Fantasy Movies Are Supposed To Be Bad, Yet Again

Just watched John Carter Warlord of Mars at the movie theater. It was nice to have an excuse to go to the theater. And having read more than a couple of the books back when I was in third and fourth grade, I have been waiting for this video game blockbuster since Gladiator. Now that I've seen both a decent Batman movie (two no less) AND the Warlord of Mars on the silver screen, the world can end this upcoming December. If only I'd have lived long enough to see religious Star Wars fans commit mass suicide and George Lucas exposed for college age plagiarism.



I liked it, and would rate it a King Kong on a "Godzilla to Smurf" scale. Of course, I may always downgrade the movie later, as I have done with the LotR series over the years. You just never know when your frontal lobe will find something cliche and unbearable, at least in my mildly schizophrenic case-- Tuesdays can get so boring speaking to yourself in your own head!

I was really worried about the casting, I am getting tired of Scorpion King remakes, but the cast worked well for me. Thomas Kitsch, with a self conscious stage name like that, I shouldn't be thinking he'll be going cliche while selling out too soon. The man did a good job as John Carter, by the end of the movie, I felt he was channeling the character from the books rather well. Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas worked nicely, though all they needed to do was give him some fake arms and tusk, instead of a CGI body to make him look like a Green Martian. Lynn Collins had just enough cleavage showing to get the JCM-Old Schooler like me paying attention-- and she made a good scientist-warrior as well. Sola, Samantha Morton, is downright intriguing.

The 21st century additions to the story worked out for me. Hey the wife and kids are a part of the movie watching for adults, get over it "High Fantasy" fans. The animals of Barsoom, including Woola, were a part of the tapestry of the books. The "Heroic Despite Himself Would-be Anarchist" story-arc for Carter helped out the romance, which was the point of the novel The Princess of Mars, as well ecological destruction by overly zealous industrialists. The twisting plot back on Earth was nicely done. It gets rather Sherlock Holmesian towards the conclusion, yet still the Hollywood writers didn't diverge from book too far. Let me note, that when it comes to Burroughs, being wholly Hollywood is not a bad thing. The hometown of the author renamed itself to Tarzana, after his Tarzan series of stories.

My criticisms of this take are minimal. One is that the story went too many places. Part of the wonderment of Barsoom is wondering what will Edgar Rice Burroughs show you next novel, or short story. The gold martians and the white martians appear later in the series, as well as mentions of the Thern. And the uniquely Martian take on astrology, Barsoom means "8th Planet" after all, is missing. I think this would've given the movie a bit more authentic, as well as trippy, feel.

The only problem I have with this version is that I believe Disney bought out the rights to the John Carter material. This means too much marketing and not enough re-takes on the tales. Here's to the Disney sequels then... don't let Peter Jackson anywhere near them.





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A Weekend for Awesome Uber Overlords, Elvismas 2012.

The west of the Miami River Holler, Illinois-ese, for Hoot, did materialize this last weekend, even if the folks from Illinois that the event was placed for couldn't make it. No "Awesome Overlord" admission badges for anyone; though, Scott, Sligo, and I were still the Awesome Uber Overlord's of the event so there was no going back. And this Birthday trip had a lot of serendipitous elements to it that made this Elvismas rather magical.

Jordan, hence forth known as Batman, instead of Bruce Wayne, reminded me the evening before the drive in Indianapolis that we would be staying at his house, not the Red Roof Inn. I was busy with homework, so I figured I'd just call everyone in the AM. We didn't leave the house until 1am. But the drive from Cleveland to Indiana that Friday morning was a little bit of fun. The roads were clear except for a couple truckers and us. Once we passed Columbus, I had a great view of the waxing moon and Orion in the western portion of the winter sky. Luckily Pery was napping, though she'll deny it, despite her snoring, because I'd shut off the headlights for up to 30 seconds to just soak in the view. We arrived in Indy and at Batman's house a little past 6am, I forced everyone into a root beer while I had a beer and we got caught up a bit before napping some.

After a bit of sleep, I was able to divert Trevor, Tre-Pod, to Batman's house instead of the motel. Alas JerryTel, ever the imposing sort, insisted on remaining at there. Sligo and I chatted via text messages for the early afternoon, while her majesty, Pery woke up and made herself presentable, Batman went for a run and Tre-Pod took a nap. The Arsenal's shifting opening time indicated that events would begin in the evening. During this time I noticed Batman's next door neighbors were Arsenal, the soccer team, fans. How awesome!

