TWILIGHT SWORD: My First Champion

As promised in my last news update on the upcoming Twilight Sword RPG, using the recently released (to backers) character creation document, I have made my first Champion: Elean Starlight, daughter of former Champion Staghind Starlight.

I've long thought that Twilight Sword sounds like the perfect way to pool all my memorable characters - and previous adventures - from a lifetime of gaming into one place. And this is my first attempt to do that.

I'd originally thought I'd opt for someone with an isekai-style origin, but this seemed too good an opportunity to tie my old D&D character Staghind into this new world.

Now to go through the character creation steps:

NAME & ORIGIN: Elean Starlight, Heir.

"You are the heir of an ancient Champion or a hero of legend. You had no choice in your own destiny, and you always felt different."

KIN: Huma - the predominant humanoid lifeform in Radia, the huma are superficially elves.
KIN FEAT: Reroll a single failed Ability roll. This Feat can only be used again after a Rest or a Quick Rest.
DISTRIBUTE ABILITY SCORES: Either through points allocation or use of a standard array. I opted for the latter as this was my first run-through of the system.* 

• STRENGTH: 7 
• AGILITY: 9
• VITALITY: 7
• PERCEPTION: 8
• WILL: 8
• KNOWLEDGE: 6
• CHARISMA: 5
• STEALTH: 6

HEARTS & STAMINA: 17 ❤️ and 3 🔷
WAY: Way of The Wild

FEAT: Aim (Can use her reaction to aim. Gains Advantage to the next attack she makes this Turn using a ranged or thrown weapon).
STARTING GEAR: An old bow, an old short sword, padded armor, 12 arrows, and a torch. 3D6 (I rolled 9) Green gems (?).

Obviously, there are still bits and bobs that need to be clarified, such as the damage weapons cause, what difference do "old" weapons make, how much damage armour absorbs, what form does the currency take, how does Advantage/Disadvantage work in this game and so on.

But this introductory, early look at Twilight Sword has filled me with a great deal of optimism. I may have spotted three or four typos in the text, but these looked like they were probably down to translation issues and will hopefully be picked up in future edits.

And, personally, I felt there needed to be some consistency in the breaks between paragraphs (although that might just be the old sub-editor in me), but otherwise - at first look - it appears as though Twilight Sword will be a thing of great beauty.

The character creation process was quick and simple. In fact, it would have been even quicker with a print copy of the rules to hand, as then I wouldn't have had to keep switching - like a bumbling, technology-challenged old man - between the PDF and the document I was writing in.

Even with my own incompetence, it only took, maybe, 10 or 15 minutes... as I already had my mini-backstory in mind. 

I'm eagerly looking forward to the full beta PDF release at the end of this month. 

* As I understand it most tests - including combat - involve rolling a d12 and scoring under (or equal?) the relevant statistic. 

Elean Starlight

Good News/Bad News On Twilight Sword PDF

Way of The Wild

Game publishers Two Little Mice announced today that they would be unable to meet the previously stated April 7 release date for the beta PDF of their highly-anticipated, anime/video game-inspired Twilight Sword roleplaying game. 

However, all is not lost, as the release date has only been pushed back a couple of weeks, so - all being well - backers of the game should be receiving their PDFs in the second half of the month.

Not only that, but we were treated to a 35-page PDF of the first chapter of Twilight Sword, which includes the Champion creation rules, the five core Kin (species/races), Ways (classes), and Feats, which this update says is "[m]ore than enough for you to start making your very own Champions!"

I've only skimmed my PDF so far, but it looks absolutely gorgeous and, after the holiday break, I hope to get down to creating my first Champion.

I'm already excited to see in the "origins" section of character creation that there are, at least, two options that lean into possible isekai backstories for your Champion.

Outlaw of Gor (1988)

Filmed concurrently with Gor,Outlaw Of Gor is a half-baked sequel with a turgid plot and apathetic acting that makes the original look almost Oscar-worthy in comparison.

It's about 40 years since I read John Norman's Outlaw Of Gor but I'm pretty sure this limp movie bares very little resemblance to its supposed source material.

Set three years after the events of Gor (we learn this from the VHS cassette box, not the film itself) and Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) is summoned back to Counter-Earth, but this time his slimy colleague from the university, the lecherous Watney Smith (Russel Savadier), accidentally tags along... and has no problem adjusting to the fact that the pair of them have suddenly arrived on an alien planet.

