Thursday, May 31, 2012

Dave K.'s Wild Kingdom


The number of gaming articles I will be publishing is going to be dropping off for the foreseeable future as I have had a bit of a dry spell of late.  I do have an idea for a series of articles but it requires me to watch a lot of Farscape and Gargoyles so it might be a while before those things get written.  In the mean time this article has been sitting on my USB drive for some months now.  It is something I have returned to again and again, tweaking it here and there.  While much of it is admittedly focused on nostalgia there are one or two kernels of advice locked away in there.  Somewhere.

Back in the day, before the goatee, when I possessed a glorious head of earthen hued locks, I was this guy:


Check out that dimple.  And the single chin.  Man, good times.

I  used to play Dungeons & Dragons (2nd ed.) every Saturday with a bunch of guys.  There was Rich, Gary, Mike, John (I think.  He was a quiet guy, the nicest of the bunch, and I recall he used to wear a cap all the time) and the two Daves: Dave M and the DM, Dave K.  If you are wondering why I am not mentioning names I do not think it fair to spread ‘em around without permission from the owners.  I have mentioned Dave Zyn’s before on this site but he already has a ‘net presence.  Man, I know a lot of Daves.  I think "Dave" might be the most common name in Michigan.

Now, if I am critical of a GM's actions please do not think my motives are vindictive.  Well, okay, there was that series of Drew posts I wrote last year but I like to think that is a freak occurrence.  I do not pretend to be a better GM than others; one of the reasons I chose to write this blog was to offer advice, said advice coming from years of mistakes I made in running games. So when I discuss this incident please do not think this is me attempting to get revenge on Dave K years later. Dave was a pretty uptight guy, but to be fair when he had to spend every Saturday trying to run a game whose players acted like a herd of feral cats then in retrospect I can see where some of his attitude came from.

Players can often be appeased by munchies.

On a side note, one thing I do recall of Dave K. is that he was quite possibly the biggest Jethro Tull fan in Michigan.  What Kate Bush was to me and Heart was to Dave M., Tull was to Dave K.  Musically, that is.

I always played a fighter type in Dave K's games: Barbarians, Rangers, things of that nature.  The only character I recall is Draffa of the Bujoc because he had an 18/00 strength, rolled legally.  Well, there was some contention because I did not choose which colored die denoted the single digit but with "00" there was no other outcome.  Draffa was not the sharpest pencil in the box but I liked him.  Hell, he scored +6 damage with every hit, what was there not to like?

I knew a guy from high school, a friend named Gene, and to me he was one of the best players I knew.  He once played a half Orc with a brick/rock as a weapon proficiency ("You can always find a brick", he had once explained to me.  I found his logic sound.) and I spoke to Dave K, asking him if he could squeeze him into the game.  Dave said “Sure” and I brought Gene in.  Gene was pretty excited to get involved in an established campaign and he had an idea what he wanted to play, inspired by an article he read in Dragon Magazine.  Ah, Dragon.  If I had more of a disposable income and space I probably would have purchased every issue.  Allow me to drift off on a(nother) tangent as I think on the awesomeness that was Dragon Magazine.  Back in it's heyday you had articles regarding a wide variety of subjects related to gaming including short stories, adventures, game reviews, even comics like Wormy, Fineous Fingers and What's New with Phil and Dixie, written and illustrated by the awesome Phil Foglio (These days Phil is doing truly awesome work writing and illustrating the comic Girl Genius).

Click on image to enlarge.  Say what you will, Phil knew his target audience.

Dragon Magazine was an invaluable tool for GMs and players alike. But like most tools Dragon Magazine could be quite dangerous in the wrong hands.  In Gene's it was like giving a chainsaw to a wild chimp and Dave's campaign was the tree.

Natural twenty!

Gene was very much interested in Japanese culture, he even spent some time in Japan later on teaching English.  He was one of the first people who turned me on to anime.  So it was only natural that when he came across this article character class he was very excited.  The article?  The samurai class. Bear in mind this was before the Oriental Adventures supplement came out so this character class was fresh and new.  The most almost anyone knew about Samurai was from the Shogun television mini series.  By the way, I was on a huge James Clavell kick years back and if you are looking for some non-fantasy or science fiction to read, I highly recommend the book Shogun.  In a way it it reminiscent of some science fiction plots in that you are reading about a man trying to deal with an utterly alien culture with it's own set of values that are often opposed to his own and he must struggle to adapt to them..  It is a wonderful read.

