Apocalypse in the Purple Land, Part 2

Yoon Suin Princes of the Apocalypse Campaign Session 2 SIX. MONTHS. LATER.

Notes: First I'd like to acknowledge the regret I have of beginning this adventure setting in Red Larch and not Yoon Suin itself. The Yellow City is the gem of this setting and Red Larch sounds like a boring tree classification. My idea was to have the sprawling urban decay and decadence of Yoon Suin strike the players as wonderfully Other from their small home town of Red Larch, but so much flavor is being left out. 

Solution: Red Larch is destroyed by those elemental bombs. God-damned Eco-terrorists! They blew it up! They blew it all up! Or the characters could be captured and sold as slaves or something.

ASSASSIN!

Our intrepid adventurers from last time are healing up and hiding out somewhere safe in town. This session introduced other characters: Danny the Diabolist (played by Matt), Fun Yun Chu the Arcane Trickster Dwarf (played by Ronnie), Mugen he Monk (played by Arthur), and Meagan the Talent Agent (played by Heather, a first time player!). Heather is Arthur's girlfriend and she has good instincts.

We opened play back in Gaelkur's Opium Den and General Store, with all of the players smoking opium this time. Unfortunately, no one became addicted :(. Rumors were spreading about the temple ruins underneath the town that were discovered by the last group of adventurers. Also some other rumors in the mill included a necromancer causing trouble out at Lance Rock and a trade caravan on a Diplomatic mission has gone missing in the North. 

Some hesitation followed the description of the ruins and the last group barely making it out of there alive, and so I rolled on Necropraxis' Hazard table for a random event in town. Guess what turned up? That's right, Assassination. Who was assassinated? None other than everybody's favorite opium dealer and general store clerk, Gaelkur! Except this time I called him Garrett because I couldn't find my notes and he actually lived thanks to a potion of healing from Fun Yun.

In the chaos of what appeared to their opium addled-minds as a demon with galaxies for eyes stabbing Gaelkur, Danny the Diabolist leapt up and stabbed the assassin, killing him in one blow! Meanwhile, Meagun the Talent Agent looted as much opium as she could find. What did I tell you about those instincts? 

Looting the culprit revealed an impressive dagger, a mark similar to that found on the corpses down in the temple ruins, and a note with a building sitting on a hill and the word Wednesday written below it. What does this all mean? What day was it anyway? Should the days be called something different in this world? 

WILDERNESS TRAVEL DOESN'T SEEM SO HARD.

The Sherriff arrived just in time to give directions to the building on the paper: Sacred Stone Monastery. Ominous right? The characters bought some riding worms and headed off with Meagun successfully leading them through the wilderness. Riding worms are the size of horses and move like an inch worm for comedic effect.

Overnight the shadow of a Dragon passed overhead and flew North. The direction they were heading! Super ominous! (This was a random encounter, but show a group a dragon and they'll expect it around every corner afterward. It's great.)

Interestingly, this is the first world I've DM'ed that didn't have airships or spaceships of some kind. You know I love science fiction and will place those anywhere, but I wanted this world to be more constrained. Mountains and haunted jungles hem in the world and the characters to make the region feel like it's the only source of civilization in the world. Ideally. I'm not sure players ever think about the environment in that way. Overland travel is rare for me, but will be much more prevalent in this setting. 

The party came upon some corpses on the side of the road next to broken wagons and graves a little further away, but clearly from the same time frame. Completely uninterested in anything but loot the party moved on after noting the giant holes in the ground that looked like something had erupted out of them. 

NOBODY HERE BUT US MONKS

The characters made it to the Sacred Stone Monastery with no trouble, and we asked their way inside to stay for the night. As they walked in they saw someone staring at them suspiciously, and interrogated everyone around them as to who it could have been. Very smooth. Even after all of this behavior followed by a complete denial of their inquiries they stayed the night. To sneak around of course. 

Fun Yun tried to oil all the squeaky hinges of doors during the day so no creaking would alert the denizens to the party's shenanigans, but an old monk caught him and chastised him as using oil was unnatural and against their beliefs. True? Probably not, these monks are sketchy.

Mugen took the first watch because the sketchy monks werided them out. During his watch one of the Sacred Stone Monks lured him away from the others and around a corner where he quickly realized he was surrounded by 4 monks! Don't worry though, Fun Yun, Dan, and Meegun snuck behind and followed in order to make sure he didn't come to any harm. 

Mugen tried questioning the monks, but they were the ones asking the questions not him! Not liking their attitude he challenged their leader to a monk duel of the elements and they had an avatar style fight. Danny tried to help, almost summoning a demon, but a monk trapped him in a fist made out of the zen garden sand. Meagan ran in and destroyed the sand fist with her short sword and Mugen got beat up. Tired of playing around, Mugen demolished the monk with a whip made of water, effectively hitting him with a geyser in the chest. 

