How Many Firefly Lost Episodes?

I've been rather enjoying my "Firefly: The Lost Episodes" games. In particular, the use of the 'known' characters allows people to slot in very quickly to their roles. However, this week it occurred to me that MWP (publishers of the game) have now produced more pre-gen episodes for the game than there actually were episodes of the show. When we add to that possible conversions of the old Serenity adventures, and any Episodes that I generate myself (of which I hope there will be many), that very quickly starts to add up.

And so I found myself wondering how many Lost Episodes there could reasonably be, before we have to start moving beyond the film?

Firefly aired its single season in 2002. There were fourteen episodes, one of which was the double-length pilot episode. If we extrapolate that to a full 2002/03 season, then, we get a further seven episodes.

We can then add a full season for 2003/04, giving another 22 episodes, and then most of a 2004/05 season. This last gives 19 episodes, as the film is essentially a triple-length episode. So, a total of 48 Lost Episodes, of which I've run six. That's enough for about three and a half years of gaming, which is probably plenty!

There's a certain story oddity to that, since the film is in many ways a conclusion to the first season of the show rather than the third, resolving as it does the issues surrounding the Reavers, and Simon and River being on the run. It also fits best if it occurs just a few months after Inara leaves, which should be rights be shortly after the last episode of the show. Indeed, in a perfect world I'd just jump beyond the film and start there. The problem with that can be summed up in one word: Wash.

Another possibility is to run another year or so of Lost Episodes, handling Inara and Book leaving at some point, and then bringing that series to an end. And then advancing the timeline to catch up with my Christmas Games to start "Firefly: Phase II".

Or a third option would be to simply ignore the film entirely, and just run indefinitely. Book never leaves, Wash never dies, and all is shiny.

Or something. I'm probably over-thinking things, since who knows what my thinking might be in three years time?

Princes of the Apocalypse

After "Tyranny of Dragons", I was a little hesitant about WotC's next storyline product. And some of the hype surrounding this adventure was also off-putting - I try not to buy into the hype because that too often leads to disappointment. That was probably a wise choice. This isn't an instant classic, and it certainly isn't 5e's killer app, or anything of that sort.

But it is a very good adventure.

This is a 256-page hardback book divided into 7 chapters and 3 appendices.

Chapters 1 and 2 present background information for the adventure. Chapter 1 gives details of the various factions in play and also the four elemental cults. This is all fairly interesting stuff, and useful for running the adventure. Chapter 2 then provides something of a gazeteer of the region in which the adventure takes place, including some adventure hooks that a DM may wish to pursue later. This is all fine.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 then present the meat of the adventure itself - chapter 3 the overland investigations into the cults, chapter 4 the upper levels of their domains, and then chapter 5 the lower levels and the climax. This is all good stuff and well presented (though I personally would prefer the stat-blocks to be embedded in the text).

My one concern here, and it applies to the adventure as a whole, is that this is actually pretty short. The meat of the adventure accounts for less than half of the book, and the book itself already seemed pretty short for a full-blown campaign. So it's good stuff... there just doesn't seem enough of it.

Chapter 6 then provides some supporting adventure material: two optional 'intro' adventures, and eight sidequests.

The main "Princes..." adventure is intended to run from levels 3-15. The two intro adventures are therefore provided as a means to advance 1st level PCs to a point where they're ready for the main plot. They are, consequently, not an essential part of the story. Nonetheless, I really liked these, and would recommend they be used.

Sadly, I was less enamoured with the sidequests, only two of which really interested me. A shame, but at least they're non-essential material.

Chapter 7 and the Appendices then provide additional support material for the adventure. Chapter 7 is monsters and magic items, both of which were solid. (I'm a fan of the way 5e presents monsters generally.) Appendix A details Genasi as a new PC race, while Appendix B gives new spells. All good stuff.

Appendix C then provides some guidance on how to port the adventure to other worlds: Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, and Eberron; and then some suggestions for porting to a homebrew world. In particular, it provides specific advice about how the adventure might alter to fit the flavour of different worlds, and also how the various factions might be replaced if the setting doesn't include a direct analogue. I have to applaud, therefore, not just the inclusion of guidelines, but also the way the guidelines were presented. Good stuff.

One final note: after all of this, there's an Afterword followed by a few pages of concept art, some of it for items that were considered and rejected as not quite fitting. I felt this was a really good use of a few pages, and hope it is repeated in future storyline products.

So, how does that leave "Princes of the Apocalyse" overall? Well, I remain somewhat disappointed that the 'main' adventure is so short. It really doesn't feel enough for a full-blown campaign. And yet, it does feel like a complete adventure.

