Shocktober Day 15 - Horrors to Play - Sauna

So I've thrown out my themes for this last week of Shocktober in favor of throwing up a bunch of Horrors to Play movie reviews since everyone knows the best part of Halloween is a good scary movie. Where yesterday's movie, Pontypool, seems like a movie ready-made to play right out of the box, today's movie will take more work and just the right group to really be effective. I didn't want to let this difficulty level keep me from reviewing one of my recent favorite horror movies though, so here we are with 2008's Finnish historical horror movie, Sauna.

Sauna is a dark, quiet ghost story set in a no-man's land between Finland and Russia after a long, bitter war in the year 1595. It's a desolate, swampy, wet, muddy, and grey world, and our main characters are tasked with the responsibility of working with each other to develop a new border between the two countries. Even in the quiet, mundane moments (of which there are virtually none), the tension is thick between these two camps as they travel through a vast, unknowable swamp better left behind by both countries.

When I began watching this movie, it sucked me in immediately. The acting is immense, and since there isn't a whole lot of dialogue, the subtitles weren't even the slightest bit distracting. A little bit in, my wife looked up after I made the comment that it looked like it was a WWI film and not something set at the end of the 16th century. She replied that she thought it was a WWI movie. In other words, if you're familiar with the staggering depression and oppression of movies set in the late 1910's, and that's your thing, Sauna too will likely be your thing.

Really though, Sauna shines when it comes to the menace it presents in the unknowable. The movie is scary enough in the first portion of the film as we follow the exploits of the surveyor teams and see how they would operate normally if freaky shit wasn't happening. It's in this first leg of the journey though that we see how haunted the characters really are. In the second portion of the film, when we're presented with the eponymous sauna house in a bizarre village in the exact center of this epic swampland (think the Dead Marshes from Lord of the Rings, but with more trees and less smiles and giggles). Never before has a dark doorway ever given me such a feeling of dread.

After seeing Sauna, you will know why this is so scary.

I don't want to get into the details of the plot because I highly recommend seeing the movie for yourself, but let's just say that the horror of the movie comes from the characters having to face their own regrets and mistakes in a tangible way. It's cosmic horror in the late sixteenth century done without any real overtly supernatural aspects. It's a story Lovecraft could have written if he were in Finland in this time period.

As far as playing the game goes, there are plenty of aspects of the story that just seem off and will easily put your characters on edge. They're little things like peasants that look too clean to be living in the middle of the swamp or that there are no children around that will throw your players into a fit with the mystery of it all. Games where players have to intentionally create a history and well-rounded (i.e. more than just combat stats) character are perfect for Sauna as you're going to need fodder to throw at your players. Dread (my perennial favorite) often presents stories where the plot forces characters to look long and hard at their character's fears and past mistakes.

Sauna is a great example of doing fantasy horror. The characters have swords, knives, and extremely primitive firearms. They still wear a bit of armor, and use torches everywhere for light. When I got this from Blockbuster, It was described as "transcendental" horror. A lofty claim, for sure, but one I believe Sauna lives up to.

Shocktober Day 14 - Horrors to Play - Pontypool

Pontypool is a movie that encompasses everything great about the different themes I've been exploring this month. It takes place in a single location - an old radio studio in a tiny town in Canada - and is pretty much perfection when it comes to the one-shot kind of story I love to play this time of year using Dread or Call of Cthulhu.

Stephen McHattie plays the diminished shock jock-turned small town morning radio host Grizzly Mazzy on his first day of work in his new job. Everything is going just as boring as Grizzly must have feared as he pushed the boundaries of what the small town can handle and shows off (aided immensely by the amazing voie of McHattie) just why he may have lost his big syndicated gig in the first place. Everything's going fine, that is, until they start getting calls of people acting more like animals than humans as violence seems to be randomly breaking out all over the area.

