Sword & Sorcery & Cinema: Sorceress (1982)

Getting back to this last week I was at my parents' and the week before I was celebrating my wedding anniversary.  So let's jump in feet first with another cheesy 80 Sword & Sorcery flick. This time I am watching 1982's Sorceress.

I was pretty sure I had never seen this one before and I was right.  I would have remembered something so dreadful.  Bad acting? Check. Weird mutant creatures? Yup, check. Gratuitous nudity? Oh yeah. Lots of violence against women? Well, yeah it was the 80s.

Let's be 100% honest here, this movie was made for one reason, to show off the nubile assets of Leigh and Lynette Harris, and I am not talking about their fighting ability. Or acting ability. 

Besides being known for being Playboy playmates in 1981. Lynette also went to prison for 5 months in 1990 for tax reasons. She and her twin were both mistresses of businessman David Kritzik.  He was paying them to have sex with him and the IRS doesn't like it when they don't get their cut.  They both would later be exonerated in 92.  Not to be outdone Leigh would later expose herself to some minors.  Their real-life stories sound more interesting than this movie.  Though they seem to have fallen into a bit of obscurity.  Likely that is what they do prefer. 

Hmm...maybe I should return my attention to the movie.

Not to dump on this movie too much.  We do have a cool wizard who gives the twins their fighting powers. A creepy satyr. A generic Viking-like warrior.  An evil sorcerer who is also the twins' father. An evil priestess. Zombies attacking. And a battle of the gods.  So I mean all the right elements are here.

It does have Corman's fingerprints all over it.

They have the same abilities as the Corsican Brothers; they can feel what the other is feeling.  With the brothers that was typically pain, these two...well it's a bit different.  The idea though is not a bad one, I used a similar idea with the Anamchara.  Well, the sensing the others feelings part anyway.  

Roberto Ballesteros, the evil sorcerer Traigon, is really the only one here that has any sort of resume here.  I hope the poor acting here is really due more to bad dubbing.

I will give the director credit on one thing.  While the twins are constantly in trouble they never once appear weak or scared about their situation.  When given the chance they pick up weapons and fight.  Sure they act naive at times, but they were sheltered their whole lives so that is expected. 

In the end rather laughable, but the zombie battle is fun.  The gods battling in the skies is weird, but I will admit I got a solid Deities and Demigods vibe from it.  Ok the D&DG if it were made by Roger Corman

Yeah. Not great.

Gaming Content

The movie is very generic 80s fantasy; derivative to be honest.  It's not so much what you can get out of this for your game since likely your game has already done everything in this movie. 

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Tim Knight of Hero Press and Pun Isaac of Halls of the Nephilim along with myself are getting together at the Facebook Group I'd Rather Be Killing Monsters to discuss these movies.  Follow along with the hashtag #IdRatherBeWatchingMonsters.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 7 Inspiration

Going with another alternate word today.

Day 7 Inspiration

Every so often I get asked what sort of things inspire me.  I usually half-jokingly say 70s metal, cheesy horror movies, and comics.

Only half-jokingly because there is a not-so-small amount of material in my bibliography of published material and blog posts that are exactly all of that.

Presently I am re-watching Star Trek Enterprise with my wife. We only saw bits and pieces of it when it was new, our kids were babies then, and keeping up on TV was not our main priority. 

So Enterprise takes place before The Original Series, thus the ship feels a little "low tech" and everything has a frontier feel to it.  While I am enjoying it for its own merits I am getting a ton of ideas for my two Star Trek campaigns; BlackStar and Mercy.  Season 1 deals with the Temporal Cold War and the Temporal Accords, which comes up later in Star Trek Discovery.  This is also putting back into the mood for a combined Star Trek/Doctor Who game which means FASA rules.  BUT inspiration aside I don't want to start YET another Trek game. I haven't even gotten the ones I am planning off the ground.

SO...maybe I can add some of these ideas to Mercy, BlackStar is a bit full as is.  Maybe I can add a character from the 31st century on my medical starship.  But why is he/she there?   Maybe I'll leave that to the player.  

Getting back to music for a bit, there is a song that has some solid Trek connotations to it.

One of my all-time favorite songs by the band Queen is '39.  Written by the guitarist, and Ph.D. in Astrophysics, Brian May.   The song deals with 20 astronauts that leave Earth on a one-year-long mission. One of the astronauts says goodbye to his wife and daughter, but due to the time dilation effects of moving near the speed of light, it is many, many years later when they return.  While he is "older but a year" his daughter is a grandmother now.   In the song, they had discovered a new world.

I have often thought it would be possible that later warp drive ships would run into older, slower relativistic ships with a crew that had left Earth decades if not a century before.  You see this played out really well in Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth.   It was one of my favorite books of his and I loved the idea of "gritty" space travel and one very removed from the notion of warp drives.

Now we have seen visitors from the past in Trek before, TNG's first season episode "The Neutral Zone" has frozen humans from the late 20th century, the second season "The Emissary" with frozen Klingons, and the awkwardly named "The 37's" from Star Trek Voyager's second season with humans from 1937 found on a planet in the Delta Quadrant some 70k light-years from Earth. 

