horror – Page 10 – PopCult Reviews

Announcement – Screen Play: Corp Borg

Coming in March to the PopCult Patreon.

For their second series of Screen Play, Ariana and Seth embark on an odyssey across the bleak & bloody demon-infested world of Corp Borg, a rules-lite tabletop RPG inspired by the hit game Mork Borg.

For more info on Corp Borg click here.

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.

Read Part One here.

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.

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.

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.

TV Review – The Curse

The Curse (Showtime)
Written by Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie, and Carrie Kemper
Directed by Nathan Fielder, Nathan Zellner, and David Zellner

I will not sit here and pretend to tell you I know exactly what The Curse was about. Having watched the series only once, that would be an absurd claim to make. Not since Twin Peaks: The Return have I felt I was in the presence of a piece of art that seemed like an impossible thing made reality. The fact that Showtime greenlit this is a monumental achievement. Nathan Fielder enters a new era, taking the themes and threads of his pseudo-documentary programs like Nathan For You and The Rehearsal and developing a narrative experience that is so incredibly rich & dense. He’s also a damn good actor, which reminds us that the Nathan we think we know has always been a performance and not the actual person.

Seth’s Favorite Books Read of 2023

Fiction
In A Lonely Place: Stories by Karl Edward Wagner

This was a republishing of an out of print horror short story collection by Wagner, a fellow native of Tennessee. He set out to become a doctor in the late 1960s but became quickly disillusioned with the medical industry’s focus on reactive rather than preventative care. Instead, he leaned into writing with horror & fantasy being his favorite genres. Wagner struggled with mental illness and used alcohol to self-medicate. He died in 1994, at age 48, from heart and liver failure due to alcohol. His stories are in the classic pulp vein, a little sleazy & very scary.

Comic Book Review – Ice Cream Man Sundae Edition Volume One

Ice Cream Man Sundae Edition Volume One (2022)
Reprints Ice Cream Man #1-12
Written by W. Maxwell Prince
Art by Chris O’Halloran & Martin Morazzo

Image Comics is one of the most dramatically transformed companies in the industry. It began as an escape hatch for popular Marvel artists of the time to gain independence, and the stories focused mainly on superhero types; specifically, it felt like every title attempted to mimic Spider-Man or the X-Men, most but not all. Today, Image is a place where comics creators can get their start with concepts they own, or veterans can shift from the big two and develop stories that neither DC nor Marvel would be interested in.

Movie Review – Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)
Written and directed by Jalmari Helander

The mixing up of Santa lore is a prevalent trope in modern Christmas fare. While it’s becoming more common to see dark, action-oriented Christmas movies over the last few years, Rare Exports was one of the first. I saw this when it was initially released in 2010, and this was my first rewatch since my initial viewing. I found it to be entertaining & charming on my original viewing, but now, thirteen years later, it has not held up very well. There’s a fantastic kernel of a premise at the center of the film, but it never entirely comes together and commits the greatest sin an action movie can: it becomes interminably dull.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Dark Space/Cthulhu Dark Part Two

Purchase this game here.

Read Part One here

In the same way, I randomly rolled for crew members, I chose a similar method of exploring the Orpheus Station. On an earlier roll, I failed to get a map of the station from the tight-lipped AI, so our characters would wander through the facility trying to find an explanation for the sudden disappearance of thousands of people & the origins of the strange gray dust littering the floor everywhere.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Dark Space/Cthulhu Dark Part One

Purchase this game here.

Read Part Two here.

In space, no one can hear you scream, they tell us. Popular media has certainly given us lots of scares set among the stars. Dark Space is a collection of science fiction/horror scenarios compatible with the rules-lite Cthulhu Dark, with eventual support coming for Mongoose’s Traveller system. The rules for Cthulhu Dark are included at the back of Dark Space but are also available for free online. The game would also mesh well with any of the Cthulhu-themed rpg systems on the market.