"We Should Have Burned Them When We Had The Chance"

There are many great programmes on television at the moment, but nothing tops this season of House of The Dragon.

See above for the trailer for episode five, while below are the usual, spoilerific behind-the-scenes features:

Night of the Eagle (1962)

Night of The Eagle will air in the UK on Talking Pictures TV, on July 25 at 9.05pm and July 28 at 9pm

The other year, one of my oldest online friends, John, announced he was having a clear-out and wanted to dispose of some of his old horror-themed Blu-Rays.

Never one to turn down a free movie, I offered to take a few off his hands and soon a package arrived with four discs in.

Among them was one I confess I'd never heard of: Night Of The Eagle (aka Burn Witch Burn).

So, naturally, that was the first to be taken for a spin in the Blu-Ray player.

Charming and charismatic psychology professor Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde aka Jason King of Department S) has it all: a great house, a career on the fast-track to success, and a beautiful wife, Tansy (Janet Blair).

Therefore, Norman is shocked to discover that his wife has been secretly practising witchcraft, she says to protect him from dangerous and jealous forces that would otherwise seek to derail his career or even harm him.

Angrily, he makes her destroy all her charms, fetishes, and witchy paraphernalia.

However, no sooner does she do this than their lives take a dramatic turn for the worse.

First, Norman is accused of sexually assaulting Margaret Abbott (Judith Stott), one of his students, at Hempnell Medical College, then some 'force' seemingly attacks his home.

The rational professor tries to deal with all these things logically, but Tansy starts to take increasingly wild, and potentially dangerous, steps to thwart this with - what she believes is - magic.

Night Of The Eagle is a fantastic, little, horror film, in a similar vein to 1957's Night Of The Demon and 1963's The Haunting.

It's oozing with atmosphere, relying on limited special effects and a strong amount of suggestion, so, like Norman, we're never 100 per cent sure if what's happening is co-incidence, feverish hallucinations, hypnosis or genuine black magic.

The ending is a bit sudden, given all the furore that has just unfurled, and certainly comes from the "karma is a bitch" playbook.

But, then, that was the style of films back in the day - they knew not to hang around and outstay their welcome. They had a story to tell, got in, told it, and got out. A trait seemingly lost on some filmmakers and their more recent overlong snorefests.

Based on Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife (which first appeared in 1943 in Unknown magazine and then as novel in 1953), Night Of The Eagle's original New England setting was changed for 'old' England, instead.

This adaptation (there have been several) was penned by horror legend Richard Matheson with Twilight Zone writer Charles Beaumont, and some tweaking by George Baxt, at the behest of producer Albert Fennell.

A smart, tight, script, buoyed up by cracking performances from all concerned, Night Of The Eagle is definitely one for those who are happy to take their horror served without dollops of gore and jump scares.

MUSICAL MONDAY: Storm (OTYKEN)

The music video was filmed in Siberia, Krasnoyarsk Territory, on the Chulym River. 30 km from the village of Pasechnoye (the capital of the Chulyms). This is the birthplace of the members of the OTYKEN group.

Chulyms are the smallest indigenous people of Siberia. According to one version, the Chulyms are the ancestors of the Japanese Ainu and the indigenous peoples of North America. According to another version, the Chulyms are an ancient Turkic tribe.

The song OTYKEN - STORM talks about the difficulties that people face when traveling to the East.

The music of the OTYKEN group is dedicated to giving kindness and warm light to all people on earth! The magical power of our music will heal your soul and your body as well, and it can even send you into a trance.

Another retro slice of bombastic music, from way back in 2022 (remember those halcyon times?)

HEALTH UPDATE: And So It Continues

Image by Conmongt from Pixabay

We're now in our second or third heatwave of the Summer. It's not fun. 

Not only can I not really focus on anything still, but I also feel lethargic and just want to vegetate.

For reasons, primarily the extreme heat, I've now only managed to attend two meetings of Biscuit Club in the last six or seven weeks.

