Seth Harris

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Eldersworn: Florida Grotesque Part Two

Eldersworn
Written and Designed by Wasteland Sniper

You can access this game through the Ironsworn Discord server.

I had yet to mention this in my first part, but Eldersworn has adapted the dungeon design mechanics from Ironsworn: Delve to build mysteries. Mysteries operate with the same progress tracks that everything else in the Ironsworn family does, but developed with help from Crime and Narrative cards. Like the Theme and Domain cards in Delve, these provide two Oracles to work with. They contain Plot Features and Threats/Dangers.

PopCult Podcast – Babe: Pig in the City/Happy Feet

George Miller, creator of Mad Max, has made some pretty good family fare. This week we look at one which is a pig’s wild adventure in urban environs and the other is a jukebox musical about penguins.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Little Town Part Four

Little Town
Designed & Written by Gustavo Coelho

You can purchase this game here.

Last year, I came across this solo tabletop rpg inspired by the creator’s love of Twin Peaks. As someone who also thinks Twin Peaks is one of the best pieces of American media ever made, I had to buy and play it. It was a lot of fun, structured with a time mechanic & scenes, pulling bits & pieces from other games Gustavo Coelho liked. He recently contacted me with a revised edition of Little Town set to come out later this month with some revisions. One of those additions was a town backstory oracle, so I rolled on that and got: “The Town’s settlement traces back to dubious land deals,” a new detail I will incorporate as the story progresses.

I jumped back in with the story I had started last year, which you can read here, and probably should before you continue with this.

Comic Book Review – X-Men: Mutant Massacre Omnibus

X-Men: Mutant Massacre Omnibus (2022)
Reprints Uncanny X-Men #210-219, X-Men Annual #11, X-Factor #9-17, X-Factor Annual #2, New Mutants #46, Thor #373-374 and 377-378, Power Pack #27, Daredevil #238, Fantastic Four vs. The X-Men #1-4, and X-Men vs. The Avengers #1-4
Written by Chris Claremont, Louise Simonson, Walt Simonson, Ann Nocenti, Roger Stern, Tom DeFalco, and Jim Shooter
Art by John Romita Jr, Bret Blevins, Rick Leonardi, Alan Davis, Barry Windsor-Smith, Jackson Guice, Marc Silvestri, Terry Shoemaker, Walt Simonson, David Mazzucchelli, Jon Bogdanove, Sal Buscema, and Keith Pollard

One of Chris Claremont’s goals with X-Men was that it would be a team constantly experiencing change. In an interview published around X-Men #200, the writer said he wanted it so that if you picked up issue 100, you’d get one version of the team. A hundred issues later, another version and a hundred issues after that would differ from the first two. This was a particularly refreshing viewpoint in superhero comics, where stagnancy is the default setting. Think about Uncanny X-Men just as the Mutant Massacre was happening. Cyclops was married and had left the book, Magneto had taken over Xavier’s role, and Storm had lost her powers and become a mohawk-wearing punk, bringing in characters like Kitty Pryde, Rachel Summers, and Rogue. There was another significant change coming.

TV Review – Rain Dogs

Rain Dogs (BBC/HBO)
Written by Cash Carraway
Directed by Richard Laxton & Jennifer Perrott

While searching for a television series to watch recently, I looked at Metacritic’s best new shows on their 2023 list and noticed Rain Dogs at the top. It stars Daisy May Cooper, who I’ve enjoyed on Avenue 5 and Taskmaster, so I decided to try it. Sadly, I ended up not really enjoying the series. It was confusing because so many of the elements on paper are things I like, but when it all came together, it felt underwhelming. My biggest stumbling block is how life in poverty should be portrayed in the media and how it often gets portrayed in contemporary shows and television.

Movie Review – Intervista

Intervista (1987)
Written by Federico Fellini and Gianfranco Angelucci
Directed by Federico Fellini

When you think of Federico Fellini and movies about movies, you probably think of 8 ½, and rightly so. It’s one of the best movies ever made and the best movie about a movie ever made. However, I already reviewed it when I did a series on the iconic Italian director in 2022. When I discovered this late-career picture, I put it in this series instead. Intervista was Fellini’s second to last film, and like most artists in old age, as they grappled with their mortality, he returned to his memories. This wasn’t new for Fellini; nostalgia has always played a significant role in his work. 8 ½‘s beautiful dream/memory sequences of Guido’s and the reflections of childhood presented in Amarcord are some of the strongest examples of this in his films. Intervista is a movie about falling in love with making movies, and Fellini goes back into his memories of this time.

Movie Review – Day For Night

Day For Night (1973)
Written by François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, and Suzanne Schiffman
Directed by François Truffaut

Like Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt), Francois Truffaut seemed like someone born in a movie theater. One of the French New Wave movement’s founders, Truffaut, felt cinema in a way few people do. They were certainly not the same and had a very contentious relationship as colleagues. Godard’s approach was to tear down norms, push back against expectations, and embrace a sometimes mechanistic view of the form. Truffaut was far more into the pathos of his work, wanting it to be relatable, often adopting a very sensual approach to his films. Day For Night was Truffaut’s self-reflexive movie, something for his longtime fans but also an exploration of why people make these pictures in the first place.

Movie Review – Contempt

Contempt (1963)
Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

In doing a film series spotlighting Movies About Movies, there’s no way we could exclude Contempt from this list. Filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard were lovers & critics of the medium first before they exploded the form and sent cinema hurtling down a magnificent track for about 20-30 years or so. Godard was a profoundly complicated person, and I think he was likely neurodivergent, or at least his work was inspired by a neurodivergent perspective. There’s an intense focus on what most people might see as unimportant or the constant repetitive movements or behaviors of people.

PopCult Podcast – Bunny Lake Is Missing/A Taste of Honey

It’s another week of pulling from the Letterboxd Watchlist, this time with the theme being the 1960s and England. One film is a thrilling mystery about a lost girl and the other is about a girl lost about what to do with her future.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Eldersworn: Florida Grotesque Part One

Eldersworn
Written and Designed by Wasteland Sniper

You can access this game freely through the Ironsworn Discord server.

Read Part Two here.

It was inevitable. At some point, all tabletop RPG systems get a Lovecraftian/cosmic horror hack. It may be one of Newton’s Laws. I was curious how the Ironsworn system would handle mysteries. I could imagine some ideas based on its progress-tracking system, but I couldn’t nail down the concrete mechanics of how that might work. Leave it to Wasteland Sniper, the author of the in-development Eldersworn game, to come up with a pretty ingenious collection of investigative moves that, like the official Ironsworn content, remains genre-neutral so you can layer it over any mystery style.