Movie #418: Goodfellas

Goodfellas is a gangster flick directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Ray Liotta, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, Paul Sorvino, Lorraine Bracco, and a lot of other folks, including a young-ish Samuel L. Jackson. It's one of the defining movies of the genre and earned Pesci an Oscar.

As far back as Henry Hill (Liotta) could remember, he wanted to be a gangster. The movie traces Hill's life from his childhood in New York to working for Paulie Cicero (Sorvino), meeting Jimmy "The Gent" Conway (DeNiro) and Tommy DeVito (Pesci), who become his partners in crime, and working his way up in the family. He marries and has kids, and the movie occasionally switches perspective to that of his wife Karen (Bracco), a Jewish woman who marries into this mob and comes to regard the insular nature of "the family" as normal.

Eventually Hill goes to prison for a few years and winds up hooked on, and dealing, cocaine, which brings down more heat than he can buy. He gets busted, sells out his friends, and winds up in witness protection, lamenting everything he lost. There's a whole lot more I'm skipping, but that's the guts of it. A lot of the more famous scenes involve Pesci (his "what am I, a clown? Here to fuckin' amuse you?" bit gets parodied all over the place), but Liotta holds the movie together. It's also kinda close to accurate, at least according to Hill himself (skips his military tenure, for example, but that really wouldn't have fit the tone of the movie).

The performances are pretty darned amazing; Pesci and Bracco are standouts, but DeNiro has all of the charm and intensity of his early, pre-Dirty Grandpa career and Sorvino, though he's not in too much of the movie, does a great job of conveying the power of a boss who "didn't move for anybody."

If I have a complaint, it's that the sections where Karen narrates never really go anywhere - she gets to relate her side of the story a little, but then about the time Hill sets his mistress up in an apartment we don't get her first-person perspective anymore, which is a shame. Beyond that, though, it's a fantastic movie - you can say it glamorizes the life, but really it comes off as Hill trying to glamorize it and looking like a dick in the process, which of course he was.

My Grade: A
Rewatch value: Medium (it's long, but paced really well)

Next up: Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2

Character Creation: Orkworld

Wow, I actually haven't posted anything at all since before GenCon. Been busy with, well, GenCon, but also being back at work and doing writing n' stuff.

Anyway, I feel like making a character and I read this game recently, so!

The Game: Orkworld
The Publisher: Wicked Press (written by John Wick, but it doesn't seem to be available anywhere that I can find with an easy Google)
Degree of Familiarity: None. I've read most of the book.
Books Required: Just the one.

 
So, the story behind this game, as told in the book, is that John was playing in a D&D game and asked to play an ork (orc?) bard, and the GM said no, orks are evil, and John, ever the contrarian, turned around and wrote a 4000 word essay on ork culture to justify the character when then mushroomed into this game.

Much of the book is about ork culture. The book falls into that category of games that I probably wouldn't run because it would require the players to read the book, and I don't have players that do that so much anymore. That said, the world-building is extensive and pretty interesting in a lot of places. So let's get to it!

Part of what you do here is build a household, but there's also a system for building lone orks, which is what I'm gonna do because I don't have a group. I also found an interactive sheet for this, so that's pretty neat.

So I start with...the character questions, I guess, which is technically under the household section? (This book isn't intuitively organized, which is a problem I've had before.)

What does your character look like? I'll say my ork is short and stocky. His front teeth are blunted and maybe a bit too big, and he's got a tinge of blue in his black hair. He's missing two toes from his left foot (bitten off by another ork in a fight).

Does your ork have any distinct habits or quirks? My ork favors clubs, but lighter ones that are balanced for throwing. He's always tossing them (or some other bulky object) up and catching it.

When does courage end and bravado begin? Odd question, and in context what it seems to mean is "do you really believe your soul lives on eternally after you die?" I think my ork believes it pretty much whole-heartedly; he jokes about what kind of spices he should be flavored with (orks eat their dead).

