So let's say that I have a "friend" who may have hypothetically downloaded the illegal PDF's of the new Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual, because said "friend" thought spending over one hundred dollars to check out a system they're very unsure they'll ultimately use is an absurd waste of money (although I am sure this "friend" would be very willing to pay out for the hardcover books if this "friend" ends up running more than a single one-shot of 4th Ed). And said "friend" may have spent the last couple of days reading through the Player's Handbook, and skimming over the rest. What might this "friend" think of the new system?

A tentative "meh". Not a "meh, this thing sucks but maybe there's a glimmer of hope here" but more of a "meh, the system works but the feel is all wrong for what I want to do with a fantasy setting although there is enough interesting stuff to make it worthwhile to edit it into what I want from it."

PROS

• The core system is very streamlined and intuitive, and should be easy enough to pick up within a single session. I know this from experience based on the 4th Ed games I played at KublaCon.
• Characters of all classes have a deep set of abilities that allows everyone to have an almost equal hand in combat, meaning that no one need sit by the sidelines waiting to heal characters or for the combat to end to recharge their spells.
• The dynamic of healing surges, action points, and the difference between at-will, encounter, and daily powers all combine to create a game that gives players a great deal more tactical control over how their characters carry out their action, and this should trickle-down into some degree of narrative control.
• The model of "points of light in a world overrun by dark forces" makes for a more interesting campaign setting than the usual "you start in a tavern and go from place to place killing things and taking their stuff".

CONS

• Although the core dynamic is simple and easy-to-learn, it is instantly burdened with the plethora of special conditions that power many of the feats and powers. Even with just the core books, there's a lot to keep track of but it should be easily manageable; however, once WotC begins bloating the system with splatbooks, I'm sure that is going to change.
• That deep set of abilities for all characters also means that no class feels as special as it did in previous editions. When most if not all characters can stand well in combat, heal others, etc. it becomes easy for the characters to become faceless and homogenized based on their stats alone. That last bit is why I don't really think this is much of a con, but I can see it being a culture shock for veteran D&D players.
• Based on my experiences at KublaCon, it is very difficult to bring a character to a final death as long as they are near still-living comrades (particularly ones with healing powers) and not fighting against unusually bad odds (and have no way to run away). This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the system balances it out by making enemies with greater-than-expected hit points (unless they are mook-like minions) which bogs combat down into a long slugfest of attrition.
• The art is still the angular "SCA gone wrong" with lots of buckles fetish motif of 3rd Ed, rather than the pseudo-medieval Tolkienesque look of past editions. I list this as a con as I really like the Tolkienesque look, even if it is done-to-death.
• And my biggest con: starting characters are simply too powerful. I don't mean in stat terms, which is neither here-nor-there, but in terms of their status in the bad-ass hiearchy. A 1st level character in 4th Ed has almost as many powers, feats, and abilities as a starting character in Exalted, where the characters are meant to be superhuman combat monsters capable of levelling whole cities and punching the moon with their big toe. Whereas in previous editions, you were meant to be, at best, a veteran soldier or a novice spellcaster not too long from their bumpkin village roots, in 4th Ed you begin as a great hero with fantastic abilities. Now I suspect in play this does not seem so, as the low-level antagonists also have high hit points and access to superhuman feats; but that actually only makes the situation worse for me, as now you have characters that only look like ultimate bad-asses that end up taking forever to slaughter a measly kobold or two. I like the idea of starting small and building oneself into a paragon full of wonders, but 4th Ed wants to skip that part and get directly into the bad-assitude. That's not necessarily a bad thing (and, as some folks on web forums have pointed out, makes 4th Ed a good choice to revive the old Birthright campaign setting), but that's not really what I've been looking for.

So all in all, "meh"... hypothetically.

