The Skinny on Dice Rule! (Part 2)

This past weekend, I split my time between reviewing the second half of Dice Rule! and watching some classic horror films, heavy on the Vincent Price. It was, after all, the season for the fiendish master of Poe. It's been a while since I've seen VP in all his glory and thoroughly enjoyed his brilliance in Tower of London (gotta love Richard the III stories) and The Haunted Palace (gotta love a movie set in Arkham even if it is a monster mash of Lovecraft storylines credited as a Poe story). I was also able to sneak in the final installment of the Blind Dead quadrilogy, Night of the Seagulls. More on these movies in a later post, though.

As noted in the post below, the second half of Dice Rule! is composed of five chapters and now comes in at text-only 88 pages. The bulk of the content focuses on the rules for minions (aka monsters), so it fit in well with the running weekend theme. I made it through 4/5ths of the book and knocking off the final chapter this week. Chapter 12 details adventure construction and includes topics on wave play, chapter play and campaign play. It's probably the biggest chapter in the book, which is the one dilemma I have right now: page count. I did not imagine that the book would grow to the size it is, but as the chapters unfolded, one topic led to another and another. Much of the content and rules covered in Dice Rule! was birthed at our convention game tables over the last five years. It's amazing to see how much WEGS 101 Old Skool has spawned.

It kinda creeps up on ya...

Just like Vincent Price...

WEGS At The Movies (WATM)...

The last four posts were all movie reviews - no, I haven't forsaken gaming. I've been vegging out with some horror flix the last couple of days to get me into the Halloween spirit. Watching good action/horror flicks is almost as much fun as gaming. They almost all boil down to an adventuring party with different weapons/skills who set off to face impossible odds. The first third of the movie is the character creation, the remaining two thirds is the encounter and resolution stuffing and frenzied dice rolling.

For as long as I can remember, I watch movies with WEGS in mind. I'm sure other folks do this for their own game systems, too. I'm always asking "How does WEGS handle this encounter?" I find that horror and adventure movies are easy to break down into a WEGS inning structure. Movie storylines are (mostly) chronological and the blow-by-blow action/fight scenes fall right into the game flow. I've always said to folks who don't understand this type of gaming that:

It's like playing your favorite movie, but the ending is up to the dice.

From Dusk Till Dawn...

From Dusk Till Dawn starts of as a crime thriller and switches midway to an all-out vampire horror fest. Inevitably, the movie boils down to one great good versus evil battle – more like bad versus evil given that all the “heroes” begin tainted. Clooney and Tarantino are ruthless thieves/murderers. Keitel is a man-of-god sans god. The rest of the denizens of the bar are bottom-of-the-barrel types. It’s the group’s conversion in the face of true evil that makes this a fun ride. Can’t help but to break down the characters to WEGS Arketypes:

The Sage
Harvey Keitel. The holy man, ‘nuff said. His “spell” use was the way his convictions boosted morale in the final battle. Once he found god again, the others all jumped on board. You could say that their combat stats were all raised by him (a la Blessed Warrior spell). He was also able to bless the water (spell effect that caused enchanted wounds to vamps) and keep the vamps at bay with his holy symbol (spell effect).

The Rangers
Both the kids in the film are Rangers. Juliette Lewis due to use of crossbow and guns. Ernest Liu due to use of water-pistol and holy water grenades. These two held down the ranged weapon attacks during the final battle. Due to their age, I’d even categorize them as Gnobbits (wee folk). The way that Juliette invades the same square as Clooney during the final shoot out is evidence of this…

The Warriors
Tom Savini with high Trickster marks (due to use of whip/gun and stealth combat techniques). Fred Williamson is a straight up hand-to-hand warrior with amazing Prowess stats.

The Tricksters
Clooney and Tarantino are Tricksters. Clooney’s main weapon was his Get The Point skill, which he uses beautifully throughout the movie. He gets high Warrior marks, too (due to his use of brute force/fists). His gun skill (ranged weapon) is pretty bad (couldn’t even hit the clerk in the first scene), so he must have a pretty low Ruggedness (or his dice rolls just suck!). His jackhammer weapon at the end is a wacky weapon that loans itself to equal parts Stealth and Prowess. I’d have to say that the Clooney character is a straight-up Trickster who has chosen Tough over Lucky (more Wounds than Spoints).

Tarantino is a tough one to call. He is equal parts Trickster and Ranger. He’s more of a shoot ‘em up type and gets high Ranger marks due to his gun/ballistic skills. He stinks at hand-to-hand combat and doesn’t stand a chance when the vamp jumps him. Even after Tarantino turns into a vamp, he still stinks in hand-to-hand, and is easily destroyed by the others who hold him down. He’d have Insanity marks higher than Sanity. I’d say that he’s a Lucky Trickster who uses his Spoints to counter his Insanity stat. He’d have to have a high Spoint pool as he’s the one the vamp selects to feast on first. He seems to be the Spoint prize (normally this would be the Sage, but as Keitel starts faithless, his Spoints have bottomed out).

In the end, only one Humnz Trickster and one Gnobbit Ranger survive.

That’s WEGS at the Movies, folks!

(or WATM - New tag for this blog...)

Evil Dead...

Yup - watched this one, too, this weekend. The movie wasn't as good as I remembered it. I totally forgot about the original Hills Have Eyes poster hanging in the root celler. Ha! All in all, the movie seemed goofier this time 'round. Toward the end, I got tired of the gore and fast-forwarded a bit (especially the cheezy undead melting effects).

Watching this was pre-con prep. We're running a WEGS scenario at Ubercon called From Dusk Til Dead, which is (in part) based on this movie. We're even equipping the party with a chainsword, which should be a very, very, interesting weapon. Kinda like the good, ol' vorpal blade on steroids... Powered by spoints, naturally. The weapon will be only as strong as the person wielding it - and it's not something that will last forever. That's why I like WEGS...

Noche Del Terror Ciego...

Another film review. Sorry - I'm on a movie kick lately, particularly horror, due to the season and the upcoming con. Noche... is a horror film from Spain, 1973. Called Night of the Blind Dead for the US release (they were cashing in on Night of the Living Dead craze). It was also called Revenge of Planet Ape to cash in on the Planet of the Apes craze (even though there isn't a single simian in it...). Is this movie about undead apes? Nope.

The movie opens with twelve or so Knights Templar riding into a Spanish castle. They have a virgin sacrifice with them. They perform a dark ritual with her that ends in each Knight biting her, and this imbues them, somehow, with eternal skeletal life on horseback. Ringwraiths, of sorts. The plot quickly switches to modern times (1970's). Two swinging Spanish girls (who share some dark uncomfortable college secret) have an accidental pool-side reunion (both in their bikinis). They are joined shortly by the one's boyfriend, who likes what he sees, and then invites the new girl (who he was just introduced to) to go "camping" with them. A threesome, of sorts. His girlfriend (Girl A) is none to happy about this. The next day they all get on a train to go camping (in their polyester leisurewear). On the train, there's some flirtation between the new girl (Girl B) and the boyfriend which sends Girl A steaming out of the railroad car. Girl B follows in pursuit and the two discuss the "uncomfortable situation" between them. We are treated to a flashback: the two girls in their college dorm room. Girl B makes some unwanted advances on Girl A. The flashback ends in a kiss.

Shortly, Girl A jumps off the train, leaving her boyfriend and Girl B to get on with their travels. These two see her running off into the woods and ask the conductor to stop the train. He informs them that the train can not stop at this point. It is an evil, evil area... Instead of jumping off the slow-moving train, they decide to just double-back the next day to find her. She, of course, must spend the night in the haunted castle of the Knights Templar, who arise from their crypts and slowly chase her for, what seems to be, hours. (The only thing slower in this movie is the earlier train.) The action culminates with the mounted skeletal Knights Templar chasing Girl A on horseback (she somehow gets a horse). This scene is a dead-ringer for the scene in Peter Jackson's Fellowship Of The Ring, where the wraiths chase Liv (sorry, I'm not in the mood for typing Elvish names at this point, especially when I've been reduced to calling the other characters Girl A and Girl B...).

Girl A's body is found and this kicks off a whole investigation that culminates in the boyfriend, Girl B, a Spanish smuggler and his girlfriend spending one swinging night in the castle. The dead rise and all hell breaks loose until dawn. There's a big subplot wherein Girl A reanimates as a zombie and then hunts down Girl B's office assistant in a city many miles away...

I'm not sure why any one of the twelve of you who read this blog would want to watch this. The movie is soooo bad on so many levels - but its soooo easy to enjoy. I'm sure none of the script quality was lost in translation either. See it for the pre-Jackson version of the Wraiths. I think these guys are creepier - especially the bearded one (who could have been Dr. Zaius, I suppose). See it for the creepy guy who hangs around the morgue playing with frogs. See it for the plethora of female mannequin torsos (there's a LOT of them and this film borders on strange fetish stuff throughout).

This film is weird - really weird. It's just one more reason to realize that the 70s were the last great age of entertainment when movies could be made just 'cause folks had a free weekend, a couple of cans of film, a semi-finished script and some skeleton props. And these flicks actually made it to the theatres without a single commercial product endorsement in this flick - end rant.

The best part is that this is just Part 1 of the director's quadrilogy. Yes... There's four of them! I'm tempted to see the next one - and that's more than I can say for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise... As per the original movie poster for this film "It makes Night of the Living Dead look like a pajama party!"

Time to watch From Dusk Till Dawn...

Dog Soldiers...

Quick movie review. Dog Soldiers (2002). Saw this film last night - British werewolf flick. Basic plot: Full moon. Small troop of solidiers doing some field training in the remote mountains of Scotland encounter a pack of werewolves. The troop stumbles upon a suspicious enviromentalist chick who happens to be in their neck of the woods and who takes them to a suspiciously empty farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. With limited ammo (which does nothing to the wolf pack onslaught), the heroes basically need to make it until dawn... Depite the goofiness of the werewolves (monstrously tall and rather rigid rubber costume), the film has enough flair and quirky humour/suspense blended in to make it a fun watch. It is almost identical to the action of Night of the Living Dead (heroes inside, monsters outside, until the monsters get inside in more ways than one) - but there's a whole Agatha Christie-esque blending of the plot, characters and mystery to keep this one from sinking. Just like in The Mousetrap, the little bits of humor never kill the suspense. And there are some very funny moments - like when one of the soldiers who finds himself facing a werewolf with nothing but a stick in his hands, just throws the stick and shouts "fetch". Another soldier just decides to start boxing with a wolf when his ammo runs out. And then there's the moment when a wounded soldier with his guts torn out is fighting with a normal dog who is trying to steal off with a piece of his intestine... And the Goldilocks undercurrent is just too good not to mention. Good stuff. There's a bunch of twists/turns to the plot, almost all predictable, but its still one I can highly recommend. And it would make the perfect WEGS Horror scenario, too...