This week’s Game WISH (original) is about player-driven shifts: What’s the biggest PC-driven shift you’ve ever experienced in a campaign? If you were a player, what made you feel like you could successfully change the GM’s world? If you were a GM, was this planned or something the PCs surprised you with? Probably unsurprisingly, my example comes from a Feng Shui campaign. (Shifts in the world are built right into the background.) Brad was the GM; the PCs were Transformed Dragons who were not part of the Ascended. Ascended — think Illuminati, but with a ruling class made up of animals who had transformed into human form. Brad made it really clear from the beginning that he wanted to run a world-changing campaign, and we took him up on the offer by going back to the 1850s juncture and working to make demons part of society. The plan was to increase the ambient level of magic so that we could take our true draconic forms once again. ...

It’s document time in the ongoing White Wolf v. Sony saga. First off, here’s Mike Tinney’s deposition (original) as described here. At no extra charge, we’ll include Andrew Zaffron’s declaration (original). It covers more or less the same ground as did Mike Tinney, with a little additional commentary. Paragraph 8 is amusing. Moving on to new material, we have declarations from Len Wiseman (original) and Kevin Grevioux (original), two of the three guys who wrote the screenplay. (And of course Wiseman directed it.) Both note explicitly that “I had never heard of any of the Plaintiffs’ works before early in 2003, after the movie Underworld had been shot.” ...

The Monday Mashup returns with Hitchcock’s Psycho. This is another one that almost has to be a one-shot, unless you wanted to make Norman Bates an ongoing master villain — which is an interesting idea, now that I think about it. But I’m going to be thinking one-shot. There’s an insane villain, obsessed by someone who doesn’t exist anymore, and there’s a lonely location. Now, do you cast the PCs as Marion Crane and helpless prey, or do you cast ‘em as the post-death investigators? I’m inclined to think the latter, although that turns it into a police procedural… which is in and of itself interesting. My approach follows.

It’s an early morning Monday Mashup today, since I’m going to be non-bloggy most of the day. This week’s source material is the Oscar-winning Silence of the Lambs. Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, what’s not to love? Other than the rumors about a prequel focusing on Lecter, of course.

Advanced D20, huh?

Sure, spammers are scum of the earth, but the plight of the guy who made death threats kind of warms the cockles of my heart. Welcome to the real world, in which making death threats is not considered a normal element of discourse. I’ve been on the company’s of that sort of thing a little too often to feel sorry for Mr. Booker.

I almost passed on Intolerable Cruelty, but it’s been a long time since I missed a Coen Brothers flick and I figured I might as well watch George Clooney emanating suave for a couple of hours. The Coens didn’t write the movie, which means it’s not the pure hit of creative oddness I wanted, but it was still OK. As Coen screwball comedies go, it’s no Hudsucker Proxy, and as Coen romantic comedies go, it’s no Raising Arizona. I don’t think it was trying to be a screwball comedy, really; there wasn’t any snappy dialogue in the classic screwball sense. It felt more like a casual exercise than anything else. ...

Did you ever read Usenet? Miss those newsreader days? Population: One is now available via NNTP. It is perhaps a bit quixotic of Dan to scrape weblogs rather than slurping up RSS feeds, but it’s a kind of quix I have to admire. The old diesel engine of blog syndication, as it were.

The North Korean crisis has been pretty quiet lately, at least until KEDO decided to halt the North Korean reactor project. This is pressure on North Korea to come back to the negotiating table. We’re betting that North Korea won’t escalate as a result. The only levers we have are power, food, and military action. We’re not going to starve people, and even if we were so inclined, the UN is working on food aid. We’re not going to invade a nuclear power. That leaves cutting the nuclear power plant construction, which has the advantage of not making the North Korean situation any worse. It just blocks one method of making things better, so it’s about the most palatable pressure possible. ...

It’s a little known fact that the best gonzo journalists around are writing for a little ezine known as the Death Valley Driver Video Review (original). One time I was making fun of Bionic J because she was wearing this big skiing goggles and I said she looked like a doofus like Yoko Ono.