Not a lot of progress made over the past couple weeks, due primarily to KublaCon and the usual post-con lethargy. I spent all last week working on my scenario for the con, the con itself took all of the Memorial Day weekend, Tuesday was my weekly Shadowrun game, Wednesday I tried (and failed instantly) to start a regimen of diet and exercise, Thursday I got caught up in reading new comics and watching the Lost season finale, Friday I was lazy and watched Atonement (probably a good novel but pedestrian and pretentious as a film), and yesterday I was enthralled by coverage of the Democratic Party Rules & Byways Committee. In between all that, I did organize the Karotechia rough draft into a position where I can begin writing, which is what I plan to do over the next week. I am going to be more realistic, and set a goal of completing at least one of the pre-Karotechia sections (Ariosophy, Thule Gesellschaft, Ahnenerbe) by next Sunday.

My secondary goal will be to write up my Toteninsel scenario for publication. I don't plan to put it up anyplace other than the Delta Green: 1939-1945 website, but I do want it to be written in such a way as it'll be most useful for anyone that wants to run it.

This past weekend I attended KublaCon, one of the three main gaming conventions in the Bay Area. It was mostly solid, with one major hiccup. The only loot I snagged from the dealers was some dice (and a few glow-in-the-dark zombie minis from a boardgame supplement I won, having thrown away the rest of the game). I played in two demo games of the forthcoming 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, another demo of the forthcoming Hunter: the Vigil game from White Wolf, a game of Rippers from the Savage Worlds system, and what was advertised as a "modern supernatural" LARP which seemed entirely like Changeling.



So in summation: D&D 4E is mostly more of the same (both good and bad), Hunter: the Vigil looks awesome (without violating my NDA, I will say that all Delta Green fans with any fondness for the nWoD system must check this game out), not all LARPs are fun, Savage Worlds is still a kick-ass system that I wish had more thickly-realized campaign settings, and KublaCon remains my favorite. Now on to GOcon in July!

Whisperer in Darkness and The Haunter in the Dark have been added fully to the chronology, but I punted on the rough draft of the Karotechia chapter. As I got into it, I decided that it was silly to write a rough draft quoting almost verbatim the Karotechia information in the Delta Green books, as I'm going to have to rewrite all that anyways. Instead, I'm going to try to make a full-out and proper rough draft, consisting of all the research and most of the ideas I've developed on the Karotechia. This is a much more ambitious undertaking, but I hope to get the early sections on Ariosphy, the Thulegesellschaft, and the Ahnenerbe done in the next couple of weeks.

Speaking of which, next weeked is KublaCon, so they'll be no update till the following Sunday, June 1st. I don't expect to get much work done this coming week, as my time will be entirely focused on prepping my scenario for the convention. Still, my goals for the following week are to get those early sections of the Karotechia written into a rough draft.

I spent this past week mainly organizing stuff. I transferred my chronology (which currently starts in 1855 with the arrival of the Green Men of Agartha to Japan and ends in 1969 with the opening of Club Apocalypse in New York) into MS Excel, which is not the best format available but does allow me to filter the 916 (and growing) entries. I've also started go through my Karotechia notes, which are a complete mess. I wasn't able to add Whisperer in the Darkness to the chronology, but I hope to get that done this week. In addition, here are the other goals for the next week:

• Continue working on the chronology. Besides Whisperer, I'm also hoping to add The Haunter in the Dark.
• Continue organizing my Karotechia notes. I think I might be able to complete this task this week.
• Write a rough draft of the Karotechia solely from material in the gaming books. I might be able to add the extra material from the fiction as well.

In the next two weeks, I'll also be doing some serious edits to my convention scenario Toteninsel, which I will be running at the KublaCon gaming convention in Burlingame (just south of San Francisco). This will be the last convention I'll be running it at, and when that's done I'll edit it  for non-pregenerated characters and put it up on the Delta Green: 1939-1945 website.

Confession time: I have not worked on Our Darkest Hour, the WWII sourcebook for the Delta Green setting of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game and the purported purpose of this blog, in months. I haven't talked with anyone at Pagan Publishing about the project in an even longer span of time. I am not even certain if anyone in the initial team is still working on the book, as we have not discussed the status of our work since last year.

