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Fantasia 2025: Reflections

July 23, 2025
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Midway through my week in Montreal for Fantasia Festival, and boy is my ass tired. Losing weight is excellent, it’s just that I don’t have as much padding as I used to and Concordia University lecture hall chairs were not completely designed for two hour stretches. Worth it, though.

This is not my look at the full festival — that’ll come next week. Instead, I’ve been spending time thinking about why I cherish this festival so much.

Part of it is simply the continuity. My first Fantasia was 21 years ago — Chris and I drove up from Boston for the weekend. My second one was a couple of years later, and was the first one with S.; then for reasons which I’m sure were sane at the time I didn’t go again for like ten years. Then another eight years. After 2023, S. and I realized there was no reason not to go as often as yearly, and here we are again two years later.

I can look back on those previous visits and trace a lot of my life’s changes. Not just that this blog ran on Movable Type for the first one. I was gaming more the year we went from Montreal directly to Indianapolis for GenCon, which is not something that seems appealing right now even if it wasn’t exhausting. The differences between driving up from Boston and flying, which come to think of it is probably why I had those really big gaps. The ways I’m reacting to movies changed considerably during the pandemic.

So that’s one thing. Then there’s the audience: I am 100% sure that every single movie I see in the Henry F. Hall (except Jeruzalem) is benefiting from the enthusiasm of the audience. Every movie, no matter how bad, should be seen with audiences that are so happy to be there.

Finally, most importantly, there’s the risks. The movie industry is struggling in real and important ways; I can’t minimize the difficulties around original ideas, mid-budget movies that just don’t get made any more, and so on. All of that is real.

What’s also real, though, is that a majority of the movies I see here every year are taking big swings. I didn’t have to love Redux Redux last night to notice that it was made by a couple of brothers who just wanted to make a Terminator homage, so they grabbed a bunch of actors and some cheap locations and took their knowledge of the craft and put together two hours of film that made them happy. That’s fucking cool. I did love Sasyq, and it’s made by a Kazakhstan dude who’s played the ominous thug in a few Hollywood movies and TV shows and wanted to put his dream of a fairy tale on screen. I absolutely adored Dog of God, and it happened because another pair of irreverent brothers wanted to mythologize the story of a werewolf trial and realized they could get Latvian state funding for it as an experimental film. “Nobody cared what was in it as long as we had the logos in the right place at the beginning and the end of the movie.” Fuck yeah.

This festival reminds me that filmmakers are still finding ways to bring their weird little visions to life, with varying degrees of competency. This week is a celebration of parts of the human spirit that I will always love without reservation. Much of the time I get to see the directors come up before the movie and thank a rabidly excited audience; some of them have been here before, and some of them are experiencing this for the first time. How can I not be grateful for the opportunity to welcome them?

Dark Inheritance: Context & Introduction

July 5, 2025
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I don’t own a lot of remnants of the D20 boom any more, just a few select books, for the novelty and quality of the ideas rather than for anything mechanical. Tynes’s D20 Call of Cthulhu, for example. The least remembered of these is a D20 Modern setting called Dark Inheritance, which I bought at GenCon. I absolutely adored this back in the day, for its weird mix of genres and modern occult vibe, plus I always thought D20 Modern looked like an interesting system. So in my constant effort to blog a bit more, I dug around till I found my copy, pulled it out, and am spending some time reading it and blogging my thoughts. This is not a review, because I haven’t played it, although that’d be a kick — it’s just a once over. No promises on how often I write these.

The original book was published in 2003; I believe there’s also a Spycraft version, published a year later. It is not available in PDF. Noble Knight has a copy of the D20 version, and it occasionally shows up on eBay. The publisher is Mythic Dreams Studios, which appears to have been mostly Chad Justice. Chad is no longer working in the industry and Mythic Dreams only had these two releases, despite plans for other books as per an advertisement in the back of this one. Still, one solid 200 page campaign book isn’t bad.

The other writers are a range, career wise. Alphabetically, we have Edward Milton, Jason Olsan. Aaron Rosenberg, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Jeremy Tibbs, Wil Upchurch, and Sam Witt. There’s no indication of who wrote what, but I’d bet that Ryder-Hanrahan wrote at least some of the words that sparked my imagination back then. The cover artists is a dude named Mark Sasso, who sets the tone with a painting of a shadowy figure stepping forward out of what appears to be a fire. Sasso’s gone on to what looks like a decent career in and out of the TTRPG space, with some fantasy-inflected design work for the WWE and metal bands like Dio.

The interior art is B&W, mostly spot illos. The book is good 2000s TTRPG design: clear layout, in-world fiction broken out into sidebars, nothing to complain about. This is definitely the era when people expected big metaplot and lots of fiction in their game books.

OK, let’s dig in.