Fun Yun tried to convince Dan not to summon a demon or kill anyone in general, but things got out of hand and they killed two monks and Fun Yun knocked out the others with his sleep darts. 

The group found their way into the underground tunnels, decided not to free the giant beetle monster and found some slaves working on mining out more tunnels and decided to end the session with a cliffhanger while they decided whether to escape with the slaves and come back, or push on through the complex and come back for the pitiful beings.

SUPER lame that I forgot to hit publish on this post almost six months ago. This exact group hasn't gotten back together really and we sort of transitioned to the 1990's WEG d6 Star Wars RPG for a while. 

Welcome To Wayward Pines

Wayward Pines is fucking nuts. Lets start there. I picked up the first book based on the minimal amount of detail I had heard about the Fox show being developed from the trilogy of books by Blake Crouch. There are enough books about odd quirky small towns to fill a football stadium but Wayward, the first book, quickly set itself apart by slowly promising and providing plenty of reasons to keep reading. By the time I reached the last page, I was clamoring for the next book, frantically searching online hoping to find confirmation that it could be found on the shelves of my local library (or any library within 20 miles). Some books are so good that you want to start back on page one the second you finish in hopes of recapturing, even fleetingly, the way you felt poring over those words the first time. These books are not like that, but what they are are page-turners in the best way. They give you enough what-the-fuck moments and cliff-hangers to want to keep going while not being too cliche-ridden or hokey. Crouch is not a Pulitzer Prize-caliber writer but he's a great genre writer, he knows his influences but has enough of an original voice to hold his own. The plot moves forward at a brisk pace, and our protagonist Ethan Burke learns more and more about his predicament and the fate that has befallen him and the town of Wayward Pines. I think I audibly said "What the fuck?!" a number of times throughout the three books which I think is a good sign.

M. Night Shyamalan serves as a producer and the director of the first episode of the Fox adaptation entitled, understandably, Wayward Pines. Chad Hodge, a jack-of-all-trades writer bouncing around Hollywood, read the first book and like me, couldn't put it down and was dying to find out more. He wrote a treatment on spec and presented the project with Shyamalan attached and Fox agreed to produce it as a 10 episode limited series, the vogue method of presenting prestige television these days. What was notable about the whole process and the saga of Wayward Pines was that Crouch and Hodge became good friends and worked so closely that as Crouch was working on the second and third books of his trilogy, he would read Hodge's scripts and see things he liked and ask if he could put them in his books. Fast forward to now and what they've created is a series that, while not quite on the level of other event series like True Detective or as popular as another Fox show Empire, is original and mysterious and curious and fun and delightfully ridiculous. A few notable things about the show include the fact that each episode picks up exactly where the previous one left off, there is no time jump, no presuming what happened or having to spend twenty minutes of exposition while characters react after the fact. It works as pure fan service and gives answers exactly where you want them. Speaking of, the show did something that is pretty rare even in the era of limited series with closed endings, it gave the answers in episode five, with five episodes still to come. If this were a traditional network show, the simultaneous reveal that Ethan and his son Ben were exposed to would have been the cliffhanger ending on the season finale of a 13 or 16 or 22 episode season, with 6 months to wait until finding out more. It's refreshing to have a show get right to the good stuff and know exactly how and when they're going to end it. What ultimately doomed Lost, in the eyes of a lot of fans, was the fact that they had to keep going. There were a lot of questions and mysteries that the writers proposed and then figured out the answers to at a later point. In the meantime, they had to write a lot of filler and became, for lack of a better term, lost along the way. If you started Wayward Pines, you will know everything in 10 hours. 

The show shares some DNA with fellow odd and delightful classics like The X-Files and perhaps most notably, both in setting and title, with Twin Peaks. In fact, Crouch, in an afterword in the first book, writes of his love and admiration of the seminal show and how it very clearly inspired what he put into his books. However, Wayward Pines seems to be having trouble escaping the shadow of Twin Peaks, as a cottage industry of internet blog posts and articles comparing, contrasting and discussing the show in relation to its thematic predecessor have popped up. Anyone not coming into Pines with preconceived notions about the show will see pretty quickly that it is not Twin Peaks 2.0 and isn't trying to be. I'd say it's more in line with Shyamalan's other films than Lynch's show, the fact that it's set in a wooded small town in the Pacific Northwest clouding people's judgement and making it too easy to compare one with the other. According to Hodge, they did a little something different with the ending to their show so I'm hoping that there is still some mystery left in Wayward Pines for me.

