Walking Dead still not doing it for me

Read this comment in a (non-gaming) pop culture forum today, and it sums up my feelings on the episode last night.


"None of the deaths had any impact. It felt like a show in panic mode, thinking everything sucks so they have to kill a bunch of characters off. T-Dawg getting replaced by T-Dawg II is hilarious."

The writing is just god aweful. Things like the Guv'na's easy wipe out of trained military men (we know by now that in real life, such as in the middle east, panicy soldiers shoot first and ask questions later) last week is a big deal breaker on its own. Just another example of things happening because the writers need them to happen, like The Joker in The Dark Knight. I hate that kind of writing.

Michonne is an interesting comic book character, but in the reality the TV show presents, she seems really out of place. If this was a movie she would be the main hero and everybody else would be supporting characters. She is also mostly portrayed as smart and savvy, but she seems to put all her cards on the table by questioning the governor about the soldier encounter. More poor writing.

I know it's TV and writing often sucks on even decent shows, but damn. I guess I should not watch really good shows before watching this. This last weekend I finally watched the first few eps of Homeland. That is MUST watch stuff. Writing and character development is off the hook. From now on I won't be catching WD in it's time slot. I'll be catching up on it On Demand later in the week while doing other stuff I think. Nothing about it is must watch to me, and I don’t think it’s going to capture the magic of that pilot episode. If this is the best they can do, then it’s all downhill from here. I really don’t care what happens to anybody. This is in stark contrast to other great shows, such as Breaking Bad, where each and every character is full and interesting, even mundane ones.

And as for Talking Dead, they really need to stop having producers as guests. They suck the friggin life out of it. They never have anything to add. The moronic Chris Hardwick constantly asking questions he knows they will not answer. And the actors usually suck too. Most actors need really good interviewers so as to not come up forced and hammy. It's at it's most fun when geek comedians such as Patton Oswalt are there to add a little color (although Drew Carey was a total dud).

I was so excited the other year when I heard about a zombie TV series being made. But it turns out for that to be good and outstanding they need compelling characters and strong writing, which this show totally lacks. I really wish they could have done a show based on Max Brook’s World War Z, using clever filming methods to stay on budget. What a great, international anthology series that would have made. A different story and setting each week or season. Dare to dream.

Scarface vs. The Zombie Invasion!!!

Oye me, Chico, more Zombie Fun!!!

A little something to hold us zombie fans over till World War Z comes out. Hey Chico, get the Yayo!

Tegel Manor Dynasty

Tegel Manor is one of those love it or hate it old school items. Even by Judges Guild standards, it was an especially wacky and crazy funhouse dungeon. It’s so chock full of wild shit (a huge undead, demon, and monster population in a relatively small area), it has the almost random feel of something written up on a weekend of heavy marijuana usage. I mean, just the butler in one of the front main rooms is described as a “Balrog Ghost.” That seems so random. And do demons like Balrogs even have ghosts when they die? Don’t they just go crying back to hell when you kill them?

I guess I can’t throw stones. I added even more weird crap to the mix as a very young teen with this. I had Green Warhoon Martians with radium rifles in one of the big rooms off the main ballroom, and pretty sure I had some kind of robot created by a mad scientist roaming around as well. As I got a bit older, I stopped trying to use it as a dungeon to be explored, and used it here and there over the years mostly as a mission based location. Characters arriving to find an item lost in the Wizard Tower or something, and only moving into a small area of the Manor and then leaving.

In these OD&D games I’ve been doing here and there since last year, I’ve thought about Tegel a bit more. I think all those old Dark Shadows episodes I’ve been watching on Netflix have affected me.

I thought of using the super-haunted house for these sessions, but the problem was my OD&D games are set around 200 years prior to the current time period of my 1st edition game setting. So rather than expect that the manor has been around in maximum haunting form for several hundred years, I thought that it might be interesting to check out the manor and the surrounding area before it was taken fully over by evil and the Tegel family (yes, I do not use the name “Rump”) more or less died out. A sort of Tegel supernatural soap opera like Dark Shadows.

