Twilight Sword PDFs Now Available to Purchase

Those of you who've followed my coverage of the Twilight Sword roleplaying game, but didn't back the crowdfunding campaign, may be interested to know that the official PDFs of the anime-inspired ttrpg are now available for purchase on DriveThruRPG.

Italian publishers Two Little Mice are currently offering a bundle deal, which saves you 30 per cent off the RRP, and includes: 

• Twilight Sword: Core Rulebook
• Lands of Radia
• Starter Set 
• Card Chest
• GM Screen

SHOW ME: Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026)

Who's The Mummy? Katie (Natalie Grace)
Mummy's Love? n/a
Where? Egypt (Cairo/Aswan) & Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
How Long? 134 minutes

Television reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is stationed in Cairo, Eygpt, with his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two young children, Katie (Emily Mitchell) and Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams).

Just as the family is preparing to move back to their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Charlie has a new job offer, Katie is kidnapped from their back garden by a mysterious woman known only as The Magician (Hayat Kamille).

The police investigation, led by a suspicious detective (Husam Chadat) and his English-speaking assistant Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), gets nowhere.

The story jumps ahead eight years and the Cannons are settled back in Albuquerque, sharing their house with Larissa's mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcon).

Katie's bedroom remains a shrine to her, while the other two kids, Sebastian (Shylo Molina)  and Maud (Billie Roy) still share a room.

However, in Egypt a small plane crashes outside of Aswan and in the wreckage is a 3,000-year-old black, basalt sarcophagus.

When opened by a pair of archaeologists, they are very shocked to discover it contains the mummified body of Katie (Natalie Grace) - still very much alive.

A brief aside here, because this issue crops up several times in Lee Cronin's The Mummy, but if the police had investigated the two men who had died in the plane crash, the story would have been a lot shorter. But, for some reason, this obvious angle is never pursued or even really mentioned again until the final act revelation of what's been going on this whole time.

Katie is, unsurprisingly, in a very bad way, and apparently in a locked-in state, yet her doctors in Cairo - without any real medical justification or investigation - tell her parents that the best "medicine" would be to take her home to Albuquerque!

Clearly that serves the movie, but - like ignoring the inconvenient aspects of the plane crash - makes no logical sense.

Determined not to rely on actual specialists or anything sensible like that, the Cannons bring their traumatised daughter back from Egypt and Carmen insists on caring for her daughter, pretty much on her own.

Meanwhile, journalist Charlie is determined to get to the bottom of what happened to Katie in those missing eight years.

However, as Katie begins to wake up it very quickly becomes clear that she is not the Katie her family remember.

There is something very wrong with her. And it starts to spread to other members of the family.

As Lee Cronin had written and directed one of my favourite horrors of recent years, Evil Dead Rise, I cannot express just how excited I was to learn that he would next be tackling my favourite classic monster archetype, the mummy.

Add to that the fact that during pre-release promotion for Lee Cronin's The Mummy he teased that he considered this to be - unofficially - set in the same world as the Evil Dead movies.

However, I was still expecting a "mummy" movie, not an in-your-face (albeit "unofficial", I guess) addition to the Evil Dead mythos.

Sure, mummification processes are involved - and mentioned once - but Lee Cronin's The Mummy is not a "mummy" movie as such, but way more a mix of Evil Dead with a side order of The Exorcist thrown in for good measure.

This is a film with demonic possession, levitation, telekinesis, corpse defilement, bodily transformation and decay, ceiling scuttling, and creepy voices, with quite a bit echoing Cronin's brilliant Evil Dead Rise.

For a pulpy horror the 134-minute runtime is too long and The Mummy starts very slowly and juddery, despite an intriguing pre-credit sequence.

However, it does gains momentum as the horrors escalate within the Cannon home.

The narrative then gets slightly confusing as it jumps all around the place, between America and Egypt, with different avenues of investigation being pursued, while the demon within Katie gradually spreads its evil to her young siblings.

I also found the prevalence of video cassettes and - more tellingly if this was all taking place in (as it appears) a contemporary, 21st Century setting - VHS players rather jarring.

Perhaps Charlie needed one for his job, but I do think - if that's the case - a passing comment might have it made it stand out less as a plot convenience.

Not as convenient, though, as Chekov's morse code: when we first meet Katie and Charlie he is testing her on morse code, apparently for a badge with the Egyptian eagle scouts or something. It's really obvious that this is IMPORTANT. Again, it's never explained, it's just some heavy-handed foreshadowing.