That's all I'm going to say about the plot, because I don't want to spoil the really weird - and original - nature of the plot and the way it makes a lot of new, interesting rules for the genre of horror movie it would most easily fit into. The hook of Pontypool is the fact that the town itself is small and isolated, but then our characters (the cast is tiny with three main characters and a fourth interested late in the movie) are even more isolated in the large radio station building. They're helpless as they try to take in what they hear and get information back out to the people of Pontypool and make the horrific situation a little less terrible.

I want to play Pontypool in a game so badly. As I mentioned above, it does some things I could only see a one-shot story try to pull off. A lot of what makes the plot work would be very difficult to sustain in a long campaign or series of sequels. Obviously isolation is built right into the story as it's extremely dangerous to leave the radio station, which the players would find out really quickly if they attempted such a foolish act. More so, I think it would be a heckuva lot of fun to make some voice recordings before the game to be played as people call in and report what they see and experience. The definited roles of the characters - morning show host, producer, and technician - are also really well set up right away as player characters.

I recommend Pontypool to anyone who isn't squemish and is looking for something a little different. Everything about the movie shows a higher production value and level of talent involved than it probably has the right to. It's quick moving, and even though everything happens in the one building, it never feels stale because the director and cinematographer are constantly giving us new ways to look at things and different angles to throw us off guard. There are so many game-able ideas throughout its runtime, and it's frankly an inspiration to a GM who feels burnt out on running their seventh or fifteenth Halloween one-shot horror game.

Shocktober Day 5 -Horrors to Play- Session 9

It's day 5 of Shocktober 2011 which means I've made it through a full week of daily posts! Today is Friday which means a Movies to... AHEM... Horrors to Play post. In these posts it's a sort of hybrid between a movie review and inspiration for playing a one-shot game. Basically I pick out a movie I think would be fun to play as a one-and-done game. All this month on Fridays I'll be posting a horror movie that fits that description and matches the week's theme. This week I'll be reviewing the classic cult horror film Session 9 from 2001 since it's a great example of how props could be used in in our own games.

Session 9 is a nice small indie horror flick that has a small cast and is pretty much located in one location through out - an old abandoned mental hospital badly in need of renovation. That's where our characters come into play - they're the unfortunate crew of contractors hired to clean the place up in a week and make it basically livable.

There's a couple problems right from the get-go. One is that the five guys on the crew, while all are competent workers and seem to work together well on the surface have deep cracks that run between them. Another problem is that the crew boss is hiding some deeply unhinged feelings that are just waiting to burst through to the surface. And let's not forget the real problem - rumors of teenagers making trouble in the abandoned mental institute and that patients who were long ago de-institutionalized during the 80's have been found squatting somewhere deep in the halls of the asylum. These are all just rumors though, right? Maybe...

Session 9 is a tight film full of close moments in a very unsettling place. The asylum is broken down, hollow, and full of hundreds of little nooks and crannies where something - really anything - could be hiding. The threat is unnervingly elusive but also always-present. It's a movie with immense atmosphere that presents a workshop for all aspiring horror GM's out there. It's unrelenting and disorienting throughout. Just like with the main characters, the spirit of the place gets under your skin, and although there are times when certain characters do certain things that seem crazy, you can kind of understand where they're coming from. I know I couldn't handle being holed up in that empty(ish) asylum for a full week of 12 hour workdays.

But of course let's get down to the title of the movie. One of the characters discovers an old set of tape recordings from a string of treatment sessions recorded in the hay-day of the asylum. The subject is seemingly a young woman with multiple personality disorder, and the different voices that come up are chilling to hear when imagining they come from the same person through out. Here's where the true "to play" part of this post comes out, especially in regard to props. On Monday I wrote about several different forms of props to use in games, but one of the most interesting to me to experiment with is sound props.

