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Movies reviewed this week: Ready or Not.

That was sure a couple of movies jammed into one two hour window! And I liked it. Danny Boyle’s a great director working with stylistic flair. The primary beats of the movie are completely fantastic. It’s a dream, perhaps literally: it’s constantly playing with space and time. The titles tell us we’re in Los Angeles before we get there. Conversations don’t miss a beat while characters instantly teleport over the space of miles. Kate McKinnon is playing a Suffolk schoolteacher’s imaginary version of a music executive. It’s a fantasy! If you’re critiquing this movie because it doesn’t make sense, well —

I got a wild hair today and hacked together an issue of the Doskvol Illuminator from my Blades in the Dark game. It took a couple of hours but even for an incompetent graphic designer like me it wasn’t too hard. The tools: Apple Pages and the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society Font and Prop combo pack. The pack comes with a sample newspaper with notes on typography – all you need is that plus a reference plus the fonts, along with any program that will let you shuffle blocks of text around and draw lines. ...

Movies reviewed this week: Long Shot.

Pelgrane Press (original): $50 (print plus PDF, the PDF only version will be released in a couple of months). Hideous Creatures feels like kind of an under the radar release, perhaps because it’s about 50% made up of previously published Ken Hite monographs. At a quick glance, the main text is exactly the same as you got if you bought the monographs, although the book does add a fun handout for each creature. So there’s some retread factor there. ...

S. and I took an Amtrak up to Vancouver last Friday, hopped onto Skytrain, had a nice lunch in Gastown, and boarded the Ruby Princess for a one day repositioning cruise down to Seattle. This frivolity is brought to you by the opportunity to check out a cruise line’s style cheap before booking a longer Baltic cruise in a couple of years. We’re gonna stick with Holland America but the Ruby Princess was fun. ...

Movies reviewed this week: Alita: Battle Angel.

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.