A couple were cancelled and one was optional (and I didn't feel up to attending), but also there was the week where I had my steroid injections (which don't appear to have worked) and one where Rachel was overwhelmed with organising the annual awards day she puts on for the local media in the South-East of England.

I've tried to do some exercises, but the heat just tires me out.

Unfortunately, this has also meant I've had a couple of falls. While nothing was damaged beyond my dignity, it's a stark reminder of how I was a year ago and the fact that I had gone several months without any kind of collapse.

On a possibly positive note, I went back to the GP's this week for my latest blood test, to monitor my liver function, and my veins were much more visible than they usually are... which we atre attributing to the heat.

It was still incredibly painful, and I crushed Rachel's hand again as the nurse wiggled the needle around in my vein (well, that's what I think she was doing - I had my eyes screwed shut). But, apparently, she got two and a bit vials of my blood out.

Also, rather impressively, several days after my needle-encounter, I still haven't bruised around the penetration site, which is possibly a first.

Now, I just have to wait for the results and find out if I need to come back for more of this torture.

When Science Meets Fiction, Reality Sinks Atlantis

Photo by Paolo Resteghini on Unsplash

In homage to Pete's recent OUTGUNNED Adventures campaign, in which  our characters found - then sank - Atlantis, I thought I'd share these two videos from geek architect Dami Lee.

Here she uses mathematics and physics to investigate Plato's description of the fictious city, and, unsurprisingly, the numbers don't add up.

But remember, gentle reader, to never let facts get in the way of a good story...

It's A Marathon Rather Than A Sprint: Why I Will Always Champion The "Forever Campaign"

Trawling back through his archives recently, I found myself agreeing with the sage wisdom of Grognardia's James Maliszewski, in his pontifications on a subject near and dear to my heart: the desirability of long-running campaigns.

I've mentioned a number of times on this blog my personal white whale: my dream of an open-ended "forever campaign", which I have long-considered the definitive expression of our hobby (certainly where Dungeons & Dragons-style games are concerned).

Inspired by the early practitioners of our art (from Gary Gygax's Greyhawk via David Hargrave's Arduin to Dave Arneson's Blackmoor), I'd always felt this was how the game was meant to be played.

Characters should live, grow old, and die (either in battle or in the comfort of their own keep) during the run of a campaign, but the world always carries on. Characters have long and storied careers, then retire, raise castles and families, become legends, but the world always carries on. 

The world shouldn't 'end' when a particular adventure ends (unless, of course, it's an apocalyptic adventure such as I concocted for the Tuesday Knights in The Chronicles of Cidri).

Modern campaigns, to me, feel like they have a story to tell and once it's told, it's time to pack things up and move on to another game.

For instance, while I loved playing my human fighter Syr Edvard in Simon's Dungeons & Dragons 5e Curse of Strahd campaign, we knew from the moment we stumbled through the Mists into Ravenloft we were destined to ultimately confront the vampire lord Strahd and try to free the land from his grasp. 

Us and the thousands of other gamers who have - and will have in the future - played through this campaign book, all following roughly the same story.

The details may vary, both in the plot and how the character's react, but, ultimately we all have a single primary objective.

The current crop of campaigns from Wizards are designed to take characters from 1st to 20th level, in a compressed period of time (10 to 18 months of weekly games, I believe), and then those characters go away, and new characters are "designed" (not generated)  for the next book-length campaign.

Ultimately, we are telling the story that Wizards wants us to tell. And that's okay, if that's how you want to play Dungeons & Dragons. And a lot of people do, I get that.

These are blockbuster movies, whereas my gaming interest lies more in the direction of the on-going soap opera, a marathon rather than a sprint.

I look at Robert Wardhaugh's famous four-decade spanning campaign, and the original campaigns I mentioned above, and that's what I want a piece of.

I like the idea of a sprawling, living, setting where the characters create their own story, rather than characters being created for a story.

