Dungeons and Dragons, "Legions of the Undead"

Standard Introduction

            I have been writing about Dungeons and Dragons semi-regularly this year and in the course of writing those I found a 30-day blog challenge.  As I have done those a couple times before it seemed remiss not to jump on this one.

            If you want here is a link to my 30-day challenge on Disney Movies, here is a link to my 30-day challenge on Video Games, and here is a comically out of date 30-day challenge on Movies (it is old and the writing is rubbish).

Day 19- Favorite Undead

            There are 10,000 monsters in this gods damned game.  Today is Undead, my favorite type of monster.  Look to my blog about Vecna (and undead god) for a little more, but generally it can be summed up with, “Undead encapsulate a good metaphor for Dungeons and Dragons.  Exploring the ruins of the old world, plumbing for their secrets, and facing the horrible monsters they left behind”.

            Let’s go.

#7 Morhg/Ghoul

            I think these two are closer to one another than their appearances might lead you to believe.  One is a skeleton that has purple flesh running thru it and causes paralysis with its tongue.  The other is a gaunt purple skinned creature that causes paralysis with its claws.  They have the same sort of role in a combat encounter, stop the movement of characters with weak Constitutions.

            I’ve never used these guys for anything but goons, they are not exactly thinker types and I would say that they are probably not the first choice on the Necromancer’s “To-Make” list.  They are a good monster to sprinkle into an encounter to make things more dangerous, but not more dynamic, they literally slow things down.

#6 Bone Claw

            These guys look so cool, and their use of the reach rules makes them strong encounters in any situation in which closing ground is difficult, a narrow bridge, an elevated area, that sort of thing.

            I haven’t used these to great effect, but have had them used to great effect against me back when they first came out in 3^rd edition.

#5: Devourer

            Another awesome looking monster with a cool concept.  They slowly burn a trapped soul within their chest to grant them power.  I can’t even think of a way to make that better.  4^th edition did by providing 3 types which took the concept and cranked up the extremeness of it.  Kudos to 4^th edition.

#4: Vampire

            Quintessential bad guys of literature and screen.  They have been translated everywhere and are almost always great.  They are kind of the best monsters in fiction for all that has and can be done with them, but are not necessarily the best in Dungeons and Dragons.

            I actually think these guys were interpreted too faithfully in 3^rd edition.  The number of weaknesses and abilities got to be cumbersome, so much so that I just never bothered.

            Even the best movies and books about Vampires tend to leave some of the mythology at the door so that they do not have to comment on running water; holy water; holy symbols; sunlight; silver; garlic; OCD; blood of virgins; the ability to talk to wolves, bats, insects; the ability to shapeshift into creatures of the night; the ability to transform into monsters; the ability to turn into mist; the need for soil of their homeland; the need for a coffin; vulnerability to fire; vulnerability to falling in love with bland women who consider “clumsy” to be a personality trait; the need for torpor; blood potency; spellcasting ability; the nature of the soul; transformations of one’s face in order to feed; strength level; flight; drinking blood; hypnosis; rivalry with werewolves; and jiminy cricket this list could go on forever.

            I think that a “Make your own vampire” feature might have been cool.  Pick two weaknesses of varying strength, pick three abilities of various strength and get an approximate challenge rating for facing your players.

            Oops, thought of another one, Lack of Reflection.

#3: Wight

            I had a really good use for these guys in a 3^rd edition campaign in which a magical plague transformed hundreds of people into wights to be used as somewhat intelligent slave labor in the excavation of a section of underground city.

            When the players found the whole thing while looking for missing people, all of the wights had been left in holding pens and cages, they then began crying out for help in low moaning voices, “Save me,” “Save us,” “Where am I,” “Please help me,” and I do lots of voices so it was pretty creepy.  I managed to pull off some rather haunting images of pale clawed hands reaching out from between bars not to strike but to beg for mercy.

#2: Mummy

            Mummies, much like Rats from my entry on “Favorite Animals” have access to disease as a secondary rules benefit.  Beyond that, they have a lot of pop culture recognition, obvious exploitable weaknesses, and plenty of significance as a cultural marker in certain settings (Egyptian theme being the most obvious).