Before that though, for anyone perverse enough to want to watch Outlaw Of Gor without first having seen Gor, Tarl has a very convenient flashback précising the events of the first movie - but without mentioning Oliver Reed's rather central character (obviously they didn't want to have to pay him again).

Our less-than-dynamic duo make their way to Ko-Ro-Ba (which is noticeably different to what we saw in the first film), where Tarl is reunited with his love Talena (Rebecca Ferrati), her father Marlenus (Larry Taylor), a village elder who treats Tarl like an old friend, but I'm pretty sure we've never met before (Alex Heyns), and the sinister Priest-King Xenos (a bewildered Jack Palance, who is still not an insectoid alien).

Cabot's arrival at Ko-Ro-Ba prompts a truly hilarious sequence where random people just shout "Cabot" (one of the many bizarre moments in Outlaw Of Gor ridiculed by MST3K). The strange thing about this is until they arrived on Gor, I was convinced Watney had been calling his friend "Kevin", not "Cabot".

However, things are not all hunky-dory in Ko-Ro-Ba. Turns out Marlenus has hooked up with duplicitous Queen Lara (Donna Denton), who is secretly in league with Xenos in a bid for ultimate power (over a single village - not exactly epic ambitions).

Lara promptly seduces Watney ("Tell me, how do they make love on your planet?"), kills Marlenus and frames Tarl.

However, as if one Jar Jar Binks in his life wasn't enough, Tarl is also reunited with the midget Hup (Nigel Chipps), who is even more pointless in this movie than he was in the original.

Tarl and Hup go on the run in the desert - little realising that Lara has sent Ost The Hunter (Tullio Moneta), a monosyllabic bounty hunter, after them with the express orders that Cabot be brought back alive.

Ultimately this fuels a rift between Xenos and Lara (Xenos accuses her of acting like a "bitch in heat") and eventually culminates in one of the most embarrassingly degrading death scenes for a Hollywood legend in the history of B-movie cinema.

Where the plot of Gor at least moved forward, in Outlaw Of Gor it just goes round and round.

If it wasn't for the awful lines and risible fight scenes, this film could almost be called tedious.

But thankfully, it has some wonderfully WTF moments that make bad cinema so great.

A particular highlight here is the character of a nameless slave girl that Tarl and Hup rescue from slavers in the desert (a sequence in itself so laughable as to be a classic - just watch the slavers reaction at the end when they are standing around as their camp burns down around them).

From the moment she first appears among a crowd of slaves the camera picks her out as "someone important". She is then rescued and, in true Gor style, offers to "pleasure" Tarl as a reward. He refuses, because of his love of Talena. Then they are all captured - rather easily - by Ost, who takes them back to Ko-Ra-Ba, where the slave girl gets chained up in the mines... and promptly forgotten about. Never to be mentioned, or seen, again!

All this sets up the climactic fight sequence, which is another masterclass in "what the frakkery" as Ost changes his allegiance for no readily explained reason and tips the scales in Tarl's favour.

As you may have guessed, Outlaw Of Gor isn't particularly well-written. Not only is it full of clunky dialogue (much of which clashes with the themes of John Norman's books), but many things happen without explanation.

The character of Xenos is totally wasted, as all his Machiavellian machinations are just echoes of the more successful Queen Lara's schemes, and the nameless slave girl - who you are led to believe is crucial to something or other - is simply filling a narrative role that Talena could have taken.

I'm also not sure why this merits an 18 certificate, while the original was only a 15. Once again there's no nudity or cussing and the fights are comparatively tame (Tarl has a knack for killing floored opponents by stabbing the ground beside them). I can only imagine it's possibly because of the reasonably protracted torture scene of Tarl being whipped for Lara's pleasure.

The cassette box claims that "Tarl embarks on a series of wild adventures battling the strange and magical creatures who live in this forbidding universe". Doesn't happen. There are no "strange and magical creatures" to be seen anywhere in Outlaw Of Gor... and even "wild adventures" is stretching things a bit!

Gor (1987)

Generally I'm not one to complain if a movie based on a novel doesn't stick one hundred per cent to its source material, but this 1987 adaptation of John Norman's Tarnsman of Gor is simply taking the piss.

