The 7th Day of Horror: Teleforum

 

Teleforum (PC)

Teleforum is a point-and-click analog horror game from Monumental Collab, who look like they have a fine knack for this sort of game. The good news for those still suffering from PTSD over the 90's era of pixel-bitching point-and-clicks is that this one is full of modern conveniences, so it plays well and I advise when playing that you mouse over everything, some stuff will trigger that you might not expect. I did a playthough and then handed it over to my son to do his own run; I have found that the boundless energy and optimism of youth will lead to unexpected results every time over the old jaded Gen X gamer. A single playthrough can be done in less than an hour (my first run was only about 35 minutes), but subsequent playthroughs yielded some interesting additional results I had overlooked, and my son unlocked several new achievements. Indeed, if achievements are a goal of yours, this thing is loaded with plenty of low-hanging achievement fruits.

The premise of Teleforum is simple: a reporter named Juliana and her cameraman (your character) are visiting the apartment of a fellow reporter Walter who recently killed himself following a grisly event at the broadcasting station. He brought a tape to be played, but a technical error prevented it from playing. Juliana wants to interview his widow, and see if she can figure out why Walter did what he did...and see if there's a working copy of the tape somewhere. Things get increasingly weird until at last the tape is available for viewing, and then things begin to loop, as your cameraman begins to sense that he's done this before... 

Teleforum is also adjacent to the hidden object subgenre which has recently evolved into horror with walking simulator elements, where you move through a familiar environment and then look for things that are different each time. Teleforum is more of a hybrid.....but subsequent playthroughs with different choices have yielded some interesting results that were not evident or accessible the first time around. 

While playing, I did start to think a bit about the book and film Ringu, which of course has a haunted VHS tape at the center of its mystery. Unlike Ringu, Teleforum provides a compelling mystery with plenty of hints, but offers few real answers. 

Ultimately Teleforum works well for having a 80's era analog setting, excellent creepy audio and a compelling short story with lots of variables within its restricted environment. It is also free on Steam, so there is that! I enjoyed it enough I purchased the supporter's pack. I give it a solid A, especially considering the price of admission.

Bonus Spoiler/Hint:

There are codes you need to find for hidden endings....

The 6th Day of Horror: The Nun (2018)

 

The Nun (2018)

This has been on my shelf for a long time, as a collection of Conjuring Universe movies I bought for my son to watch. I watched the first Conjuring film and while it was fine, it was also a bit too mainstream and "jump scare-laden" for me to be terribly invested in it. I also probably know too much about the real Ed and Lorraine Warrens, conceding only that their fictional selves are probably how they imagined they really were. 

That said, my son advised that to truly dive into the Conjuring Universe you should start with the film that depicts the earliest events, and that is apparently The Nun. Set in Romania in 1954, it focuses on a remote castle turned into a nunnery where a local man witnesses a nun hanging from a noose, a nun who jumped to her death to deprive an evil entity (demon?) from possessing her. Trapped in the old castle, this force prowls in wait, and the Vatican obliges by sending Demian Bichir as Father Burke, the Catholic equivalent of a Special Investigator along with the young not-yet-a-nun Taissa Farmiga as Sister Irene. They meet their guide, the man who found the dead nun, named Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet) and then proceed to spend the night in the haunted locale, which was all that the movie needed to kick off what is basically an hour and a half long jump-scare thrill ride through a FX laden haunted house. 

So first, in defense of this movie, I actually rather enjoyed it even if I was sort of hoping it might take more time to actually slow down and put a bit more effort into its storytelling. This sort of horror film has its market, though, and in terms of loading the screen with scary moments, jump scare, quick reveals and sudden plot twists it does its job admirably. It is not art, but it is damned proficient at what it does. 

Second, while watching I realized that this movie, from a horror RPG perspective, is a solid "one night stand" sort of adventure. You could easily take the core conceit of this film (haunted castle full of dead nuns and a demon) and make a fun evening session out of it with a game like Call of Cthulhu or Liminal Horror. It is, in this regard, an excellent template for such things.

That said, I had a moment midway in to the film where I realized that this movie reminded me in a few ways of the much older movie about an ancient evil locked away in a haunted castle called The Keep, The Keep was focused on a much more methodical pacing, and of course suffers for the special effects of its day, plus it was an imperfect adaptation of a much better novel. I happen to have the Vinegar Syndrome release of The Keep, so may review that next for a proper contrast. 

One final thought: this movie leans heavily into Catholic horror. Everything I know about Catholicism comes from movies, I realized, and I have no idea if this is a genuinely good depiction of those bits which make it in the movie or not, but that does mean that The Nun is definitely firmly planted in the Catholic Supernatural Horror subgenre.

All told: it was a fun movie, and a good "scary jump scare woo what's gonna get them next???" Sort of romp. Solid C+ and worth watching for GMs interested in some set locale and "packaged plot" inspiration.

The 5th Day of Horror: Censor (2021)

 

Censor (2021)

I have mentioned this movie before in my "best of" end of year lists, but I don't think I've actually reviewed it. Censor is a fascinating slow-burn psychological horror film set during the early eighties in England, focusing on the Video Nasties scare at the time, in which the British government was determined to censor or outright ban the wave of local and international films focused on gore, violence and other disturbing content. 

Niamh Algar plays Enid Banes, a woman who works as one of the censors, reviewing films, noting unacceptable content, and then reporting what must be cut from a film for acceptable release, or outright banning content. Enid has a problem, though: it is quickly evident by her obsessive compulsive behaviors and unusually flat affect that something is not quite right with her. She meets with her parents, who have secured a death certificate for her younger sister, who it turns out disappeared years ago in 1965 under mysterious circumstances, though Enid herself was present when her sister vanished, though she has no memory of what really happened. Instead, Enid watches the movies she is supposed to critique and advise on, and occasionally a film presents something that seems to jog her memories....including one film depicting two sisters in the woods when one is gruesomely murdered....by the other sister! Something about the scene is just a bit too familiar to Enid, and she becomes obsessed with finding the producer of the film, a lecherous sort she had briefly met.

Amidst all this, a story blows up about an amnesiac killer, a man who slew his family, and a journalist who links the names of two specific censors (of which Enid is one) to the release of a film with content that seems to mirror the actual killing. As the press begins to hound her, Enid grows more obsessed with the films that seem to be leading her down a trail to the discovery of where her sister really went, as she is convinced she was abducted and is alive somewhere, being forced to make horror movies.

I dare not say any more about this film without a proper spoiler warning, so instead I suggest that you should go watch it (and not watch any media about it, if you haven't already been spoiled on its content) instead. It is a slow burn horror for at least the first half of the film, then ramps up rapidly. I love this style of film with its slow, methodical pacing and clever use of cinematography for effect. Niamh Algar is excellent as the protagonist of the film as well, and she is the sole focus of the camera for the run of the film. Solid A for me!

SPOILER SECTION

Okay, you have been warned! Enid is, to begin with, the focus of the camera for the entirety of the film. We are effectively watching what she does from her own context and understanding of things. Every now and then something happens and maybe a contradictory flash of something else not quite right appears, suggesting that not all is as it seems. Enid is a classic unreliable narrator, and while her "narration" is via the camera itself, what we are seeing is entirely affected by her own unusual state of mind. Over the course of the film the dimensions of the screen shift from the usual widescreen format to a more conventional 4:3 format, typical of the grainy old televisions these VHS tapes would once have been watched on. The more frayed Enid's sense of reality, the quicker the screen locks down to a 4:3 format. This is one of a handful of films I have seen which manage to cleverly use this format to good effect (The Lighthouse is another). 

Enid's clearly not well. She has obsessive compulsive behaviors, her flat affect suggests strange emotional detachment, and midway through the film she abruptly (sort of by accident) murders a film producer in a truly grisly manner and instead of being horrified at what she did, she quickly behaves as if nothing unusual happened. In short order she makes her way to a film shoot where she believes an actress is about to be killed, an actress she is convinced is her long lost sister. When she gets there, her ability to tell reality from fiction is effectively gone; the earlier background story of the man who murdered his family after being influenced by a video nasty is no longer the problem; Enid herself is the one who has become influenced by the video nasties, and she is unable to tell her hallucinations from reality. The film ends on a grim note as she returns to her parents, with what she thinks is her sister found at last, though jagged moments of reality interrupt to see horrified parents and a terrified actress.

The film does not address a couple items I sort of wish it had, though I can understand why it might not have: Enid's long lost sister possibly was killed by Enid, if you conclude from her viewing of "Don't go in the Church" that the depiction of two sisters, one being murdered by an axe, is triggering her memory of that day because that is actually what happened. That raises questions, though: such as where did her sister's body go? Did her parents help cover it up? Or was her sister really done away with or abducted, as Enid seems to believe, despite the fact that later events suggest her powerful ability to disassociate from reality and see what she wants means literally anything could have happened to her sister. Perhaps that is the point. Sometimes it is just fine for a movie to leave deliberate loose ends. 

Anyway, if you like slow, methodical horror that builds tension and dread with slow precision rather than jump scare, I definitely advise you check Censor out! It remains one of my favorites. I got my copy from Vinegar Syndrome, indeed it was my first purchase from them.

The 4th Day of Horror: Yellow Brick Road (2010)

 

Yellow Brick Road (2010)

In the realm of low budget indie horror films the ability to manage a story, get some decent cinematography and directing in, and maybe even some good acting and special effects is a smoking gun for future success stories. Sometimes no one succeeds...but also, maybe, they don't totally fail, either? Yellow Brick Road feels like a film that didn't quite succeed, but also managed to pull together just enough decent cinematography, and not bad acting, then wrapped it in an enigmatic and largely inexplicable, threadbare storyline to motivate the plot, and made something watchable (at least once) for those who enjoy watching amateur efforts at serious film making. For people just looking for a solid film I might point to a few hundred other options, though.

