HeroPress: December 2010

Friday, 31 December 2010

When Humans Ruled The Earth...

When Humans Ruled the Earth from Stephen Ong on Vimeo.

One hundred years, I tell you,
then it's "good night, Vienna!"

Primeval - Your Five-Step Route To Its Return...

Set your chronometers to January 1, 2011, the criminally underrated (even by me initially) Primeval is coming home...

Which also means more Hannah Spearritt on our TV... and that has to be a good thing!

Music Of 2010 - Louder Than God's Revolver...

Sing - My Chemical Romance

Thursday, 30 December 2010

I Am... Bat-Monkey!

It's not just the humans that got Christmas presents in our household.

Rachel's parents' got Mon-Key Wan Kenobi a Batman outfit, so that by day he is a mild-mannered jedi knight and when darkness falls he dons his cape and cowl and takes to the rooftops as the crime-fighting Bat-Monkey!

The only problem is the eye-holes on the cowl are too wide apart for Mon-Key to see out of...

Unveiling Stan's New Superteam...

Following the recent announcement of the superheroic team-up between Stan Lee and the National Hockey League (NHL), to create a legion of team-specific superheroes, a Facebook Application has been released to enable fans to determine the order in which each team’s Guardian will be unveiled.

Voting at www.guardianproject30.com will continue throughout January, with fans determining which team will win each match-up. The winners will be revealed daily, beginning with a face-off between the “Penguin” vs. the “Capital” to celebrate the 2011 Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic match-up on Saturday (January 1).

Every day, for the first 30 days in January, the winning Guardians will be revealed at 8pm ET with an exclusive image designed by legendary comic book artist Neal Adams along with their bio.

The last winner will be unveiled on Sunday, January 30, when all thirty Guardians will come to life during a special presentation within the 2011 NHL All-Star Game presented by Discover in Raleigh, N.C. (4 p.m. ET live broadcast on VERSUS in the US and on CBC and RDS in Canada).

Unveiling Stan's New Superteam...

Wednesday, 29 December 2010

Christmas Gets Everywhere...

... at Rachel's parents' house! If you thought that the bedclothes might have been an amusing 'one-off', here's some picture from Rachel of other highlights from this year's interior decorations.

Santa toilet paper - you probably can't see the expression on his face, but it changes with across each sheet!

The giant cracker was a new innovation this year - and so Rachel and I had to pull it!

Snowman icecubes, of course!

Even in the garden (and in spite of the snow, although it curtailed the lighting), Christmas makes its mark.

Even in the small, downstairs' toilet there's no escaping Santa!


A sneak peak at next year's new decorations - seasonal seat covers from the post-Christmas sales!

And The Greatest Gift This Year Was...

... sleep!

Rachel and I have returned from her parents' after our extended, traditional stay for the holidays, where - as usual - we were pampered rotten and spent most of the time either eating or sleeping.

Those who follow me on Twitter and Facebook will probably have picked up on the fact that for the last three or four months I haven't had a decent night's sleep.

But this Christmas holiday - perhaps due to the seasonal bedclothes Rachel's mum had on the bed we were staying in (see above) - I was sleeping, on average, about 12 - 15 hours a day!

And this was without resorting to my prescription Temazepam.

Usually this wonderful new sleep pattern took the form of rising about 1pm, then having an afternoon nap, then heading back to bed about 11pm.

Let's hope the quality sleep remains now and my cycle of insomnia nights has been broken. That would certainly be the best gift - probably for Rachel as well - Santa could have given me this year.

Monday, 27 December 2010

Leftover Turkey...

Here's a fine selection of fine cuts of turkey to enjoy in the post-Christmas lull...

A selection of bizarre re-imaginings, reworkings and rip-offs from around the globe (from Mexico to the Philippines, via Italy, India and Japan) of classic superheroes - complete with distorted soundtracks and laughably feeble special effects.

Sunday, 26 December 2010

Know Alignment...

Explaining the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system in terms any geek can understand...

Sunday Funny: Oops!

Saturday, 25 December 2010

Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol

A gaming podcast I was listening to a couple of weeks ago made some passing jibe about how all American '80s sitcoms had to have a Christmas episode that was some riff on Dickens' A Christmas Carol - because they were so bereft of originality.