Where was I?  Gene, Dragon Magazine, Samurai class.  Right.  Gene showed up that Saturday, Dragon Magazine in hand.  He sat down with Dave K to generate a character and he made his pitch.  When I knew Gene he often had jobs in retail selling stuff.  Gene was pretty good at his job and he was able to sell Dave on allowing him to run a Samurai.

I apologize if I seem hazy on details but I was not writing notes at the time so I am operating on memory alone, and frankly the only parts of the campaign that were memorable were the parts where Gene was involved.  If that sounds cruel where Dave K.’s campaign is concerned, it is not intentional.  The advantage of running a PBEM is everything is documented so if I so choose I can go back twelve years and search for details.  If I did not have that luxury I am certain only a fraction of my adventures would stick in the minds of my players; they have more important things to commit to memory.

That still does not mean I hope at least one or two of my adventures are memorable.

Gene was one of those guys who felt very strongly about playing in character.  No, he did not show up in costume or insist on talking in a funny accent.  But he did feel that if you were playing a thief, you lied, cheated and stole (not from fellow PCs; that is just stupid, and stupid Gene was not.).  He was once in a Shadowrun game playing a pair of bikers (We often played two characters in our group.  You know, in case one died during the adventure.  It tended to happen.  A lot.).  When the GM (me) noted a plot point about a rival biker gang riding down the street (this was the Dreamchipper module, by the way) he asked if the PCs were currently in his gang's territory.  When the answer was an affirmative his characters Iron Paw and Drunken Monkey (Gene had a talent for names) whipped out his submachine gun and went to town on the invading bikers.  Never mind the (drunken) monkey wrench thrown into my plans, those bikers were not supposed to be there and they knew it!  This is an important point so bear with me.

I forget how, exactly, Gene's character met the party or why he had decided to join our quest.  Odds are three to two that we met in a tavern.   The party reached the outskirts of a town and if I recall correctly we were searching for a network of caves where a pack of ogres were hiding.  We came across a farmer and asked him for information.  The farmer was pretty abusive to the player characters.

“Wait,” Gene said to Dave K., “The farmer said that to my character?”

“Yes,” Dave K. replied, not thinking anything was unusual about a player asking for clar-

“I kill him!” Gene said.

“…What?” Dave asked after the laughter died down.

“I kill him!” Gene repeated as he rolled his ten sided die for initiative.

“Why?” Dave asked, desperate to regain control of his game.

“Samurais don’t take crap like that from peasants,” Gene explained.  He grinned at his initiative score and said, “I have fast draw with my katana, I don’t think anyone is going to be able to stop me.”

 
Really, why did anyone want to stop Gene?  This was the most fun we had with Dave’s game in weeks.  At least, it was the most fun I had had.  Like I said earlier, I mostly played fighters and the death count was pretty high for meat shields in Dave’s games.  Back then before you had online random name generators you were stuck coming up with them on your own.  After the first four or five characters in as many months you start to get jaded and start calling them variations of your middle name or were pulling random ones out of a phone book.

Back to Gene.  The peasant did not stand a chance.  In the aftermath there were in-character arguments but in the end the good players determined that the foreigner could not be held responsible for a misunderstanding.  The fact that Gene’s samurai murder machine was likely to score initiative and had a high probability of critical hitting us had absolutely nothing to do with our decision to let the dead peasant issue lie.  Really.  Dave K quietly fumed, but really what could he do?

The cave network was found and we went in, then we discovered a host of ogres.  And that was when we discovered just how lethal Gene’s samurai was.  The Ginsu Warrior, as he was now known, had a devastating two weapon combo attack that sliced into ogres and almost guaranteed a kill each time.   We came to a fork in the cave and ogres were flooding the passageway from two angles, and I am sure Dave was thinking now was his chance to regain some semblance of sanity.  Only Dave M. or Mike, I forget which, determined the best way to handle this was to have all the meat shields charge down one passageway to fend off the ogres there, and Ginsu (by this point we forgot what Gene called his character; nick names have a way of developing lives of their own) hold the other passage while the magic users act as artillery.  While the meat shields valiantly held off the ogre assault on the right with the thieves acting as back stabbers, Ginsu was having trouble finding new targets, what with that pile of corpses forming in front of him.  I swear, I think everyone playing a fighter type at that point was seriously considering playing a samurai for all those wicked hit bonuses.  Dave K’s campaign soon came apart and he had to retreat, metaphorically speaking, to determine what to do next.  Dave K later took Gene aside and Gene agreed to retire Ginsu.  He later ran a Halfling thief named Erwal Fizwig, which really was not his real name; it was the name he cried out during torture.  We never did discover what name Gene wrote on the character record sheet.