This project has been vaporware for years and by all standards should either be tabled or put into the hands of more efficient writers, but I've put far too much work and effort into it to just leave it at that. So starting today, I'm going to begin making a weekly update every Sunday on what work I'm doing and where I plan to be in the process by the following week.

Yesterday, I began working on ODH in earnest again, doing some editing to the master chronology of both factual and Mythos events I've been developing. I was in the process of adding events from Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness to the chronology when I left it off, so that's where I'll begin again this week.

My goals for this coming week are to add that story completely to the chronology, and then get to work on adding The Haunter in the Dark. I also hope to get my Karotechia notes in order so I can begin working on a proper writeup for the organization. In terms of research, I will also return to reading The Master Race by Heather Pringle, which I only half-finished some months ago.

Last night, I ventured out to Endgame in Oakland to take part in an alpha-playtest of The Dresden Files role-playing game, coming sometime later in the year or early 2009 from Evil Hat Games. The game is based on Jim Butcher's series of novels about occult investigator Harry Dresden, which was adapted into a short-lived television series for the Sci-Fi Channel. While my wife Jeannine is a big fan of both the series and the books, I only know it from the TV show, and my interest in the game lies mainly in the fact that Jeannine would be very interested in playing it.


Bottom line for me is that I can see the game working, but the "SotC mechanics packed into an occult investigation game" felt rather square peg into round hole to me. This may have been because I don't have a grounding in the books, because my first (and establishing) experience with FATE was SotC, because we didn't use enough social mechanics to see the genre-specific value in this system, or simply because this was an alpha-playtest. Ultimately, I'd want to read through all the Dresden books (I have Storm Front next in my reading queue), see the finished product, and play in a convention game or two with other GM's before making anything near a final decision on the system. And even then, from what I can see, I'd still buy the book for its massive Dresden-universe background material alone, and just run it with something like Unknown Armies or Savage Worlds if the system doesn't catch my fancy.

I was a player in two playtests of Trail of Cthulhu, and now I've GM'ed a game, this past Saturday with my monthly group in San Francisco; so I feel I've explored enough of the system to make some kind of judgment. However, after the debacle that resulted with my negative review of Secrets of Japan and a respect for what the authors of Trail of Cthulhu are trying to do, I'm not going to make a review. I'm simply going to leave it at this: this game is not for me.

All of the players in the Saturday game said they had much fun, but everyone agreed that the system was flawed. I've always felt that the investigative mechanic works, although it runs a bit dry in practice. My biggest concern from the playtest was that the players were never in much danger from death or insanity, but this was solved by using the optional caps on Health and Stability given in the book. That said, while I do think Trail of Cthulhu works systematically, it doesn't do anything for me that Call of Cthulhu does equally well or better for my sensibilities.

I will say this though: I don't think The Kingsbury Horror, the scenario given in the book, does a very good job showcasing the strengths of the system. The philosophy behind the GUMSHOE system is not just that clue-gathering should never become obstacles to the narrative, but also that the fun in investigative games is not the actual gathering of clues but what the characters do with those clues and what they mean. There is never any explanation for why the antagonist(s) in The Kingsbury Horror are committing the murders, so it really ends up boiling down to getting the clues which lead to an abrupt climax with an almost anonymous villain(s). I do admit that this kind of unsatisfactory scenario design is also endemic to many (if not most) Call of Cthulhu games (hell, I've run more than my share of this), but since the GUMSHOE mechanic works mostly as "there's clues and you always get them", that should cause Trail of Cthulhu to emphasize the "why" of the scenario rather than the "how".

Trail of Cthulhu might end up more satisfactory for me if I could take greater agency by running a scenario of my own design. Here I went from being a player to running it, but I was still running off a canned scenario. My problem is that I don't feel comfortable running something (either for my friends or for hapless strangers at a convention) that I'm not 100% sold on to begin with. So I'm probably done with Trail of Cthulhu, although I am glad I bought it. At the very least, it has caused me to examine the importance of investigative design in my games, and there is a lot within the system (the Preparedness skill, how Mythos madness is handled, Ken Hite's descriptions of the Cthulhu Mythos, and the division between Mythos-weakened Sanity and mundane-shocked Stability) that I want to homebrew into Call of Cthulhu. So I would encourage any and all Cthulhu-philes to check it out and give it a fair chance.

