A night at the theater

Skyfall

            I applaud the Daniel Craig series of Bond films for taking him in a new direction, even if I do not think it is an entirely successful direction.  Bond is back, and Bond is very human.  In Casino Royale, but truly falls in love and actually has to convalesce from his wounds for an extended period of time.  He even has to be saved from poisoning by his love interest.  Skyfall continues along this same vein.  This is a Bond that feels, a Bond that bleeds, a vulnerable Bond at times.  This makes the endless chase scenes more exciting, because we are keenly aware that this Bond could fail (perhaps even die?)

            It’s hard for me to evaluate a modern Bond film because of my memories from boyhood.  My mother took me to see my first bond film when I was around 11.  I can’t match the enthusiasm or willingness to suspend disbelief that I had then.  To my failing, jaded adult eyes, this film scores a solid B.  I don’t give A’s to many films, and Skyfall never approaches anything nearing perfection.  The talents of Judy Densch and Ralph Fiennes are largely wasted in this film.  Oh, their characters are likeable enough, but I wanted much more from their interactions with each other and the rest of the cast.  These are heavyweight actors in an action fantasy, I know, but why cast them if you’re not going to let them reach their full potential.  There is a deliberate lack of gadgets in this film (which is the source of some self-referential humor in a brief scene between Bond and the new Q) and I’m ambivalent about how that plays out.  I like exploding pens and cars with ejector seats.  More of that, please.  That’s not what this Bond is about, though.  He’s about blood and guts, real blood and guts, and he demands the suspension of your disbelief through shock and awe as Bond is battered by forces that are largely beyond his capabilities to effectively confront for much of the film.  Roger Moore never seemed to so much as spilled a drink on one of his suits.  This Bond goes to work with bullet holes in his.  One is left to wonder, in fact the very question is posed by more than one of the characters in the film, why Bond perserveres through it all.

            If you’re looking for a fairly innovative take on the Bond character, go see this film.  The old theme music is worth hearing at a theater.  If you’re at all nostalgic for cars that turn into submarines and watches with lasers in them, you’re going to be disappointed, but perhaps not entirely.  There is a notable cameo from Goldfinger towards the end of the film.  I could have lived with shorter car chases if it brought the film down to 2 hours instead of nearly 3.

            Thanks to Coach for taking care of Lily while Kim and I saw the film.

Sunday's session

We last left our heroes in the bowels of the Misty Monk Monastery and Brewery.  They had encountered several monks with bloated stomachs and twisted, demonic faces who spewed forth animated ale that then attempted to worm its way down the throats of the nearest humanoid.  The monks and the ale monsters were dispatched, and Ripley the thief (a rogue by class, but a thief by some poor life choices) unlocked a door to a hallway lined with many large barrels.  As the company proceeded cautiously down the hallway (much to the displeasure of Graela the barbarian, who disdains caution) Several of the barrels fell off the shelves and coalesced into a humanoid shape with glowing eyes. 

Without waiting for a consensus on whether or not to act, Graela and Bolo the fighter proceeded to try to chop the barrel monster into kindling with their massive swords.  They made short work of the beast, but not before Graela was dropped once to the floor, bleeding profusely.  Thanks to some healing from Witch Hazel, the barbarian was quickly back on her feet but still low on hit points.  Mixx the alchemist lobbed a bomb into the fray, expertly avoiding setting any of her teammates on fire.

No treasure was found on the vanquished abomination, but the hallway did have two closed doors to examine.  The one to the right was locked (and trapped, much to Ripley’s chagrin).  Ripley narrowly avoided becoming a Halfling shishkabob by virtue of his quick reflexes, just missing falling into a spiked pit.  After rigging the platform to stay put, Mixx listened at the door and heard voices discussing the noise outside.  ‘Something activated the trap,’ said one.  ‘Get ready for whatever comes through the door,’ said another.  Deciding to leave the paranoid denizens of the monastery well enough alone, the party elected to try the door to the left, which was not locked, trapped, nor did anything jump out at them when they opened it.  How dull, thought the DM.

