Magical Swords

The group, well one of them at least, came across a magical sword. It could speak to them, both verbally and telepathically, and decided it liked the dwarf just well enough that it might let him wield her.

The dwarf thought she was annoying when she constantly wanted to rush into battle, calling him cowardly when not jumping headfirst into stuff, and generally being a pain in the ass, and so decided to leave it.

Did not see that coming.

Godzilla

Just got back from the new Godzilla movie. A few thoughts are listed here, hopefully spoiler-free.

The new Godzilla movie is:

• About white men
• Pretty fly creatures

it's not:

• good at representation
• good at equality
• good

Alright. Granted, I fell asleep a few times during it, but I don't think I missed anything important. But here goes: the main character is a white guy. Everyone else, with two exceptions, are white men. There's one white woman, and one asian (Japanese?) guy. That's it. The main guy's girlfriend is a white, blonde girl who is also a nurse. I, for one, am surprised by this. I think the dialogue must've gone sommat like this:

-- Okay, we need a girlfriend or wife or something for him. Something important.

-- What if she's a nurse, we can show how caring and loving she is?

I mean what the fuck? I don't know, but it's just such a fucking cheap move that I get tired thinking about it. Isn't Will Smith's wife (or whatever) a nurse in Independence Day? At least that movie had an ex-wife working for the president (who was white, obviously). I can't remember.

Anyway. Yeah, so look: the entire cast, and most of the background people, are white. Would it have been so fucking hard to make the girlfriend latina or Japanese or something? Like, white guy's father worked in Japan, he could very well have married a Japanese woman, but no -- gotta have a white main guy. Aight, so make the girlfriend Japanese or African-American, or Latina or whatever. Make the general something other than white. Make some of the marines or whatever they are non-white. Representation isn't hard. Just take a character, then make them not-white. You don't even have to change anything. The general could have been a woman, that would have raised the number of important women in the movie by 100%.

Oh yeah, also: the white guy's girlfriend is absolutely pointless. She doesn't do shit (ok, I might have slept through the parts where she's amazing, but I seriously doubt it).

So no. The new Godzilla movie isn't very good. The entire idea behind the kaiju (I think they're called?) is cool and can be lifted completely out of the movie and applied to Your RPG Setting of Choice. In fact, I will do so for Roanoke. Apart from the city destruction scenes (which are okay), it's a bad movie.

Online RPG Thing: Shadowbrook Manor - Completed

Last year I ran Shadowbrook Manor as an online one-shot thing. I never wrote down what happened, but basically this:

The party oooh spoilers, more under the cut: