The Gift of the Gaming

It's been a little while again since my last post, but it's been a busy few weeks. This last week saw not only my birthday, but also my wife's birthday and our wedding anniversary. Gifts were given, and my wife being the complete star that she is, knew exactly the sort of thing I like... GAMES!

We took a trip into London, and visited three suppliers of RPGs in one day! Besides the game section of Forbidden Planet, we checked out a couple of the biggest FLGSs in the capital. First on the agenda was Leisure Games. Resisting the urge to purchase the rather epic Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition, I gained the rather cool Cold City RPG.

Haven't had chance to read it yet, but I've heard great things about both Cold City and Hot War. Though typically, I didn't realise it was a partner publication with Cubicle 7 until after I left the store. Looking forward to reading it!

While at Leisure Games, the wife managed to find a very cool set of blank dice. Chessex make this rather cool little set which is essential to the design work I've been pondering for WILD.


I'd been thinking about incorporating some form of "Wild Die" to add a bit of a "critical" element to the dice rolls in the game. I was initially thinking of something odd, so I ordered some of the more bizarre dice that don't usually get used in RPGs (D14's, D16's, D24's), and even looked into getting some custom made irregular dice (snub cubes, that sort of thing), but cost is always an element. So I started thinking about using D12's, with 2 or 3 sides coloured differently. May not even make it into the game, but it's something I'm playing with at the moment.

Next stop was the very cool store Orc's Nest, another FLGS, only with two floors of goodies squirreled away in there. First time I'd ever been in there, and they really do have a lot of cool stuff.

On top of Forbidden Planet, it was good to see all three of the big RPG suppliers in London all stocking the Doctor Who RPG, and it was even cooler to see that Orc's Nest had Conspiracy X 2.0.


In addition to Cold City, the wife bought me the excellent Mouse Guard RPG. We've been fans of Mouse Guard for a while, but I'd never checked out the RPG before. Based on The Burning Wheel RPG, there are some really nice elements to the game play in there - seasonal and environmental factors, the Nature of a Mouse and how "mousey" or "human" you are, and the use of Traits. Really good read. And the added bonus is that it was signed by the creator of Mouse Guard himself! Bonus!! And such a nice little hardback format too - square and compact. The sort of proportions I was thinking for WILD...

Final cool purchase of the week was a complete surprise. The eagerly awaited Marvel Heroic Roleplaying core rulebook. I'd bought the PDF the moment it came out, but I knew there was going to be a delay getting the "in print" version over here in the UK due to licensing, but it appeared! Excellent! Possibly would have preferred there to be a hardcover, but that's just me. My computer is so old it struggled a bit with the PDF so now I can really explore its intricacies and see what all the discussion has been about.

That's given me plenty to read for the time being - I think a hardcopy of Leverage RPG is going to be the next purchase, as the PDF I bought is so slow on the ancient computer, but in the meantime there was a particularly excellent delivery from Eden Studios this week - the Kickstarter copies of Conspiracy X 2.0: The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook arrived, along with my author copies, and the T-shirts.

For those of you who didn't Kickstart Conspiracy X, the Extraterrestrials Sourcebook is hitting distributors this week in the US and Europe, so please badger your local FLGS to get it in. And reassure them that the Conspiracy X 2.0 Core Rulebook is still in print to complement it. *hint, hint*

The Irony is not lost on me...

How typical is it that I'm supposed to be writing about Dreaming, and the worlds of Dreaming, and I can't sleep? Bloody typical. So instead, I'll sit up at 1am, try to fight off this head cold that I've probably gained from my day job (being the hive of public germs that it is), and sit with the cat upon me, writing my latest thoughts and updates.

WILD is progressing, albeit slowly. Not wanting to give too much away, I've made a radical deletion of a lot of the rules used in Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space and it is going a little more interpretational and freeform. It'll suit the game more than being too fixed in the heavy rules.

I've also decided to try to incorporate some random inspiration and interpretation story elements that'll give the GM plenty to draw upon when ideas are drying up, but also to add that weird random element that dreams sometimes have - giving the potential of the whole "Oh, I didn't realise my front door was connected to my old school classroom," effect. Trust me, it'll make sense in the end.

