Dnevnoy Dozor

Picked up 3 movies over the weekend. Nochnoi Dozor, which I've already watched and enjoyed aspects of; Dnevnoy Dozor which I watched today and liked; and License to Wed.

License to Wed is a chick flick, but mostly safe for males. Robin Williams and John Krasinski do an okay job. Mandy Moore is so out of her league, it's not funny. The movie is nothing to write home about and I've seen both Robin and John do much better. Still, if the SO wants you to watch it with her, the pain should be somewhat minimal.

Dneevnoy Dozor is the movie adaptation of the book of the same name, Day Watch. It's the follow up storyline to Nochnoi Dozor, or Night Watch. Night Watch gained fame for being a Russian film that made it to the outside world, with special effects equal to the BBC in the 1990s, and having some very cool visuals. The movie lacks the depth of the book in many ways, including the cut down storyline resulting in some Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moments.

I haven't read Day Watch, yet. It's still sitting here waiting to be read. I hope to get to it by summertime. However, I found the movie to be far and away better made than Night Watch. The special effects were good and modern. The story made sense. They introduced the concept of the Inquisition, which is the third book/movie. The actors did a good job.

The focus was more on the Day Watch than the Night Watch. However, they stayed focused on Anton and Svetlana. The movie opened with another great battle scene, this time with horses riding through walls and oriental warriors shapeshifting from raven form in mid-flight.

It's a good follow up to the original movie and sets up a "what are they going to do in the third movie?" atmosphere.

On the down side, I picked up the nWoD books and I'm not sure I made good purchases.

RPG Recommendation?

A game idea I had for modern fantasy (which I'm reading as modern supernatural).

City will be my fictional version of Memphis - Silverbrook. It's a city of fog.

Characters will start as basic people. They will have experiences which will lead them to a run in with a doctor. The doctor will provide them medicine and devices that will give them the ability to fight the bad supernatural folks. The medicine will function similar to mana/essence/quintessence and will power the devices.

The devices could include such things as masks of disguise, cloaks that make you invisible or clean up your appearance, magical pirate matchlock pistols, hidden swords ready at a moment's notice, books of magic, books of truth.

I want to be able to do original things (to me) with the system, supplying cool devices and even cooler bad guys.

Eventually, the world the characters know will morph into more of a spirit realm.

I want a rules system that uses or can easily incorporate Legend/Hero/Drama Points.

I do not want straight up d20 or oWoD. However, I may use elements of oWoD Changeling. I want a court of supernaturals in place, as I plan to have all supernaturals part of one Fae Court or another. Mind you, this will conflict the doctor's plans and many of the villains involved with that part of the storyline.

I am not going to use Little Fears. These girls have been through some real world trauma and I don't want to go down that road. It's nothing against , he knows I love his work.

Psychic powers may also be an element of the game. High weirdness and freaky shit that makes no sense ala Unknown Armies or lighter elements of Kult are also good. However, the UA rules are not okay.


So, my question to you, gentle readers, is what game line would you recommend I use for this game? The game system must use dice. I don't care for card based systems.

Thoughts I have thus far for the system are:
nWoD
Scion
Cinematic Unisystem
Armageddon - for the powers of the Old Gods

I'd love to use Cold City's mechanics, but they are a little lighter than I really want.

Westerns!

Been in a Western mood lately. Read 3:10 to Yuma, then picked up Elmore Leonard's complete Westerns collection, Larry McMurtry's Dead Man's Walk (the first of the Lonesome Dove series), and Robert Parker's Apaloosa (yes, that's Robert Parker of Spenser: for Hire fame).

I read through Apaloosa first. I know Parker and his style. Knowing that, I knew I could kill it in a few days. Well, two to be exact. It's a good read. Nothing overly fancy. An ending I didn't expect, but did enjoy. About 1/3 of the way into the book, it started to feel a little close to Spenser as a Western. I was afraid of that, but I didn't mind. The characters were definately not Spenser characters, but some of the dialogue was close.

