Labyrinth (1986)

My quest for creative and imaginative films that can inspire gamers continues with the sublime Labyrinth from Jim Henson.

With a screenplay by Monty Python's Terry Jones, puppetry from the Jim Henson Creature Shop, designs by Brian Froud, production by George Lucas and music, as well as central performance, by David Bowie... what could go wrong?

In fact, very little. Although, primarily a children's fairy tale, there are still elements that an older, more cynical, eye could possibly view as "inappropriate", such as the Goblin King (Bowie's) expressed feelings for the 16-year-old Jennifer's Connelly's character. But is he telling the truth or just using it as misdirection?

Whatever the case, it gives Labyrinth that darker edge common to the original Grimms' Fairy Tales.

I do wonder also what younger viewers make of some of the stranger, Alice-in-Wonderland-like imagery, particularly the ballroom sequence and the Escher-inspired staircases of the Goblin King's castle. Nevertheless, the film is always engaging and its spectacular visuals only falter occasionally when an aged piece of greenscreening is employed for certain effects.

Connelly plays Sarah, a dreamy teenager annoyed at having to babysit her younger brother Toby who wishes "goblins would come and take him away".

When they do, she goes on a quest through the Labyrinth to reach the castle beyond the goblin city where he is being held by Jareth The Goblin King.

In Dungeons And Dragons terms, while there may be very little actual fighting (until Sarah and her friends arrive at the goblin city), this remains one of the best live-action portrayals of a "dungeon crawl" that I can think of from the 1980s - complete with atmospheric corridors, secret passages, pit traps, talking statues, wandering monsters, etc

Sarah is joined on her adventure by a mixed species party of fellow adventurers including the gnome/dwarf Hoggle, the anthopomorphic fox Sir Didymus and the giant hairy beast Ludo (with the useful 'summon boulders' ability).

This again makes it all an interesting study from the gaming perspective with the different characters bringing different skills to the group and each adding their own dynamic.

As a fairy tale Labyrinth needs a moral and I guess it's about growing up and learning what's important (e.g. friendship and family over material possessions), but also the necessity of retaining a spark of child-like imagination and wonder.

Jabberwocky (1977)

A Dark Age kingdom is being terrorised by a mysterious monster, driving much of its populace to seek shelter behind the walls of the main city.

Eventually doddery, old King Bruno the Questionable (comedy legend Max Wall) decides to organise a brutal jousting tournament to find "a champion" to slay the beast.

This is despite appeals by his equally aged Chancellor, Passelewe (the always excellent John Le Mesurier of Dad's Army and the Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy radio plays) who would rather the search was conducted in such a way as to not keep killing off the land's knights.

Meanwhile, upon the death of his father, clueless and clumsy Dennis Cooper (future national treasure Michael Palin) decides to leave the village where he grew up and move to the city, to start afresh.

This leads to a series of chaotic, often slapstick, set-pieces as he bumbles his way through every encounter from trying to get into the city to being mistaken for a prince-in-disguise by Bruno's daughter, the princess (Deborah Fallender).

Her hand-in-marriage and half the kingdom are being offered by the king to whoever kills the troublesome monster.

After his only friend, Ethel the lusty squire (Steptoe and Son's Harry H. Corbett), is accidentally killed, Dennis ends up as the squire to the eventual champion of the joust, Red Herring (Dave Prowse aka Darth Vader), and the two brave men set out into the mist-dappled lands, looking for the fearful monster.

However, the church and the rich merchant-nobles of the city aren't so keen to see the creature murdered because it is surprisingly good for business, as people are buying and praying more.

Therefore, they engineer an ambush by the Black Knight (also Dave Prowse), and his small gang of thugs, to take out Red Herring - and Dennis - before they actually reach the monster's lair.

I can't believe I was halfway through my sixtieth cycle around the sun before I made time to see Jabberwocky, a wonderfully, very British, dark comedy with smatterings of gory Grand Guignol.

While strictly not a Monty Python movie, it is written and directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Michael Palin and features several Python regular collaborators, as well as a host of British comedy faces of the era.

There's also the visual, grimy Medieval verisimilitude of 1975's Monty Python and The Holy Grail (which Gilliam co-directed) and a similar picaresque throughline to 1979's Life of Brian.

The monster - which may be the Jabberwocky of the title, but is never directly called that - remains unseen until the climax, with Gilliam instead employing canny, low-budget camera techniques as would be used in Sam Raimi's 1981 Evil Dead (and then the rest of that gore-drenched franchise).

Once we finally see it, the Jabberwocky (a man in a costume) is more Classic Doctor Who era alien than glorious Sir John Tenniel illustration, but that just heightens the surreal craziness of the film.

