Friday, April 27, 2018

Film Review: Avengers Infinity War

So it's hard to fully review this movie without spoilers, but I'll start off with the spoiler free summary: Avengers Infinity War is definitely worth seeing, and is part one of the two-part big payoff of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The part one part is really important, as this movie ends on a cliffhanger that guarantees people will be back this time next year to see how things resolve.

The movie manages to simultaneously pay out for the hardcore fans of the movies, as many, many moving parts all slide together into the grand, unifying plot we've been waiting for. That said, if you've not been paying too much attention, or catching every film, this one is still going to work for you; it's stand alone story element holds its own, and even if you have no idea where the infinity stones have been showing up in prior movies (or why) this movie doesn't require that a priori knowledge.

Oddly, one of the most interesting characters in the movie was Thanos himself. Marvel finally has a villain no one can complain about, and this works well; the narrative on Thanos and why he is doing what he does makes him a more compelling and ultimately interesting villain.

So yeah...solid A, absolutely.

Beyond that? Spoilers, lots of spoilers. Actually, I'll try not to spoil things, but I will make the following oblique observations:

1. There's more than one interesting cameo in here, and in particular (you'll know who when you see the scene) that was kind of a "Wow holy cow look who just showed up" moment.

2. This movie HAD to come out right as my kid, in his mid sixes, is developing a strong sense of the concept of mortality.* I saw it on a special preview, but the whole family goes tomorrow and I need to brace my wife for the fact that before this movie is over he's very likely to be streaming tears and snot at certain deaths in this film. It's gonna be rough.

3. The movie politely subverts expected deaths, even as it surprises us with more than a couple unexpected deaths. Then there's....well, a damned good cliff hanger, we'll just say that.

4. Thor had a surprisingly good heroic arc, a sort of fall and redemption, then return to power. Which was good, because like the first five minutes of the movie completely negate any victory garnered at the end of Thor: Ragnarok.

5. No Hawkeye? I thought Hawkeye was going to be at least cameoing.

6. Implied and direct nods to the notion that Scarlet Witch is actually one of Earth's most powerful beings.

FRIDAY REPORT: The family viewing was today. Kiddo handled it better than I expected, although I gave him a pep talk about how this was a sad movie, with some sad things, and then he told me as long as Spider Man didn't die he'd be fine....anyway long story short the ending was perhaps just a bit metaphysical in a sense so it left him sad but not in a streaming snot kinda way (whew) despite ...ahh.....all that stuff that went down at the end (um, trying not to be spoilery). But the overall impact on the total crowd, which had a LOT of kids in it was almost palpable...tears, cries of shock, etc. etc. only the old jaded comic fans were "unmoved." The youn 'uns who haven't gotten used to how these sorts of stories work were genuinely shocked/traumatized/surprised/horrified, etc.

*I found this out the hard way. I bought the animated film "Batman: Escape from Arkham" which I did not realize was quite as adult and violent as it was, but the problem came when my kid immediately bonded with the Black Spider character, who later dies an ignominious death in the movie. My son was devastated, crying, and a couple days later told me I am never to mention that Black Spider died, ever. Period. So.....when you see a movie like Infinity War, as an old comics veteran how do I impart to my son the wisdom that no comic death is ever really permanent? Hmmmm.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Film Review: Ready Player One

This has been out a long time so it's unlikely I'm spoiling much, other than to state that this is another great example of a good movie you can take the family to. Unlike Rampage (reviewed last week), Ready Player One has some interesting subtext to it....there's a thoughtful movie hidden underneath the armada of VR skins that this movie is essentially all about.

Fair warning: unlike many of the other reviewers on this movie, I have A: very few nostalgic memories of the content of this film (I remember the 70's and 80's as something I got through/survived, not something I think back on with any sense of delight); and B: I have not actually read Ernest Clines' novel of the same name. As such, I have no opinion on how this movie reflects the novel, or "fixes" it as some other reviewers appeared worried about. 

The short and quick summary: about 27 years from now an 18 year old protagonist Wade, alias Parzival in the virtual reality world of the OASIS, is one of many people trying to unlock a grand easter egg left by its now deceased creator, Holloway. Figure out the puzzle, and you gain ownership of the OASIS. Other players are after this, of course, as well as the evil corporation IOI, which is funding an enormous number of "players" to unlock the easter egg and take OASIS for itself. 

