Category: Geek Interest

Posted on

Casting Monday: DOCTOR STRANGE

Kicking off a potential new regular feature here at the Monologues: Casting Monday.

One of my favorite geek pastimes has always been speculation and discussion along the lines of “if they were going to make a move about ‘Geek Property X’, who should be cast?” So I figured that it would be fun to bring that to the blog. I present my choices below. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments. If this takes off, we’ll do it every Monday.

This week: DOCTOR STRANGE.

One of my all-time favorite comics — it’s been done as an awful 1978 TV-movie, an expired-option-turned-into-serial-numbers-filed-off direct to DVD film in the early 90s called Doctor Mordrid, and most recently a not-too-shabby animated version released on DVD. Reports are that Marvel Studios is now working on a Doctor Strange film as part of their line-up.

So, how would I cast this?

 
 

 
 

 
 

Doctor Strange: Guy Pearce.
Pearce has the necessary combination of thin features, otherworldly intensity, and aristocratic bearing.
Clea: Romola Garai.
Well, I mean, just look at her. She’s brilliant in the BBC TV show The Hour as an independent career woman in 1950s Britain, and I think she’d bring the same strength to the Daughter of Dormammu.
Baron Mordo: Rufus Sewell.
Mordo needs to be the dark reflection of Stephen Strange. He needs to be what Strange could have become if his arrogance and thirst for power had overwhelmed him. Sewell can definitely hang in there with Pearce, and makes a good pairing, in my opinion.
Dormammu: Tim Curry.
Obviously, the Dread Dormammu would be a CG creation (and hopefully wreathed in flame far more convincing than that which appears in Ghost Rider. He needs to have a great voice, though — powerful, commanding, dripping with venom and arrogance. Tim Curry’s past performances as Darkness in Legend and Cardinal Richelieu in Disney’s Three Musketeers informed my choice here.

 
 
So there are my choices. What do you think?

Posted on

GenCon Bound

I realized today that in two years, I will have been going to GenCon for half of my life.

That took a bit of adjustment.

This followed closely on the heels of the realization that this year marks my twentieth anniversary of attending the show.

Photographic evidence, from the lobby of a Milwaukee hotel as the members of KU Gamers and Roleplayers (KUGAR) awaited transport back to the airport, is over there at the left. I’m sitting on the couch to the righthand side, waving my hand in front of my face. Next to me is Laura Hanson — a good friend at the time, and now, twenty years later, Laura Hanson Skarka. Lower lefthand corner of the picture is Aaron Rosenberg, a great writer and a great friend. I’m occasionally in touch with other folks in the shot, but mostly in a Facebook-comment sort of way.

Twenty years. Wow.

I attended GenCon a couple more times before making the leap to working GenCon as a game designer and publisher, which I’ve been doing since 1994. I don’t get to play nearly as much any more — for me, GenCon is now about 18 hour days seeing friends that I only see once or twice per year; selling games in the exhibit hall; signing books that people want signed; taking time to talk to fans that want to ask a question or share a cool experience they had with one of my games; attending awards presentations for the year’s best stuff; and — despite the fact that we work in a world of digital media, Skype, Twitter and email, packing every mealtime with face-to-face business meetings where the cool stuff coming a few years from now gets born.

If I’m lucky, I get a chance to pick up some stuff myself. My list of big interests this year:

  • The One Ring: The big release for us at the Cubicle 7 booth this year. I expect that I’ll need to hold off on getting this, since the limited number of copies we’ll have available need to be reserved for the gamers attending, but I will be getting a set eventually.
  • Fortune and Glory from Flying Fox Games: The latest boardgame from the folks who did Last Night on Earth, this time pulp-themed! Oh, HELL yes. However — looks to be pretty pricey, and would also pretty much require shipping back home, rather than bringing on the plane, due to gigantic boxed-set goodness. But OH SO TEMPTING.
  • Cosmic Patrol RPG by Catalyst. They say they’ll have GenCon editions of the rulebook for this 1950s-pulp-scifi game (which plumbs the same vein as my own Rocket Patrol concept from 10 years back). I’m a sucker for the genre, so I’ll strap on my ray gun and go looking.

I was also interested in Leviathans, the steampunk air combat wargame, also from Catalyst, but they’re not going have it for sale at the show due to printer trouble. A shame to be sure (I’ve been there — Hong Kong Action Theatre! missed its GenCon ’96 debut by a matter of days, for example, leaving us with a booth and promotional items for a game that wasn’t there).

Beyond that? I’m hoping to get a chance to walk through the exhibit hall once, to take a look at what I haven’t heard about — because that’s where the coolest stuff always can be found… and that’s also the source of meeting people who are just getting into the business, and seeing their enthusiasm, their energy, their ‘HOLY SHIT MY GAME IS AT GENCON‘ look… and remembering.

 
 
See you in Indianapolis, if you’re there. Most of the time I’ll be at booth 711 with Cubicle 7. If you’re not attending GenCon, feel free to follow @AdamantEnt on Twitter for updates from the floor, or @GMSkarka for more personal commentary.
 

Posted on

Inclusion in RPGs

First off, spreading the Kickstarter love: Heartbreak and Heroines, a fantasy RPG specifically designed (in the words of the author) to be much more inclusive:

Heartbreak & Heroines is first and foremost a fantasy adventure game. It’s not preachy and it isn’t a textbook about feminism, but it’s written from a feminist point of view. It challenges some of our assumptions about the role of gender in gaming but at the heart of H&H, it’s about being a heroine (or hero) and finding your way to happiness in a dangerous world.

I think that this is great, a laudable goal, and also pretty much exactly why Kickstarter exists. Come up with an artistic project concept, tell people about it, and get the project funded if enough people are interested.

So naturally, there is a 200+ message thread on RPGnet, bitching about it. Now, to be fair, most of those messages are in defense of the project (or at the very least “WTF”-ing the detractors) — but still. The “conserva-gamer-libertarian-anti-‘political-correctness’-warrior” stereotype is out in FULL BLOOM, kids. Because making an effort at inclusion? “Extreme.” “Silly.” “Insulting.” “Condescending.”

I pledged just because they pissed me off. I want to see this game funded because it will stick in their craw like the ashes of defeat.

When the thread started, I saw that the designer had only raised $300 or so. She’s asking for $3K. I’m pleased to report that it’s almost to $1K now, less than a day later — and the Kickstarter runs for another 29 days. So please, consider chucking a pledge their way.

Couple of things:

1st, it seems that the original poster also has a problem with what he calls “the Kickstarter Gold-Rush” — I’ve seen him bitch elsewhere, terming it “the money-grab”, etc. The less-socialized corners of the geek community has always had a problem with people obviously enjoying something that they don’t, and therefore railing against it with as much vitriol as they can muster. Kickstarter must really push that button even harder, because the enjoyment of others now has a visible dollar-value tagged to it, making it more of an incitement to rage to these folks.

To which I say: Fuck you, grow up.

People like things you don’t, and sometimes they ‘like’ with money. Nothing to bitch about here (without waving the “I have problems with mature interactions in public” flag wildly, at least).

Second: Inclusion? Important. Just as important to those of us who have chosen not to make it an explicitly-stated mission statement of a project, in fact. I draw your attention to the artwork that we’ve presented from Far West:

  

We didn’t come right out and say it. We were sneaky. But everything we’ve done, we’ve done for a reason.

(So I guess now the Usual Suspects will grouse about our ‘political correctness’ and give us an upward spike in pledges, too!)

Proudly powered by WordPress