Lights! Camera! Die Roll! Set-Piece Ideas For Gaming

By Elizabeth Thompson - Royal Collection , Public Domain, Link

Great memories - that is "magic moments" in roleplaying games - often come from the unplanned and unexpected, but that's not to say some gentle nudging and downright scheming from the Gamesmaster is inappropriate.

Browsing the deep back catalogue of Craig Oxbrow's excellent inspirational resource The Watch House (if you're into sci-fi and/or Doctor Who gaming then you need to read his Door In Time blog as well) I came across an article he'd written on Six Staples Of SF/F Series, by way of Den Of Geek.

These standards are:

• The Bodyswap
• The Time Loop
• Ascension To A Higher Plane Of Existence
• Alternate Dimensions
• The Doppelganger/Double/Duplicate
• The Dream Episode

And all are immediately applicable to the anime-inspired fantasy campaign I'm kicking around at the moment while the Tuesday Knights get all pulpy in Pete's new Outgunned Adventures game (season two of his epic weird science campaign).

Tie these "standards" into my own "wish list" of cool moments and there's plenty of meat for potentially memorable adventures, if I'm GM enough to script plots that can do these tropes justice.

I guess, in part, all this comes from my passion for visual media (films, TV, and comics in particular) and thus my desire to emulate moments I see in these at our table.

The main bullet points from my "wish list" were:

• Have the players running the defence of a "hopeless situation", ridiculously outnumbered by an implacable foe, as seen at Rorke's Drift in Zulu, Dros Delnoch in David Gemmel's Legend, and Helm's Deep in The Lord of The Rings. To name but three.
  
  
• A "Horatio Holds The Bridge" moment - I'd just discovered D&D when this poem was read to us at school and the two just clicked.
  
  
• An interesting time travel story (cf. Doctor Who et al)
  
  
• The party encounters cosmic entities that threaten the world and only the heroes can stop them - every Marvel/DC comic book that features this sort of stuff inspires me to greater madness, combined with a lifelong love of the works of HP Lovecraft.
  
  
• Rescuing a trapped companion from incarceration in the pit of Hell - this came from reading the dedication pages in my original (and treasured) Arduin Grimoire Trilogy, by Dave Hargrave, where he mentions an epic campaign to free his own character.
  
  
• Having the players caught up in a war between angels and demons.

Originally my list was drawn up for a legacy D&D campaign, but the ideas are so broad, universal, and potentially over-the-top that they work just as well for anime fantasy game in the same vein as Delicious in Dungeon, Frieren, and Record of Lodoss War.

Gothic Horror Continues Even When Halloween Is Over

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Crimson Peak (2015)

At the turn of the 20th Century, American heiress and aspiring author Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) is swept off her feet by impoverished English baronet Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and whisked back to Cumberland to live in the ancient and isolated Allerdale Hall, with Sir Thomas's sinister sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain).

The house is crumbling, sinking into the red clay that was once their family's fortune, and it soon becomes clear that Sir Thomas and Lucille have ulterior motives for bringing Edith into their bosom.

Cut off from the nearby community by snowstorms, and not realising that her childhood sweetheart Dr Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam) has pursued her across the ocean, Edith struggles with her failing health as she tries to piece together the mysterious backstory of the Sharpe family.

The Sharpe siblings' scheming is rather predictable, almost clichéd, but Crimson Peak is also a Gothic ghost story told through the lens of an adventure movie, where the monstrous ghosts are really just "metaphors for the past" - as in Edith's own novel.

Although sold to the public as a Guillermo Del Toro horror story, with all the shudders that implies, Crimson Peak is more about the family drama and Edith's entrapment than any of the supernatural gore and special effects.

The spooky elements come across as more exciting than frightening. Even the odd jump scares are delivered with such class that they don't feel cheap.

For the little impact the ghosts have on the action, they could almost be dismissed as hallucinations brought on by Edith's deteriorating state of mind - except for the fact that on a couple of occasions they appear to be seen by others.

Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain stand out as the Sharpes, the dark heart of this tale. Hiddleston outdoes his Loki, alternating between sympathetic, scheming, and conflicted, while Chastain just gets increasingly more bonkers as the plot unravels.

