I like the idea of a high Luck rating, and I'm fine with Samuel not having any great shakes in the Might department.
I get 1d6 Wealth, which I assume I roll now, since stuff in play costs Wealth (it's not really clear, but I'm not reading carefully, either). I get a 2. Bah. I get no Lore, whatever that means. I get a choice of two things from a list. I'll take the town attorney as a contact, and I'll take a "good item" worth up to 3 Wealth that I inherited from the Hales that we don't really talk about. I'll say it's a cane with a black gem on the hilt. Samuel's great-great-uncle Dederick used it to walk around, and his will stipulated it should go to Samuel.
And then I get two special moves. I want Frantic (I can use Luck instead of Might to Threaten after I'm harmed). Hmm. There's a move that lets me heal quicker, there's one that reduces Shock because I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for this, but then there's Ancestral Home. If I were actually going to play Samuel, I'd take Ancestral Home if it was cool with the Keeper that some of the action revolved around the place; if we're not there it's not much use to me. I think I'll take Certainty (that's the one that reduces Shock); by the end, Dederick didn't have much left. The house is in disrepair and may have been sold off at some point. Samuel only got the cane, though that creepy lawyer is still hanging around...
I would normally assign Trust at this point, creating intersection between PCs, but you know how it is, it's just me. As such, I'm about done!
Frodo and Sam are being led by Gollum up to Mount Doom, by way of the tunnel of Shelob, the spider-queen. Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli head for the city of Minas Tirith with the soldiers of Rohan, but stop along the way to rouse an army of ghosts from a mountain. They arrive and wipe out Sauron's mercenary reinforcements, and help win the day Gondor.
Meanwhile, though, it's all about Frodo and Sam, who manage to limp up the mountain, whereupon Frodo finally succumbs to the ring and puts it on. Gollum, though, jumps on him, bites of his finger, and is promptly knocked into the lava. The ring melts, Sauron is defeated, all the orcs run away (we don't find out where they go, but one assumes Tolkein gave each of their addresses in an appendix or something), and then we get the epilogue. Which lasts an hour or so.
Life goes back more or less to normal in the Shire, but Frodo is still wounded from his stab on Weathertop, and never really recovers from his time as Ring-Bearer. Sam marries Rosie (Sarah McLeod) and has a couple of hobbit children, and then accompanies Merry, Pippin, and Frodo to the harbor to see Bilbo (Ian Holm, remember) off to the Gray Havens. Frodo, of course, decides to go as well, as does Gandalf, and the movie ends with Sam going home to his family.
So, I can only imagine what it must have been like filming that scene, after so many years of shooting together. I hope the actors were really close and not just sick of each other. In any case, though, the feeling of this movie is just weary. Everything is coming down, and while the scope of the movie is just as spectacular as the rest, it's another huge battle, another majestic cityscape, another battle of wills over the Ring. The best parts of the movie are probably with the hobbits and Gollum, because Sean Astin really gets a chance to shine as Sam. At the same time, though, you can see the end coming, and the movie is so long and has so many apparent end-points that you just wind up wanting to jump ahead maybe a little.
With all that said, the effects hold up really well, the performances are fine for the most part ("A diversion!"), and the ending, taking us back where we began to the Shire, is sweet and simple. I still think Fellowship is the best of the trilogy, but you really have to take the trilogy as a whole.
Monday was Feng Shui. It's been about a month since our last foray into ape-land, in which the Dragons fought off the soldiers of Thrill Kill Mandrill (whom they assumed was dead, since they watched him get vaporized by magic). This time, they were camping out in the ruins of an old factory when the monkeys attacked!
The monkeys swooped into the factory and started grabbing the humans that the Dragons were escorting. An unseen assassin shot Wildfire from the trees; Wildfire responded by changing into his monster form, of course. A knife came flying through the air and struck Bai...a knife that smell oddly boozy ("God damn you, Drunky Monkey!").
The battle was joined, with Dragons flipping between the two levels of the factory and knocking monkeys off and into the trees. Celeste used her whip to yank prisoners out of monkey hands, and Wu Tang employed his signature "hit a monkey with another monkey" method. What the Dragons missed, though, was a monkey sneaking up to the truck and letting out Smilin' Bill; both that monkey and Bill Cheesed It into the trees (carrying the parking meter that Wu Tang had used to bar the door), and soon thereafter the rest of the monkeys fled. The Dragons captured a couple of monkeys and put them in the truck, and headed on.
