Moviewatch: Looking forward to 2012

I know that this is a little "off topic" but who doesn't use movies as inspiration for their games...?  Here's a list of movies I'm looking forward to in 2012

MOVIEWATCH: LOOKING FORWARD TO 2012 

JANUARY

• The Divide - 13th January (USA) - A bunch of survivors are holed up in the confines of their apartment building's basement after a nuclear war.
  
  
• Haywire - 18th January (UK) - Steven Soderbergh directs this story of a female Black Ops soldier who seeks revenge after being set up during a mission.
  
  
• Underworld Awakening - 20th Jan (UK) - Kate Beckinsale dons the leather catsuit again for another outing as Selene in the 4th Underworld movie.

FEBRUARY

• Journey 2: The Mysterious Island - 3rd February (UK) - Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson leads his girlfriends family to a mysterious island in the search for their grandfather.
  
  
• Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance - 17th February (UK) - Nicholas Cage returns as Johnny Blaze.

MARCH

• John Carter - 9th March (UK) - Disney adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian hero John Carter.
  
  
• The Hunger Games - 23rd March (UK) - Gary Ross (Seabiscuit) directs this adaptation of the Suzanne Collins novel of a dystopian future. 
  
  
• Wrath of The Titans -  30th March (UK) - Sam Worthington returns as Perseus to battle Hades and rescue Zeus.

APRIL

• Iron Sky - 4th April (FIN) - Nazi flying saucers leave their secret moon base to invade Earth.
  
  
• MS One: Maximum Security - 13th April (UK) - Guy Pearce stars in this outerspace prison break movie written by Luc Besson. - Update: In the UK this was titled Lockout
  
  
• Battleship - 20th April (UK) - Liam Neeson tries to see off an alien invasion with his trusty naval fleet
  
  
• The Avengers - 27th Aril (UK) - Thor, Iron Man, Capt. America, Black Widow, Hawkeye and The Hulk appear in 2012's most anticipated superhero slugfest.

MAY

• The 25th Reich - 10th May (AUS) - Time travel, Nazi Robot Spiders, what's not to like?
  
  
• Sinbad: The 5th Voyage - 18th May (US) - Patrick Stewart narrates this low budget Sinbad tale.
  
  
• Men in Black III - 25th May (UK) - Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones return as agents J and K in this time travelling sequel. 

JUNE

• Prometheus - 1st June (UK) - Ridley Scott directs this Alien prequel which covers the events of an earlier expedition to LV426.
  
  
• G.I. Joe Retaliation - 22 June (UK) - Sequel to the family friendly action movie featuring Channing Tatum backed up by Bruce Willis, Dwayne Johnson and Ray Stevenson

JULY

• The Amazing Spider-Man - 4th July (UK) - Andrew Garfield dons the lycra in this reboot of the spidey movie franchise and faces off against classic super-villain The Lizard played by Rhys Ifans.
   
  
• The Dark Night Rises - 20th July (UK) - Christain Bale returns as Batman to face off against Bane

AUGUST

• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - 2nd August (UK) - Dominic Cooper and Alan Tudyk feature in this adaptation of Seth Grahame Smith's novel.
   
• Total Recall - 22nd August (UK) - Colin Farrell stars as Doug Quaid in a remake of the classic Phillip K Dick short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"

SEPTEMBER

• Resident Evil: Retribution - 14th September (UK) - Milla Jovovich makes another outing as Alice in the latest installment in the war against the Umbrella Corporation.
  
  
• Para Norman - 14th September (UK) - The team behind Coraline and 9 return with this animated tale of a boy who can see speak with the dead.
  
  
• Dredd - 21 September (UK) - Karl Urban stars as Judge Dredd in this big screen outing for the 2000AD hero, which will hopefully blow away all the bad memories of the 1995 Sylvester Stallone version.
  
  
• Looper - 28th September (UK) - Sci-Fi thriller where mob hit-man Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets hired to kill his future self.

