Amazing Tales: A Game for Children Who Love Adventures Revised Edition

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Fastest I’ve read a book in about forever, but also it’s short. Honestly, I was surprised by quite how fast I managed it all the same, since Amazing Tales is a role-playing game sourcebook. See, I had this idea to play D&D with the kids, and then Mary had the idea that maybe we start with something a little lower key and kid-focused, and this is what she found.

And I have to say, it fits the bill. Honestly, it’s pretty clever. First, you pick a genre, which is to say The Deep Dark Woods (animal/fairy fantasy), Magical Kingdoms Long Ago (generic fantasy), The Pirate Seas (swashbuckling, but also probably fantasy) and Among the Stars (sci-fi, obvs). But also it would be pretty easy to take what you wanted from the former two settings and include them in the latter two settings. Or for that matter to make them space pirates.

Then your kid makes a character, which is to say, something that fits the setting. Is it a pirate captain? A robo-dinosaur with jetpack legs? A fairy who is also a princess? Then they get four skills that they’re good at, like Being Brave, Doing Science, Marksmanship, etc, and one of them they’re best at, second best, third best, and last best, and each skill gets a descending die, from d12 to d6. Then, anytime they want to do something that seems hard, they pick a skill, say what they’re doing, and roll. 3 or higher succeeds! And you either tell them how they succeeded and what next, or how things got worse and now what will they do?

It’s a kid game, obviously nothing irrevocably bad happens, but I suppose it could get hairy now and then, and mostly you’re trying to tell a story with them about how things went great. RPG 101, or so? I suppose someday soon I’ll find out how it goes.

Never Flinch

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Stephen King keeps writing murder mystery novels, possibly because he likes the genre but I think mostly because he likes his mystery solver character Holly Gibney. Never Flinch actually has two such mysteries. In the first one, there’s a serial killer who is targeting random people but naming them as proxies for the jury pool of a man who was innocent, but sent to jail and then murdered there. In the second one, one of those religious nuts that likes to blow up abortion clinics is hunting a lady who is going around the country encouraging people to vote for better state representatives to expand abortion access on a state by state basis.

As I know I’ve said before, King with an axe to grind is simply not as good of an author as King with his imagination flowing freely. I agree with all of his politics, and I nevertheless continue to wish they would not infect his books. It’s just too… apparent. Takes me out of the narrative, it does. And in this case, it’s half the plot. So, y’know. There’s that.

All the same, one of the things at which he excels is weaving disparate pieces of a narrative toward each other like three freight trains that seem to be on different tracks but it turns out they’re all headed for the same place, and if you think only two trains can crash into each other because of the way that train tracks work, well, that’s sort of my point, innit? So that’s the part of the story that was great. (And also, I share his enjoyment of his character.)

The only remaining downside of this book is that, the pieces of the plot woven together, the crescendo reached… the weaving was great, you see, but the crescendo was… fine. It was fine. It was not great. All in all, it was a mid book, which still means I followed it breathlessly and wanted to know how it turned out the whole time, because you see it was a mid book on a Stephen King scale. And I do love me some King. Ask anyone.

But I can also be honest with myself in the aftermath of that aforementioned trainwreck.

À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma

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It started, like it does a lot more than is probably apparent from the individual offerings here at Shards of Delirium[1], with Joe Bob. The first episode of The Last Drive-In this month was a sequel movie about Coffin Joe, a Brazilian villain (or anti-hero, back before that was a thing people said) I had never previously heard of. The two-pronged catch was, a) I have of course never seen the first movie, and b) I could not stay awake past the first 20 minutes of the sequel because of having had three vaccines earlier in the day.

Obviously, I decided to watch the first movie first, which I now have. My conclusion is that the choice to not air At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul was the correct one. Joe is a mortician, and he’s a pretentious self-absorbed dick, but in a way that is initially hilarious. He strikes dramatic poses from on high, he mocks the superstitions of the plebes (including faith), he beats his wife at only period-appropriate levels, that kind of thing. …okay, the last one wasn’t hilarious, but ultimately this is my point. Coffin Joe of this first movie is, as soon as his plan kicks off, supremely unlikeable.