            Magic the Gathering just did an Egypt themed setting and the clever thing they did was take Zombies and Mummies, undead creatures associated with Black Magic, and making them more associated with the veneration and societal order of White Magic.  This is a subversion and I like it a great deal.  I think this sort of twist on what is expected can be applied to mummies in DnD and I think I will attempt something like it in the future.

            I have used Mummies before, in 3e and 4e, both times to good effect.  They make good slow moving goons that deal a lot of damage and leave an impact on play in the form of Mummy rot.  They are good monsters.

#1: Lich

            They are the best bad guys.  HARD STOP.

            I don’t know what else to add.  They are a threat up close, at range, they are capable of plans, their weaknesses are not debilitating but still exploitable.  They are the best bad guys.

            I already talked about the king of the liches, Vecna in my “Favorite Deity” entry.  They are the best.

A Special Mention: Zombies

            As I write this I have learned that George Romero died just this past Sunday.  If you don’t know, he invented the modern idea of what a zombie is with the movie “Night of the Living Dead”.  I would like to point out that do to a strange error when securing the Copyright, the movie entered the public domain almost immediately, meaning George made only a tiny fraction of the money he should have for all the times the movie has appeared or been shown.  The converse of that is the movie ended up appearing everywhere and on everything which led to it being so iconic and influential.

            The reason I want to point that out is it illustrates everything wrong with copyright law, the law does not protect creators, it protects people who know how to fill out paperwork.  It also shows how valuable and powerful the Public Domain is.  The ability for things in the public domain to be used by a wide audience allows those bits of media to quickly transcend what might have only been a cult status and change the way people look at fiction.

            I wish there had been a compromise on this.  That Romero had been able to make money off of his insanely influential movie, and the movie to be diffused into the public consciousness without needing a marketing machine like Disney or Warner Bros behind it.

            I wish more things, after having made back a healthy profit, could be released to the public domain so as to be seen as part of media culture.  So as to benefit the creators and the creative community.  Kind of like how Dungeons and Dragons provides rules and materials to help people be more creative, but at the same time is a brand that sells books and materials.  It is a business, but it is a business that serves as a powerful tool to educate people about their own creativity.

            George Romero leaves behind a potent legacy.  He was vastly more influential than I think he ever pictured himself being and added to the world.  The world is a better and more interesting place for him having been in it.  We should all be so lucky to live as long and be as positive an influence as George was.

Coming Tomorrow

            Tomorrow I am going to talk about my least favorite monster.

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Games I will be Playing

            I have not been posting nearly enough this year and I want to steer back from that.  To that end I have found a 30-day blog challenge and will be writing out entries, hopefully I can get all thirty days without any breaks, and if I manage to do that (since August has 31 days) I will think of an additional entry to write about.  I have done a 30-day challenge before, it for movies, but that was a while back, feel free to read those too if you like.

            Today is day 29 and the topic is “A Game I Will Be Playing”.

            I do not have a single game earmarked for this topic, so I picked something more nebulous, My Steam Library.  Way back on day 4 I said that the PC was my favorite system to play on, and that was because of Steam, and right now I have a shit ton of games all loaded and ready to play just as soon as I get past that initial push of actually turning them on.

            Let’s look at 5 games I have played for less than an hour, but I still want to play more of them, I just haven’t for whatever reason.

You can almost hear the moody low key score in your head.
Even if you have never played this game you can picture what it sounds like.

            1) “Deadlight”

            While I am sure of the narrative developing it is a solid platforming game.  I imagine that if this game had not been about zombies, which I am kind of sick of at this point.

Let me talk about zombies for a second.  The thing about fads in pop culture when they relate to science fiction and horror elements, be it vampires, werewolves, angels, or aliens; these things tend to show up, they get 4-5 movies or shows, then there is a brief period of backlash when people start to analyze the nuances of why they would and would not work, and finally the fad passes out of the system to get revisited a decade later with a fresh twist.

At this point zombies have not only been deconstructed, they survived the backlash and just kept on walking around, getting even more shows and video game tie ins.  We are going to end up hitting the revisiting/revitalizing stage of the cycle without them having ever dropped out of popular consciousness.  That is weird. 