I decided that the evil curse on the house/land began very early on in its existence. That even the first few generations knew something was wrong, and minor haunting went down. The house grew in size from additions, and the family carried on, despite certain cries, screams, moans, and whimpers from older parts of the mansion at night. And the people of Tegel Village carried on as well, generation after generation being used to weirdo happenings.

So I took four family members from portraits that were together in the list: Lady Rubianna, Riven, Rotcher, and Ruang. I don’t believe the 1-100 portraits are in fact linear and meant to be taken as having been in order of family members as they came along, but I thought it would be easier to take some who where next to each other in the list. I kind of also went with the description in that entry to some degree, thus “Rotcher the Radiant” is a handsome, charismatic, and fun loving person while alive. Here’s the family members in question and what I did with them for the current, living lords of Tegel.

Lady Rubianna: Mother of Riven, Grandmother to Rotcher and Ruang. Fled the mansion as a young lady 20 year ago, to have her child Riven in the big city of Tanmoor.
Lord Riven: when he reached adulthood, took his mother back with him to Tegel to reclaim the birthright. Brought loyal Tanmoor butler “Slappington” as well. Married a local girl soon after returning, and had two boys, Rotcher and Ruang

Rotcher and Ruang: Riven’s children with his wife Rhian (who has no Tegel Manor portrait). Rotcher is happy and handsome, Ruang is dark and brooding, taking delight in the suffering of things. Rotcher is a hit with the other local teens, and on Friday nights Riven lets a chaperone (in this case Terry’s elvish fighter/MU “Rose”) take them on an outing to the Tegel Tavern.

There are portions of the mansion that are now very haunted, and dangerous for strangers to wander into it. Even for Tegel family members; Lady Rubianna one day wandered into the East Wing, and was possessed by the vampire portrait of an ancestor when she stopped to admire it. Since then she has laired in a nearby sea cave, and has been gathering undead to pester the land.

So with Terry’s Rose character in place working for Lord Riven as a bodyguard to the teens, the rest of the party are a group of adventurers passing through on their way to the big city. This particular one-shot (more or less) is supposed to be telling a story to a degree, so a bit of a railroad job compared to my dungeon sessions for OD&D. So I just thought that a couple of decent role-play situations, combined with some breezy location based fights, would fill up the session and give me some good “phone it in” ease of DM’ing in a semi-public setting. Nothing too complicated for me, or ponderous for the players.

So after camping near some gypsies, and getting their fortunes read (including some semi-vogue warnings of what might be in store in Tegel), the party came up on the village proper. They passed the large monestary that is to the north on the Tegel area map, but alas there was no monk character so didn’t feel compelled to get them to go there. They decended upon the town hollow, and found zombies prowling the town square in the rain. Nice combat (wherin one character almost died, but I decided to go for -10 and die rather than the -5 I had been using for OD&D), and got the party involved in Rose and the Tegel kids who were at the tavern on their Friday outing. So a bit of tavern role-playing, with the happy go lucky teens of Tegel hanging out with Rotcher and Ruang, and the older townsfolk brooding in their beers over strangers and walking dead being afoot.

Lord Riven came with some guards from his manor eventually (the characters learned that the local constabulary were cowardly Keystone Cops who rarely showed up when there was monster trouble) to investigate the zombie fuss, and offered the PC’s a job. In the less-haunted part of Tegel Manor, Riven had butler Slappington serve drinks, while he and his wife skittishly told of the mother possessed, and the need to stop her haunting the area for the sake of the Tegel kids if not the village folk. The party agreed, and went to spend the night at a two-story several room guest house nearby.

