Hey, I’m using the year in the titles now! Shows I didn’t have much confidence that I’d keep this going a year ago. Well, a big raspberry to younger me. We’re getting spooky again, of course, with a lineup that is varied both in types of horror and in quality. I think we have another contender for worst movie to ever play on the Channel – read on to find out which one.
Welcome back to my read-through of Dark Inheritance, a mostly forgotten child of the D20 boom! Find all the entries in the series here. The first chapter after the introduction is a big old lore dump. This matches general expectations at the time, although you know there’s gonna be more lore integrated into the mechanics, and it’s also probably smart for the modern world but occult setting. It’s only 20 pages long, which probably helps explain why it was an impulse purchase for me way back when – I skimmed this quickly in the dealer’s hall.
Well that was an excellent week. Some vacations are a great way to disconnect from work while not being at all relaxing; this was one of those. I came back tired and a bit uncomfortable from a week of trying to navigate diabetes plus campus area quick food plus short blocks of time between movies. Informative on my current physical limits, though, and it was a shining Fantasia in terms of movies. We hope to go back next year, although in the process of going through this blog and tagging all my old Fantasia entries, I’ve found out how often I said that only to hit blockers. 30th anniversary, though! ...
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. ...
What a fun lineup. I think the Channel’s really nailing the summer feel this year. As always, there’s a palpable absence of Boston Crime collections, but I imagine they’re just waiting for the fall to get into that one.
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.
Summertime! Pretty solid lineup coming in July; last month set a very high bar but we’re definitely continuing with those sun-drenched themes. Plus, uh, Haneke.
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. ...
It’s clearly the beginning of summer because Criterion’s June lineup is even more summery than last month’s. And last month they did a whole collection of Coastal Thrillers.
The May Criterion lineup is, in my book, timely and exceptional. I am going to be excited for perhaps controversial reasons; let’s dig in! (Man, and I completely forgot to post this in a timely manner. Had it ready days ago.)