TV
Yet another THURSDAY LINK DAY!!!
- More DMing advice from Penny Arcade
- The movie Gattaca is being made into a sci-fi, police procedural TV show. Sound pretty cool!
- How we’ll cope (or not) with the Dollhouse cancellation – the 5 Stages of Grief. But, maybe we’ll get more Buffy?
- Setting up your Mac to play PC games.
- Michael Chabon on breaking out of genre and the role of fan-fiction in popular culture.
- What Stormtroopers do on their day off.
- Some guy at the Guardian reads George R. R. Martin for the first time.
- Robin D. Laws does a great real world RPG inspiration. Maybe we should change the way we do ours?
- i09′s take on what SFF books you might like if you liked some recent movies. It’s a cool idea, done well and the recommend some great books!
- Finally, The Onion A.V. Club gives us more geek fun with their New Cult Canon write up on Army of Darkness, a movie I have never seen but now really want to!
Dollhouse cancelled
Apparently Dollhouse has been cancelled but will still see out the second season.
I haven’t watched any of season 2 yet, but still this is a shame. It was an interesting show.
Adventure ideas as TV guide write-ups
Superstar RPG designer Robin Laws has made a pretty awesome suggestion on his blog on the concept of ‘player generated premises’. Basically the idea is that players give a short ‘tv guide’ style suggestion for next weeks adventure. Each session a different player takes a turn to suggest one:
- El-Haumarzeid unwittingly becomes the centre of a new religious movement.
- Lacklow learns that not every problem can be solved with a swift thrust of a blade to the eye when a thiefmaster’s convocation is held in a mysterious temple where violence is impossible.
- A normal mission suddenly gains deadly stakes when Lacklow learns that one of his missing family members may be involved. Are they a hostage? Slaves? Or something more sinister?
- Saltiamara discovers a little more about the potential destiny of the orc child she adopted.
- The local mafia tries to convince Shoryu, in his role as a pit fighter trainer, to help set up a bunch of games.
All the above are from Robin’s post – I particularly like the first of the Lucklow ideas.
The main problems I see with this are a) the issues around weaving these into a single campaign and more importantly b) the players who will do the most with this aren’t the the players who need the most help.
Players who can come up with snappy ideas about the direction of the game and their characters don’t need tricks to get them into the campaign. It’s those players who do need the help (in my experience the friend of a player who has never played before) who will never come up with quick ideas like these. Still it’s a cool way to help take the load off the GM as well…
And some TV and movie links
Just a couple of interesting news items:
- Apparently Dollhouse has been put on a brief hiatus due to the upcoming sweeps week. Hopefully the fact that its DVR ratings have been huge means that it will finish up the season – at least.
- An Iain M. Banks story has been picked up to be made into a film! Bank’s short story ‘A gift from the Culture’ from the collection The State of The Art is apparently going to be made into a film. More here and here (tip from A Dribble of Ink). No word on timing or anything else. I’ve read the story but can’t remember a thing about it and I think the book is on my parents shelf half a world away. Anyone else remember much?
Geeky TV
As the days get longer down here in NZ they get shorter in the US, which means that the Fall TV premiers are just round the corner! There is a large bunch of genre TV starting up this year as well of the return of some of my favs from last year.
Amazingly Dollhouse returns next week for it’s 13 episode second season. Despite all the evidence it was renewed at the last minute and from all reports the show is going to be building on the still of the last half of the first season. I finally got to watch the now slightly mythical “lost” 13th episode, Epitaph One, the other day and if it continues down that track it’s going to be great. Looking forward to see what they come up with.
Not so amazingly Fringe, from sci fi golden boy J J Abrams, started it’s second season on Thursday and will no doubt provide more mind bending, reality twisting, horrific plots. I was a tad disappointed by the season finisher last year, though I think that might be because the big shocker finish just doesn’t resonate as much with me as it would with American viewers. However I can’t wait to see more of Walter’s hijinks and am looking forward to seing how they play out the twist in his relationship with Peter.
Of the new crop of shows I’m looking forward to Flash Forward and the re-boot of V. So watch this space to see whether they’re worth watching, or in my case buying the DVDs for.
