Nuadha says I should mashup Planet of the Apes. I have no fear of the damn dirty apes! We all know the basic plot, right? Statues of Liberty are optional. Start your engines for this, our fortieth mashup.
For our thirty-eighth mashup we’ll go with an absolute classic of British television, The Sandbaggers. If you like espionage at all, I strongly recommend it. It was all kinds of tense and thoughtful; lots of each episode takes place in the offices of British Intelligence, where people are arguing about the ethics and practicality and safety of missions. And plenty of each episode takes place out in the field, where intelligence agents are not supermen.
Our mashup for yesterday (cough) is another Ginger suggestion: “Games Without Frontiers,” by Peter Gabriel. It’s evocative as all hell — I can’t wait to see what people do with it. Me, I’m going to reverse it. Those fond of children may wish to avert their eyes.
I can answer these in any order I want! And I want to do WISH 93 (original) right now. Does joining a game with a lot of background thrill or intimidate you? What do you do to try to learn the background, or to compensate for not having it? If you GM, how do you help newcomers to a background-heavy game? What has worked for you as a player/GM, and what hasn’t? ...
This week’s mashup is another xiombarg suggestion, Full Metal Jacket. Seems timely.
“You wanna know what it takes to write mashups? It takes brass balls to write mashups.” Yeah, it’s all about Glengarry Glen Ross this week, and don’t you forget it. It’s a movie about desperation. It’s really brutal. It’s really good. I’m gonna mash it up. It’s not gonna be exactly work-safe.
Justin suggested (original) the Titanic as a mashup subject, and that seemed like a pretty good idea to me. I’m not going to use the movie as source material, since I’ve never seen it, but don’t let that stop you.
WISH #92 (original) asks: Have you ever gotten burned out as a gamer? What did you do to combat burnout? Which things you tried helped, and which ones didn’t? Which ones would you recommend to a gamer with burnout? I actually feel a little burned out right now — not a lot, but a bit — so good timing. Hm. I think that burnout is a life phenomenon for me, not a gaming-specific phenomenon. My work is keeping me too busy to think about gaming as much as I’d like, and there’re a bunch of other things swirling around, and I have trouble working up the enthusiasm to generate characters or think about GMing or anything. Which saddens me. (Yes, this is a typical symptom of depression; yes, I know.) ...
WISH #90 (original) asks: What do you think about system updates (Paranoia XP, Amber 2.0, DnD 3.0/3.5) and conversions (d20 Silver Age Sentinels, GURPS Traveller)? What about world/setting updates that result in system reboots (the end of the Age of Darkness)? Do you buy them, run them, or use them for resources? Why or why not? I don’t have a generic answer. I really liked the D&D 3.0 update. I didn’t much care about the D&D 3.5 update. Many of the Traveller updates sucked. The Hero 5th Edition update was great. The Vampire Revised update was quite good, for entirely different reasons. Etc. ...
Our mashup subject today comes to us care of Ginger, whose own gaming meme I have shamefully neglected. She put forth the divine M — not Bette Midler, but Madonna. You can use any incarnation, or you can use her ever-changing nature to concoct a rich gaming stew. Don’t think too hard about that last metaphor.