That plan is to have a son. The downside is, his wife is barren. So he gets rid of her, picks a new girl, gets rid of anyone standing in the way of acquiring her, and so on until he gets caught up in some kind of consequence, and I ultimately did not understand why people like him or would watch sequels. Then I did watch the sequel, wherein he’s an anti-hero with likeable qualities instead of just a wife-beating dick, and even though he’s still clearly a villain, he’s a lot more fun, and so ultimately, I would say it’s fine to give This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse a try, even if it has one of the worst endings of any movie I’ve ever seen. (But that was not Joe’s fault[2], and is undone in the third movie [which I have not seen], so yay.)

The sequence in which Joe is walking alone at night on All Hallow’s Eve[3] and runs into or maybe hallucinates the annual procession of the Dead is pretty great, though.

[1] And like is probably eminently apparent from the site in aggregate
[2] Joe the director, not Joe the character, although it turns out they are portrayed by the same human person.
[3] or maybe it was the Day of the Dead, but since it was at night and what I’m about to say happened, I assume it was the night before

My Friendly Neighborhood

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If you ever found the puppets on Sesame Street a little creepy[1], have I got a horror game for you! My Friendly Neighborhood tells the story of a kid TV show from an alternate, slightly darker turn of the millennium America. Somehow, their unnamed Vietnam went even worse than ours did, and kids / parents just kind of stopped watching children’s programming, or maybe I’m wrong about that cause and the true cause is public television was never invented, so ratings were the sole driver of a show’s survival. Either way, after a pretty successful 15 or so year run, the show was canceled in the early ’80s, and now, ten or twelve years later, it’s suddenly broadcasting again, overwhelming the signal of intended shows.

So you, a broadcasting engineer named Gordon[2] are sent to the old abandoned studios to shut down the signal and restore everything to normal. Only, when you get there, everything is weird and creepy and oh, right, dangerous, because I left out something important. Apparently another facet of this alternate America is that the puppets are and always were alive. And sometime between the show’s cancellation and now, they’ve gone kind of crazy. And not the normal kind of crazy where they’re just trying to kill you for interfering with their nefarious plans, although, okay, yes also that, but the creepy kind of crazy where you start to listen to what they’re saying and it sounds like what the puppets in H.P. Lovecraft’s Sesame Street would say, and also they’re not so much trying to kill you as they are incidentally killing you while enthusiastically hugging you.

Needless to say, this is all pretty great, and were I of an age where I had countless hours to fill and not enough entertainment to fill them with, I would happily play this again with cheats enabled and on a higher difficulty level, just to see what all else I could unlock that I didn’t find the first time around.

Fantastic atmosphere, occasionally legitimately scary, yet with a surprising amount of heart. Easily recommendable.

[1] I never did, and the game still works
[2] ie the main adult character on Sesame Street for a good long time, and boy howdy am I certain that was on purpose

La polizia brancola nel buio

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Gialli!

The Police Are Blundering in the Dark was the absolutely perfect title of one of the movies in a box set categorized for forgotten giallos, which you may note was not indicated to be forgotten gems or anything, just, forgotten. But that’s okay, when you’re in the right company and already like the genre and especially, my lord, that title.

A bunch of fashion models have been disappearing over the last few months, including one nice lady who clearly should have worn a bra if she was going to be running away that much, and a second nice lady who had abysmal taste in boyfriends. But now that she’s dead, the boyfriend has decided he cares enough about her to at least find out what happened, even if he couldn’t be bothered to show up the night before and help fix her car, since he was cheating on her at the time.

He quickly finds himself at the center of an inexplicable and poorly explained family drama involving a local erotic photographer, his unhappy wife, their niece, and the local doctor who likes to hang around and prescribe drugs for the wheelchair-bound photographer, who to be fair is in poor health. Also, the photographer can take pictures of thoughts. For some reason.

