Formerly submerged town that was under water for 25 years.

Tether: First Snow
Tether

Tether is a pilot/concept piece for a web series; a post-apocalyptic setting where mankind is slowly rebuilding from a virus that decimated the world a century ago. Now, mysterious cables are dropping from the sky, revealing an isolated world long forgotten.

Very nice.

[The Blacklist]

U.S. upfronts are this week. Here's the first preview I've seen...

The Blacklist

Looks interesting. Hard to believe that Spader was once Daniel Jackson.

I'll second that whole sentiment.

OR, in honor of Grimm, humans are the special ingredient in a wide variety of non-human medicines.

Now for a different campaign use the same setting but all the players are drakes (or similar things). It becomes a game of survival and protection. Possibly the PCs are the elders and/or warriors of their clan and are trying to find a place to live where they aren't mercilessly hunted.

Tie different species feats to different valuable body parts that the local humanoids want to harvest, with different demands in the various places they travel though.

That is ... brilliant!

Lars doesn't utter a prayer - silent or otherwise.  If he is to defeat the frog, it must be through strength of arms.  His god demands strength and whining and asking for divine favor when he has already asked for a sacrifice could be seen as blasphemous.  He steels himself and tries again to destroy the frog.

The first blow flies wide as the frog moves to avoid his comrades.  He then yells out, "I sacrifice you to my master!"  The second blow connects, but not as solidly as he would like.

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Swing and a miss.

1d20 + 1 -> 21
Why, yes, I'll spend an Action Die.

Damage: 1d8+1 (Crunch!) -> 2

Truth be told, I was thinking more in the vein of a magic-less world (setting design idea that's rolling around in the brain-pan) where folk (mostly human) use the "monsters" as natural resources.  NOT everyone's cup of tea but interesting none-the-less.  

That said, there are some truly wonderful ideas in here.

EDIT: I can't spell today.

[Gravity]

Gravity

It's Alfonso Cuaron. It's guaranteed to be as awesome as it looks. Probably better.

I'll keep my eyes on it but I'm not holding my breath.  With the cast and director, it's got legs but the story could go all sorts of ways.

But this is the story of Judge William Minty.

Very nice!

Little Witch Academia

It's anime Harry Potter with an all-witch cast, with dungeon crawling.

One of the better pieces of animation that I've seen in a long while.

Lars sees the great frog from the corner of his eye and silently thanks his god for a challenge worthy of sacrifice.  Aloud he says, "Serve my Master well in his garden, great hunter!" while dashing forward.  At the last second his footing slips off the good ground and his attack flies wide.

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1d20+1 → [8,1] = (9)
Looks like a swing and a miss to me.

A city founded on excavating and using the constantly regenerating bound body of the tarrasque

 

That's a whole pile of hubris if I ever saw one.

Age of Dragons is a bad, but watchable take on Moby Dick where, in lieu of whales, the crews of land boats (don't know what else to call them) hunt dragons for their "vitriol" - a flammable substance that lights their world.

The movie is only worth viewing on TV if you have nothing better to do; however, the idea caught hold of me.  Humans (and other folk) hunting "monsters," not to rid the world of the dangerous things that go bump in the night, but to harvest the resources they represent.

It's only the kernel of an idea but I'm hoping to expand on it.  Thoughts are welcome.

[Oblivion]

Saw Oblivion a couple of nights ago. Fun movie, great score, but my God did it telegraph its punches to anyone even mildly familiar with the genre.

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Admittedly I didn't see the whole army of 1 thing coming, but even if I hadn't seen the trailers which massively massively set it up, the fact that Jack mentions "mandatory memory wipe" within moments of a dream memory he couldn't possibly have directly experienced according to his voice over just screamed "he's a clone". Especially if you've seen something like Moon.

The interior of the Tet might well have been directly lifted from the mothership sequence of Independence Day. I felt like they'd started to run out of SFX budget by that point, so instead of giving us something interesting -- a call out to the City of Lead & Gold (aka the 2nd book of the Tripods trilogy, the TV adaption of which the Tet certainy evoked) would have been great, with all manner of alien tech processes for us to guess at, what we got was dull grey, foggy, bleh with a poor (and poorly defended) knock-off of HAL 9000 at the heart of it.

I wish we'd gotten into Victoria's head -- she seemed almost willingly complicit in the situation at times to the point she seemed expecting Jack49 to be killed and be issued with a new one who wouldn't remember the woman she clearly loathed. I think there's definitely a possibility for a direct to video animated prequel here. Also, the vastly expanded size of her pupils was disconcertingly abnormal.

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I'll second the comments about Victoria.  She seemed genuinely shocked that the drone had been turned on her.  You could tell she expected it to go after Jack.

Lars spends a brief moment in prayer before he can be heard muttering, "Won't even provide time for a proper sacrifice."

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Notice Check:
1d20+7 → [1,7] = (8 )
It would appear that Lars is contemplating his navel or perhaps seeing castles in the sky, or whatever the GM deems appropriate.

Schools? Underfunded. Roads? Breaking. Military? Ground down. Goldman-Sachs? Too big to fail. Education Loans Bubble? Never pop.
But we've still got money enough for Iron Man.
...
No, not bagging on the movie. It's great, deserves it's profits, just....Baffled.

Priorities.

Everyone (nearly) wants the government to do more but no one (hardly) wants to pay for it.  Thus, the country has to set priorities which, sadly, politicians are very bad at.  Why?  Because we - the voting public - are fairly fickle about which government programs are in vogue at any given time.  Safest thing for the politicians?  Over-promise and under-deliver; then, blame the other side of the aisle or the previous incumbent for any failings.  Rinse and repeat every X years.

If we could truly sit down and agree which programs were truly important, then we MIGHT be able to spend the money more wisely but I'm not going to hold my breath.

As to Iron Man or whatever: People can spend their money on whatever they like.  They too have to set priorities but the choice between another round of drinks and a night out to see the latest installment of summer block-buster fun isn't nearly as hard as deciding if they want to tax themselves more for a school their grown children no longer need and their grandchildren won't use (because they live in another state).

EDIT: Spelling