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In other news, I read a few good non-Wayward Pines books lately including The Revenant, by Michael Punke, a novel based on the true life mountain man and trapper Hugh Glass who, while on an expedition with his company in the Rockies in the early 1800's, was attacked by a grizzly bear and left for dead by the two companions tasked by his company to stay with him and see that he is given a proper burial. The two men leave him and take his kit and gun presuming he will die at any moment. However, Glass survives and proceeds to crawl, literally, toward his two targets with a single burning desire fueling his progress, inch by inch: revenge. Leonardo Dicaprio will play Glass in an upcoming film directed by Alejandro Gonzales Inaritu. I also picked up a more conventional nonfiction telling of the Glass story entitled Here Lies Hugh Glass by Jon T. Coleman which also serves as a fascinating history of America's expansion westward and the men who worked to make it happen. Somewhat related to that theme, one of my new favorite comics is Manifest Destiny written by Chris Dingess which chronicles the Lewis & Clark expedition and the many odd and unknown creatures they find in the new lands to the west, including walking dead infected by plants and giant man-eating minotaur. As a fun little side note, a character who shows up in both the fictional Manifest Destiny story and the true Hugh Glass story is Toussaint Charbonneau, husband of Sacagawea. I read Manifest Destiny as part of my Image Comics catch-up before Image Expo next month, which includes catching up on the trades of Southern Bastards, Saga, Black Science, East Of West, The Fade-Out, Lazarus, Outcast, Sex Criminals, Five Ghosts, Pretty Deadly, Zero and Fatale, among others. I also finally got around to the newest Erik Larson book Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by a German submarine. Larson is a master at weaving intricate historical detail and dialogue with the stories of two men and the legacies they left behind, as he did previously in one of my favorite books The Devil In The White City about the serial killer H.H. Holmes and the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. 

Apocalypse in the Purple Land

Yoon Suin Elemental Apocalypse Campaign Session 1

TUTORIAL LESSON

Play starts in Red Larch which is situated on the eastern fringes of the Hundred Kingdoms. The characters started inside Gaelkur's Opium Den & Barbershop, and showing a massive display of discipline, no one tried the opium at all.  The constable came in looking for some seedy types to run off some bandits and of course he tried the characters. Super jazzed about being here, the characters accepted and then ran off to go slaughter some bandits. 

Some sneaky bush crawling hid the characters from the youngest thief coming out of a cave to piss, and mild torture followed. The characters learned there were only a few bandits and they just wanted to steal things so they could eat. It's basically a job anyway. The characters had little mercy for these idiots and dragged the poor kid into the cave while Slurfin held a knife to his throat. Some blustery sword waggling couldn't dissuade the players and poor Jai, the Kid Bandit, bled out all over the cave floor.

 Chummy barraged the cave with arrows, Vata tossed fire, and Slurfin held the line with his sword work. During the first round the caged bear broke free and attacked the bandit from behind. The seeing this the characters wisely left the cave while the bear mauled and mangled the remaining bandit. The last baddy tried to run away, but some thrown fire and arrows slowed him down enough for the bear to catch up with him.

The raging bear looked to turn on the characters next, but Vata cast Animal Friendship (which she almost passed on) and the bear moseyed off into the wilderness. Grabbing all that they could carry (including bandit ears) the characters made it back to town and were paid handsomely by the Constable. Its at this point that I should point out that I have always been terrible at handing out treasure, so they probably received way too much. I think I went by the book, but God who knows. 

DUNGEON!

As they counted the hard earned gold they were paid for selling the bandits' loot, an earthquake hit the town and a sinkhole swallowed some children! This was awesome and the suckers-- I mean characters went right in to save the poor children. Now should this have happened as early in the adventure as it did? No, probably not by the book this mini-dungeon is a little too strong for level one characters. Did I let them go in anyway? Absolutely yes. Both Vata and Chummy know dwarven and recognized this as an old dwarven structure.

Inside the dwarven structure the adventurers took an immediate left turn and found a small room filled with corpses and some bioluminescent bombardier snails, who did some decent damage by flinging acidic globules to our intrepid heroes and provided a fun glow-stick/acid bomb. One of these corpses was the holy-man that Chummy rolled up as a contact in character creation. Oddly enough she had just talked to him earlier in the day, but this corpse looked at least three days old. Chummy was unconcerned. Also ritualistic symbols were carved into the foreheads of the corpses.

The next chamber over had a strange floating stone with a diffuse light softly spreading from the center of the area. Now if you want to confuse and perplex players just add a room like this where the only remarkable thing is something that mildly breaks the laws of physics. Works like gangbusters. This room killed a lot of time, perhaps needlessly, but I think it did a lot to add to the magical reality of this adventure. 

OH NO...

Just to the south was a more finely carved room that held a statue of a dwarf surrounded by a circle of coins and small treasure. Chummy took a knife covered in dry blood, and the characters all left coins of their own in the pile. Like a wishing fountain or something. It was cute. Sadly this is when the bandits who called themselves "The Bringers of Woe" entered, and brought woe all over the character's faces. 