This off-hand comment only heightened my fears for the Doctor Who Christmas Special - unimaginatively entitled 'A Christmas Carol' - and after my disappointment with Stephen Moffat's first year as The Doctor's showrunner I was beginning to think that this festive one-off could easily be the nail in Who fandom's coffin for me, the straw that broke the very forgiving camel's back.

Thus I settled down to watch the episode at 6pm on Christmas Day with much trepidation - I'd even toyed with the idea of not watching it all, seeing what the reviews said then watching on Sky+ when we got home.

An hour later I was grinning like a loon, with a slight trace of dampness at the corner of my eye and delighted to proclaim that not only did The Doctor save Christmas - as always - but this was also the Christmas that saved The Doctor, for me!

It was a simple plot - that openly declared its homage to Dickens' classic as The Doctor used it as his inspiration for his machinations - after a spaceship (on which Rory and Amy were honeymooning) heading towards a crash landing on a cloudy, pseudo-steampunky world where the wicked and heartless moneylender Kazran Sardick (Michael Gambon) controlled the one device that could possibly help bring the ship in for a safe landing.

Kazran, naturally (or there wouldn't have been much of a story), wanted nothing to do with The Doctor and the crashing ship and so The Doctor took a journey back through the old miser's life to find out why he was the way he was and change him for the better.

It was a surprisingly lovely, sweet story - with an engaging, but heart-breaking - romantic subplot with Abigail (opera star Katherine Jenkins), who could only be taken out of deep freeze once a year on Christmas Eve - with only the slightest of flaws: the fact that The Doctor totally overlooked the dials on the front of Abigail's deep freeze ominously counting down as he and young Kazran (Laurence Belcher) popped back year-after-year.

It would be easy also to ridicule some of the special effects - particularly the flying shark when it was attached to the carriage - but Who has a tradition dating back to its earliest days of overstretching itself when it comes to special effects, and the half-baked green screening simply reminded me of the Pertwee/Baker era when the BBC technicians were getting to grips with CSO.

Even the casting of Katherine Jenkins, in her first acting role, was spot on and totally relevant to the story -as her character was required to sing beautifully - unlike the pointless, stunt-casting of Kylie in the dire Voyage Of The Damned, which I'd feared this might have been following.

I do think the routine that The Doctor pulled on Kazran sets a dangerous precedent though - I mean what's to stop him running the Christmas Carol schtick on Davros, The Master or any other villain he runs into next?

A Christmas Carol was flawed - slightly - but also genuinely festive, truly emotional (without resorting to the heavy-handed RTD era soap operatics) and visually entertaining (if you could look past the occasionally wonky effects) and I hope an indication of the level of the fun we can look forward to when the show returns for its two half-seasons next year.

My fanboyish love of the show may have wavered these past 12 months, but A Christmas Carol hit all the right notes for me and has pulled me back on board, slightly more reserved, less dewy eyed, but certainly back on target and looking forward to 2011.

When Doctors Clash...

THIS is the Christmas Special I want to see...

The Eleventh Doctor Locked In A Life Or Death Struggle With Doctor Doom...

...as the Fantastic Four and Amy Pond look on helplessly!

Art by the incredible Dan McDaid.

Merry Christmas We Wish You, Yes!

Happy Christmas - and Yub-Yub - To All My Readers!

Friday, 24 December 2010

Star Wars Health & Safety...

Celebrate the season responsibly!

Thursday, 23 December 2010

Behind The Mask: The Money Shot...

Great memories - that is "magic moments" in roleplaying games - often come from the unplanned and unexpected, but that's not to say some gentle nudging and downright scheming from the Gamesmaster is inappropriate.

Browsing Craig Oxbrow's excellent inspirational resource The Watch House (if you're into sci-fi and/or Doctor Who gaming then you need to read his Door In Time blog as) I came across an article he'd written on Six Staples Of SF/F Series, by way of Den Of Geek.

These standards are:

The Bodyswap
The Time Loop
Ascension To A Higher Plane Of Existence
Alternate Dimensions
The Doppelganger/Double/Duplicate
The Dream Episode

And all are immediately applicable to my Knight City Villains & Vigilantes campaign, as they are all regular features in comics as well.

