Achievement Unlocked - Bloganuary

I mentioned in my New Years Resolutions post that I wanted to try to blog more and so I have, well at least for January 2022 that is.

What was the secret to your success?

Getting ahead of the game was key.  Writing and scheduling posts made the task much less stressfull and less prone to writers block.

I regularly spend my Saturday morning anlysing my notes from the previous nights session at Dragons Keep Roleplay Club and committing the action to our session blog.  

I find writing is cathartic and you need something to warm you up and get the creative juices flowing.  Our session blogs were an excellent motivational tool for this.

What about Inspiration?

A lot of my blog is about getting my ideas out of my head and onto a page where they can be immortalised and free up some space for something new.  Sometimes this is immediate, I have an idea in the shower and scribble it down, other times it takes more planning and production. These longer form articles can take many weeks to craft, especially if they are accompanied by original artwork.

Can you keep this up?

Maybe... Today, I return to work which means early starts and a long commute into and out of the office.  Will I have the energy to think about things or will I just decompress myself on the sofa. who knows...

Movieweek 3 - Spider-men vs Munich

Real life events once again got in the way of my screentime and life appears to be giving me a bit of a punch in the guts at the moment.  However, I did manage to slip in one long awaited movie and a bit of an epic historical espionage thriller. 

Spider-man: No Way Home (2021) - 8/10

I was really looking forward to this latest outing of Tom Holland's Peter Parker and to be fair it was a pretty good movie if you view it through the lens of setting up the Multiverse of Madness story arc.  As a standalone spiderman movie it kind of sucked.  

I totally get what they were trying to do with the premise.  Bring back some characters from yesteryear, fan favourites.  It was a neat idea which fell flat in execution.  We have seen this spider-man fight, as a member of The Avengers, much more imposing and dangerous villains than those from his past and they just seemed so provincial.  Moving the focus to helping and not killing them was something new but I just didn't care enough about them to feel empathy towards them.  

Live action Doc Oc was always a talker rather than a doer and whilst I always enjoy seeing Alfred Molina on the screen, this role is really beneath him.  I did like that he accepted his redemption with grace and humility which made him seem like a much more complex character than perhaps his earlier outing gave him credit for.  However, Sandman was always a pretty pathetic character, Electro's alter ego was more interesting than he was and Willem Dafoe's green goblin was only interesting when he went full goblin.

It was nice, but a bit weird, to see the other spider-men, although Toby Macguire is really starting to show his age.  This felt like they were trying to reference Spider-Man into the Spider Verse but in a much less satisfying way.  Each has their own cautionary tale for the MCU spider-man and this was painfully self aware such as referencing the back problems, the "Amazing" prefix etc etc.  I'm not adverse to a dollop of fan service every now and then, but this was really quite heavy handed.

Ultimately the film is a two hour prelude to a quick and largely down beat finale in the last 30 minutes.  I felt quite depressed by the ending and I hope that this will ultimately be resolved in future MCU movies because I truly felt that everyone got a raw deal at the end of this movie.  

Perhaps this is the MCU's defining moment, it's Empire Strikes Back middle film, it just definitely wasn't what I expected of a spider-man movie.

Munich: The Edge of War (2021) - 9/10

Wow, what a movie!!  This is a real tense espionage thriller set against the backdrop of impending war and the Munich peace conference.  Wonderfully cast with the ever classy Jeremy Irons who blows everyone away with his portrayal of Neville Chamberlain, but some creditable performances by some younger faces.  

This movie is based on the best selling book by Robert Harris and is an insight into the year long prelude before the outbreak of WWII which gave the Allies the time to prepare to win.  Chamberlain has been treated quite badly by history, mostly through the benefit of hindsight, and this movie goes someway towards trying to explain the events surrounding the peace conference and the famous piece of paper waving moment which ultimately defined his Prime Ministership.

It's a beautifully crafted movie with perfect pacing and stage craft which is rare from Netflix.  Every moment is engrossing and the viewer feels like they are transported to Autumn 1938 and that they are a fly on the wall at a pivotal moment in history.  The last time I felt like this was when I watched the masterfull Churchill.

This movie manages to pull off the almost impossible, a war movie without any war.  I recommend any real cinefile should put this on their bucketlist immediately.  

Dungeonquest - It's a Classic!

One of my passions is the Games Workshop Bookcase format games of the 1980s.  I am gradually completing my collection and one of the games I absolutely had to have was Dungeonquest.