While the film is disappointing in general, with plot holes that if addressed could have shortened the movie, at least when it gets to the horror parts Cronin doesn't let us down, delivering twisted gore and putrescent body horror of the finest kind.

Not that I mind having my expectations subverted - this the horror genre after all - but when the subversion changes the subject into something else completely, it becomes rather bemusing.

I just wish, rather than saying he's making a "mummy" movie, Cronin had been allowed to make another Evil Dead movie, introducing the indestructible, family-hating,  Nasmaranian demon into that canon if he so wanted.

Because I really can't help feeling that's where it belongs. Kinda like Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday.

When I come to file my Blu-Rays, Lee Cronin's The Mummy will be sat next to my Evil Dead collection, rather than my Mummy movies.

A WESTERN NOVELLA BY BRUCE 'ASH' CAMPBELL!!!

A new arrival for my "to be read" shelf has immediately leapfrogged to the head of the queue, and will be the next book I crack open once I've finished Mark Finn's Fight Card: The Adventures of Sailor Tom Sharkey .

So, what is this tome of great literature, I hear you ask...

It's only a freakin' Western novella written by the B-movie legend Bruce Campbell.

That's Ash from the Evil Dead franchise, Autolycus from Xena: Warrior Princess, Pizza Poppa in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Winkie Gate Keeper in Oz the Great and Powerful, and countless other roles: the most pertinent of which is, possibly, the titular lead in all 28 episodes of the weird western The Adventures of Brisco County Jnr.

This isn't Campbells first book, as he's written a number of humorous autobiographical memoirs, as well as a couple of satirical works and a political thriller.

But this is a Western! 

Released just at the tail-end of the month-long window for the annual June On The Range event, sadly, I didn't learn of Reconcile until too late for that reading challenge.

But, never mind, the 105-page novella is now in my greasy mitts.

The back cover blurb, which is also the promotional text for the book, reads as follows:

"My mother, Joanne, loved the Western genre. She read every Zane Grey novel he ever wrote. I know because I drew stick-figure cartoons in the margins of her massive paperback collection.

"Westerns, by nature, are riddled with clichés – the steely-eyed, unshaven hero protecting innocent pioneers from brutal, unforgiving savages.

"With Reconcile, I tried to sidestep many of the cliché elements we've read or seen in Westerns for a generation. Reality isn't tidy or reliable. Reality has unpleasant circumstances that don't always resolve themselves like they do in the movies. In the heat of battle, the "good guys" and "bad guys" aren't so easily defined.

"In the sprawling history of the American West, I'd like to think a different kind of story was possible, and I hope you enjoy it."

So, do I have a clue what it's about? Nope. But it's a Western... written by Bruce Campbell. That's all I need to know. And that's why it's at the top of my TBR list!

PS. I know the cover looks like AI, but I have read that it is genuine art from a friend of Bruce's that has been "modified" by AI (I guess to put his head on the main character?).

Yes, I think it's disappointing if AI was involved in the production of this cover, even in an apparently, "small" way. Perhaps future editions will feature real, untampered, AI-free art? That would be nice.

Meet The Characters of Little House on The Prairie

THROWBACK THURSDAY: When Hawk Failed To Fly!

Back in October 2015, I was devastated when the Kickstarter campaign to secure the final funding for the proposed Hawk The Slayer sequel, Hawk The Hunter, fell well short of its goal.

Getting the bit between my teeth, I penned an amateur dissection of what I felt went wrong.

Remember this was written over 10 years ago. In the meantime 2000AD (published by Rebellion) has run a number of original Hawk The Slayer comic strips, but - as far as I am aware - Hawk The Hunter as a movie property is dead and buried.

You can read my commentary from back then below:

The Kickstarter to secure the final slice of funding to get the long-awaited Hawk The Slayer sequel off the ground ended this week, having raised a pitiful five per cent of its target.

The Hawk The Hunter campaign started with great gusto, screenings at FrightFest in London and at a convention in the States, a slew of magazine and news website coverage.

Then nothing...

It was as though the campaign organisers were just sitting back, expecting the cash to come flooding in. Or they simply didn't understand how Kickstarter works.

The campaign launched on August 30, and ran until October 1, hoping to raise a cool half-a-million dollars, the final 20 per cent of the finances needed to get the film made.