My poor unsuspecting test subjects (AKA, playtesters) have just about generated characters. Most have gone for older characters, which is a surprise, and the latest to be created was assisted along with the new Trait creation rules, for the whole new Traits set. It may be a little while until I'm confident enough to GM the game, I'll need to bash the test scenario into shape first...

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Anyway, while I wrote today I watched another inspirational film to add to the list. This time, Parasomnia. A low budget horror movie from 2008 that was created and directed by William Malone, the chap who did the excellent Dark Castle remake of "House on Haunted Hill". Lacking studio backing, this really was a labour of love, with just enough budget to lure Jeffrey Coombs in to help.

The tale follows the story of a young girl, Laura Baxter, who's a parasomniac - meaning she sleeps most of her life, waking only for a fraction of the day and can fall asleep with very little warning. She's being haunted in her dreams by a crazy, hypnotising serial killer, Byron Volpe, in an adjacent room in a psych ward. So, when Danny falls for the sleeping beauty and steals her away from the ward, the serial killer attempts to recapture her, both in the waking world, and in the dream realms.

It's not bad, it feels like a straight to DVD movie, and it tackles some ideas that have inspired stuff for the game, but it's not sure if it wants to be A Nightmare on Elm Street or something different.

Well, the cat has just gouged chunks out of my legs, so I shall go to bed (after applying antiseptic) and hope for inspirational dreams.

Which reminds me - if anyone wants to suggest movies, TV series, books or even music about Dreams, that may inspire or help with the writing of WILD, please let me know in the comments!

Pleasant dreams...

Podcasting and Probabilities

It's been a little while since I've talked about gaming, my last post being mostly about a dream-like movie. Not a whole lot has happened with the game, but I did have a bit of a moment of clarity and I may (emphasis on MAY) have focused on a system. Nothing major, it's just the core mechanic that I want to get down - there are loads of permutations, and bizarreness to build around it.

If you imagine that the basic mechanic of Doctor Who is Stat+Skill+2D6=beat a difficulty, it's how that mechanic is implemented that makes the difference to the feel of the game. But without a core mechanic, it's hard to write the bits that go around it.

Sitting and cashing up at the day-job, the realisation came to me, and I had to stop and write it down on a scrap of paper. Then the next stop was (a) typing it all up so my notes made sense, (b) sounding it out to the genius gamers that I've been brainstorming with to get their feedback and (c) work out some probabilities to see if it's fair and works.


We'll see. It may all change and go a different route. When not thinking about the core mechanic, we had an excellent discussion about how the game can be used. And I have to admit, some ideas that came out of that surprised even me! I thought I'd worked out the many possibilities of WILD, but the scope is even more immense and bizarre than I thought.

I'll post more as and when it happens.

Meanwhile, I'm on the interwebs a bit more - I recently did a podcast with the cool guys at CarnageCast - (You can download and listen to it HERE). The podcast is a great chat about my work on Conspiracy X 2.0 and the game's recent revival thanks to Kickstarter. Give it a listen, hopefully I won't say "er" or "erm" too much during it.

Until next post! Sweet dreams!

The Nobody that Nobody has seen...

Before I start ranting about how amazing the film Mr. Nobody is, I should make something clear first - I had no idea what this film was like before I watched it. Okay, I confess, the wife and I are big fans of Thirty Seconds to Mars, and my wife had become a little obsessed with cool frontman Jared Leto, picking up some of his lesser known films. Sure, everyone's seen Fight Club and Requiem for a Dream, but we'd heard he'd made this odd reflective movie just before he started on his 300+ gig tour for Mars, and I thought I'd get it for wifey for Christmas/Yule last year.

With nothing much on TV a couple of nights ago, we popped the Blu-Ray into the player with very little expectations, only to witness the stunning, multi-layered, reality hopping genius that is one of the best films I've seen for a while.




Mr. Nobody is a hard film to describe. Initially, it's a story of the last mortal - Nemo Nobody. At the age of 118, Nemo is the last human whose life hasn't been prolonged with medical advancement to a state of immortality. In his final days, he's interviewed about his life and Nemo tells the tale...