I, again, cite my own Chronicles of Cidri as a small example of what I have in mind: when I began that campaign (taking over the reins from Pete a few sessions in), I had no end goal in mind, there was no set objective for the characters. A string of events - all driven by the player-characters (knowingly or unknowingly) - led to the final apocalyptic battle and the destruction of the world.

If Clare's character hadn't fallen under a certain curse and then hadn't chosen to trust the untrustworthy Witch of The Woods the campaign - and the world - would have turned out a lot different.

James pulled out a brilliant quote from 'noisms' of Monsters and Manuals:

"We need long campaigns. We need to sit down with the same group of people on a regular basis over the course of years, telling the kind of stories which require concentration and thought and, above all, loyalty; stories which gain their own momentum through peaks and troughs, ebbs and flows, ups and downs and ins and outs; stories in which the events which happen matter because they have a context and a background and an unknown future waiting to be discovered. We don't need the inconsequential frippery of the one-shot; we need time."

However, 'noisms' also wraps up his own commentary on the need for long campaigns, thus:

"Almost everything worth doing, knowing, reading, hearing, feeling or saying in life has the character of being unobtainable via shortcuts except in a form which diminishes both you and it. Why would you expect RPGs to be any different?"

While I have been known to enjoy an odd one-shot as a palate-cleanser, a way to explore new and different rules ideas, I want my players' characters to become enmeshed in their game-world, there to live and breathe, rather than drive one single plot forward at breakneck speed.

In his article, James said:

"A multi-year campaign is, I think, the ideal form of most roleplaying games ... and by "ideal," I don't mean some unattainably lofty goal but rather the most desirable and satisfying version of this type of entertainment."

I realise my time on this Earth is finite, I'm heading towards my sixtieth birthday later this year, and I'm plagued with a host of health issues that fate has foisted upon me.

If I'm lucky I have the time - and energy - left in me for one last, massive, sprawling campaign in the manner I aspire to. 

This is why I remain staunchly zealous (almost certainly to an annoying degree at times) about protecting the Tuesday Knights' precious, monthly gaming slots.

I'm still quite adamant that while we are bound to "one RPG session a month" (meaning a maximum of 12 a year, and we rarely achieve that for sundry health, family, and work reasons) I want to play (or, more crucially, run) something with the potential to become this kind of open-ended "forever campaign".

I'd love to see characters invested in something other than an "overarching plot", putting something back into the game world, be it building a castle or a dam, seizing a crown and struggling with the mantle of rulership, getting married, growing their dynasties etc

There would still be the grand expeditions, the megadungeons to loot, the Big Bads to slay, but between all this the characters would have lives, dreams, aspirations, passions, and growth that might not be measured in experience points, but would certainly make their personal stories more rounded and interesting.

Of course, I realise if I'd just stuck to my guns when we launched the Tuesday Knights, back in 2008, and kept my initial Castles & Crusades campaign going, there's every possibility that I would be running such a "forever campaign" as I dream about. 

But there's no point having regrets over my stupidity back in the day. At least, it was a learning experience. Albeit rather late in life.

I'll let James have the final word on the subject of extended campaigns, quoting one of the founding fathers of our glorious, and occasionally frustrating, hobby:

"Indeed, I'd argue this is the way D&D at least was intended to be played, as Gary Gygax states in the foreword to OD&D: "it is the campaign for which these rules are designed."

From The World of M3GAN Comes A New SOULM8TE

Unnerving, suspenseful, and darkly compelling, SOULM8TE follows a grieving engineer tasked with testing a ruthless tech giant’s new AI companion. But when he attempts to program her to be a truly sentient soulmate, she develops needs of her own - unleashing a relentless spree of precision-engineered mayhem.

The Archer and The Sorceress (1981)

A sword-and-sorcery flick that has long eluded me, I finally caved and got myself an imported German DVD of The Archer and The Sorceress aka The Archer: Fugitive from The Empire (aka Der Zauberbogen).