In that time there were only three updates to the campaign, the last being on September 1, where the writer/director of the original Hawk The Slayer, Terry Marcel, said: "Just wanted to let you know we've raised $4.5M on this project, we need the final $500K to make this happen."

Through the duration of the campaign we heard nothing from the director chosen for the new film, nor from Rebellion (the comic publishers and video game company providing the special effects), no sample footage, no tunes from Rick Wakeman, or anything that might spur people to invest... beyond simple nostalgia for the original cult classic.

In the end the Kickstarter raised just under $27,000.

You just need to look at the Kicktraq data for the campaign (which is more readable actually on the Kicktraq site) to see the enthusiasm was there at the start, but then dropped away dramatically.

Days before the end of the campaign, producer Andrew Grocock posted a message to the Official Hawk The Hunter Facebook page spelling out some of the reasons why the campaign had faltered so spectacularly.

First up, a couple of their pre-release promotional videos on YouTube were removed because of music clearance issues:

"The first two videos were then taken down from YouTube by the representative of the Harry Robertson Estate [citing] Soundtrack Copyright as we’d used a few seconds of original Hawk the Slayer music without permission.

We were also issued with a statement that under no circumstances were we allowed to use the HtS soundtrack music to promote the sequel Hawk the Hunter."

Luckily co-producer Jason Kingsley, head of Rebellion, stepped in and helped create an alternative launch video.

Then, despite some success with getting Terry in front of reporters to talk about the campaign, Andrew said:

"Many newspaper, magazine, RPG and games-based media outlets refused to help promote or mention our campaign as Kickstarters are not wholly recognised as being 'FOR REAL'. Games Workshop Weekly newsletter being one opportunity that was a ‘NO’ and disappointed me the most."

In the end, the Hawk The Hunter campaign received pledges from only 375 backers (which, of course, now won't be collected). If it was just members of the Official Facebook Group who were backing it that's still less than 60 per cent of the group's 639 membership.

If self-professed fans of the franchise weren't even willing to chip in $10, what chance did Terry and Andrew have of raising $500,000 from others  who weren't so invested in the world of Hawk The Slayer?

Let's consider for a moment Iron Sky (the 2012 fan-funded Nazis-on-the-Moon 'comedy'). That was a pretty awful film that makes Hawk The Slayer look Oscar-worthy in comparison, yet its sequel, The Coming Race, raised $614,599 from 8,807 backers on IndieGoGo at the start of the year.

The current Mythica film Kickstarter (the third fantasy flick, from indie film company Arrowstorm, in a five-part saga) has gotten over 1,000 pledges already, while the second part got 1,382 and the first 1,527.

Both the Iron Sky crew and Arrowstorm get crowdfunding, understand the need to keep their backers enthused so they continue to spread the message, regularly update their sites while their campaigns are running, drip feed new titbits about the production or new investment incentives etc

Earlier in the week, when it was clear the Hawk The Hunter fundraiser wouldn't reach its goal, Terry posted an upbeat message on the film's website:

"As you may be aware, the Kickstarter campaign was unsuccessful so we are re-evaluating the project. I hope to have news before the end of the year."

However, this needs to be taken in tandem with Andrew's earlier message, which said:

"You all know the resulting failure of the Kickstarter, the numbers of which cannot justify holding onto our studio, post [production], CGI and equity pledged investment..."

So, it looks as though, if Hawk The Hunter is ever to move ahead, it's not going to be simply a question of making the movie with the $4.5 million they had raised, as they may not even have all of that now.

It's very easy to sit back here, behind my keyboard, and armchair quarterback what went wrong, but given that, in some shape or form, Hawk The Hunter has been 'in the works' for more than 30 years, you have to question some of the decisions made as the film raced towards its final hurdle.

Besides the music clearance issue discussed above, I found a number of the high value rewards on offer for the campaign rather strange, for instance:

• $250 for a 15-second bespoke voice message (even though there was no indication who the actors would be in the film).

or

• $3,000 to be an extra for a day in a tavern scene (I don't know how much extras get paid these days, but to pay three grand to appear in the background of a scene seems a mite excessive. It didn't even state where the filming would be taking place, so you could have coughed up the money then found it was being filmed somewhere you couldn't get to)

And the thing was, about the bulk of these high-end incentives, as written, you didn't even get a digital download, let along a DVD, of the movie when it was completed... or any other of the lower price incentives!