Yesterday I attended the Spring Mini-Con at Endgame, a gaming store in Oakland. These mini-cons, which are run periodically throughout the year, host three 4-hour slots of RPG sweetness, focusing mostly on indie games. This year I only took part in two games, as I'd been up too late the previous night for there to be any hope of making the morning sessions.

Red-eye Flight (World of Darkness) - This game had originally been listed as using Spirit of the Century rules, but when the con organizer corrected that typo, I decided to stick with it as I knew the GM to be top-notch. It was a good call, as this was a very fun game, packed with roleplaying and suspense even though the whole thing lasted only about three-&-half hours. I don't have much experience with nWoD, but what I've seen of it has been pleasant. The mechanics are clean and simple, and, although I somehow manage to forget the rules shortly after playing them, they remain very easy to pick up once the game gets going. The game itself involved a passenger flight being possessed by ghastly apparitions, where I played the 15-year-old female gymnast/physics student overachiever - a stretch pour moi, but it was fun to change things up.

The Bad Man Over Your Shoulder (Don't Rest Your Head) - This was my first time playing DRYH and I was impressed. I had a chance to read the entire book in between my afternoon and evening games, and it strikes me mostly as a cross between the film Dark City, a steampunk version of H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands, and Carcosa. I was a little worried in reading over the mechanics, which seems confusing and cumbersome in the book; but, in play, they worked very well, and were picked up easily. We played very young children brought over by "The Bad Man" who sought to eat us and our loved ones, and only two of us made it out of the Mad City (my character, with his Superman cape, turned into a monstrous superbeing while fighting off the monsters come to devour his sleeping friends). I can see how the game can be brutal, and I'm eager to pick the book up and maybe play around with using it as alternative mechanics for Call of Cthulhu characters when trapped in a Dreaming state.

The next mini-con at Endgame will be the Good Omens Con in June. I would encourage anyone in the Bay Area around that time to check it out, as these things have consistently been a blast, full of interesting games (many with systems not often run at the larger conventions).

I've been sluggish this week, which means I've barely started reading through Trail of Cthulhu, which, by the first eleven pages (sluggish may be an understatement), seems pretty good. That eleventh page has a particularly striking section on occupations and gender in the period (the 1930's), where the author Kenneth Hite rolls off statistics on female employment (or lack thereof) back then before adroitly dismissing their relevance:

This means exactly nothing for players of Trail of Cthulhu. The default option (and the publisher's assumption) is that if you can suspend your disbelief sufficiently to imagine giant betentacled monstrosities, then a female doctor should be no problem.

It always seems that when gamers focus on historical accuracy, they do so mostly to preserve stereotypical attitudes of sexism and racism (and the minutiae of gun manufacture, but that's for another post). Very little thought is given to the complexities of these attitudes, to the differences between private thought and public demeanor, or how these attitudes are actually translated into action (for example, how an anti-Semite could end up marrying a Jew). Even less thought is given to how these attempts to preserve an often ill-researched model of historical accuracy ("women were always subservient back then" or "blacks were always disenfranchised") affect party dynamics, creating a bad gaming experience for others. And it should be remembered that the whole point of all this is not to, for example, completely simulate gender politics among upper middle-class academics in 1930's New England, but to have fun.

I'll grant that some verisimilitude must be preserved to maintain a suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy the experience. I've had my own little history tantrums when trains appear in Lhasa, Tibet in the mid-1930s, or when a Shinto chaplain is assigned to an American submarine during WWII. However, as Hite well points out, if you have more of a problem believing in Edith the female police detective than the squamous horror that was once your Uncle Winthrop, you're letting your peeves get in the way of your fun. Hite also points out that the movies and fiction of that period were full of strong, independent female protagonists (which were also full of minority protagonists, raunchy sex and other adult themes); so, if the racists and sexists believed to be everywhere in early twentieth-century Western culture could suspend their disbeliefs, why can't modern gamers?