The PC’s took up residence in some of the rooms and the lounge, falling asleep to the occasional howl or spooky laughter from the haunted parts of Tegel Manor across the way. The vampiric Lady Rubianna came to Rose in the master bedroom, and offered her info on some of her own family secrets (Rose came to Tegel because her uncle had mysteriously died in service to Riven and the family) if she convinced the party to leave Tegel. She fled the guest house before summoning a hoard of rats to attack all in the house. That was a fun little scramble, with PC’s fighting rat packs as a thief character ran around behind the scenes using secret passages in the walls.

The next morning it was off to the sea cliff, where before the stairs down to the waves they had to pass a local mausoleum. A small hoard of skeletons, led by a couple of wights, came pouring out of the mausoleum to combat the party. The cleric of St. Cuthbert tried a bit of turning here and there, but the battle was ultimately won through cold steel and elbow grease. Fun fight.

Then down into the caves, to first face Rubianna’s Wraith, then on to the lady herself. It was a fairly quick battle, as the cleric used hold person and the save was failed. I know, I would probably not let a hold person work on a full vampire, but Lady Rubianna was still alive and human, just possessed by the vampire spirit. After a bit of treasure looting, the group dragged Lady Rubianna out to the daylight, where the ancestor spirit retreated back to its portrait, and Lady Rubianna was cleansed of evil and returned to her family. Happy little ending to a nice little session.

I’ve really loved this idea of a Dark Shadows inspired Tegel Manor prequel setting, and I’m for sure going to do more with it. Plenty of opportunities for chilling adventures as the current tenants of Tegel Manor try to hold off the encroaching evil; even though we all know how it will eventually turn out in the long run. So more Tegel Manor family fun in the future I hope, with at least some of the same great players.

Zombie Invasion Dream (sans zombies)

Last night I had an interesting zombie dream. It had no zombies in it.

Now, I should have been dreaming about Mickey Mouse. I’ve had a couple of people offering to buy my Nintendo Wii (see this recent post) from me, since it has been sitting in the closet collecting dust since I won it at the office Xmas party last year (this year I just won a shiatsu massage pillow from Sharper Image). I decided yesterday that I had better try a real game out on it, so I went to Blockbuster and picked out Epic Mickey to rent for a few days. Now, I am not a huge fan of the Mouse from the Disney House. I find him bland and lacking in any kind of depth (unlike the always awesome Goofy), nothing more than a corporate shill. And I haven’t been to Disneyland since I was a teenager there on a date (I hate lines and crowds and phony baloney cutesiness, so there ya go).

Anyway, I got it because of all the hype, and I played over three hours of this Mickey Mouse game, and that much video gaming at night will usually lend itself to dreams inspired by that game for me, but no go. It was zombie apocalypse all the way.

But this is the weird part. No zombies. Oh, they were out there all right. I mean, my dream self knew it for a fact. I don’t know if this was because my mind did not want to scare me. I’m pretty zombie-out, actually. I’m enjoying The Walking Dead on TV, but really, after I saw the excellent Shaun of the Dead, and then read World War Z (and also listened to a lot of the audio book for that), I figured I had experienced all I needed to in the world of animated corpses. So I’m thinking my brain just decided to go for the human element. It was all about dealing with other survivors.

Early on I was alone on an office building rooftop. I started out with a handgun. It was a glock at first I think, but at some point when I checked the bullets it was more like a revolver. But either way there I was, looking down on the city and seeing other people running around, or on other rooftops. The zombies I guess were down on the streets where I wasn’t looking.

Soon I was joined by a hot blond chick. I liked that. I lead her around by the hand as we left the roof and went down into the building, which seemed to be not an office building, but made up entirely of stairwells, hallways, and huge indoor parking areas. Nameless blonde and I were soon joined by others, and we all discussed our options and things to do. At one point a side door was opening, and I ran over to cover the door with my gun. I tried to shoot, but I didn’t know about the safety. Good thing, because it was a big black security dude. He drew on me, but luckily he did not shoot. Maybe he didn’t know about the safety either.

