[Games] Pirates & Wonderland & Miscellanea
Continuing the Voyages of La Armadilla Amorosa ... at Home:
I blinked, and 3, almost 4 months have gone by since the Amorous Armadillo Game Shoppe "temporarily" closed its doors, to move to a new location. The target months (never a specific date) keep passing, and the purported location keeps changing. It's been a third of a year. The iron's going cold. Hence, I decided that it was high time to call everyone up who'd been in my store game, find out who was interested, and just plot a time to run the game at my house.
Unfortunately, Saturdays don't seem to work for two of the more active players, so it'll be on Sunday afternoons, every other week. We're starting on Sunday, April 22nd, due to a variety of factors, trying to mesh with as many players' schedules as possible. I'm anxious about that since most of our online Sinai games have been on Sundays, but currently that's on hiatus, and for 4 months now I've been pushing things off because of something that MIGHT happen any day now, so I need to just commit to dates, and then I can work other things around them.
We left off at a bit of a cliffhanger, and due to player availability issues, we'll have some discrepancy between who was there for the last game and who will be here next time ... but I'll handle it best I can. Let the hand-waving commence. If and/or when the Armadillo opens up again, we'll consider relocating back to the store.
I also have some stated interest in some players who'd like to join in if I start up my zombie apocalypse campaign again, but that's going to have to wait. I can only run so many games at once.
Wonderland No More - April?
And then, there's the matter of starting up my online Wonderland No More campaign. TuftEars's character is all written up and ready to go. For Boingdragon's character, there's a character concept, and I've done a portrait (example to right - Mr. Griffin Paisley, Professional Photographer), but no stats written up yet -- and due to scheduling issues, real-life stuff, etc., it looks like the game can't start until "sometime in April" at the soonest, though I have nothing for dates. Assuming it goes on Sundays, it'll have to be NOT on the 22nd. If I go every-other-weekend, that'll seal up Sundays, for sure, for the foreseeable future (aside from the occasional disruption due to holidays, etc.).
In addition to doodling up token portraits for the game, I've been fleshing out the adventure in written form, drawing upon my previous game runs, but also expanding a bit and describing locations that were glossed over in the original runs. Due to the nature of the adventure, it's highly unlikely that these alternate locations will be visited, but I figure it's a good idea to be prepared. Besides, a GM might be able to use some of the encounters and puzzles as "idea seeds" for her own adventures.
Custom Bases Update:
I showed off some of my "clockworkpunk" bases to Dr_Rhubarb, and he provided some helpful feedback, but none of my work was quite up to par for molding and casting resin bases for War Cast Studios. A lot of the advice in retrospect seems "obvious," but since I didn't already incorporate it, obviously I needed to hear it anyway. I've invested in some better tools and materials to help out, but mostly I need to take more care in my work, learning from mistakes made so far. Basically, I need to start over on some of this, and do it right this time, rather than just trying to fix and smooth over things that really ought to be redone.
To my surprise, he rather liked the two "Egyptian-style" bases I was making for Digital_Rampage's "cat-girl" and "cat" miniatures, and asked if I could manage a set of 5. I need some more "blanks" as a starting point, but it's otherwise definitely doable.
Also, I picked up another Deadlands miniature, this time of an "undead outlaw." I decided to try decorating his base to fit a "boot hill" theme. I mixed sand with Magic Sculpt for the uneven ground, suggested the edge of an open grave, made a shovel out of bits of plastic sprue and resin flash, and sculpted/carved a tombstone from more Magic Sculpt. Perhaps if this goes over well, I could try my hand at making a whole set of "boot hill" bases, for some other Wild-West undead minis.
...
In other "news":
Anime:
Gwendel showed me an anime series called "Madoka Magica." I wasn't too keen on it, because it seemed like yet another "magic girl" anime, and I've seen plenty of those already. What particularly bugged me was how some of the elements seemed all too ripe for me to interpret in sinister ways. Then it struck me that ... no, this is giving me way too much ammunition. No, I think this series is being deliberately subversive and creepy. In fact, I'm starting to think that this series might be better classified as horror.
Meanwhile, Gwendel finally started catching up on "Stein's Gate." It has its annoyances, but I think she's warmed up to the overarching storyline ... though the time travel elements do get tedious at times. At least they did it far better than the "Endless 8" episodes from the second season of "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" (where they quite literally present practically the same series of events 8 times, across 8 episodes, kind of like Groundhog Day, but FAR MORE ANNOYING AND FRUSTRATING).
I'm also still watching "Natsume Yuujincho" (AKA Natsume's Book of Friends), but Gwendel hasn't been interested in catching up on that, so I'm pretty much checking up on it on my own.
Movies:
We saw John Carter. Gwendel had actually read the first John Carter book, Princess of Mars, and hence was making disapproving noises almost throughout the film when it deviated wildly from the book ... though this decreased a bit (surely out of exasperation) once it was clear the movie was going wildly off course. Still, she was delighted when "Woola" showed up. I was just familiar enough with the setup of the John Carter stories to know that it had deviated mightily right from the start, but at least they did better than I'd expected: I'd thought it a significant chance that they might abandon the hero's Civil War veteran roots entirely, on account of the time period and him being on the wrong side of the war. I did not mind at all that they left out the bizarre stuff about being an immortal (without explanation), and that they tried to introduce some sort of REASON behind the transportation to Mars. But then, I guess I'm just not a purist.
Bottom line? It was cheesy, and didn't hold up well if you thought about it too hard, but it was nice, pulpy action fun. It's probably about as close as we'll get to "Space 1889: The Movie." ;)
On the Netflix front, Gwendel finally watched Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. She thought it was silly (naturally), and spent entirely too much time focusing on the fact that the main bad guy had a very visible posterior, and expressing incredulity that the "Feral Kid" could not talk. I was more concerned with, say, the way that boomerang worked. ;)
Next up, she's got Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome queued up. Let the post-apocalyptic '80s cheese-fest begin!
TV:
I finally caught up on The Walking Dead over at Digital_Rampage's place. We went over there while I worked on bases and terrain, and we caught up on whatever shows were recorded on his TiVo. We had time, so we opted to watch the remaining Walking Dead episodes, though Gwendel retreated upstairs rather than being subjected to zombie gore. (It amazes me what all gore and such she'll put up with in movies, but somehow as soon as zombies are involved, it's too much. But then, I guess if zombies are involved, you're guaranteed gore at regular intervals, rather than just the occasional, "Augh! Someone's digging out a bullet!" in an action movie.)
The TV show differs from the graphic novels on several counts, but I think most changes were for the best. I think some of the changes (such as how much of the series was spent at the farmhouse) were made out of consideration for budget: It doesn't cost nearly as much to travel from ruin to ruin in a comic book and have burning buildings left in your wake as it does to try to depict all of that in a live-action TV show. Hence, in the TV show, they had to get some good use out of their sets, I suppose, and some of the characters stuck around for longer, so they wouldn't be blowing their way through a rotating list of actors quite so quickly. That's my guess, anyway.
They've finally introduced a character that I've thought of as one of the more iconic of the series, but I also dread how they're going to treat some of the events coming up. I was a bit surprised to see one of my favorite characters in the TV version die off (messily, of course) when in the graphic novels he lasts for considerably longer. Contract issues, perhaps? The last episode also addressed one aspect of the contagion that I think addresses many of my "suspension of disbelief" issues regarding problems with how zombie hordes could form globally so QUICKLY (with an infection essentially spread only by bites, as typically presented). The thing is, I can't remember if it worked out the same way in the graphic novel series; I guess I'll have to look that up.
Anyway, I hope it sticks around for the next season.