This would be an adventure for Mercy.  The starship Mercy gets a distress beacon from a ship that left Earth in 2139, just prior to the wide adoption of warp drive. Yeah, there are cargo ships that can go warp 1.8 or so, but most ships are going to be sleeper ships. Mercy, being Mercy, goes in to investigate and discovers a crew from 156 years ago.  Likely the ship, I might call the Arthur C. Clark, was headed to a planet that is now claimed by the Klingons, or Romulans, or some other species.  

I'll need to ponder this one a little more. In any case, I guess I'll keep looking for inspiration.

Kickstart Your Weekend: Night Companions and Avatars

A couple of REALLY GREAT Kickstarters are happing right now.

The Night Companion

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jasonvey/the-night-companion?ref=theotherside

This sourcebook for Night Shift: VSW RPG blows the doors off! New classes, species, magic, monsters, core system options, and more!

Night Shift has been a labor of love for Jason Vey and I.  It has been a chance to use the rules we love (Old-school D&D) and bring it to a modern supernatural setting like the licensed products we have worked on in the past.  If you liked any of my work regardless of the system used then this is a great fit.

Here is what the book is right now:

• Four new character classes: the Divine Warrior, the Mystic Martial Artist, the Psychic Gunslinger, and the Spirit Rider
• Rules for playing supernatural species including Celestials, Driven, Ghouls, Infernals, Lycanthropes, and Vampires, expanding upon the "Supernatural Race" option in the core rulebook
• New options for generating ability scores for normal, gritty, and cinematic games
• Rules to convert your game from class-and-level to entirely point-buy
• An alternate Alignment system focused on good, evil, light, and dark
• Guidelines to convert your game to a unified mechanic: both d20-based and percentile-based options are covered
• Enhanced combat rules: variable weapon damage, range increments, weapon classes, grappling rules, jumping, drowning, suffocation, poison, disease, and more
• New Arcane Powers and spells, plus enhanced rules for ritual magic 
• A GM section that goes behind the scenes of the system, talks about keeping track of your play style options, gives guidelines for creating cults and secret societies, and discusses tropes of sub-genres of horror and how to use them in your game
• Dozens of new monsters, enemies, and NPCs for your game
• New art by industry notable Bradley K. McDevitt, commissioned just for this book. At first, it will be the new classes and species, but more may be added depending on how well the Kickstarter does (see Stretch Goals). 

And at the $5,000 stretch goal, I am going to provide a new Night World!  And I am quite excited to bring you this one.

Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magpiegames/avatar-legends-the-roleplaying-game?ref=theotherside

This one so doesn't need my help. I scored $1 Million in its first 24 hours and has been hitting $1M a day since. 

But it is Avatar and it is a lot of fun.  I am not a huge fan of Powered by the Apocalypse, but this game is just too gorgeous to pass up.  Plus those sweet stretch goals.

So spread the word!  Both of these games are going to fantastic.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 6 Explore

Going to go with an alternate word again. 

Day 6 Explore

Back on Day 2, I talked about maps. So I figured today would be a good one to go with Explore.

Exploration is a key factor in a lot of games.  In D&D and other FRPGs exploration is a key element in Hex Crawls. Even in games like Traveler and Star Trek exploration is a key element.

In truth, I don't do a lot of exploration these days in D&D. Most, no rather, all, my D&D games have a goal in mind.  When I ran Vault of the Drow a while back I did a lot of reading on what others have done with it in the past. There is a ton of material out there on exploring the area around the vault of the Drow.  Dragonsfoot alone has more material than I'd ever use in a lifetime. 

For my BlackStar game exploration is the name of the game.  Well, that and horror.  I think that is because in BlackStar I really don't have anything like a "big bad" save for all the horrors of space. I am also not sure what my end game for it is, maybe part of the exploration will be mine as well. 

Dungeons

Also, this month is all about Dungeons at the RPG Blog Carnival and hosted this month by Plastic Polyhedra.  Certainly, the Underdark of the Vault of the Drow qualifies and it would be fantastic to go exploring there one day.  

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 5 Community

I think today I will go with one of the alternate words on the list.

Day 5 Community

Today I am going with Community.  One of the things I really hope to get out of this month of posting is to get a sense of community from this.  

While writing these posts is a joy in and of themselves and I do enjoy the challenge, what I am looking forward to is the community. 

I am very curious to see what everyone else does.  Take today for example.  I have no idea what I would write for Throne and I am very curious about what others might write about.  Will someone else choose Community?  What days might occur where each word is chosen.  That might be fun.  

I also feel it is important not to be just a passive participant here.  So I need to make sure I also interact with all the other posting on various social media sites. 

So if you are participating in this please feel free to leave a comment below with links to where you are posting.  I'd love to see what everyone is doing and saying.