Yellow Brick Road is about a man who pulls together a team of like-minded friends to investigate a mysterious event in a town where a bunch of people back in 1940 set off on a wilderness trail and disappeared, never to be seen alive again (dead, sure, just not alive). A modest effort is made at introducing our disparate array of investigators as the film slowly moves into the realm of insanely low budget horror, in which (to reference a common refrain of the Red Letter Media gang), most of the film is shot in the best free place you can find: the woods. 

The story of the film is very basic: they go into the woods to follow this trail from decades before. Eventually they wander into a Liminal Horror event as they realize they are losing track of their sense of direction and maybe even time, as strange vintage music plays everywhere and nowhere at once, haunting and driving them on to find its source. Gradually, one by one they go mad, and eventually the last man standing, our protagonist, finds he has come full circle and the story ends because the runtime necessitates and ending. 

Thankfully, this process is made bearable by some decent young actors making a good effort, some fun but cheap special effects (my son was sufficiently grossed out at one dismemberment scene he lost his appetite) and the strange and vague references to The Wizard of Oz keep you wanting to know why this old movie hangs over the film like some sort of allegory. The answers at the end, which are no answers at all, do nothing to clarify, leaving you either annoyed at the fact that the film seemed to barely do anything with its theme, or perhaps satisfied, if you are a bit masochistic, at its lack of desire to provide any sort of closure beyond the barest suggestion of some sort of loop.

The film makes clever use of New Hampshire's woodlands mixed with eerie forties music to provide a creepy liminal horror/backrooms vibe. This is, in fact, the main menace in the film, the endless woods and the ever present diegetic music causing people to slowly go insane. 

The most exciting moment in this movie for me was watching the extras on the making of the movie and discovering that a younger Robert Eggers was the costume designer for this film. It has me wondering now if anyone else in this movie has went on to better things....scanning IMDB I am going to say "sort of...?" There do appear to be a few other horror movies under the writer/directors' belts, with slightly better ratings, so I may have to check them out. That Eggers was a costume designer who subsequently went on to a serious film career (Nosferatu, The Witch, The Lighthouse, Northman) proves that real talent must start somewhere!

The old notion that B movies can get a lot out of filming in the wilderness is thoroughly played out here. The scenery is in general put to good use, but the film thankfully ends right around the time you are kind of hoping it will; it just barely overstays its welcome.

The box art of the copy I got (with a Scarecrow on it) references a single scene in the movie that left me wondering for some time (right to the very end) just how the scarecrow got there; I won't spoil the details, but someone had to have done it....and we don't learn who that is until the very end; and even then, nothing is explained at all. 

A lot of horror is easily explained if you simply assume that everything happening is the survivor's purgatory, behind which some cenobite-like monster is pulling the strings. But hey, a film's plot shouldn't rely on another media resource to explain its own absence of a plot, and honestly? I think the movie's ending is trying for some sort of surreal way to tie it to the beginning, though it does so in the least satisfying way I could imagine, if only because our nemesis (if that is what he is) is otherwise absent from the film except as capstones to the tale.

At the very end, I think even if nothing else were explained, I wouldn't have minded a more substantive explanation for why the Oz themes are even a thing, beyond the hint (I think?) that maybe Wizard of Oz was the movie people watched before disappearing. 

Anyway, I would rank this a solid D+, chiefly because it had some nice scenery, not bad acting, some good but exceedingly low budget gore, clever use of liminal horror's obsession with muzak and interstitial spaces, and even if I was unsatisfied with the ending it did show promise. Worth a watch if its streaming free somewhere and you have a high tolerance for amateur low budget film-making.

The 3rd Day of Horror: Ghost Virus (Graham Masterton)

 

Ghost Virus by Graham Masterton

If you are unfamiliar with Graham Masterton then I would imagine you are not much of a horror buff, or perhaps someone who does not look upon the recent movement toward classic era horror fiction of the 70's and 80's that has led to restorative projects like Paperbacks from Hell, and loads of entertaining pastiches and homages to a distinct period of two decades' worth of gore-filled, often horrifying, sometimes ridiculous, fiction from a time when small paperback formats ruled supreme. If you want to know more about this I recommend finding a copy of Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell overview of the era, a fine read which gives you some firm footing on which to stand in exploring this very specific style of horror fiction. 

If you want to go real deep, just start by reading Graham Masterton! His prolific decades as what I like to think of as the Steven King of Europe (or would that be that King is the Masterton of America?) have led to some of the wildest, goriest and most bizarre stories in the genre. His early career kicked off with Manitou and then The Sphinx, and it just got better and better from there. I loved to read his books back int he 80's, and was pleasantly surprised to see that he is still up to no good even today. 

I actually grabbed the fourth book in the Patel & Pardoe series first (What Hides in the Cellar) and quickly caught on that this book had recurring characters from prior novels so I sought out the first in the line: Ghost Virus. The protagonists of the series are both detectives in London district, Jerry Pardoe who normally likes to run down pretty thieves, and the somewhat more enigmatic detective seargent Jamila Patel, who happens to be especially good at what she does due to a little gift she has in which she can divine whether a person is telling truth or not. A weird murder involving a local immigrant family draws the two together as subsequent murders, each with an inexplicable cause of death, begin to form an odd pattern. That pattern  grows over time as the detectives catch on that something very weird and supernatural is going on, and around midway through the book it goes off the rails. Then you get to the final act and realize you weren't even close to going off the rails until then. 

I really hesitate to say anything about it because the sheer audacity of the source of the supernatural killings is so nuts, but I have to say a little bit: I will put it this way: the source of the murders, and the gradual build toward an explanation (which is, similar to many other horror tales a somehow acceptable yet also ludicrous explanation) is so over the top that I can't readily imagine anyone ever being able to turn this into a movie and be taken seriously; it works so much better in print than it ever could on a medium like film, simply because Masterton himself can make you desperately nervous around your own coat, thanks to the power of word in imagination....a feat that a more visual medium would have a very hard time pulling off without aiming for farce or campiness.

Masterton is such a great writer that it is hard for me to put a book of his down once I start and I blew through this over a couple days. I am now looking forward to starting the next book in the series, and I am intrigued to see where Masterton takes his two hapless detectives next. Solid A!

SPOILER SECTION:

Okay! Don't read on here if you want to read the book first. The supernatural threat in this book is a nutty concept: a ghost virus, a sort of propagating infectious supernatural plague that infects clothes. The clothes become possessed by the ghost memories of those who died under duress and desperately want to live....and can do so by finding victims they can get to wear them. At first its a couple coats, but then it turns into pretty much the entirety of everyone's wardrobes by the end of the book. The book suffers a bit from its focus on the detectives, mixed with the in-between chapters focusing on the victims. The ramp up to madness as you get close to the end and the nature of the threat looms large is not unlike the pacing in the movie Weapons, actually. You have a slow burn tale of weird murder and investigation, which slowly escalates to what seems like a supernatural serial killer using a strange medium, and then it turns into a full on zombie apocalypse at the end....but with animated clothing instead of zombies. Deadly, murderous, poltergeist-like possessed clothing flying everywhere and murdering likely hundreds in their wake. It is so utterly preposterous that I just stopped questioning the logic and went with the flow. It was like Masterton was challenging himself by seeing how he could write himself out of the corner he had painted himself into. Lovely stuff.

And that, you see, if why I can't wait to see what the subsequent novels in this series bring to the table!

The 2nd Day of Horror: Weapons (2025)

Weapons (2025)

You may have seen this one recently, as it became a runaway hit at the box office over the last month or two, but if you haven't, and you happen to like really weird horror films (and don't mind more jarring tonal shifts at odd moments) then Zach Cregger's Weapons is well worth a watch. Julia Garner plays a teacher named Justine caught up in a month of insanity in a small town where one day all of the children in her class except for one fail to show up....and it turns out all of them disappeared willingly in the middle of the night, sneaking out of the house to run Naruto Style* through town to an unknown location. The relatively ill equipped local police find themselves at a total loss as to where the kids went, which proves especially amusing (and perplexing) later on in the movie.

I won't go into any spoilers here as the movie is out now and best watched without any idea of what to expect, but I will comment on its format: while we have some main characters to root for, the movie is really almost an ensemble piece, focusing on the impact of this event on the lives of several disparate characters, and the stories of these five-ish protagonists weave together to assemble the whole story. It's weakness is that most of the actual reveal on what the heck is really going on is end-loaded with the final character we are introduced to, and I can't say I 100% bought in to some of the necessary leaps of logic for the events to transpire as they did, but the ending was overall sufficiently weird and crazy that the pay off was worth overlooking a few "that doesn't feel terribly likely," moments.

This has been a pretty good year for horror movies, and while I found that I loved some other horror films that came out this year a lot more (Nosferatu and Ash both come to mind), Weapons is a solid addition to a generally great roster for the genre this year. B+! Would have made it an A if certain plot bits didn't keep nagging at the back of my mind. I mean...it works, don't get be wrong, but there's a couple spots where the logic feels forced.....you'll see what I mean.

As an aside, on the way out of the theater my buddy, my son and I were talking about the movie and i commented that it did well enough that I was sure they would do the sequelitis thing, and predicted that it would be a prequel about the villain, to explain the whole deal (origin story). Then if that does well a third film will come out focusing on the lone surivor kid when he grows up. They announced recently that yes indeed Creggers is going to do a prequel to Weapons next, so I am right on count one.....!

*A thing I know exists because my teen was into it before he was a teen. He and I still argue over whether its really a thing or even a smart way to run, of course. 

