Dark Heresy. You are the retinue of Inquisitor Lord Zane Castis, the oldest Inquisitor in the Calixis Sector. His purview is heretical documents, which – for centuries – he has collected from the hands of those who would misuse them. Generally not peacefully. All such documents are stored in the vast ship Tabularium Bibluvio, which also serves as Inquisitor Lord Castis’ headquarters. It is a sphere, dwarfing lesser ships. The heretical archive is contained in the featureless top half of the sphere; below that, the sphere is hollow for half of the bottom hemisphere, with four mighty black pylons connecting the archive to the living quarters which make up the bottom quarter of the sphere. Shuttles and other such less important spacecraft dock on the top of the living quarters. ...

I’ve been enjoying the Filmspotting podcast; decent opinions, good chemistry between the hosts, a wide variety of topics. One of the regular features is a movie marathon (original). Over the course of a month or two, they watch one movie per week from a given genre and comment on it. The idea is that listeners can follow along. They just finished a heist marathon, and will be moving onto a 60s British Angry Young Men marathon in September, which sounds cool. So I’m gonna hop on board. I will no doubt post reviews here, and if anyone local’s interested in joining me and my Netflix queue for viewings, feel free to speak up. ...

The moral equivalent of running World’s Largest Dungeon for 4e, at present, would be to just run the module series. WotC is gonna put out three modules for each tier; H1 and H2 are the first two for the Heroic tier, and when H3 comes out that’ll get a campaign to level 11. There’ll then be P1, P2, and P3; followed by E1, E2, and E3. These are all announced. ...

As an entry in this month’s RPG Carnival, I took a line of attack from Amagi Games; here’s a mini-system/technique for mechanically providing greater weight to the death of NPCs. This is sort of vaguely in the vicinity of being on-topic – the subject is character death, failing to specify player characters, after all. And undeath can be metaphorical. Or so I claim. Following the cut, a list of steps.

For reference. Quantum of SolaceJCVDSynecdoche, New YorkW. (if I get to it) MilkFrost/Nixon, depending on reviews The WrestlerThe Brothers BloomSlumdog Millionaire

The Core Mechanic wants to get an RPG Carnival started, which is pretty cool. Carnival, in blog terms, is a once a month thing where a lot of different blogs write on a topic and the host does a big wrapup post linking to all of them. Generally the host changes each month. I thought about doing one at 20x20, but by the time I had the idea I’d run out of steam. ...

The new version is pretty usable. The author fixed the issue of slider feedback, so it’s possible to be precise about how many dice you’re rolling. There’s also a new feature allowing you to auto-tally rolls equal to or higher than a target number. Finally, you can double-tap dice to hold them and reroll the unheld dice, which is cute. At this point I’d say THAC0 is a good choice for die pool games, and D20 Dice remains optimal for other uses. I’d still like to see THAC0 have some sort of display of die type so you know if you’re rolling d10s or d6s or what, but in practice you’ll usually know.

One’s been out for a while, but just got upgraded; one just came out. I’ll do the latter first. Images follow.

We finally caught it over this last weekend. I guess a lot of other people did too, since it’s hit 300 million bucks already. I am eagerly waiting to find out if it has the sort of legs that’ll get it into the top five ever domestic, although I suspect it won’t. Somewhat surprisingly, it didn’t blow me away. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t overwhelm me. Great acting, excellent plot and theme – I thought the whole balance of duty and public personae was superb, and it echoed through both good guys and bad guys. The early Scarecrow appearance was ideal. ...

The Starman Omnibus is awesome. Probably less awesome if you’re not a fan. DC’s going to do six volumes, which are slated to include every issue of Starman plus all the related material (e.g., the Shade miniseries and so on). The art’s still gorgeous, if less surprising than it was at the time of publication. Beautiful art deco cityscapes, excellent use of shadow and darkness. Tony Harris was so good. It benefits from the high quality of the hardcover’s paper, too. ...