Naturally the IOI plays dirty, people die in the real world, heroes are born in the virtual world, and gradually three mysteries leading to keys are resolved and the plot ends on a suitable high note. 

For what it's worth, I suspect that in 27 years people will look back on Ready Player One with great amusement. "This is what they thought it would be like???" our future selves (and my adult son, no doubt) will say. Like Lawnmower Man in the nineties or Tron in the eighties, Ready Player One will no doubt fill that void for the late twenty-teens.  That said, it was a very fun movie and quite straight forward in how it depicts what amounts to an almost painfully damaged future that is nonetheless utterly disguised by the cultural and economic obsession with virtual reality as a means of literal escape. Hell....the glipses of "life" in this future were really fascinating to me, probably the best part of the movie, overall, from Wade's insanely damaged relationship with a parent and a "step dad" who were both highly self-absorbed and utterly devoted to the VR universe to the general level of social and cultural decay that was exhibited literally everywhere. 

The movie's consolation is that, in the end, the new OASIS owners shut down the servers twice a week to foster human interaction in meatspace. It's all presented as a happy ending....but....yeah. This was like the friendliest and most upbeat Spielberg-type movie you could imagine that still basically sidesteps the entire issue of the film's underlying social decay, even as it plays the entire display straight, a sort of matter-of-fact "Yeah, this is coming, and this is what it's going to look like, but whadda ya gonna do???"

I had a hard time feeling very emotionally invested in the bulk of the virtual action since there wasn't a lot of consequence to it (any more so than an elaborate World of Warcraft raid would), but the overall tale still worked well....and for my son, this was a joy to watch, and he had to get on one of our two VR headsets as soon as we got home. For my wife and I, it kind of felt a bit uncomfortably like our current experience with gaming online, just in a more immersive future where the most improbable thing on screen was how the OASIS developers got so many IP licenses going for the skins of various IPs. The absence of any Disney characters (Star Wars, Marvel, etc.) actually worked for the film, because we all know in this future, Disney has it's own OASIS somewhere, seriously locked down. 

Without the subtext of the future soft cyberpunk dystopia this would have been a fun B, but I have to say that the overall film and its unfortunate implications worked well to bring it to a solid A for me. 

Monday, April 23, 2018

Genesys Core RPG: Bringing something new and exciting to the table

Saturday we had a smaller group than usual so we decided to try out Genesys Core RPG. The Realms of Terrinoth sourcebook had just arrived in print, providing a substantial boost to the fantasy-related content of the system, and also helping a great deal in demonstrating how the system can work for the fantasy genre.

The core rules are actually pretty decent at this, but leave the impression that you have your work cut out for you if you want to develop more archetypes, species, professions, gear and special talents/abilities for specific settings. That said, I had a a pretty good idea on how I could run a futuristic Cyberpunk setting using pretty much just the rules content in the core for the Modern and SF genres. However, hen it came down to experimenting and learning the rules with a "learn as we play" game session, fantasy is hard to beat.

After a little over an hour of character generation and plot-assembling I worked out a scenario with some encounters that I cribbed from various sources (including copious pregenerated material on the Fantasy Flight Forums where Genesys has a lot of productive fans). I also borrowed some content from the only introductory module out so far (albeit wedded to a new plot).

The result was pretty interesting as well as fun. My three players drafted up a catfolk primalist, a burrow gnome rogue and a rough orc warrior who all worked in the city state of Keranos in a setting I drafted up specially for Genesys, inspired by what I had read of Terrinoth (and whether the region of Keranos fits somewhere in the Genesys default setting or will become its own thing I have yet to decide.....*)

Some role play events mixed with one distinct battle, in which local thugs hired by a rival of the PC's patron to steal the maguffin they were tasked with protecting and delivering. A group of five thugs and one boss thug proved to be a fun fight, albeit less of a threat than I expected. Playing the combat in Genesys Core was an eye opener....the dynamic of a single dice roll that determines level of success/failure as well as levels of threat/advantage and triumph/despair provided a fascinating scenario in which narrative intrusion into what was going on not only was encouraged, it was practically necessary. It was like a game system which not only asked me to do what I tend to do as a GM already when I run games (describe things in a manner that makes it illustrative and fun) but gave me a mechanical reason to do so, and to reward players for assisting in this narrative, too.