The 1st Day of Horror: The Mansion of Madness (1972)

The Mansion of Madness (1972) 

To kick off our first day of 31 Days of Horror, we have a Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray restoration: The Mansion of Madness from 1972! Known as La Mansion De La Locura, directed by Mexican director Juan Lopez Moctzeuma, and based loosely on the Edgar Allen Poe tale "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," this is less of a horror film and more of a sort of weird, 70's style surreal satire, the kind that could only have been produced in that era of film making. 

The story focuses on our protagonist, Gaston LeBlanc, a reporter for an inquiring newspaper sometime in the 19th century as he seeks to investigate the nature of a series of innovative treatments at a remote sanitarium run by the enigmatic Dr. Maillard. As Dr. Maillard takes him on a tour of the maddening facility it becomes apparent that the inmates are running the asylum, and Maillard is the maddest of them all, perhaps. Other characters are woven in, including the woman Eugenie, who is the daughter of the man who previously ran the sanitarium, as well as some hapless allies of LeBlanc who are unable to escape the clutches of the madmen.    

The movie has a number of elements typical of the more experimental (and often foreign) films of the late 60's and 1970s. The perspective of the mad, the nature of madness, the relationship of the insane to those who try to cure them. The further back you go, the more exotic and strange perceptions on psychiatric treatment tended to be, although this movie hardly tries to portend to such matters; the Dr. Maillard of the film is a doctor in name only, and his bizarre method of treatment for his patients is basically to let them do as they will, and to indulge in his own control fantasies in the process. 

One side effect of being a film of its time is that the orchestration for the movie is completely batty. For the time this movie came out one must be mindful that we were still a few years away from John Williams redefining film scores with Jaws and Star Wars, and I imagine that contemporary viewers of the day would be more in tune with the tonal incoherence of the film as dictated by the disjointed choice of music from scene to scene. Some of the music sets a disturbing and menacing mood; other pieces emphasize a unique early seventies take on "the sound of madness" which to today's viewer makes the pieces sound absurdist (and maybe they did then, too). I have to admit, I feel like someone could completely redo the music in this film and get a shockingly different feel out of it as a result. 

All things considered, this isn't a scary movie by any stretch, though it might be a bit disturbing or even just unsettling, though I think deliberately uncomfortable portrayals of madness have been outdone by subsequent films over the decades, making this one feel a bit quaint. At one point I sort of felt like, "This is what the crowd at a free love Ren fair in 1972 looked like if you got them to work as extras on a film set for a couple days," and that's probably not far off the mark.

Choice bits:

Apparently, the director was friends with and influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky, which explains a bit. 

Ellen Sherman, who played Eugenie, was the only American actor in the film.

Check out the third act sequence as the Godiva-like woman on horseback is led through the vast chamber of glass coffins...would love to find out where this was filmed, as it is an excellent visual to steal for a future horror game!

The main protagonists of this film are almost amusingly incompetent in their fighting skills, though they do at some point rally a bit. The basic, almost mundane nature of physical conflict portrayed within the film is oddly refreshing in how "normal" it is, contrasted by the aberrant behavior on parade.

Who Should See This: I would suggest this film is best enjoyed by film viewers into studying that era of film-making from the 70's in particular, and I also think anyone into surrealism in films might enjoy it a bit. I wondered to myself if this was a film a very young David Lynch might have seen early in his budding film career, as certain moments felt like they might have been influential.

Available in restored 35mm from Vinegar Syndrome here. The restoration is actually quite striking, and gives the film an interesting vibrancy that makes it stand out. The greenery of the filmed outdoor locations are especially striking, and many of the set locations are fascinating and suitable locations for depicting the labyrinthine sanitarium.

All in all, a solid C, but with the caveat that this film is meant to be an interesting (albeit not at all contemporary) experience...and may not always feel entertaining so much as perplexing to younger film goers. 

31 Days of Horror in October!!!

 Credit where it's due: The Other Side Blog has this idea first! I did this ages ago but its been a while. Over the weekend at the Morgue & Krypt Horror Convention in my local neighborhood I got a chance to load up on weird old movies from the Vinegar Syndrome booth, something I've been obsessed with for the last couple years now. 

For my 31 days I'm going to do a mix....some horror films, some horror games and some horror books. A well rounded experience! Also a chance to talk about some of what I've been reading, watching and playing....and kick myself back into a better writing habit (I've fallen off the deep end on my writing consistency this year). 

Realms of Chirak the Setting and Pathfinder 2E

By popular demand my Wednesday group has returned to Pathfinder 2E, now Remastered, and everyone is having a good time. I gave some thought to what setting I would use...I had created the Oman'Hakat world for Pathfinder 2E when the system came out and ran a series of successful campaigns in that world, including one that ran to 20th level. I ran some shorter campaigns in PF2E using Keepers of Lingusia, and even the Enzada campaign, which was the world I designed for Pathfinder 1E when I switched over to that back in the day. I had not, however, used Realms of Chirak.....which I ran a huge number of campaigns for using D&D 3.0, 3.5, 4E and then Pathfinder 1E. I had kept my scenarios and campaigns in Chirak with D&D 5E, but a side effect of that was that I was generally less satisfied with running future games there because of my many issues with the 5th edition mechanics, which were now amplified by the even less satisfying new 2024 5.5 edition. So it was time to merge PF2E with Chirak!

This has led me to realize that I have a lot of work cut out for me, though maybe less in some ways than I might have thought, as specific ancestries in Chirak that do not have proper analogues in Pathfinder 2E will require more extensive write ups with the racial feats and such to provide proper support. Right now I am sort of running these scenarios ad hoc....reskinning appropriate NPC and monster stat blocks to get what I want, and finding the best analogue already in PF2E for players. Eventually I will work up the energy to develop actual ancestry paths for things such as the animates, cannesh, Masirians and so forth, and add in feats to support the gnome/goblin connection stuff like that. If you are unfamiliar with tis setting, I still have an old 4th edition take available out there on Drivethrurpg sites. I have an extensive 5th edition draft that I have run 5E games with for years, but never compiled into a print-worthy document. Now, maybe, I will find my writing spirit again and cough up something for Pathfinder 2E. Who knows! I'd love to feel that inspiration to write hit me again like it did back in the day, though I think it didn't so much leave me as life kind of crumpled it up and shoved it down deep into the couch cushions. It's hard to feel motivated to indulge in such fancies when the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you know?

Anyway, I am having fun with this return to Pathfinder, and likewise this return to Chirak. I rolled the timeline forward another 20 years so many of the plots and NPCs the PCs are meeting are now older than their last appearances, and many children of said NPCs are now adults. It will be interesting to watch this develop. Some venerable old PCs who have gone on to become important NPCs will weigh in, and I admit it is a shame I lost touch with some of my old gaming crew, would be fun to have them back again, but life has a way of carrying on....ah well!

As a side note, Friday's biweekly game has wrapped a scenario in Tales of the Valiant (we all enjoyed it, and found it slightly more satisfying than classic 5E, and much more satisfying than the new 2024 5E lite), but we are all eyeing the new Starfinder 2E hungrily now, especially since it is now 100% fully compatible with Pathfinder 2E mechanics....I have the Player Core, GM Core and Galaxy Guide now and I have to say, I like the approach they have taken over all --though I miss a lot of the older art style in the game; a lot of the newer art is just not as dynamic as it used to be from the old core books. The art is still good, though....just not as good as it used to be. Either way, this new edition handily embraces its space fantasy elements and fixes practically everything I had issues with in the prior edition, so I am looking forward to trying it out now.  

The Thing From Another World in Mothership

I don't think anyone has done this exactly, but I think it's time to do a series on adopting various famous monsters to the Mothership rules. Let's start with one of the greatest of all time: the Thing!

Love this Alt Poster!

The Thing's key traits:

An alien creature that is in fact a cell colony with the ability to absorb and replicated/replace the cells of any other creature, taking on their appearance, abilities and even their identity. 

The Thing's original appearance is difficult to discern, and it may have no consistent appearance (even the description of what it might have looked like, with three eyes, could just be the current form it was mimicking).

The Thing is intelligent, and presumably retains knowledge from prior assimilated victims. This includes the ability to craft and pilot something as sophisticated as a starship.

When absorbing a creature, it takes the Thing about 45 minutes to completely convert a human sized target into its own. 

The Thing exhibits a weakness to fire, though this could be better described as "it burns like anything else." But due to its malleable, ever-changing nature and ability to remember and mimic any life form it has previously absorbed, the Thing can sustain and recover from most damage with only modest initial impact. Fire and energy damage that can destroy it at the cellular level is most effective at destroying the Thing.

The Stats for a piece of the Thing depend heavily on what it is mimicking and/or what sort of amalgamation it forms in the moment. Several stat blocks will be provided to reflect different sized/focused forms of the Thing as a result. 

Special Qualities: The Thing has these traits in all forms:

Infectious. All Things have an infectious trait, and skin exposure to the Thing leads to assimilation when exposed. PCs who take any damage or come into any skin contact with some portion of the creature, even at the cellular level, must make a BODY[-] check or they are infected and have 45 minutes to assimilation into a Humanoid Thing.

Malleable and Resilient. The Thing takes damage from kinetic weaponry, but it rapidly heals, repairs and restores function. It regains 1 Wound and equivalent health every minute, and as a special feature may heal even sooner (per combat turn). It is unable to use this feature if it takes fire or energy damage for one minute, and is "dead" if it loses all wounds from such damage, with only a slight chance a portion of its mass survives.

Head Crab Thing: C: 25%, 1D10 DMG, I: 50%, AP 1D5-1, W1(10) - may have 1D5 additional appendage features (EX: 1-crab legs, 2-extendable tongue with a grasping feature, 3-eye stalks, 4-spits acid, 5-whip tail with poison barb)

Humanoid Thing: C 50%, 2D10 DMG, I: 60%, AP 1D5-1, W2(20) - may have 1D5 additional surprise features (EX: 1-claw arm, 2-head splits for attacking maw that does 4D10 DMG, 3-infecting tendrils, 4-chest maw (4D10 DMG), 5-exotic eyesight); Special: indistinguishable from the humanoid it mimics until exposed.