Tie these into my "wish list" of cool moments - covered way back in January - and there's plenty of meat for potentially memorable adventures, if I'm GM enough to script plots that can do these tropes justice.

The main bullet points from my "wish list" were:

A "Horatio Holds The Bridge" moment - I'd just discovered D&D when this poem was read to us at school and the two just clicked.
An interesting time travel story (cf. Doctor Who et al)
The party encounters cosmic entities that threaten the world and only the heroes can stop them - every Marvel/DC comic book that features this sort of stuff inspires me to greater madness, combined with a lifelong love of the works of HP Lovecraft.
Rescuing a trapped companion from incarceration in the pit of Hell - this came from reading the dedication pages in my original (and treasured) Arduin Grimoire Trilogy, by Dave Hargrave, where he mentions an epic campaign to free his own character.
Having the players caught up in a war between angels and demons.

Originally that list was drawn up for my legacy D&D campaign, but the ideas are so broad and universal that they work just as well for superheroes. Perhaps even more so, as most won't now require waiting for the characters to reach a certain level of power - as superheroes (hopefully) should be strong enough, out of the gate, to better cope with these scenarios (well, at least avoid the TPK!).

Red Shirts...

from Foxtrot by Bill Amend

Wednesday, 22 December 2010

Prepare To Be Stung...

Another look at next month's Green Hornet.

I'm not a big Seth Rogen fan, but I think this is going to be fun.

HeroPress Readers Can Save 15% On TV And Film Tours!

HeroPress readers are being offered a 15 per cent discount on bus and walking tours operated by Brit Movie Tours - which runs tours of Doctor Who filming locations in London and South Wales.

Lewis Swan, Director, Brit Movie Tours, explained that readers need to: "use the promotion code BMT15 when they book a tour online ... they will automatically get the 15% discount on any of the bus and walking tours we offer".

The company is also launching its first Downton Abbey tour.

Following the huge success of ITV’s period drama starring Maggie Smith and Hugh Bonneville, which reached an audience of over 11 million people each week, fans can now visit the setting of the show.

The tour will take in key locations including both Downton village and Highclere Castle which was used for many of the scenes used in the series.

Lewis said: “One of the aims of the Downton Abbey Tour is to get fans of the show to see the places used in the show and to get a closer experience of how life ‘above and below stairs’ was. The commissioning of a second series in 2011 will also help to increase interest in the show.”

Other tours the company offers include Harry Potter movie locations, a Gavin & Stacey tour to find out "what's occurin'" in Barry Island, and Jack The Ripper tours of East London.

Find out more about London Tours of TV and Film Locations

Surviving The Holiday Apocalypse...

Those lovely geek gals of Team Unicorn have come up with an instructional film (1950's style) on how to combine your Christmas festivities with surviving the zombie apocalypse...

Tuesday, 21 December 2010

Keep On Walking...

Some (vague) insight into what's coming next year in The Walking Dead...

If Music Be The Food Of Love, (Role) Play On...

For pretty much every legacy Dungeons & Dragons session of my Tekralh campaign I ran for The Tuesday Knights I always had a CD of atmospheric music cued up and ready to play... and every time I'd get so excited - post-pizza meal - about the game itself I'd forget to turn the music on.

However, that doesn't mean I'll stop trying to bring the extra, audible element to the games' table - and to help me achieve this I've recently discovered a couple of new sources of RPG-specific music.

Musica Cthulhiana, as the name suggests, is 'horror ambient' music for roleplaying games, like Call of Cthulhu, Kult, Vampire, Werewolf, Cyberpunk, All Flesh Must Be Eaten and similar and is offering a free, five-track EP sampler of its new album Fragments.

The full, 20-track album (2-CD) of "dark-ambient, doom-jazz, horror-electronic and strange noises" is also available on the website, for 16.40 € (plus shipping). It is also available as a digital download for just 11.99 €

Meanwhile Fantasy Games Unlimited has a free download of a six-track album, arranged by Dave Woodrum, of funky, eclectic, dance/house music to accompany his free adventure supplement: Flying Saucer - Vessel Of Abduction (for Villains & Vigilantes).

