Weekly Geekly Rundown September 15, 2023

I Know What You'll Do This Weekend

An Ancient Piece of Tunnels & Trolls Lore

I thought about opening this week’s Weekly Geekly with a miscellanea discussing the central limit theorem, and I found a good video, as a way to set up the game reviews I’ve got coming down the pipeline. That was before I listened to this very old discussion of Tunnels & Trolls that had been done for an interview promoting Tunnels & Trolls for the British RPG marketplace. I found out about the interview from the Monsters! Monsters! Kickstarter in Steve Crompton’s latest update for the project.

This is an interesting glimpse into the minds that were behind the creation of the Tunnels & Trolls role playing game: Ken St. Andre, Liz Danforth, Jim “Bear” Peters, and Mike Stackpole. While Ken’s work has a large legacy, if you play Fallout you’re playing a “sequel” to Wasteland which he worked, he has never really received the accolades I think he deserves as a creator. A part of the reason for that is that Ken has a bit of a Ralph Bakshi/Gilbert Shelton sense of humor. It’s very gonzo and you can here that sense of humor at play from time to time in the interview. Liz Danforth not only edited and illustrated a fantastic version of Tunnels & Trolls, taking from the fairly primitive into the cutting edge of layout at the time, she has gone on to do art for Magic the Gathering and written for a TON of other properties. She’s a Top 10 most important RPG game designer/rpg community founder in my opinion. Mike Stackpole went on to become a major game designer and a New York Times Bestselling author writing for the Battletech and Star Wars lines of fiction.

This conversation from 1982 is an interesting glimpse into the gaming world of the early 80s. Fast forward past the beginning and ignore the couple of places where the tape fuzzes out and if you do you’ll learn a bit about the Tunnels & Trolls setting.

Weekly Luke Y Thompson and Courtney Howard Film Article Cavalcade

The Nightmare Before Christmas 4K (Luke Y Thompson for The Geekerati Newsletter)

My Seven Stages of Nightmare Before Christmas Reaction, Prompted by the New 4K Release (With Bonus Mermaid)

Okay, I’m going to admit that it feels pretty damn good to be publishing a review by a critic who is also carried by AV Club, SuperHeroHype, and a host of other well established venues. He pitches me ideas and I think it’s really cool to be on the editing side of things. My long term hope is that I can grow audience here sufficiently that I can become a place where Luke is able to publish more reviews and where other reviewers bein to submit.

Diamond Select’s Blade, MoM Doctor Strange, Black Panther (Luke Y Thompson for SuperHeroHype)

Luke’s a long time reviewer of action figures and has very high standards. Here he is reviewing some premium figures from the Diamond Select line. I used to buy a lot of superhero action figures, but now I’m D&D themed only and even when it’s a less articulated “ReAction” figure. I still love to read about what’s coming out in other genres and seeing innovations in design.

Dumb Money (Courtney Howard for FreshFiction.tv)

The Game Stop (and AMC) memers vs. short sellers is a story that has a lot to offer if one wants to dig really deep into them. According to Courtney’s review though, it looks like this film fails to do it justice.

I believe that both stocks were undervalued at the time and that their low prices were a part of an attempt by hedge funds to take over the companies so they could be “strip mined” for their physical assets. It’s similar to what I think was done to Toys R Us which was doing very well until it had to deal with the debt from other companies also owned by the hedge fund that owned it, who discovered that (1) that outside debt was too much for Toys R Us in the short run and (2) that Toys R Us still had real market value when things were done. To quote The Atlantic:

Less attention was paid to the albatross that Bain, KKR, and Vornado had placed around the company’s neck. Toys “R” Us had a debt load of $1.86 billion before it was bought out. Immediately after the deal, it shouldered more than $5 billion in debt. And though sales had slumped before the deal, they held relatively steady after it, even when the Great Recession hit. The company generated $11.2 billion in sales in the 12 months before the deal; in the 12 months before November 2017, it generated $11.1 billion.

Game Stop is in a similar situation to that of TRU. It’s profitable, but not by a lot. It’s not an identical situation though, Game Stop doesn’t have the real estate holdings that TRU did. The memers kept both Game Stop and AMC alive after an attempt to short sell them to death, but how have the companies fared since? It’s a mixed bag.

Game Stop still needs to innovate by moving more online and creating something to compete with Steam and GoG.com, selling stock to memers could have been a way to fund a purchase of GoG.com but that road wasn’t taken.

As much as I love physical media, and there are a lot of people like me, purely digital offerings have their place too and it’s a much larger economic space. Game Stop needs to be in that space to survive and their stores need to be support for that and help to create “experiences.” They are in an IBM moment. There was a time when IBM’s business was “selling servers.” They eventually realized that their real service was “selling consulting.” It saved them and made them bigger than ever. Game Stop needs to find what their real core competency is…and I don’t know how “how can we make Comic Book/Video Store/Video Game Store Guy/Gal a profit generating thing” could work. I do think that’s what they need to do.

As for AMC? They raised enough money to survive, but their fate is tied to that of the film industry in general and how people want to watch movies. Their challenges is also one of “experience” and based on their stock, it’s not looking good. Game Stop is slightly up from when it was being short sold like crazy, but AMC is flatlining.

Roleplaying Game Recommendation

There was a time in the mid-80s when it seems that every game TSR was producing had a color coded chart for resolution. Whether it was the changes to Star Frontiers in Zebulon’s Guide, the FASERIP Marvel Superheroes Role Playing Game, or a new edition of Gamma World, TSR’s catalog is filled with games that use a color coded universal table/chart for resolving actions. It’s a pattern that was also followed by Pacesetter games for their full line up of games. Many reviewers at the time were critical of these games as being simplistic or for kids, but the passage of time has shown that these games (especially FASERIP) have developed a solid fan base.