Monstrous Form Large Thing: C 75%, 4D10 DMG, I: 90%, AP 5+1D5, W3(30) - will have !D5 additional features (EX: 1-multiple limbs (1D4) for extra attacks, 2-infectious tentacles, 3-vomiting infectious attack, 4-wings (if local atmosphere and gravity support it), 5-spines (50% chance they shoot))

Exposing The Thing: In the film, it is revealed that the Thing's individual cells are engrained with a survival instinct, so jamming a hot wire into blood samples reveals what is real and what is imitation blood. Creative PCs may find other interesting ways to reveal imitations in their midst. For example, The Thing often has an exterior form that mimics the appearance of the human it just assimilated, but may have an internal morphology that hides appendages intended for attack or other special purposes. An x-ray may reveal these internal differences.

It is Settled (for now): Mothership and Tales of the Valiant

 So I have at last wrapped the D&D 5.5 campaign (we have loose plot threads, so who knows, maybe it will be revisited eventually) and Wednesday night formally begins with a Mothership ongoing campaign. I am plotting for around 5-10 sessions, but maybe we'll get more out of it; who knows! Mothership is a very fun game, but it is easier to do one shots and short campaigns with it than it is to do protracted campaigns....similar to Call of Cthulhu, the group can only sustain so much horror before it transitions from spooky fun to "wow how aren't we dead yet."*

I have had an infrequent Friday group as well, which my son was occasionally running Pathfinder for (and I ran Shadowdark for them before that). The group expanded to six players with last week's return to form, and I began running Tales of the Valiant at long last! It was a good session 0.5, with some char gen followed by a bit of gaming. I am introducing the variant concepts to them as we go (such as lineages and heritages, luck, doom, dread and so forth) bit by bit, in a completely new world setting I devised jut for TotV. I had initially planned to use preprinted modules but after reading through everything I had I decided most of them sucked for purposes of my GM style and what I wanted out of the game, and so I devised my own low level intro campaign module instead. I meticulously followed the encounter design rules outlined in the Gamemaster's Guide and have so far found them more satisfying than 5e/5.5E's traditionally more vibe-based guidelines.

Anyway, this mix seems to work for now! I have plans soon to try out Cairn 2E, Fabula Ultima, Outgunned, The Electric State** and possibly a return to Savage World's Pathfinder edition. We shall see.....but the important thing is, lots of options that require no further engagement with D&D 5.5.  

*Or, alternatively, "We have all lost multiple PCs, does anyone have a living PC who remembers why we landed on this haunted space station in the first place?"

**RPG and the original book only, we will not speak of the Netflix movie. 

Superman - A true revival of the Comic Film

 I saw Superman (2025) twice this weekend, and will likely see it a third time soon, and who knows, maybe a fourth. It's easily the best superhero/comic movie they have done in the last several years, and the interesting choices made by James Gunn to lean heavily into the comic book reality of the movie has, I feel, paid off in spades. This feels like an actual comic book movie, they could have easily called it "Action Comics Issue #1024" and that would have been perfectly okay. It's an optimistic, uplifting film filled with crass villainy that gets soundly defeated, and it does not shy away from providing allegorical content that one can readily read in to. It's the opposite of most Marvel films, in other words.

Gunn's prior comic book outings are starting to reflect a sort of form and style that is consistent, which I suppose is good, as it means you know what you are getting with him, but it does mean you might watch this movie with a recognition of his particular style in the craft. For example, it is now clear to me that every movie Gunn makes has to have that moment in it where someone, usually with a small but incredibly dangerous object, proceeds with what can only be described as a madcap moment of violence that plays out in the background as a sort of montage or collage, often entirely in one take. We've seen it repeatedly in Guardians of the Gaaxy (standing out with Yondu's arrow sequence in the second GotG film), Harly Quinn's hallucinatory rampage in The Suicide Squad, and now Mr. Terrific and his T-Balls vs. Lex Luthor's army of raptors and mad scientists in Hawaiian shirts.

If you've heard about the movie being "woke" then be assured it is, but that is not to the detriment of the film. The "wokeness" of this film is just optimism, human decency, and a desire to see the old, better America stand out...the one that used to care about being decent and good, instead of cruel and spiteful. Salon's review describes this better than I ever could. 

I will say, if you feel (like I have) that the golden age of Superman films was with Christopher Reeves in Superman from 1978 and Superman II, then I think you are likely going to find this film to be a worthy successor. The worst thing I can say about it is that it starts rather jarringly in what feels like the middle of the third act of a normal film, but this only ultimately lends further to the unique take of the film, and I enjoyed it even more on a second watch. A+++! My favorite film so far this year, maybe even this decade.

Reinvigorated! Or maybe Reanimated?

 Well I am feeling less burnout this week! But also sometimes more burnout. I did a deep dive into various systems and found that I was definitely starting to sense a pattern in my interests. Here's what I realize now; noting that this isn't a unchanging constant; just what my tastes seem to be running to in the moment:

Verisimilitude Over Abstraction: I prefer somewhat more simulationist systems, which favor verisimilitude over "rule of cool" as a natural recourse. I liken this to the difference between a movie where our hero drops 10-15 feet and seems to take injury or has trouble getting up from such a fall, vs. other movies (Marvel films come to mind) where same hero seems able to drop 30-50 feet and is unphased, even without having super soldier serum to explain his massive invulnerability.

This means systems like BRP, GURPS, Mothership, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, Cyberpunk Red and Dragonbane are standing out to me because they provide meaningful engagement levels with some sort of baseline "reality" but some other systems....even ones I like....aren't feeling too good to me at the moment because I am not presently "vibing" with the idea that the abstractions on the character sheet and in the system are really just numbers and have more to do with "did this look cool?" than anything else. That rules our D&D 5.5, Cypher System, Fantasy AGE, Tales of the Valiant, and no doubt others.

Pragmatic Character Info: I'm preferring systems which communicate clearly what you rcharacter is about, without a lot of rule-flipping and holistic interpretation. Pathfinder 2E is not a good example of this; it is laden with weird feats, obscure conditionals, and a balanced mechanical process which means skill sets are very "meh" in figuring out how your character looks different from another similar character. Contrast with BRP, which narrows the character generation to a set of common baselines defined by genre expectations for powers (if used), but in general you can look at a character sheet and understand what it means to run that PC without having to crack the book open constantly. 

The System Respects Theater of the Mind: lots of games these days lean in to the popular desire for maps and minis, and I get it; those can be fun (I suppose). But I have run RPGs for most of my life without such gimmicks, and the sorts of stories I want to convey through gaming these days (and most days) work better when the players aren't focused on the ancient wargame element that remains embedded in conventional takes such as D&D. Admittedly GURPS, as an example, supports elaborate hex-based movement and suggests this can be useful; I have played in GURPS games where the GM used this to effect, and I get it. But I have also run (and played) in countless GURPS games where it was all theater of the mind, and the experience was always more creative and superior. So systems which either implicitly or explicitly support TotM play are preferred.

No Authorial Overtones: I won't single anyone out, but if the system has a heavy authorial overtone which tries to tell you how to play, either explicitly or implicitly, that can be a real turnoff. The author does not trust you to play the game the right way for you, the end-user, and that is just not cool. I can be in 100% agreement with the game writer's viewpoint and this will still piss me off because it is an attempt by the author to control the narrative on the end user experience.* 

There are quite a few RPGs on the market today that like to talk about how their source of inspiration was, shall we say, a racist person in his time, and then denigrate his works, even as they then proceed to write an entire system around said works, implying there was still merit to the man's creations, enough for them to exploit for money. Hypocrisy! It makes it very hard to take such works seriously. Either you acknowledge that you are, indeed, inspired by the creative works of said author which means you feel his imaginative developments have merit and inspiration beyond the unpleasant bits you did not like (okay, yeah, I'm talking about Lovecraft here) and will expand upon his vision despite your dislike of his century-old racist attitude, or you maybe should decide that its ethically better for you to go write a different game and leave well enough alone. I'm looking at you, Age of Cthulhu and Arkham Horror. 

Sometimes it feels like these games were written by authors fearful that their audience would get mad at them for not appearing cognizant of these perceived injustices or social issues. The best head-scratching example I can provide is in Liminal Horror, which has a paragraph about how its not cool to play cops, authority figures or people with wealth or means. This, of course, is actual nonsense; part of the point of RPGs is the ability to explore roles beyond most people's grasps....and horror as a medium is excellent at skewering all sorts of professionals and the wealthy with equal aplomb; its not merely the purview of the poor and downtrodden to be murdered by eldritch cults. But if you were writing this game a few years ago when there was a strong push on social media to "strike back at the man" or you are a younger author (spiritually or physically) enmeshed in antiauthoritarian counter cultural values, then this might feel like a sensible paragraph to put in, no matter how utterly stupid and counterfactual to the actual genre of horror it is. 

Important: despite this minor rant, I really like Liminal Horror as a mini-system; it occupies a unique concept space and I look forward to the Kickstarter backed future edition coming out soon. Also, I find that entire rant ironic given that the best module produced for Liminal Horror so far, the Bureau, is entirely about a fictional authority organization inspired by the Bureau of Control from the eponymous video game. So one of the system's first modules directly contradicts this angry little countercultural paragraph that demonstrates a woeful lack of imagination and genre understanding right off the bat. 

Okay, rant off! Tonight I plan to close out the D&D 5.5 game, and am proposing we tackle Dragonbane or Mothership next (because that's what I packed for).