Although there really isn't much depth to the film, Crimson Peak is visual masterpiece, from its A-list stars, to the Victorian costumes, and the stunning set design of Allerdale Hall, which is almost a character in itself.

In truth I wish more time had been spent exploring the haunted mansion, as we are only given tantalising snippets of its many halls and rooms.

As with the rest of the film, you come away feeling you've only glimpsed a fraction of what was there, and are left wanting to know more.

IT'S ALIVE!!!

First Trailer for Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein

Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Frankenstein is on Netflix this November. Starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, with Charles Dance, and Christoph Waltz.

Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro adapts Mary Shelley’s classic tale of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.

Hellboy - The Crooked Man (2024)

It's the late 1950s and, following a train accident, Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and rookie Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense researcher Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph aka Agatha from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) find themselves stranded in the Appalachian Mountains.

They soon become entangled in the life of Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), an ex-soldier and former resident of the area who has returned to try and undo a pact he made with a demon when he was a child.

Initially, they accompany Tom to visit his former childhood sweetheart, Cora Fisher (Hannah Margetson), who has since become a witch.

Tom explains to the BRPD agents that he had been seduced by a witch called Effie Colb (Leah McNamara) who had taight how to create a lucky totem and urged him to summon a local demonic ghost-entity called The Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale).

Cora returns to her home, telling Tom and the agents that she is being persued by other witches... and it tunrs out that they are being led by Effie, who looks exactly as she did when Tom met her all those years earlier.

She is riding a white horse that turns out to be Tom's transformed father (Anton Trendafilov), who promptly dies when Effie is scared away by Hellboy.

Tom wants to take his father to the nearby church, to be buried in consecreated ground.

However, on the way they are attacked by a demonic snake that kills Cora and injects Hellboy with its toxin, causing him to have hallucinatory visions of his mother, Sara (Carola Colombo), herself a witch.

At the church, the group - meeting the blind Reverend Watts (Joseph Marcell aka the legendary Geoffrey from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air) are besieged by The Crooked Man and his coterie of witches.

Through some clever magic, our heroes manage to repel the supernatural attackers.

Hellboy and Tom then chase after The Crooked Man to the abandoned mansion that was once his home, while Jo and The Reverend head into the old mines that crisscross the mountain, believing that that is the source of The Crooked Man's power.

Working from a screenplay co-written by Mike Mignola (the creator of Hellboy) and Christopher Golden, his frequent collaborator, director and co-writer Brian Taylor serves up a Hellboy movie unlike any that have come before.

I have to confess that, for all my decades as a comic book reader, I might have only read a handful of single Hellboy issues and they've never really hooked me as Guillermo del Toro's early 2000's pulpy Hellboy duology did.

But, Hellboy: The Crooked Man, an adaptation of a 2008 Hellboy mini-series of the same name by Mike Mignola, steps away from the superheroic blockbuster nature of the del Toro era and leans, instead, heavily into Hellboy's horror roots. 

It's of a smaller scale, and more focused on its single driving narrative, than we might be used to - cinematically-speaking - from movies involving Hellboy and his compadres in the BPRD.

But have no doubt, Hellboy: The Crooked Man is a phenomenal down-and-dirty work of  mesmerising, disorientating weird Appalachian folk magic that has more in common with the works of HP Lovecraft (who gets namechecked) and atmospheric films like The Blair Witch Project, Night of The Demon, The VVitch, and Evil Dead.

If you know my taste in horror then you can see why I loved The Crooked Man.

The verisimilitude of the world created is second to none, relying mainly on practical effects, and proving you don't need a honking big Hollywood budget to produce memorable horror movies.

While this is very much its own thing - officially unconnected to del Toro's wonderful flicks and whatever the dickens that 2019 mess was - I could see an argument for Jack Kesy's charismatic Hellboy being a younger version of Ron Perlman's take on the character.

I can also see why The Crooked Man might not be for everyone, but given that this was co-written by the character's creator, I have to believe that this is the closest iteration of Hellboy to the source material.