The same thing applied with social encounters, or really any skill encounter. For example, a Lore check on the gnome to see what she knew about her people (she's a gentrified gnome) could result in a couple successes (so she knows a thing or two about her heritage), but imagine a success with a threat or two....that could mean she knows something, maybe something that she shouldn't, or her information is not the kind she wants to divulge. A failure with lots of advantage could mean she doesn't know much about her people, but she bluffs her way through it so people think she does.

There are a lot of interesting way to interpret the dice, though in most cases where it is useful (such as in combat) to gain an immediate mechanical/situational benefit the rules have charts on how to proceed in case the GM is at a loss.

The net result of all of this was a moment in play where the gnome, cornered by a foe (the thug leader) such that she couldn't maneuver to disengage, made an attack in desperation and failed to connect but got five advantages (which look like chevrons, or arrows)....that was enough by the rules to suggest she did, in fact, manage to slip between the thug's legs even as he dodged her attack, and then let her sprint down the alley to medium range with a blue advantage (boost) die for her next action against him.

I don't know of many games that let you get all of that out of one die roll, which was initially just a missed attack.

Anyway: I'm really enamoured with the way Genesys Core RPG plays now. We're going to tackle it again this Saturday, and I'll report more as the play experience evolved. I haven't felt this excited for a game system in a while: a system which is decidedly new and unexpected to me, one for which I can't say I have a strong grasp on, but which is challenging in a fascinating and fun way, that I really want to learn through and through in play. Genesys Core has me very, very intrigued.

*As a habitual setting creator who can only run homebrew with any reliability, my money's strongly on "devise my own setting, even if I borrow cool bits from Terrinoth," such as the rune stone mechanic which is quite cool and distinct, as well as the heroic abilities.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Film Review: Rampage (good family fun!)

Rampage is a classic Summer film, released perhaps a bit early in anticipation of the encroaching box office hell that will be a month of Avengers followed by another month of Star Wars. Despite this, it's a fun movie....not the "think hard and ponder reality" kind of movie, nope. This is a movie which takes the barest backbone of a early nineties video game and turns it in to a Dwayne Johnson blockbuster, fully digestible for the family.

So, all snark or whatever aside, Rampage really is a fun film. It's arguably also a successful game-to-film adaptation but I would go so far as to suggest that reviewers touting this as a feature are being disingenuous; the movie is at best taking the barest core conceit of an already anemic video game as a point of inspiration and then transforming it into the basic structure of a story. The only parts of the movie that are from the video game are as follows:

Three giant monsters (a gorilla, a wolf thing and a reptile thing) need to crawl up a building or buildings and do lots of damage in the process while occasionally eating people

If you capture that, then you've captured the game. All the rest is just icing on the cake....and there was plenty of icing on this cake! The lead protagonist is an empathetic character built to play to Dwane Johnson's particular style. His female counterpart is a mousy but feisty scientist guaranteed to appeal to women in the audience. The villains are suitably villainous in an overt manner designed to make you happy when they get eaten like popcorn. George the gorilla is played straight up to be the most empathetic character of all, and in the words of my son, "They almost made me cry!" at a particular scene I won't mention that I am 100% sure was tested with an audience reaction for maximum positive reaction in the end.

The whole movie, being so carefully constructed, is therefore an entirely empty but utterly enjoyable ride. Well worth it if you have kids to take them to see this, but note that the violence level borders on Jurassic Park level at times, just not in an overt manner....think "people getting squashed, but only occasionally do we get evidence of real gore." Sensitive children probably should avoid it, but my son just ate it up. When the "Yes We're Broadcasting Just How Evil We Are" bad spec ops team goes in after the wolf, my son was gleefully saying "The Wolf's gonna kill them all" with the delight that only a budding wildlife conservationist anti-poacher can evoke.

If my son becomes an  wildlife conservationist one day, or even joins PETA or something I think I'm going to blame this movie.

So....Solid A!

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Pathfinder 2.0 Magic

There's a blog post up here about how magic will work in Pathfinder 2.0. Without going in to it much, it's really interesting to see that Pathfinder is going to distinguish itself in some pretty interesting ways from prior and current iterations of D&D with a few specific process and organizational changes.