Branded as John Norman's Gor, the opening credits proudly proclaim that this film is based on Tarnsman of Gor - but the first thing you notice is the marked absence of any actual tarns: the roc-like warbirds the warriors of Gor ride into battle.

Instead they have horses.

This is pretty much on a par with Peter Jackson replacing the eagles with Irish Wolfhounds in The Hobbit or Lord of The Rings trilogies.

But this isn't the only peculiar choice scriptwriters Rick Marx and Harry Alan Tower and director Fritz Kiersch make in this un-faithful of adaptation of Norman's 1966 pulpy sword-and-planet story.

It almost feels as if they scanned through the book, picked out key names and phrases and then scattered them at random throughout the script.

We first meet our protagonist, wimpy physics professor Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) lecturing bored students about the magical ring he inherited from his father and its connection to an alien world known as Counter-Earth or Gor (which is odd because when he actually arrives on this alien world and is told the planet's name he doesn't register that this is the place he was talking about 10 minutes earlier).

Having lost his girl to a campus bully (an early appearance from The Mummy's Arnold Vosloo), Cabot is involved in a car accident and wakes up to find himself on Counter-Earth.

However, it's not the alien world readers of the Gor books would be familiar with - the towering spires of the Gorean cities have been replaced by mud huts and caves, while the verdant nature of Gor is replaced with never-ending deserts (more Barsoom than Gor).

Clumsy Tarl accidentally stumbles into the role of hero when the village of Ko-Ro-Ba is raided by the soldiers of Priest-King Sarm (Oliver Reed) - in the books the Priest-Kings are large insectoid creatures, but not here - who are stealing the village's mystical Home Stone (a big point in the book is how bland and ordinary the Home Stones are) and kidnapping the village's ruler, Marlenus (Larry Taylor).

In the book, Marlenus is, in fact, the villain of the piece and it is his megalomaniacal schemes to take over Gor that Tarl is opposed to. Here, he's just some old duffer that Tarl has to rescue - aided by Marlenus' daughter Talena (Rebecca Ferratti) and other random one-dimensional characters - including an annoying midget called Hup (Nigel Chipps). No, I don't know why, either!

With a two-minute training montage, idiot Tarl is transformed into hero Tarl and the plot devolves rapidly into a run-of-the-mill "lifting the yoke of slavery" storyline - which, again, anyone familiar with Norman's Gor series will appreciate the irony of.

Given the general level of sauciness in the novels, it's bizarre that when Tarl is taken to Sarm's decadent palace of delights, it's more Flash Gordon than Flesh Gordon.

This is possibly the only '80s babes-and-barbarians movie where the women keep all their clothes on!

Then just as you think everything is coming to an end, and you're wondering where Jack Palance - mentioned high in the opening credits - has got to, Jack Palance appears, as another Priest-King, and introduces a whole other storyline which goes nowhere and doesn't appear to amount to anything.

Who could have realised they were actually, rather clumsily, setting up a sequel - Outlaw Of Gor - that was filmed alongside Gor?

While Palance is barely in this movie, mention must be made of the other big name though: Oliver Reed. Clearly the worse for wear from drink in many of his scenes, I hope Oli's towering genius was well-rewarded with alcohol for allowing his name - and talent - to be attached to such a trashy flick as this.

Gor is one of those incredible pieces of cinema that is so changed from its source material you have to wonder why the film-makers didn't go the whole hog and simply make it its own thing. It's not as the Gor books have ever had the same cultural cachet of, say, Lord Of The Rings.

There are only really a couple of minor details that they actually get right, subtle little background details (such as the Gorean drink 'paga'), that it would have far simpler to have changed the character and place names (most of which are already used incorrectly anyway) to something else and dropped the Gor connection entirely.

On the plus side, Gor is full of unintentionally funny moments, crappy fight sequences, no-budget special effects, a plot that meanders all over the place, and a drunk Oliver Reed. And Oliver Reed - drunk or sober - can make anything watchable.

In The Name of The King - The Last Mission (2014)

Dominic Purcell (from The Arrow'verse shows and Prison Break) is Hazen Kaine, a burned-out, no-nonsense American hitman working in Bulgaria. His "last" job - before retirement - is to kidnap the two daughters of the Bulgarian royal family, so his paymasters can demand an enormous ransom.

