It’s set up is pretty simple. You get 5 people in a room (sense of humor and ability to poke fun essential). One person will GM the other 4 will be two groups of best friends, one supernatural and the other human. Add a large dash of angsty teenage romance, shake vigorously and serve.

It’s important to note that you don’t actually need to have read the source material to get this game. Watched Buffy and seen the drama of Buffy’s relationship with Angel, or Willow’s with Oz? Ever heard of this small book series called Twilight? Then you’ll get the game. Find your inner teen, ramp them up 10 fold and make them as self obsessed as possible and you’ll be all good. The author obviously does know the source material well though, so if you want to get in the right frame of mind check out the Recommended Reading and Recommended Viewing section of the Appendix.

SKMTFM is elegant in it’s simplicity, which is actually really refreshing in a pick up game. Many other games I’ve read that are meant to be easy to just jump into generally aren’t and get bogged down by too many rules and game design discussion. It’s a small book (40 pages), but covers everything you need to know about running the game, hand outs and character sheets. There is even an intro scenario to help you out if you find the idea of making it all up on the fly a bit daunting. It’s also been very well designed, which is a plus.

I would recommend going through the whole process though, as that is a large part of the fun. Deciding on your supernaturals, who the characters are and what their secret agendas are is hugely entertaining. I’ve played it three times, twice as the supernatural love interest (a goddess of fire and a were-panther) and once as the human best friend.

Over all this is a hugely fun game for when you have players not show up, you need a break from killing orcs or want to run something at a convention. If this sounds like you then pop over to Lulu or RPGNow and grab a copy!

(Disclaimer: I know the author well, game with her regularly and was given a review copy of the game.)

So far there have been two Transmissions. Issue 1 focused on the work of Nigel Kneale, creator of the Quatermass series which was a huge influence to Hot War creator Malcolm Craig. Issue 2 focuses on UK politics in the early 1960s and how they might have flowed into post-apocalyptic London.

Each Transmission also includes a pre-written game set up, with appropriate characters so you can give Hot War a go with minimal set up.

They’re both well written and useful for Hot War games. So go check them out.

As you can tell from the trailer this movie is pretty unabashed and it’s title character is also convinced of his own greatness.

I enjoyed the explosions, Scarlett Johansson, Robert Downey Junior and the total over the topness of the whole thing. I thought they were a little heavy handed in the way they tied it all in with the upcoming (and potentially Joss Whedon directed, though that’s a whole other blog post) Avengers movie.

For a bit of mindless fun about a narcissistic genius who dons a shiny suit and flies around, you should totally go see it.

To start with the World this house is going to inhabit is not George R R Martin’s Westeros. I’d decided a while ago that as two of the players hadn’t read the books and as I wanted them to have as much freedom as they wanted to mess up the world that I’d make my own setting, which borrows very heavily from George R R Martin’s masterwork. So I filled the players in a little on what to expect, and then we lept straight in with total random rolls to let the dice decide the history of the House.

It’s a very simple system which has a huge amount of depth in it’s small series of tables. Essentially each house is created much like characters. Players or the GM  roll 7d6 and that decides the house ‘stats’. Each house is made up of Defense, Influence, Lands, Law, Population, Power and Wealth. The result of each 7d6 gives your house their starting values. These are then adjusted depending on the realm the house is located in. Finally you decide on your house’s history.

I think this is the element of  house creation I like the most. You roll 3d6 this time and it gives you a broad event type that happened to the house. Things like Glory or Favour or even Madness. These give you ideas on how to develop your house and if you’re the GM gives you good story seeds to add flavour.

Most interestingly, to me at least, is that this whole process is deeply collaborative. The night that we rolled up the house I was expecting it to take an hour or so. It took 3 hours and all three of us were rivited the whole time coming up with reasons and stories. This whole section of the game is extremely easy to use and I expect will help hugely when developing other NPC houses.