The more I read about Pathfinder 2.0 the more I am convinced it will be both an interesting new system in its own right, even if it is spawning out of D&D 3.75, and possibly worth investigating for those who may be keen on experiencing the engaging process of immersing in an entirely new mechanical implementation on D&D.....I'm getting the feeling that this will be a system with lots of interesting synergies and emergent mechanical experiences that will scratch that itch that some of us (myself included) often feel when playing RPGs.....not merely the fun of an actual game, but the fun of mastering said game as well. This is an odd take for me, as I always grew annoyed with the imperfect and sometimes bizarre learning curve of D&D 3.5 as well as its predilection for system mastery reward, but I'm sort of hoping that the lesson Pathfinder 2.0 takes away from 5th edition is that you can build a system that rewards with synergies and emergent experiences while not forcing the system mastery concept down everyone's throats in the long run.

Monday, April 16, 2018

Also, Comics Worth Reading: Titans

After bitching about what a weird train-wreck the entire Dark Nights: Metal series was, I realize I haven't talked about good comics in ages. And there are a lot of them! Here's one you should check out:

Titans (DC)

Although there's a rumor that Titans will be cancelled after issue 24, I think it's at best because the series will get a restart soon following the current plot line in which the Titans have effectively been forced to go on hiatus as a team while the Justice League figures out what to do about Donna Troy. It's possible they plan to capitalize on the imminent new TV series of the same name and more or less the same team that I've heard is in the works.

Fans of the old days of the Teen Titans (and you know what I mean....the Marv Wolfman era of greatness) will find the current run on Titans very familiar territory; the story telling is top notch, and Dan Abnett (who has always been good at this sort of tale) shows off his skill as a writer with a series of stories lightning-rod focused on the characters and their internal conflicts, both for better and worse.

The current Titans run is up to issue 22 right now and has put the team through the wringer on multiple occasions, culminating in a story arc recently in which Donna Troy is revealed to have a potentially dark future when her distant future self, Troya, returns in time to set her past self "straight" on how to handle the gruesome events to come, chiefly by becoming a sociopath. The team holds up against this but then the Justice League intervenes, and the "younger" and former sidekicks are all essentially forced to disband while the older, more experienced Leaguers try to figure out what to do.

Queue a focus on Roy Harper (Arsenal), the rough and tumble one-time sidekick to Green Arrow, who continues on his usual path, this time investigating the spread of a strange new drug, the source of which is hard to pinpoint. As tends to happen when Arsenal goes off on his own and starts fighting the drug trade, Cheshire shows up again to continue her never-ending con on her baby daddy Roy.

Menawhile, behind the scenes the cutest couple in DC's continuum, Mallah the Ape and the Brain, are the creators of the new drug, which it turns out has a mind-expanding, mind-sharing psionic property, allowing the Brain to aggregate all the minds of the users to expand his own consciousness, giving him effectively singularity-level intelligence.

It's really nice to see interesting plots with a tight focus on the specific characters and their many foibles, relationships, doubts, fears and hubris. Dan Abnett knows how to write this stuff and do it well. The art team of Pelletier, Hennessy and Lucas is "classic," which to me at least means this looks like a DC comic and does not skew toward the more juvenile or cartoony designs of some other titles (Teen Titans, Batgirl), which I appreciate.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with an exaggerated, cartoony style like that, but tonally it changes how you react to the story, and thankfully the more traditional style in Titans works best for the somewhat more hard hitting, emotionally resonant tale of the twenty-something Titans the book focuses on.

Anyway, check it out...either in current form, or start picking it up in graphic novel format. The revival of the Titans began with a tale returning the long absent Wally West to the fold, and it's never let up since, so you won't be disappointed if you have (like me) been craving something that felt more like a continuation of the old Marv Wolfman style than the prior New 52 runs on Titans were.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

What the Heck, Comics? Why Dark Nights Metal Was Just Too Much

Warning: I'm about to rant with spoilers and madness about a recent comic tie-in crossover event. If you haven't read it, don't care about it, or DO care about it and have read it and thought it was awesome, you have been warned!

