Thoughtful Nerd

I suppose I should start this by saying where I'm coming from. I do like a bit of Star Trek . I even quite like the bad films - like Star Trek 5 (the one where Kirk meets God and calls him a git). Its not that it always good science fiction, or even that it is always good fiction. But is has always been something different to most other television sci-fi. An ensemble based fiction built around optimism for the future, something Gene Roddenberry visualised from the outset. Through 5 different series the program has tackled issues associated with race, gender, trans-gender, disability and social exclusion. It isn't about diversity, but diversity is in Star Trek DNA. Its a hopeful, positive future where humanity is constantly striving to be all it can be in an occasionally hostile but always dangerous universe, and that is what makes Star Trek unique. It has also taken great pains to stay, roughly, internally consistent. Really we've only got Doctor Who and Star T...

Auntie Beeb chose to tell us who the next Doctor is going to be. For some reason it was after the tennis - one could maybe assume thats because there's a big weekend audience glued to the googlebox already. A cynic might suggest this was a date chosen to steal the limelight from Game of Thrones Series Season 7 premier. I'd be very surprised indeed if both assumptions weren't true. What do we know about the 13th Doctor? Well not a lot. There was something of a nonsense of a teaser... ...and then after seemingly endless internet speculation Auntie dropped this: # And we finally get to see that they've cast Jodie Whittaker. She's done a fair bit of telly, you might know her from Broadchurch. Or more likely if you're a nerd you know her from Attack the Block or Black Mirror. She's a competent actress and it doesn't seem a bad call. I mean lets consider Capaldi - if we'd judged him on, say, Local Hero and Thick of It we'd be saying...

It didn't suck. Which was, I think, a relief. Its a good superhero film, elevated to really good in places by a strong performance from some actors. The thing about Wonder Woman is that, for me at least,its actually quite a tough sell turning it into a movie franchise. Its not about the character herself - while  conceptually weird from the outset  she's great. Its more that in the  DC mythos a hero is very much defined by her or his villains. Batman and Joker, Catwoman, Bane, etc. Superman and Lex Luthor or General Zod. Green Lantern and Sinestro or Black Hand. Wonder Woman and... errm... Well who?  Superman and Batman have been done both well and badly on screen and, as much as anything else, the quality of the villain is a key part of that. Perhaps the best hero performance was by Christopher Reeve - in his first two outings facing Lex Luthor and General Zod in perhaps the most iconic superhero films of 70's and 80s, where he defines not only how Su...

A profound change came over RPG shops in the early to mid 90's. White Wolf. Certainly where I was (Lancaster and then Nottingham) the game shops were ever more dominated by the World of Darkness setting, because thats mostly what people were playing. I suppose there were plenty of reasons why this was so, but mostly because it was well written, well thought out, and quite interesting in an era when AD&D was in a catastrophic decline. TSR found they could sell a campaign setting quite well, so they kept producing more of them. Which meant each supplement or adventure for a specific setting was selling fewer and fewer copies. The incessant 'splat books' in the middle of the decade meant that even the die-hard fans were finding it hard keeping up. It seemed for a while that not only had playtesting gone out of the window, but basic proofreading seemed beyond TSR - as each product sold less they created more and more of them the quality declined and margins were squeez...

So there was a brief discussion on Twitter among some old school pen and paper podcasters talking about game shop memories, and it got me thinking about the game shops and spaces I've frequented over the years. Now the thing is, as a RPG gamer in the '80s and '90s I had no cash. Like, sometimes literally, I was skint. The '90s was my sixth form and degrees, the 80s was being a kid. But from as soon as I discovered D&D way back in, what, 1983 this was something I was out looking for in the shops even if I couldn't afford to buy anything. There was a dedicated RPG shop down near the Worswick Street end of Clayton Street in Newcastle, and there were two hobby/model shops Beatties (also on Pilgrim Street) and Liesure World. Today of course there's the splendid little Nerd cluster with Travelling Man, Geek Retreat and Forbidden Planet - they're light, fun, and full of people. But I'd have said that the game shop  back then was sort of was seedy, ...

Pretty much every kind of living thing has '-man' put after it in some way in gaming. You know the kind of thing, an anthropomorphic tree, cat, hippo, rock... You name it, its probably been done in D&D or some other game. Even ducks . It can be done well, and there's nothing inherently wrong with this. Lets be honest, when running tabletop RPG's we've all included one or more of these at some point. But what are they for? Are your players really so bored of hacking and slashing their way through orcs, kobolds, hobgoblins, goblins, and bugbears that you need to start putting frogs heads on humanoids for a bit of variety? I can't help but think that monster manuals in every version of D&D have got ever bigger largely for DM's to give more and more variant things for adventurers to beat up. But the games themselves are so much more fun when your games antagonists are more than just another set of stats with a different head. And of all of the a...

Great playing pieces - Zombicide looks and feels a quality game In some ways I'm an old-school gamer. I like my D&D classic, and I enjoy the risk of PC death as I strive for a more powerful starting space pilot (10 life points for whoever gets that reference). But I'm not opposed to a new board or roleplaying game when its well made, and for my money probably the best such game in recent years has been Zombicide . Cool Mini or Not started out as a sort of rate-my-miniatures website, where people would paint up their minis and submit them for judging. A bit of fun that led on to a desire to create simple to play games packed full of beautiful miniatures, and Zombicide fits that bill. Somehow between kickstarter and release the game became the child of Guillotine games, and the rest is history. There are three core Zombicide games (referred to as 'seasons'), each can be played individually or mixed up with any of the other core games, or the three main e...