The lessons to take away from this incident are these.  First of all, it is all well and good to want to make players happy, but do not bow before pressure if you have reservations about the character they want to play.  Each character should be looked at carefully to see if there are any potential pitfalls to avoid.  Is the character too powerful, is their background too weird or exotic? That is not to say that Gene would have walked if Dave had rejected his samurai.  Likely he would have pulled out the half orc with the brick weapon proficiency.  Which in retrospect would have been an entirely different kind of awesome.

I was talking to Dave Zyn a little while back and discussed the concept of Mary Sues and he in turn mentioned the Special Snowflake.  I had never heard of this term.  For those of you who do not know what that is, the Special Snowflake is the PC who has to be different from everyone else.  They are not necessarily a Mary Sue but they must be unique and stand out.  You see this a lot in Star Trek games; the half Betazoid/half Bajoran, or the dude from the 21st century, or the rescued Borg.  Spock is partly to blame for this, but the real culprit is The Next Generation with their collection of Special Snowflakes: the only Klingon serving in Starfleet, the only android in Starfleet, the half human/half Betazoid, the child genius, and the blind guy with a visor that gives him super vision (And notice how you never see anyone else with disabilities in Star Trek employing devices to compensate for them?).  I am not saying Gene-the gamer gene, not Gene Roddenberry-wanted to be a Special Snowflake, but you see how the unique nature of his character really put a monkey wrench in Dave’s campaign.  And if a player threatens to quit if he does not get his way then perhaps he is not suited to your game.  A player has to look at thing from the GM’s perspective.  In this case Gene was easy going about the whole thing.  It was just a game; everyone should have a good time, DM included.

Second, a GM who does not do his homework is only asking for trouble and gets exactly what he deserves.  If a player is role playing a character from a comparatively alien or unusual culture from the other PCs then the GM should take special care in how that character is going to interact with PC and NPC alike.  Furthermore, if the player is running an unusual character class, research it thoroughly first.  Gene should have approached Dave earlier about the class but back then before scanners and e-mail (Yes, this happened that far back.) the only way he could have done that was to drive the ten or twenty miles to Dave’s house, and back then we all played at Mike’s house so hardly anyone knew where Dave K lived.   So the pair getting together before Saturday?  It would have been a pain in the ass to do.  It is hard to say what they could have done differently.  Met for dinner at McDonalds somewhere, maybe?  Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Third, never assume!  It is hard to get into Gene’s head but I think he thought everyone knew Samurais were lethal swordsmen who did not take crap from peasants.  This was before the big anime boom so you had to be a pretty hardcore fan of the genre to get ahold of the good stuff and not crap that was normally dubbed and released for American consumption.  Japanese culture simply was not as widespread as it is now among geeks and the only way you really knew about this sort of thing was if you saw the aforementioned Shogun mini series, or got your hands on Shogun Assassin from the local video store (Video stores were places you went to in order to rent things called video tapes), or maybe had read Frank Miller’sRonin.  Access to the genre was still pretty thin.  Gene simply should not have assumed Dave K was prepared when the game began and Gene should have warned Dave in advance a bit more about what the Samurai was about and what he had in mind.  So while Dave K made some mistakes so did Gene.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Song of the week

We close out Anime Month with the theme song to Nadia, The Secret of Blue Water, one of the few animes I actually own.  Damn, listening to this makes me want to sit down and watch the series again.  Most of it, anyway.  The part where Nadia and Jean are stuck on that island went on Forever...

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Song of The Week

I remember  a few years back when one of the big three networks had attempted to market new anime for American markets and completely botched it.  One of the two was Card Captor Sakura, an anime that while is very good, some of it's subject matter simply is not right for American audiences.