As he tells the tale, we see his life play out - but here's where it gets wacky. Starting with the hardest decision of his young life, choosing when his parents split whether to go with his mother to the States, or to remain with his father, he decides that every decision shouldn't be an either/or - it should be both. Why choose one or the other, when you should be able to choose both paths?




From here we see Nemo's multiple existences - the life in the States with his mother, and the girl of his dreams, Anna, as well as his life in the UK with his wife Elise, or his life with his wife Jean. These multiple lives splinter even further - we see Nemo die in a car accident, and not. We see him live with his incredibly disturbed wife Elise, and watch her die shortly after marriage in an explosion. We see him bored and married to Jean, and wander off letting his fate be decided by the flip of a coin.

We even see another reality where Nemo doesn't exist, a strange dreamlike reality where huge blocks of ocean are being lowered into holes in the sea. We see Nemo have a scooter accident and end up in a coma, and we see another possible future where he travels in suspended animation to Mars.

Trying this all together is the narration of the ancient Nemo Nobody, and some rather cool "Open University"-esque bits with Jared Leto in his best tweed explaining the physics of the universe, the big bang, how time is perceived and the multiple realities caused by every decision.


Sometimes, when you're watching a film you're enjoying, you have that moment when you think "Man, this is absolutely genius". It's hard to pinpoint that moment in Mr. Nobody. The obvious moment would be the bit that hits home to us all - the 14 year old Nemo is sitting at the side of a lake, and Anna sits next to him. He tells her that he doesn't want to swim, as "swimming is for idiots", and she goes away despite his liking her. We see his life play out a little, and see that it was doomed to be spent far from Anna. He ponders, "why did I say that?" and we rewind to the same moment, where Nemo says that he can't swim, and Anna stays with him.

How many times have we pondered our decisions - just the smallest of things sometimes in our past, and wondered how life would have changed, how things would have been different, if we'd only said something different, done the right or better thing? It's some thing everyone can relate to.

Maybe the moment in the film that sold it for me was the awesome camera shot near the beginning of the film when we see Nemo wake, brush his teeth and walk off, but the camera shot watches the reflection then goes into the mirror and follows the reflected world, where words are reversed, people move backwards, or do they?


Or was it the moment when the helicopters are airlifting in blocks of the sea? I remember looking over to the wife and she looked at me with a knowing glance - knowing that at that very scene I was loving every minute of the film.

The film is a complex but rewarding watch - at 2 1/2 hours, it's not a short experience, but the great thing about it, is the explanation of the whole film. There's always that fear, getting near to the end of a mind-bending film like this, that you get the pay-off, and it sucks. I started to worry when the word "Architect" was used, but... I really had nothing to worry about.

I won't spoil it for you, but the reason behind the whole film works perfectly, and it all makes sense. It's a dream of a film, with dream-like images that will remain in your subconscious for years to come. I'm already eager to rewatch the film, and I hope you take the opportunity to give this unseen gem a try.

Up the Hill Backwards

...as Bowie would say. To say I've been throwing ideas around for a long time now for the game system for WILD would be putting things mildly. But just recently I've been doing things a bit differently and seeing if it works, and there are a few things to thank for that...

First up, strangely after discussing this with the lovely wife last week, the BBC posted a news feature (entitled "The Myth of the Eight Hour Sleep" which you can read here). Basically, it discusses the theory that our sleep patterns have been frelled by artificial lighting and other things, and the whole "I must get eight hours sleep" is a myth. What is revealed in Roger Ekirch's book "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" is that in the past we went to bed was the sun set, slept for about four hours, then woke, did things for a couple of hours, then went back to sleep again for another four hours.

I was chatting with the wife about it as it sounded like some of the Transcendental Meditation she was looking into, how those two hours in the middle of the night can be some sort of "super clarity" time, when the brain is active, working well, but rested and uncluttered from the day.

I must admit, I had that moment last night, having gone to bed early due to stinking head-cold. I woke about 1am, with a clearer mind, and realising what I should be doing.

Which brings me to the second part. I'd been looking at some videos online about RPG design and stumbled upon John Wick's series of videos discussing just that. Something he said in the second or third one really struck home...