In terms of quality, it fares rather better. It's true that it's not an instant classic, and it's probably not up there with, say "Lost Mine of Phandelver" or "Rise of the Runelords". Indeed, I didn't think it was quite as good as "Giantslayer", the other adventure I've reviewed recently. However, it is better than both "Tyranny of Dragons" (as a whole, or either part alone), and it's better than "Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil". It's a good adventure, and I can recommend it, especially for a DM willing to beef up the sidequests for his own use.

Firefly: Strawberries

Ouch. That didn't go so well.

The game was set up for five players, but could also work with four. I was rather concerned for much of Tuesday that we'd end up with three, but I needn't have been worried - not only did all four of the expected players attend but one of the "Maybes" was present as well, giving us a full complement.

Unfortunately, the problems with the game session were of my own making.

I had thought the premise of the game was quite clever: Mal, Zoe, and Jayne were busy meeting with Badger, and Inara was likewise otherwise engaged. The rest of the Crew then discovered an imminent threat which they would have to deal with themselves. The absence of the captain and first mate meant that there was no obvious chain of command (and meant that the burden of solving the problem wouldn't fall on just one player), and the absence of the three 'fighters' meant turning and fighting was a poor option. Plus, Simon's pressing need to be elsewhere was directly at odds with Wash's need to stay put, which should generate some interest.

The way I thought it would play out was as follows:

• Prelude: River wakes up screaming after a dream-premonition indicating there was serious trouble coming. Meanwhile, Book notices that one of Badger's men in taking an unhealthy interest in the ship.
• Act One: Simon and River retreat back to the ship. Along the way they find themselves being pursued by a bounty hunter, and have a run-in with local law enforcement. However, the alert on River's head is unexpectedly cancelled, so they're free to go.
• Act Two (actually run concurrently with Act One): Wash, Book, and Kaylee confront Badger's goon and extract information from him. Sure enough, Badger has betrayed them, having realised who River was after she insulted him (in "Shindig"). He therefore made some calls to bounty hunters, the law, etc. The goon had actually been ordered to stay away, but the money was just too good.
• Act Three: The Crew spend some time working out a plan on Serenity.
• Act Four: The Crew carry out their plan.

Now, I had been slightly concerned about Acts Three and Four, because I had no idea what plan the party might come up with. I was prepared to let just about any scheme, no matter how half-baked, go ahead, and was broadly ready whether they tried to Fight, Flee, Negotiate, or Trick their way out of it. (Obviously, "Fight" was a poor option, but they might try it.)

The other slight concern I had was that Simon and River might not head back to the ship, leaving me with a split party for the duration of the game. Though I figured that was unlikely, and so I had some contingency in place for that case.

But what I singularly failed to prepare for was for the Crew to take no action at all. Having identified that Badger's goon was watching the ship, the three PCs who were there decided to lock the place up tight and otherwise ignore the guy. Having calmed River down enough to be somewhat communicative, Simon proceeded to go back to his consultation with the friendly NPC doctor. (Unfortunately, I'd even prepared for that - had either half of the group made contact with the other, they'd have accessed the Cortex and become aware of the alert on River's presence, thus spurring action.)

And so the adventure came to a horrible screeching halt. Disaster!

(And I'm kicking myself about another thing, too. I gave the player who was running River a bag-of-thoughts representing her impressions from the dream. Some of these were nonsense, some were references back to the show (such as Book's hair and his many secrets; or "Mal" meaning "bad"), and some were plot points for the episode. And one, in particular, said simply "RUN!!" I should have realised that red herrings are a bad idea - the player latched on to the nonsense and completely missed the plot points.)

From there, it was a salvage job. Eventually, Simon and River decided to return to the ship, but by then the bounty hunter was right on top of them. And naturally, being PCs, they elected to stand and fight rather than just run like hell. (Another mistake on my part - I shouldn't have had the bad guys continue to close in while the PCs wasted time. I should have stuck with the original Act One.)

Anyway, at length they got back to the ship. The bounty hunter was arrested by local law enforcement and thus taken out of play. I was even able to drop in the oddity about the alert being cancelled, and made it clear that that's a sure sign that the Alliance is up to black ops. And I even gave River a "worse is coming" Complication to hammer home the situation.

So, okay, things should be back on track at that point. There's bad stuff afoot, and it's down to these five characters to deal with it. What will they do?

Cue my biggest, most epic screw-up of the scenario. Faced with this situation, the five PCs decided that what they really really needed to do was get in touch with Mal, Zoe, and Jayne. Clearly, the point of this Episode was a rescue mission - the captain was unavailable because the five PCs were expected to rescue him. But they had absolutely no idea how to even start with that, because I hadn't laid out any options (having not even considered that they might try).

After this, there was a pretty quick conclusion. The Episode just hadn't worked, so as well to bring it to a close as painlessly as possible. And then never, ever, do something so half-baked again.