How will your ork die? He'd like to die in battle and be carried back and made into stew. He's afraid he'll die lost and alone in the wilds and no one will find his body.

OK, so now I skip ahead a few steps to step five, creating thraka (warriors, basically). I get 15 points if I'm an ork without a household, which is effectively what I'm doing here. I note that I'm rank 1.

Virtues! I get five (Courage, Cunning, Endurance, Prowess, Strength); one at 3, three at 2, one at 1. I can raise them with points, too.

So, I think I'll put my 3 in Prowess, my 2s in Courage, Cunning, and Strength, and my 1 in Endurance.

Skills, then. I guess I can put them under whatever Virtue? Oh, there it is, yep, whatever Virtue is appropriate. Okies. Skills are 1 point each and then 1 point to increase, to a max of 3.

Well, I want a "Throw Club" skill, which feels like it should go until Prowess. I'll put that at 2.

Oh, christ, there's "Overpowering Flatulence" listed as an example skill. FFS.

Anyway, I do like "That Didn't Hurt!" as a skill, so I'll take that and stick it under Endurance. I'll also spend four and raise my Endurance to 2. I have, therefore, spent 7 of my 15.

I sort of want to take some kind of social or mental skill, maybe something to do with reverence or prayer, which I guess would go under Cunning, but literally none of the examples listed have anything to do with that. Ork Lore, I guess. Maybe I'll be a bard someday.

I'll take Block as a Skill, I figure my guy is good at taking and deflecting shots. Unless some jerk bites his toes. 2 points there, 5 left.

I'll take SMASH as a Skill, since "Spear and Shield" doesn't really cover his fighting style. I'll put 3 in, why not. 2 left for a Charge! Skill under Courage.

And then I do my wound rating, which is 3 (Endurance + Rank) and my Trouble (which is 1).

Oh, I have names, too. I'll say his current name is Doodaykin. Seems pretty orky.

I think that's it, actually. The other stuff on the sheet is household related, which as I said, I'm not doing. I like the vaguely spiritual vibe from this ork; like, he's a believer but is more focused on being a warrior. I think it'd be fun to have a spiritual crisis with him.

Movie #417: Mirror, Mirror

Mirror, Mirror is a retelling/reimagining of the Snow White myth, starring Lily Collins, Julia Roberts, Nathan Lane, Armie Hammer, Martin Klebber, Danny Woodburn, and Lisa Robert Gillan.

The movie focuses more on the Queen (Roberts) than on Snow White (Collins) as far as POV goes, but it's really the same story: The evil queen wants to remain the fairest in the land, but as her stepdaughter grows up it becomes obvious that she's going to get outstripped. Meanwhile, she taxes her people into poverty, relying on vague attacks from a "beast" to keep people afraid. Snow White, meanwhile, is kept to her room, until one day she goes walkabout and gets ambushed by seven bandits, who turn out to be dwarves, led by Butcher (Klebber) and Grimm (Woodburn).

Said dwarves have previously ambushed and trussed an adventure-seeking prince (Hammer), who the queen promptly drugs with a love potion, attempts to marry, loses to Snow White (who frees him with a kiss, in a nice little subversion). The dwarves teach Snow to fight, and she eventually does confront the beast, who, it turns out, is her father (Sean Bean), enslaved by the queen.

There's a lot going on here, I realize as I write this up, and most of it works. There are other assorted bits - Nathan Lane plays the queen's scummy little assistant, the prince's love potion makes him think he's a puppy (serious props to Armie Hammer for committing to that), but the best part of this movie is Roberts as the queen. She's evil, no question - she's quite willing to have people killed and she's utterly remorseless - but she's not detached about it, either. She's excited on her wedding day to the prince, she's angry when Snow bests her, and she inhabits the role in a way that's a lot more visceral than such villains often get played.