I'm about 90 pages into Dead Man's Walk. It's nothing special thus far. I've a feeling though, that it's about to get good. For those that have read it, I'm at the part of the story where the characters are leaving for to join the army.

Having already read 3:10 to Yuma, I'm saving Leonard for last. He was first, I'll get to him later.

And eventually, I do plan to read Louis Lamour, I'm just not in a hurry.

So, with that in mind, I went trolling through Youtube and found some interesting indie Western flicks. I'll stick them behind a cut to save on your load time.

In addition to that, my on again off again Western script idea is back on and I'm slowly plugging away at it. Expect nothing soon!

The Hayfield Movie


Six Reasons Why This is the one I'm most interested in.


The Spaghetti Western style trailer.


Six Bullets


Dodge City: A Spaghetto Western (with Isaac Hayes



And if you’ve never seen it, here’s the opening gunfight from Once Upon a Time in the West.


Sergio would follow this up with A Fistful o’ Dynamite (aka Duck, You Sucker!) and Once Upon a Time in America.

March for Dimes donations

Hey folks,

I’ll be walking with the March of Dimes again this year. If anyone is able to, I’d love to see some donations from my friends. Any amount would be appreciated. My local walk is on April 26 at 9am.

Anyone able to contribute can send money to me direct, or use my online MoD account to donate.

Star Wars: Infinities

I've started reading the A New Hope graphic novel in this series. The premise is that Luke's torpedoes didn't hit in the original Death Star, Yavin 4 is destroyed, and Leia is captured and taken as Lord Vader's student.

So, SW fans, does this sound like an interesting setting to play or no? I'm wondering if it's just me that's interested in the idea. As of now, I'm not looking to run a game of it.

Landshark Lager and other tales of sailing

As requested by my good friend Meghan, I tried Landshark Lager this evening while at Max & Erma's for dinner. Now, I've got this terribly wonderful headcold/sinus infection thing going on, so take my review with a slug of rum. I gotta say, not that impressed with the lager. It tasted like a cross between a corona and "classic" American beer. It's from the wonderful folks at Margaritaville wherein my friend works. Anheuser-Busch is making it for them.

Next up, kaiju pressganged 8 of us into playing in a Freeport game Saturday night. We'll be playing every other Friday night and it looks to be the start of a good game. The game storyline is actually titled, "The Adventures of Ur-tarczek the half-elf and his companions Yasmina the Medusa and Michelle the Privateer." Of course, no one knows this but my character - Ur. Ur is half elf and half-goblin, but all piratey. He wears a simple leather vest, a leather skull cap with tie-downs, pants, and an eye-patch (to protect his good eye). Yasmina is actually a Medusa scattergun and Michelle is a pistol. The game looks to be horrendously painful in a good way. I even found a pirate goblin fig with scattergun this evening while at Fantasy Games.


Privateer Press has issued Pirates of the Broken Coast, adding ship rules to the Warmachine world. The book is overpriced, but I bought it anyways. I was going to pick up the Five Fingers book, but the cover was banged up in such a way as I did not want that copy. I'll keep my eyes open at Borders and other places in my travels. I'd love to run another Iron Kingdoms game. It's a great setting, very similar to Freeport. When I ran it a few years ago, we used the Unisystem instead of the OGL system it was designed to be used with. While I preferred the Unisystem rules, the magic rules broke the setting IMO. I'm not sure what I would do if I ran it again. True 20 works a bit better in my opinion, so I may do some converting. Iron Kingdoms just has so many setting specific character types with specific rules, that the moment you step away from those rules, you may step away from what makes Iron Kingdoms, Iron Kingdoms.

Privateer Press also has several new sets of pirate related figures to go with PotBC. I'm tempted to pick them up, just to have them.


Course, I'd lurv to run me another Star Wars game, too. :D