There's pretty much nothing better that I could imagine to use for sound props than these session tapes. To think about them in more gamey terms, each tape/session recording could be its own fetch quest for the players. The tapes could reveal another tidbit of horribleness that is behind the game in the first place. It's a great conflict for the players to face. On one hand, it's an RPG, and everyone knows you have to complete quests to "win" a tabletop RPG. On the other hand, more and more terrible crap gets brought up, and the players are going to be confronted with the decision of having to keep digging or just finally get to the point where they throw their hands in the air and go "Alright, I've seen enough, let's get out of here!" Of course, if you're playing Session 9 using Dread (which I suggest doing so for all horror one-shots, but that's just me), the questionnaires should give each character a reason to keep pursuing the tapes and getting down to the bottom of the mystery.

It's that kind of compulsion that players will push up against that makes Session 9 such a playable movie. At any point the characters really should throw their hands in the air and leave, but there's a mystery to solve and character growth to attain! That, my friends, is a good sign for a powerful (and worthwhile) prop!

You can watch Session 9 right now on Netflix Instant Watch!

I want to hunt treasure in the cosmos!

Something possessed Andrea and I to go on a Disney animation binge lately. It started by us both inexplicably craving to watch the Lion King. We followed that up Monday night with The Little Mermaid and immediately went through to add a bunch more Disney movies to our Netflix Queue. By the way, Tangled was much better than I expected. Last night we got Treasure Planet, a Disney movie that was caught between a time when Disney couldn't miss and when all they did was try to ape Pixar's success. As a kid of the late 80's/early 90's, Disney animation was the bee's knees. The only problem was that the studio tended to focus on the princesses in their stories, and the opportunity for a strong male role model were few and far between. I liked fairy tales well enough (still do), but I wanted to see something like Star Wars in the animated world. Unfortunately, I was a bit out of the loop when Treasure Planet was released and missed it all the way up until yesterday.

Skip to today, and I find myself completely taken in by the setting. Treasure Planet, based on the literary classic Treasure Island, throws the characters, tropes, and trappings of the original work into some far-off future where aliens are more common than humans. I love the anachronistic setting so much because it feels like a real world. The spaceships have sails - because they're solar powered! The sailors and pirates wear tri-corner hats - because they look cool! I envision this being so far into the future that technology has progressed to the point where we can create artificial environments and project them off the top of our ships so we can fit the latest fashion and technology trends. The whole setting feels like a society that longs for simpler times but does so through accessing tech we can barely imagine much less understand in our own time.

I want badly to play in a tabletop game in this world. Being based on Treasure Island, you've got to use a system full of pulp or otherwise focusing on the story-telling aspects of the traditional pirate genre. Truthfully there are very few, if any parts of the story that would require the settign to strongly represent the aspects of sci-fi that makes it Treasure Planet. That doesn't mean you couldn't make the sci-fi an integral part of your story of course. I love the setting because it avoids any grim-darkness of other sci-fi settings while still being serious and full of consequences, unlike my least favorite form of science fiction - stuff like Flash Gordon. Ultimately I want to role-play in the funny accents, have my character wear a petticoat, and fly around on his spaceship. Is this too much to ask?

  

Movies to Play: The Last Exorcism

Movies to Play is a series in which I examine movies for their game-ability. In other words, I try to grab character hooks, plot set-ups, general cool stuff to use for my own games. Today I'm looking at a recent Netflix rental of The Last Exorcism. As a life-long Catholic, I have a special place in my heart for exorcism movies. They've been one of the most consistently-freaky kind of horror movie because they're based so much on the weird things humans are capable of pulling off. It's the combination of real-world terror and the possibility of trickery on the part of the "possessed" in trying to convince the exorcist that he or she is truly with a demon. There's a lot of angles in exorcism stories, and that's really what makes them so great gaming fodder.

Horror Movies to Play - Miracle Mile

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While Miracle Mile isn't a traditionally scary movie in the sense that things will jump out of you with horns blazing just when you most expect it (and you're still scared!) or is it gorey or gross by any means, it still presents a very terrifying concept that will make you really ask yourself what you'd do in this situation.

It's going a little against the grain, but Miracle Mile is still quite an alarming film that does a great job of putting you into the shoes of the characters on screen. Keep Reading for more on why you should watch the movie and why it's so compelling you might just have to play it as well!