Before they could proceed down the next hallway, Hazel (whose player had heretofore been occupied with a squalling real-life baby...) allowed as how she wanted to talk to the people in the trapped room.  So they went back down the hallway and let Hazel wave a white flag on a stick poking through the door.  (The flag was fashioned from fabric from one of the poor fallen monks in the entry hall.)  After a bit of brief negotiation, the group learned that the bank hiding behind the trapped door was the Father Superior mentioned in some of the letters Hazel had read earlier in the adventure. 

The ale at Misty Monk Brewery, it seems, was possessed by demons who were summarily dispelled by a priest from the Temple of the Five before it was shipped out and consumed by the general public.  This process gave the ale a taste that no other brewer could replicate.  Unfortunately, something had gone wrong with the latest batch, and the ale had escaped it’s magic circle and began pouring itself down the throats of the hapless novices involved in aiding the ritual possession and exorcism.  The party’s aid was entreated and they consented… in return for some platinum pieces, a magic sword to help defeat the main demon in the summoning room (who might even now be attempting to gate in more of its brethren), and the title of ‘count’ would be bestowed upon one of the lucky adventurers.  Mixx thought to give a hard look at the Father Superior to see if he was on the level, for his methods of ale making were suspect at best, but her powers of sensing motives were dim, and so far as they could tell his offer was on the level.

Review: The Prophecy

It seemed like a bargain - 6 movies for 5 dollars.  Of course, all six movies were The Prophecy 1 through 6, but my brain ignored that inconvenient fact (along with the fact that this was a grocery store hawking dvd's in a bargain bin) and I happily deposited the 6-movies-on-3-DVDs set in my cart.

Mind you, I still have a 6 month old in my house and have zero time to watch movies.  That, and the infant currently sleeps in the same room as the main DVD player.  (Incidentally this is the reason I've watched T.V. exclusively on mute with closed captioning for the last 6 months.)  I thought I could make it work.  I saw my opportunity when my wife left for a few hours with the baby for a support group for (relatively) new moms.  Dishes be darned, laundry be darned, porch in desperate need of sanding and painting be darned, I was going to watch a movie and get my .833333 cents worth. 

My view could be squewed by the fact that I was giddy to be watching anything with the sound turned on, but Prophecy wasn't exactly bad.  Well, the 30 minutes of it I watched weren't bad.  Then I stopped.  I doubt this is a spoiler to anyone who cares, but the film seemed to be centered on certain angels, led by Gabriel (played by the ever-creepy Christopher Walken) instigating a second war in heaven (the first having been led by lucifer).  I got to the point where Walken fries a hapless Eric Stoltz (who is an angel on the 'good' side, if any side is good in this film) and stopped watching.

An asside:  there are certain things I don't watch, ever, even if they're corny.  One of them is the show Ghost Hunters, because I refuse to take ghosts seriously or watch anyone else who does the same.  This is because I am weak minded and would have trouble sleeping for the rest of my life if I believed for a second that there were dead people from every past generation floating around houses just waiting to cover me in ectoplasm.  Another thing I don't watch are films that take certain liberties with certain... figures, let's say. 

Gabriel, I'm told, was the angel who let Mary know she would soon be pregnant.  Gabriel is an archangel, right up there with Michael and pre-fall lucifer.  There is no way he turned into Christopher Walken, no matter how bad a day he had.  It just couldn't happen.  If they had made up a name for Walken's character other than Gabriel, I might not have taken issue with the film.  There are other films with angels in them that I've watched -  Constatine, for example.  Now that's a bad film (that I enjoyed watching), and exactly why that was palatable to me and Prophecy wasn't is a thing I can't exactly put into words.  Perhaps I can't take a film seriously with Shia Lebeouf in it.

I'm sorry that this is a review of a film, rather, 30 minutes of a  film that I stopped watching due to my own foibles.  There aren't many.  Add Prophecy movies to the list.  There you have it.  There were cool parts, like a recent suicide victim acting as Walken's lackey for a time with the promise that he'd be really dead once his service was over.  I liked that angels perch on things like ravens while they're observing things. 

