2024 – Page 5 – PopCult Reviews

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Solo Liminal Horror Part One

You can purchase Liminal Horror here
You can purchase Jeansen’s Machines here
You can download the Liminal Horror Solo Starter here

Liminal Horror is a game born out of a long series of deviations and hacks that started with the OSR game Into the Odd. Elements of that game were combined with rules-light fantasy RPG Knave which created Cairn. Cairn has become an all-purpose foundation for several other systems – Tunnel Goons, Eco Mofos, Into the Grasslands, and more. Liminal Horror is a modern horror system using these mechanics that lends itself to SCP-style stories, but it is not limited to that subset of horror.

Summer 2024 Digest

Features
Patron Pick – Shanghai Noon [Bekah]
Patron Pick – Federer: Twelve Final Days [Matt]
Patron Pick – The Way [Bekah]
Patron Pick – Enter the Void [Matt]

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Supersworn: The Victory Academy Part Three

Read the previous chapter here.

[Begin a Session: Unexpected return of an enemy or threat]
Thread: The Machine Collective – Aiden Bell
Oracle: Defend Reputation

Aiden Bell is attended to by his personal physician, Dr. Carly Clayton, formerly known as the hero Aegis. Clayton tells Bell he appears to be okay but wants to know how he was able to change into Captain Quantum, given that he was supposed to have expunged the entity years ago. Bell spits at her with rage, throwing his food tray across the room.

“It was a filthy dirty trick by that bastard Silver Sentry!” spits Bell. “And I am going to destroy him!”

TV Review – Ren Faire

Ren Faire (2024)
Directed by Lance Oppenheim

The term “reality TV” is thrown around so liberally these days, when most of the programming under that umbrella is highly contrived, and its figures’ personalities are obviously contrived. The performative nature of “reality TV” seems to have leaked out into the real world, where we see those who shape their identity around a quirk or two. How do you make a documentary in a landscape where capturing authenticity has become much more complicated. Lance Oppenheim seems to have found it. His style layers melodrama over the mundane, embracing the audience seeking something heightened. Yet, it never feels as if its subjects are being misrepresented.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Against the Wind Part Three

You can purchase Against the Wind here

Read about our previous session here.

This is my final actual play of Against the Wind for now, but I have to say this is one of the best solo systems I’ve played thus far. I love the tools of Ironsworn/Starforged, but I do feel it misses procedures that help create settings and situations sometimes. Against the Wind has such clearly written steps for building the world, creating NPCs, exploring the wilderness & settlements, and in this session dungeon delving. The tables are evocative enough without locking you into one path. I can definitely see myself returning to this one in the future.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Supersworn: The Victory Academy Part Two

Read our previous chapter here.

[Begin a Session: External factors create new danger, urgency, or importance for a quest]

Thread: Time Cop on Patrol
Oracle: Strengthen Alliance

Tempus Wright is hurtling through the time stream and picks up an anomaly from the year 2080. He reroutes his journey to 2024 to make this stop further into the future. When he emerges, Forge City is in ruins, and strange cybernetic spires rise above a black cloud-choked sky.

TV Review – Fantasmas

Fantasmas (2024)
Written and directed by Julio Torres

The post-Internet era of media is very much here, and one aspect of that is this DIY/hyperreal style of filmmakers like Julio Torres. The work is very much queer both in its presentation of diverse genders and sexualities but also in the strangeness of its presentation. It’s clearly modeled on our real world but often exaggerated in ways inspired by the cartoons of the 1990s and early 2000s these artists grew up watching. They address the current reality of capitalism’s buckling by finding humor in the mundane but nevertheless infuriating odyssey of trying to get adequate health care or resolving a bank charge. And it’s all done in a manner that feels fresh and exciting.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Against the Wind Part Two

You can purchase Against the Wind here

Read my first session here.

For our second session of Against the Wind, I wanted to try out the settlement building procedures. Like everything in this game, creating parts of the world is guided through dice rolls. The tables here cover everything from the angle of the streets and the number of intersections to how dense each block is. You’ll use tables to detail activity on the street and the purpose a building serves if you choose to enter one. I found it to organically build the community and provide many natural adventure hooks or set up potential NPCs to encounter again. Below is my second session playthrough, which ends with a clear direction for our third and final session.

PopCult Podcast – The People’s Joker/Ghostlight

This week it’s two new releases about performance & identity. In one, we see a transgender woman’s story of self-realization through a parody of Batman and his world. In the second, a construction worker happens upon a theater putting on Romeo & Juliet that helps he and his family process a recent trauma

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Supersworn: The Victory Academy Part One

This campaign started as a world-building exercise. Click here to see how we got to this point.

What has come before:

The Naxramman Alliance had its attempted invasion of Earth thwarted by the largest coalition of superhumans ever assembled. Even some villains bordering on antiheroes joined the fight to save their planet. Thousands of tons of wreckage litter the globe. Governments are attempting to secure it, some for good and others for ill. Supervillains and their minions are also grabbing up as much as they can.

The death of Silver Sentry signaled the end of The Silver Generation and the transition into the darker Bronze Generation. A battle with Bombardier left the android’s body in pieces. He was laid to rest by his family & friends, with his adopted human daughter taking on the mantle of The Silver Rose in her late father’s honor. Months ago, rumors that Sentry was alive again started to circulate. He was spotted in Hong Kong, Cape Town, and Rome. Other androids, robots, and AI all started to vanish. STRIKE believes Sentry is gathering these beings under something called The Machine Collective. Its purpose is unknown.

Aiden Bell used to be Captain Quantum, a child’s fantasy of a superhero. As a thirteen-year-old, he would blow the right notes on the quantum whistle and swap places with the alien super-being Quantum. Along the way, things went sour, but he’s in his fifties now and claims to have been reformed since then, or at least pretending to be. This rebranding has been so persuasive the city leaders have appointed Bell the headmaster of The Victory Academy. He’s interested in making this a pathway for young superheroes working directly for America’s institutions. The instructors at the Academy are highly suspicious of this move.