All posts filed under: role-playing games

Followup Questions: An Interview with Kier-La Janisse, editor of Satanic Panic!

November 11, 2015
by Matt
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books / film / role-playing games

Last month I reviewed Satanic Panic, a collection of essays examining the decade-long freakout over supposed Satanic influences across American media. It’s a fantastic introduction to the social mores of the period, and sheds light on a lot of the country’s Puritannical tendencies, and how they’ve continued on. Kier-La Janisse, author of House of Psychotic Women and co-editor of the collection, has agreed to answer some questions about how the book came to be: Short […]

Review: Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015)

October 8, 2015
by Matt
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books / film / role-playing games

While it may have laid down roots in the late Sixties and Seventies, with the blockbuster success of films like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Omen (1976), or with the resurgence of interest in occult matters after the founding of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, the “Satanic Panic” is really a relic of the Eighties. It was a time when such seemingly innocuous things as rockstars prancing around in tights and big hair, half hour toy […]

Review: Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons and Dragons and the People Who Play It, by David Ewalt (2013)

September 1, 2014
by Matt
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books / role-playing games

Musical Accompaniment: “Ready to Roll”, by Flashlight Brown I’m not entirely sure for which audience David Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men was written. Is the book intended to be picked up by absolute newcomers to the concept of Dungeons and Dragons, or tabletop roleplaying altogether? Is it supposed to be of interest to people who already play, but are interested in the story of the game’s creation? Or is it for readers interested in a memoir of a […]

Thoughtprojektor – Film Noir Emotion Game

May 2, 2012
by Matt
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film noir / role-playing games / thoughtprojektor

One of my longtime interests has been film noir and its predecessor hardboiled crime fiction. It’s something I wrote about many times while I was at school, and I even went back there a couple of years ago to lecture about it for a class in Comparative Literature. There’s something about the seamy world of double-crossing dames, obsessed detectives and greasy gunsels that just makes me happy, which is kind of strange considering how shitty […]

Downton Abbey D&D Alignment Chart

November 7, 2011
by Matt
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alignment charts / role-playing games

Just saw the last episode of Downton Abbey‘s second series, and it was excellent. If you haven’t seen this great show, it’s about the wealthy owners of an English manor house in the 1910s, as well as the servants who live in the “downstairs” world. If you liked the movie Gosford Park from a few years back, or are a fan of good English drama series like Pride and Prejudice or especially Brideshead Revisited, you […]

Postgame Report: Killer Thriller – Death of the Authors

June 25, 2011
by Matt
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postgame report

Enough with the pretentious literary analysis this page has devolved into. If only for a brief interlude, THE GEEK WANTS OUT! So the other weekend some of my friends and I got together to play one of the many tabletop role-playing games I’ve collected but have never been able to use: Killer Thriller. It was an absolutely excellent gaming experience, one of the best I’ve ever taken part in. Killer Thriller is an extremely rules […]

Boardwalk Empire D&D Alignment Chart

March 23, 2011
by Matt
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alignment charts

After the huge success of the Deadwood and Community alignment charts, I decided to try one for what was, in my opinion, one of the best new shows of last year. Hopefully the next season starts up soon! Notes: – I had a really tough time finding someone from this show to fill the alignment of Lawful Good. Something about the fact that everyone’s a gangster on this show, I guess. I went with Angela […]

My D&D Campaign Overview Part One – The Companions of the Bouncing Barrel

March 17, 2011
by Matt
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role-playing games

With all of the recent discussion of fine works of literature for the past few months, and because I don’t want to read Brideshead Revisited too fast because I’m actually really enjoying it, I felt it was time to inject the “nerding” back into thisnerdinglife. For this reason, I’ll now talk about the current state of the Dungeons and Dragons campaign I’m running, as this is extremely important information that all of you folks at […]

Community D&D Alignment Chart

February 3, 2011
by Matt
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alignment charts

So I know there’s another one of these floating out there in the ether, but after tonight’s D&D themed episode (which was pretty great, right?), E. and I decided to make an alignment chart for Community. And here it is: Notes: – E., of the lovely blog Straight on Till Morning, provided quotes this time around, while I found pictures and stuff. I don’t much care for MS Paint anymore. – All of Abed’s best […]

Deadwood D&D Alignment Chart

December 19, 2010
by Matt
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alignment charts

So here’s an alignment chart that my friend Marcus and I made last week, in the style of Mighty God King’s fantastic Mad Men Alignment Chart from a few days back. I think we did a pretty solid job on this one, but here’s a few thoughts: – Wikiquote does not have very many good quotes to give to our CG character, Trixie. Rectify this at once. I just picked one that I thought was […]