Friday Night Videos: Long Distance Requests

Kind of mixing my 80s music mediums here.

I am pleased with the reactions I am getting for this feature.  I have often joked that my Appendix N consists mostly of 80s music and bad sci-fi movies.  I am starting to think I am not the only one!

I want to lead of though with this one.
I finally found a copy of the intro.  Really, could anything be more 80s than this?  The 8-bit sounding sound effects. The neon. The lone rocker dude against the world...yeah.


So here are some requests I have had since starting this.
Have a request?  Send it to me.
Have a long distance dedication for next week, Valentines Day Weekend?  Send that too!

Knightsky requested two songs. First up, Chris de Burgh's Don't Pay the Ferryman.




Next is Murray Head's One Night in Bangkok from the concept album Chess.



Murray Head is also the older brother of Anthony Stewart Head.

Rainswept requested Men Without Hats' Safety Dance.
While the video is more Ren Faire than it is D&D, I do have some good memories of this one and playing D&D as well.





Based on this weeks earlier Sol Invictus post, here is a request. Billy Thorpe's "Children of the Sun"


Might be better for a trippy near future space age game.  Or a 70s fueled psychic game.

Friday Night Videos: Iron Maiden

Ok.
Last week went great.  Had some good hits and some requests.
So lets get back to it.

This week I want to feature a band who I, and many others, consider to be the quintessential Dungeons & Dragons band.

Iron Maiden!

I was introduced to Iron Maiden via my Jr. High School DM.  He was a huge Iron Maiden fan and lived close to the Capitol Records/EMI plant. So we would ride our bikes there and shift through the discarded tapes that would litter the back lot.  We found tons of Kenny Rogers and The Tubes, but finding Iron Maiden was a treat.

He would come up with adventures based on the album covers (at the time he had all five of their first four studio albums and "Maiden Japan") and songs.  Later when we got to High School and a new DM (we both kept on as players) we would work "Eddie" into a our universe as an undying assassin. I don't think we ever came up with stats.    

Somewhere in Time was my favorite album of those days.  So first up is one of my favorites, Wasted Years. This video also features a pictorial history of Eddie up to that point.



"Woe to you, Oh Earth and Sea, for the Devil sends the
beast with wrath, because he knows the time is short...
Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the
beast for it is a human number, its number is Six hundred and sixty six."

Honestly. Could have anything sounded cooler to a bunch D&D obsessed 13 yearolds with an healthy obsession with the occult?  No. Nothing else was a cool as Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast.



No discussion of Iron Maiden and my early D&D days can happen without at least acknowledging The Trooper. This was my DM's favorite song and the one video we would wait for before playing.



And another great one from the time, Flight of Icarus.



And my first request, from Mercurius Aulicus, Fear of the Dark:



Going through all these videos and memories I realize I have enough for a Part 2!  So look forward to that at some future date.

Have a request?  Hit me up!
Want to be a guest VJ (video jockey for those that don't remember MTV)? Also hit me up!

Friday Night Videos: Werewolves

This is something I wanted to start the year off with, but for some reason didn't get it set up.

Maybe it is the age I started playing or the time, but there was a strange alchemy that has forever link D&D (and most RPGs) and music together for me.  When I was in Jr. High we would not start playing until we saw at least one Iron Maiden video on the then commercial free MTV.  And in High School it was through D&D that I was introduced to scores of new bands and music that I remain a fan of to this day.

So it is with that in mind that I introduce my newest weekly feature.
Friday Night Videos.  I'll post a couple of videos, maybe around a theme, and talk about how they tied into my games.  I won't just focus on the 80s, though there will be a lot of that, nor will my focus be purely D&D related.

For my first post I want to include a video that I first saw on the show "Friday Night Videos" on NBC back in the day.  Just like the original, I'll have this up on Friday nights at 11:30 PM Central time.

First up is Ozzy Osbourne with the title track from his 1983 album, Bark at the Moon.
Honestly to this day I can write about werewolves and NOT think about this video.  I put this album on repeat when I was working on the monster section of Ghosts of Albion.



My Jr. High DM introduced me to Ozzy and my High School DM introduced me to Rush.
Of course the song has more to do with paranoia (and Paranoia) and a police state, I took it more literally as an enemy within yourself.  From 1984's Grace Under Pressure, "The Enemy Within".



Finally. Really how can we talk about werewolves and not include Warren Zevon's classic.
Excitable Boy was one of those albums that my DM threw at me and told me I had to listen to it before I came back for our next game (we were doing the Slave Lords adventures then).  The album is fantastic and it is almost regrettable that people usually only know "Werewolves of London".  You do get people that know about "Lawyers, Guns and Money", but most don't know what album it is from.   "Lawyers, Guns and Money" of course I used in my Buffy/Angel games.

"Werewolves of London" is honored in my games a number of ways but the most obvious is my vampire run strip club Mayfairs.



So what songs remind you of gaming?  Put in your requests below and I might pick them up on next weeks Friday Night Videos!  (People posting on Friday nights get to move to the front of the request lines).

I Don't Like Mondays.

Been really sick over the last week.  I have a lot of work to do at work (day job) and then finishing up my obligations to various editors on various projects.

So here is a musical interlude.


This song is much darker than I recalled.

Though somehow it also seems appropriate for the last few weeks.

Lindsey Stirling - Dragon Age / Occult Violinist

If your Bard is not as cool as this then you are playing her wrong.



I will admit I am a fan of this little pixie.

Of course with the right tinkering in Ghosts of Albion you take the Occult Poet and make an Occult Violinist.

This is not the greatest song in the world.

This is just a tribute to the greatest song in the world.


We'er off to the witch. We may never never never come home.
But the magic that we feel is worth a lifetime.

Sorry. But Dio (and Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath) are so much a part of my gaming history I figure a Dio Retro Clone would be appropriate.

D&D40 Bloghop: Day 23

Day 23: First song that comes to mind that you associate with D&D. Why?

Hmm.

Again, given the age I am I usually associate D&D and AD&D in particular with Led Zeppelin.

I grew up in the mid-west, the middle of Illinois to be exact.  Classic Rock was all that was on the radio.  So songs like "The Battle of Evermore" or "Misty Mountain Hop" invoke that quasi-Tolkien feel that goes hand in hand with D&D.  But I also have to mention "Kashmir" and "The Immigrant Song" as having some lingering associations for me.

I have to admit I once wanted to create a series of adventures all based on the songs from Led Zeppelin 4 (aka "Zoso").  While that is SOOO a typical High School kid in the 80s thing to do with D&D, I still think it might be fun.  I mean look as the adventures I did for The Dragon & The Phoenix, Season of the Witch and The Hex Girls.  Obviously I listened to a lot of music in my formative years.














"Does anybody remember laughter?"

White Dwarf Wednesday #95

White Dwarf Issue # 95 from November 1987.
I want to state upfront that I actually don't have the flexi-disc. It was not part of the magazine when I got it (no surprise really). Plus I don't actually own a turn-table anymore so even if I did have it.

White Dwarf #95 takes us to November 1987.  I asked my wife if she remembers what we were doing then. She didn't recall.  I know that gamewise my old 1st Ed DM had come up and we were running an adventure together for some other people in the dorm.  One of the characters we made that day would later live on as a vampire in other games and finally come back to my 3rd Ed game as the only person in my games to ever be cured of vampirism.  I think I mentioned this one before. (yup, WDW 93).

Sean Masterson discusses the influence fantasy and sci-fi has had on rock.  There is the obvious influence of metal at least on gaming, at least in terms of how WD does it.  So we should not be surprised when gaming influences metal. Thus the flexi disk that came with the magazine.