Okay, ten year old boys crushing on teenage boys?  I don't think that is right for any audience.  Seriously the Japanese are just weird.  But don't you go changin', Japan.

The other anime they screwed up was Vision of Escaflowne.  Dave once described Escaflowne to me as well disguised Shoujo anime.  Shoujo anime, for those of you who do not know, is anime directed at an audience of teenage girls.  But despite that I think the show was very well done.  Yeah, sure, you had the teenage love triangle (done years before Twilight, btw, and done far better, IMO) but I thought the animation was great and the heroine was likeable.

So here is the complete opening song to Escaflowne:

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Song of The Week

More anime goodness, I give you the opening theme song to To Aru Kagaku No Railgun:

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Wands and Wizardry

A quick note.  I saw The Avengers last week, saw it again yesterday.  I give it an 11 out of 10.  I have seen some vloggers talk about it not being a perfect movie.  I fail to see how Joss Whedon could have made it any better.  Some people have complained about "slow" parts.  Apparently those people suffer from ADD because the "slow" parts were parts where actual character development was going on.  Just an outstanding movie from start to finish, and I am looking forward to Avengers 2.  It will be interesting to see if new Avengers are added to the cast or if they want to stick with these six.

Oh, and Paramount?  Disney?  I want my Black Widow and Hawkeye movies.  Now.

Okay, now on to the article.


The past two weeks I have given suggestions for X-Men alternatives, so today I wanted to focus on another franchise that is (all too) often employed by GMs and moderators: Harry Potter.

I never really got Harry Potter.  I saw the movies and thought they ranged from decent to good, but overall I found the world did not make a great deal of sense to me.  What sorts of jobs were all those students being trained for at Hogwarts?  What did these people do with all that magical power?  Why didn't someone just bring a gun and shoot Voldemort?  And I am not alone in my confusion regarding this world; the Harry Potter franchise has spawned a great many Cracked articles, all of them not only funny but thought provoking.  Here is just one example.

These suggestions can also apply to the Twilight fans.  Seriously, twihards, read some decent books.

So anyway, let us look at some potential alternatives to the Potterverse.  Here is a list of popular contemporary fantasy novels, some of which could work as alternatives.  Among the most notable are Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, Mercedes Lackey's works, especially to me the Diana Tregarde series, and the works of Tanya Huff and Laurell K. Hamilton . 

Now you might say, "Tom, I don't want to play Harry Dresden!" or "Tom, many of these books center around a single person." Very true, not all these books would work well as canon worlds in which to run your campaigns, or some would work better than others.  However, I do suggest GMs should look at these fictional worlds for inspiration to create their own.  Anyone who has read my earlier articles must be aware by now how much I endorse playing original characters over canon and these fantasy novels are rife with ideas for making your own game universe.

Take the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series.  In it the principle characters are the children of Greek gods.  Imagine your players running characters who are the children of gods or are the reincarnation of gods, or like Neil Gaimen's book American Gods are new gods (i.e. god of the internet).  What if the players are like the champions of Greek mythology, aided and led by their respective patron gods?  Perseus and Heracles/Hercules were both sons of Zeus.  Imagine if you had a host of PCs who were all related, bastard children of the same god who have to team up on some quest?  I haven't even read the Percy Jackson series and just knowing the series premise has given me some ideas for a couple games.

Okay, now on to other properties:

B.R.P.D.



The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense is a government organization whose task is to protect normal men and women from supernatural threats conventional forces are not equipped to deal with.  The group's origin springs from the Hellboy comic, created by artist and writer Mike Mignola.  Like Doom Patrol and X-Men, the various members of the B.R.P.D. are societal outcasts who only belong in such a group.

While playing canon characters is one way to go, there is nothing stopping ambitious GMs from playing other branches, located in other cities across the world.  The movies suggest that 99% of magical stuff happens in New York for some reason but I can easily see B.R.P.D., London branch (called something more British, like the Magical and Paranormal Investigation Executive.  "Executive" seems like a very British word for organizations for some reason.  Or Investigation, Magic and Paranormal: IMP.  The Department of Unearthing the Magic and Paranormal: DUMP.)

Shadowpact


Shadowpact was a DC Comics series that came out after their 52 series, it was about a collection of magical heroes who gathered together to handle mystic threats conventional hero teams were not equipped to deal with.  Written and illustrated by Fables writer Bill Willingham (who also created the awesome series Elementals), it was not a commercial success.  However, I think it was a fun series and it made excellent use of largely forgotten characters.