One of the human folks approached Wu Tang and asked what he planned to do when they reached the river. Tang asked him to elaborate, and the man explained that there was a wooden bridge that led across, but that it wasn't really sturdy and the apes might have taken it. There was another, much larger stone bridge up ahead, but that required walking along the river, which with the truck would be difficult. Tang thanked the man ("Shimmy-ya, Wu Tang," he said in respect), and then assembled the Dragons.
Celeste recognized that this was the futuristic ruins of Hong Kong, and that if her calculations were right, Genomic Solutions - wherein they'd first fought Thrill Kill Mandrill - was in the woods somewhere. The Dragons decided to let the humans crossed the river at the stone bridge and move along, while they turned into the forest to check out the remains of the lab and, perhaps, confront Thrill Kill. Thanks to careful driving from Johnny, they made it there safely, and the people headed over the bridge to a (hopefully) safer life.
The Dragons headed into the trees, and were suddenly accosted by a troop of chimps with bows and arrows. The leader, a jaunty fellow wearing green, demanded payment for traipsing through the woods. ("Robin Hood?" said Johnny. "No, robbin' you!") He said he'd take the truck, and the Dragons shrugged; they were just about done with it anyway. Wu Tang, though, just couldn't let it go without a fight. He slashed a tire as he walked by, and the leader chimp ordered the attack.
The Dragons fought them off non-lethally, knocking them into the convenient nearby pond and batting away their arrows, until finally Johnny said that if they weren't allied with Thrill Kill (the leader had earlier spat at the mention of his name), perhaps they would be willing to do a little light ninja-ing? The leader-chimp, Errol, asked Tang why he was going after Thrill Kill, and Tang explained that he'd killed his partner. "A noble quest for revenge, then!" said Errol, and ordered his monkeys to get the truck fixed.
Next time, we'll see where this insanity leads us.
My group that was playing Iron Eddadecided to switch over to something quick and light in tone before we jump into Promethean again (we also talked about getting back into my Hunter: The Vigil/Mage: The Awakening game, but the consensus was that if we played Mage we wanted time to really get into it and this game isn't going to go that long. In a related matter, I love that I can say to this group "we'll totally play Mage in a few months" and they're like "Oh, OK, fine").
Anyway, we talked about a bunch of different games, but we were aiming for a pretty narrow target. To wit:
A game that was light in tone, even if it had horror elements
A game that I didn't have sink a lot of time into reading (which meant a shorter book)
A game that didn't require the players to read it, because they won't
We talked about a bunch of games, but many of them fell short of those last two requirements. We talked about Guild of Shadows, which I'm interested in running at some point, but folks were skeptical about the "everyone's a thief" bit. In the end, we landed on East Texas University; it's modern day, it's Savage Worlds (which most of them know), and it's Buffy-level horror. Plus it's got a random adventure generator, which I'm totally using.
The Game: East Texas University The Publisher:Pinnacle Entertainment Group Degree of Familiarity: Very familiar with Savage Worlds Books Required:ETU and some version of Savage Worlds
As you know, I like to make characters for the games I'm running, so since I have a little time before I have to go pick Kai up from riding lessons (which sounds so posh when I say it like that), I'll do up a college freshman real quick. I said on Facebook that my next character would use this as a theme song ("Colors", by Halsey):
Don't worry about the video per se, it's just the song I'm after. Well, reading the lyrics, the drugs are evident. I can't decide if I want to play the person singing the song (I mean, not Halsey) or the subject. I think I'd like to play the person singing. So here's the deal.
My character is Drake Stephens. He's a freshman at ETU, but ETU wasn't his first choice. He was going to go to his local university, which I'll say is Michigan because I know the area kinda-sorta. So he's from the Detroit area. Drake fell in love with a guy (Ryan) his senior year in high school. Ryan didn't have as easy a time with coming out as Drake did (Drake's parents' reaction was basically "yeah, and?"), and Ryan developed a drug habit. This culminated with Ryan OD'ing in late July and then disappearing out of the psych ward. As far as Drake knows, Ryan's parents had him moved to a different hospital.