*Note that I am not talking about games which have advice on "know your audience," sections, or talk about the use of the X card. Those are just practical advice (don't run a game for 9 year olds with Kult, m'kay? or if you are running for a diverse crowd of Gen Z players, an X card may be quite revealing if you are not good at reading a crowd as a GM). Admittedly, if a game tells me to "remove the spiders if a player is offended" my internal advice is: don't run a game with spiders for someone who is scared of imaginary spiders, you know? Maybe find different players?

True Burnout

 In recent weeks I think I hit an almost unassailable wall. I have bailed on a Saturday game night (admittedly, family stuff dragging me away from it as well), but also because I was running out of steam as GM. I have bailed from as much else as possible. I am still running Wednesday night, but even there I am finding the old spark for D&D is gone. I am not even sure its purely a "5.5 is kinda meh" problem although that doesn't help. I need to get this campaign to an end so I can look hard at what to do next, and see what happens. 

I've been fighting with periodic burnout for years, but this time around feels different.....a first for me to make active efforts to dodge out of GMing, something I have historically always enjoyed, but with this recent shift escaping from that responsibility is now now proving so enticing. I have bought some new RPGs of late, stuff I should be very excited about (Daggerheart, Cypher System Neon Noir, Batman Chronicles RPG and more) but I just can't find the motivation or interest to engage with any of it. I am finding most of my free time is subsuming into reading, both regular books and catching up on my comic and graphic novel collections. I'm just.....dang, I hate to say it....worn out on RPGs and gaming at the moment. It's weird. But maybe not so unexpected; I've run an average of two games a week now for most of this century, what did I expect?

Being a player doesn't even help! It's fun for a bit, but never really been the side of gaming I enjoy all that much. It does keep me involved in the friend circle, I suppose, but my sense of dedication as a player is paper thin; I find reading, playing a video game or watching a movie to be immensely more satisfying. 

I'm hoping this is just a phase, and some time off will rest me up for a more productive GM future. But I also worry its a side effect of age, and maybe a general component of just slowing down a bit, with my interests and desires shifting focus. Deep down I am one of those introverts, and know that without effort it is very, very easy for me to sink into an isolation quagmire and that is not ultimately terribly healthy. I must ponder.....I am sure I am not the only one who has experienced this.

EDIT: I may not be giving D&D 5.5 enough credit for how much it impacts my desire to game. I just read Alexandrian's hot-take on Calibating Expectations with 5E and it really resonates with me as a clear enunciation of all the core conceits of this edition that just make it so much less fun for me.

As the Werewolf Changes

 During last night's game I was surprised to notice that Jackalweres no longer have a problem with silver in the 2025 Monster Manual. So in checking out the other lycanthropes I discovered that hey, it turns out in D&D 5.5 you can harm werewolves with anything, normally, now. They get a few extra HP and a slight AC boost but lose all the mythological flavor of the thing they used to be.

This got me to thinking about how they looked in other systems, so I thought I'd plunge down that rabbit hole a bit to see:

AD&D 1E/2E: Can only be harmed by silver or +1 weapons. So at this stage in the game, low level PCs who have trouble finding magic weapons really need to carry a silvered weapon with them just in case.... In rereading their entries I assume they transform as an action but maybe it was as part of their movement. I seem to recall running AD&D where they could move, transform and attack all in the same combat round, which makes sense in the longer 1E turn cycles.

D&D 3.5: Gain damage reduction 10/silver but only in hybrid and wolf form, interestingly! Shapeshift is an action. Looking at the old format for D&D 3.5 stat blocks on monsters reminded me of how convoluted and information dense they were; how interesting to see that the 2025 MM swung so far to the opposite direction that the current stat blocks feel anemic and drained of all color and flavor.

Pathfinder 1E: Have resistance 10 to all attacks except silvered weapons! Change shape is a move equivalent action, and they induce lycanthropy on a failed saving roll following a bite.

Pathfinder 2E: They have shapeshift as an action, and are vulnerable 5 to silvered weapons. Lycanthropy is induced on a failed save.

D&D 4E: they have regeneration 5, but silver stops their regeneration. They shapshift as a minor action, and they do extra damage against bloodied opponents. Instead of imparting lycnathropy as a disease they induce moon frenzy, which behaves a bit like the confusion spell (but does not end with the inflicted turning into a lycanthrope, interestingly). Diseases and curses in 4E were notoriously weak and ineffectual.

D&D 5E (2014): resistant to nonmagical or silvered weapons, but shapeshift as a standard action. Still have some flavor text that leans into making werewolves interesting in a traditional way. If bitten, on a failed save you just have lycanthropy now.

D&D 2024 (5.5): They gain 13 hit points and get a better AC, but lose any special resistance to ordinary damage, and silver is not even mentioned. They can shapeshift as a bonus action. Lycanthropy if bitten, but you have to reach zero hit points for it to take effect.

Tales of the Valiant: Werewolves are resistant to non-magical damage (silver is not mentioned here either). They induce lycanthropy as a curse after biting someone who fails a save.  

How about some of the other games out there? Let's see:

Swords & Wizardry Complete: mirrors AD&D 1E; so they can probably shapeshift as part of their turn, and are immune to nonmagical, non silvered attacks. Lycanthropy is automatic in an opponent reduced to 50% of their hit points by the werewolf.

Dragonbane: Werewolves hate silver as it deals full damage (along with fire) and messes with their senses. They take half damage from non-magical weapons. taking even 1 point of damage from the werewolf induces both paralysis (potency 9) and lycanthropy, and can only be cured with powerful magic or wolvesbane. And on its monster attacks a 6 induces a berserker frenzy in which your party probably dies!

Basic Roleplaying/Call of Cthulhu: They have regeneration, are immune to most damage (silvered weapons will do full damage and kill them on a serious wound, though), and taking any damage from a bite induces lycanthropy, which can maybe be avoided on a luck role if the bite also severs the limb that was bitten. Nice! The BRP statblock addresses magic and fire doing full damage as well.

Cypher System: they are level 4 creatures, which normally would mean 12 health but they have 24 health. They can cause lycanthropy if you are sufficiently injured to be reduced on the damage track. They take a long time (1D6 rounds) to shapeshift if caught in the act.

Dungeon Fantasy RPG (GURPS): These things are terrifying with damage resistance 15 against all attacks except silver (which does double damage and ignores the DR), and they regenerate 1 HP per second (GURPS combat rounds are 1 second long, so for D&D purposes that's 6 HPs of regeneration for a D&D round). Interestingly Dungeon Fantasy punts on the lycanthropy as a bite-induced curse with some flavor text about how the local temples try to keep that under control, and the rest of the statblock ignores it. GURPS Werewolves from the 3rd edition sourcebook of course does a lot more that I won't belabor here.

Fantasy AGE: They show up in the Bestiary sourcebook, and can induce the lycanthropy curse on a stunt, with the difficulty being based on how many stunt points are applied. The inflicted makes checks each night until the full moon; if they don't kick it before the full moon they go full lycanthrope. There's a section on lycanthrope vulnerabilities, but silver is mentioned as only one possibility, with the GM encouraged to customize for the campaign.

Mythras: Mythras punts on this one terribly and you need to go dig in the wolf section to get a sense of it. Ostensibly they are emulating older, more archaic notions of shapeshifters rather than more modern takes on lycanthropy, I guess? 

Mork Borg: It's actually a character class, the Cursed Skinwalker (in Feretory). You die, and your body is possessed by an animalistic presence, returning you to life as a cursed skinwalker. a bloody, skinless wolf is only one of your options. Tangentially werewolfish, but it wouldn't be Mork Borg if it was conventional now, would it? 

Okay, it was at this point that I ran out of energy (I was looking at The Fantasy Trip's take, which is to lump werewolves and vampires together as cursed/diseased species when mental fatigue just overwhelmed me). I have to say, if you want a werewolf to be scary, then there are two games that do this exceedingly well: Call of Cthulhu/BRP and Dragonbane (with honorable mention to GURPS/Dungeon Fantasy). The least scary edition of the the werewolf can be found in the current D&D Monster Manual for 2025, which is a real shame; it really lacks any of the color and vibrancy of the mythology it derives from. Curiously, they have done a better job with some other monsters in the book (medusa got a slight improvement imo, for example) so it is a shame to see them drop the ball here just because, apparently, someone might not want to be bothered with finding a silvered weapon? Weird. Very weird. Aside from D&D 2024, the next worst take on werewolves is (imo) Mythras, which puts the least amount of effort into the concept, delegating lycanthropy to a paragraph in the wolf statblock section.

This is making me want to consider Dragonbane for gaming in the very near future now, though. 

Genuinely Tough Fight - So yeah it is possible to take out D&D 2024 PCs

 Brief post, but my D&D 5.5 campaign last week had an actual tough fight. The encounter balance was on the high end for a group of 6 players with a competent NPC ally, against 4 vampire spawn (CR 5) and 12 CR 1 satarre from the Monster Vault for Tales of the Valiant. Half of the party dropped before victory was snatched from defeat. I admit, I used some competent monster tactics, including the vampires putting out the light sources in the chamber on round two, plunging the room in to darkness. Somehow, amazingly, only two of the six party members had any darkvision so that created a harrowing round or two until they secured some light.

The real killer wasn't the vampires, although like many monsters in the 2025 MM they do have a slight boost in that their main attack leads to an automatic secondary benefits (grapple) rather than prompting a saving throw. They do then get a bite attack if a grapple is landed, which alas does require a saving throw....so only one bite was made successfully in the session. My experience with D&D has been that, on average, PCs make their saves unless something weird is going on. 

But the surprise moment in the encounter was the satarre, vicious void-driven gecko/lizardfolk things from the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault (and other books prior). They are only CR 1, but they get two attacks, which land with base damage plus necrotic/void damage. The result was that I had a furious level of success with them....they could overwhelm D&D 2024 PC defenses with so many attacks, and in the space of two rounds three PCs dropped. 