Justice League Dark


If at first you don't succeed...

JLD has a lot in common with Shadowpact, although writer Peter Milligan has a very different writing style than Willingham and he has decided to go with a different line up.  I am not a fan of DC's New 52 program but to me Justice League Dark is one of the few bright spots, and like Willingham Milligan has made use of some characters who have gone largely unused over the past few years.

Both series show just how many magical characters exist in the DCU alone, from mages to mystical beings to those who employ magical artifacts.  Marvel Comics has similar characters, from Doctor Strange to Morbius, the living vampire, to Ghost Rider.  In fact Marvel Comics had a series called Midnight Sons.  DC also had a series called Night Force.  The point is both comic companies have a wealth of characters to choose from.

And...of course these characters are fantastic sources of inspiration for original characters for players to create.

Avatar: The Last Airbender/Avatar: The Legend of Korra



Avatar: The Last Airbender, was not only one of the best animated series made in the past decade, it was one of the best series, period.  Outstanding voice acting, fantastic animation, a stunning series of scripts and a tremendous three season story arc culminated in one of my most enjoyable viewing experiences.  If you have not seen Avatar: The Last Airbender, I highly recommend you borrow it from a friend, check your local library or buy it outright.

The series is about a world consisting of four nations: Air, Earth, Fire and Water, and in this world people exist called "benders" who are masters of one of these four elements.  The Avatar is a master of all four and is unique, his or her duty is to provide balance.  The Fire Nation declared war on the other three nations and Aang, the last of his race, must find a way to master the other three elements and defeat the Fire Nation. There, that is all you need to know, now go watch the series because it is all kinds of awesome.  Just do not rent the live action movie because from all accounts it sucks about as badly as a movie can.


Avatar: The Legend of Korra is the sequel series currently running on Nickelodeon but if you have missed any you can watch past episodes on that network's web site.  So far the series has lived up to the first in terms of quality and I am enjoying it very much.

The great thing about Korra is how different the series looks and feels while at the same time making the viewer believe the action is still happening in Aang's world.  Technology has advanced as has the public's perception on benders, it borrows a bit from the X-Men world in that people without super powers fear those that do and I think the writers have produced a very valid argument for those fears.

I do not recommend GMs run games involving Aang and company or Korra.  Instead I would suggest they run adventures taking place in the 70 year or so gap between series with original characters.  Or more confident and daring GMs could run a game taking place another seventy years ahead.

And now for the most obvious alternative to Harry Potter:

Dungeons & Dragons


If there is any property out there that just cries out for use as a magical campaign, it is this one.  The versatility of the settings, characters and creatures PCs can run in to are almost overwhelming. The amount of material available in hobby stores and online are staggering.  You can find inspiration in low fantasy stories like Robert E. Howard's Conan to high fantasy properties like J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of The Rings. Dungeons & Dragons offers a tremendous amount of versatility, you do not even have to follow the stats system to run a PBEM.  You create or borrow a fantasy world, have the PCs meet somehow (the cliche is a tavern) and bang, you got yourself a good old fashioned dungeon crawl. Personally I found two approaches work better and I mentioned them both in one of my earliest posts.

So there you have it, numerous properties that aspiring GMs could use as alternatives to the Potterverse.  The options are there people, just waiting for you to take advantage of them.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Song of The Week

Anime month rolls right along, this time with another contribution from the incomparable Yoko Kanno.  It is Tank, the opening song to the Cowboy Bebop anime.

Friday, May 4, 2012

X-ed Out

Last time I focused on ideas for (primarily) canon game concepts that could be alternatives for X-Men, most notably games involving schools and teen heroes.  Today I would like to talk about alternative super hero teams that contain the same sort of angst X-Men lovers seem to enjoy.  The first one is the most obvious:

Doom Patrol


The Doom Patrol was originally published around the same time as Marvel's X-Men and shared some similarities: group of freaks led by a wheelchair bound genius.  Of course, there were many differences. The X-Men had a common origin (mutations) while each member of the DP had a different bizarre origin.  Over the decades the series has seen dramatic changes in it's line up and creative direction with varying levels of critical and commercial success, the greatest being Grant Morrison's thoroughly bizarre and excellent run during the eighties.

