And not to be outdone, a new Ghostbusters movie trailer. I have to admit, that I’m 1000% more interested in this than I ever was with that reboot that came out a couple of years ago. Less because it was an all-woman cast – I legitimately don’t care about that – but because they basically completely ignored everything that came before and crapped on the original source material (which sounds familiar with the Star Wars garbage.) This actually honors the original movies. Definitely interested to see what happens next.
Wonder Woman 1984 trailer
Looks pretty interesting. I will admit to not really caring much about her relationship with Steve Trevor, but then, I’m the same when it comes to Superman & Lois Lame. I believe Pedro Pascal is playing Maxwell Lord, so it seems highly likely to me that the Trevor in this actually isn’t Trevor in some capacity since Max is a telepath in the comics; it’s still a toss-up whether Trevor isn’t here at all & Diana is simply imagining him or whether he’s someone entirely different that she’s been conditioned to see/hear as Trevor. Don’t have enough to go on with the Cheetah angle – that’s the other lady talking to her … I want to say Kristen Wiig? But still, Gal Gadot is once again as insanely charismatic as she has been previously …
Wonder if this is going to be another sort of soft reboot?
Black Widow trailer
On the flip side, this actually doesn’t look terrible. It helps that I’m actually invested in the Black Widow character, but … she’s dead. She died in Avengers: Endgame so the point of this is … what, exactly? It reminds me too much of Solo which came out after they’re ganked that character in TFA. This certainly should have come out long before Captain Marvel …
No Time To Die Trailer
I absolutely hate to say this, but … meh. Seriously, this trailer looks horribly, horribly blah … though I will admit to already being predisposed toward disliking this based on how flat out terrible “Spectre” was and all of the media reports about this movie talking about how “woke” it is. That last thing I want to watch is a thoroughly emasculated Bond.
I did like seeing the mini-guns behind the headlights at the end, though. That’s classic Bond right there.
Playing Around With Blog Layouts
Don’t be terribly surprised if (or rather … when) stuff changes. I’ve been playing around with various WordPress themes in order to find one I really, really like instead of just tolerate.
Verge Logo
Created this logo for my Obsidian Portals and rather happy with how it turned out.
Pregame Setup: Faction Cards
There are going to be five players in my upcoming Traveller: The Verge game and, conveniently, there are also five different “factions” (for lack of a better term.) With that in mind, I’m going to have each player select one of these Factions as their originating one during the character creation phase. This will be at the very beginning of the process and characters are not required to remain in that faction beyond character creation.
What I’m currently planning on doing is printing the following and putting them on 3×5 cards, but not allowing any of the players to look at the adjustment side until after they’ve selected their options.
Holiday Blues? Disgust? Irritation? Setting In
I’ve made no secret how much I freaking hate this time of year, especially X-Mas. My dad died around X-Mas back in ’91 so I have certain sense memories tied to this time of the year. As a result, the closer we get to that point, the more … unbalanced (for lack of a better word) I find myself getting. Today and yesterday are especially good examples: out of nowhere, my mood has sharply deteriorated to the point that I came home from work and just immediately secluded myself in my bedroom where I did some reading and tried to focus on things that wouldn’t piss me off. Unfortunately, the book I’m reading – Kurt Schlichter’s Collapse – probably isn’t helping because I can totally see this being the future of the US. My roommate has invited me to accompany him to his family’s Turkey Day thing tomorrow and I’m still debating whether to go or not. On one hand, I do like his family and he’s basically my “brother from a different mother” but on the other, I’ll have to deal with observing family stuff and God, I’m in no mood to deal with that.
New Year’s cannot possibly come soon enough so I can get back to avoiding introspection.
Idling in Neutral
So … I’m in between running games and in a bit of a weird state. I was absolutely ready to be done with the ConsOps game by the last couple of sessions, but now, I’m jonesing to be back in the GM chair, particularly with the Verge game. Unfortunately, I can’t really do a lot but work on setting stuff since we’re doing the Session 0 to develop characters probably after the first of the year. Normally, I build the game around the characters, so this will be a different mindset I need to get into.
Factor in also the rapid approach of the “stupid season” … my dad passed away back in ’91 around X-Mas so I have certain sense memories tied to this abysmal holiday & it doesn’t help that I’ve got some weirdo friends who are the insane happy-happy-glee-glee types about Christmas (and seem to be unable to comprehend how much I actively loath it.)
So I’m in an odd mood. I’m trying to force my brain into something useful but alas…
Game Prep: The Verge, Pt 3
As stated in a previous post, I’m looking at running Mongoose 2nd Edition Traveller for the Friday face-to-face group at some point in the foreseeable future – we’re playing Night’s Black Agents right now, but I’m “on deck” (to use some baseball lingo) when the current GM finishes his run. We’re planning on doing a Session 0 where we all gather together and spin up the characters …
As a result, there’s very, very little I can do in terms of planning because I don’t have characters to plan around. I’m still sort of planning on using Tripwire as a basis, but I sort of have Pirates of Drinax in the back of my mind as well … since we’re not using the actual Traveller universe, but rather a customized universe (more info on the Obsidian Portals site for the game: The Verge), I can’t use it exactly as written, but now … I’m sort of leaning toward Tripwire being a big-ass prequel that leads into a massively revised PoD? I guess we’ll see…
Regarding the characters, I’ve sort of spun up a Character Creation Worksheet that I’ll make a copy of for each player so I can publish this info on the Portals after session 0. Planning on using a lot of 2300 AD character stuff since that’s actually a lot closer to the game I’m looking at …
The bad part here is that I’m really enjoying the NBA game but man, I’m ready to kick this game off…