One person chipped in for a Mind Sword prop replica, a couple went for framed art, and three were hoping for a pair of premiere tickets, but most of the high-priced items didn't attract any interest.

I guess, because there was the big launch at FrightFest, Terry and his team felt committed to run the campaign to completion, but given the lack of anything from its organisers after the first few days, sadly, I'm not surprised that few others were interested in pitching in.

I'm still holding out hope that Hawk will live again, but if this campaign couldn't even muster the full support of its own fans, maybe the wider world just isn't that bothered about seeing Hawk do battle with Voltan again.

Perhaps, the Hawk The Slayer video game will still come out from Rebellion, perhaps they'll still publish the comic that was mentioned in passing during the initial promotion, or perhaps we'll have to make do with our shiny new Blu-Rays of Hawk The Slayer...

Final PDFs For Twilight Sword Have Been Delivered

Sample cards from the Twilight Sword roleplaying game

Twilight Sword backers got a lovely surprise today in the latest update from publishers Two Little Mice.

The final PDFs of the core rules, setting book, and starter set are now available for their consumption - along with PDFs of all the cards that come with the roleplaying game, a gamemaster's screen, and a file for using the in-game font (Auran).

Where beta PDFs for the anime-inspired game have been sent previously, backers just need to redownload the updated PDFs from DriveThru.

The only digital elements still missing are the soundtrack, solo rules, and Third Party Licence, which are all due by the end of the year.

The update added:

"The Alchemy VTT module is also still a work in progress, we'll let you know an ETA as soon as we have one!"

Unfortunately there was an issue during the production of the (odd-shaped) print books for the game.

This has now been resolved but means an inevitable bumping of the shipping date for the physical products from the end of June to the end of August.

"We understand that many of you will be unhappy with the delayed shipping, and for that we apologize sincerely, but we also trust that you will appreciate our decision once you have these marvellous books in your hands!"

Says the team at Two Little Mice, wrapping up this latest message to backers on a positive note:

"... the books are already in production and many of the components are ready, so there should be no other issue going forward!"

Ghosts Haunt The East Palace, Who You Gonna Call?

A man who walks the spirit world and a court lady who hears the dead enter the East Palace by the king's orders — can they unravel its dark secrets?

The East Palace, an eight-episode South Korean supernatural serial, comes to Netflix on July 17.

Dragon Quest (2009)

I've said it before and I'll say it again, for my money, legendary mockbuster-makers The Asylum are at their best when they're turning out fantasy movies.

While Dragon Quest (or Dragonquest or DragonQuest) may not be anything particularly original (it's basically another rehash of the "hero's journey" we all know from Star Wars) it's still a half-decent Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure yarn.

Reluctant, magical-dope-smoking hero Arkadi (Daniel Bonjour) learns from local wiseman Grandfather (Jason Connery) that he is actually the prophesied Keeper tasked with collecting the stones of virtue under the guidance of legendary warrior Maxim (Marc Singer) and his rather attractive protégé, the scantily-clad Katya (Jennifer Dorogi).

Katya (Jennifer Dorogi) - Dragon Quest's eye candy

It's no surprise really that former Beastmaster Marc Singer steals the show with a scenery-devouring performance that blends Mister Miyagi with Yoda and a dash of Basil Exposition.

To be honest Maxim justified the minimal cost of the DVD alone and I could easily have enjoyed 90-minutes of his solo adventures!

The Keeper has been called into action because a former colleague of Maxim's, the Darth Vader-ish Kirill (or Krill) - played by X-Files/Buffy The Vampire Slayer bad guy Brian Thompson - has summoned a wicked (CGI) dragon of smoke and fire to act as his avatar in his (generally unspecified) plans for world domination... and bolster-up his legions of anarchy-spreading Tolfar mercenaries.

There's dragons and there's questing and some other CGI beasties along the way for Arkadi and crew, some running about and some fighting and it's all wrapped up in an easily-digestible 85 minutes.

Filmed in the deserts of California and interspersed with stock, aerial footage of sweeping landscapes, Dragon Quest quickly shakes off its early fairy tale vibe and segues into full-blooded swords and sorcery territory.

While it delivers very little we haven't seen before, it does so with an innocent, cheeky charm that makes it enjoyable nonetheless if you are open-minded to what it has to offer (and let's be honest you have to be reasonably open-minded knowingly sitting down to watch a movie from The Asylum).