OCTOBER

• Hotel Transylvania - 12th October (UK) - Genndy Tartakovsky directs this animated tale of a boy falling for Dracula's daughter in an upmarket holiday resort for monsters.

NOVEMBER

• Red Dawn - 2nd November (US) - Chris Hemsworth stars in this remake of the 80s classic as a group of American teenagers attempt to save their town from a North Korean invasion.

DECEMBER

• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - 14th December (UK) - Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in the first part of Peter Jackson's adaptation.
  
  
• 47 Ronin - 14th December (UK) - Keannu Reeves stars in this true story of 18th Century Japanese samurai who take revenge for the death of their master.

SCHEDULED FOR SOMETIME IN 2012

• War of The Worlds: Goliath - Animated steampunk movie sequel to HG Well's War of the Worlds produced in association with Heavy Metal Magazine.  This one has been threatening to come out for a while, hope it doesn't turn into vapourware.
  
  
• Paradox Alice - A rescue mission is despatched to Europa to fetch water for a dying earth but something puts the mission in jeopardy.
  
  
• A Little Bit Zombie - An HR manager turning zombie trys to keep his life together and marry his fiance.
  
  
• Polypore - A young man's hunt for answers to his newly found gift of telepathy uncovers a web of corporate intrigue.
  
  
• Cheech & Chong's Animated Movie - Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong's animated movie based on their Grammy Award winning albums.  Probably has nothing useable from an RPG stance but I like a bit of Cheech and Chong now and then.
  
  
• Vehicle 19 - Paul Walker stars as a foreign tourist who unwittingly picks up a rental car and is drawn into a scheme of corrupt local police.

Happy New Year and 2012 Resolutions

Happy New Year to all of you out there in RPG Blogging land, especially to those members of the RPGBN and RPGBA who have been along for the ride over the past 12 months.

RPG Resolutions for 2012

1.  Be a Player and not a GM - In 2011 I spent most of my time (33 weekly sessions) GMing my C&C campaign which took up most of my freetime.  I don't know how other bloggers manage to fit two or three campaigns into a year, but one was enough for me.  Playing games rather than running means that I have more time to put thoughts onto paper (or screen) and develop ideas for future games.  I suspect that I'm no different to a lot of other gamers in this respect, I need a playing sabbatical in order to recharge my batteries.

2.  Read More and Play Apps less - I have been seduced by a number of really cool app games over the last year which have taken over my daily commute and turned me into an iOS zombie.  I used to read on the train but now I can be found playing drawrace or some other equally addictive timewaster.  I have a huge stack of books beside my bed which I really ought to get through.

3.  Re-skin the blog - Although this blog is cool it looks pretty scruffy and amateurish in comparison to other blogs, my day job is in the web so it's actually quite embarrassing at the same time that I've not done anything about the CSS or branding on the site at all.  This year I hope to smarten things up.

4.  Publish more - becoming a self publisher has been a blast so far and I have a number of projects which are in several stages of completion.  This year I really must pull my finger out and get them published.

2011 in Review

2012 is almost upon us and its time to set some goals, but first I have to review 2011.

2011 Resolutions Progress

Last year saw me start blogging in earnest and for the first time in ages I made some New Year Resolutions:


1.  Take More Notes (5/10) - I'm counting this as a partial success.  I created the Lands of Dual website to act as a repository for session reports and to store all my campaign notes and maps.  I also began using record cards to take notes, but still relied far too heavily on players notes than I would have liked.  This became particularly troublesome when calculating the XP earned by individual PCs so I must come up with a better solution.

2.  Weekly Blog Series (5/10) - Another partial success as I managed to create two of the weekly blog series ideas I spoke of in my original resolutions article.  Unfortunately they petered out within a few articles.

• Monday Motivations - was an attempt to compile a list of mini-backgrounds for fantasy characters along class lines.  I managed to write 12 articles before the juices ran dry.  There's plenty of life left in this series though and I did promise to publish it as a collected series which will clearly need to be expanded upon.
  