This game also sounds exactly how you would picture it to.

            2) “Invisible Inc”

            I like turn based strategy, and a stealth game that utilizes a system akin to “X-Com” but for thievery sounds great.  I had actually hoped for a game with fewer narrative elements so I could just play it while doing something else, but with the story kicking in between every mission and sometimes during I can’t split my attention entirely, hence why I have not managed to play thru the thing.  I guess I will have to make time to go thru the thing rather than it just being something I keep busy with.

This is a longer game and has a more diverse sound.

            3) “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning”

            This game has a style, both in gameplay and art, that reminds me a lot of “Fable” and I think that if I just give it a shot it will draw me in, but I’ve played it less than 2 hours.

This actually sounds nothing like I would picture.

            4) “Mark of the Ninja”

            This is a stealth platformer that is fun, but for whatever reason I found myself annoyed by being graded for my performance by the game while at the same time being unsure what it is I needed to do in order to improve my performance.  I think I will have to give it another chance and just ignore the repeated instances of me sucking.

This one sounds like the 90's cartoon adaptation of itself.

            5) “Shadowrun Returns”

            This turn based gameplay added to a cyberpunk setting, but with magic… This seems to have everything I look for in a story based game.  I liked the first half hour, but much like my non-starter romantic relationships in my life, I was afraid to commit.

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Now let’s look at games that are downloaded, and ready to roll, but I haven’t actually played them, instead just looking at them for a few minutes before playing “Age of Empires III” or “Civilization V” again.  These were initially in reverse alphabetical order, because I thought that would provide a strange sense of symmetry to the list (as the previous list is in alphabetical order), but then I realized that if I put them in Alphabetical order I would have started the previous list with zombies and ended this one with zombies, and that seemed even more symmetrical.  I am a bit of a mad person.

I think this has music that is suitably a mix of grim and epic.

1) “Darksiders II”

I played the first one, and while I found it to be over the top it was still fun… Until I hit a boss I couldn’t beat.  I turned the difficulty down, played it several times, and then quit in a huff (This attitude is also why I have not played a lot of “Dark Souls”).  That experience with “Darksiders” left me a little uninterested in trying the sequel, but I got it as part of a game bundle when THQ went out of business and have been willing to give the series another shot but just haven’t yet done so.

Creepy and weird.

            2) “Dishonored”

            This is probably the most well regarded game on this list.  I have no idea why I did not dive into this the day I got it.  I have wanted to, but just haven’t.  I think I might have some deep seeded fear of starting something I will probably enjoy.

Bit of a color change with this title as compare to the previous entries.

            3) “How to Survive”

            Fucking Zombies again.  At least this one has a unique view of the gameplay, and seems to emphasize making weapons to fight the zombies in different ways.

Sexy chick in a cyberpunk dystopia.  Tell me I'm Dreaming.

            4) “Remember Me”

            A science fiction dystopia about manipulating memories and kung fu.  Am I in the Matrix?  No?  Okay.  But that’s what the game is about.

Windmills?  If I had played this it might make sense.

5) “Valkyria Chronicles”

This is a turn based strategy game set in an anime version of World War II, but they don’t call it that.  Cause, Japan.  Which is fine by me.  I have heard tons of good things but much like everything else I just haven’t done it.

Anything I write in this caption will be more words than what I wrote under the description.

6) “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux”

This is about a guy walking around.  That is all I have managed to gather about this thing.

Even the music on this thing is better than the show.

            7) “The Walking Dead: Season Two”

            I talked about the first one being a masterpiece of storytelling (except for chapter 3) and I have put off actually playing this thing for freaking ever.  I no idea why.  Two of my buddies played it in tandem and invited me to watch it but I foolishly blew them off expecting to have played it on my own time.

            This is kind of where that lethargy toward zombies was really kicking in.  I had been giving the TV show a shot at this point (what a piece of shit) and this could just wait.

            I think it is pretty clear that I have allowed way too many god damn games pile up in my Steam library and have not done enough to actually take advantage of owning them the way I took advantage of how easy they were to purchase.  This is the problem I think with some online shopping that lots of people fall into, when you have instant access to something you want on an impulse and those impulses are stimulated frequently by sales, special offers, or just more content being released it feeds that squirrel part of the brain that just collects and hordes hunts until your squirrel hard drive looks like an overstuffed red bar.