Who among them is the killer, though? Or could it be the newly hired stone-faced butler and nymphomaniac maid who are objectively pulling some kind of con? Or the mentally simple son of the innkeeper and his estranged wife? Or for that matter someone I’ve forgotten? But I don’t think I have. Like the police, you’ll blunder in the dark wondering what is going on, why so many plot points have been dropped, and how the mystery got solved other than timing and dumb luck.

The thing is, this makes it sound like I didn’t like the movie, when, oh no, it was hilarious and inexplicable in exactly the ways bad exploitation movies should be. Great with friends and drinks, and probably still pretty great just by yourself.

Olympus Has Fallen

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Here are a series of weird things about my experience of watching Olympus Has Fallen that have nothing to do with the actual movie.

  1. I thought I had already seen it. I did the thing I do now and then where I decide, I’ve seen enough Shudder movies in a row, what’s on my Netflix queue? And the oldest thing on that queue was London Has Fallen, which is what I thought I would be watching, until I realized, huh, never saw the first one.
  2. But so then I found it was on NBC/USA, but not on Peacock, which is stupid. Which made me nervous that it would be edited, but nope, not edited, tons of adult language and violence. And yet, with commercial breaks edited in. Does that mean if you’re watching cable on the actual USA channel, they just air it uncut now?
  3. When I say commercial breaks edited in, I mean there are fadeouts / fadeins that clearly were not part of the movie in the theater. Which stood out to me because they did not line up with the streaming commercial breaks in any way. How is it possible that we’ve reached a place where commercials are worse than they were in my youth? How is this possible?

Anyway. There’s this secret service guy not on active duty because of reasons that are explored in the first act, but he happens to be looking out his window when the White House is attacked by terrorists and/or foreign powers. So he runs down the street and crashes the party, John McClane style, and before you know it he’s the only good guy in a completely captured government facility.

Pretty much everything else happens the way you’d expect, it’s an action movie after all. I liked it well enough to be a movie, but I am skeptical that there’s enough here to support a trilogy, you know? We’ll see, someday!

Skull: The Mask

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With a sample size of two[1], I can say reliably that modern South American audiences and filmmakers are mostly afraid of demons, with an undercurrent of being afraid of corrupt police. Skull: The Mask is about waking up some demon dude who wants to either help the intestines of the earth move (because that would be bad) or stop them from moving (because when they’re moving that’s a good thing), I am really unclear as to which.

After a throwaway gorefest scene with Nazis, we fast forward to modern times, where the top stories are Bolivian children gone missing[2] and a murder spree that started at the home of an archaeological professor and her way too young girlfriend, both of which cases are being investigated by the same lady cop who was recently cleared of murder charges in some as far as I know unrelated case, but man is the press well-informed on these matters, giving out specific details of the murders and showing graphic footage, and I really do have to wonder if it’s done that way down there, or if local audiences would be rolling their eyes a bit.

But so anyway, there’s this mask which is kind of a six horned skull that wraps around your face and now you’re possessed with the demon, and if you guessed that this has some tie-in with the Nazi shit and the archaeologist and the earth’s intestines, then I’d say you’ve been paying attention. There’s plenty of gore, plenty of weird dream sequence stop motion animation, and a respectable number of breasts, all gratuitous as though the dream of the ’80s is alive in São Paulo.

My intent here was not to give everything away, but I’m torn right now between feeling like I should say more, feeling like I’ve already said too much, and feeling like honestly I’m not sure I’d know how to spoil the plot fully even if that were my intent. In any event, this was an experience and a half, and I’d say check it out.

[1] The other is an unreviewed Joe Bob showing of a movie whose title I’m blanking on, I think Argentinian, and with some serious darkness to it. Like whoa. If I remember the name of it. I’ll mention it.[3]
[2] Maybe something to add to the things South Americans are afraid of?
[3] When Evil Lurks, about which I should add that another fear, if perhaps not of the public but for sure of the writer, is custody battles / divorce.

