Modern Weird Horror Dungeoncrawl: The Movie

So As Above, So Below was not what I expected, at all.  The trailer bills it as a straight up horror movie, but what I got was more of a dark fantasy dungeon crawl, set in modern times.   If anything, it reminded me of a Lamentations of the Flame Princess negadungeon.

The acting was shit, but that's not really what you're going for.  It proceeds at a nice clip, whizzing you along as the hapless fools are forced to go deeper, then deeper, then deeper still.  There's a magical artifact, there's characters with specialties (I'm the translator!  I'm the climber!  I'm the navigator! etc) and.... there's a bunch of set pieces that I'm totally stealing for my next game, so I won't go into it here.

The ending... well.  It's an ending.  Not what I would have done with it, but what do I know from movies, eh?

Post Apocalyptic Theater: The Rover

Ten Years After the Collapse.

Looking back on the film, this really sets the tone for the next hour and forty five minutes.  This is a sparse movie, cutting the plot and exposition to the bone, leaving a tale as rawboned and gaunt as the characters.

It tells you nothing you don't absolutely need to know, like the nature of the Collapse.  It doesn't matter.  Shit is so far gone that nobody cares about how it got that way anymore.

I'm pretty sure that this is the latest in a trend in movies, where the funding comes from governmental agencies, tied to the promise by the filmmaker to ensure that they show off the beauty of the land, presumably to encourage tourism.  As a result, despite the sparse nature of the film, it feels maybe ten or fifteen minutes too long.  Without that extra time, though, it's doubtful the movie would have gotten made, and it's a fair trade for the wide open views of Australia.  The vivid colors that float above the dry and dusty brown where the humans live.

The result is something that feels like a cross between the Road Warrior, but with the breadth and scope of The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford.  It's a movie that showcases the beauty of the land, even as mankind roots about in its own shit.  It's as much a slow seduction as a film - it pulls you in, teasing you with beauty and ugliness combined, innocence and damnation, black humor and bleak realism.

As for the acting, Guy Pierce is Guy Pierce.  'Nuff said.

The real surprise, though, is Robert Pattinson.  It's unfortunate that he cut his teeth in Twilight - this is twice now that he's surprised me.  While Cosmopolis was ultimately forgettable, he stood out, and here again he disappears into his role, perhaps even more so than in Cronenberg's weak outing.  The range of acting on display in his role is nothing short of remarkable, and really drives home the ending.

It's a testament to the directors of this film that you are sucked into the movie to the extent that you assume the same intensity as Guy Pierce's character.  The hows and the why's fall away, leaving you only with the Now.  You stop asking questions. You accept situations with the same equanimity that you do the introduction - Ten Years After the Collapse.  You quickly realize that it doesn't matter.

It's not until the end that you're reminded that some things do matter, and all of a sudden, you reevaluate everything that has come before, and only by seeing the distance between your perceptions at the beginning and the end of the film, only then do you understand what it truly means to live in that world.

FtA: From the Ashes Play Report

Awhile back, I was a backer of Ron Edwards' Sorceror Upgrade Kickstarter.  I backed at the level which forced Ron to playtest my game.  It took forever for me to hammer what I had into some sort of usable form, but I finally managed to get it to him, and he was able to run a session of From the Ashes last weekend.  As promised, he's written up a review of the experience, warts and all..

I'm glad some fun was able to be wrung from the game, and while I obviously have some more work to do in order to get it ready for primetime, so to speak, it is encouraging to know that I at least seem to be on the right path.

More soon!

My thoughts on Pacific Rim

Not quite right...

I'm on vacation this week and wasn't going to post at all, but I saw Pacific Rim this morning, and felt I needed to be the 9,584th person to comment on it.

Overall, I enjoyed the film.  It does what it sets out to do well - to make a movie where giant robots and monsters punch and stab and shoot each other.  Hollywood doesn't think that's enough, though, so you end up with plot and character development shoehorned in awkwardly.  Did Idris Elba need to have cancer?  Did Dudebro McGee (does anyone remember the main character's name without checking IMDB?  Bueller?  Bueller???) have to have any sort of character arc at all?

Think about all the criticism the movie has suffered since its release - 99% centered around paper thin plots and broad sweeping characterizations.  Why?  Because those sorts of things don't really belong in a film about giant robots and monsters that punch and stab and shoot each other.  You're not going to the movie to see character development.  Idris Elba's name might have been on the top of the posters, but he wasn't the star of the show, the giant robots and monsters were.  And if you don't need it, putting it in there anyway is always going to feel forced.