The team is full of angst ridden men, women and other beings that are outcasts and are at home only within the team itself.  Yet even there oft times the team members seldom get along.

Not only is there a large line up to choose from, from the different eras, but The Doom Patrol provides players with an opportunity to play original characters as well.

The Avengers


Earth's Mightiest Heroes have their own motion picture now and it is obvious from the trailers that these guys do not always get along.  This is very true as in the comics quite often there are conflicts within the ranks regarding romance, social issues and the simple fact some of these people are hard to get along with.  Numerous Avengers have their own personal issues, from Iron Man's alcoholism to The Hulk's tendency to go berserk, to The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver's mutant origins, the Vision's existence as an inhuman android, etc.

And there is nothing preventing a GM/moderator from allowing original characters into the ranks of the Avengers, either.


The Outsiders

Back during the eighties writer Mike W. Barr and artist Jim Aparo came up with a bold comic where Batman quit the Justice League and formed his own group of super misfits. Batman and The Oustiders was a team that had adventures and missions The Justice League normally would not be involved in.  It is a team concept that has, like Doom Patrol, seen different incarnations and levels of success.

GMs can have Batman as a leader giving the team assignments, or the team could be one of those incarnations not involving The Dark Knight at all.  And, again, there is plenty of room for original characters.

Suicide Squad


Imagine you are a super villain doing a prison stretch, and a large black woman named Amanda Waller has offered you a chance to shave some time off your sentence.  The catch?  To earn it you have to go on a top secret mission that will likely get you killed.  Welcome to the Suicide Squad.

I can't say enough how awesome John Ostrander's original run on this series was.  Full of dysfunctional characters, Suicide Squad had as many failures as they did successes, which made perfect sense when you send a bunch of amoral bastards led by an emotionally scarred Colonel Rick Flagg into the field.  This series is unique in that not only could you play original characters as well as canons, but some players might have fun running different canon characters on different missions, especially if they have no problem seeing their canons die horribly in the field. This series had a pretty high body count.

Oh, and the current DC series?  Crap.  Amanda Waller did not need to be made skinny.  Part of what made her unique was the fact she did not look like a Playboy model like 99% of all the women in comics today.  Waller was awesomely unique, damn it!

Pam Grier as Waller. Smallville got something right.


Secret Six


Secret Six  was a comic that shares some similarities with Suicide Squad in that the principle characters are villains.  Every bit as dysfunctional as the 'Squad, the each member of the Secret Six carry their own dark past and barely co-exist with their fellow criminals.  What is nice about the series is how you have people who in some cases are insane or irredeemably evil, but you also have others who are looking for some sort of redemption or even a place to belong.

And again, with the team's rotating line up there is room for original characters.

The Defenders


Marvel's "non team", The Defenders consists of heroes that normally do not work well with others for one reason or another.  Many members are Marvel's B and C listers and outcasts as well as strange characters who just do not seem to fit anywhere else.

Judging from some of the past members The Defenders is an ideal group for players to run original characters.  Yes, I am going to bring that up often.

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents


The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents is about a team of heroes working for the United Nations, they are equipped with equipment that is inherently flawed.  Two of the items will ultimately kill the wearers.

Now darn it, is there anything more angst-producing than that?


The Liberty Project


The Liberty Project was a comic about a collection of super villains given a choice by the Federal government to acts as super heroes in exchange for an early parole. One of Kurt Busiek's earliest works, it was published during what I consider comic's "golden age" when 1st Comics, Eclipse, Comico, and Dark Horse Comics, among others, were all in existence, providing outlets for projects The Big Two would not have considered, or a place where writers and artists could own their creations.


No doubt there are several teams I have missed, but I think these examples as well as the ones I proposed last week reveal how many different options there are to the slew of dull and repetitive X-Men games players are exposed to on a regular basis.  If you are a GM/moderator, please look at these options and if you are thinking about running an X-Men game, please think again, reconsider.

Next week I will be directing my attention on another property, one that is almost as popular as the X-Men franchise.  Next week, it is the Potterverse's turn...

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Song of the week

It is anime month here at GM's Revenge, at least where Song of The Week is concerned.  First up is the theme song to Magic Knights Rayearth: