Belated Halloween

Dear gods. It seems I've gone five months without posting a rant. I also haven't really written, drawn, coded, seen, or done much of anything in that time period. So, it isn't so much that I've been neglecting this site as it is then I've been wallowing in grief and depression without getting anything done. The important thing though is that I'm done with that I'm more or less done with that now, and ready to get back to work. Hmm... I'm getting rather bloggish here aren't I. Well, let me just run with that a while before I get into the actual ranting and raving.

Prior to shutting down for half a year, I was doing a lot of reading, and a lot of game design. Mainly on The Massive Vs. The Masses. I'd have the PC port released by now except that A- Getting the network code cleaned up is taking longer than expected, and B- a fabulous artist friend of mine is giving the whole thing a massive face lift. After seeing her early work, I can promise it will be worth the wait.

Then there's Tyranny... Nasty business there really. I had planned to run a demo at NonCon hoping the new book would pique some interest and I could get a nice demo run, get some feedback, all that good stuff, but there weren't really any takers. The next three books for it are deadlocked until I can get some serious feedback from a lot of people, particularly people who don't know me or read this page, so this puppy is going to be gathering dust a while longer.

Then we have RPG the RPG, and Power. The latter is a back burner project right now, which unlike most iss being good and staying there instead of spitting ideas at me to steer my attention away from what I should be focused on. The former I could get to the testing phase on a moment's notice, which is precisely why I'm procrastinating on testing it. Plus, if I'm not going to fluff it up to more than 10 pages or so, I really should just file it under Promotional Item and give it to people for free when they pay for other stuff.

Finally, we have the big time suck. It doesn't have a name, but I'm working on a major RPG project. Tyranny is essentially a party game, or an add-on to another RPG. This is intentional. I like the notion of a quick, simple, pick-up-and-play diceless RPG with simple enough rules that you can pick it up, read it, and have characters made up within 10 minutes. Granted, when I finally get the Hard Rules books out the door, you can beef it up more than that, but it's really meant to be quick and easy. Then there's Power here, which goes the opposite direction in the general design philosophy and mechanics, but campaigns are designed to snowball into appocolyptic showdowns within 10 or 20 sessions, it really only works with small groups, and it doesn't offer a lot of wiggle roomcampaign concept wise. Plus it's also likely to be fast and loose.

So... we have the new RPG here. Three words come to mind looking at what I have for it thus far. Huge. Detailed. Cheap. When all is said and done on this one, I expect to have something like 50 books, each with around 400 pages of highly detailed rules. However, the way I'm structuring things, to run any given sort of campaign you will only need to own one book. Oh, and it's nothing at all like GURPS before you jump to conclusions.

Now then. Getting into the ranting proper. Halloween is upon us, or would be if I weren't behind schedule. Bringing with it such wonderous things as perfect weather, costumes and candy, and movies I am prone to find quite enjoyable. Specifically, Shaun of the Dead. I saw previews for this movie, which were enough to know I'd enjoy it on at least a couple of levels, but, as with nearly all previews these days, they were excessively misleading. "I don't want to see it," said some "because it's a romantic comedy that happens to have zombies in it." Uh... no. First off, that isn't really possible. The romantic comedy is such a dismall, formulaic, predictable genre that it will reject or subdue anything interesting you may try to throw in. Thankfully, Shaun of the Dead is not a romantic comedy.

Others said "I don't want to see it, because it's a spoof of zombie movies, and all spoofs suck." They may have said almost all spoofs, making exceptions of some of Mel Brooks' better stuff, and/or Airplane, but for the most part, I will agree with this assessment of spoof movies. There are an awful lot of pitfalls when it comes to parody. The biggest one of course is that a spoof of something is going to be much much shorter than the source material. If you can't make a joke about an aspect, you're going to gloss over it, and if you can, it's not going to take you that long. So if you want to spoof a rwo hour movie with a two hour movie, you need to fill out that space. Generally to do that, you either spoof a bunch of other things, which tends to be pretty forced and thus not funny, you kill time with a lot of awful low-brow humor or sight gags, or worst of all, you try taking yourself seriously between the gags, and just come off pathetic. Thankfully, Shaun of the Dead is not a spoof of zombie movies.

What Shaun of the Dead REALLY is, is a straight-up Romero style zombie movie. Heck, you can slip it right into the ... of the Dead timeline with no inconsistancies popping up on you. Really, the only things that seriously seperate this from Dawn of the Dead (the real one, not the one with the fast "zombies" and whatnot) is that it doesn't have the theme of "zombies don't kill people, people kill people" going, it's British, and it's a black comedy. To reiterate, it's a properly done zombie movie. It's a black comedy. If you do not make some attempt to see this movie at some point, I will take it as a personal insult.

My real point here however is that movie previews have seriously gone astray. The point of a movie preview should be to give the viewer a good grip on what sort of movie is being advertised, so that those who find it an appealing sort of movie know that they should go see it. It is extremely rare these days to see such a preview. Looking at previews for movies currently out there, or have come out in the last, say, five years, the only movies whose previews gave me some understanding of what they were about were for the sort of mindless drivel that I can hand you the whole script if you give me a one sentence summary and an hour. With everything else, you get a few scenes from the movie, or the cutting room floor in some cases, taken completely out of context, and used to try and sell the movie as something it's not. Said something it's not tends to be meritless filth 9 times out of 10 too, so I don't really see the point.

There is one thing Shaun of the Dead's previews did however that I would like to see more often. They quoted the opinions of a lot of people who have made similar movies. Specifically, the people who brought us Army of Darkness, Dead Alive, and the ... of the Dead trilogy. Mind you, they didn't credit these people as such. Instead refering to them as the directors of Spiderman, The Lord of the Rings, and, well, the ... of the Dead movies, but George Romero hasn't directed a big budget high profile action flick recently. Still though, the important thing is, they quoted them, and I care about their opinions in this context. If you make a black comedy about children's entertainment, I want to know what Danny DeVito thinks of it (as he did Death to Smoochy). If you make a cool dark artsy movie in the vein of Dark City, I want Alex Proyas to chime in on it... for that matter, I want him to do anything, but that's another topic. If you make some big epic space opera, I want to know if George Lucas digs it... well, OK, not George Lucas NOW, but you know, if you have a time machine, want to go back 20 years, and ask him THEN, I'd like to know.

That said, it's time for something of an announcement. This rants section here was, until now, the heart of my site. If I update anything, I update this. There's a problem there though. The point of this section isn't to be the heart of the site, the point is to be a collection of, well, rants. Indignant page long essays about subjects on which I have a very strong opinion I wish to voice. I don't have one of these every week. Heck, I don't have one of these every month. So, if I want to keep throwing out new content on this page, I have to pass off update logs as rants, like I did up there, or I have to write bloggish entries, like I did, well, higher up there, and back in July when i last touched this. The alternative is to let things gather dust for months on end... which I did from August to late November.

Then there's the actually GOOD alternative. Make this section no longer the heart of the site. I have a main index page which I generally don't make any use of. No point in that. So I revamped it. It is now a sort of update log/mini-rant/whatnot hub, which I am going to update in some form or another on a daily basis. So, bookmark THIS instead of this. I am not going to be posting a new rant until the next time I have something to really rant about. I am going to update all sorts of other things, without mentioning it here. I will mention updates to this and those HERE. So again, bookmark it.

Oh yes, and in the spirit of the season, have I shown you all the picture of the severed chupacabra head? I'd make a warning not to click if you're squeamish, but the link says "severed chupacabra head" and that should be clear enough.