The chest piece of their light armor had the same symbol as on the corpses foreheads and these six circled around the characters while the players decided what to do. A running battle erupted because these baddies were mad at their sanctuary being disturbed, and the players didn't like the odds of a 3v6 fight. Three villains followed in pursuit and the other three circled around. Everyone almost died. Literally, Vata and Slurfin were down, and Chummy was limping for the exit with 1hp when I convinced her to turn around and try to at least to save her friends.

Vata went down first against the first three BoWs, and while she was throwing her death saves she rolled a 1 and was on death's doorstep. Luckily Tracy remembered she was a halfling and could re-roll any 1's. This brought her back to life and she got back up to light the second group on fire. They barely pulled it off, and I made some bad judgments, but they survived and carried/crawled away.

So apparently I forgot to hit Publish on this when I wrote the damn thing back in June. So here it is, and the second adventure should be coming soon.

I'm sorry Lee, but I'm back.

I've started a new D&D campaign and it's off to a good start. Why a new one you ask? Well, the people that showed up were all new people so it didn't make sense to place them in the very climactic battle of the last adventure group. (For more on that see: Lich, Mummy Lord, and Bronze Dragons). 

So anyway, I've got a hobby with no practice and I decided to do something about all these books I collect for it. Plus it's fun as hell so here goes.

__

This campaign begins in the east of the Hundred Kingdoms of Yoon Suin. I've (very) casually adapted the new D&D 5e adventure "Princes of the Apocalypse" to the vastly haunted, vaguely-Asian influenced Yoon Suin and I hope it pans out. Players start in Red Larch on the border of the Lahag, the Cursed Jungle, and everyone has a connection with one of the six major establishments in the city. 

The Players and their characters from last week's game are:

• River, with her Half-Elf Fighter CHUMMY, formerly a prostitute.
• Jordan, with his Slug-man Fighter SLURFIN, who comes from a family of opium smugglers.
• Tracy, with her Halfling Druid, VATA SULTENFUSS, who is an outlander.

I'll post and Adventure Log and update on the state of the game late, but for now here's just some useful stuff.

Here are the House Rules for the Campaign:

Spell Rules

• Light is now a full, Level 1 spell and not a cantrip.
• Wizards: Spell slots are gone, each spell is a single cast per day. You can RESEARCH in order to increase the strength of your spells. This is identical to researching a spell equal to the level of the strength that you're trying to attain.

Removed:

Immunity to Disease, Immunity to Poison, Darkvision. (This idea comes from Arnold K.'s article about keeping play interesting.)

Races from the Player's Handbook that must be unlocked: Dragonborn, Gnomes, Half-Orcs, Tieflings and Elves. 

New Races for the setting: Slugmen, and Crabmen. (see below)

(By limiting which races are allowed initially I hope to create a greater sense of individuality for the setting than generic fantasy. Plus Dragonborn and Tieflings are OP.)

Shields Shall Be Splintered: Whenever you take damage from an attack you may sacrifice your shield in order to cancel that damage out. This destroys the shield, but who cares you didn't get hit, amiright? If you are Proficient in shields you can use this to automatically succeed on a save versus any spell that allows a save for half damage. This means you automatically take half damage, and you must decide before you roll the save, but it's better than taking a full lightning bolt to the face.

Downtime Activities (From Hack&Slash)

Whenever you go back to town you can spend your treasure to do certain downtime activities.

• CAROUSE: Spend any amount of gold drinking, partying and causing mayhem in order to gain twice that much back as XP. Pass a CON save or roll on the mishap table.
• RESEARCH: Learn a new spell or enhance an old one. Characters that are spell casters may purchase and scribe spells within their purview for 1,000 gold pieces per spell level per week. A single fourth level spell would cost 4,000 gold pieces and take 4 weeks to learn. Then you make an Intelligence (Arcana) skill check to see if you've succeeded.
• Hire HIRELINGS or HENCHMEN: Hirelings are torchbearers, porters, laborers, and lackeys. Henchmen act as individual player characters, will only adventure with the character that hired them, demand a full share of treasure and experience, and can be used as replacement characters in a pinch if you die.
• PHILANTHROPY: You spend gold on a worthy social group. At the end of the week make a WISDOM SAVE DC 15.
• STUDY LORE: You spend gold seeking ancient or forgotten lore. At the end of the week make an Intelligence SAVE DC 15
• GOURMANDISING: You spend gold seeking new things to eat, consume, or experience. At the end of the week make a save Dexterity DC 15.
• TRAINING: Whenever you gain enough XP to level up you have to go back to town and train in order to level up.

Level Attained	Cost	Time Spent
2nd-4th	20 gp	10 days
5th-10th	40 gp	20 days
11th-16th	60 gp	30 days
17th-20th	80 gp	40 days

Slug-men:

Slug-men are the aristocratic rulers of the Yellow City and occupy the highest social tier there. They have the best rights and property available to them, and their society is highly corrupt. They can be any class, but favor magicians and holy-men.