At the Arsenal, I can't say enough how impressed I am with the place. Between the well maintained appearance of the place, the functional kitchen, and the conference areas, this frugal, but not cheap-minded, enterprise shines among adventure gaming oases. Bill and his staff have high standards and it really shows. I hope to have many years of association with the joint. Counting up the attendees, the game festival idea just wasn't going to happen. So a Hoot, err Holler was. Upon revising the list of what was going to be ran, Sligo, Pery and Tre-Pod had play-testing events, so things were going to turn into GM workshop. JerryTel decided to stick to his "Game of Thrones" D20 scenario, leaving his first attempt at T&T for a later time. I challenged all the collected GMs to a die roll off for the first slot, which Tre-Pod took up. I won the roll and the first slot was mine. So I humbly pulled out my notes, inside a PDA, for "Journey Through A Strange Vale" and got started.

AND IT WENT AWESOME. Not saying there weren't glitches, like in the combat math (the second time in within three months, dammit), but overall it went well and I enjoyed myself immensely. Even when Batman had to get up and leave for a "few minutes," Jo-Jo, Sligo's friend wandered in a minute later and took over that PC until his friend showed up-- Just as Jo-Jo had to leave Batman showed back up, amazing. Kerry, called Wanderer from here on, a regular from Sligo's T&T group, proved my old adage "presence is like hair, better to have too much than too little. The actor can always get a haircut to fit the director's role in mind." He was good at providing leads for me to play off of, even if I had to tell him to let me run my NPCs and my own plot. The pacing of the scenario was pitch perfect though, and a couple spiffy tricks I came up with worked very well. When the group got to the "Strange Valley" my deadliness was effective but not unfair, and my major monster was fun to play and lead to some very good scenes. I played with the FBI Origin's 2011 card deck as a 'divine intervention' piece, basically any dead PC had to play Charon at a hand of Five Card Draw and win to somehow miraculously survive death. With that we concluded the first night of "InConTroll."

The following morning was a little hectic, but we found a rather fancy Mexican restaurant in an old Church that had some great grub and spent time with Batman and Colts Gal and her friends. Tre-Pod wasn't impressed, and I was stressed out because we ended up late for the noon game. By 1 pm though, we were developing characters for ND-RPG (No Dice RPG), Sligo's card deck based experiment. The scenario was just designed for mechanics-checking, though I am flattered that Sligo felt the need for a reason for our characters to be together, ie a role-playing premise. We the PCs were walking along a sidewalk, a hole appears and the scenario started from there. The rules worked well enough, and the opposition resolution isn't just playing gin rummy or poker, so there is something there. My own feedback was concerned with the character sheet, while others pointed to this or fact rules functionality or specific.

The Walk the Spiral (RobinHoo) scenario had everyone scared, seriously scared. Perhaps it was the start were everyone had was a pre-generated character, that knew everyone else in the party as a character in a FRPG campaign, but now were people from real life, who did not know each other. Maybe it was rather the surreal setting where time seemed to mixed up. A bit of over-reaction and being overly cautious kept things at a snail's pace for a while. I finally just got over it. Remembering that Pery wants to resolve this campaign and probably had not designed a Doom 1st-person shooter scenario so common among amnesia Lost-like plots, where the scriptwriter is pretty much making it up from session to session. Maybe following my lead, if misunderstanding the difference between a clue and threat, Tre-Pod, Sligo and Wandering began to act irrational, running from harmless encounters to calling out and waving to people with strange items attached to their belts or in their hands. JerryTel was looking furtively around still being very, very quiet. Because of the slow start, the ending was rather hurried. Oddly enough no character was killed.

Tre-Pod's Saturday night game suffered the fate of all Hoot's "the last Saturday night game," everyone ran amok. At least no one fell asleep like last June. I became the "I Just Did 1 Million Hit Points" Guy. Though I derailed the plot, my experience points were awesome. Dude, I killed Quetzalcoatl. Almost everyone else followed suit and helped me cover my blood-stained hands from there. It didn't end pretty.

At the closure of the night's gaming, Colts Gal and a friend, Batman, Pery, and Tre-Pod treated me with a pubcrawl around the Fountain Square neighborhood. It was a great night.

Sunday came too early for some, and too late for others. JerryTel cancelled his slotted Sunday game, having been left to his own means at the Red Roof Inn and could not take isolation from his fair and beloved pastures and rolling hills of Toledo. I personally think he was too overwhelmed by all the Awesome Uber Overlord GMs he saw over the past couple of days, myself, but that's just a theory. Tre-Pod we left in bed as the revelry from the night before was proving to be a little too much for him to find his glassed let alone consciousness. Sligo offered to step up with a T&T game, but decided to switch it out with his arena-style board game in development. Batman loved the game. Pery was impressed and I have to say that even the prototype looks great.