My group and I came across some other folk in the parking area, and it was on the verge of violence. But I spoke up as the voice of reason. “We need to come together. We are the survivors, and maybe the last humans around. We need each other.”

That was about it. What a gyp. I can’t fly in my dreams, and I guess I can’t run n’ gun on zombies either. Maybe this was a lesson for me though. Maybe my brain wants me to think things through and take a more peaceful path. But shit, I really would have loved to have shot that gun at least once in my dream. I bet I would have, if I had been playing Halo instead of a damn game about a helium-voiced rodent.

WW2? Spice that boring crap up!

By Gar, it’s been awhile since I piggybacked on one of Grognardia James’ posts, so I thought I would glom on today.

I so very rarely think about World War 2 settings for RPG’s. Why would I? Although I like to watch the occasional documentarily or WW2 movie, this is not a genre I have had a lot of love for. A lot of gamers my age and older cannot really say the same. In this scene, WW2 fanatics are legion. Whether it was hanging out at Aero Hobbies as a kid, or in my gaming groups of the 80’s and 90’s, there was always a WW2 lover in my groups. More often than not, these were older guys that had started out with war gaming. SPI and that kind of shit. You will actually still see a lot of that at little gameday events and cons. Older dudes standing around terrain tables pushing tanks around little French villages (Achtung! Where are the pretty French fraulines?), while the little kids at the other table being forced to play D&D with their dads glance over at the tank models with longing.

War is hell, but I like my hell with good doses of Demogorgon and Orcus, thank you very much. But this had me wondering – if I was going to run a WW2 setting RPG, what would I do to make it interesting enough for my players, and more importantly ME, to sit down and work on it?

Well, for one thing, the 1982 game mentioned at Grognardia, Behind Enemy Lines, doesn’t seem to account for a lot of things you would want in your character in a more modern game. Apparently in BEL, you don’t get much in the way of skills outside military ones that you need for missions. Things like Animal Husbandry, and Play Music Instrument, would be just the thing to flesh out a G.I. Joe. You’d want to have “Ox” with his great strength and pro boxing skills, or “Sketch” with is cartooning ability. Your platoon should have “Strings” the negro guitar blues man, and don’t forget “Joey Provoloney” the New Jersey born company cook who always finds a way to make a delicious lasagna out in the field.

OK, now you have your fleshed-out Joes, but what about scenarios? Well, they ain’t gonna be your run of the mill mission to grenade that nazi bunker on the hill. Here are some ideas I would inject if I had to run a WW2 setting:

Zombies, zombies, zombies! The dead are suddenly rising all over the world, and no where on earth are they more plentiful than on the battlefields of Europe or islands in the Pacific. Can you imagine the dead starting to rise on the beaches of Normandy? I betcha Tom Hanks wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about finding Private Ryan anymore!

Dino Wars! Nazi scientist have recreated dinos using mosquito’s in amber, and they are afield! Pterodactyls over England! T. Rex’s on the Russian front! And don’t forget the 50 foot Megalodon Sharks to attack those yank subs out near Bora Bora.

Gigantogantua: the Japanese have unleashed a giant lizard/turtle/gorilla from their ancient legends, and aimed it directly at the west coast of California. “We destroy yankee by destroying his true heart and soul – Horrywood! Banzia!

Heroes and Villains: the world’s first true superheroes are sent by the allies to fight the supermen of the axis of evil. What is that ruckus up in the sky? Why, it’s Captain U.S. vs. Commandant Creepo!

Monster Blitz Squad: those dirty krauts have resurrected the famous monsters of Europe to join the SS Stormtrooper squad of monsters! Dracula! Frankenstein! Wolfman! Hell, those sausage dog eating bastards have even recruited Baba Yaga and her chicken hut! We’re doomed, unless we can count on the knowledge of that doddering old Professor Soandso the government stuck with us.

Alien Axis: “they” have arrived in their flying saucers, but whose side will “they” be on?

So there you have it. Maybe WW2 gaming might not be so boring after all. Do you have any ideas?