Dungeonquest (or should I call it Dragon Keep)

Drakborgen was designed by two Swedes Jakob Bond and Dan Glimme and licensed to a range of board game companies.  Games Workshop picked up the license for the UK and sold it as Dungeonquest.

The game is essentially a race to the center of a randomly generated maze where you grab some of the Dragon's hoard and try to get out before the dragon wakes up.  As you generate your path you will encounter variouos obstacles, dead ends, traps, monsters designed to halt your progress or rob you of valuable turns.  

There is a heavy push your luck element to the game and whilst on your way out of the dungeon you won't have to face any of the monsters you encountered getting to the dragon, your path out may have been blocked requiring you to start finding a new path and encountering new monsters and traps.

Man, is this game stacked against you.  I remember playing it once back in the 80s but I didn't remember how hard it is to win.  It's a lot of fun 

It's a component fest with lots of cards and tiles, 4 character models in really cheap hard styrene and plenty of plastic cones which were the defacto stat tracking counter of the day.  The component quality is classic Games Workshop, thin as you like cardboard that just wouldn't fly in todays boardgame market.

Replayability is high because every game will have a different collection of tiles in your path.  Yes, the choice of monsters is limited, but the ingenious combat mechanism means that the monsters react differently and your combat outcome will vary depending on the cards you and the monster play against each other.  

Art was provided by Gary Chalk (creator of the Lone Wolf books) and it is very much of its era.

Re-releases and Immitators

There have been numerous reissues of this game.  It was rereleased in Sweden as Drakborgen Legenden in 2002 and in the 2010s Fantasy Flight teamed up to reissue a few of the Games Workshop bookcase games they chose Dungeonquest alongside Fury of Dracula and Warrior Knights (probably the three best games of the series).

Drakon is another random tile laying dragon heist boardgame which Fantasy Flight re-released back in 2006 as part of their silverline game range.  A super simple game which turns it from being a race to the center to get to the dragon into a race against the other players and avoid the dragon.  I also own this and for a time it was a go-to filler game if our friday night sessions started late or ended early.  It's a quick game and is so easy to pick up for new players.

RPG Inspiration

The tile laying aspect of this game really floats my boat.  I'm a big fan of the dungeonmorphs concept and have created a bunch of my own tiles over the years and even contributed some art to a kickstarter and the davesmapper project.

It would be childs play to use the tiles to map out a random dungeon for use in any role playing game.  Much quicker than the famous Appendix A - Random Dungeon Generator found in the Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG) in my opinion.  I might even have a go myself one day. 

Every year at Dragons Keep Roleplay Club we host a memorial trophy in honour of members who are no longer with us.  One year, I actually went to the trouble of building a 2d cardboard version of the game but with a simplified combat system and character generation which used playing cards.

Out of The Abyss - The final Session... or is it?

Tonight sees the final session of our journey through the Underdark at Dragons Keep Roleplay Club as we play the module Out of The Abyss.

Will we continue our exploration in a future rotation.  I certainly hope so, but until that time here is a chronological list of all our sessions:

• Out of the Abyss: Part 1 - Janek's Story
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 2 - Escape from Velkynvelve
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 3 -The Darklake
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 4 -The Princess Heresy
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 5 -A Two-headed Demon Giant
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 6 -Secret Missions
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 7 - An Audience with a Dragon
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 8 -The Whorlstone Tunnels
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 9 - Weird Water
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 10 -The Grey Ghosts
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 11 -Kasra's Minions
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 12 - Bupido the Butcher
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 13 - Burn Butcher, Burn
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 14 -The Black Obelisk
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 15 -

A New RPG YouTuber Worth a Watch

From time to time the algorithm hits paydirt and suggests a video that tickles my fancy.

Ethnic Diversity and Role Playing Games

This is a fascinating take on the problem seen from the eyes of one black roleplayer.

My regular Friday night group, Dragons Keep Roleplay Club, is a very ethnically diverse bunch of guys and gals, but we also do not have any black players.  

Is this a generational issue, because I am sure diversity among players is not an issue in video games.

The zeitgeist fueled by nostalgia vehicles such as Stranger Things would have us believe that it was different in the 80s.  The make up of the core friends conveniently mirrors that of the Ghostbusters, but the interesting thing about Lucas is that he is also our conduit to the cultural changes in the world which surrounds Hawkins.  He is confident but at the same time wants to embrace the latest trendsto blend in.

His sister was also a fantastic addition to the show.

I hope that as time goes on more black players get introduced to this fantastic hobby and they can enjoy the fun of letting your imagination run wild. 

Go watch the video and like and subscribe because this is a voice I  think needs a bigger audience.