Wrapping up the playtest after two matches, at my insistence, we had a parting meal with Wanderer, Sligo and Batman once again on the Fountain Square. Batman took the longest way he could to get home, not wanting Pery and me to leave. Though it is flattering, I was in a state of near exhaustive panic at being so late.

On the way home, I responded to a volley of Happy Birthday calls and a called a couple texters. Tre-Pod texted to let me know he was home and fully functional. So getting home at 11:30, Pery and I decompressed just a little before bed. I was an Awesome Uber Overlord this Elvismas, that takes some transition when slipping back into reality.

Moby Dick and Call of Cthulhu

I happened to be thinking of a contemporary political comparison today when one of the collections of H.P. Lovercraft fell from the bookshelf, thanks to a cat. And that got me comparing the two works instead, mostly because the political one wasn't going anywhere.

It occurs to me that Cthulhu might've been Lovecraft's take on Moby Dick. In my own mind, I do not see his collected works as the works of a master, but as masterful work of a writer finding his voice. Once again, to me, he was something of a modernist to begin with. Though his language was rather romantic, he wrote of prevalent views going on around him, without being overly topical. Lovecraft ascribed a certain amount of technical detail to the nuts and bolts going on in his work-- from radios with microphones and receivers, to submarines, to gas masks.

Lovecraft did try for emulation of earlier authors, such as Edgar Allen Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Arthur Machen. The writers of "weird fiction" between the wars were prone to playing with each other, why shouldn't they borrow, err work from more widely known works such as The Scarlett Letter or say, I dunno, Moby Dick?

What is uniquely Lovecraftian though is HPL's angle. Instead of the reader being inspired with images of adventure and wanting to meet diverse and non-Christian cultures, the reader is supposed to know that going to the South Pacific, let alone anywhere in a boat, is dangerous. Ironically, while Moby Dick can be said to inspire people to read the Bible while considering the debate of god-worship and atheism, "The Call of Cthulhu" assumes that everyone pretty much avoids the discussion of religion and skirts sideways into superstition and cults.

2012, If Not the End of Time.

Over the past week, I keep hearing about how bad 2011 was. And all I am hearing is slaves singing songs over Saturnalia about the worldview of someone else. Granted I _LIKE_ rough straits, but 2011 was a good year for me. People were flexing their shoulders. I want to see where things are going.

And if the Mayans have it right, I am so beating up more than few illegal immigrants, I suppose that includes my mother and me-- they could have told us.

Crafting a Good Yarn, Am I?

I ask myself that question often. Well, I probably already know Bennet's answer to this question, but excuse me while I indulge myself by thinking about it for myself.

Game-wise is one thing.

One of the things I've tried to avoid since becoming one of the hardest working GMs in the world (does anyone else you know run six to twelve events each year for non-regular groups, as well as about a eight to twenty games for his regulars?), is the urge to "go improv." You know, where you walk into a scheduled session and just wing it. Not sure why I don't, because the times that I have, it has gone well-- I swear that I've sold more than a dozen copies of T&T for Flying Buffalo the times I have. But I think it has something to do with the cathartic qualities of writing things out, versus the thrill of being spontaneous, as well as something of a showboat, as a GM.

On the other side of gaming sessions, I have to watch out to not overly push my story on the players. They often do indeed like to improv. Over the last two years, I have been experimenting with forcing the players to improvise just to see the dynamics in a more clear fashion. Alas I have found it, the GM's seeds make a good or bad session for everyone, and not just the biggest ham bone in group.

But at the table, it's still bits and pieces that come out during the course of play, despite pages upon pages of written text. So I've started putting in the image, sometimes image, that I want to describe and then start crafting the tale around that. From emails that I have received for my Elder Tunnel scenarios, this method has seemed to be somewhat successful. I often hear my script is well paced, which is a surprise to me, because I am not paying attention to that as I write these pieces. Mostly I am trying to fill out the world that feel makes my images, and sometimes spiffy game mechanics, coherent. That and fill up a couple pages for the print product. I suppose though the theatrical format facilitates a sense of stage management that isn't actually the intent. Glad I get something right.

Fiction-wise is another.

In the age of the internet and limited social network interfaces, many fiction writers that I know have started to think that anything over two paragraphs is boring and repetitive. I read a friend's "novel in progress" end up yes with 50,ooo words, but at the same time it had 92 chapters. While Kurt Vonnegut or Kathy Acker might think that is good thing, I as a reader could barely get into the ever-shifting pace. In the end, narrative needs a bit more than Point-To-Point mechanics. Still my own 14,ooo worded chapters, often come off as rote to me.