A really interesting bit: When the queen uses the titular mirror, she enters a little pocket realm inhabited by her reflection, which you'd think would be played by Roberts. Instead, though, they cast her sister (Gillan), who looks really similar, but just different enough that she takes on this ethereal otherness next to the queen. Nice effect.

Also, the whole thing ends with a Bollywood number (it's directed by Tarsem Singh), which was a fun touch. If I have a complaint, it's that the beast doesn't show up until the very end, and up until then it's kind of an afterthought. Generally, though, it's funny and light and enjoyable.

My Grade: B+
Rewatch value: Medium-high

Next up: Misery

Night's Black Agents! Whoa!

I ran this game on Saturday, and then GenCon prep got geared up and I completely forgot to do the write-up. Blah.

So! Last time, the agents ended an op and decided they'd head out Lithuania and see just what the conspiracy was hiding (part of the reasoning was that the last time they did this, it led them to the Isle of Man and they got some pretty useful intel, so). They set themselves up with a safehouse, and then MacAteer started taking low-level thug jobs using a connected cover, someone who knows Matis Bagdones (who, remember, was a merc/driver in the Isle of Man and is now in Budapest prison).

His first gig was just taking a bunch of stolen stuff out of a warehouse. Bringing his impressive array of skills to bear, he noted that one of the guys, Soulis, was being taciturn - he was deflecting questions and just generally not saying anything. They toughs all went out drinking after the job, and Soulis was using the same kinds of tricks MacAteer was to avoid getting drunk.

MacAteer contacted the others, managed to finagle a moment alone with Soulis, and punched him in the head, dazing him long enough to get him to a second site. There, he and Ess got to work on interrogation...

...and realized he was an undercover cop. Shit.

They salvaged the situation, though, with some quick use of Cover and some other skills. They claimed to be Interpol, looking into human trafficking out of Vilinus, and paid for Soulis' emergency dental work. He was glad to have the help, and was apparently reporting to just one CO (probably to avoid leaks getting him killed). That gave the agents an in, and potentially some backup.

Meanwhile, Parker wrote Sedillo a letter and asked about reproduction - the agents had learned that Hajnal supposedly had a son, which they thought gave them a timeline for when he was turned. But if Sedillo was right, if these vampires could reproduce, that didn't necessarily mean anything - he could be hundreds of years old. She wrote back and said that it might very well be possible for a vampire to have a child with a human, but she wasn't sure, genetically, what that would look like. Likewise, the child of two vampires would probably be a vampire from birth, but it was hard to know without experiments that she wasn't equipped to do.

The agents also noticed a lot of interference in wireless communication in Vilinus, which is weird because it's usually really good in Europe. They took a few days to build a device that could analyze and track the disturbance, and then drove around the city following the boops. This led them north, into a state park, and eventually down a disused dirt road. They concealed their van and waited. Hours later, a Hummer emerged and left.

They decided to check it out. Gambone and Ess posed as hikers (backpack to conceal the device) and sneaked through the woods. They saw a jeep with a couple of guards armed with assault rifles, but they weren't sure what was beyond that. We'll find that out next time.

Promethean in the Distant Mists of Monday

It's Friday, you see, and I kept meaning to do this write-up but I've been sick and at work.

Anydangway, last time, we had a bunch milestones. This time, we were missing Feather (because Michelle was sicker than me so she stayed home).

Skip is still at the hospital and Parris had whispered "Nergal" in her sleep. When she wakes up, Skip tries to ask her about it, just to see if she remembered something from a dream, but Skip is not the most socially adept of Prometheans at the best of time and winds up putting her into Disquiet. Parris kinda smiles and nods, asks for a nurse, and Skip gets the distinct feeling he's no longer welcome. He heads for home, calling ahead to have Enoch send Feather out to watch over Parris.

Meanwhile, Avalon, Matt, and Grimm are headed across the river with Charon to get some juice back. They ask about the meeting coming up with the various supernatural folks in the city, but Charon still doesn't know where it's going to be (lots of political nuance there he isn't privy to). They get to the power station and juice up, and then feel Azoth call to Azoth. They followed it back and meet an Osiran, also there for a top-off. Matt uses Heed the Call to take his Measure, and the man introduces himself as Paul DeVries.