It's hard to come up with any real lessons to be learned from this session. I screwed it up really, really badly. I didn't present the opening scene with enough tension, I didn't force things to keep moving, and I somehow managed to present the wrong story. It was just a mess.

The bottom line is just: don't do that again.

Room by Room

I'm in the process of reading "Princes of the Apocalypse", and there's something that's bugging me about this adventure. Though I should be clear: this adventure is far from the only offender; indeed, it's much rarer to find a published adventure that doesn't fall into this particular trap.

There's a 10-page section in the adventure where the PCs are interacting with a monastery populated by evil monks. So far, so simple.

So this adventure does what every other adventure does: it provides a keyed map and then details the monastery room by room, carefully detailing the contents of every room, and placing the monks in the appropriate locations, and that's that.

And it's incredibly dull. Reading through it, I was left with the overwhelming impression: surely there must be a better way to present this information?

The thing is, there's a whole lot of detail that we just don't need and that is, frankly, fairly uninteresting. Worse, the adventure text locks down a lot of detail that shouldn't be locked down - in a 'living' building, characters will naturally move from room to room.

So I found myself thinking that they'd have been better instead presenting the half-page map of the monastery on one page (and the lower level on a second), with bullet points indicating the salient features of the level right there next to the map. If need be, they could then have a couple of pages of key encounter areas, but let's not bother with a paragraph of text detailing the content of a storage room, please!

That description out of the way, they could then better use the rest of the text discussing how the life of the monastery goes on: where are the monks in a 'normal' day? How does that change if/when they come under attack? What about at night? And so on and so forth. Indeed, they could usefully provide a list of the total population of the monastery and a few random tables allowing the DM to generate the actual populace of a given room - perhaps the training hall has 8 monks in it this time (training), or perhaps they're all in the mess hall (dinner).

It seems to me that that's the better way to detail any mid-sized building, and especially a 'living' building such as a manor house, tavern, monastery, or office. People move around a lot, and tend not to be happily waiting for the PCs to kick in the door and kill them!

Plus, that should allow the book more room to detail some of the personalities present, and how they interact. Perhaps the sensei is a brutal martinet and widely disliked; perhaps Bob the monk is formenting discord, while Al and Clive are the sensei's loyal bullies. Or something. Give the PCs some levers they can pull so that they can influence the running of the place, rather than just detailing the leader and the lieutenant in isolation with no indication as to how their particular quirks influence the rest of the monks.

Of course, I may be completely wrong. Maybe the room-by-room description of the environment really is the optimum way to present the information. But, somehow, I doubt it.

Death of the FLGS

Some twenty-seven years ago (minus a few weeks), I first ventured into a speciality RPG store to buy my shiny new "Red Box" D&D Basic Set. Said purchase has a lot to answer for, but that's another rant.

Over the years, I would return to that store, "The Dragon and George" many times. It was... quirky to say the least. The opening hours were always erratic, the availability of some products was doubtful, and it never did get around to taking card payments (a somewhat disastrous lack, to be honest). Plus, it was battered hard by the rise of Games Workshop (which killed the market for non-GW miniatures), was battered harder by the rise of internet shopping (where Amazon can sell you a PHB for less than the FLGS can stock it), and was done no favours at all when a competing FLGS with much better stock opened just along the road.

So the writing was on the wall. And, indeed, I had myself almost completely stopped going there: when 4e turned out not to be for me (and yet I had no interest in getting on the Pathfinder treadmill), and when SWSE was cancelled, I found I had no reason to go - I simply was not ever going to buy anything. 5e might have changed that, but WotC's decision to maintain a much smaller release schedule for the game removed that hope.

And yet it was something of a shock when I walked past the store on Saturday to find that "The Dragon and George" is closed, permanently this time. The store-front has been repainted, it's up "To Let", and the stock is gone. The only indication that there was ever anything there is the tiny card showing the theoretical opening hours.

The major consequence of this is that I'll now be buying my RPGs online. The FLGS had been an exception to my policy of not bothering visiting real shops, since the internet has killed them and taken their stuff. But with "The Dragon and George" gone, that exception is no longer valid. (It would be different if there was an FLGS in Falkirk, in which case I might feel inclined to support it. However, there isn't, and you'd basically have to be mad to start one. So no worries there.)

Otherwise, though, it's the end of an era. All that remains is to thank "The Dragon & George" for starting me on this path, and to raise a (metaphorical) glass in honour.

How I'd Do a D&D Movie

So there's been a settlement, and everyone gets to move forward with a new D&D movie. Apparently, Warner Brothers are going to make it, using the "Chainmail" script written by the guy who did "Wrath of the Titans", but retrofitted to take place in the Forgotten Realms. And Courtney Solomon is going to produce it. Virtually none of that fills me with any confidence.

Which raises the question: how would I do a D&D movie? (Well, actually, I'm not sure it does. But I'm going to write about that anyway.)

Well, the very first thing I would do is throw out any notion of making a "good" movie, not because I don't want it to be good, but because that's a useless goal since it doesn't actually mean anything. "The Dark Knight" is a good film, "Pulp Fiction" is a good film, but these are very different films.

What I'd be shooting for is an unabashedly entertaining film, something like the last three "Fast & Furious" films. I won't claim that any of those are "good" films, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed all of them, and especially "Fast 5". And, crucially, they now seem to have settled into a formula that just works. And there's a lot to be said for that.

(Those last three films have also been absurdly successful, which is a massive plus. A successful D&D film opens the doors for more films in the series, while a "good" film that flops does not. And while a sucky-but-successful film is of no use to me, a series of films that are at least entertaining is.)

There's another key reason why I'm looking to the recent "Fast & Furious" films for my model going forward: Vin Diesel. As we know, he is famously a fan of D&D, and he's also been known to take on projects as a labour of love (the third "Riddick" film, for instance).

So, my next step (after ditching the "good" goal) would be to approach Vin Diesel and (hopefully) the Rock, and indeed as much of the team behind those three F&F films, and see if they can't be persuaded to take it on - with a fairly simple remit: do all that stuff you do, but do it for D&D rather than F&F.

'Cos let's face it - I actually know sod all about making a film. And so, like Augustus Caesar but unlike Courtney Solomon, the biggest part of my plan would be to assemble a team of people who do know what they're doing, and then trust them.

As for the story, I think my premise would run something like this:

The Rock is the leader of a team of dungeon-crawling adventurers (the classic four-member group), who are of course less-than-entirely law abiding. VD is the badass bounty hunter sent to bring them in. (This effectively reverses their roles in F&F.)

Anyway, the film opens with TR and his team digging through some dungeon, with the very first shot probably being the classic image from the PHB cover of them digging the gem-eyes out of a dungeon statue.

There then proceed several scenes of TR leading VD a merry chase through various adventures, until we get the initial confrontation. This goes badly, with at least one of the adventurers (and probably one of VD's team also) dead on the ground. Worse, in the process of this confrontation the two forces set off some disaster (be it awakening the Tarrasque to wipe out the nearby town, or causes the dungeon to start to collapse, or something), thus forcing them to work together for the remainder of the film, the final confrontation with the BBEG (or whatever).

And the film therefore ends with VD giving TR and his team 24-hours head-start. Cue the end credits, and the stinger showing them all gathered at the table with dice and books.

Something like that, anyway.

One thing I'm pretty certain of is that I'd be avoiding the classic story of The Special hero Saving the World from the Nameless Dark Lord. That film has been made once or twice. (Of course, I'm pretty sure that that's exactly what we'll be getting, probably including the obligatory Plucky Comic Relief, the Love Interest, the Quest for the McGuffin, and the Potentious Voiceover at the start. Which I'm sure will be both cool and awesome. Like 4e.)

Vampire: the Masquerade's New Edition

VtM is probably my second-most-played RPG of all time, behind only D&D. For a good number of years there, from about 1995 through to 2005, I played endless hours of that game. And so by rights I should be quite excited that it's finally getting a new (fourth? fifth?) edition.

Sadly, no.

The sad reality is that I largely grew out of Vampire: the Masquerade. By the time I ran my last game, I'd actually reached a point where I'd done just about everything with the game that I'd ever want to do with it. It was simply played out.

But, also, VtM was very much a product of its time. Firstly because we've largely moved on - it's all about zombies these days. And secondly because VtM stood at the start of the long media process that somehow turned evil bloodsucking fiends of the night into sparkly stalkers of drippy girls. (And, later, into the bondage-loving heroes of mummy-porn fanfic, but by then they'd ceased to be vampires and become something worse: plutocrats.)

Thirdly, though, Vampire had a very distinct end-of-the-world vibe going on, with the ever present threat of Gehenna. This was largely because the Millennium was right around the corner when it was first released, and they built on that extensively.

The problem being that when the Millennium got here and the end of the world turned out to be a matter of a few mobile phone networks being overly busy for a few hours, it lost a huge amount of its attraction. Millennial angst is rather less appealing from the other side.

Actually, that seems to be a general problem with apocalypses in general. Judgement Day came and went unremarked (a fact that hasn't stopped them making another three Terminator films, and two seasons of a TV series, since then); the Millennium was a mobile phone outage; the Mayan Apocalypse turned out to be a few minor traffic jams. It's getting so we can't trust end-of-the-world panics at all. But that's another rant.

Still, good luck to them. I'm not really complaining that there are more RPGs on the market, even if I personally am not going to buy. It's just a shame to realise that I game I played extensively back in the day has reached a point where I just don't care any more.