Tuesday 26 October 2010

More on Vampire: smile, you're on camera.

Justin Achilli considers how modern technology could mess up a vampire's existence, while Russell Bailey adds how it could help.

With Requiem specifically, there's the issue of vampires blurring in mirrors and photos, something I'd likely houserule away, particularly for a game set in the UK where we have the most CCTV cameras per head of population of anywhere in Europe. (Or was it the world? Anyway, we have a lot of CCTV cameras.) So you aren't bending the Masquerade every time you step out of your haven, but could potentially break it and be caught clearly on video every time you do something vampiric. So you don't have to be careful just out walking, but you do have to be very careful out hunting.

(It also stops people using cameras as handheld vampire-detectors, as seen in Channel 4's Ultraviolet.)

It's a reminder of why so many horror films these days have that shot establishing that the characters' mobiles don't have any signal, and Let Me In was set in the 80s. And Paranormal Activity is made entirely out of security camera footage.

Icons, then?

Yes kids, Icons. Really simple superhero gaming, complete with an idea-prompting random generation system. It's like coming home, really - the third or fourth game I ever got was Golden Heroes and my first campaign as a player was Marvel Super Heroes Advanced - ah, The Ultimate Powers Book...

So obviously, pretty different thinking than Vampire. I could run both on the same day and they probably wouldn't affect each other notably.

Apart from three months GMing Doctor Who where the short time kept me from going really mad, it would also be my first time returning to GMing a big Kitchen Sink game since running The Watch House. Even more throw-it-all-in, even. "A game where a mutant can team up with an alien and a skilled normal to stop an army of ghosts invading Ape City and that's not an unusual session."

I wouldn't want to do a deconstruction - I'd want a big crazy superhero action game with a bit of heartfelt emotion mixed in with the laser sharks and exploding galaxies.

Probably a new universe.

Maybe a Golden Age setting where the PCs get to be the archetypal heroes of the piece - the Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America - the first and classic examples of certain styles in their world.

Maybe a "modern widescreen reboot" as imagined to be drawn by Bryan Hitch or made live-action with a $250 000 000 budget.

Maybe something slightly odd, like a space opera setting with modern humans interacting with superpowered aliens and fighting a Ming-style space tyrant, probably stuck in a dinky little spaceship.

I dunno. We'll see.

Sunday 24 October 2010

Vampire: The Requiem Trailer

Vampire: The Requiem

Or the 100MB downloadable .dv file version

The product of three or four afternoons over two weeks, the last image for it grabbed from a trailer I saw on Friday.

Only four shots from things that actually have anything to do with vampires, and one of those is the logo and another is people attending the ballet in an episode of Angel. (Which replaced a people-attending-the-opera shot from a recentish version of Dracula because iMovie refused to upload it.) That leaves the Nosferatu types from Blade II and the vampire episode of Alias, and that show also provided almost half the rest of the shots.

Hopefully it conveys a mood with its consistent palette and gloom, and lots of occasionally-superhuman foot chases and unflashy physical violence.

Of course, now it looks like I'm more likely to be running Icons this year...

Tuesday 19 October 2010

Blimey

DWB DriveThru RPG PDF bundle with Hot War, Exalted, Contenders and Icons all for the price of, say, Icons.

Thursday 14 October 2010

I've been away...

... and when I got back, I found that all the evening games at my local games society were overstuffed, but then the excess players seemed to have vanished with about one exception. Which is a bit annoying, as I had some games in mind...

As a result of going to The Grand Masquerade, I was galvanised to run Vampire The Requiem.

Hell is a city much like London.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Peter Bell The Third