With his business partner, Jared Sorensen (who did the awesome "Lacuna - Part I: The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City"), he came up with the big Four Questions of RPG design:
1) What is your game about?
2) How does it go about doing that?
3) What behaviors does it reward?
and 4) Why is that fun?

Which got me thinking about how I was going about writing WILD. There I was thinking about a generic system that I could adapt for other things, when I should be thinking about what I want from this game.

And then the moment of revelation came. Sod the character stats, and which dice and whatnot... what I should be concentrating on is how Dreams work in the game. And bingo... it came to me. With the excellent advice from Derek (who was one of the rules brainstormers for Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space) I think it's just about sorted.

Now all I have to do sort out what the characters can do, what they want to do, how they'll get up to it, and what mechanics are needed to facilitate that.

It's just a bit different from how I normally do things. Rather than starting with Stats, dice mechanics, and then seeing how it all works, I really am walking up the hill backwards, doing things from the reason to have a rule, rather than the other way around. Hopefully, this will result in a better game system for the setting, something simple, easy to use, easy to remember without lots of referring to rulebooks - that's intuitive and makes sense for the game.

Anyway, enough chatting, I need to get some work done!!!

Until next time!

Sweet dreams.

Systems are doin' it for themselves...

Another sleepless night. I don't know what's going on. I'm supposed to be writing about dreaming, and I'm not sleeping enough to actually dream. I spend my time laid in bed (or woken by the cat's demands for food) pondering over game systems.

A couple of days ago, I'd just had this idea for the actual stats for the characters, woke fully thanks to the cat, and wrote them all down (hence my Twitter comment about having a breakthrough). The more I thought about it, however, the more I thought it wasn't the huge breakthrough I wanted, it was just an idea...

Last night was the same. I was drifting off to sleep after a day off from the day job spent reading game systems and watching some Youtube videos about RPG design, and I suddenly thought of a dice rolling system that hadn't been used before. I got up, scribbled it down, and went back to bed, thinking about it...

Then, five o'clock this morning, I woke again from a half-sleep, with another realisation about the system. What I'd written down was far too complicated and time consuming. And I'd thought of something new. What do I need Attributes for anyway? Why am I getting so bogged down in traditional gaming? No, it's not going to be super weird just for the heck of it, but the very nature of the subject is lending itself to a different type of game system. It could be the way to go, but it needs a bit more thought and pondering.

It's odd. I can see what I want the book to look like completed. I can see in my mind the layout, the design, the size, the colour and the shape. I can see the interesting gimmicks I want to add - like augmented reality codes. I can see how an iBook version of it would look, complete with animations and "going deeper" options in the text.

But can I nail down the system?

Soon. Hopefully. Even if it takes another couple of sleepless nights...

My Gaming Career (in Lego)

This morning, my lovely wife was about to depart to see family in London, and gave me a couple of Lego minifigs. Before I get too carried away with this post, I have to say that we're both big fans of Lego, spent Christmas putting together Hogwarts, collect the little minifigs, and I can't wait for the Avengers and Lord of the Rings sets due in the summer.

Anyway, the two minifigs were completely random, but they both represented parts of my roleplaying game writing. One was a grey alien, just like the ones in Conspiracy X, and the other was the tired guy, who can be posed so he's asleep or sleepwalking, very representative of the new game, WILD.

It got me thinking, I think we have Lego minifigs that represent 90% of my game writing career...

Challenge Accepted!

Okay, before the published stuff, I tried my hand at writing RPGs in the past - my first real attempt at getting published was writing (using a typewriter, and posting a manuscript to West End Games) a couple of adventures I concocted for their awesome Ghostbusters RPG. If it wasn't for the positive and encouraging letter I had back from WEG I wouldn't have tried to continue.


It wasn't until I started talking to the amazing guys at Eden that I actually saw my work in print.

While I submitted a supplement for All Flesh Must Be Eaten, my first published stuff was Project Editor on Terra Primate, the "Planet of the Apes" version of AFMBE. And look, there's a mini fig for it!! Terra Primate was a blast, and a surprise too - I was hired to take the settings and plug in the AFMBE rules, converting and adjusting for the new game, and it surprised me the scope of Ape related gaming! Cool stuff!