Continue ReadingDark Inheritance: Context & Introduction

GILT 2025

April 12, 2025
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Umpteenth in an occasional series discussing games I might ilke to run or play someday. What’s on my mind in 2025? In no particular order…

  1. Nahual has been on my list for a while now. It’s a really cool adaptation of a Mexican graphic novel. The Kickstarter had a translation of the original material as a stretch goal, but you know how those go sometimes. Anyhow: it’s interestingly rebellious urban fantasy about shapeshifters who hunt angels to make a living in Mexico City. Needs to be a campaign because the journey of becoming a more adept shapeshifter is a pretty key part of the rules, and the setting is about community which means it also benefits from time to breathe. Somewhat more inclined to run this because it’s a world I’d enjoy riffing on.
  2. Legacy: Life Among the Ruins is an odd choice in a way. I’m not compelled by the setting which is fairly generic post-apocalypse material. It’s sort of more a toolkit setting — you can make of it what you will, but you have to put that effort into it. However, the generational style of play is fascinating for me. Also obviously a campaign. I’d run or play. 
  3. Outgunned is so high on my list of one-shots I can’t even say. I want to find out first hand if the action mechanics are good; word of mouth is strong. I could use a more flexible version of Feng Shui in my toolkit. One-shot, or maybe one scenario’s worth of play over a couple of sessions, since the whole point is finding out if I like it. I do have a campaign floating around in my head set in a Madripoor pastiche, complete with street level superheroes and mad science, and the existing superhero rules for the game would do just fine even before the upcoming superhero-specific book, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Happy to run this.
  4. The Troubleshooters is occupying a similar place in my head except it’s more that Tintin nostalgia is strong in me. Pulpy 1965, you bet! Nice d% system that won’t get in the way, Jet Age coolness, etc. I would really dig playing this, I think.
  5. Worldwide Wrestling is fun. I’ve run it once; I’d be into running a year’s worth of events in my PNWage Wrestling promotion. (Man, past me put in the work to make that writeup usable, thanks!)
  6. Trophy one of these days. Specifically Trophy Dark, I don’t need the campaign play here. And I wanna play this, not run it. I mean I could run it but I’m interested in how it feels at the other side of the table. I did play Trophy Gold once but the scenario never got finished, which was a bit frustrating.
  7. Agon or a derivative, but probably Agon. I like getting the pure form of an exciting design. You could talk me into Deathmatch Island. I am more interested in this as a player than as a GM, because I’m interested in the competitive aspects and I don’t want the extra effort of nudging players in that direction. But, you know, with the right group…

Bodyguards in the Dark

March 15, 2025
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I’ve been rereading Greg Rucka’s Atticus Kodiak books on the occasion of him republishing the first four in the series, and it’s been a pleasure. A gloomy, morose pleasure but a pleasure nonetheless. As always they seem like they ought to be quite adaptable to tabletop RPGs, so I spent a while thinking about that last night while I was falling asleep.

The super-easy adaptation would use Night’s Black Agents, drop the vampires. It’s easy to dial that flavor of GUMSHOE into gritty dangerous street level action, and the bursts of competence that result from the Military Occupational Specialty rule — automatic successes once per session on your chosen MOS skill — would also fit perfectly. Atticus and his friends spend a lot of time being able to push themselves to unreasonable levels of competence when the situation really calls for it.

You’d have to generate some new Backgrounds, I think, which is easy. Also drop Occult Studies and Vampirology from the abilities list and… yeah, Sense Trouble is the critical ability for keeping focus when you’re on watch for hours at a time. Without play testing this, I think using the Thriller Chase rules for standing watch would work really well; the assassin is testing abilities like Infiltration, Surveillance, and Disguise against abilities like Sense Trouble, Surveillance, and Preparedness. Winner gets points in a combat pool before playing out the actual attempt.

But then I had another idea, which I like more and which would take way more effort to implement. The post title gives it away, I know.

One of the core mechanics of Blades in the Dark is the engagement roll; the goal was to reduce the amount of time a group of players spend planning out every detail of a heist. You just go straight to the start of the action, and rely on flashbacks to fill in plans as necessary. So why couldn’t you just invert that — make an engagement roll to cut right to the start of the attempt on whoever you’re body guarding?

In Blades, you choose the point of attack before making an engagement roll. For this application, I think you’d go a bit metafictional and choose the opposition’s point of attack — this may be a bit too much player control for some but it allows the body guarding PCs to look awesome. Bad engagement rolls mean more variance from the determined point of attack, so that it’s not a guaranteed win for the players.

The time consuming part of this hack would be building a bunch of new playbooks. Not too hard to come up with them, just using the Kodiak series as the point of reference: Bodyguard, Private Detective, Driver, Special Forces, Cop, Medic. There’s six, voila. Writing them up is left as an exercise for someone else.

I don’t see a lot of value in multiple crew types, since this is about a very specific topic. I suppose there’s a game about urban action in here somewhere, in which case Bodyguards is one of several crew types with special rules for engagement rolls, but that’s even more work.

And then time to work out a new list of actions, etc. etc. As I said, there’s real effort necessary here, but I dig the idea.

March Criterion Channel Lineup

March 5, 2025
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March’s lineup is the kind of varied, interesting curation that represents the Criterion Channel at its best. Unfortunately, there’s one big miss: no celebration for Women’s History Month! Nannina Gilder took up the slack with a great Bluesky thread curating the collection she’d have made with movies that are already on the Channel.

Also I’m late on this one. Criterion dropped the lineup later than usual and it’s been a very busy month for me. So it goes.

Continue ReadingMarch Criterion Channel Lineup