Dave Woodrum, of course, was responsible for the excellent freebie 'location/mini-adventures' that have been on the FGU site for a while and expands upon the alien race that he introduced in one of these earlier products (Truth Seeker Weekly News).

Supersongs...

Superdad - another Charlie Harper 'classic' jingle from Two And A Half Men. It's a theme tune and an origin story...

Rejected Tom Waits theme for Iron Man 2 - as delivered by Adam Buxton.

Monday, 20 December 2010

Behind The Mask: Counter Culture...

A random selection of V&V counters (uncut)

From my earliest days of role-playing - probably because I came into Dungeons & Dragons by way of Lord Of The Rings and generic fantasy wargaming - miniatures have always been an accepted part of the gaming environment.

Not that we used them for particularly detailed tactical purposes (as they are used now in the current version of D&D), more as general reminders of where we were, party order etc As much as anything it was just another neat gimmick to have at the table, to add a certain je ne sais quoi to our adventures.

However, the one game we never used miniatures for was Villains & Vigilantes - for two reasons:

One, given that superhero costumes are individual and unique it's very difficult to find a lead, plastic or pewter miniature that exactly captures how you see your superhero (unless you are playing a character in the Marvel or DC Universe, in which case you can use HeroClix, or you happen to have connections with a manufacturing company and can have miniatures made of your own hero and villains); and
Two, Villains & Vigilantes has always had a very proud tradition of including superbly illustrated card counters in their modules.

The rules are geared towards using these inch square beauties anyway and it's (relatively) easy to produce your own at (almost) a moment's notice (either by sketching your own creation on a blank square or doing a bit of natty cutting and pasting with a pre-existing image).

Monkey House Games offers a free selection of blanks (along with some DIY containers and flight stands) while FGU has a fantastic range of - equally free - illustrated counters (for the military, CHESS agents and emergency services - complete with vehicles - and street furniture, as well as counters for Bill Willingham's two adventures, Death Duel With The Destroyers and The Island Of Doctor Apocalypse).

Villains & Vigilantes was the first game we encountered that promoted the use of counters such as this - before TSR came along with its tri-fold stand-ups for the Marvel Super Hero and Indiana Jones RPGs - and this was at time when the range of miniatures generally available was comparatively limited, so this was an eye-opening innovation to us youngsters.

It's taken the rekindling of my love for all things V&V to realise how useful (and affordable) counters are. I still have my miniatures, but when you factor in the cost of not only buying them but then paying someone to paint them (I'm artistically inept in that department), sticking with the counters that the rules are written for is just the obvious solution.

They also still work well with battle mats, 'dungeon tiles', HeroClix maps etc

But the main thing is you can easily personalise the counters to your own campaign (Steve's already offered to do this for The Tuesday Knights), rather than having to settle for a pre-made lead figure that kinda, sorta, maybe looks like you imagined your character - which makes counters a winner in my book!

Like many aspects of Villains & Vigilantes I welcome this "counter culture" as it is another way of aiding and encouraging creativity in your game, rather than putting blinkers or restrictions on it because you can't quite find what you are looking for.

Sunday, 19 December 2010

Sunday Funny: Awesome

Saturday, 18 December 2010

Behind The Mask: Why Am I Doing This?

Teaser image for Marvel Comics' next big "event"

Over at the fledgling Villains & Vigilantes-themed blog The Hero Alliance the other day, Tymothi Goss wrote an inspirational piece about an aspect of superhero roleplaying that I feel is often overlooked (it certainly was by me 'back in the day'): motivation.

What drives your character to pull on a Lycra outfit, a domino mask and a cape and beat up similarly attired bad guys?

Tymothi cited Captain America's patriotism, the Hulk's desire for solitude and Batman's quest for vengeance, but how many of us - and I am guilty as the next man - have roleplayed a superhero simply because we were playing a superhero roleplaying game?

Thinking back, the Acrobatic Flea had no deeper motivation for blasting supervillains than "it's fun". I enjoyed it as a player and never thought to give him any more nuanced character development beyond the fact that we were playing V&V therefore I would be a hero because it was "what you did".

I fear this 'flaw' in his backstory comes from the fact that the Flea was simply me as a teenager, as we were playing the core V&V "your character is you" rule. And honestly, I had no real motivation to be a superhero when I was a teenager.