Roll 1d6 to determine your family background:

1-2 Oligopolist family (opium, tea, or slave traders)

3 Criminal family (smugglers)

4-6 Brahmin family (sages, tax collectors, archivists, poets, bureaucrats)

Ability Score Improvement. Your Charisma score is increased by 2 and you can choose to increase either your Wisdom or Intelligence score by 1.

Size. Slug-men are about the same size as humans. Your size is Medium.

Speed. Your base walking speed is 30'.

Hermaphrodite. Slug-men are gender less, but can choose to refer to themselves as male or female around other races. Most prefer the gender neutral "it."

Merchant Princes. No one can outbid a slug. You add your proficiency bonus to any Charisma checks you make while haggling.

Languages. You speak the Trade Tongue, Slug-man, and one other language of your choice.

Crab-men:

Crab men are the lowest social tier in the Yellow City and are considered extremely dumb. Mostly used as slaves and gladiators, Crab-men can only be Fighters (Champion Archetype). 

Claws. A crab-man's only attack is with his claws. Crab-men are so strong and their claws so powerful that each successful hit causes double damage: roll to hit as normal then roll 1d8x2 to determine HP loss. 

Natural Armor. Crab-men have a natural AC of 15 from their tough shells. This improves to 16 at level 4, 17 at level 8, 18 at level 12, and 19 at level 16.

Languages. Crab-men can only speak Crab-man, but they understand what they are told in Trade Tongue and Slug-Man, and communicate with gestures to some degree.

Slaves. Any adventuring crab-men are non-existent and you should pick another character in the group who is your master.

Happy 100th Orson Welles

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."

What I've Been Enjoying (Lightning Round)

BANSHEE - I fell a little behind on Banshee and I deeply regret letting that happen. I caught up on seasons 2 & 3 in the last few weeks and have been blown away by what they've done, by raising the bar for serialized action television beyond anything else anyone else is making. Being on Cinemax, which is a network that knows its audience and knows what they want, Alan Ball and Jonathan Tropper and and the cast & crew of Banshee can go completely balls-out and deliver everything that people like me are looking for on television. On the surface, there are beautiful women who are naked a lot & fight a lot and lots of explosions and fights and shootouts and did I mention fights? Those provide plenty of engaging scenes every episode to keep the audience coming back for more but what I've been impressed with is the progression of quality from season to season; the writing and attention to detail that might get overlooked and burned away in a lesser, loud, fast paced show. The world they've written is so rich and the people so fleshed out and, perhaps best of all, so original and interesting and weird.* Banshee is unapologetic, brutal, bloody, fast, kinetic, smart pulp fiction, and I love every moment of it. Banshee is Justified on the next level, Justified without the limits of network cable. And the Proctor-Hood dynamic is the closest thing we're going to get to the Raylan Givens-Boyd Crowder firecracker of a relationship that Justified gave us for 6 years. 

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS - "BEAT THE CHAMP" - Beat The Champ is the latest from the prolific songwriter John Darnielle and The Mountain Goats and their best in years. Where the last few albums seemed to plod along pleasantly down the same road the group has trod for a few years now, their latest offering is a love letter to something near and dear to Darnielle: the squared circle. The whole album isn't about wrestling, but where it excels is when Darnielle marries the low-brow glory of local wrestling with meditations on life and death and childhood. We see the world of these wrestlers through the eyes of Darnielle, how he imagined them as a boy, as heroes in masks and capes, and how he thinks of them now as a grownup, their struggle in the ring for a little bit of glory and maybe a couple bucks to make the long drive home worth the trip. Darnielle has never shied away from documenting his life as a child in the shadow of the tormentor that was his stepfather so one can't help but imagine little John watching these people become superheroes in the ring and have this world to escape to, even if only one match at a time.

THE WINTER FAMILY by Clifford Jackman - Clifford Jackman has submitted a piece of work in what has become one of my favorite genres in the last few years, the dusted off and resuscitated western. The titular Winter family, guided with an unwavering and unrelenting iron fist by patriarch Augustus Winter, stalk their prey all over post-Civil War America as henchmen, bounty hunters and outlaws in search of carnage and chaos wherever they can find it. There's a theme of resistance to the march of time and progress that Augustus leads the fight against, the resistance of the oncoming growth of civilization and civility. In recent years, works by the late Robert B. Parker, Joe R. Lansdale, and the modern classic The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, have all touched on the elements of the classic western story and given it new life by injecting a modern sense of storytelling and, my favorite, some neo-noir bloodlust.
  

 KILL ME THREE TIMES - This is an odd little movie about a hit man who is summoned to a small town at the behest of a bar owner who believes his wife is cheating on him. His suspicions are confirmed, but with that realization comes an entire intricate web of double and triple crosses to come crashing down. The movie is oddly paced and it keeps you interested simply because of how off-kilter it all seems; you want to keep watching as each thread of the story slowly comes unraveled to reveal the next odd turn. It's not really a comedy but it's not dramatic enough to be a thriller; it's somewhere in between, an Elmore Leonard-style dark comedy noir. Simon Pegg plays the hit-man caught up in the middle of a crooked cop, a dangerous bartender, an angry boyfriend, a spurned dental assistant, a hapless dentist, a woman who has an almost cartoonish ability to avoid being killed and a bag of cash.