Terra Primate was cool, but working on Buffy The Vampire Slayer was awesome. I just playtested for the core set, but the future tech and a few additional weapons were mine in the Slayer's Handbook, as well as working as Assistant Editor on the Slayer's Handbook and Monster Smackdown. Real shame the game didn't continue. But, hey! Lego cheerleader! It's Buffy!










While doing that, I also helped with the edits on a few of the AFMBE supplements. Most of the work was on Zombie Smackdown and a Fistful of Zombies, but I also helped out on some of the other supplements, and did some rules help on Army of Darkness (groovy). I was surprised to see that Lego even did a zombie, but it's really cool. Need to buy a whole lot more of them though to get a horde!









After that came the badgering to Eden to convince them to let me change Conspiracy X into Unisystem. Thankfully, they agreed to let me do it, and I spent the next four years working on those books. The little grey alien Lego dude is great... fits in nicely with the Lego alien invasion range with the saucers, the abducted redneck, now all I need are some suited agent Lego minifigs! Conspiracy X 2.0 is having a new lease of life thanks to Kickstarter, and the supplements are starting to hit production right now!








And then, I have to cheat a little. Okay, so it's not Lego, but it's compatible with Lego. While Conspiracy X was on hiatus, I worked with Cubicle 7, pitching the concept of the Doctor Who roleplaying game to the BBC. Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space hit the shelves to critical acclaim in 2009, and the new 11th Doctor edition should be hitting the shelves in the very near future.








Which brings me up to date with my most recent project. At least, until Lego decide to do their Inception sets, with little Lego Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page minifigs, this little sleeping Lego minifig is the best representation of WILD I can imagine... so far. But then, you can dream of anything, so anything is possible in the game...

Which reminds me, I have some time off from the dayjob to get some writing done, and here I am writing about Lego! I'd best get back to writing the game.

Let's see... "It all began with a dream..."

Project Somnacin

All very interesting. Of course, the problem is, the moment a technology exists that allows you to go into other people's dreams, it's not just military training that it'll get used for, but the most probable uses - espionage and assassinations.

New Year's REVOLUTIONS

So 2012 is upon us. And we have just under 12 months before the end of the world (supposedly) - whether this is by zombie apocalypse, the sun going nova, or the return of the Saurian fleet from being trapped in the edge of a wormhole.

Not much to report, the wonders of a day-job in retail taking all of my time over the festive season. But things are getting back to normal, and I can get back to the writing.

WILD is progressing, I think I know the new system, just needs a few tweaks and maybe a brainstorm with some of my reliable game system guys.

Other projects are moving as well, but slowly. You never know!

Meanwhile, I've finished watching Warehouse 13 Season One (which was pretty darn groovy), and I watched the pilot for the already cancelled 17th Precinct - I can see why it never made it to series, while it was good, it just wasn't something you could accept easily. Harry Potter with its mix of a muggle world and a magical world was just about perfect, and 17th Precinct's take of everything being magical down to using plants as electrical conductors was a little too far to take. Had potential, but I think I'll just wait to see the Fables rip-off series that are currently screening in the States.

I just need to stop procrastinating, and start the whole darn thing!!!

This year could be big! It could be the last one, so if you're gonna go, go with a smile!

YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!

I thought it had been a while and that I should really post an update about the many projects I've been working on. It's been a bit crazy with the whole "day-job in retail at Christmas" getting more and more like Helm's Deep with every day (except the wall is the counter, the orcs are customers, and I don't have a bow), but despite all of that, I've still been writing.

My lovely wife managed to easily hit the "NaNoWriMo" target, and she's continuing until the book is finished (possibly even tomorrow). The book sounds awesome, about ghosts attached to books, unsolved murders, getting infected with ink, and other cool stuff. Hopefully, after another draft/edit we'll look into getting it out there for people to read.

And talking of getting things out to read, I've posted a blog post below about the movie Tintin. I'd originally written it for the SyFy Channel blog, but the blog is on a small hiatus and as the US audiences are about to get the movie, I thought I'd post it on here. Check out the movie, it's great.