            What games have you been looking forward to playing but haven’t had the time or the drive to actually hit “start”?  Or are there any games you only played for an hour before setting down?  Not because they were bad, just because you had other shit to do and it could wait.  And they continue to wait.  Please comment.

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Saddest Video Game Moment

            I have not been posting nearly enough this year and I want to steer back from that.  To that end I have found a 30-day blog challenge and will be writing out entries, hopefully I can get all thirty days without any breaks, and if I manage to do that (since August has 31 days) I will think of an additional entry to write about.  I have done a 30-day challenge before, it for movies, but that was a while back, feel free to read those too if you like.

            Today is day 11 and the topic is “Saddest Video Game Moment”.

            This review contains spoilers for the Tell Tale video game “The Walking Dead”.  As it is one of the most critically lauded games in… probably of all time.  And it is both accessible to non-game players and fans of the show, if you have not played the game YOU REALLY SHOULD.  I know it is zombies and that topic could not be more done to death if they tried.  And I know the TV show is crap, but the game is good.  Please play the game.

Seriously, the TV show is crap.

            Hell, people who have played the game already know what scene I am talking about and agreeing with me (unless they are one of those people who claim that the “Final Fantasy” series isn’t full of crap in which case you are wondering why I did not pick the scene in which an overly cheerful woman gets killed by what looks like the front man to an emo punk band).

            Let’s start with an overall review that I threw up on Steam just the other day.

This game represents a lot of things, all of them good.

1. The use of original characters in the same universe helps avoid comparisons to the critically acclaimed comic, feeling like growth of the work rather than a retread (the TV show is a retread and I would describe it as inexplicable popular).
2. This is the game license that allowed Telltale to break out, previously producing fun adventure games they are now producing the best ones to wide acclaim with more content set in comic and fantasy universe known to the general public.
3. This is one of the most accessible games out there.  Where the game play is less reliant on skill and more reliant on making decisions that impact the story.  There are still stakes, but since all of them are about the characters' feelings and relationships it ultimately has a deep impact.  Your input makes you feel responsible for ending and makes it hit harder.  And it is sad.

            If I were to log a complain it is this: it is a modern adventure game based more around story than gameplay, it is one step removed from a “Chose Your Own Adventure” novel and thus you will not get a lot of traditional gameplay elements based on reflexes and accuracy (when those elements do show up the controls are not built for them so you may lose those sections frustratingly).

I will also say that the chapters are not uniformly good, with chapter 3 being the weakest, reason being that in an episodic game, it is an episodic chapter, there is no unifying story that tie all its parts together.  Chapter 3 is like they took all the standalone episodes in which “things happen” and put them in one place, whereas all of the other chapters have one big thing happen in several smaller parts.  It is fine, I like it, but compared to 2 and 5 (my picks for the best episodes) it stands out as weak, you could almost skip it entirely because so much of what happens in it could just be shrugged off as, “I guess that happened off screen” like all of the things a person assumes happens off screen in a TV series between seasons.  Again, it is still good, just not as good.

            Now to talk about the ending and this is the last part at which you can avoid SPOILERS.

            You are Lee Everett, formally a teacher and a murderer, when the dead started to walk you did your best to secure the safety of yourself and in doing so discovered a child, Clementine.  Over the course of 5 chapters, or 10-12 hours of playing what is a very well written story of survivors in a zombie wasteland you arrive at the destination you have sought the whole game.  The young girl you have been protecting learns the ultimate fate of her parents and you succumb to the zombie virus.  There is a choice to be made 1) you can choose to have her put you out of your misery or 2) you can spare her the grim task of dispatching your ass before you are too far gone by having her leave you to become a walker.  Either way, the little girl is all alone and you are dead.

"Yeah, that sounds pretty sad."

Clementine has been the sad little innocent in the story that Lee has done his best to protect, but in the end she has to lose all the innocence you tried to let her keep.  And after your death she wanders into a world full of monsters, cannibals, and the bleak uncertainty of a civilization that has completely collapsed.  It is incredible.

            Share your own thoughts on this in the comments.  I know I am not the only person out there who cares about video games, and I am sure many people disagree with me.

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Movies of 2013, Apocalypse, pt3, World War Z

Apocalypse Films (or "What is the Dumbest Thing I have seen all Year?")

World War Z, or "What?  Seriously, what?"

Overall: 3/10 (To answer my starting question, this is the Dumbest movie I have seen all year)

It is clear this script was not written for the book it was supposedly based on.
It is a series of set pieces strung together rather than a carefully plotted tale building to a climax.

            Another god damn zombie movie.  Look, this is just a really, really stupid movie, if nothing else it is that, and I would not recommend seeing it. I am now going to look at some spoiler info to show how dumb it is.

            Spoiler time discussion: The zombie outbreak starts... somewhere and spreads through airports, the zombies can only be incapacitated by bullets though unless they are completely destroyed they seem to keep coming after a short respite, they are fast, the infection spreads quickly, and all the actors in zombie make up over play the role to the point that it is silly rather than scary or engaging.  Brad Pitt is a UN investigator that is sent into... I don't know what he does, I think his job involves figuring out what happens in warzones.

            The movie is a road trip, going from scene to scene all over the world, initially it is pretty good with the outbreak in the city, followed by raiding supplies and escaping via helicopter on a roof.  These are simple down to earth adventures that could be experienced by anyone in a crisis situation.
            Then Pitt travels to Korea, and while refueling in the rain the zombies attack, how the zombies saw, heard, or smelled them in the rain (at night) is not explained and the rules for how these things behave is a little unclear.  One character, thought to be plot indispensable falls down and shoots himself in the face... It is hilarious.

            After Korea they go to Israel in the most laughable point in the film.  Israel has apparently been spending all the foreign aid the US has been giving them on walls to keep the zombies out (METAPHOR) and then decides to let everybody into the walls having never heard of quarantine procedures before.  Then when the groups of Jews and Palestinians start singing about love, togetherness and acceptance the noise attracts zombies to break in and annihilates the whole thing (METAPHOR?)

The Israeli wall is where this happens.

            Brad Pitt escapes in a plane, which gets infected (I have no idea where this comes from it is established that infection takes 12 seconds, they have been in the air for an hour... Again the rules are made up and the plot points don't matter).  The plane crashes near enough to walk to a WHO (World Health Organization) facility... Near enough to walk with a piece of plane debris going through Pitt's torso.  The WHO faculty then threaten Pitt with violence and interrogate him... Why?  They are doctors and viral pathologists not fascists, there is no reason for them to act this way.

            They then explain that sick people are effectively invisible to zombies... The zombies only wanting to infect healthy people... because only a healthy person can spread the infection properly... a magical disease that turns off the circulatory system... No kidding they establish that biological attacks on the zombies won't work because without a working circulatory system there is no way for the disease to harm them...  So what difference would being sick make?

            Regardless Pitt gets to the zombie infested lab with all of the virus samples, infects himself (it is important to note that he is in a refrigerator and finds syringes to inject himself, because of course they keep syringes in the refrigerated room with all the Ebola).  And it is true that undead can't see sick people... They then infect the world with  some kind of flu and people commence to exterminate the zombies in epic battles which look all the more preposterous because all of the human attacks are effectively invisible and completely immune to attack from the zombies now who ignore them even while getting bashed apart.

            Pitt then gets to reunite with his family in the Canadian wilderness.

            Additional problems: There are not this many people in the world to make the things that happen in this movie happen.  You have millions of zombies in every location pouring like a tidal wave over crowds of humans... Horseshit.  It would not take that long to figure out sick people are invisible, it would be immediately apparent.  The WHO are a useless international disaster response force, if you want someone to hand out condom information packets and hold an AIDS seminar for people who don't listen, call the WHO, massive viral breakout would require the CDC which is in Atlanta and would have been destroyed instantly in this movie.

            There are so many things wrong with this movie that any active viewer will become bored and frustrated with it after the first 30 minutes.

Movies of 2013, Apocalypses, pt1

Apocalypse Films (or "What is the Dumbest Thing I have seen all Year?")

