Doomsday

Oh, Neil Marshall. I had such high hopes for you. Dog Soldiers and Descent were really good, but Doomsday?

Just tried to watch 'Doomsday', the one about Scotland being quarantined for a few decades because of a killer virus. I got about an hour into it before I realised why I was so confused - the movie wasn't Escape From New York or Mad Max, but an amalgamation of the two to create what some people call a 'homage'. It created what I call a steaming pile of shite.

'What more do you want', I hear you cry. How about an actual film that makes sense? Like, why are the mad Scots cannibals when there's thousands of cows walking around? And the APC could take 30 mil rounds and chemical hits, but couldn't stop a twat with an axe smashing the window in?

Rubbish rubbish rubbish.

My First Dragon Warriors Campaign Ends!

Well, my last Dragon Warriors game of my first full campaign is this Sunday (I'm the GM) so I'll tell you what's been going on.

The game started in Third Crusade England with two assassins and a Knight. One thing lead to another and they found themselves transported to the Land of Legend where they embarked upon a series of quests to find a way back home to the 'real' world. The campaign started in January and we've played (most) Sundays. All in all the game has been excellent and we've really enjoyed using the system.

Here are a few things I realised about the game, bear in mind this may only be pertinent to my group.

1. To simplify resolution we use 1D20 for all rolls and not the combination of 1D20 and 2D10. It makes life much easier.

2. It was remarked several times that a skill system would be really useful and I have to agree. Although we can manage it would define the characters more.

3. Combat is excellent and we use the optional damage roll and not the set damage that weapons have. It made things much more unpredictable.

4. I allowed one of the assassins to learn magic once they arrived in Legend, so he changed his Rank 2 assassin career for a sorcerer one, starting at Rank 1. I allowed him to keep his assassin's skills and scores and it made for a very interesting character - it didn't unbalance the game at all.

Now that we know and enjoy the system I'd love to carry on using it in my upcoming science fiction campaign, so instead of a DW 2nd Edition they could do a refined skill-based generic science fiction version. I reckon it could work.

All in all, great stuff. I'm hoping to get a sequel to this campaign on the go by the end of the year (depending on whether the PCs survive, of course!)

X-Files

More like the Why?-Files.

I've been going through a back catalogue of movies I've missed over the last few years and the last three have been absolute jokes. I had high hopes for The X-Files: I Want To Believe... but it was utter drivel. It was like a cast-off over-long episode that filled in the gap between the better episodes. What the hell were they thinking? They had every chance to give it a new lease of life with a shitload of lore and what do they come up with? Rubbish.

Highly dissapointed. I liked The X-Files, even the first movie, and it deserved better than this.

Warhammer Roleplay

This is kind of a throwback to Chainmail in the early 1970s and what the players did to change it into the first dedicated roleplaying game. If you have a working knowledge of roleplaying games you can introduce new players to the tabletop RPG through any tabletop wargame. All you need to do is take a profile of a character from, say, WH40K and add a couple of stats for social interaction. Stick on a 'Charisma' stat or a 'Social Skills' stat and you've got a character to play. The stat can be random or whatever and you have to roll the stat or less on a D6 to succeed.

So, next time you're wargaming with try suggesting adding the stat and try roleplaying out a parley between the two sides and take it from there. Or try a basic dungeon bash - set up some combat in catacombs and send in several players with defined characters. Set it up as a basic skirmish but suggest they talk in character when discussing tactics or sharing info. Maybe even throw in a couple of NPC-types and roleplay them yourself, kind of lead the way and show how it's done.

You never know, they might go for it and expand on the characters using the wargame. From there you can introduce them to RPGs. Even wargamers who had no interest in RPGs might go for that and, at the very least, do the roleplaying as an extension of the game.

Either way, any wargame can be used as a rudimentary tabletop RPG.

Aliens + Predator + teenage slasher flick = garbage

That's Aliens Vs. Predator: Reqium. Nice to see that an already horribly damaged franchise was degraded further by being reduced to a pointless pre-pubescent date movie gore-fest.

Rodriguez, Scott - please, save these movie icons.

In the Name of the King

I've watched approx. 90 minutes of this film and have just one question - how the fuck does Uwe Boll continually get financing to make movies?

It's utter shit.

Sins of a Solar Empire

I'm a massive fan of Homeworld and play it regularly. In fact, I've never found a space-based RTS game that compares with it. I've been looking around recently with the intention of finding a new game that can expand on the fun I had in Homeworld. Also, with my next tabletop campaign being a Traveller game, I'm looking for something in that vein.

I've recently come across Sins of a Solar Empire and this looks like the sort of thing I'm looking for.

An RTS with world-building and a diplomatic/trading angle? Perfect. I was seriously considering EVE Online but I don't want to get involved with another MMORPG - I quit World of Warcraft for a reason.

I think I'll seriously check it out. Looks like my kind of thing when it comes to galaxy-spanning science fiction.

Nazis? On the Moon?

Space Nazis attacking the Earth from hidden bases on the dark side of the Moon?

Sold.

Treasure Planet

I just watched Disney's 'Treasure Planet'. It was like a slightly higher tech version of 'Spelljammer'.

So, the first thing I'm thinking is 'I'd love to make a roleplaying game out of this cartoon's universe'. It just looked so evocative - how weird is that?

Outlander, Avatar and District 9

Okay, so I've sat down and watched all three of these films in the last few days. I've had my intense sci-fi head on recently as I'm working on new material so I was probably a bit more involved than usual.

Outlander was pretty stupid but it was good fun. The fact that the hero of the story was from outer space and he found himself in the age of Vikings made no impact on the story and it was a shame that not more was made of who he was or where he came from - that ruined it a bit for me. The whole backstory he tells towards the end was great, though, and could have been a movie of it's own. It was good, and the action scenes were great. Ron Perlman as a Viking nutjob - cinema gold.

Avatar was what I expected it to be. It was very involving and looked amazing - there were moments you forget the smurfs are digitally rendered and you really get involved with them and their culture. Truth be told, though, the story was hardly original - in fact, it was pretty dull - and the characters were a bit bland and predictable, especially the loud-'n-nasty military leader. It was a great film and I really enjoyed it. The action scenes were amazing and the world of Pandora was fantastic. I hope we get to visit it again soon.

District 9 was my favourite of the bunch. The mixture of documentary, fly-on-the-wall, security cameras, news footage and standard filmaking was a fantastic mix, and the story and characters were so well defined, especially the alien Christopher, that you felt part of the whole thing. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. If Moon hadn't blown me away so completely then this would have been my best movie of the last year.

Great films. I can recommend them all.