This year I am going to try something new, my Dreaming. Not as plot guides, dreams don't do that well. And the age of mass media imagery TV turning the human subconscious into a flat planet, my dreams just aren't the guide to amazing visions or deep inspiration towards things unknown that they once were. No I am going to use my dreams for guide to finding the emotionality of my characters. This just may be the key towards having characters that surprise me. I hear every fiction writer claim that their plots just fell together and they had no idea what was going to happen next because of those zanny, wild and whacky Out-of-Control characters on the page in front of them. Considering how formula most those authors tend to be, I think they are bullshitting. But I'd like to get more depth into characters, despite the lack of spontaneity in my daily emotions, so perhaps my dreams can help here.

And now to start piecing together "Bigger Than A Breadbox" for A Dark Gathering horror role-playing event, coming up this May in Syracuse, New York.

TAG 2.0?

I have been doing a lot of "rules design" in my head over the last week. Not sure why, just doing it. Making rules systems to me is kind of like spending time with the lawn or making cookies instead of buying them. Pleasurable work and good for practicing needed "gamer skills."

I have been playing D&D, err D20, err 3.75 err a game sessions over the past year. That is as well as run various T&T sessions to people that only ever played one of the variations of D&D. I have also been reading through Roy Cram's, Yorda's, vast and varied submitted works, I think they're supposed to be for PeryPub, over the last few weeks. One of his four and half projects that he is working is something called Mad Roy's Super Simple System (MRSSS for short), as opposed to re-learning MSPE for this Summer's issue of Elder Tunnels (the theme is modern T&T-based items).

It occurs to me that keeping it simple isn't always fun for audience when trying a new game. I have never had a harder time explaining to people that rolling high on two six-sided dice is a good thing than after I explained the T&T Saving Roll to both hardcore veterans and casual players of D&D alike. From complaints that are blatantly wrong like, "there is no randomness;" to the intellectually honest, "I hate doing addition." So this system isn't the "simple system to end all simple systems. "

Instead I am taking experiences from playing D&D, err 3.75, err D20, err some games with an icosahedron and differential tables with Pery, Rook and JerryTel, and working on making the combat more step driven and defined. I have to admit even my T&T combat sessions are enhanced by adding details during the fray rather than coloring the results. And I am working in a couple "but ifs" so the players can feel that they're playing a trump card every now and then.

Who knows I may take my "Tom's Rip-Off of Tunnels and Trolls," fondly referred to as TROTT in Pery's and my household, and turn it on its head. More like a "Rolled Over Tunnels and Trolls, Expanded and Nuanced," hmmmm a ROTTEN core set of rules or something. Am I going to use this new system for my re-working of Spacers(TM) or the release of the "Powder Punk" setting this upcoming year? I dunno. But more than likely there will be a very quirky setting where I try out this new games matrix.

As of yet, there is no d20 in these blueprints though.

Bogey Men, the Mothman and 665 Hits in a Single Day

This one goes to Bennet, who I'll still just keep continuing to delete his comments. Freedom of Speech means you get make an ass of yourself elsewhere or just do the "I HATE KOPFY" forum, please provide all my links for all your fans. I seem to have had a bad egg magumuffin this morning, so maybe your voodoo doll is working. Oops sorry a bit of salt and broccoli seems to have helped. Stay strong and remember to lock the door so your mother can't walk in during the ritual. I am your biggest fan, but sadly you're still just getting tossed off.

While that above is fascinating to me, I actually wanted to talk about the paranormal. Or should I say, "The Paranormal." Which happens to the title to a spin-off project of the horror role-playing rules I wrote called CrawlSpace for Monk and TAG in that order. Paranormal doesn't get worked on too often, but for the bad conspiracy/ superhero setting Nixon World I've been reviewing the cases of Big Foot and the Mothman. Anybody else notice that these occurrences tend to pop in places where everyone is "honest" and "knows each other?"

Then with just a little, very little actually, research a couple of things come to light. Someone that describes red-filtered flashlights on a National Guardsman's steel pot, with him flapping his poncho to scare away a car full of teenagers, as "red eyes that peered into my soul..." . Three years later, that person admitted to being stoned out of her gourd and "telling fibs." A decade earlier, half a continent away a restaurant owner makes casts of some large imaginary creature and runs around for about three miles away from the spot, and then makes a film of a friend in a gorilla suit; then years later gets outed by his son when he is dead and buried, as having conducted a hoax. Both of these people get described,... no.... keep getting described as "hardworking," "salt of the earth," and "honest" "folk." And then those other "good" folk around that keep collaborating the tales, even after the showings, fall into either the roles of superstitious or culpable with the hoax to begin with. Not even a one can crack a smile while maintaining the fireside tale.

And I'd like to thank everyone who helped Kopfy's Kreche, ""We're All Mad Here." Carnage 2011: part 2" get 665 posts in one day. That like put the month of November 2011 to the most audience that I have ever seen.