Although he's having doubts about his latest assignment, he hides the girls in the nominated shipping container anyway, then notices that one is wearing a pendant that matches the tattoo on his arm (which his late wife chose for him).

The girl tells Hazen the medallion, a family heirloom and talisman of protection against things he wouldn't understand, is magical. He takes it outside for a closer look... and causes a rift in time and space to materialise and drag him through.

Hazen finds himself in a mysterious land - which, he later learns is also called Bulgaria, but clearly is a fantastical, pseudo-Medieval version - and stumbles into a nearby village which is being attacked by a dragon!

He uses the last bullets in his gun to drive off the dragon, in the process befriending a pair of warrior princesses, Arabella (Ralitsa Paskaleva), and Emeline (Daria Simeonova).

They're living in this village because of Game of Thrones-style violent machinations which saw one of their uncles, Tervon (Marian Valev), usurp their father and steal his throne.

They are now part of a rebellion led by their other uncle, Tybalt (Nikolai Sotirov).

Eventually, Hazen comes to accept his position in this new world - his tattoo marks him out for a special destiny - and hatches a plan that will allow him to slay Tervon and steal the king's magical medallion, which will send Hazen back to our world.

During all this he develops a rather cute and chaste romantic relationship with Arabella; the hitman's flirting technique seems to be telling her about the horrific fiery death of his wife at the hands of other gangsters.

Hazen's big plan comes to nowt, as the rebels are ambushed in a forest by Tervon and his men.

However, the fight goes surprisingly well in favour of the rebels, even though Tervon has been controlling the dragon this whole time.

The evil king flees back his castle... followed by Hazen and Arabella.

The castle is remarkably easy to access and our heroes fight their way through Tervon's goons to confront the Big Bad on the roof of the castle, where Hazen dispatches him, causing the time rift to reopen.

This time, not only does Hazen travel back to our world, but also the dragon. Not entirely sure why Arabella didn't go with him.

Hazen then races to where the kidnapped girls have been hidden and fights the mobsters who have come to collect him... at which point you realise that the head gangster Ayavlo is also played by Marian Valev.

Does this mean that Hazen's whole isekai adventures in In The Name of The King - The Last Mission were a dream? Or a metaphor? He does kidnap two young princesses in our world and then become entangled with two princesses in the fantasy world. But then how do explain the dragon now loose in the skies over Sofia? 

There's a lot that's handwaved in Joel Ross's 85-minute script and under Uwe Boll's taut - let's get things done - direction. As an example, I particularly loved the blasé attitude of, I guess, the king of Bulgaria to having his daughters kidnapped and then returned by the same person. It rather implies that this happens all the time!

Honestly, for my money, too much time is spent in modern day Sofia and I'd have preferred Hazen to stay in mythical Bulgaria with his new love... but then that would have left the kids in the shipping container and at the mercy of the gangsters.

In D&D terms, I reckon it's a young black dragon (although it breathes fire)

For a decade-old, low budget , direct-to-video sword-and-sorcery flick, all the special effects, including those that bring the dragon to life, are pretty decent. Of course, the beast is obviously CGI, but I've seen far worse in this calibre of movie (yes, Asylum, I'm looking at you).

On the other hand, the fact that the rebellion relies on caves so much - despite having several villages to call their own - is a real throwback to '80s sword-and-sorcery films that also often operated on similar microbudgets and had to make do with what nature provided.

Director Uwe Boll certainly makes great use of the beautiful Bulgarian landscape and the film was largely filmed at Nu Boyana Film Studios where, co-incidentally, the new Red Sonja movie was shot as well as Jason Momoa's Conan The Barbarian and the excellent last Hellboy movie, The Crooked Man, and many other great films.

Dominic Purcell and pretty much the entire Bulgarian cast of In The Name of The King 3 are all great and clearly invested in their roles, but they're not always best served by a script which barrels along at such speed that a lot of plot threads are just left dangling.

It's also a shame that In The Name of The King - The Last Mission appears to be totally disconnected from either the first or second films in the franchise.

I'd rather hoped that Hazen was actually in the Kingdom of Ehb (where the previous films took place) and that Arabella and Emeline were the daughters of Dolph Lundgren's Granger, to continue the generational narrative of the two earlier movies.

I guess there's always headcanon. 

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.