A Christmas Carol - Deja Vu?

I posted about this video last year and it's an annual ritual of mine either to read the book or to watch this classic rendition thereof. If you've not seen it yet, check it out. If you have, watch it again and enjoy!

Fear on Friday - Apaches

You may have had this experience in dungeons past; setting out with a strong, confident party, optimistic and looking forward to some good old-fashioned monster hacking and gold-garnering.

But then it all starts to go wrong. Someone fails a save or a monster gets maximum damage or a trap that no-one spotted claims its first victim. Then someone else falls to the capricious dice of doom and before you know it, you're stuck in a dungeon that's somehow acquired a personality - that of a serial killer.

Now, it's not so much "Will we get out alive?" but "Who will be the last to die?"

It's a routine that's familiar to slasher movies since time immemorial but in those movies, there is usually more than one survivor to bear witness to the horror that they've just experienced.

So now, let's take a look at Apaches - a public information film for children, made in 1977. This tells the story of a bunch of kids who decide that a farm is a great place for games of Cowboys and Indians.

Bad move.

We soon see that the farm is the countryside version of Tomb of Horrors as one by one, the children fall victim to the Grim Reaper in some pretty gruesome ways. Watch out for the slurry pit!

Stuff like this, with its impending sense of doom, and The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water that we saw last week must have had some traumatising effects on kids back in the 1970s. I remember a film that we were shown at school about the risks of bad driving that put me off learning to drive until well into my twenties. Perhaps the British attitude to health and safety stems from the generation whose elders thought it a good idea to show them this sort of thing...

Fear on Friday - Trapped in the Dark

Today I'm looking at horror films. I can't bring much to the table on this one, because I see so very few of them. Since becoming a family man, the films we go to see are very much suited to a child-friendly perspective and so I have to think back to stuff I watched in my single days or things I catch late at night when everyone else has gone to bed.

The last film I watched that had me truly shaking on the way home (this will show how rarely I go to the cinema and how little modern horror I watch) was Event Horizon. I found its use of jump cuts very effective at immediately raising the heart rate, and its slow unfolding of the true horror of the rescue crew's predicament gnawed away at my nerves. There were some rather corny bits but the combination of the aforementioned elements and its ambiguous ending meant that I was jittery and jumpy on the way home and for sometime afterwards.

Other than that, it's hard to think of other films that have chilled or scared me to a similar extent. The appearances of the skeletal Death in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Navigator send a shiver right through me but the rest of the films hold little terror for me.

So what is it about the cinema that makes it a more powerful, more affecting experience than reading or watching television? Is is that perhaps we find ourselves a truly captive audience whilst at the cinema? Sitting in the darkness, devoid of any other sensory distraction, we cannot turn off if we think it's going to get too much, nor - unless we want to make a spectacle of ourselves - can we get up and walk away. There is also the factor of the cost of the ticket if we do so - cinema isn't cheap these days. The huge screen, with its visual impact magnified and the much louder sound levels mean that the senses are rivetted and overwhelmed. If you go on your own, there is not even the sense of another human to whom to turn for comfort or escape.

Of course, not all of us watch horror movies at the cinema. Home viewing makes up a sizeable proportion of the occasions on which such films are watched. The impact of these may well be slightly lessened, since there will be the option of escape, others to talk to and contextualise the experience. There is no option to pause a cinema film while you go and get a beer and some pretzels.

Regardless of where we watch horror films, I'm opening the floor to you all to share your cinematic terrors with me. Is it modern splatterpunk or old-style chillers that send shivers down your spine? Do you find sitting in a cinema more evocative and atmospheric than sitting on the couch with the remote in your hand in case it gets a bit too scary?

Over to you...

Mountains of Madness - then or now?

As we all know, Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) is at the wheel for the movie adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness, HPL's classic tale of where not to go on your skiing holiday. Good news for Lovecraft fans, even if his co-pilot on this project is James 'Titanic and Avatar' Cameron.

I was all a-go for this until a thought struck me - I'd assumed that any film of the book would be set in the 1930s where it belonged but how do we know that's what would happen? Would it actually work if updated to the present day?

If we really wanted a modern version of AtMoM, we've got John Carpenter's The Thing and Aliens v Predator (the similarities between those and Mountains are manifold, although there are, of course, big differences).

I watched Jackson's King Kong the other day (eeeew, big worms, must use for next CoC adventure!) and he has very faithfully recreated the world of 1933. The original was a work of its time but I'm sure we all remember (although we try to forget) the 1976 version with Kong on the World Trade Centre (perhaps that's why it doesn't get shown much these days) fending off jet fighters.

For me, part if not all of the attraction of HPL is the (to us) period setting - am I alone in thinking that if del Toro and Cameron update the story, it would somehow lose something?

I've set up a poll on the matter - let me know what you think and vote for your preferred option.

Film Friday - The Mummy: best D&D film ever?

The other day, I acquired the DVD of The Mummy (the Brendan Fraser one) for a pittance at the local supermarket. I’d had it on video for years but hadn’t watched it for quite some time.

It struck me, thinking about the film, which is particularly good anyway, that it is probably one of the most dungeon-like films I can remember. Hell, it’s set in the desert – you can’t get a bigger sandbox than that! Granted that it’s not set in mediaeval times and it has guns, but careful consideration of the themes and events therein yield some interesting results.

[MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD]

Let’s look first of all at the main characters. We have a fighter (Brendan Fraser), a magic-user/cleric (Rachel Weisz), a thief (John Hannah) and for want of a better title, a ranger/paladin (Oded Fehr).

The backstory is quickly dealt with, very effectively and gruesomely, laying the groundwork for the rest of the adventure without reams and reams of exposition.

The fighter first encounters the lurking evil during a pitched battle against what might as well be hordes of orcs. He survives but only just – clearly, he is more than just an average character. Good strength and constitution there. The DM also manages to work in some enigmatic NPCs without having to go into great detail, although…

Many Med-jai (roll 1d20 three times)

1 Wear black
2 Have facial tattoos
3 Carry at least three daggers
4 Sit around on white horses looking enigmatic
etc…

The magic user is busy working her apprenticeship under a rather fussy and overbearing mentor (whose true status is only later revealed) when the thief arrives, having filched what appears to be a quaint but ordinary trinket. It doesn’t take long before the DM delivers the first clue to the location of something legendary and lost.

Soon, having recruited the fighter in a most dramatic fashion, the party is on its way to the lost city – complete with annoying NPC - but already they have encountered a group of rival adventurers, a useful staple of dungeon adventures. The rival party also has its fighters and a magic user of their own. And a thief, whose connection with the party and the dungeon quickly becomes clear. Effective recycling of an NPC with whom one of the PCs has history.


"Please don't kill me, I'm an NPC"

We then have the first encounter with what appears to be the forces of darkness. They wear black and they attack by night. Needless to say, not everything is as it seems, but the DM does not, of course, spill the beans about what’s going on.


"Talk amongst yourselves while I roll up the next encounter"

So we then arrive at the dungeon. Yes, it’s in ruins and it doesn’t take them long before they get in. Soon, however, it becomes clear that there is something nasty inside; the minds of the parties are however, solely on the treasure that they reckon is waiting for them.

"We can't die yet, this is only room 3"

Nasty bugs and seriously nasty traps are encountered (in a way that makes me think the place was designed by Jim Raggi) but the real menace is yet to come. The magic user then reveals her inexperience when she reads That Which was Not Meant to be Read. The DM’s clues about what’s about to happen are laid on thick at this point – courtesy of they who were previously thought of as the baddies - and after some casualties, the parties take the hint and run for it. Oded Fehr’s character now joins the party – perhaps his player turned up late and this was the first point at which the DM could fit him in to the flow of the game.


"Sorry I'm late, I couldn't get the car started. Now, what's been happening?"

Unlike a lot of megadungeons, where the party go in, raid and then retreat to the nearby town, which is strangely untroubled by the hordes of nasties in the dungeon – I’ve never sussed out why the monsters don’t just trash the adventurers’ base – the monster in this dungeon decides to follow the parties back and take the fight to them. It would certainly liven up a few games to have the parties shaken out of their complacency.


"Okay, I reckon it's a Lich...anyone know its stats?"

One by one, the rival party, being NPCs, are picked off by the undead monster and it quickly becomes clear that only clever use of magical artefacts is going to stop him. The DM’s drip-feed increase of the powers of the undead keep the party on their toes and don’t allow them to get comfortable. In a lot of adventurers, the party seem to have it very easy while doing their research or rummaging for manuscripts or artefacts outside the dungeon. It makes more sense to see, as here, the forces of evil actually taking the initiative.

We see a kind of Deus ex machina escape for the party, although they lose their magic user and the magic user’s mentor is finished off by the zombie hordes, presumably to show the party just how much danger they are in without actually killing anyone. The death of mentors is an interesting theme and one I’ll be posting on soon.

It’s now time for the return to the dungeon, armed with brawn, weapons and some sort of mad plan. Before that can be put into place, there are more combats and the use of magic books that really look the part.



Finally, rather than overcoming the monster through combat abilities, the use of magic is required (although there is a neat scene where the thief makes a Pick Pockets roll that saves the day – how many dungeons have you been down where the whole thing hinges on just one roll?)

And they make it out with the treasure (okay, a small part thereof, but still enough for them to consider it a dungeon well-braved) and the rascally thief gets his come-uppance.


"You want to know how many scarabs there are? Great, I get to use my D10000"

Like a lot of films, I would describe the Mummy as a dungeon that went successfully for the party. No-one wants to go and see a film where Brendan Fraser gets killed in his first encounter with flesh-eating scarabs. Rachel Weisz being sprayed with salt acid would make a great dungeon anecdote “Yeah, but there was that time when my character thought she’d found where the magic book was hidden, but she failed her Dexterity roll and… ” However, it’s not the kind of thing that a test audience would tolerate. Even when Oded Fehr’s character appears to be overwhelmed by mummies, he manages to make his escape – some good rolls on the d20 that night.

A lot of DMs (tending towards the younger and newer) make the mistake, when they see a cool film, of trying to replicate the events of that film in their dungeons, rather than using the film as inspiration to create a scenario in which the events of the film could take place if all went well for the party. Another mistake they tend to make is to slavishly copy the film and its milieu rather than fillet out the underlying elements and incorporate those into their campaign.

That’s all for Film on Friday this week. Has anyone got another film that really nails the essence of D&D? Feel free to share – I might make this a guest spot where we can have fans waxing lyrical about their favourite movies.