Said I: “Oh, I’ll just grab the winning entry from the 2018 Shotgun Scenario contest and find some pre-gens from somewhere and that’ll be my Delta Green one-shot.” And then I said “Hm, there’s no Northern California town called Rama, but the Klamath National Forest is real. What real town could I use instead? And while I’m at it, let me outline a few NPCs so that I’m not coming up with them on the fly, and let me extend the scenario just a bit, and…” ...

A bunch of random games I’d like to run that could be campaigns of whatever length, in no particular order. Bookhounds of London, in Arabesque style. This itches my GUMSHOE urges. Fortunately Night’s Black Agents won’t be out for a while so there’s little competition for that chunk of my brain. Ashen Stars is also tempting, but a bit less so. I’d probably rather play this than run it. A bit of space opera would be fun. Some kind of superheroes maybe. Also more something I’d like to play. Icons, DC Adventures, not Champions probably. I keep wanting to do an emergent superhero world. Barbarians of Lemuria for sword and sorcery. Simple system, looks fun. I don’t even have a world in mind – I think you could probably just ad lib one. Day After Ragnarok, speaking of sword and sorcery. It’d also be nice to give Savage Worlds a good workout. That old Warren Zevon Buffy game I always wanted to run but never did. Nostalgiapire, now that I have Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition. I can’t imagine that it’d take more than four or five sessions to get the nostalgia out. The further adventures of The Black Library, my Dark Heresy conceit in which the Inquisitor is the guy who holds onto all the dangerous books. Which is to say most books. In this story arc, he is trying to retake his library from the dangerous Chaos servants who were his last set of agents. My fairly politicized not yet written up D&D 4e setting. Sort of Eberron in flavor, but with universities as another power axis and not so much of the magitech goop. Smallville, probably without the DC Universe trappings. I just wanna try the relationship maps. If I think of anything else I’ll add it. I’m sure there’s something I want to use Reign for.

Movies reviewed this week: Killer’s Kiss and Nightfall.

For reference and for my friends who can’t make it to a Noir City showing this year. (San Francisco, Seattle, Hollywood, Austin, Boston, Chicago. Make it if you can.) I’m just listing movies with subscription/free streams here. Subscription service info is mostly from Lettrboxed (original). One of the many cool features they have: you can click on a movie and find out where you can see it. You can also filter film lists by services, so if I wanna feel classy I pull up the list of TSPDT 21st Century Top 1000 Movies and find out what’s on Netflix. ...

Movies reviewed this week: The Well.

I’ve been accreting a Las Vegas Feng Shui setting since we lived in Austin, where I ran a couple of sessions of Feng Shui set there. The idea stuck and I really liked Jay Ackel, PI; the Chairman of the Board; and a few other NPCs. I also enjoyed working with a primary faction conflict consisting of two Ascended factions. California is home of the bears, right? So it’s been slowly gaining mass since then. I have a Scrivener file that gets a little more weighty every time I open it up. That isn’t all that often, mind you. Regardless, if I’m gonna run a Feng Shui one-shot, it’ll be in my Las Vegas. Rather than write up an adventure I decided I knew the setting well enough so that I could just write an oracle. It’d work as a skeleton for any city, although you’d have to replace a bunch of People and Locations entries, plus a couple of the McGuffins. If you’re interested, grab the PDF here. Let’s do a quick test run:

I just sent my Blades in the Dark players a summary of one PC’s research, since he finished up a long-term project clock during the latest downtime. Useful knowledge: Setarra is Dock’s chosen friend from character creation, and his long-term demonic patron. Last session, Dock performed a ritual which shows him the history of an item in order to break into a safe. As a perhaps fortunate consequence of the ritual, he learned that the a powerful set of demonic relics woven through the story to date was originally Setarra’s, and she wants them back. ...

Geek joke. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is doing some awesome things with live-streaming. Beto O’Rourke is embarrassing himself by live-streaming his dental appointment (except he didn’t). Justin Amash is pretty blunt on Twitter. 2020 is going to be a good exercise in decoupling authenticity from our political preferences. Beto’s rambling blog posts are political; I don’t see how he couldn’t be aware of the pressure to run, the magnitude of the decision, and the pros and cons of his choices. He’s auditioning. So is AOC. So is Amash. ...

As per last time, this is a lightly edited copy of a Twitter thread. Wanna do a live-read of the new The Sprawl (original) supplement? Yeah, I think I’m in the mood.

This is not a review, it’s just some thoughts on the movie and the characters. Briefly, though: four and a half stars, superb acting, beautiful sets, funny but ultimately quite tragic.{{ double-space-with-newline }}