THE GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS - I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the hometown heroes, the Association's best, my Golden State Warriors. They finished the year 67-15 which, for the uninitiated, is historically good, like, Michael Jordan and the Bulls good.^ As a native Southern Californian, the LA Lakers were a natural choice for my fandom but I've always disliked the Lakers for numerous reasons. The Warriors are a perfect team to get behind; they're smart, well coached, disciplined and humble, and they're winning in ways that people had previously thought teams couldn't win by. Old school basketball people like Charles Barkley want teams to have traditional big men and be able to drive to the basket with strength and power but what the Warriors do is funnel the ball to the outside shooters, most notably Klay Thompson and the league MVP this year, Stephen Curry and use their quickness, ball-handling skills and sharpshooting abilities to outscore just about everyone. Traditionally, teams have a point guard who brings the ball up the court and sets up the play and distributes it to the playmakers but Golden State has the best shooter the league has ever seen who, every time, can either just spot up and shoot a three or, because he commands so much attention, outsmart the defense and get the ball to someone else on their incredibly deep team who can get an easy shot. Steve Kerr, formerly of the aforementioned Chicago Bulls teams with Michael Jordan, is a first-year coach who led his team to the best record in the NBA and have already completed a first round sweep of the New Orleans Pelicans in the playoffs. I can't wait to watch their deep playoff run this year and with the defending champion San Antonio Spurs already knocked out, the presumptive representative of the Eastern Conference, the Cleveland Cavaliers, reeling from an injury, a suspension and an old, rusty set of bench players, and no other real competition, I'm hoping the boys will bring a Larry O'Brien trophy to the Bay Area for the first time in almost 40 years.

*Banshee villains include Kai Proctor, former Pennsylvania Dutch Amish turned butcher and gangster; Chayton Littlestone, a brutal, rogue Native American sociopath whose life mission is to take back what the White man has stole from his ancestors; Rabbit, a Russian gangster who was at one time our hero Lucas Hood's former boss; Neo-Nazis; a gangster who is so physically large that he travels in a mobile office inside a tractor-trailer and an unhinged Army colonel.

^That still may not hold any significance for the uninitiated.

The Cats Are Always Watching...

The cats are not what they seem...

Still Fast, Still Furious, Still Going Strong

I've been trying to think about how many film franchises stay viable by the time they get to the seventh in the series, let alone how many franchises continue on with the same cast and continue to be better with each in the series, let alone have the seventh film make 140 million dollars in its opening weekend. I guess it's all about family. But what the Fast & Furious movies have been able to do is pretty remarkable, especially considering how many of the factors that go into conventional filmmaking are notably absent, namely plot, character development, a script, etc. I suppose the audience for these films, starting with the first in 2001, doesn't care so much for character development as long as Vin Diesel throws on a white tank top while prowling around car races amidst girls in bikinis and gleaming rice rockets with their hoods up. However, nearly 15 years and 6 films later, nothing has changed but how much money they're bringing in. I want to say they are creatively advancing but I don't think that's quite accurate. The set pieces are becoming larger and more extravagant, the directing becoming sharper and slicker, the costars becoming bigger and bigger, both literally and figuratively, but in a sense, they've become simplified, boiled down to the leanest, meanest, cleanest thing they can think of. You could watch these movies with the sound off and not miss a beat. The scenes of dialogue in 7 are the same they were in the first, mini monologues on porches and balconies praising street values like loyalty to friends, family, toughness and cars. The draw is the cars and the choreographed scenes of carnage and mayhem inflicted upon the streets of just about every city in the world. There is no subtlety or subtext to anything going on in these films, it's all about watching Vin Diesel fight The Rock, or Vin Diesel fight Jason Statham, or in the case of Fast & Furious 6, which includes a bit of a tongue in cheek gag that has the bad guy putting together a crew that is the funhouse mirror version of our beloved crew, Vin Diesel's Dom and The Rock's Agent Hobbs standing side by hulking side in a tag team match versus Luke Evans as Shaw, the British mercenary and his giant sidekick Klaus. It's something you could imagine seeing in a WWE ring but in this case, it's in a giant cargo plane that is in the midst of crash landing on seemingly the longest runway ever made. The filmmakers know what we want to see. These films are the last of a dying breed; dumb, big budgeted, overblown, larger than life blockbuster crowd-pleasers.