Afterwards, we agreed it was reflective of the fact that while the 2025 MM has monsters that often benefit from simplified effects in their attacks (with a secondary benefit landing automatically, for example), the Tales of the Valiant monsters seem geared to hit a bit harder.

I am not 100% sure if this entirely true (many of the changes I have caught so far in TotV are along the lines of Kobold Press design standards simply being broadly applied to their own variant system), but it does make me want to play Tales of the Valiant in a pure form at the game table even more than usual. I need to convince the group of this. With many more new tomes coming out that contain player-facing archertypes and material this may be an easier sell now. Labyrinth, The Old Margreve, a Player's Guide 2 in Kickstarter and a forthcoming Book of Swords adapted to Tales of the Valiant are all full of useful player stuff, something the core Player's Guide was a bit short on with only two subclasses/archetypes per main class. When you have an old, experienced and jaded group like my own, they need more weird stuff, not less. 

Anyway, if this happens I will report more on it.

Handheld Gaming Update: ROG Ally X vs. the Switch 2

 Well much has gone on in this weird space of "video game devices you can hold in your hand." In prior posts I talked about my experience with the Asus ROG Ally, the Steam Deck, and the Lenovo Legion Go. Since then, I have ditched the Asus ROG Ally and Legion Go, selling both to cohorts who found good homes for them. For the Steam Deck I have my original, but last year I upgraded to the Steam Deck OLED model, which was a nice improvement in terms of screen quality and battery size. 

And then....I picked up the Asus ROG Ally X, about a month or so back, when I saw it on a bit of a sale, and just last week wandered into a Target and found a Switch 2 on the shelf. So no sooner had I pared my handheld collection down than I reboosted it back up. This does mean that I have been exploring the advantages of the Asus ROG Ally X more or less in tandem with the Switch 2, and have some thoughts for those interested. 

Right off the bat, I'll just state this: if you want the best overall handheld device with the most flexibility, I think the Ally X is the best choice. It has superior screen quality and processing power to the Switch 2; it has better battery life; it does rest on a Windows 11 platform but I understand you can load up Steam OS for Linux if you see fit. While a Xbox themed ROG Ally X is on the horizon, that doesn't appear to do much that this one doesn't other than provide a streamlined Windows experience. I have been running plenty of "play anywhere" Xbox titles on the Ally X already with excellent results, so not sure how much better the branded edition will be.

The Switch 2 does have some cool features going for it, though. They are very specifically as follows: you can play most of the original Switch games on it, so backwards compatibility in like 95% of cases so far; it is a smaller "footprint" and weighs less than every other handheld except the original Switch and Switch Lite; it runs all those Nintendo games you like (well for me that's the Xenoblade games, Metroid, and I dabble in the Zelda titles but never get far in them). It's got gorgeous visuals compared to the original Switch, and a surprising number of older games run better on it, which is good because not many Switch 2 games are out yet, certainly not enough to merit a purchase on their own. If you get a Switch 2, grab Fast Fusion, it is easily the cheapest and best tech demo for the system yet (at only $15 USD it is much cheaper thank both Cyberpunk 2077 and Mario Kart World, both of which are also good tech demos for the machine).

Both systems have some downsides. The Ally X is still a Windows environment, and that can be annoying. It's a much smoother experience now than when the original Ally came out, however. They also fixed the MicroSD card problem, so that's a positive (don't even try using a MicroSD card in the original Ally unless you want to heat-kill it). The Ally X is a bigger device, so its a bit chonkier (not as chonky as all those Legion models, though).

Meanwhile the Switch 2's downside is that if you compare games on it to equivalent games on the Ally X, you will immediately realize that the best Switch 2 can do right now is at best mid-tier for what the Ally X can do. I was running Gears 5 and Starfield on the Ally X and it was a smooth experience for Gears 5 and pretty good for Starfield, but if you load up Cyberpunk on the Ally X and compare it to the Switch 2, you will notice that the Switch 2 version is doing some tricks to make it work, while the Ally X is just a better overall experience, with more options to tweak the graphics to suit to taste (Switch 2 have quality and performance mode, that's it).

EDIT: should mention price. While the Ally X goes for around $800 base model or $900 for a model with more storage, the Switch 2 of course is $450, which many news outlets have been complaining about. As price goes, its actually pretty reasonable. It's not 2017 anymore, unfortunately; a $300 original Switch is simply not going to hold a candle to the Switch 2. I feel like I got my money's worth, in other words.

For owning both systems I am content to have them, and they both have their use cases. For travel I kind of prefer the Ally X overall, but the Switch 2 continues to allow you the ability to play games without having to check in on the internet (unless you've set it up that way), and has a smaller print when it comes to packing and portability. It also is built for multiplayer experiences, and can handle that easily. The Ally X makes up for that by letting you access any of your PC gaming libraries on the go. Both seem to have decent battery life, as far as handhelds go; but you want to tweak Ally X to improve overall performance. I haven't tried running them both down yet, but I have gotten more time of the Ally X overall on an unplugged playthrough.  

Cypher System Rising

 As the weeks have gone by I've begun to settle on a system with consistency: Cypher System. I mean sure, I've run this plenty in the past, but I've honestly not run it in a good while and I think maybe now it would be the ideal solution to my doldrums. 

Cypher System does have some warts, though. It's a player-roll facing system, meaning the GM never really needs to roll dice except maybe for some random cypher charts or something. 99% of the time the players roll to attack, roll to defend, roll to take action, etc. So this does mean that the core conceits of the system depend on player honesty and understanding of this mechanic. A player who unfaithfully does not report a roll of a 1 which incurs a GM intrusion, for example, is defeating a key story-telling element of the game. 

The second issue with Cypher is really user-dependent: the system's dice pool methodology has some "numbers that mean other numbers, and ways of making tasks reduce in difficulty that also mean converting to numbers" sort of approach that can seem simple enough to some, and can be oddly baffling to others. I know that when I first got Cypher System I sat on it for like a year or two because the core conceit of the system seemed so counter-intuitive to me, and felt like it would be a real hassle to teach people. I eventually pushed past that (long, long ago) and quickly grokked and loved the mechanics for what they are, but this has always proven to be a problem for at least two of my regular players. One of them has actually expressed keen interest in playing it though, despite my recalling she was very frustrated with the system in the past.....so maybe she (like me) suddenly grokked it. 

The third and final issue I have always had with Cypher (and other players of the system as well) is that XP gain is pretty quick, and the rules as written make it that way. Your characters advance over 6 tiers of play, the system's version of leveling and in each tier you have four advances which cost 4 XP. In addition, there are a range of temporary and circumstantial benefits that can be gained by spending XP. In the past, and this tends to reflect the first edition of Cypher, it was easy to see PCs gain power creep by advancing fairly quickly in tiers (especially if they horde XP for long term advancement, as that only takes 16 XP to hit a tier cap). This led to a problem where the PCs were improving overall power level faster than the GM could readily account for it (a polite way of saying that you could plot out threats that in a matter of sessions become trivial and inconsequential for the players to overcome). 

My first few campaigns of Cypher System (all in the first edition) ran into this issue, as I would tend to hand out enough XP through GM intrusions along with 1-2 XP at the end of the session, and the players hoarded XP so they tended to tier up every 4 sessions or so. After 20 sessions the PCs were approaching tier 5 and the storyline (and my newbie GM experience at the time) meant my plot was pacing for a group about half that power level, and they were already hitting what felt to me like godlike levels of performance with boosted Edges, talent pools and effort levels. In Cypher System, higher stat values often simply mean that difficult tasks at tier 1 by tier 4-6 often become "descriptive sentences in which the GM explains how cool you are" as you step past a task...unless of course the GM wants to drop an intrusion on you.  

Under the Revised rules there's more wiggle room baked in to how one goes about handing out and allowing XP to be spent, so I think this will pose less of an issue. The new rules emphasize options such as requiring players to spend XP awarded in-game to be spent in game, and XP between sessions (so end of game, for goals met, story arcs progressed, etc.) to be retained for tier advancement. The GM can award XP at a slower pace as well by focusing only on XP gained through character arc advancement, and between-game awards amending that total for specific "group/plot" goals. They give the GM a lot of leeway, in other words.

In addition, as the group levels up I have since wrapped my own head around the idea that higher level threats and concerns in Cypher System are (and should be) more about discovery, cosmic revelation, and existential threats of unusual nature, and the things which were of dire nature at tier 1 are now just footnotes along the way. 

Either way, I am looking forward to this planned excursion, and I have been pretty exclusively focused on what I can do with Cypher next. I am still mulling over the idea of Numenera vs. one of the Cypher genre settings (or maybe Magnus Archive which is rather cool), but its definitely going to be this. 

Hot Take: D&D 5.5 is kind of boring now (but it could just be me)

 Well, the title says it all: I played more D&D 5.5 ongoing last night, and while fun was had, I realize I've been avoiding combats, sometimes like, a lot. We have them; the game kicked off with an encounter between the group and a red hag, some millitaurs (both from Tome of Beasts), and a stone giant from the new Monster Manual. The fight was brief and while its "sort of fun" the combat wasn't terribly exciting for a group of level 6 PCs, nor was there much in terms of dynamic interaction......D&D 5.5 is basically a process of generating numbers (attack rolls and damage) to make other numbers (hit points) go down. Words are interspersed to imply something different is going on, but ultimately it is a very basic process. 