Besides that, the first Kickstarter for Conspiracy X (the Extraterrestrials Sourcebook) finished well over its target. Excellent. The second Kickstarter for the Paranormal Sourcebook has already reached its target, but it's still running if you'd like to preorder the book and get your name in the book!

I got a little sidetracked from my NaNoWriMo attempt at around the 30,000 word mark with a couple of other projects creeping into view. No great loss I guess, my fiction was just too damn weird for public consumption...

These other projects have also distracted me a little from working on WILD, but I'm still thinking about it, researching it, and working out mentally how the whole thing will work. One upshot of this research took me back to the film SuckerPunch. I'd already looked in depth at the movie in an earlier post, but watching it again recently with Zack Snyder's "Maximum Movie Mode" on BluRay, Snyder confirmed that the whole thing takes place in that fraction of a second, and he did let slip (despite wanting to leave it vague) that he considered the other girls to be fragments of Babydoll's personality. It's nice when you have a theory about something and the creator confirms it later for you...

Okay, that's it, I need sleep. I call it "research"...

G'night all.

Tintin Review

Tintin’s latest movie outing has ditched the 2D animation and the (sometimes bizarre) live action approach and recruited some of the biggest names in film and television - but is it any good and, more importantly, is it a faithful Tintin movie?

I’ve never been an obsessive Tintin fan, but he’s always been present. I remember watching the old Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin TV series as a kid, and when I was first trying to get into comics someone printed a review of my first comic calling me a “goth Hergé”, which I took as a huge complement. My best day-job was working for a company named after a Tintin book (Ottakar’s), so I was naturally cautious going in to Spielberg’s first foray into the realms of 3D motion capture animation.

Luckily, I had nothing to worry about. From the opening title sequence done in excellent retro-style, looking just like stylised panels from the original comics - a sequence you’ll want to rewatch on DVD to spot all the references to other Tintin tales (much as you will during the rest of the film), to the brilliant Hergé cameo as the street cartoonist, you can tell that this has been carefully crafted by people with a genuine love of Tintin.

While the animation sometimes strays close to the “uncanny valley”, the design of the characters is marvelous. Tintin himself is perfect, while all of the support characters look fantastic - though Andy Serkis steals the show with his portrayal of the tormented and alcoholic Captain Haddock.

Taking elements from three of the original Hergé stories (The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure), Doctor Who’s Steven Moffat (who provided the initial script) and the genius pairing of Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, have created a superb script with witty and often hilarious dialog, blending the three stories seamlessly into a very coherent whole that manages to pack a lot in. I remember looking at my watch about 90 minutes in thinking “wow, they’ve covered loads!” but it never felt long. In fact, as the last scenes played out, I would have been happy to have had the film continue for another couple of hours to continue the adventures.


The thing that you may have to do before you go to see this is dismiss your memories of Beowulf or Polar Express - this is a film that really couldn’t have been live action, though at times it’s convincingly close. The whole motorcycle/sidecar chase sequence is dazzling and will have you whooping with every gravity defying twist and laughing at the ludicrous destruction.

This is possibly Spielberg’s finest family film since Jurassic Park, and certainly should not be missed. I honestly can’t fault it, and can’t wait to go and see it again. 9/10 (maybe even a 10...)

Conspiracy X 2.0 - The Paranormal Sourcebook

A little while ago I posted on here about Eden Studios and the work I did for them for Conspiracy X 2.0 - mentioning how the second book, "The Extraterrestrials Sourcebook" was finally seeing print thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that would fund the print run, and give those who preordered loads of cool extra bonuses.

Well, we're at it again. Launching just yesterday, Eden have decided to get the Paranormal Sourcebook into print for the first time (it's not been released before, not even as a PDF) using Kickstarter (Click Here to go to the Page).

The Paranormal Sourcebook collects the three original paranormal phenomena sourcebooks for the original Conspiracy X system (Shadows of the Mind (Psychics), Forsaken Rites (Magic and the Occult) and Cryptozoology (strange creatures)) and converts them into Unisystem.

I guess the big deal with this one is that it not only converts the material to Unisystem, but it also covers how to use Seepage (the psychic phenomena that's causing all the weird stuff) in other Unisystem games like WitchCraft and Armageddon, and how it relates to their use of Essence - the natural magical element in the universe.
It's all cool stuff.