One of the better entries in this wave was TSR’s Conan Roleplaying Game. It combined a semi-narrativist feel with solid and simple mechanics. The one oddity of the game was that even as TSR was publishing a stand alone Conan RPG, they were also publishing a series of modules that were designed to be used with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and not the Conan RPG. As much as I think the modules are worthy entries, I wish they had created dual stats for them.

The Conan RPG has a couple of interesting things going for it that were highly innovative. Chief among them was how skills were used and the concept of a “global skill” based on the average value of subskills. Mechanically the game is very well designed, but it does have one significant flaw. The opponents it lists in the bestiary are all too powerful for starting characters and this means that the game is not playable as a “non-Conan” game without a lot of work. Yes, the Conan and companions in the modules made for this game (that’s right TSR made Conan modules for this game and for D&D and none had cross referenced stats) were playable, but a starting character wasn’t. At least not against any non-human foe. Given that a Sword & Sorcery game should highlight human opponents, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is still a minor issue.

Thankfully, some people got hard to work to take the central design and to add all the missing elements with the ZeFRS project. The ZeFRS project takes the basic engine that Zeb Cook (yep, Zebulon himself) designed and flushes it out with added foes to give you a fully playable rpg. The game does remove any and all references to Conan, as is right. However, you might want to check out the new Conan comic book series if you are looking for ideas. I’ll be reviewing that soon and let’s just say I am having a great time so far.

For a longer breakdown of the Conan game, I recommend reading this article by

J.Q. Graziano

Barbarian at the Gates: Old-School Conan Role-Playing Game Boxed Set

As for ZeFRS, I’m providing a copy of the free game below. Check it out and experience game sessions of gigantic melancholy and gigantic mirth.

Zefrs Core Rules

2.84MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Classic Film Recommendation

If it’s on Criterion Channel, it’s automatically a “classic” right? At least that’s the standard I’m using this week. Since it’s the beginning of The Season of Pumpkin Spice, Food, and Frights (tm), all of the film recommendations for the next six weeks or so will be horror or horror adjacent. This week’s film comes from the pen of Kevin Williamson. There was a period from 1996 to 2005 where Williamson wrote a series of excellent entries in the horror genre ranging from Scream to Cursed. While these movies alternated between the meta-cognitive (Scream) to species switched pastiche (Cursed), they all showed Williamson as a writer who loved the genre and who knew how to produce films directed at a teen market hungry for horror. Most of these films are what I would classify as “soft-R.” Given that they often feature slasher killers, there’s enough violence and profanity for an R rating but they don’t wallow in the violence for extended periods.

That’s even more the case with this week’s recommendation. I Know What You Did Last Summer is a straightforward “what’s wrong with the kids today” horror film that has several nods to urban legends somehow seem to linger in the zeitgeist of every new teen generation. From a basic description of the film, it might seem as if viewers might be in for a bland and trivial cinematic experience. That couldn’t be further from the truth. As simple as the story is, “teens hit someone with a car and cover up the death only to discover that someone is out for vengeance a year later,” the film’s direction and single subtle twist make it a fun ride.

From the opening notes of Type O Negative’s Summer Breeze grinding in your ears as you watch a sophisticated helicopter shot to the scene where the teens are drinking on the beach, you get some stellar cinematography. Denis Crossan and his crew select illuminate the night scenes extraordinarily well, especially in the aforementioned beach scene. Seeing cresting waves at night doesn’t add verisimilitude to the film, but it does make for some beautiful imagery. As for that helicopter shot, as much as I love the effective use of a good drone shot in a modern film, this shot demonstrates that there is still a place for the far more expensive helicopter shot.

The cast is young and sexy and alternates between unlikable and sympathetic with an ease that demonstrates the acting talent on display. In particular, I’m thinking of Ryan Phillipe and Sarah Michele Gellar here. Both play characters I loved to hate at times, but who I genuinely worried about as the film progresses. Gellar is featured in a wonderfully timed “inverse” jump scare where we see the set up for a potential jump as it develops as she turns the corner where the audience knows “the hook” was but has moved on. Speaking of jump scares, there is only one in the film and it is used to good effect. No cats jumping on garbage cans here, just wild eyed potential killers in the backwoods in a nice Deliverance/Texas Chainsaw Massacre nod.

My only real complaint with the film is that the “final girl” doesn’t have as much agency as I’d like. In a world with You’re Next and Ready or Not, I expect young women to act a little less helpless. Before you think that this is just a product of our times as we’ve become more inclusive in our cinematic heroes I’d like to remind you that Jamie Lee Curtis has a ton of agency in Halloween and there are a host of other examples. That’s not to say that Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character Julie is entirely without agency, she does solve the mystery after all, it’s just that there are a couple of scenes where she is depicted as more helpless than I’d like.

As for the mystery, I think it’s a good one. The film has a small twist that is similar to Don’t Breathe where the audience discovers who the real villain is and in a way that sets up a chain of events that shifts the moral calculus of the film. The film asks the audience “what if the person they hit wasn’t a good person?” It’s question that adds a moral complexity to the film. Not the kind of complexity a Wes Craven film might have, but a moral complexity none the less.

All in all, I Know What You Did Last Summer is a fun and worthy entry in the teen horror genre and it reminds us how and why Hollywood keeps making horror films. It’s a genre where you can make a profitable film of relatively high cinematic quality for a significantly lower cost.