So in between a beloved sports figure retiring, the death of the creator of the hobby that dominates my life, and the recurring saga of Ohio screwing over the nation at the ballot box (way to go folks - "No, We Can't!"), this has been a pretty shitty week so far. All that may have changed as I now have my hands on Trail of Cthulhu, an attempt by Ken Hite and Robin Laws to rewrite the rules on Lovecraftian investigation.

I playtested the ToC rules twice (as a player) and both times found it sorely lacking. While I admit that I may simply not buy into the central paradigm of the rules ("the way to solve investigation games that come to a halt when a skill roll fails is to make those kind of skill rolls impossible to fail"), my real complaint was with the combat rules, which were equally confusing and absurdly easy to survive. That said, the approach towards Sanity mechanics was refreshing, and for all I know, the combat rules have been fixed. I'll hold off on any final verdicts until I've had a chance to read the book thoroughly and playtest it at least once as a GM.

One interesting addition is a campaign for "Project Covenant" - the codename for the raid on Innsmouth. It's basically a two page version of Delta Green for the 1930's, positing that a conspiracy of military intelligence and FBI veterans of Innsmouth decide to continue investigating the Mythos, calling themselves "Covenanters" or (my favorite) "Friends of Ezra", for Ezra Weeden (the guy who Lovecraft wrote as leading the18th century raid on Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). He gives full names for all the major NPCs in the raid section from Escape From Innsmouth, which is what the short chapter seems most based upon, although it ultimately feels like Delta Green with serial numbers filed off, which it admits, stating it's pitch as "It's The Untouchables meets Delta Green!"

There was only one glaringly wrong note in all this, that being the statement that Credit Rating for Covenanters should be capped at 5 because "not until 1942, when William Donovan creates the OSS from his Yale banker contacts, does the wealthy aristocrat enter the US intelligence world." The Office of Naval Intelligence during the First World War was practically staffed entirely by wealthy aristocrats, brought in under pre-war reserve training programs established with the help of Franklin D. Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. In fact, much of the intelligence being gathered by the US during the 1930's was by wealthy patriots who used their own business activities as cover overseas. Before the Second World War, that's basically who carried out espionage for all sides: dilettantes with guns.

Anyways, I plan to run the Cleveland Torso Killer scenario in the book with one of my gaming groups soon, so I'll post how it went and if the combat rules have been sufficiently fixed at some later date.

Yesterday, Jeannine and I made our way to WonderCon 2008, the biggest comics convention held in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was an anniversary present to each other, as we are both huge X-Files fans and there would be a Q-&-A panel held for the upcoming film sequel.

The X-Files is what brought Jeannine and I together. Once upon a time, I created a website for Chris Carter's other show Millennium shortly before it premiered. A few images I had taken from newspaper and magazine ads caused Rupert and his thugs to go ballistic over copyright infringement, and created such a furor that CNet brought me to San Francisco for an interview. While here, I got in touch with a couple of local X-Files fans, one of whom was Jeannine. The rest is history, actually nine years of blissfully wedded history this Tuesday, so it was natural that, when we heard that not only David Duchovny (Mulder) and Gillian Anderson (Scully) but major showrunners Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz would be attending the local WonderCon, we forego'ed the usual anniversary presents of books and DVDs and instead gave each other a one-day pass.


Lots more pictures, mostly of The X-Files panel can be found here at my Flickr account.

So, all in all, money well spent, but it weren't much fun beyond the X-Files panel. There was nothing in the Dealer Room that I couldn't purchase cheaper on Ebay, and my plan of "general cons okay, gaming cons no way" for any future involvement of my future offspring in this slice of my geekery was ended quickly upon witnessing softcore (and maybe even hardish-core) porn being peddled in the Dealer Room. I might spring for another one-day pass should a great panel again be assembled or an artist like George Perez or Mike Deodato (two whom Jeannine mentioned as being interested in buying original art from) attends, but otherwise, I will stick to my gaming cons from now on.