The throng chats with him; he's been in New Orleans for a while and he's acquainted with Sicky, Barbara, and (formerly) Papillion. He owns a big house outside of the French Quarter and is a venture capitalist, which surprises the characters (they're used to Prometheans being poor). He talks with them, asking some rather probing questions, including asking Grimm which of the throng he finds the most troublesome (Skip, of course), but then points out that if the problem was really Nergal, and Nergal is gone, what's the trouble?

He gives them a lift in his boat and offers to take them back to his place for dessert. Avalon is game (she sees in him a direction for her Pilgrimage), but Matt wants to head back to the town to check on Parris. He puts it to Grimm to break the tie, and Grimm, uncomfortable, agrees with Matt. DeVries shrugs and drives them back. The Prometheans head back to the storefront (after Matt checks in with Feather).

Skip and Enoch are at the storefront with Sicky (Sicky is bouncing a ball against the wall like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape; turns out Sicky used to hole up in a Blockbuster store at night and watch movies). They talk and Skip reveals that he doesn't really know all that much about Nergal - where he came from, what he wanted, where he went, even what he was. They call Barbara to come over and she says that based on the description Skip gave, Nergal sounds like a spirit of chaos or mischief, but without seeing him it was hard to know. He might not have been able to follow Skip into the Hedge when he flew off the mountain, but again, who can say?

The others arrive in the midst of this, and Grimm wonders if Nergal might be the spirit that was now driving Red, but isn't sure if that was the kind of spirit that worked with "the Bound." It's late, so the Prometheans bed down for the night.

In the morning, Avalon calls DeVries to hang out, and he comes to get her and takes her out on his boat. They head out into the gulf to go swimming, and Avalon notes that DeVris is missing his genitals (it's traditional for some forms of the Osiran creation ritual; DeVries doesn't seem bothered). They swim and talk for a bit, and then DeVries gets a call. At first he refuses whatever it is the caller asks, but then something changes his mind. He informs Avalon that tonight, he'll be hosting a meeting, and she can just come back to the house with him and get ready. He's sure he has something she can wear.

The others spend the day doing...things. Enoch continues work on his Athanor, while Grimm pesters. Grimm also reflects that his choice not to go with DeVries was counter to his Refinement, and falters a bit on his Pilgrimage; he sticks with it, but is a little unsteady. Skip heads to the library to research spirit summoning and occult stuff, but isn't able to find much of real use. He calls Charon, who recommends he talk to Jesse Cartwright at the meeting - Jesse's a ghost and spirit hunter and a decent sort.

Sicky and Matt spend the day walking around the city noting any remaining Pilgrim Marks for Matt's atlas, and get back in time to learn that the meeting is tonight at DeVries' house. Sicky kind of blanches a little; last time it was there a werewolf kinda went nuts and ripped the place up a bit. His name was Jesse. "Cartwright?" asks Skip. "I don't know," says Sicky. "I just knew him as Jesse Burning-Bones." "Great."

(Sicky also mentions that while werewolves don't succumb to Disquiet the way human beings do, it does make them more edgy and angry.)

So with all of that mind, when we reconvene, we'll have this big meeting at the DeVries house.

Board Game: Evolution

Finished the Chill game a little early yesterday, so tried this game out.

The Game: Evolution
The Publisher: North Star Games
Time: About an hour
Players: Me, +Michelle, +Dirty Heart, +Jessica

Time for the fittest to do a little survivin'.

Game Play: The idea here is to guide your various species to dominance. This involves making sure they get enough to eat, and have the right combination of traits to survive whatever predators might be out there.