I didn't come from a broken home, my parents weren't murdered by gangsters, I wasn't in the armed forces, I wasn't the last surviving member of an alien race - so if someone suddenly gifted me the ability to leap around like a human-flea, fire energy blasts from my hands and regenerate damage, I'd probably go out and have some fun with those powers!

In fact, it was probably just a twist of fate that the Acrobatic Flea didn't turn out to be a supervillain himself!

I mean, come on, you give any real teenager superpowers, you can't honestly expect him to become a paragon of virtue like Superman, can you? Have you seen Misfits?

Hopefully, when the Tuesday Knights get to sit round the table for our first V&V session next year and randomly generate their superheroic persona and backstory, I will think to ask them - of their characters - the simple question: "But why are you doing this?"

The 'ASBO 5' in costume - don't forget Misfits Christmas Special tomorrow (Sunday)

Snow Days...

picture swiped from The Happy Whisk

Presented Without Additional Comment.

It's Coming...

Mirroring last year's weather to the day, the snow is falling again this morning - and settling on top of yesterday's surprisingly heavy layer.

Rachel and her mum were supposed to be going to a carol concert at the Albert Hall today - well, that plan has been sunk!

It's not particularly deep per se at the moment (maybe a couple of inches at the most), but the grey clouds and almost-blizzard conditions outside don't bode well for the short-term future.

An Animated Early Christmas Present For Doctor Who Fans...

An incredible series of short, stop-motion Doctor Who animations, made by YouTubing genius 21stcenturywho - who must have the patience of a saint!

Sit back, enjoy and try to forget for a few moments that it's only a week until the 'fleshy' Doctor - and the gorgeous Amy Pond - return to our screens for A Christmas Carol at 6pm on Christmas Day.

Friday, 17 December 2010

Unexpected Snowfall In Super Hero City...

Today brought not only a surprisingly heavy snowfall, but a couple of packs of new Super Hero Squad figures - namely the cutest, 'ickle MODOK with a teeny-tiny Iron Man and Captain America (Bucky version) with motorbike (kinda buried in the snow!).

Still haven't been able to find any of these critters in the wild, but eBay has been good to me nevertheless.

The Eleventh Doctor Gets His Game On...

Cubicle 7 has just revealed that its rebranded Doctor Who: Adventures In Time & Space RPG - featuring Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond - is due to hit shelves in April.

This should also unblock the logjam on supplements that have already been produced, but not released, under the David Tennant era branding.

So, we hopefully we'll see The Time Traveller's Companion, which was originally scheduled for a June 2010 release, soon after this.

The Eleventh Doctor edition of the core rules features:

All-new art and graphic design
Aliens and Creatures from the Doctor's most recent adventures
A new adventures book written specifically for this edition

Game Line: Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space
Category: Core Rules and setting
Retail Price: $59.99
Size: Boxed Game, 144pp Gamemaster’s Guide, 86pp Player’s Guide, 30pp Adventures Book, 4pp Quick Start Guide, Pre-generated Character Sheets, Blank Character Sheets, Gadget sheets, Story Point Tokens and Dice.
Interior Art: Full colour
Author: David F. Chapman et al.
Stock Code: CB71109
ISBN: 978-0-85744-038-9
Imagine you could go anywhere. This world or countless others, encountering strange alien races, new cultures or hostile environments. Now imagine you could travel to any time. See the pyramids and the Sphinx (back when she had a nose!), discover who (or what) really built Stonehenge, meet the first Emperor of Japan, or travel into the far future as humanity spreads to the stars. Where would you go?

With Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, the power is in your hands! You can go anywhere or anywhen in the universe. It’s not going to be easy. It’ll probably be dangerous. The universe is a hostile place, full of Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, The Atraxi and worse. There will be fear, heartbreak and excitement, but above all, it’ll be the trip of a lifetime.

Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space is a roleplaying game set in the universe of the world’s longest running science fiction show on TV – the BBC’s Doctor Who. Published in a boxed format, the core set includes:

Player’s Guide
Gamemaster’s Guide
Adventure Book
Quick Start Guide
Character sheets, including pre-generated characters for the series cast
Tokens and Dice

Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space has been written to appeal to both the experienced and first time gamer.