Yep.  Might be a cool film.  I'll never know.  And I'm not watching the other 5 to find how they turn out, either.

Rereading

I've been going back through the Pathfinder rulebook since a)  it's been a while, b) most of the people I relied on to correct my rules knowledge aren't currently playing as far as I know so now it's on me to be the rules expert in an inexperienced group, and c) holy crap are there a lot of mechanics I've never used.  Particularly the skill rules.  I started on 1e AD&D where there were no skills and never really played with them much in 2nd or 3rd.  I'll go ahead and say it:  I'm not a purely OSR kind of DM.  I actually don't mind if player agency is dimished by character ability at times.  If I have a player who doesn't want to roleplay much, so be it, make a diplomacy roll and be done with it (although I've had some great outpourings of role playing from players who told me they don't much care for that sort of thing).  I like role playing a lot, and I'm heavily into it when I'm a character, but when I'm a DM I want players to want to come back to the table again and again.  That definitely involves making the player feel challenged, and that can't be done just by measuring out stat blocks against character capabilities.  I want them to have ideas I never thought of in the creation of the dungeon.  I want them to speculate about the little snippets I throw in that hint at a greater backstory, but they're free to ignore them as well.

Not sure why I felt the need to say that, since I don't know that anyone was wondering.  I guess I think the OSR is a cool thing - that people are still that passionate about the ideas and underpinnings of this game - but I'd rather not pigeonhole myself into any category, even a cool one.  Again, not that anyone asked me.  I sort of like the skill rules for Diplomacy.  I like that a player who foolishly spent feats just to increase his roll might talk the hostile princess into running away with him and abandoning her betrothed on the night before the wedding.  Does there have to be a rule set for this scene to happen?  I suppose not.  In fact I know from experience that it doesn't.  But I like there to be a framework that the players and the DM have a common reference to.  (Damn, ending a sentence in a preposition.)

Anyhoo, I don't think I can remember every single rule from the hundreds of pages I've read through (again) and I'll definitely make stuff up on the fly since none of my players will know the difference

(Unless they read this specific entry, to which I say:  I'm sorry you had to find out that I'm a fraud in this fashion - I should have told you up front that I know nothing.)

This Sunday's Session

A party of mostly parental players met on Sunday night for a brief 3 hour sojourn into the bowels of the Misty Monk Brewery.  They’re other choices, rejected out of hand in favor of beating up monks and the possibility of getting soused, were the Deadcliffe Caverns and the Fens of Filimore.  The monks, it seemed, had stopped producing their world famous ale a few days ago, and the doors had remained shut and locked.

A locked door was no match for Ripley the Halfling stereoty… I mean thief.  She quickly popped the lock and the PC’s were in like a swashbuckling icon I’ve yet to invent for this world.  There was a secret entrance behind a nearby waterfall, but the front door worked, too.  Inside the brewery the Witch, Hazel, ever hungry for knowledge, started reading books on the shelf in the entrance hall.  One of the volumes, “The History of Mister Misty, Mascott of the Misty Monk Brewery,” caused a secret door to open into another chamber.  Ripley rapidly lost interest in the statues he was examining upon the appearance of the secret room.  Hazel kept the volumes, “Secrets of Ale Making” and “The Cronwell incident – When Monks Father Children.”

The room was rather lavishly decorated with a gold-inlaid tapestry and a silver bust of a bald, severe-looking monk which the placard identified as the current Father Superior of the monastery/brewery.  Not one with a head for figures, Ripley asked Mix to appraise the tapestry and other objects in the room.  Meanwhile Hazel learned through perusing letters on the Father’s desk that he had been ordered to find new methods of productions before his staff or the general populous were severely injured.  The group speculated as to how something dire must have already happened that caused the shutdown.  Hazel also learned from the books that some had speculated the monks were tampering with supernatural forces beyond their control in the process of their brew making.