I finally finished DC Comics' insane Metal super crossover event. For readers of most regular comics there were only a handful of mostly ignorable crossovers; most of the series was contained in a 6 issue mini-series and a bunch of special one shots, all priced at $4.99 and attached to metallic covers that were designed to scream "collectible!" as much as possible. And yes, I got all of it.

Here's the best summary I can get for those interested: Batman, in an old story arc from the trippy Grant Morrison days, was apparently killed but really went back in time. A demon bat named Barbatos got sort of obsessed with him and "created" a multi-thousand year long event in which dozens of seemingly unrelated events in history and story are all tied in to this thing by which Batman's nightmares manifest in a very real "dark universe," come to life, are united, and seek to subsume the light universe in to the dark universe using something called the Ninth Metal (that's really the Nth Metal) and a lot of stuff happens in the course of this process. If you thought the comic book physics of the DC Universe was already stretched thin by Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and the Crisis on Infinite Earths then you ain't seen nothing yet.

Preamble: I am a huge DC fan. They rarely ever disappoint, and usually its only on rare occasion I don't immensely enjoy DC comics in general. I regularly pick up a fair number of DC titles every month, and I love what they've been doing for the last few years. I was a New 52 fan and I liked their efforts to make it distinct, although I also feel like the Rebirth era has been even better.

Okay, that's out of the way. Now....for the odd exception.

Issue #6, the grand finale of the mini-series Dark Nights: Metal is out and having finished it I really have to say...I love comics (especially DC comics) for all their comic-ness, all their tropes, and -isms and so forth, but good grief.....this is the first time in a very long time that I felt I'd just read something that no one wrote to even attempt some form of coherent narrative. There is a narrative....sort of.....but exactly what that narrative is, why it should make any sense at all, or even why I should have cared to follow this entire run is, in the end, beyond me. Indeed, the series ends with an ominous warning that in saving the universe our heroes may have changed it, and that in doing so the universe may have been blown wide open....leading to greater, more inconceivable threats to come. Threats, presumably, more monumental than an entire negative-universe comprised of Batman's worst fears about himself come to life, which was the core guiding point of the series at first.

My understanding of this series is that Scott Snyder had been planning it a long time, and it was based on some fairly obscure derivations of old Batman comics  (the bat demon Barbatos, specifically) as well as the trippy and (some might argue) unpleasantly bizarre death of Batman sequence turning in to a trip through time that Grant Morrison wrote years ago. I feel like maybe yes, this is entirely true that Scott was given a blank check to do this......and thanks to DC being pretty lax about direction these days on its narrative arcs to its creators, maybe no one stopped to look too closely at the overall narrative arc on this tale, which at various time managed (in early issues) to serve as a fascinating concept but somehow just got too big, too wildly self-referential, supremely immersed in the sort of Dumb Ass Metaphysics only comics can conceive of, and in so doing added what started to feel like infinite layers of nonsense to the already heavy and weird canon of the DC metaverse, a metaverse that desperately needs someone to step in and tone it down a bit, not do the opposite.

Sometimes, the ideas just, WAT


Ninth metal is actually Nth metal, which of course is what Hawkman and Hawkwoman have long been associated with, but now plenty of other objects are as well (Wonder Woman's bracelets for example, and Plastic Man who spends most of this series inexplicably in an egg shape). Batman has Ninth Metal in him thanks to his "resurrection" tale some issues back during the whole close of the old New 52 pre-Rebirth reboot. And so does Joker, weee!

The Dark Universe is alternatively a nightmare universe, an anti-matter universe, a universe which can literally "flow up" or "slide down" and subsume the "normal" or "light universe." It is the place where Batman's nightmares specifically formed out of the 52 universes in situations where Batman went Very Very Bad in various ways. And apparently specifically Batman alone more or less thanks to Barbatos's time-long obsession with him. Or something like that. It's really not explained very well at any point in what passes for a narrative arc in this tale.

The House of the Bird and the House of the Bat are in eternal war because Sure Why Not, and maybe I didn't read the right Morrison collections from the past ,and then the entire Court of Owls was just one long part of this because "owlssssss" but isn't that a bird and not a bat??? and Oh My God this is what happens when you try too hard to make Everything Tie In To Everything Else.  Sometimes it is possible to know the esoteric lore and canon of a series too well, and in so doing damage it a bit by trying too hard to make it all tie in together.

I liked the Court of Owls when they were just a secret society of ancient families in Gotham who tried to control the city's direction behind the scenes with semi-immortal assassins.

Tenth Metal. Jesus Effin What the WHY

All those one-shots did set up fascinating "alternate reality" nightmare Batmans. But their end pay-off was obscured by what amounted to a bizarrely incoherent final few issues in which who the hell knows what was going on because it felt like plot twists and deus ex machina moments were being yanked out of the nightmarish corners of the writer's ass. See also: Tenth Metal. Only "Evil Batman-Flash" gets proper closure through a noted death. The rest just sort or go away in the endless panels of random shit that the last few issues throw at the page.

The final "It's super dark here so Tenth Metal doesn't work," metal ex machina moment. Honestly it felt to me like someone forgot to tell the artist for those panels about Shiny Batman Tenth Metal Suit and so the dialogue hamfistedly explained it away like this. Or even worse, they just wanted to make sure Batman didn't look too silly in his silver armor while he and the Joker beat up the Batman who Laughs, and they really, really, really wanted this scene in but couldn't justify it until the Tenth Metal sequence, so.....sigh....fine, whatever....

And the almost insanely nonsensical writing of the last few issues with a prosaic style that felt to me closer to the way Penny Arcade mocks this stuff than some sort of writing which was even attempting to explain an interesting story.

Dragon Joker Thing. Why. Just.....why. It was like there purely to be drawn, commented on, and than Whatever.

Oh and thanks to Reasons the entire Metal Event apparently caused new superhumans to manifest for purposes that felt a lot less like "this was a plot thing we totally conceived of" and a lot more like "and then someone in marketing said we should tie in the eight new titles DC wants to release in 2018 to the end of Metal so like yeah they really want this in here."

Hawkman and literally his entire "journey/arc" in this series. WTF

Did this series sell well?* Someone needs to think harder about this crap, and think about how they could actually have tried to construct a tighter and more focused tale out of this comic-spew-word-garbage insanity.

I love DC comics, but.....please, let's avoid something as awful and nonsensical as this again for a while. Please!!!!! Or....well....maybe try and think about what you're actually writing, and why you're doing it, and how there could be so many better, more interesting ways to actually try and tell a story than this.

*#1 sold like hotcakes.....sigh.....

Monday, April 9, 2018

Surrealism in Gaming

I'm only really aware of one specific RPG* which tackled the idea of surrealism as a core concept: Over the Edge. For it's time, Over the Edge was a masterpiece on how to represent the sort of trippy, not-quite-real experiences that were cultivated from the likes of William S. Burroughs, David Lynch and the Cohen Brothers (with a hefty dose of Burroughs influencing the setting). It was an effort to capture a unique sort of subgenre of film and fiction that was ramping up for a short time in the nineties, and in all honesty it didn't do too badly.

I was really in to the concept of surrealism in the 90's, particularly after a trifecta of exposure to the concept in the form of David Lynch's movies (Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Eraserhead), The Cohen Brothers' Barton Fink, and the film adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (I had previously read Burroughs, but the idea of adapting his work to film....let alone gaming!...was not so obvious to me until I saw Cronenberg attempt it). I had a fair number of games, usually powered by GURPS (but at the time I was also heavily in to Cyberpunk 2020 and Dark Conspiracies) which were tainted by, or even completely immersed in the core conceits of the surreal, at least as best I could convey it in the medium of gaming.

Recently I wrapped a lengthy year-long campaign in Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition that was best described as "Weird Oregon," or "Something's Wrong in Coos Bay." It originally started out as a short game with a goal of starting a zombie apocalypse, Mythos style. Then it rapidly revamped in to a more conventional CoC investigation with shades of Twin Peaks: The Return influence, as I decided that it would be really interesting if this one region on the Oregon Coast had like, a dozen different intertwined CoC scenarios all going on and weaving in and out together, with a grad climax over a two month (in game) run being the 2017 solar eclipse. The game started about the time of the solar eclipse, and ended last week, so not a bad run for a CoC game! Only one character who was original to this game made it all the way to the end (with both life and sanity intact) so despite the fact that there is still more to do in the region, it will have to wait for a new, future group to explore.