Seven more to the mix
Yesterday, US time, seven more parts of the HBO pilot for A Game of Thrones were cast. They all seem to be actors of relative unknowness this time round, though by all accounts very strong. An article over at The Hollywood Reporter runs through them all, but for ease of use I’ll list them here:
- Jaime Lannister – played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
- Daenerys – played by Tamzin Merchant
- Robb Stark – played by Richard Madden
- Ser Jorah Mormont – played by Iain Glen
- Theon Greyjoy – played by Alfie Allen
- Sansa Stark – played by Sophie Turner
- Arya Stark – played by Maisie Williams
Some of these actors are such unknowns that they barely have a web pressence at all. So for more info head over to George R. R. Martin’s Not a Blog to read up on them.
This is all very good news. The finished product is still a long way away, but it looks like it’ll be pretty grand once it gets here!
Modern vampires – the neutering.
I recently finished George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream – a vampire novel set on steamboats in the Pre-Civil War South of the US (some spoilers follow). I recently watched season 1 of True Blood. I’ve read a bit about, and heard people discussing, the Twilight series. And I was always a big fan of Angel.
So it was with some interest that I read this article about how vampires have lost their bite, as it were. Because all of these examples feature vampires who are trying to redeem themselves, especially through their lack of human blood-letting.
Largely due to goths and Anne Rice, I’ve always found vampires sort of annoying. But last year I made a vampire the big bad of a WFRP campaign I ran and I’d happily use them again. But the article’s right – vampires are far more interesting as charming but powerful and diabolical monsters than as safe but sexy wimps.
Let’s make vamps a threat again – no friendly vampires looking to reunite with humanity. No sexy vampire boyfriends. No animal blood drinking softies. Let’s get vampires in our games and our fiction who rip out throats, seduce and then slay and do all the nasty vampire things we know and love.
As a side note, I’d really recommend Fevre Dream as well – it’s very well written and having read so much of Martin’s work through A Song of Ice & Fire, it was interesting to see him tackle something quite different.
More HBO A Game of Thrones casting news
Straight from the horses mouth (as it were). George R R Martin has confirmed two really key roles for the HBO pilot have been filled.
Another huge piece has fallen into place for the HBO pilot of A GAME OF THRONES — we have signed Sean Bean to play the part of Lord Eddard Stark.
For King Robert I Baratheon, we’ve got Mark Addy, a veteran British actor of stage and screen that many of you may remember from his fine turn in A KNIGHT’S TALE.
This is wicked news. The casting alone for this work feels more like they are preparing for a movie, not a TV show. It also makes me extremely happy that they are bringing in some serious talent to give these characters the dramatic weight that they’d need to work as well on screen as they do in the books.
The rest of the news can be read over on Martin’s LiveJournal, Not A Blog.
Dollhouse – the end?
As promised some time ago I haven’t been blogging weekly about Dollhouse, the latest show created by Joss Whedon. However with the final episode being shown last week in the US (not to forget about the 13th episode, but the season is over) and the likelihood of a second season remaining slim I thought I’d try to digest my thoughts on the show. If you are staying spoiler free don’t jump below the cut as I’ll be talking about the season as a whole, and won’t spare details when needed.
More news about A Song of Ice and Fire
It seems that George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is all sorts of hotness at the moment. First the new, shiny RPG from Green Ronin finally came out, and then (as Nick reported in this post) the HBO series based on the first book in the series, Game of Thrones, is starting to get traction.
Talking of which the Hollywood Reporter has this small article giving the first names (other than Martin’s) to be attached to the project. It seems that the star and director of The Station Agent are joining together again, but for something quite different. I think that Peter Dinklage as Tyrion is a very good start at casting. Looking forward to hearing more news.
Now over to the computer game world and it seems that the rights have been obtained by a company I’ve never heard of, Cyanide. At the moment I’m not going to get in anyway excited as in all honesty I think these books would be extremely difficult to turn into a computer game. Possibly you could do a Total War type thing and have the houses facing off across the battle field, but I’m not sure. The thing about the books I enjoy so much is that they are made up of complex webs of characters which would be extremely difficult to emulate. However the setting that Martin has created is very rich and it will be interesting to see how it pans out.