I would argue this isn't entirely a D&D 5.5 issue, and not even really an issue; I may just have played this game for too long now, and its no longer as exciting. But there are some fingers that can be pointed: D&D 5.5, for example, has some big numbers being thrown around, and there's not a lot of nuance; the notion that someone might miss an attack isn't terribly common; its far more likely that the staying power of a monster isn't in resisting damage or avoiding it, but instead in being a bag of hit points. All of the older mechanics that let a monster bypass, ignore, or deflect damage are mostly gone these days. I was musing on the fact that the red hag, with her magic resistance, was still easily dropped by magic missiles in the final round (she was whittled down to a few HP left) because, unlike the original incarnation of magic resistance from long ago there's no possibility it would affect magic missiles. 

The characters all have their cool attacks and abilities, but these are by and large the same abilities, used over and over again, because the game system has since at least 4th edition been trying to flatten out and remove all the bubbles or bloat in character options; the bygone era of 3rd edition where a PC could have too many choices to pick from in terms of actions and strategies are a thing of the past, for the large part. It all plays more or less the same.

So for me, this means I spend an inordinate amount of gameplay time focusing on the story, exploration, role play moments and mystery because that stuff is fun and doesn't get old. But for my players, some of them do look forward to those combat moments. It is hard for me to admit to them that....yeah....those combat moments are just not doing it for me. And for some of my players they aren't that excited anymore, either. 

Last time we played Cypher System a couple of my players commented that it was really exciting to play a game where the combat/conflict was genuinely exciting and unpredictable, with a sense of tension. It is very, very hard to get that feeling in D&D 5E. This is, of course, why a lot of my recent posts are all about figuring out what game system I want to play next.

Heck, I feel like I would love to be playing this exact campaign I am in, right now, but with the Cypher System and Godforsaken fantasy book. That would be cool! And fun! And surprising. Maybe that will be what we do next. 

On AI Slop Part 2 - When the AI Consumes Bigger Projects

 I just received my hardcover copy of Delta Green: God's Hunt, a four part campaign series that is, as all things tend to be with Arc Dream and Delta Green, really cool. The reason it comes up is because, in a rather interesting observation from my son, we were looking at the cover, and I was speculating on the insects on the cover swarming the astronaut when my son said, "That really looks AI generated." 

I was a bit defensive at first, suggesting that there appear to be obvious tells its not AI generated by the use of certain painting techniques, such as on the bugs, to evoke imagery through a stylized brushstroke, and that I wouldn't think AI could easily replicate that, but I sort of realized that yeah, at this point it probably could. Moreover, my son pointed out some other inconsistencies, such as the difficulty in telling where a thumb is on the hand. My take is, the thumb is hidden....but in consideration, that's not really an easy "pose" for a human hand. But still....it seems so unlikely to me this would be AI art, right?

Well, when I read the contents of the book I find that there are credits to Dennis Detwiller as the art director and illustrator, which is interesting. There's no other artist in the book? My old school self is just impressed at Dennis Detwiller's art talent even as modern me is growing suspicious. My son, however, finds it odd that no piece is evidently signed, as real artists tend to leave signatures. I don't muddy the water by pointing out that AI can probably imitate badly scribbled artist's signatures easily enough. 

When in doubt on these things I google a bit, and do hit a patreon notice about Dennis taking steps into using AI art. I'm not a patreon supporter so can go no further on this, but it does lead to me now leaning toward the notion that my son, in fact, is right. 

All of this is a bit of a shame. I really want to enjoy my Delta Green works, but at the expense of real artists? I am more than a little uncomfortable at supporting projects out there which are not giving real artists a fair shake. To contrast, there are an enormous wealth of real artists supporting the gorgeously illustrated Daggerheart RPG (more about that soon.) You know all those weirdly bemused reviews I and many others had about the oddly off-putting art in the new D&D books? Yeah well all the really cool, evocative and inspiring fantasy art is sitting in Daggerheart, which resoundingly slaps the D&D art  around when it comes to showing it how its done. But if you do some searching, people have at times questioned if the art in the game is AI generated, and while this has been refuted, it is an example of how the use of AI more broadly is impacting the ability of people to tell when a real person is behind the art. 

Anyway.....more examples of how AI generated art is creeping in to places you could not or would not expect it, and the unfortunate results. Look, I get that some AI art is now reaching the point where it is quite impressive. But every time I see a piece of AI art like that, it means somewhere an actual artist was not given a chance to show their work and get paid for it. I know art is probably one of the most expensive components of writing an RPG product (especially for small press publishers), but this is one corner of a larger erosion of human value and input into the picture; I'd rather just not buy a product that doesn't support live creators (be they artists or authors) than contribute to a product that removes live creators from the mix. Unfortunately this means I need to be more meticulous in my consideration of Arc Dream purchases in the future.  And if I am on Drivethrurpg going forward, if your art credits on your listing don't look like the ones on Daggerheart RPG which says "hand crafted" (see here), then I am going to assume that declining to identify your Creation Method (as Delta Green Products do, for example) is tacitly endorsing AI use in your art, and that's a no-go for me. 

AFTERTHOUGHT: I was looking through older Delta Green books and it seems Dennis Detwiller is pretty consistently the only identified illustrator, even when its from books that predate the rise of AI generated content. This certainly makes sense, as Delta Green has a pretty distinct style to it and having one illustrator will keep that style. Maybe Dennis doesn't want to identify himself as utilizing AI in the art to avoid conflating his use of the tool with his own style, but this is only exemplifying my point: AI is muddying the waters here, badly, when it comes to identifying human generated works vs. AI generated works. So I suppose if, regardless of tools in use (treating AI as a tool) the artwork would remain consistently the vision and intent of Dennis Detwiller then there is perhaps no conflict here. But how much longer before we start seeing competition that uses AI with prompts like, "Make it like Dennis Detwiller does?" I can see a lot of art like that on Drivethrurpg already.....even with the "block AI art" button turned on. 

No matter where you look at it, this road doesn't end well for human artists and authors. 

Random Musings - AI Slop on Drivethrurpg (and elsewhere)

 I was browsing Drivethrurpg.com and noticed a lot of what looked like AI generated content (cover images on the home page). Sure enough, these were listed in their descriptions as containing AI generated content. I double checked my account settings and the icon said I had it set to turn off showing AI generated content. Hmmmm. I clicked it on and off again and now it seems to be working.

It is weird, because there is indeed a lot of AI generated content. The one image I checked out was a solo scifi book (solo journaling book? Not sure). The woman had too few fingers (but had a cybernetic hand so who knows) and her negative percent fat stomach had more muscles than I think actual human bodies do. Still, it seems like there's a lot of this art out there. 

As someone who grew up in a family of artists I can empathize with the irritation and existential threat that AI art creates for real artists doing real work. From a purely aesthetic perspective I find the AI art to feel derivative and soulless. But from the writer's perspective, after decades of battling with people who liked to pirate work and complain about cost (as there's a majority out there who are good consumers of content but have no creative bone in their bodies) I eventually let it go with the caveat that hey, these people who pirate were never going to pay anyway. 

While I gave up on the fight of protecting written works, I feel a bit differently about AI art, though. I am not a great artist myself by any means, but if I put some effort into it I can do something halfway okay. If you are a good artist, one would like to get some fair compensation for your work, right? But AI art removes the creative soul from the process, generates a product that is purely derivative of other works, and ends up being, to use the popular term, slop. 

A lot of people like slop, though. And some of these AI products I saw on Drivethrurpg.com are probably not coming with content that was heavily written by a human, and may also be computer generated. How much of a market is there for this? None of the AI stuff I saw appears to be showing up on the top 100 list on the site, so that's probably an indicator that people prefer content with actual agency behind it. If this is true, then does this content, which will only appeal to people who are not bothered by AI slop, really harm anyone anymore than the pirates who would never pay for a PDF will not also harm anything?

The answer of course is: yes it will, as does the ancient problem of piracy and the devaluation of the work and effort a creator puts into their work, be it writing or art. But without a good solution, which the internet overlords are disinterested in providing unless it suits them to do so in some way, nothing will happen here. AI slop will, over time, devalue human work as it becomes more normalized. PDF piracy at least diminished somewhat, but people still engage with it and continue to perceive a PDF as somehow having no value to it despite containing the core energy and creative output necessary for the PDF to be worth downloading in the first place.

There's not much to be done other than to abstain from supporting AI slop generators. Likewise, to not pirate PDFs if you want to reflect a respect for the creators of actual human content. But these things require taste and consideration, and the large crowd out there that has grown conditioned to consume content regardless of quality are a tidal wave of cultural destruction.

Okay, rant off! 

Narrowing the Game Nights Down

 I've been gaming a lot in recent months....too much by a long stretch, as the fun of hanging with friends and supporting my son's desire to run games overwhelms the pragmatism of how much time I really have for fun vs. work and life. Well, I made an important step recently to free up some of that necessary time and have bowed out of my Saturday group for at least the next few months, which will help. I am keeping my Wednesday game going as that one is firmly rooted in the hump day, the least productive day of the week when it comes to "getting stuff done" after work is over anyway, so its good enough for me to continue gaming on that night! Been my main game night for decades now, anyway.

Running just one game a week has me thinking more seriously about what I actually do want to run, though. And despite my prior recent posts musing about all sorts of systems from now and then, I think I've been able to narrow down some thoughts on this significantly: 

First, Pathfinder 2E is a better design and experience than D&D 5.5 in every way. But, it is what my son is running on Friday nights now when he GMs, and for those nights I can attend that is probably enough for me. Plus, a nontrivial chunk of my desire for a break is "fantasy gaming burnout" so I'm trying to reduce the amount of D&D or Pathfinder I run so I can recharge the batteries. 

Second, for game systems which deliberately prompt creative energy I have to hand it to Cypher System. This is a resoundingly smart, creative engine which encourages interesting and fun games. So Cypher is definitely "in."

Third, some of my more traditional choices stand out as obvious preferences that I enjoy running short form campaigns in, therefore providing what I need in the form of a break from long-form campaigning and D&D specifically: Traveller and Call of Cthulhu come to mind right away. Less "traditional" but equally viable are the indie alts for these systems, which are Mothership and Liminal Horror respectively. So all four of these games are viable choices to focus on.