Furious 7 opens with a boner-inducing scene for action film lovers in which we see Deckard Shaw, played by Jason Statham ... exactly the way Jason Statham plays every character, in a hospital room telling his comatose brother Owen Shaw that he will find Dom Toretto and his crew and avenge him. As Shaw leaves the room, we see that he has wreaked havoc on the hospital and turned it into a war zone in order to gain access to his brother, under heavy guard due to his actions in Fast 6. After blowing up the Toretto-O'Conner home in Los Angeles directly after blowing up Han in Tokyo (who left the crew to go back home after the death of his girlfriend Giselle, the stunning Gal Gadot, soon to be seen in the new Batman movie as Wonder Woman), Shaw sets out for the crew. Described as a ghost, Shaw is working with an African warlord to procure a device known as God's Eye which is capable of spying on any and every citizen in ways that would make every Whole Foods liberal in Berkeley's head explode. The bulk of the film sees the crew protecting a (for some reason incredibly hot) hacker named Ramsey who is trying to both acquire and hack into the God's Eye program to plant a virus and deactivate it. Kurt Russell appears as Mr. Nobody, the head of the shadow organization responsible for developing the God's Eye program who, for reasons not quite made entirely clear, needs Dom and his crew to track it down after it has been stolen. From there, we see Vin Diesel and Paul Walker drive a super car (which, for some reason, has no brakes) from one skyscraper to another to yet another in Abu Dabi, Vin Diesel making an entire parking garage crumble with a stomp of his foot, The Rock flexing his biceps and breaking a cast off of his arm, The Rock shooting down a helicopter with a gatling gun he took off of a drone that he crashed by jumping an ambulance off a bridge into, The Rock saying the line, "Woman, I am the cavalry," and various other amazing gravity and logic defying feats of strength and cunning. Walking out of the theater, you feel like you need to pick a fight or Tokyo drift out of the parking lot; all of the testosterone and bare knuckle brawling makes a guy feel a little extra kick in his step. There is a great scene (repeated verbatim later in the film!) where Diesel and Statham face each other in their respective vehicles, pure American muscle and slick European sportscar, and play a game of chicken where neither of them blinks and end up smashing head on into each other. Another scene has Vin in yet another suped-up muscle car that he drove out of an airplane and parachute-landed on a mountain road as he faces about a dozen henchmen vehicles and gunmen in odd black masks and instead of shooting his way out or trying something crazy and elaborate, he simply just drives off the cliff and crashes to the foot of the canyon. That's it. It's yet another example of the simplified choices they make, you're expecting something crazy but what ends up happening is the most basic yet ridiculous thing you could think of.

What I really liked about 7 is the melding of a few different styles that James Wan brought into this film. A veteran of the kind of horror films I generally don't go for (Saw, The Conjuring), Wan's only real action film directing experience is the 2007 Kevin Bacon film Death Sentence, which was pretty decent. The last few films have been crisscrossing the globe, from Rio to the DR, to Spain and England, to the Middle East and back to where it all began in Los Angeles, which was actually kind of nice to see, as the climax of 7 was the crew zipping around the streets of LA with choppers, drones and Jason Statham after them at every turn. But with Wan comes an eye for foreign talent, which brings in the likes of Statham and Tony Jaa, legendary badasses in their own corner of the world, not to mention Ronda Rousey and Kurt Russell. This newest installment is the most of something else that we've seen in the series so far; one part kinetic close-quarters Asian martial arts film, one part Mission: Impossible-style globe-trotting high tech thriller, one part American muscle action film. I am much more interested in seeing this kind of thing, trying to catch homages and influences, marveling at the sheer delightful absurdity of it all, than trying to poke holes in the plot, which seems to be the big knock from non-fans, which is a tired debate. I found it immensely delightful to see Kurt Russell in a suit cracking jokes and trying to give Vin Diesel a Corona, and then later on, having him go old-school Kurt Russell and start picking off henchmen in a warehouse like he's done it a thousand times. It's impossible to not want to stand up and cheer any time The Rock comes on screen (although he is mostly absent from 7, just one heavyweight match with Statham in the first act and then his triumphant return during the climactic LA battle which involved the aforementioned drone, ambulance, broken cast, etc.) because he makes Diesel look like little more than an overgrown kid. Some non-action flourishes added to the film in an attempt to add dramatic tension involve the completion of the Lettie-has-amnesia storyline and a subplot involving the late Paul Walker's Brian lamenting the fact that fatherhood involves a lack of bullets and explosions. The final scene is a touching if slightly confusing tribute to Paul Walker involving a Vin Diesel voice-over and a montage of the best of Walker. I don't know where the series will go from here, however the semi-cliffhanger ending leaves plenty of avenues to explore and since two of the main characters have died in the last two films and one of the main actors has died in real life, they will either have to bring in some new blood or continue on with who they still have and create another dynamic of some kind.  