  
• Citymorphs - Following in the footsteps of the Geomorphing community I successfully created 29 citymorph tiles over the course of 7 articles.   In retrospect I should probably have reduced the number of morphs per article and eked it out over more posts as the pressure to create 4 morphs per week quickly exhausted my creative juices.  However, I did manage to get them added to Dave's Mapper so you can play with them to your heart's content. 
  
  The focus for Geomorphs seemed to shift towards the Dungeonmorph Dice project founded by Joe "Inkwell Ideas" Wetzel but there were casualties along the way and the inspirational Dyson Logos has apparently gone off line for the forseeable future.
  
  I liked the concept a lot and as my attention drifts away from Fantasy (in the form of my current OSR clone Castles and Crusades) towards Sci-Fi (namely Judge Dredd) I think there are options for this in the future.

This was not theend of the story and a couple of other series ideas sprang forth.

• A to Z of 80s UK RPG - Was an attempt at nostalgically recording my gaming inspirations but stuttered at "I is for ....".  I intend to continue this series as I have written further articles along the line which have yet to see the light of day and it would be a shame to end it after only 8 articles.
   
• Mapping Tools - Was a little 4 part series investigating the state of free cross platform mapping solutions at different scales.  I enjoyed making this series and it led to the discovery of the sweet little tool TILED which I have now used on a number of occasions to construct classic blue style dungeon maps such as The Ruined Tower of The Archmage.

3.  Blog in Advance (3/10) - I have come to the conclusion that scheduled blogging really only works if you have an ongoing series combined with enough inspiration to easily create articles for it in advance.  This lack of inspiration has really been my issue and I don't want to end up with quality suffering for the sake of quantity.

Other Achievements in 2011

Blog Performance

2011 has seen Roleplay-Geek hit the 20,000 pageviews mark (woot) and I've written 96 articles.  I've even tried mobile blogging with limited success, if anyone has any suggestions for free iOS apps for mobile let me know in the usual way. 

 The top 5 articles of the year (by pageviews) are:

1. Minions My OSR take on the one hit wonder (697pv) - High interest in this article probably due to being picked up in Tracy Hurley's Festival of Lights article on the official D&D website.  I must namedrop 4e concepts a bit more...
   
2. Make: 3D Dungeon Tiles Pt 1 - The Design (193pv) - Where I set out the design to produce a cheap as chips and, more importantly, a useable 3D dungeon set.
    
3. Make: 3D Dungeon Tiles Pt 2 - The Build (189pv) - Building the rooms with foamcore.
   
4. RPG Mapping Tools Part 1 - Battle Maps (183pv) - Part one of my 4 part series exploring free cross platform mapping tools.
   
5. UPDATE: RPG Google mapping with MAPLib (159pv) - An update to my article on using MAPLib for your campaign map needs.

Top referrers are of course RPG Bloggers Network  and RPG Blog Alliance, thanks for all the visits guys.

Roleplay Geek Publishing

In April I became an RPG publisher and over the course of the year managed to create a total of 7 products which are currently available for download on RPG Now.  All the advice I gleaned from the various blogs I read forewarned me that this wasn't going to make me a millionaire, but I have enjoyed the experience so far and have been pleasantly surprised with the results so far.

Item	TOTAL SALES	TOTAL EARNINGS
Item Cards - Adventurer's Gear	57	$ 36.68
Item Cards - Potions	44	$ 26.18
Item Cards - Animals	32	$ 18.48
Paper Minis - Animals	28	$ 18.90
GM Aids - Decision Deck	18	$ 25.20
Item Cards - Free Sampler	391	$ 0.00
Paper Minis - Free Fungaloid Lurkers & Brain Vine	130	$ 0.00
Grand Totals	627	$ 124.44

RPG Now is a fantastic way to publish but consequently there are some 15,436 products available to download and standing out from the crowd is extremely difficult. Most of my sales occurred soon after products were added to RPG Now and so featured in the Latest Products list and I haven't worked out a marketing strategy yet.