Incident at Raven’s Gate

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Now, here’s a movie where even talking about the random rolls used to get to it would be a spoiler. Well, okay. the style die was “Australasian”, it’s only the monster die that would be a spoiler. Still, though, it would be, and Incident at Raven’s Gate was good enough that I don’t want to spoil it, so.

The movie starts with a burned out shell of a house being investigated, and then dumps back to five days earlier, where we meet the players: a super uptight sheep farmer (maybe?), his bored younger plant-growing wife, his fuck-up younger brother on parole, some annoying twerp barflies, the hot lady bartender, and the local cop who is obsessed with her. Add the drought-stricken central Australian landscape as a pressure cooker, and a mysterious outside force to push the button I guess?, and then watch the players progress from point A to the burned out farmhouse point B, with occasional flashforward interludes to the investigators.

There are twists and turns, some predictable, some not, but it’s mostly a study of characters in crisis, and I very much dug it.

Psycho Goreman

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You learn basically everything you need to know about Psycho Goreman[1] in the opening text crawl, when we learn that he comes from the planet Gigax. These are people who are definitely in a joking mood, and want you to be in on it. …for certain values of “you”.

There are these two siblings, and the younger sister is abusive to the nebbish older brother. (10 and 7, maybe?) For example, in their regular game of crazy ball[2], if he wins he gets something pretty regular, I forget what because it was reasonable, while if she wins, he has to dig a hole and then bury himself in it. And of course he never wins.

Anyway, in the course of digging the hole, they uncover the hidden burial site of an immortal dark power bent on galactic domination, and wacky hijinx ensue. It’s astonishing how close this comes to being a family-friendly movie[3]. You would have to change almost none of the plot, but man would you have to change a lot of the special effects.

My point is, you shouldn’t watch it with your kids. Even if it does have a little bit of a lesson right at the end. You should watch it if you like gross-out horror comedy or were ever kind of a dweeb, and if you’re not allergic to children in movies.

[1] PG for short, but since the movie is unrated, I guess they did not compromise on their artistic vision.
[2] Dodgeball but with a Calvinball-influenced ruleset
[3] There’s even a musical interlude in the middle, almost more of a music video, entitled Frig You. Which is a perfect encapsulation of how it’s almost family-friendly.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

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Fifteen years later, and also a remake, and I’m only just now seeing the original How to Train Your Dragon. In fact, it’s because of the remake. There are new toys, and my kids like dragons, so they have the new toys, which begged the question, shouldn’t they know what’s the deal with these toys? And Bob’s your uncle.

The plot twist [that I’ve already revealed] being, shouldn’t I know what’s the deal with these toys? Which brings me to a fun fact, in which I can objectively prove that previews are getting worse. I did not learn until 2025 that the dragons were nominally the bad guys of the movie. I always took it straightforwardly that the loser kid who never fit in found a way to be awesome via dragon training, not that he was supposed to be dragon killing this whole time! And I mean, it’s not really a spoiler for the movie, since you learn it during the opening scene narration. But I thought it was a clever subversion of the original previews’ expectations, and now the current previews are all, we cannot subvert anything, as our audience is dumber than ever. Or something like that. My point is, fuck[1] screw previews.

Anyway.

So there’s this Viking kid who is scrawny and engineering-minded, instead of being large and strong and (let’s say) single-minded. Which means he doesn’t fit in. Oh, sure, he still wants to kill dragons, same as everybody else, he just wants to use tools instead of muscles to do it. What a maroon! But once he actually manages to use said tools to get a dragon in a position where he can kill it, he… comes up with a new plan.

This is a kid movie, so the result of the new plan is that he ends up fitting in after all, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about accepting people for who they are. And, okay, as a parent, that’s a good lesson. Also, as a parent, I recognize that sometimes it’s a lesson parents need to learn as much as kids do. But the real point is, the actual plot underlying these lessons is at least halfway decent as well. Plus, riding around on a dragon is cool. I would not, I think, affirmatively recommend this movie to anyone unless you really like dragons and can live with kid movies, but I would not disrecommend the movie to anyone, if they were about to be in front of it. Because, you know, it’s fun!

[1] Family movie, I should watch my language.