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 4 Weapon

Excalibur, Stormbringer, Mjölnir, the Sun Sword, Blackrazor, Narsil/Andúril, the Bessy Mauler, the Sword of Kas, Needle, Elbe the Heartbow.  All worlds, whether ours or fantasy have fantastic legendary weapons.  

Quasi-artifacts to quest for or be granted to those that are worthy. 

Day 4 Weapon

Like all good game worlds, I have a number of unique and special weapons.

Demonbane

Demonbane is a bastard sword from The Treasure Trove found in Issue #91 of Dragon Magazine.  The sword is described as "a great, many-hued blade of which the origin has been forgotten, but which was wielded by the great paladin Nord in his single-handed destruction of the Citadel of Conjurers."  Created by Ed Greenwood it would later go on to be called Dornavver in the Forgotten Realms.   In my games, though it became one of the weapons of my paladin Johan II and used to defeat Orcus in module H4.  IT was lost in the Astral Sea and it has been the focus of all my paladins for the last four generations to recover. 

The "forgotten origin" has been changed to a drow savant, Sharis Val, that created it along with his adoptive father a dwarf cleric of Moradin. The multi-hues come from the variety of metals used in its construction.

Ebonblade, the Sword of Black Flames

Ebonblade's history is tied up in that of Demonbane's.  The story of Demonbane's construction is not as forgotten as reported.  Among blacksmiths, the tale of the swords construction and its use to defeat the Citadel of Conjurers is a tale told by masters to apprentices all over the world.  One such apprentice found where the Demonbane was made and used the leftover materials to make a sword to avenge the death of his killed master.  The materials used in making Demonbane responded to Sharis Val's desire to rid the world of evil and in particular demons.  Ebonblade responded to the hate and desire to kill others and thus became an evil weapon.

The Star Sword

This weapon was made from bit of a "star" the fell to the Earth. Longer than a bastard sword, but not quite as long as a two-handed sword. This sword focuses the magic energies of the wielder into the blade to add extra damage.  

The Mace of St. Werper

Admittedly not all that different than the Mace of St. Cuthbert, in my defense I made mine before I ever read about it in the DMG.  This one though was specific to my first cleric.

The Death Staff

This weapon is the very first Staff of the Warlock used by my character Magnus. It can blast a humanoid with its necrotic power and turn them into a zombie under the wielder's control. 

 What weapons populate your world?

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 3 Tactic

Interesting one today. The alternate words are just as appealing to me as the main one.

Day 3 Tactic

I am currently in the different stages of a few very interesting and fun projects.  A couple I hope to get you all soon and others I hope their respective publishers get to you.

Presently I am also rereading some texts from my grad-school days and one, in particular, is about course design.  Now while books are course do not serve the same purposes they do have some similar design ideals.  It should be noted in my day of writing course curriculum I run into peers and colleagues who also are professional game designers. At one point I worked with several fellow designers that were also game designers (or had been) for WotC, White Wolf, and Mayfair.  The skills are similar.   But I digress.

The tactics I use to design a course or even design a bit of game work are also similar.

Whenever I have an idea for something. I usually start with what I call a vision document or a notes document. This lays out some ideas and key elements I want for the book/project. Let's take an example for a project I recently opted to put aside for now.  The project on my working projects drive was called "Demon City Tokyo: 2074" and it was going to be an anime-action "Night World" for Night Shift.  The idea came to me last October and grew out of a few other ideas I had "on paper" at the time.  It was going to be expanded on from these core ideas.  So I took that all and placed it in my vision document with some broad ideas; New type of super-collider, Tokyo of the future, some ideas on mixing a lot a Japanese and English for words.  I also linked in a bunch of maps, pages on the internet.  Help pages to refresh my Japanese after not speaking any in nearly 30 years (I can still count though!) and more.

My next phase or tactic in this process is to create the "thick outline."  This is exactly like outlining, save that I am allowed to include paragraphs and other details.  This allows me to start seeing the material in order and allows me to move material around a little easier.  I find doing the vision doc first gives me free-thinking room and then the thick outline focuses these ideas into a form I like.

Up next is detailed writing.  This is where I am on the Basic Bestiary series and where Demon City died.  Not because I did not have the details, but because Dyskami Publishing was coming out with their own Demon City that was WAY too close to mine.  NOW please be aware I am not suggesting anything here other than we both had a common idea.  Theirs is in Kickstarter now and it is likely to be very good.  I felt the world did not need TWO Demon Cities.  Plus as I was working on my detailed thick outline my lack of knowledge of Tokyo was becoming more and more obvious. At one point I even moved the whole thing to my more familiar Chicago, but it didn't have quite the same feel.

Basic Bestiary on the other hand moved forward to the detailed writing stages.   Here my tactic has been to pull any and all material I already had and use it here.  Demon City Tokyo lives on in Basic Bestiary III since a lot of the demons I researched for it are still fantastic demons.  While I write a ton of material here, not all it sees the light of publication or blog posts, and some not in the way they were originally envisioned. 

After that comes playtesting, editing, revisions, layout...but those are all tales for another post I think.