Marginalia, Open Box's lesser offspring, is next with "reviews" of some GW products.  Up first is "The Fury of Dracula" board game.  I'll admit I have always wanted to play this one, and it always looked rather cool.  Reading these design notes/reviews actually get me more interested in a game.  Though I do feel compelled to point out something. The review is written for the point of view of someone who has only known Dracula in movies and maybe never read the book.  That is fine, a lot of people don't like the book.  They are careful to point out that Dracula was killed with a Bowie knife to the heart in the book (true) but add that he was trying to build an empire of the undead (not true).  Not quite sure where they got that.  Of course people have also been looking for some deeper romantic connection between Mina and Dracula and that was also never in the book.
Covered next are two city books, one for Warhammer the other for Judge Dredd.

Critical Mass covers a number of Sci-fi books including the latest Stainless Steel Rat book.  Never could get into this series.

Our first big adventure of the issue is for Judge Dredd, "To Live and Die in Megacity One, Prog: 2 The Big Sleep".  Again hard for me to judge this one, but I have been told that the Judge Dredd adventures of this time are good. It is a long one, 10 pages with 2 more of maps.

Lots of pages of pictures of painted minis even before we get to 'Eavy Metal. Here is a review (more detailed than I ever could do) on the minis. http://realmofchaos80s.blogspot.com/2012/08/acceptable-in-80s-white-dwarf-95.html

Actually if you are looking for you White Dwarf fix every week I would recommend Realms of Chaos 80s as a good blog dedicated to things I only briefly touched on.

Ad for Fury of Dracula.  At first I thought it was a mis-print of the first page of Marginalia again.  Looked exactly the same.

"On the Boil" is an adventure (or is it Scenario?) for Warhammer Fantasy. 5 pages.  I wish I knew more about Warhammer to be honest.  Not just to judge these, but because reading these makes me aware of a huge gap I have in my RPG background.  I honestly don't think I would get much out of the Warhammer experience. I can't paint. I don't like collecting minis of armies.  But there is something so...well, Warhammer, about it.  I am sure there has to be something in this experience that I could port back over to my own old-school D&D games.

"The Madcap Laughs" deals with setting the scenes for new Stormbringer Adventures.

"Warhammer Rock" is where the flexi-disk would have been. It is also an interview with the band Sabbat.
Here is a link to the entire article. http://hem.bredband.net/b306090/white_dwarf.htm

And here is the song.



The lyrics are in the magazine and on the video page on YouTube.

Next are ads, then Illuminations featuring the art of John Blanche.
Letters follow and then some ads.

Again we see similar things here that we did in issue 94.  I have mixed feelings about Marginalia; I like the in-depth reviews but dislike that they are only focusing on house brands. Granted that is really the only way a magazine would do it and in 1987 I wasn't buying much of anything.

If you are looking for another good source of White Dwarf information I have been enjoying the fuckyeahbritisholdschoolgaming blog on tumblr http://fuckyeahbritisholdschoolgaming.tumblr.com/

First Loves Blogfest

http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.com/2012/04/friendly-to-z-challenge-and-next.html

Here are my first loves

First Album I loved: Thomas Dolby "The Golden Age of Wireless"

First Movie: Star Wars (I have no idea what "A New Hope" is...;) )

First Book: The Hobbit

First Person: Harder, I mean after all the first people you love are your family. So let's go with first person outside of your family. And that can only be...

BATGIRL!

Specifically, Yvonne Craig's Batgirl from the Adam West Batman TV series.
What's not to love?  She is smart and kicks ass.  Plus she rode a purple motor cycle before Prince was even born (ok, I might need to re-check that date but you get what I am trying to say  ETA: ok, Prince was only about 8-9 at the time.)

What Does D&D Sound Like?

What Does D&D Sound like?










D&D sounds like Dio.

What Does "The Dragon and the Phoenix" sound like?

What does the first season of my Willow & Tara game, "The Dragon and The Phoenix" sound like?


Episode 0



Episode 1





Episode 2



Episode 3



Episode 6





Episode 7



Episode 8





Episode 9



Episode 10





Episode 11



Episode 12









A little like that.

What does D&D Sound like?

What does D&D sound like?

This is what it sounds like to me.











D&D sounds like Rush.