The film's title, and monster's possible name, comes, of course, from the famous nonsense poem in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

Snatches of the poem are heard, Greek Chorus-like, throughout the film, recited by an unseen - and unidentified - Punch and Judy puppeteer, heightening the mythological - or fairy tale - nature of the adventure.

Ultimately, the 105-minute Jabberwocky may not be as laugh-out-loud funny as much of Gilliam's other work, but it still manages to be subversive and smart behind its veneer of blood, guts, and toilet humour.

Jabberwocky (2020)

As Alice wanders through the dreamscape of Looking-Glass Land in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, she happens across a book written in an unintelligible language. 

Inside, she discovers an epic poem filled with nonsense, fearsome creatures, and whimsical language. Dive into Carroll's legendary poem, Jabberwocky and see if you can make sense of the nonsense.

Poem by Lewis Carroll, directed by Sjaak Rood.

h/t Marco Graziosi's A Blog of Bosh

Early Thoughts on Personalising The Twilight Sword Setting

As a youngling I had this Pauline Baynes map of Narnia on my bedroom wall

With the impending release of the beta PDF of Twilight Sword, I have begun to noodle around ideas for "personalising" the lands of Radia - the game's default setting. 

World building from scratch is one of my weaknesses as a gamesmaster: all my worlds created whole cloth tend to end up as simply reskinned versions of real lands from Medieval(ish) Earth... and not in a clever, Robert E Howard Age of Hyboria way.

I also have a tendency to "Game of Thrones" things up before the first die is slung, by which I mean I overcomplicate and hyperdetail the setting way beyond anything the players will probably ever have any interaction with.

This is because I tend to fall in love with my settings and then mistakenly believe I'm the next JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis or George RR Martin! When all I'm really doing is creating a backdrop for some wonderfully silly elfgames.

Aware of this fault in my planning process, I'm approaching Radia - which we know is inspired by video games and anime - with broader strokes.

At the moment, clearly, I know almost nothing about the actual, 'official' setting, so am just scraping together notes and bullet points of ideas, locations, names (for places and people) etc that - hopefully - veer away from the usual Western/Tolkien norm of fantasy settings.

For the anime influences for Radia, I shall be looking to pick up cues from my beloved Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Record of Lodoss War, and Delicious in Dungeon.

My knowledge of anime is limited (although greater than my knowledge of video games), but I remain firm in my belief that these three serials have the best resources in the pure fantasy (Dungeons & Dragons-inspired) genre.

Beyond anime, I'm looking at established settings such as Narnia, Wonderland, Oz, Neverland, Eternia, and Arduin, and films like Labyrinth, The NeverEnding Story, The Dark Crystal, and so on, rather than my usual inspirations, for example Hawk The Slayer and Lord of The Rings. 

Don't get me wrong Hawk The Slayer remains the definitive old school Dungeons & Dragons movie in my book and Peter Jackson's Lord of The Rings trilogy is simply the greatest movie of all time, which I ensure I watch at least once a year from start to finish.

But, in my experience, the thing I find about such intricate settings as Middle-Earth and Westeros is that they are 'fragile'. If you mess around with them too much they break and are no longer the setting you fell in love with in the first place.

Now, I know you can say: but it's your game, you can do what you like with the setting, who's going to know?

But, besides the fact that I would know, it's my belief that these settings are so intricately interwoven that if you mess with, or change, one bit it will have a cascade effect further down the line so that something else isn't going to make sense (just look at George RR Martin's anger with The House of The Dragon tv show because characters were cut out who actually have an important role to play in the story at a later date).

Hence, why I'm shifting my focus to loosey-goosey, weird and surreal settings that are governed by more fairy tale aesthetics. I believe these will gel more with my vision - and understanding - of how Radia (and Twilight Sword) is supposed to operate.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. But I hope not.

I'd really like to run a setting that was, at once, familiar to the Tuesday Knights but also fresh and original, and not just another Middle-Earth/Forgotten Realms/Medieval Europe retread. 

And has talking animals.

Isekai? It's Narnia Business!

Isekai (Japanese: 異世界; transl. 'different world', 'another world', or 'other world') is a sub-genre of fiction. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, webtoons, anime, and video games that revolve around a person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world, such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe, with or without the possibility of returning to their original world.

Portal fantasy, also called portal-quest fantasy, gateway fantasy or crossworld fantasy, is a plot device in speculative fiction, particularly fantasy fiction and science fiction, in which characters enter a self-contained fantasy world through a portal, typically within a quest-based narrative that focuses on exploring and navigating that world. Portal fantasy works typically feature protagonists who enter alternate realities, explore unfamiliar landscapes, and encounter distinctive characters. Overall, portals in speculative fiction act as catalysts for narrative movement, worldbuilding, and thematic exploration.

