craigoxbrow

Star Trek is 45 today. They even found a nice thing to say about Voyager.

Meanwhile, a group in the UK is trying to re-contact the British satellite Prospero sixteen years after the original programme ended. Look at us, we're a space power. :D

So on the week Marvel give us this Thor trailer (private joke caused by Trek RPG and someone's unfamiliarity with the name of an obscure planet: "I am betazed!") and announces friend of Downey and master of raucous character-centric action comedy Shane Black is directing Iron Man 3, let's see how DC are faring by comparison, as someone leaks the Wonder Woman pilot script.

Marvel must really like only answering to one other group in this sort of thing.

BBC4 showed Macbeth with Patrick Stewart in the title role. A modern-ish production riffing on the Russian Revolution and Stalin for its imagery, cutting the ever-popular "he has killed me, mother!" but keeping most of the text, with the three witches as creepy wimple-hatted nurses. Good stuff, obviously not a laugh riot.

Doug Drexler has gone from sharing gorgeous behind-the-scenes pictures of late Trek CG models to doing new things with them. Includes probably the only three seconds ever of what could have been Enterprise season five.

The Edinburgh International Film Festival programme is out, and... Sir Patrick Stewart's doing a Q&A. Sweeeeet.

I thought you might be interested in games I considered for the weekend before going with the Uncharted game. Some of these one-shot notions may recur at a later date.

( If there were ten of me, the GM shortage would have been sorted weeks ago... )

I'm fairly sure that this time last year I had a game planned out and ready to go, and another slowly building up. Now... I got nothin'.

The closest I've had to a thought is "um... superheroes?" Possibly with Icons if I like how it plays.

I'm already running Doctor Who after Deleted proved to be a one-term wonder. That could carry on. Or regenerate with Or regenerate with a partially or entirely different group and setup, for that matter, depending on who'd want to go forward.

I could try again with Star Trek but I got one player last time (hello Matt!) and that was off the back of the movie that made me want to do it in the first place.

Working on an Uncharted style modern Hollow Earth Expedition variant for the Nationals has me wondering if that could go, but it might be a bit limiting due to its only-a-bit-more-than-Deleted Weird Level.

I could always go to a published setting, I suppose. :D Revisit former glories, like Vampire or Adventure! maybe? Matt's talking about Star Wars already so that's probably off-limits.

I dunno.

I blame Joss Whedon for making his latest setting so game-unfriendly. :P

Star Trek failed at the crucial "attracting players" stage, but Deleted is a go with two new and two returns. (Which is as many people as there were D&D games in the afternoon...)

I suppose it recycles a little of my equally rejected Heroes game from the Sunday afternoon slot last year. Normal people thrown into an espionage setting, just without superpowers this time. That'll make it a bit different, I'm sure.

And, of course, the afternoon games in both cases were the ones I was sure I could run more easily. Deleted is substantially more laborious than Star Trek, which was to be nice and episodic planet-of-the-week stuff by and large with space-opera handwaving for any issues that arise. But, I guess the NCC 1701-K ain't ever going to leave spacedock. Nothing like total disinterest to discourage further development of a concept.

So not having a game to GM, I'll be able to offer GMing advice to the Nationals GMs' meeting next week. Naturally.

Also, Brian Bloodaxe from RPGnet said hello. And he didn't get players for a Unisystem game either. :/

( Preliminaries from the costume department )

By comparison, Deleted doesn't lend itself to this kind of work. But it does have a teaser poster.



And I'm also doing pen and ink stuff, mostly prompted by the Remake/Remodel threads at Whitechapel. For example, Harry Houdini fighting a fake robot and the Madagascar Strangler.

So I'm thinking ahead to next year at GEAS, and I had a nice straightforward idea - Deleted, a Bourne-style espionage game of agents and civilians, betrayals and shifting loyalties, isolation and madness, on the run across Europe. Sounds cool.

But now thanks to JJ Abrams I keep having Star Trek ideas.

(Or, more accurately, mad sandbox SF ideas that wouldn't fit into the deliberately constrained setting of The Stars On Fire where there's one alien race and no time travel or speech-making villains or any of that. I set it up that way after The Watch House, which was the biggest mad modern-fantasy-supers-horror-comedy-action sandbox ever. None of them require Vulcans or the Prime Directive or anything, it's just that the Star Trek sandbox has been rebuilt to be less "serious business" and more punching and arguing and running gunfights while flying around in your spaceship.)

Hrm. See what people want to play, I suppose...