DunDraCon  was pretty damn good this year. I ran my game - Toteninsel, a WWII-era Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green game - and played in a few others, including a LARP, a first for me. My only regret is that, with the exception of the LARP, I didn't play anything I hadn't done before. I really regret not trying out the Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy game, which one friend described as "Call of Cthulhu in space." Still, good times pretty much throughout, and even when the games were less than stellar, the experience itself never ventured into the "painful" range.


Besides the games, I also picked up the fifth issue of Worlds of Cthulhu (which others remarked was gorgeous, so maybe the mag will pick up a few new buyers), as well as the latest Miskatonic U. Monograph from Chaosium, Shadows of War, a collection of Call of Cthulhu scenarios set around and during the Second World War. I've only scanned it but it looks pretty solid. Expect a more detailed review once I get the chance.

After over ten years in the San Francisco Bay Area, I feel like I've shed most of my lingering Texan-ness to become one with my adopted home: I have a left-leaning political bumper sticker on my car, my next car will probably be a greener-than-thou Prius, and, as of today, I can finally say that I've been laid-off from a failed Internet start-up. It's not entirely failed (which is also why, as my severance package suggests, that I won't name said Internet start-up), but everyone in the US office that isn't a VP has been fired and the office itself is closing. It wasn't unexpected and not entirely unwelcome - I really need to get my teaching career started and I might even end making more money subbing till I can get certified.

But first, I'm going to do something I've never done before, and take unemployment for a few weeks. I figure I've voted Democrat enough times that I deserve to let my bleeding-heart tendencies subsidize my failure for a change, rather the failure of others. And while I'm on the dole, I can do some much-needed writing on ODH. I haven't even had a chance to keep up reading through my research pile while I've been working, so this'll be a nice change.

Attend! The missus and I went into the city to see the Xmas tree-lighting tonight, so we made a day of it by catching a movie and dinner. The movie was Beowulf, the super-dooper 3D Imax version which involved us putting on gigantic gag-style sunglasses to watch Ray Winstone's computer-generated butt thrust uncomfortably at our eyes. I didn't have a lot of expectations for Beowulf, and I got pretty much what I expected, that being the absolute best video game cut-scene I've ever seen.


So Beowulf was big and fun, but it could have been so much more. The creators of the film "got" the poem on a certain level, but whatever subtext is there is buried behind still-plastic-looking animation and "This is Sparta!"-style Eros=Thanatos adolescent sexual confusion. I would have loved to have seen an honest attempt to recreate 6th century Northern European warrior culture in live-action (the 2005 adaptation was close to this but burdened by turgid direction and a lifeless script), and watching real actors emoting might've given the film the punch it needed to be more memorable. Still... fun.

Thanks to Comcast OnDemand, I got to see the pilot episode of The Bionic Woman. I had decided beforehand that I would wait for this to come out on DVD, as I am already watching far too much television and then they added the odious Isaiah Washington to the cast. Still it was free and in HD and I had an hour to kill, so I gave the pilot a chance. And my non-spoilery judgment is a decided meh.

Even though there are still nearly 24 hours of gaming left to be had, I am all done with ConQuest 2007. Overall the con was much better than last year, although there are still some hiccups with game scheduling and attendance. Here's what I played:


Last year, ConQuest had some serious problems. RPGs were often packed together into small rooms, the signup process felt ad-hoc, and many games simply didn't have enough players to run. This year, every RPG looked like it got its own room, my chances of getting into games was still haphazard although the signup process no longer required constant stakeouts at the registration desk, but ultimately there was not only still a scarcity of players but now also of games. I think the con has lost some support from local RPGers, and will have to continue to improve itself to get it back. Still, it is obvious that they are trying, at least on the RPG front, so I will attend the next ConQuest and follow it as it moves to Santa Clara next year.