With a new vision of C.S. Lewis's Narnia coming to Netflix at the end of the year and the fact that I am listening to the BBC radio play adaptations of The Complete Chronicles of Narnia, I'm entertaining different approaches to hooking players into any future fantasy roleplaying setting I conjure up.

Given that the current hot contender for "game du jour" is the upcoming video game and anime-inspired Twilight Sword, I can't help but be drawn to the concept of isekai (see the definition above if you're not au fait with the term) - although I don't know if it would be appropriate for that particular game (on the other hand it is baked into Break!! as a core character concept).

But, more specifically, my current travels in Narnia have got me wondering about the idea of "child adventurers".

I know these days this is a much more common concept - thanks to the ubiquity of Stranger Things, a whole heap of anime, and RPGs like Tales From The Loop and Kids on Bikes -  but it's an idea that takes me back to the early days of Steve's Villains & Vigilantes campaign in the 1980's, where a core concept was you play "yourself with superpowers".

You didn't roll random numbers to generate your statistics, but rather you and your fellow players 'graded' each other on a scale of three to 18 for the the primary stats of your characters, then you generated random superpowers and bingo! That was how the Acrobatic Flea was born.

But, of course, the big difference between superhero roleplaying games and Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy adventures is that supers games are generally skewed towards keeping the player characters alive, where as dungeon delvers tend to be fragile, little snowflakes when they are just starting out.

There is a long literary tradition of "child adventurers" - in fact many of my favourite books have juvenile or young adult protagonists (e.g. Philip Reeves Mortal Engines saga, The Wizard of Oz and, of course, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland) - but literary tropes don't necessary work as written in a roleplaying format.

I like the idea of "Earth" men and women traveling to an alien world (e.g Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter books), as it means you don't need to explain everything to the players beforehand and they can explore the world as they go along, and I have no qualms about tooling up imaginary child characters with swords and bows, but what are the logistics of such a starting point?

How would I go about generating statistics for the player-characters? Would the players play younger versions of themselves (as per Villains & Vigilantes) or roll new characters? How would players, particularly those who were parents, feel about putting (fictional) young characters in harm's way?

I'm On A Crunchyroll

As well as helping me get my Christmas shopping finished nice and early, this year's Black Friday also saw Amazon  offering some cut-price Prime Video subscription deals for the many, many channels available through its central hub.

So, I got myself a sub to Crunchyroll, which I'd been circling for months.

But what is Crunchyroll, you may ask?

Google summarises it as follows:

Crunchyroll is a streaming service for anime and other Japanese entertainment, owned by Sony Group Corporation. It offers a vast library of anime series, films, and manga, with content available to stream both with original Japanese audio and subtitles or with English dubs.

I had two main reasons for this subscription: (a) I was fed up waiting for more episodes of My Hero Academia to be released on blu-ray and wanted to see the final season and the spin-off series, Vigilantes; and (b) I wanted to see what other fantasy anime were available that gave off similar vibes to my new favourite shows: Delicious in Dungeon and Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

Now, I knew there were a LOT of animes out there, but I don't think I was fully ready for the full Crunchyroll library (and this is nowhere close to all the animes, as there are several other streamers offering similar content, such as Prime Video itself and Netflix, the home of the Studio Ghibli movies).

The first thing I did was finish season seven of MHA, but then I wanted to save the show's final season and spin-off, allowing myself time to explore what else there was in Crunchyroll's portfolio.

I make no bones about the fact that I suffer decision paralysis when being faced by too many options, but endlessly scrolling through the shows and movies I now had access to nearly melted my little brain.

I watched the first episodes (or two) of several almost random choices that looked like what I was looking for - which is really easy when episodes are a little over 20 minutes long - but found myself being extremely persnickety. They were good, but not EXACTLY what I was hunting for.

One thing I did quickly learn though is that I much prefer anime that's dubbed into English. When I was watching Japanese language shows I found the subtitles were changing much too fast and I couldn't keep-up and was also missing the visuals while trying to read.

This is odd because I watch subtitled movies and a lot of Japanese documentaries on NHK World-Japan and have no issue with their subtitles.

I've currently settled on The Water Magician, which is - so far - an easy-going isekai serial with 12 episodes in its first season.

Being a lifelong fan of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, I'm interested in the the isekai genre as it's something I've often thought about introducing - somehow - into a roleplaying game set-up. A number of recent Japanese-inspired systems I've been looking at fully embrace the idea of "people from our world finding themselves in a fantasy world".

Of course, I've now found my own fantasy world - Crunchyroll - and may be lost for some time as I ferret around to find the magical MacGuffin that will solve all my problems... or give me the inspiration I need for my next roleplaying campaign.