Now to just decide what to run, and when! I think my Wednesday group would be a good sport about any of these systems, but I probably need to at least get the D&D game to a happy pause point (or conclusion) first. 

The 90's RPG Nostalgia Bug

 I've been thinking lately about how getting older impacts your perception of current value in change vs. the experience held from long ago. Or, put another way, the contrast between where gaming is now vs. where it was (for me, at least) in that golden era I hold in memory that is the late 80's and early 90's. 

I think a lot of people who get bitten by the nostalgia bug tend to think of their gaming experiences in their teens, but despite being a very active member of the fanzine gaming community in the eighties during my middle and high school years, I don't actually have a lot of "fond" memories of that time to fill with nostalgia....despite being so active in gaming, I didn't get to actively game very much at all until I was in college. I spent most of those formative years on a remote ranch in the middle of nowhere, so gaming was something I did on rare occasion during trips, or vicariously through the fanzines and play-by-mail resources. My sister and I managed some one-on-one gaming, but my first real, consistent game group didn't manifest until I was driving 63 miles one-way to my first year in community college. 

That first group was great! We were all around the same age, having the same new freshman college experience, and the group was very forgiving of my desire to mainly run DragonQuest (the SPI edition mixed with the somewhat sanitized TSR edition) and Runequest 3. They eventually convinced me to pick up AD&D 2nd edition and the rest is history. My college years were laden with consistent weekly games throughout the next six or so years, with campaigns designed to last one whole semester each. It was fun stuff.

So for me, my fondest memories of gaming are during college. I started thinking about how it would be fun to look back upon that time, and contrast how things were then with where things are today. How many of the RPGs I loved back then are still around now, and how many would it make more sense for me to find some old copies of on Ebay to "relive" that moment in time? How many back then are actually not worth revisiting? And....how many are still around today in a recognizable manner?

So first off, what were the games I ran iin college? I have a fairly modest list:

AD&D 2nd Edition - this was the go-to system. I ran AD&D in its new incarnation pretty much weekly from late 1989 all the way until D&D 3rd edition arrived on the scene. 

Runequest 3rd - I actually ran a fair amount of this early on using just the Standard Boxed Set and later ran the Deluxe book with more enthusiasm by 1992ish. My Realms of Chirak campaign initially started as a Runequest campaign in its very first form (there was also a Gamma World connection).

DC Heroes (MEGS Edition) - I ran a lot of this in the 80's and by 1992-93 I ran a very fun campaign using the 3rd edition of the DC Heroes MEGS rules.

MegaTraveller - This was the edition of Traveller I truly cut my teeth on. I had run a miscellany of Traveller Classic in the 80's, but the vast majority of my Traveller campaigning was during college with MegaTraveller. I even actually used the Imperium setting for most campaigns back then, too. I was one of those gamers who eventually washed out with The New Era, but I did give it my best shot.

GURPS 2nd and 3rd - I used GURPS for most of my campaigning that didn't fit neatly anywhere else. I used GURPS for most of my Cthulhu Mythos games as well, interestiingly; I preferred it a bit over Call of Cthulhu (which was I believe up to 3rd and then 4th edition in the 90's).

Call of Cthulhu - I only ran a bit of it (I used it as a resource for GURPS Cthulhu mostly) but it counts; it was pretty pivotal in terms of my horror gaming preferences.

Metamorphosis Alpha - not the original but rather the Amazing Engine powered game! I ran a lengthy and very fun campaign using this singularly unusual edition.

Dark Conspiracy - I loved the first edition of this game, it was amazing; I have heard it is now owned by Mongoose Publishing, and I am keen to see what lies in its future. Dark Conspiracy was a fantastic weird, dystopian horror setting and I ran a lot of it.

Kult 1E and 2E - the other horror game I ran a lot of; when I wasn't running GURPS Horror or Dark Conspiracy was Kult, which was as close to "Clive Barker the RPG" as one could get, even now. Back then Kult was a fantastic, creepy reality-warping deep dive into weird non-Cthulhu horror and I loved it.

Mutant Chronicles - I loved this RPG and collected all of it. I managed to run a couple campaigns, but it never quite took off the way I'd like it to.

Cyberpunk 2020 - this was the second most played system in my college years behind AD&D. Cyberpunk was highly formative for the time, so much so that it resides in memory as a fantastic reflection of where we imagined a future we'd live to see might go....and how so very different (and yet similar) that future actually is now that 2020 is in the rearview mirror.

There were likely other RPGs I dabbled in, but those were the big ones for the most part.

So where do these RPGs stack up by contrast today? Unsurprisingly (as this hobby does not grow as much as it seems) just about every one of these games is either still around in a new edition or has had a recent revival within the last 10-15 years. But are the new editions comparable in experience, particularly in terms of the nostalgia factor? This is my own personal take:

AD&D 2nd Edition - well, we all know where this went. It got more complicated (3E), then jumped the shark (4E), then revived itself spiritually (5E), and lately may have both jumped the shark and stagnated at the same time. But interestingly, I no longer feel an overwhelming desire to play the original 2E edition.....I would rather, like many other older gamers, look to what is new in the OSR community where the spirit (rather than the design) of the game thrives. My current poison of preference is Shadowdark or just sticking with D&D 5.5 or Tales of the Valiant. So Nostalgia does not win here (yet).

Runequest 3rd - The thing I liked about Avalon Hill's edition of Runequest was that Glorantha was optional. I could use the rules to make my own setting (as I did), or to run adventures in a mytho-historical earth. The current way to do this is with the admittedly excellent Basic Roleplaying RPG, but unless you have the reprint monographs that were based on Runequest 3, you won't have all the resources that originally were packaged in the Runequest 3 Deluxe Set. Runequest Glorantha in its modern incarnation is, while a fine system, entirely focused on Glorantha and is not welcoming to Runequesters who were fans of the mytho-historic earth settings. Chaosium is thankfully rectifying a bit of this with the new Vikings RPG using BRP, but even then....not the same as what the original Runequest 3 accomplished. So for my purposes? Playing this game in its original incarnation is a strong preference.

DC Heroes - interestingly this game had a successful Kickstarter reprint that may release later this year. I will be curious to see where that goes. I loved playing this back in the day, but my enthusiasm to revisit it is conditionally dependent on the players I have; the group I ran for in 1992-93 was very much in sync with the spirit of a comic book superhero RPG; these days it is harder to find such a group.

MegaTraveller - my memory of this edition is that it was great for the day, but it only got more convluted before it got less. Thankfully the great thing about Traveller is that its current edition with Mongoose Publishing is arguably the best edition to date, and this is one case where the contemporary version of the game can scratch that nostalgia itch quite easily.

GURPS - This is a rough one. I do believe that the current edition of GURPS (4E) is its most comprehensive and well organized, but something changed in the translation from 3rd edition to 4th edition that made the game a harder sell and less "friendly" for lack of a better word. GURPS 4E has an entire line of resources today in the form of "How to GM" books that suggest something was lost in translation from 3E to 4E. Unfortunately I suspect that it had a lot to do with the fact that 3rd edition was more concerned with parsing out content by setting book, and providing a flexible but less complete core experience, which accidentally meant is was more digestible and modular....while 4E became more comprehensive, but like Hero System, it also became more overwhelming and less welcoming to the new gamer, or the crowd that used to be able to do pick up and go games of GURPS. I mean....remember when GURPS provided a quick random character generator and it didn't pose any problems for quick play? Yeah....unfortunately the shift in design focus to 4E removed that convenience, replacing it with awkwardly formatted templates and a never-ending focus on mechanical rigor. So maybe finding an old copy of GURPS 3E might not be such a bad idea here.

Call of Cthulhu - like Traveller, this one only got better with time. You can even find 1st and 2nd edition in print again if you want thanks to a Kickstarter, and the 7th edition can be as nice or cruel to players s you desire. Call of Cthulhu's contemporary experience is if anything even better than it was back in the day, or maybe my ability to run campaigns with it is simply easier now thanks to experience? Either way, the newest edition of the game scratches that nostalgia itch just fine.

So how about the rest? Well, with Mutant Future you had a revival but it scrapped the original game engine and wedded it to the 2D20 engine from Modiphius, which was a mistake in my opinion. Then Kult worked out a Powered by the Apocalypse hybrid approach, and while it works....it's also somehow no longer quite the same feel as the original game (imo). Then there's Metamorphosis Alpha, which got a reboot on the original from Ward and Goodman Games, which is definitely cool but unfortunately my unique niche case for running the Amazing Engine edition is, I feel, unreplicatable....I will forever remember that campaign fondly for the unique and unrepeatable moment it rests within. 

Cyberpunk 2020 is also unique. I gotta be honest....the new Cyberpunk Red looks great and my son loves it. But when I crack it open I wish I was opening Cyberpunk 2020, and it just doesn't hold up to that edition in time, unfortunately. Worse yet, If I do look at CP2020 I can't imagine going back to it; the 90s really are gone, along with that vision of a future 2020. The new 2020's are both much less exciting and in many ways slowly getting worse than the megacorporate dystopia that was softened by cool cyberware; and the video game exemplifies a fantasy now, not a future projection. Cyberpunk Red and 2077 are both visions of an alternate reality; the next wave of future punk fiction will be a sober look at where the real 2020's today are taking us, which is unfortunately into a bleaker future than anyone really wants to game in (since we're living in it, instead). 

The shining light is Dark Conspiracy, which barely survived the GDW crash in the late nineties, to be tepidly kept on life support in some poorly realized updated editions. So maybe now with Mongoose in control we will finally see the game get properly revived with the dedication it deserves. We shall see!