Further into the Brewery, the party came across a room that must have been for record keeping, although the furniture had now been smashed to kindling.  There were the bodies of 6 monks on the ground.  Upon further examination by the witch’s familiar, the monks’ stomachs were distended and seemed to writhe.  This was all the provocation Graela the half-orc barbarian needed to strike, and as she roared her battle cry one of the monks, his features bloated and his eyes milky white, rose to meet her charge.  One swipe of a greatsword later, the monk lay in pieces on the floor (some pieces splattered on a wall), but something remained.  A strange liquid oozed from it’s wounds and its mouth and extended a pseudopod at Graela!

In the battle that ensued, Bolo the fighter, Ripley and Graela engaged the possessed monks in melee, all of which carried the strange writhing liquid within them.  Mix managed to destroy the liquid with bombs, while the melee fighters made quick work of the possessed monks.

Shortly after, we ran out of time as both (real life) babies were crying and one of the players had to adjourn for work.  It was an enjoyable session and I hope the group can meet again some time.  I am still hopeful my original group can meet again soon, as well.  It’s been too long.

Hey! A comment!

Thanks for the visit, Joe.  Reminds me I'm not alone here.  I'll have to stop hanging out at my blog in my boxers from now on....

For better or for worse, I'm starting a new game tomorrow.  It is likely a one shot.  Two of the three couples playing have an infant, and I've been killing myself just getting material for one adventure together.  Part of that is I love to keep things open ended and sandboxy, so I actually have three possible adventures they might embark on.  Likely they will finish none of them, but it made me happy for a bit, nonetheless.  I couldn't have even cobbled together the effort I did manage without a lot of work I did on a world prior to this while I was inactive before Lily was born. 

I don't think there's anyway I can get back into world building until Lily is much older.  I barely got my minis and maps together between feedings, changing, and entertaining a bored 5 month old (she's peacefully sleeping now, so I've got about 20 minutes).

Lily's baptism was just two weeks ago (for any of you not there in person).  It was truly lovely.  Lots of friends I hadn't seen for months (some of them decades) showed up, and my cousin flew in from Los Angeles to be Lily's godmother.  It really was a perfect day, including Lily's three hour tantrum right up to (and some during) the church service.  Thanks to all who came.  I don't thank my friends enough for all they do for us.

That's all for now.

My thoughts on GURPS

(After reading the basic ruleset for 3rd edition)

I like it!  I'll never find anybody to play it!  I found the basic ruleset for $6 at a used book store.  I think it's an ingenious system, in that each new genre is a potential sale for the game designer.  Wanna play a Cthutlu campaign?  There's a book for that.  Like space opera?  There's a book for that.  Wanna start a campaign with the diseased offspring of Kermit and Miss Piggy called Muppet Rabies?  Okay, that hasn't been written yet, but there's no reason you couldn't write it yourself using this system. 

That being said, I think the mechanics, being that they are streamlined to fit many different possible genres, are a bit too simplistic for my taste.  Granted, this is based purely on a single reading of the rules and a few other sourcebooks, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.  But it seems like combat has far fewer options than, say, a game like Pathfinder.  Now, I'm sure that options multiply with each supplement I buy (or a compendium, were I inclined to pick one up), but I'm talking about pure mechanics in play during battle, not the number of weapons, skills, vehicles, spells or powers I might utilize with a given character.  I think I like variety in my dice and in my rolling options. 

One of the things I've heard proponents of GURPS tout is its vaunted realism.  'Realism' in this case seems to refer to player mortality.  This could potentially appeal to the OSR crowd, possibly, if they weren't busy churning out their own retro clone kickstarter projects at the moment.  While I do applaud the fact that a fall of 50 ft would kill the average, or even considerably above average player, it's simply not my own style of play, nor would it have appealed to the group I was playing with up until Lily was born.  Although the way things are going now, I may be looking at waiting until Lily's of gaming age before I get to bust out my DM'ing skills again.

In conclusion, I think my previous group is a  bunch of poo-heads for not asking me to DM for them by now even though I'd have to tell them I'm much too busy at the moment.  What?  Oh, GURPS, right.  Good game.  Wish I'd get the chance to put it into practice.