            Strangely, the end of the world was its own genre this year with a half dozen examples I managed to see.  Most having to do with some kind of giant monster, alien invasion, or zombies taking over... I guess the alien invasion of bland unfeeling robots could be a form of zombie too... Regardless it was its own thing outside of Fantasy, Horror, Science Fiction, or Action and so I will review the 6 I saw.  This is the first 3.

Pacific Rim, or "I can't Really Complain, I knew what the Premise of the Movie Was."

Overall: 6/10

I also find it funny that the main robot's name is Gypsy Danger, initials are GD, or "God Damn".

            There is nothing really surprising about this movie.  It is Power Rangers for grown ups with giant robots and giant monsters, a distant alien threat, a wise mentor figure, goofy comic relief, and martial arts sequences.  It is stone stupid.  However, it is extremely sincere in its stupidity, it is about fun, teamwork, and action, it is not, by any measure, a bad movie, and as a special effects triumph it is definitely worth watching.

            There are parts when they talk about how the giant monsters have the same DNA and are mass produced clones sent to attack Earth, this makes no sense because each monster looks totally different from one another, giant Crawfish, ape like, acid spitting, winged, tentacles, or able to fire off EMP blasts.  These are not clones.  There is also a heavy handed environmental message, and a tie into dinosaurs that is insulting to the audience.

            See if you were to create a defense against giant monsters that always appeared from the same area the answer is pretty obvious.  Turrets.  You set them up around the portal and whenever something emerges it is immediately bombarded into fish food.  Their poisonous bio mass gets washed away into the ocean, so I guess we could also set up some sort of filtering mechanism... Point is, robots are a preposterous idea.  But since the movie is about giant robots fighting giant monsters you just swallow that part of the stupid equation for the sake of fun.

            Additional problems: The characters are very stock, but that is to be expected because they want the audience to focus on the Giant Monsters aspect of things and having complex political social dynamics would just eat up time without really adding.

            Additional blessing: the movie ends with a literal Jaeger-Bomb.  I found that funnier than I should have.

This is the End, or "Surprisingly effective set-up and pay off."

Overall: 5/10

It also continues the trend of advertising comedies by just advertising the stars rather than the content.

            I can't really say that I hate this movie, it has a lot of real problems with scenes dragging on too long as, what I am assuming is improv, goes on and on well past the point in which it was funny.  And to some people that is hilarious just watching good comedic entities bounce off one another but really it just needs to be a little sharper.

            The movie does a good job with set up and pay off, having little lines of dialogue referencing people and then having them show up later in a surprisingly twisted way, or saying that a plot point should happen in a movie the characters are working on, and then having it happen in reality like some meta eternal recurrence type thing.  The effects are often amazing, with demons, heavenly light, death and destruction, and possession.

            Strangely the biggest issue I have with the movie is that I was having more fun just at some stoner-celebrity party than I did watching them in the apocalypse, the humor takes a step down once the plot gets going, and I ended up missing the interaction with all the other stars that were in the movie like Jason Segel and Mindy Kaling.  It is fine enough.

Warm Bodies, or "That's the Power of Love?"

Overall: 5/10

I guess it can be a little difficult to have banter between the leads when one can't speak... Parody?

            My seeing this movie was subsidized by a friend.  I wanted t wait till it hit the bargain theater in a week and save $3, and they wanted to see it that day, so they gave me the difference in ticket price.  Which is nice.

            In a universe which has been over run by zombies... you know, say what you will about Superhero movies all being the same, but compared to the monotone zombie films that are everywhere Hulk and Thor might as well be different genres... in a world destroyed by zombies one zombie clings to the idea of being human, and when he ingests the brains (and with the the memories) of a living girl's boyfriend he falls in love and slowly starts to transform into a human again.

            I like the actors, I even like the premise, but let me be clear, the movie is not funny or fast paced enough for me to have been swept up in it.  It is just okay.  It is stupid and takes its metaphor to such a Nth degree that nobody is left confused or frustrated by it.  But ultimately it is not comedic, romantic, horrific, or action packed enough to really hit me.  It gets a solid, "meh".