PDF pricing seems to be a bit hit and miss, Tim Shorts of Gothridge Manor recently wrote a neat article revealing his thoughts and research into pricing his own products.  It doesn't seem to be any easier for the DIY print publisher either, Chris Tregenza has started a new thread on his blog detailing his progress towards making a profit for the 6d6 RPG and I will be watching this with interest.

My philosophy with my PDFs is that I'm producing them for my own games anyway, so the personal effort involved isn't factored into the profit equation.  I'm under no illusion that I'm going to become rich as a result, but if I can gather up a few dollars along the way to buy the odd bit of swag then it's a success.

Miniature Painting

I returned to miniature painting and finally completed my Harlequin Giant Forest Troll and am part way through painting a Ral Partha Djinn and Efreet.  As I get older I have begun to have issues with painting under electric light (or it could be those god awful compact fluorescent bulbs we now have to use) so this restricts the time when I can comfortably paint to a small window on a Saturday morning.  I have a stack of minis which need a bit of colour so I need to ramp up production in 2012.


All in all a mixed year, stay tuned for the New Year Resolutions post.

Star Blazer Adventures Random Scenario Generator, or How I Wrote a One Session Scenario in 30 minutes.

I was scheduled to be playing a one session scenario last night when I received an e-mail that the GM had pulled out at short notice due to illness.  In a moment of madness with 3 hours till I had to jump in the car, I offered to GM the slot with a Star Blazer Adventures (SBA) game.  2 hours of random internet surfing later I decided I'd better write the scenario.

Fortunately chapter 25 of SBA's monster 627 page rulebook contains a plethora of random tables to help you generate ideas for your games.  The results of my rolls were:

Mission 1		Mission 2
Mission Nature:	Corporate	Mission Nature:	Diplomatic
Objective:	Industrial Espionage	Objective:	Hostage Negotiation
Complication:	Military Intervention	Complication:	Travel Difficulties
Who:	Mobster	Who:	Alien Race
Reason:	Mistaken Identity	Reason:	Training

Nothing immediately flowed from this so I decided to break the scenario down into 4 scenes and roll randomly for each:

Scene 1		Scene 2
Location:	Town / Village	Location:	Stock Exchange
Bad Guy Encounter:	Traitorous Politician	Bad Guy Encounter:	Corrupt Soldier
Good Guy Encounter:	Unexpected Ally	Good Guy Encounter:	Enemy of My Enemy
Reason:	Heresy	Reason:	Past Embarrassment
Scene 3		Scene 4
Location:	Hostile Fleet	Location:	Refinery
Bad Guy Encounter:	War Criminal	Bad Guy Encounter:	Murderer
Good Guy Encounter:	Judge	Good Guy Encounter:	War Criminal
Reason:	Blood Feud	Reason:	Recent Defeat

Putting Meat on the Bones

By now the creative juices had started to bubble now so I decided to select parts of the random generated scenes above and began to flesh out my scenario:

Scene 1 - The PCs are the crew of a Star Patrol cruiser currently stationed on Zorb 3 and investigating the disappearance of some medical supplies which have been misappropriated by the  corrupt Mayor of the town.  During the course of this first scene the PCs are alerted to an incident at the planetary stock exchange and immediately re-assigned to investigate.

Scene 2 - The PCs arrive at the stock exchange in the planetary capital only to find that an assault has taken place and a prominent corporate figure has been kidnapped.  A snatch squad has blown a huge hole in the side of the building and made their escape in a warp capable freighter.

Scene 3 - The PCs exit a warp corridor into the middle of the Mercenary Pirate fleet of Desiderous Black, disgraced Star Patrol Officer and War Criminal.  They are engaged and end up flying their crippled cruiser into a hanger of the pirate fleet's flagship The Medusa.

Scene 4 - The PCs land at a refinery on an uninhabited world where they attempt to rescue the corporate hostage in a final showdown and capture the terrorists with the aid of the War Criminal Desiderous Black.

Scene Transitions

Clearly these scenes needed fleshing out, which would occur during play, but more importantly, they needed transitions from one scene to another:

Scene 1 > Scene 2 - During their journey from the town to the stock exchange they narrowly avoid a collision with a blue and yellow freighter which is heading out of the capital.