And, of course, if it goes well, we'll hopefully see book 4 - The Conspiracies Sourcebook sometime next year... (fingers crossed).

INK

Yeah, I know, it’s been a quiet month on here so far. You have NaNoWriMo to thank for that. I don’t know what I’m doing trying to keep up with the wife’s writing, especially as there are times that I’m convinced no one in their right mind would want to read the mass of bizarre and weird drivel that is coming out of my head.

I’m not officially doing NaNoWriMo, just trying to keep up with the word-count, which is handy as not only am I writing the most bizarre fiction put to paper, but I’m also trying to keep up with the RPG writing. Now working on two projects - WILD and a pitch for a licensed property. I don’t know if anything will come of the latter, but it’s worth a try.

As it’s been quiet, I thought I’d draw your attention to another movie that was recommended to me by one of my nieces’ husband (thanks Simon!). I’d not even heard of Ink, but he’d seen that I was writing something about dreams and recommend it to me.

Ink tells a couple of parallel stories that meet in one universe. We’re introduced to the concept early on in the film that there are forces at work that influence our dreams. One of the earliest scenes shows a street where half a dozen shamanic ninjas (called "Storytellers") appear in what looks like camera flashes. No one can see them, but they enter peoples’ houses, into their bedrooms, and touch their faces, giving them pleasant dreams. Shortly afterwards, we see the nasty equivalents - really creepy looking guys in rubbery suits (called "Incubi"), with bizarre screens attached to their faces. If they influence your dreams, you can be sure of a traumatic time.

At the start of the film, a young girl, Emma, is kidnapped by Ink. Ink is a strange creature - the best way to describe him is if you imagine a shorter Hagrid from Harry Potter, only a master of martial arts, and a nose like those urRu creatures from The Dark Crystal. Ink has been told by the Incubi that acquiring this girl and sacrificing her will allow him to be accepted into their ranks.

While this is happening, the Storytellers are trying to get Emma back, and need the assistance of her estranged father, John, who was forced away from his daughter due to his dedication to his career making him a drunk, drug taking, obsessive. It’s hard to describe much more without giving too much away. All I can say is that the story is split between Emma being lead through the dream realms by Ink, as he collects the necessary items to let him deliver her to the Incubi, and the story of John being protected and guided by Storytellers he can't see to reach out to his comatose daughter in the real world to try to save her.

The film is very low budget, but doesn’t look like it. The effects are cool - the nasty dudes are really, really creepy... almost like something from Dark City (one of my favourite films of all time). The martial arts scenes look very real, none of the Hollywood glamour, it’s visceral and frantic. There’s a great bit at the beginning when the Storytellers are trying to stop Ink from kidnapping Emma - as they break the furniture in the real world, the objects around them reverse and reconstruct themselves while the fight continues. Very cool.

None of the actors are recognisible from anything else, but they’re all very good. Quinn Hunchar is excellent as Emma, and Chris Kelly playing her father is brilliant as the tormented soul that he is.

It was one of those films where I honestly didn’t know what was going to happen next - it was great, and unpredictable, and I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

You should be able to pick up the DVD/BluRay anywhere, or you could head over to JaminWinans.com and get the film straight from the director - he'll even sign it for you, and you can get some cool merchandise, watch the trailer and support independent film!

NaNo New Mo...

Okay, so I'm supposed to be doing NaNoWriMo (but not in an official capacity), and writing shed-loads. I'm up to just over 10,000 words since the start of the month, which is all new stuff to the Case of Lost Possibilities that I started years ago, almost doubling it in length. Dunno if any of it's any good though. I may just be spouting nonsense.

I've had a couple of days of failing the word-count, but luckily I wrote a lot in the first couple of days that evens it out.

However, I've got another project that I'm working on (not WILD, though I haven't forgotten about that, it's still in the works). This is mostly why I didn't sign up officially for NaNoWriMo - I knew something like this would crop up and I couldn't submit say 30,000 words of fiction and 20,000 of RPG writing. That's not how the month works. But it does with me. As long as I'm writing, that's a good thing.

I wonder if Blog post words count?