Every Time at the Table: Halloween 2025

   
   While previously planning to do Wobble session last night, around Wednesday (October 29th) I suddenly wanted to composed a Hammer horror film-style adventure. So by the next day, I scripted a quick scenario, what I'd call a  "room-crawl"  with a mystery to solve. So I announced "Assault on Castle Vulgarr" on Thursday and welcomed any player back to Blegovia (17th-19th themed horror).  Now I expected a couple regular players would be showing up, but this apparently excited a couple others.  Imran, from India, as well as S.  Dresser, an old friend from New Hampshire days, decided to show. Iron Curtis showed up wearing his best dress to top things off. 

So the main roles were the Inspector, the Fortune-teller, and the Scientist. Through random draws, Dresser was the Scientist; Peryton (Robin) was the Inspector; and Curtis had to fill the role of the Fortune-Teller. Imran was there to watch. Curtis's fortune-teller looked awesome in their purple dress. Later Kal Luin (Brett) showed up ready to play. I didn't bother with character creation, he was an interloping English consultant arriving to tell everyone already in the game how things should be done.

So we started out with a strange murdering of multiple people, a family, so the Police-Watch of the city couldn't just file it away. The Inspector found those closest to the deceased, namely the Fortune-teller, and, after concluding that they were not guilty, arrested them. A decision not only historically accurate, Robin's decision was wonderfully apt to 'get the party together.' She was about to arrest Dresser's Professor, when the English-Consultant, played by Brett, showed up. The combined PCs not only coped, they made the story rather awesome.

Things ended up at Ostruk Vulkarra, A vampire was defeated after all but one of the Party was slain. I was surprised that any Player-Character survived. 

The State of TV Science Fiction 2025: Foundation

One of the points in my life is where being successful means watching TV sci-fi  to give my opinion on the shows happening regardless of where the shows happen to be streaming. Now I don't mean what we'll kitchen table sci-fi, where a camera and one to four famous actors gets to equivocate about society's belly button for two, maybe three, seasons about time travel or hot chicks that are genetically modified to beat up battalions of faceless people because oligarchy or something. No. I want costumes. I want spaceships. I want striking visuals. A bit of soap opera doesn't hurt.

I actually gave the Apple Corporation an email address to watch their production of Issac Asimov's Foundation series. At least the first three seasons. I did this mostly out of guilt after watching five episodes of the first season from a friend that revels in bootlegging this sort of thing like two years ago. The 14$ that I spent was well worth it. I still haven't found the cancellation button anywhere to try to stop paying the named company without replacing my debit card. I actually have stopped the account from charging me, but not being able to just cancel a subscription for a while-- Fuck off phish-mining. 



Say what you will about "the Book versus the Movie" the TV series, is not afraid to be creative. You-Tube's asshole critics will be on about "It's not like the books!" or "gender-swapping!", they're missing out on how a sci-fi series has spaceships, androids, and explosions. This criticism ignores how boring the books, held to these critics breasts, were. 

So far the series has invented an empire that clones its most perfect ruler. Who needs elections when you have perfection? And then space elevators and brain transfers into machines happen without much of a mention. No. Indeed that brain transfer has its own subplot. This is all on top of the written material of the books,



Godsheads bless the books. The books that have to be mentioned because film and TV producers need titles and plots from the past to fund doing shows (or films) like this. Is it good? Yes. The show though keeps being compared what Issac Asimov might've envisioned. I'll add that it would have been filled with schlock and pretense.

This is some sphere romance presented not trying to explain anything but the passions of its characters. Decent sci-fi doesn't need much more. 

Andor: Well that Surprised Me

 

Finally some Star Wars in the damn TV show

So to fill out a Saturday night, I went ahead and binged season 2 of the show. My summation of Andor during the first season was something like, "A World War Two movie with androids but made in Albania".  It wasn't Star Wars but it was influenced by the makers of that movie franchise as much as it was a homage to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in fashion tastes. Then there were the prison episodes, which weren't as much The Grand Illusion (1937) as they wanted to be, so they ended up being like sitting in prison while watching them. Boy did the spaceships, prison breaks, and battle scenes suck. While I love a good kepi or toupee, I was not impressed with my first take of the show.

The opening of season 2, which figured almost nothing but a TIE fighter then, elsewhere, a princess's wedding plans, caught my attention. It was 8pm when I started. I promised to work a few hours the next day. I did not mind staying up to after 3am watching it. Okay. Okay. I had no where to be until after noon. Still I was caught up and swept away into the story.

 The hat collection was put into the back ground, but the 40s Italian naval uniforms made up for it. Both yarns were tying disparate parts of the narrative together showing the fiber and composition of Star War's  rebellious bits and pieces. The interactions of the Characters were full of their personal opinions and could be judged as right or wrong, but we, as the viewer, were privy to background information that showed them to be handling what they were given not paths that they were following. Friends warned me about the pacing of the first episodes, but slow presentations don't bug me in film and TV-- it kind of makes the media worth watching compared to most its content.

By the end of the shows, I'd given up on looking for where the influences were from or what Easter Eggs were there for fandom. I wanted to see where the Characters, the surviving ones, were going. Knowing that this is the prequel to Rogue One, it's all a half-hearted tragedy. I still won't mind making a long weekend of this series, Rogue One, and Star Wars (the movie) a future event. Lucas's prequels don't make me want to do that sort of thing.

A King Kong of a TV mini-series. A Godzilla of a Star Wars prequel.