The Simpsons Movie website is now active, and it comes with a section for creating your own Simpsons-style avatar:


I had to add the glasses and shade the eyes, and there is a distinct lack of fashion options (I want my Homer polo shirt, dabbitt!), but otherwise it's pretty cool.  And yes, unfortunately that gut is to scale.

On his blog, Dennis Detwiller has remarked on postings on RPG.net which claim that Delta Green is dated:

"Honestly, this is something I just can’t understand. Are WWII games dated? Are 1920’s Call of Cthulhu games dated? This is such a strange comment that I don’t really know what to say in response. The book was written in the 1990s; before a lot of these conspiracy tropes were common — we can’t miraculously reboot such concepts."

While I agree with Dennis that Delta Green is primarily a toolkit for creating conspiracy-genre Call of Cthulhu games and should be accepted as nothing more or less than that, I'm not sure that this really answers the question.  For me, the conspiracy tropes that DG mined in the 1990's have indeed become dated, so that it's not that DG now approaches the conspiracy genre in a hackneyed manner, but that the whole genre itself has become hackneyed.  Recently this was brought home to me as I tried to put together a playtest for one of the scenarios that'll be in the new collected edition of the Eyes Only chapbooks.  While the scenario is technically fine, I just don't feel the same excitement as I used to when dealing with new modern-day DG material.

Now I don't think it is as simple as that the "government conspiracy with the paranormal" genre has been plumbed to death by a plethora of movies, tv shows, books, and games.  Rather, it may be that the cultural tropes which once made the genre such fodder for horror - fear of a world rapidly changed by new technology (i.e. the Internet), loss of traditional enemies (i.e. end of the Cold War) changed the game from Us vs. Them to Us vs. Us - just aren't as potent following 9/11, Abu Ghraib, and the Military Commissions Act.  It's not that you can't find ways to work DG into our "War on Terror" world, but that, thematically, it doesn't quite ride the razor edge of cultural fears the way it did in the 90's.  Those fictional fears of the 90's - government conspiracy, invasion through terror - have either been rendered as meaningless or accepted as reality.

As for what would be a better vehicle for modern horror... I'm not sure.  As I watched Children of Men for the first time this past week, I started to get a sense of what that vehicle might look like.  The film, obstensibly a sci-fi tale of the near future, is more accurately a hyper-realistic picture of our modern existence turned up to 11 on the "things are shitty" meter.  So, maybe the best way for Call of Cthulhu to capture today's cultural zeitgest would be to focus on the apocalyptic and give us a real and proper End-Times supplement.  As for Delta Green, it is dated and it should evolve, but I would hope that evolution would forget bureaucratic minutiae (like whether the conspiracy should go legit and become part of the Department of Homeland Security) and focus on what's really important in horror RPG material: whether it's scary or not.

Anyway, this was rambling and probably didn't get across half of what I'm trying to say, but that's what a blog is for, isn't it?

Yesterday night, Jeannine and I went to see The Police perform in McAfee Coliseum in Oakland. The first album I ever bought that didn't have a Muppet on the cover was Zenyatta Mondatta, so, along with U2 and Duran Duran, The Police are responsible for a good chunk of the soundtrack of my adolescence. I had a great time, but I have to agree with this review that the performances were flawed and the crowd atmosphere was lacking. The review is right in that it didn't help that Sting decided to get all "Dream of the Blue Turtles" on many of the tracks and jazz all the punk out of the songs. Sting, Summers, and Copeland all played very well, but they didn't really play well together, frequently missing beats. And by the time The Police even came on-stage (nearly three hours into the show), the crowd was so sleepy that even when they did bring it together the crowd just was no longer there for them.

However, what really sucked the life out of the place was the crowd itself, who were almost all in the forties and fifties. I realize it's been over twenty years since The Police last toured, but if you're going to pay over a hundred dollars to hear a rock concert, you should at least try to shed your soccer mom sensibilities and leave the business casual wear at home and rock with your cocks out, greying pubes and all. I certainly did, but most of the people there just looked constipated and waiting for it to end.