Here is the coat of arms on of the other players created for House Argent, their house. If you want to see more about how the House turned out, feel free to download the pdf I prepared for the players.

The show didn’t really start with too much of a bang. Joss Whedon shows always have a season wide arc, a theme that gives continuity while allowing the freedom to duck off that path from time to time. The first half of Dollhouse was extremely episodic. Which when you’re talking about an organisation that programs people means that you have a lot of potential episodes. They were mostly pretty fun, and certainly entertaining but where was the punch? Where were the big questions about personhood?

Those questions arrived in grand style with the “game changing” 6th episode, Man on the Street. Suddenly were weren’t just talking about the adventures of one plucky active, we were looking at the Dollhouse as a whole. It’s really a shame that the show had to wait till the half way point to really start telling the stories that the creators had obviously been wanting to tell. I’m not going to wade into the conversation around whether Fox did or did not hijack Dollhouse in the first half of it’s season, but those more formulaic first episodes really didn’t do the concept justice.

There is so much discussion about the concept, a highly illicit and underground organisation who programs people at the whim of the extremely wealthy which uses the proceeds of this high end slavery ring to finance scientific research for an even shadier parent company, that I don’t have a whole lot more to add. To get caught up though check out io9.com who have some very insightful commentary.

However what I will say is that Dolhouse showed through it’s first (and maybe only) season that TV can be a medium to ask some tough questions on the nature of a person and whether the ends truly justify the means. While technology was at the heart of the Dollhouse I don’t really see the show as saying that use of technology will make us less human, but more that technology is an amazing tool that has no sense of morals or ethics. That is up to the people who use it.

The cast of people in the Dollhouse are an impressive array of conflicted, complicated characters. They are aware of the morally grey area they inhabit and yet constantly convince themselves that what they’re doing is a good thing. It’s rather strange to root for a character who you find so morally reprehensible. Topher (the programmer) is the character that embody this the best I think. He’s a loveable, quirky character in best Whedon form who also rips peoples personalities from their brains and then plugs a new one in. Not quite so loveable any more. By the end of the season we are starting to glimpse a little of the self-loathing that he must struggle with. After all, as one Doll asks, why did he programme her to hate him so much?

At the end of the day Dollhouse turned into a complex show that actually required you to think about things, rather than always getting the answer handed to you. There are more stories to tell and hopefully a second season will be signed off so that everyone involved gets that chance. If not, well I’ll always have the DVDs.

Firstly it is only 17 pages long, but they are really good quality. The adventure contains the main NPCs, a location and a well thought out number of plot hooks and potential events which all surround an imminent wedding between two houses.

The thing that really struck me was that as an adventure it was a quick easy read and I didn’t spend my whole time thinking about how much unneeded material there was. The NPCs were well fleshed out with good belivable back stories. The reasons given for why the PCs would even be there plausible and most importantly (for me at least) the writter wasn’t trying to tell me how to run the game or spoon feeding when each event would happen. This lack of rail roading meant that I would be able to slip this adventure in at any point that I felt I needed a week off, with out needing extensive re-writes before use.

Adventures at this length feel like they would take between 3-4 hours to play through, which is exactly the length I want my pre-written adventures to come in at. So I was really happy that I picked this up and I hope this is indicitive of things to come.

You can get the adventure through Green Ronin’s store for US$4.95.

The Tine Soldier

The Tin Soldier brands itself as ‘Australian’s greatest games store’. I’m not sure that’s true but they are pretty good. I’m not sure if it started as a wargaming shop, but that’s certainly the emphasis. And unlike most wargaming shops it’s not all about the Warhammer and 40k minis. There’s a big range of historical minis here, including stacks of really impressive painted ones for sale. There’s a decent but not overwhelming selection of RPGs and a few board games and the like. It’s a nice open shop as well, and the staff are friendly and helpful.What is pretty impressive is the collection of military history books they have in the second room. It’s huge and seemed very comprehensive with lots of things ranging from popular stuff to the Osprey range to serious scholarly works.