The poster art, by Les Edwards, that had so stirred my youthful imagination, had always suggested that I was missing out out on another Deathstalker or The Warrior and The Sorceress, but sadly The Archer is a family-friendly, Certificate 12, failed TV pilot.

This kind of explains the lethargic set-up and anticlimactic denouement, but doesn't excuse the messily over-complicated plot and the occasionally nonsensical dialogue.

The land of Malveel, home to a disparate group of feuding nomadic tribes, is under threat of invasion by the Draikian empire (known, confusingly, as The Dynasty) and its snakemen allies.

The nomads have been united under the rule of King Brakus (George Kennedy), but behind-the-scenes shenanigans see him murdered and his son, Toran (Lane Caudell), framed.

With his dying breath, Brakus tells Toran to seek the wizard Lazar-Sa, to assist him in regaining his rightful position as the tribal leader.

Toran escapes with his mentor, Mak (George Innes), but Mak soon dies as well (for reasons) and in doing so bequeaths the magical Heartbow, known as Elbe, to Toran.

On his journey, Toran teams up with the slippery rogue Slant (Victor Campos) and the sultry sorceress Estra (Belinda Bauer). Having had a previous run-in with Toran, she is also seeking Lazar-Sa, but to kill him in revenge for the death of her mother.

All the while, they are being chased by Gar (Kabir Bedi), the leader of the Draikians (I think) and his warband of nine snake-people.

Snakeman

Although they add little more than a modicum of atmosphere, the make-up on the snakemen is superb, they wouldn't have looked out of place on Jabba's sailbarge.

Like the handful of other creatures and species shown in this hour-and-a-half flick, the snakepeople, ultimately, are little more than set dressing.

When our 'heroes' arrive in the town of Kamal, they end up saving the locals from someone claiming to be Lazar-Sa.

They pursue him to his hidden, magical base only to discover he is an imposter, a student of Lazar-Sa's, defaming his old master's name.

Nevertheless, Gar and his snakeboys pursue Toran and co. into the misty valley for a final showdown.

There's definitely potential in The Archer, but the ragged script (written and directed by TV stalwart Nicholas Corea) comes nowhere close to realising it, despite the best efforts of Victor Campos's duplicitous - but ultimately good-natured - scoundrel and Belinda Bauer, who smoulders extremely well in an Eva Green style.

Clearly a lot of worldbuilding had gone into the backstory, the film opens with a fleeting shot of a map of the area, people swear by different gods depending on where they hail from, and it's implied - more than once - that Elbe is not the only Heartbow.

But none of this, or any of the other setting nuggets the script is sprinkled with, really go anywhere because this wasn't written as a self-contained movie, but rather the start of an on-going serial.

Sadly, we will never know the full depth of Toran and Estra's world.

The Archer still has a few interesting moments, but its bloodless combat and bland lead mean it really should turn in its swords-and-sorcery genre membership card.

I don't know if I'm getting slow in my old age, but, for me, one of the main areas where the story fell down was my inability to keep track of who was on whose side, and really why Gar was bothering with Toran in the first place (having already successfully engineered his fall from grace).

My problem with following the narrative was heightened by the mumbly dialogue, made worse by the fact that more than once - when I could understand what was being said - it didn't make a lot of sense anyway.

For instance, the town leaders in Kamal, when thanking our heroes for their rescue, seemed to be riffing off the script they had been given, talking over each other, and generally behaving rather peculiarly.

The Archer and The Sorceress isn't so bad that it's good (cf. Deathstalker) and it obviously isn't particularly good.

Instead, it's horribly mediocre, one of the worst sins a film can inflict upon an audience.

Witch Hat Atelier Season Two Now In Production

With the first season having finished the other week, it has been officially announced that the second season of the gorgeous Witch Hat Atelier fantasy anime is in production, and will come to Crunchyroll in due course.