This last weekend, in the wake of the CoC game reaching it's conclusion, I realized that I was A: not done with running modern scenarios focusing on the weird and horrific; and B: was still itching to do a more proper, direct homage to Twin Peaks: The Return. But...a bit more preamble.

If you're even remotely a fan of David Lynch and/or the classic Twin Peaks, and you somehow haven't seen Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime (also out on DVD/Blu Ray) then you owe it to yourself to take the 18 episode dive into the "limited event" that serves as a third season with a precise 25 year gap between the 2nd season of the original show and this one. I won't belabor the plot points of this, but let's just say that the original show ended on a remarkably disturbing "evil wins big time" sort of cliffhanger and the entirety of The Return is spent wrapping that dangling plot in an 18 hour movie that is conveniently broken up into watchable chunks.

There are also two Twin Peaks novels, written like FBI case files, designed to fill you in on all the extraneous plot points a series this complicated can never properly address. If you're a fan, these are a must read. If you just like procedurals and High Weirdness then these are for you.

So, the thing about Twin Peaks (particularly The Return) that I want to pay homage to in the new campaign are along these lines:

Magic Exists in Modern Times: but it is elusive, hard to grasp, rarely exposed for what it is in a measurable way, and is otherwise impossible to quantify or measure in a scientific or rational manner.

The Spirit World Exists, but it is Weird: in the worlds of Twin Peaks the spirits, if you want to use that term, are very real but they appear to have a strange and interesting relationship with humanity, one which often brings people to interact with them in profoundly changing ways. There seem to be spirits who want to "ride along" and live through their hosts. There are spirits which need to replace you, like changelings or doppelgangers. There are spirits who want to help.....and there are also spirits who embody dire and stark elements of humanity, such as pure good and evil. And like magic, it is essentially impossible to understand, and as soon as you ascribe motives and direction to it as I did, something will cast doubt on that assessment.

Surrealism is the Medium By Which The Tale Unfolds: the core concept of surrealism is the notion of the "irrational juxtaposition of images," but to a greater extent, to honor the Lynchian elements of surrealism is to not merely juxtapose imagery but concepts, people, places and emotions. Surrealism can have moments of stark horror contrasted against almost simplistically irrational normalcy. Twin Peaks, for example, was an idyllic northwestern town of nice, simple people, and yet it was a center of the drug trade, and a spiritual centerpoint in what could best be described as a gateway to the Other (the Black Lodge) by which spirits benign and malevolent seek to interact with the local people, or even to escape. And it is clear from The Return that there are other "points of interaction" with the Other throughout the world.

The idea, though, is that this juxtaposition of sharp contrasts is important to convey the story. In Twin Peaks this is the simple but dramatic lives of the town residents, played against the background while key figures (Dale Cooper) find themselves faced with existential threats from The Other. To do this in the new game (I am returning once more to GURPS as my engine) the player characters will need to be the key figures, but they will be investigating something that is extremely Abnormal, the Other, which rests quietly among an otherwise mundane and idyllic town.

Surrealism AND High Weirdness are the Formula: it's not fair to throw all the weight on surrealism itself, which is a framing tool. Rather, it is also necessary to engage in the weird, the strange and the unusual. In GURPS terms, everyone is a Weirdness Magnet.

Each Player Will Have a Different Interpretation of Events: if the goal is to work, I feel that one of the best ways to pull it off will be to have each player enjoy the experience of the campaign, but ultimately arrive at a different conclusion about what they experienced meant, and what the events played out to be. This will be nature gamer groups tend to work to consensus and try to resolve these plots. I had a certain degree of this mystery in the CoC campaign, but in the end they did find mechanisms and lore that allowed for a degree of consensus on what happened. If I pull the plot off for the High Weirdness game, then they will each experience the same story, but arrive at interestingly different conclusions.

As this experiment progresses I'll relay more. It will be group has persevered and made it's way through a lengthy CoC campaign, and they did well, so I feel like this new GURPS Surreal High Weirdness campaign may well work as intended. Back when I used to run these in the nineties I had a diehard core of players who had all read and watched the same books and shows that I had, so we were "all on board." Now, thanks to the CoC game, I may have a group that is at least ready to accept what I throw at them.....

*I think Unknown Armies is a close 2nd, but it still provides a coherent narrative structure. You can accomplish surrealism in UA (as you can with CoC), but it's not the core conceit of the game.