Deathstalker's Deeds Finally Set Down On Paper

Deathstalker - as portrayed in Steven Kostanski’s recent, excellent, movie - finally finds his way onto the written page, this September.

Bret Nelson's official adaptation of Deathstalker, published by Encyclopocalypse, will be available as a 190-page mass market paperback and and an e-book, with an audiobook following along later this year.

With a foreword by the great Patton Oswalt (who voices goblin-dwarf wizard Doodad in the film), the book - according to a recent article on Rue Morgue - will expand:

"...upon the film’s world of monsters, magic, mayhem, and adventure, bringing readers deeper into the war-torn realm of Abraxeon and the dangerous quest that places its reluctant hero at the centre of an unplanned adventure after accidentally unleashing a curse upon…himself."

Nelson, who has a solid track record with movie tie-ins, having penned adaptations of Plan 9 From Outer Space and Manborg, as well as numerous works of his own under his belt, says in the Rue Morgue piece that his was inspired by Conan The Barbarian comics and the works of Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock, as well as many hours of sword-and-sorcery roleplaying game campaigns.

I strongly suspect this is going to be delightfully pulpy and cannot wait to get my hands on the paperback.

"The legend returns... bloodier, bolder, and more outrageous than ever.

"Deathstalker is a thief, a mercenary, and a survivor with a talent for finding trouble wherever he roams. When a dying prince's mysterious amulet becomes bound to his soul, Deathstalker finds himself hunted by assassins, monsters, sorcerers, and creatures that should have remained buried in the darkest corners of the realm.

"Armed with an overwhelming desire to be left alone, Deathstalker embarks on a perilous quest across the war-torn kingdom of Abraxeon. Along the way he'll battle two-headed trolls, flesh-eating serpents, ancient curses, sinister magic, and an army of enemies determined to claim the amulet's deadly secret.

"Adapted from the screenplay by Steven Kostanski (Psycho Goreman, Frankie Freako) by Bret Nelson (Manborg, Plan 9 From Outer Space) and featuring a foreword by Patton Oswalt, Deathstalker is an epic journey into a world of gloriously old-school adventure.

"Sharpen your sword, and try not to get cursed along the way.

"Deathstalker rides again."

Korean Zombies Are The Best Zombies!

Horror master Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan) directs a new Korean zombie thriller starring Gianna Jun and Koo Kyo-hwan.

Professor Se-jeong (Jun) is thrust into a bloody nightmare when a rapidly mutating virus is released during a biotech conference causing authorities to seal the facility.

Trapped inside with no escape, Se-jeong along with a small group of survivors must fight to stay alive while the infected undergo horrific transformations.

With a runtime of two hours and two minutes, Colony swarms into US and UK cinemas on August 28.

 

The Raven (2012)

Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare's script for The Raven takes the mystery surrounding the last days of the life of author Edgar Allan Poe and spins it into a gothic murder tale.

A madman is committing a string of murders in mid-19th Century Baltimore using the stories of Edgar Allan Poe (Jon Cusack) as his blueprint. At first, Poe is a suspect, but when his beloved Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve) is kidnapped by the killer, Poe becomes a consultant for eager, young detective Fields (Luke Evans).

Poe is drawn into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse as the killer challenges the author to document their mental duel through the newspaper as he leads the police along a trail of breadcrumbs towards the location of the missing woman.

It's a fascinating, convoluted tale and Cusack shines as the depressed, alcoholic rapscallion and romantic, but ultimately he is more interesting when Edgar is just being Edgar rather than his later manifestation as an "action hero".

The story does a great job of obfuscating the identity of the killer, but never explains the "how" of his elaborate - and presumably costly - murders.

His Saw-like "Pit And The Pendulum" killing, for instance, clearly wasn't something just thrown together on a whim, but the film never even touches on how the killer purchased the necessary equipment and assembled it all without attracting any attention.

It's probably worth noting that The Raven is by no means a horror movie, despite some moments of moderate gore, but rather a procedural, detective piece with Poe and Fields putting the clues together and tracking down their quarry before he kills Miss Hamilton.

As with many period-pieces these days, The Raven's atmosphere ultimately triumphs over the story (why introduce Poe's pet mongoose, for instance, only for it to have nothing to do with the story and be just as quickly forgotten about?), but the plot - if a tad far-fetched and anachronistic - still makes for an entertaining hour-and-three-quarters.