Horror Movies to Play - Land of the Dead

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There are a lot of zombie movies out there, and almost every single one of them would make a fantastic tabletop game. You've got your Nights, Dawns, Returns, and Shauns of the Dead. Dawn of the Dead as a tabletop game? How awesome would a map of a mall and one simple mission: survive be to play? Extremely. What about Shaun of the Dead? Give me a cricket bat and a red tie, and I'm ready for a night of great gaming.

So why pick Land of the Dead? By all standards it's a lesser Romero film (although blasphemously I prefer Land to Day) showing Georgie's first slip down a long road of inferior zombie movie making chops. What makes it shine more than any of the others as a gaming experience? Keep Reading to find out!

Horror Movies to Play - Dog Soldiers

This last week of October leading up to and including Halloween this Sunday gives us an opportunity to focus on the best two things about Shocktober - scary movies and horror role-playing. We've done other Movies to play articles which you can find here, but the basic premise is that we review a movie based on its playability as a role-playing scenario to use as a GM and enjoy as a player. We also focus on what system or systems might be best to run the movie as a game. So sit back, pop the popcorn, and keep coming back for more horror movies all week while we finish out Shocktober 2010 with a bang!

Today I'm reviewing Dog Soldiers, an indie British horror film. Keep Reading for all the gory details!

L5R Week - 5 movies to get you excited to be a samurai.

I've decided that, to celebrate the new release from AEG - Legends of the 5 Rings 4th Edition (L5R) - we should spend some time on the blog looking at what makes L5R exciting and something worth your time. When I first heard about L5R the game was deep into second edition and the CCG was running high. I was incredibly overwhelmed by the amount of product and didn't know where to start, so I didn't. It's very much like how I felt when first looking into 3rd edition D&D. Just like with D&D, now that the fourth edition, touted as simpler and more accessible for new fans, L5R is pulling me in like quicksand. Happy, exciting, samurai quicksand.

When first looking at L5R, I had the question: what do characters do in the game? A lot of games are plagued with this question and end up not hooking me with a simple concept (Mage: The Awakening is a good example of this). For me, the easiest way to look at what characters do in a certain genre is to look to movies for inspiration. So, without further ado, here are some of the movies that get me pumped for my copy of L5R to come in later this month (it's out now, but I made a deal with myself, and I'm going strong still!).


5. Red Cliff

While not technically a film taking place in Japan or about samurai, Red Cliff is a modern epic depicting medieval (and way earlier) warriors fighting against staggering odds. The movie is actually an adaptation from John Woo of one of China's most beloved epic stories, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I spent way too many hours in high school playing the Dynasty Warriors (DW) games (based on RotRK) and began learning the names of these epic warlords and generals. I thought the action was way over the top and amplified just for the sake of it being a video game. Then I saw Red Cliff. This has got to be the biggest budget Romance has ever seen in its numerous screen interpretations, and John Woo lives up to his reputation. One of my favorite DW character, Zhao Yun actually is a bigger badass with his legendary spear in Red Cliff than he is in the game. The same goes for all the characters. I loved 'em, and it really inspired me to create some equally badass Japanese warriors. While extremely slow moving at points, the action is worth watching, and I think the story's actually pretty good too. There is a bit of court intrigue in here as well, although it's extremely light.

4. The Last Samurai

I like this movie, I own it, and I make no apologies for this. I'm betting a lot of people don't give this movie a chance since Tom Cruise is in it and he's arguably fulfilling the old cliche of the white guy coming in the help the native people deal with their issues. Look past this and you have an amazing visual presentation with samurai characters that feel real and not just cardboard cut-out caricatures. I love Ken Watanabe and wish he was my uncle, and his Katsumoto character is incredibly badass while also well-rounded as a man who values the lives of the men he leads. This movie is full of incredible scenes of samurai charging en masse on horseback or fighting ninjas in a surprise night attack in their homes. The armor is awe-inspiring and the sword work is amazing. Of course we get some over-the-top fight scenes such as Tom Cruise's character duel weilding katana's (I don't think anyone ever really did this outside of 80's action movies), but it's appropriate as inspiration given how skilled and super-human the characters in L5R could be. Let's not forget the man who looks like a walking reincarnation of the great Toshiro Mifune, Mr. Hiroyuki Sanada.