Now, if I'm running the game, this being a horror game and all, Ryan might show up on the run from the demonic conversion therapy place (conveniently running distance from ETU or something) that he'd been stashed, which would leave Drake and Ryan to contemplate their relationship and whether it's a good idea to resume. But for the moment, let's assume that Drake went to ETU to get away from his home town and his memories of his boyfriend, so he's like a lot of college freshmen - a little confused, a little damaged, ready to start something new.
Step One of chargen is race, even though they're all human so why bother. Step Two is Major. I think we'll make Drake a Folklore Major. ETU actually has a well-renowned Folklore program, and I think Drake picked that because his original major at U of M was Psychology, and then he got a close look at a psych ward and decided "no, mythology is better." That makes my Major Skill Knowledge (Folklore).
Step Three is Traits. Starting with Attributes, I get a d4 in each and then five more to split up, just like in the home game. I actually think I'll just split it up evenly; d6 is each Attribute.
Now I get 15 points in Skills. I swear to god, if I ever do M0arpigz, I'm gonna put the Skills on the damn character sheet. This flipping between books is for the birds. Anyway, I'll put a d6 in my Major Skill, so that's two points. I'll take Driving and Fighting at d4, why not. I'll take Investigation at d6 (so I'm up to 6 points spent; 9 more). Ooh, Notice. I'll splurge and by it d8, which costs extra because my Smarts is only d6. I've got 5 more. Riding and Stealth at d4, Streetwise at d6 (Ryan's influence) and Taunt at d4.
Sigh. No, we don't do Derived Traits now because Edges & Hindrances can change them.
Step Four: Edges and Hindrances! I get a free Edge because I'm human. I want Be a Zebra, which raises my Parry by two if I'm standing next to a target. I want Hindrances, though. I'll take Second Fiddle, which frankly a lot of my characters should have (I feel like a secondary character and have to make a Spirit roll or lose a Benny). I'll take Clueless for my Major Hindrance; it sounds dire but it just means I take a -2 to Common Knowledge checks (and that Drake is out of touch with the mainstream, which is a pretty good representation of a Michigan boy in East Texas anyway). And them I'll take Doubting Thomas, because it's so rarely applicable (Drake, quite reasonably, doesn't believe in supernatural shit).
Right, that's four points. I'll spend two and boost my Spirit to d8. And then I think I'll boost Fighting to d6 and pick up Persuasion at d4.
I can pick an Extracurricular Activity for my first semester. I'll be boring and take Fitness (I get a +2 to avoid Fatigue from any source this semester; Drake is committed to eating right, exercising, and avoiding drugs and booze, for now).
OK, now derived traits. Charisma and Academics are 0, Pace is 6, Parry is 5 (or 7 if I'm with "the herd"), Toughness is 5, and that'll do it. Drake is ready for academic craziness! Go Ravens!
Today was Headspace; we actually just finished up a few minutes ago. But for a change, I don't have anything pressing right afterwards, so I'ma do the write-up now.
Last time, the Operators prevented PSS from making headway on their goal to subsume civilian police, and stopped Applied Optimism's project to get proof that another corp was behind the tsunami. This time, they learned the Applied Optimism was taking aim at Headspace tech directly, trying to learn to subsume or crack it.
They decided that was important enough to focus on to the exclusion of all else (which meant that the PSS project achieves an objective, but we'll get to that next time). They decided to take aim at the AO project's Time Milestone, which was Test Headspace crack using a broadcast facility. Their objectives were to locate this facility, rescue their test subjects and liberate the data, and then destroy the facility.
Spider activated his AI, Diane, to check the footage of their original raid on AO (where their Handler and Whitecoat were killed). They found that there was an aerodyne that landed just before the building exploded, marked with passes to get in and out of the quarantine zone - that must be where the facility is. As they were checking data, though, Diane told Spider that their feed was being tracked. They left, Grease driving (and plowing through a taco stand - Rage feedback!). Willis leaned out the window and blew up an aerodyne that was following them, and they made it to Grease's hideout in an old, abandoned bank.
Arrow checked the security feeds and found someone tooling around on a hoverbike, adjusting his nose - he had the same disguise implant that she did. Figuring he was probably looking for them, Arrow and Willis went down the road to see if he'd follow (he did) while Spider tagged the dude with a special invisible tracking paint that he rigged up. They followed the guy into the quarantine zone, but Grease got cold feet at the last minute before crossing the border. Willis jumped out and parkour'd their way in, following the guy, while Grease searched around for a safer crossing point.