I didn’t buy anything (pay day is next week) and it seemed slightly on the expensive side to me but I havent done an exact price comparison to be sure. Upon reflection I’m sure it’s not Australia’s best games shop, although it might be Australia’s best wargames shop and it’s almost definitely Australia’s best historical wargames shop. It is however the sort of gaming shop you’d want to live near – solid and dependable.

The book is well laid out with the first chapter being a nice quick(ish) overview of the history of the setting. It doesn’t go too far into the back ground through which is good if you’re keen to just make your own way in this rich world invented by George R.R. Martin. It then gives an overview of the game rules, followed by a really great character creation section (more on this in a moment) before getting into the nitty gritty of characters, the Noble house, intrigue rules, combat, warfare and a bit of advice for the GM or Narrator as that role is called here.

I’m not going to dissect each and every chapter, if you want that much detail I highly recommend you go get the pdf, however I’m going to touch on the stand out parts briefly.

Firstly character creation. Like a number of more ‘traditional’ games that have been released recently AISFRP has incorporated a really nice element of collaborative game creation with the creation of the Noble house that all of the PCs will belong to. This process means that all of the PCs have an instant reason to be together and to give a damn. It also means from a player perspective that you get a chance to let the GM know what kind of game you want to play in. In the A Song of Ice and Fire books the house a character belongs to has a huge impact on their place in the world, Green Ronin have tried hard to recreate that in their game. The rest of character creation is pretty standard but one nice touch is that depending on your age you have a set number of experience points to use to create your PC. So the younger you are, the less powerful your abilities and skills but the more opportunity you have to give your self special qualities that will help you out during play. It makes age relevant in a way I haven’t seen before.

Talking of skills and abilities one of the things I’ve liked about this game since I first picked up the quick start rules is that rather than the standard array of abilities (such as strength, dexterity, intelligence etc) skills and abilities are combined. It’s a slightly different take on a well established character element and one that I think will not only simplify player’s character sheets, but also make things faster in game.

The only other element of the rules I’m going go into any detail on is the intrigue system. Essentially in a game set in the Song of Ice and Fire world you need to have a way to re-create the great battles of wits that are often even more devastating than the pitched battles. In ASIFRP they’ve done just that, essentially making the combat system work in personal battles. It is in no way meant to replace the standard roleplaying elements of conversations or attempted seductions, however it is there for when those conversations or seductions have something riding on them. However I have a suspicion that the first few times it’s used there will be a lot of looking things up and referring to the rules.

So there you have it. I haven’t read the whole book yet, sections like the chapter on warfare aren’t overly of interest to me, but everything I have read is really solid and well thought through. It’s a game I look forward to running both in some shorter one-shot adventures and a longer campaign.

However this isn’t a review of the source material, but the movie that was made from it. I think that’s an important point about Watchmen – The Movie. It is not based on or inspired by the comic, it’s made from it. It has tried to so lovingly recreate the book that in many places it seems to have stifled the end product.

Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate it. I though that it was extremely well done, and as Nick says in his post, if they were going to make a movie of the comic, this was about the best movie you could make. However despite the obvious homage and great casting and respect held by the director and everyone involved it felt kind of souless to me. The fight scenes were fun but the under current of darkness and hopelessness that flowed through the comic just didn’t seem to be there for me. It also leads me to wondering why they had to make a movie of it in the first place. Comics by their nature often seem like very well actualised story boards, and in Watchmen it’s like they skipped that part of the movie making process and just used the comic (with the exception of a few scenes).

I’m also starting to kind of understand why Alan Moore might get so pissy about these movies mad from his comics. After all they don’t really add anything new, so why bother?

I also have to say that while I generally love comic book movies (even the bad ones) I am starting to get a little tired of the fan boy, wankfest sex scenes that always turn up. I’m just saying…

Despite that though I find myself wanting to see it again, though I might wait for the DVD. So I guess I didn’t hate it that much.