Scene 2 > Scene 3 - The PCs hastily follow the jump coordinates of the fleeing freighter without knowing where the warp exit point is located.

Scene 3 > Scene 4 - Desiderous Black reveals that he is in fact still a loyal member of Star Patrol and has been on a deep cover mission to wrest control of the pirate fleet away from its rag tag band of mercenary captains and to use its immense power covertly in situations where Star Patrol cannot operate publicly for political reasons.  With the mission now complete he wishes to "come in from the cold" and going off on a wild goose chase following the promise of hostage treasure is a credible escapade which befits his reputation in the the eyes of the other pirate captains.

How it Played Out

The game began at 7:30pm and finished at 2:00am which is quite long for a one session scenario, but fair considering that I had no pre-gen PCs and the players are relatively unfamiliar with the slightly obtuse character generation process that the game requires.

Scene 1 - The PCs were in the town running computer checks on the batch numbers of the medical supplies with the assistance of a low level admin clerk who refused to give anything other than minor assistance as he was in fear of losing his job.  They successfully identified the serial numbers which had been tampered with and eventually the identity of the user involved.  However, they triggered some file alarms which resulted in the Mayor making a run for it in his hover-limousine.  The PCs gave chase and attempted to communicate with the occupant of the vehicle but in-advertantly caused it to lose control and crash.  Whilst they inspected the wreckage for the body of the Mayor, he slipped into the cargo bay of their cruiser unnoticed.  They were in the process of recovering the medical supplies from the wreck when the call came through to re-assign them to investigating the incident at the stock exchange.

Scene 2 - On their way to the scene, they narrowly avoid the freighter as they enter the emergency lane splitting the cities incoming and outgoing air-traffic.  When they review the external security footage they realise that the freighter used in the incident is the same one they encountered on their way to the stock exchange.  They use up some fate points to make plot declarations ensuring that they have access to the jump coordinates for the fleeing freighter.

Scene 3 - Coming out of warp they are attacked by five fighters and although they attempted to jump straight out of the situation, I frazzled their warp coils with some treknobabble about warp static.  They engage the fighters and without suitable heavy weapons themselves attempt to use the enemies own missiles to cripple the flagship.  They succeed in punching a hole inside the hull of the ship but resist the temptation to crash their vessel into the hole, seeking the safety of a conveniently located hanger on board.  With the warp coils frazzled they need to locate suitable replacements from onboard the enemy flagship and assemble an away team to go investigate.  During this mission the away team is captured and the star patrol ship boarded.  Desiderous Black reveals his secret to the Star Patrol Captain PC and offers to assist by accompanying them for the final leg of their mission on board the captured Star Patrol vessel Aggamemnon.

Scene 4 - This was a straight up dungeon bash inside the atmosphere refinery where I gradually whittled down the Pirate Captain's lackeys until only the PCs and Black were left.  The PCs located the corporate hostage who was tied up and swinging from the claw of an overhead crane whilst the kidnappers leader laughed maniacally from its controls.  Getting the tension just right was key and when the leader was killed there was a chance that the mission would go pear shaped resulting in the death of the hostage.  One of the PCs was playing a mysterious alien with a secret "fugitive time traveller" aspect and I allowed another PC to trade a fate point in order to tag this thereby saving the day.

Things I Would do Differently

Overall the exercise was a big success, but the bulk of time wasted during the session occurred during character generation and it's something I've seen players struggle with before.  The freeform concept of aspects and legends and the complex list of skills is a little daunting to first time players and not at all helpfull if you are putting on an impromptu game.  What would be useful is a set of archetypes with all the stat blocks filled in for a wide range of standard space opera types such as the crew of a star patrol ship, a bounty hunter, a law enforcement robot... etc... etc... (sounds like a project for the New Year...).

Merry Christmas everyone.

20,000 Page Views

Some time today this blog hit 20,000 page views.  Thanks for all the support guys and girls.