Willis trailed the guy to a short, squat building in the q-zone. The others caught up, and Arrow used her contacts in the Architect's Guild to get the blueprints - there was no roof access, but they could get in through a manhole (or, to use the less sexist term, "street orifice"). The Operators went below and, hacking their way past security, emerged into the ground floor.
There, they found 20 beds, each occupied by a person hooked up to electrodes. The people were all breathing in perfect unison. One of the people was Angel, their supposedly-dead Whitecoat. But if she's here, then how is her memory still in the Headspace? (At this point, the Operators had achieved their first Objective: Found the facility, but Operators are off-balance and freaked out.)
They decided to split up. Grease left to go and find a vehicle big enough to transport these people. Spider create a failsafe to buy them time if AO decided to fry these folks. Arrow and Willis climbed up the elevator shaft (the only egress from their floor), and emerged in a control room with three whitecoats and the op from before.
Arrow nailed the op in the back with a monofilament knife, but those are messy, and the whitecoats noticed and hit the alarm. Spider was unable to stop the data from being purged (rather, he chose to save the people instead). Willis shot the whitecoats, but Diane warned Spider that vehicles were incoming.
Grease, meanwhile, contacted his ring of thieves and got them to send a bus. He got it to the facility, and Willis blew a hole in the wall. Willis used their weapons and grenades to fend off the security response, but was shot and wounded (and Taken Out) in the process. Arrow went to grab Willis, but collapsed into the bus (also Taken Out). Spider ran off into the q-zone, abandoning the others but circling back around to where they crossed into the q-zone. This completed the second Objective (Victims rescued, but data was lost and Operators and separated).
Grease drove the bus to the Dodge Clan's den, but wasn't allowed to leave the bus (the Clan was justifiably concerned that they'd been in the q-zone. Spider arrived and rigged the bus' engine to provide power to the victim's communal headspace, but knew that wouldn't last. Grease, meanwhile, fussed over Angel (who'd been injured in the escape), and Arrow obsessed over how Angel was here, alive, but also her "ghost" was in their heads. Willis woke up and discovered their left hand wasn't moving; too badly injured in the fight.
Spider hacked into the headspace, but did it too forcefully and all four of the Operators appeared. They talked with the people, who were confused and defensive, but Willis talked them into waking up. They did, including Angel, but Angel's memories after receiving her headspace implant were gone - she had no memory of the other Operators. She was, however, able to give them tests and prove that they were negative for the Tsunami Flu, so the Clan let the Operators leave.
By then, though, they'd been in there long enough that AO had time to get rid of all the evidence at the facility. This meant that the Operators failed the final Objective, but since they completed the first two they won the Milestone.
Next time, though, they'll have to split their focus or give ground.
Writin' bout Monsters. That's a Kickstarter, go back it.
Anyway!
The Game:Small World The Publisher:Days of Wonder Time: Depends how many players, but less than an hour Players: Me, +Michelle, Kathy, +John, Gwen
New game, so we get to punch out cardboard thingies!
Game Play:Small World consists of various races trying to keep hold of land in a shrinking world (I mean, the fact that the world is shrinking is part of the conceit of the game; it doesn't actually happen in-game). The board has four variants (2, 3, 4, and 5 players), and gets bigger the more players you have, but the game also has fewer turns.
Here's the 5-player variant.
At the start of the game, you shuffle the races, and then the special powers and make a line of five (powers and races are separate, so you don't get the same combos game to game). You can pick the top one in the column, or buy a lower one with victory points, but in either case, you wind up with a bunch of little cardboard squares representing your units. Once you've got your units, you place them in those little segments (starting with a border one and then going adjacent); you've got to place at least two, then one more for things like mountains and enemy units.
And then you get victory points, and then play passes!
Michelle contemplates colonization.
Subsequent rounds let you pick up your units and keep moving out, conquering other folks if you've got the units for it, but eventually you get spread too thin. At that point, you can go into decline; you flip your units, they're basically dead (they still generate victory points, but they're easy to conquer) and you can pick a new race.
Busy, busy.
Opinions: It's a fun game. Part of the strategy is knowing which combinations of race and special power are good to pick up when (I wound up with Spirit Ghouls at the end of the game, which would have been fantastic at the beginning) and when to go into decline to best maximize your race's position. Since there are a limited number of turns, you definitely have to plan ahead, but it doesn't have as many things to keep in mind as other similar games, so that's nice.