Movies like these should be done documentary style.  You ever watch Our World at War, Victory at Sea or any of the old WWII documentaries History Channel used to play when they used to talk about History?  It should be like that.  There's plot, but the characters are only presented in terms of how they relate to the plot.  The only time you get romance is when it's germane to something to do with the War.  Here's a sample:

Can you honestly say this movie would have been worse had Dudebro McGee and his merry band just been presented, profile style, and the rest of the movie was just giant robots and monsters punching and stabbing and shooting each other?

Barrowmaze II: Barrow Harder

Now that was fast!  Two days after receiving the email from Greg Gillespie letting me know that my order had shipped, it arrived today, safe and sound. I didn't spring for all the goodies that came with the Indiegogo campaign, but I did get a good amount of swag that accompanied it. 

The package contained:

• Barrowmaze II Hardcover
• Illustration Booklets for Barrowmaze I and II
• Barrowmaze Map in classic blue
• Three Exclusive Barrowmaze Dice
• A Certificate identifying me as the proud owner of number 59 of 200 in the first print run for Barrowmaze II

The Good:

I loved Barrowmaze the First,  with all of it's undead weirdness, and Barrowmaze II: Electric Boogaloo lives up to the reputation of it's predecessor, and surpasses it in some ways.  The inclusion of the poster map was key, for me at least.  As much as I love some of the megadungeons that are hitting the shelves these days, putting the maps page by page in the book itself makes it difficult to get a real sense of the place.  To me, it's closer to reading an excel spreadsheet than looking at an epic dungeon.  So yeah, big map = big plus.  I love Greg's personalized inscription on the book - a nice touch, very classy.  The Random Crypt Generator looks like a ton of fun, and something that could be used in or out of the campaign, and more new spells and magic items are always a good thing.  The integration of the new areas has been well handled, for instance room 122 in Barrowmaze I indicated that there had been a collapse, in Barrowmaze II: The Barrowmazening, that collapse has apparently been cleared, and there is now a doorway leading into the new areas.  Oh, and the art is lovely.  With the text as just as spare as its predecessors, the art fills in the gaps, giving the dungeon the breath of life.  The two illustration booklets in particular were worth the price of admission by themselves.

The Bad:

As I mentioned above, the in-book maps are a bit... well, not good.  In the first Barrowmaze, the maps were at a 90 degree angle compared to the rest of the  book, in small print, and had a bit of overlap from page to page, with some squares getting cut off by the page halfway through.  Barrowmaze II: Attack of the Clones has all of that except it's not as small print.  I mean, I guess you could photocopy all the pages, cut out the actual maps, line them up and then tape them to make your own map, but when I buy a pregen dungeon, I have an expectation that it be a bit more ready to play than that.  As I said above, the inclusion of the big map will be key to my enjoyment of the dungeon, so I'm glad that I don't have to rely on the in-book maps.  Barrowmaze II: Barrow of Doom suffers from additional problems, with what looks to be a formatting error that results in some of each page of the map spilling into the next page, with 3/4 of the page left blank.  BI was only 3 pages, BII is 11.  I wouldn't relish building that map.  The Random tables were nice again, although I was disappointed that there wasn't more original material, in the Dungeon Dressing table in particular.

The Ugly:

Getting into the nitpicking here, but the cover isn't terribly secure, on my copy at least.  The corners are a bit crumpled, with the cover art already separating from the cover itself.  Judging by how securely it was shipped, I can only assume this was a manufacturer's defect.  Oh, and my name was misspelled in the credits.  Ah well, I'll have to live in anonymity for another day.

Overall:

Any negatives are far outweighed by the vast amount of new material poured into Barrowmaze II: Barrow of Secrets, and I'll gladly sit it next to its predecessor on my shelf, ready to pounce upon unwary gamers at a moments notice!

Oh!  And hey!  That's my 3rd kickstarter type project that has fully fulfilled its obligations!  Great job good day!

 
Rejected:
Barrowmaze II: Wrath of the Barrow 
Barrowmaze II: The Two Barrows
Barrowmaze II: Dead Man's Barrow
Barrowmaze II: Barrowmaze Returns
Barrowmaze II: New Barrow
Barrowmaze II: BM2
The Lost World: Barrowmaze II
2Barrow2Maze
Barrowmaze II: Meet the Mazes
Barrowmaze II: Barrows Reloaded
Barrowmaze II: Lost in the Maze
Barrowmaze II: The Maze who Shagged Me
Barrowmaze II: The Maze Takes Manhattan
etc etc etc