3. Throne of Blood

Did someone say Toshiro Mifune? The actor for Akira Kurosawa, Mifune is the very essence of my concept of samurai. The man's played more samurai characters than anyone else on the planet, and most of them under the direction of Kurosawa. I could easily make a list of the top 5 Kurosawa samurai films and I'd have too many good choices from which to choose. Throne of Blood was picked for a very specific reason: the supernatural. Based on Shakespeare's Macbeth, ToB is the darkest samurai film Kurosawa made and could easily be considered a horror movie. There are more icy cold stares and just creepy shots in 10 minutes of ToB that will freak you out than in the entire Saw series combined. The movie is filled with tension, and it's just insanely gripping. There's a great range of the supernatural from subtle knowing looks from the Lady Macbeth character, Lady Asaji Washizu to the more overt with a ghost suddently appearing in the woods. The scene with the trees moving is just wrong in a fundamental way and will make your skin crawl. The whole thing could take place in the Shadowlands of Rokugan (L5R's setting). I love Throne of Blood.

2. Kill Bill 1 & 2

Being a gamer audience primarily, I have to assume most of you have seen at least one if not both volumes of Kill Bill. These movies are amazing modern-day representations of what a lone Ronin (masterless Samurai) would look like fighting in a world full of guns and motorcycles. Whether the massacre in the House of Blue Leaves in Volume One or the training of the Kung Fu master Pai Mei, there's a lot of fodder to draw from here. The battles in the House of Blue Leaves show an amazing combination of both one samurai taking on a horde of lesser warriors and fantastic duels between the Bride and GoGo or O-ren. The action, while not serene and respectful like Crouching Tiger, shows an amazing potential for the energy and gore that can be often overlooked in the smaller, more meditative image of a samurai doing the best job he can to take his (or more approriately her) opponent down.

1. Seven Samurai

There's really no other option for number one on this list. If you want to get a more historic image of what samurai actually did, there's no better place to turn. When making this list up, I did my best to avoid the lone samurai on a mission movies, because that's not too indicative of how a party is going to work in L5R. It's tough, because for many, Yojimbo and its sequel, Sanjuro are the samurai movies from Kurosawa. If Throne of Blood was picked because of its supernatural and horror aspects, Seven Samurai is number one on the list because of one word: teamwork. The basic premise; peasants go to town to hire as many samurai as they can to help protect themselves from bandits that come every year to steal their food. It's such a simple story, but the way the characters interact is what makes it shine. The seven hired samurai organize the peasants into a small militia and set up the best defenses they can against the large group of bandits. You'll love every one of the seven by the movie's long climactic battle, and as a nice side-effect, you get some idea of how peasants live their lives - one of the focuses of making Rokugan a well-rounded world. The movie is long (very long), so it's best to split it up into several viewings the first time through like a TV miniseries. It's worth watching and making your way through it. I'd put this in my top five movies not about samurai as well. It's good stuff. Oh, and it of course co-stars Toshiro Mifune.

What's Next?

This is just part one of our L5R week. Check back next time when we take a look at the L5R Quickstart and sample adventure, Legacy of Disaster given away this past Saturday at Free RPG Day. We also have a surprise for later in the week that you won't want to miss out on!

Movies to Play: Dead Snow

There are a lot of zombie movies to choose from when trying to plan a horror game around the undead hordes. You've got your Dawn of the Deads, Shaun of the Deads, and your Evil Deads. All are great, and many star Bruce Campbell and/or Simon Pegg (imagine the zombie movie staring those two? It'd be a sign of the rapture most likely), but did you know you also have your Dead Snows?