Players start off rounds playing one trait card into the middle (the watering hole). Then, they play trait cards on their species, taking them from nondescript lizards or whatever to, for instance, long-necked, hard-shelled, tree-climbing herbivores. Then the cards you played to the middle get flipped, and food gets added to the watering hole. Herbivores eat from that, while carnivores...well.

Sarah is not a carnivore but she's way too happy about punching out those tokens.

All species have Body Size and Population. Carnivores can only attack animals that are smaller than they are, and various traits also preclude being attacked (if you're Burrowing, for instance, you can't be attacked if you have food equal to your Population, while only a Climbing carnivore can attack a Climbing whatever). Population falls if you get attacked or if there's not enough food, and if a species' population falls to zero, it's extinct.

At the end of the game, you get points for surviving species (as measured by population), food that your animals ate (you keep all said food in a bag), and trait cards (diversity FTW).

Dinosaurs!

Opinions: This game is really pretty. The production values are off the charts, the rules were really easy to follow, and while they game does take some table space, it's a lot of fun (as compared to another game on the same subject, which was just meh).

Plus it's fun to imagine how exactly an animal with the various traits might have evolved and what cute sounds it makes.

My little menagerie. 

Keep? Yep.

Chill: Phantom Hitchhikers

Yesterday we played Chill. We were down a couple of players, but I wanted to play, and it was a good place for it.

Dylan, Edward, and Jeannie were recuperating from their last case, and BB went out to LA on business, so that leaves Dee and two heretofore unseen envoys to investigate this case. The envoys are Willa Lane (a woman from an abusive family who accidentally killed her father when he went after her mother) and Jordan Ramsey (a former EMT and now part time massage therapist who was attacked by a ghoul while on the job).

Dee had heard through her usual grapevine that a man down in Bruneau, ID (a town of about 550 people south of Boise) had had a paranormal experience, so the three of them hop in the car with Sweet Baby Jesus (the dog, remember) and head down there. They stop at the diner, run by Stewart Myers, the guy they're there to interview.

He tells them that he was on his way into town at night when a man ran out from the woods and flagged him down. The man - who said his name was Bryan - was black, mid-30s, and didn't seem injured, but was obviously scared. He told the envoys that Bryan got in the car and told him to drive, and then asked to use his phone. Stewart didn't hear what Bryan said on the phone, but when they broke the treeline and could see the town, he glanced over and Bryan was gone. His phone was on the seat, with some kind of milky gunk on it.

Stewart wasn't aware of any local legends about a phantom hitchhiker. Willa, pretty well-versed in ghost matters, notes that normally in these stories, the hitchhiker is a girl, and the fact that "Bryan" was frantic and scared might indicate something else. Stewart reports no after-effects; no harm came to him.

The envoys decide to head out to where Stewart picked Bryan up. They stop the car and wander in the woods a bit; Willa finds some stuff on a tree she identifies as ectoplasm, indicating they're on the right track. They have to be careful, though; the ground has multiple little crevasses, very easy to trip and break an ankle. Jordan senses the Unknown and follows the scent (that's how she perceives the Unknown, as a foul smell) back to a deep crevasse. They toss a road flare down, but can't see anything of interest. It looks about 25 feet deep; they'll need gear to get down there and out again.

They head back into town, and Jordan stars to feel ill. She uses Disrupt and feels better for a moment, indicating that something Unknown has touched her. They arrange with Stewart to stay overnight (there's no hotel in town and Stewart has a spare room), but Jordan is really under the weather, so Willa drops Dee at the diner to try and talk up some of the locals while she goes to buy supplies.

Dee talks with some unfriendly old-timers and the local pastor, but isn't able to learn anything about the hitchhiker. Apparently, it's not a local legend, suggesting it may be something more recent.

When Willa and Dee get back to the house, they see that Stewart is sick, too, though he's still ambulatory, just fluish. Jordan, though, is in bad shape. She's dehydrated and only barely conscious, and guess what, she's the medic. Willa calls Darnell at the bunker and has him head down, and bring whoever's handy.

Next session, we'll see who's handy.