Sunday, August 9, 2015

#RPGaDay2015 Days 6-9 catching up

Time to play catch up on this blog project. I was travelling for work last week and unable to keep up. 

Day 6:  Most Recent RPG Played
I had the opportunity to play in a Delta Green one-shot prior to GenCon. It was a playtest for a scenario at GenCon. We over-thought the first portion of the game, forgetting the prime rule of a one-shot. You are in an one-shot, you are the stars of the show, go do something or force something to happen. If you don't, the scenario never ends. All three Delta Green agents survived and we completely burned the friendly who was assisting us. He likely ended up in Gitmo or some other black hole in ground. 




Day 7:  Favorite Free RPG
In the early days of the game, Eclipse Phase was available for free to download. The product was so good that many people went on to purchase the game. Enough sales of that core book have occurred to drive it to a fourth printing, 7 published adventures, and another 5-10 other source books. I think I own a digital copy of most of their products, even if I haven't read them all. I backed the most recent Kickstarter project:  Transhuman. It's awesome. The books are layed out well, have beautiful interiors, and the setting can do anything you want. The two detractions I hear the most about this game are the rules system (percentile based) and how large the space is in which to play. The game is set up to let you do anything you want with it and you can. If you want a hard sci-fi game with aliens, you can. If you want dimension hopping through portals, it's available. If you want to go on antique hunting adventures to Earth, you can - but I wouldn't. Body morphs and lasers and space ships and sentient AIs and Things Man was Not Meant to Know are all in there. 

To the best of my knowledge, it is no longer a free game. Look around the Internet, I may be wrong.





Day 8:  Favorite Appearance of RPG in Media
I can't say that I have a favorite. I watched and loved the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon as a kid. I own the episodes on dvd. I enjoyed the quick snippets of roleplaying games that show up in TV shows, like season nine of Buffy. GG appeared in an episode of Futurama. I guess the old cartoon is my favorite, but this isn't a topic I think long and hard on. 



Day 9:  Favorite Media You Wished Was an RPG
I was going to say Flash Gordon, but GORDON'S ALIVE! So, I'll go with something more up to date, with just as much silliness, but not quite the amount of glam or camp:  Jupiter Ascending. This movie has so much going on in the background, that it almost feels as if it were designed to be a tv series and then someone kicked it to the movie production business. The mainline is girl who doesn't know she's super awesome important, finds out, finds friends that will help here, and then wins the day. Or, you can go to IMDB or Wikipedia and get a real description. Whatever.

Jupiter Ascending brings elements of Flash Gordon, Dune, Highlander II (come on, I'm not the only one that thought of that with the rocket booster roller skate things), and everything else they could throw into it. There is a big, all powerful family who is fighting in and among themselves to control the universe. As it turns out, Jupiter, a young adult with horrible parental units, can save the day. She can't do it alone and needs help from others, including a human with wolf's blood or genes or something. 

The movie is painful at times. You don't know whether to watch the background images or pay attention to the characters. If you pay attention to the characters, you get some stilted dialogue, over acting, and a sense of, "what were they thinking?" At the same time, the amount of CGI or paintings used to fill the blank space around the characters is amazing. There are worlds to be explored in this setting. Worlds, we'll never see, because the movie really wasn't that good. 

Also:  Sean Bean does not die in this film, even though he is in it.
Also Also:  No soundtrack by Queen.
Also Also Also:  There was a Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo rpg by Lin Carter and Scott Bizar that I didn't know about until I went looking for a link to Pinnacle Entertainment Group's upcoming game based upon the movie Flash!.



Past entries in the #RPGaDay2015 project

No comments: