That’s a lot of OSR to start the challenge, so I figured I’d do something less trad for day three. If I’d been thinking ahead, which I may do later in the month, I’d have thrown the playbook history section open to my pals on social media to crowdsource answers, but in the interests of efficiency I just made up my own this time around. I decided I wanted to play a character who’s a little bit out of sync with the modern world but still effective. Playbook: the Initiate, who belongs to some kind of secret sect that thinks it’s the bulwark against evil. I’m going to call her Jeanne, as a reference to Joan of Arc. ...

Mothership gets to be my second character because a pal of mine wants to playtest a scenario sometime this year. I won’t use this character for the purpose – at the table, I’d rather make PCs with everyone else around – but it’ll familiarize me with the rules a bit. Stats come first. This is another one where you roll stats in order, using 6d10 this time. I get: Strength: 21 Speed: 32 Intellect: 41 (31 + 10 from my class) Combat: 30 ...

Day one is Tunnels & Trolls, in honor of my very first RPG. I’m using the Deluxe rules, no complications. Stats are 3d6 in order and all that jazz. So what do we get? Strength 12 Constitution 5 Dexterity 8 Speed 11 Luck 11 Intelligence 9 Wizardry 8 Charisma 18+10 = 28 Phew, that’s poor. Except Charisma, which is ridiculous. This particular version of the rules allows you to roll and add when you get triples, so when I rolled an 18 on Charisma, I rolled again and added. If I’d gotten triples on the second roll I would have kept on rolling and adding. It’s ludicrous and it means my yet unnamed character starts at level 2, since level is determined by the highest first digit of any stat. ...

I got a wild hair this year, plus I need something to keep me busy in the evenings while I’m traveling, so I’m going to take a shot at the 2025 Character Creation Challenge. Basically: one TTRPG character per day. Details here. Then I missed the first day because I got very distracted by Trenque Lauquen. No regrets. That’s okay, I can play a bit of catchup! Completed entries are tagged as character-creation-2025. ...

January is kind of a traditional, vanilla month for the Criterion Channel — less experimental or unknown work, more stuff from the canon. Which is still not bad! So let’s see what we’ve got.

S. and I are up in Victoria for a brief pre-Christmas holiday vacation; mostly just lounging about. We’re sitting in Saint Cecilia as I write this, which I strongly recommend if you’re into coffee. They do great hand-brews. One of the non-lounge activities, though, was Craigdarroch Castle. Craigdarroch Castle from a slight distance — it’s a big Romanesque Revival stone building. ...

Holiday time! What does Criterion Channel have for us in December? OK, look, Hitchcock doesn’t become holiday-related just because you call your collection “Hitchcock for the Holidays.” Great collection but come on. We’ll return to this. However, I want to start with the very last thing on the announcement.

November is Noirvember for many of us, the Criterion Channel included. Their November lineup features two noir collections and a couple more that include more than a little noir flavor. Let’s open it up and see what we’ve got in the briefcase.

I really intended to spend the rest of my blogging life, such as it is, on self-hosted WordPress. It satisfies my basic needs: I control my own data and I can type words into it from pretty much anywhere. (I’m using Obsidian right now, in fact.) It is not a perfectly resilient platform in that it’s dynamically served, so I need the developers to continue to patch and update it or it’ll wind up as a security flaw, but WordPress.org always looked pretty stable and has been fine for a long, long time. ...

This is in part an experiment to figure out if I can keep to a monthly posting cadence on a particular topic. Unsurprisingly, it’s about movies – specifically, what’s coming to the Criterion Channel next month? Criterion themes their months around collections, which typically stick around for several months thereafter; any given collection is usually a mix of new to the channel movies and existing faves. Here’s a rundown of October’s collections and some specifics which caught my eye.