What I'm Enjoying Now (Nonfiction Edition)

I've been reading a lot of these nonfic books about trying to understand the world by looking at things a little closer and trying to make sense of the facts and the data that's in front of us. Nate Silver's book The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail But Some Don't is heavy on statistics and data, what Silver is most known for mastering. In Signal, Silver presents many cases where data and deep diving into statistics may present a better view of what's really going on, from evaluating baseball prospects to projecting election results. The book compares and contrasts differing viewpoints regarding analysis and how they can be used in unison as well as be used off each other to prognosticate and predict possible outcomes. He stresses that searching for the signal, the probable truth as opposed to the perceived popular opinion, the noise, may lead us to better predictions and eventually better long-term understanding.

Similarly, William Poundstone, in his book Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing & Outwitting Almost Everybody, stresses that by merely paying attention to the seemingly random and arbitrary patterns that people unconsciously abide by, we may be able to gain knowledge and understanding with which to gain favor, outwit foes and win Oscar pools and games. It's an interesting read, like Silver, Poundstone integrates real-world concerns like figuring out the stock markets and Big Data with sports, where the intersection of data analysis and unscripted action meet. A lot of what the book purports is that you can outguess simple events like multiple choice tests and card games by merely studying and understanding the things that people are most likely unconsciously going to do and using that to your advantage.

Nassim Nicolas Taleb, one of the world's foremost predictive analysts, writes in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, that we tend to come up with simple answers to complex problems after they've already happened, instead of doing the work and the research ahead of time to prevent them from happening in the first place. Taleb focuses on events such as the 9/11 attacks and the 2008 financial crisis, which Taleb predicted in the book, published in 2007, to prop up his "black swan theory," which, by using psychological and mathematical & scientific approaches, may help us understand and predict seemingly significant acts of randomness, and how to cope with them after the fact. Black Swan is a bit heavier of a read than Silver and Poundstone, and admittedly a bit over my head at some points, but extremely informative and interesting.

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, the latest from Malcolm Gladwell, explores the phenomenon of that mythical battle between an unstoppable force and a diminutive challenger and how easy it actually is to combat Goliath by using his own weaknesses against him. Gladwell uses historical events and battles, both physical (such as the titular fight) and cultural (civil rights movements, basketball, etc.) to show how underdogs can outwit their more dominant foes by engaging in unexpected behavior and using perceived weaknesses to exploit holes in expected favorites. Some of the arguments are a bit weak, such as a chapter where a successful Hollywood producer with dyslexia claims he would never wish it upon his worst enemy but wouldn't have wanted to grow up not suffering from it is uninspiring and drags a bit but nonetheless Gladwell's point of view when it comes to addressing the benefits of outliers and underdogs is evident here. It shows us that by merely taking a second look at our battles and re-assessing our strengths and weaknesses may perhaps help us beat the odds.

The most recent book of essays by one of my favorite culture critics Chuck Klosterman, I Wear The Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real And Imagined), explores the phenomenon of cultural villiany and how it affects the way we consume pop culture and the way we see our society's most infamous characters. For example, why we like some sports figures but loathe others, and why a character like Batman is heroic, but we look at real life vigilantes as dangerous criminals. What Klosterman is trying to understand is what we as a society are trying to get at when we label someone as a villain, and why, perhaps, those people are much more rewarding and interesting to study and learn about because, as he states as part of his thesis, as he gets older, the villains are just more fun. This is the most fluid and least concrete of the bunch, more of an opinionated criticism of pop culture than a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of it all but Klosterman is a brilliant essayist and has one of the keenest eyes for this kind of stuff. 

Shooting Down the American Sniper

This American Sniper story is supremely interesting to me. There are so many different levels to this story and so many controversies that it covers just about every base in social, political and entertainment circles. Chris Kyle was a US Navy SEAL who served four tours of duty in Iraq and he lived an odd, interesting, public life, wrote a book, became an icon, was murdered, and posthumously had a movie based on his life. What may or may not have actually happened in real life apparently somewhat differed from what Kyle put into his book, which was adapted and abridged by Clint Eastwood and a team of writers into what is now the number one movie in the US and the largest ever opening for an R-Rated movie in history. Kyle, a blustery, overconfident, uber-patriot is portrayed in the film by Bradley Cooper, who made the film his pet project after Kyle's death. Cooper plays Kyle as a humble, dedicated man who simply wants to protect his country from enemies foreign and domestic. As a long-range sniper, Kyle provides cover for ground troops fighting insurgents and clearing buildings. He doesn't enjoy killing but sees it simply as his duty to protect his brothers. He has his mission broken down to it's simplest form; If he doesn't kill them, they'll kill him. The fact that Clint Eastwood, the Godfather of the lone wolf vigilante film and noted conservative icon, is the architect of Kyle's onscreen story is not lost on the film's critics.

First, the film. American Sniper is, at it's heart, an action movie. Seth Rogen famously called it propaganda but it is really just a run-of-the-mill action movie. It feels hastily put-together and rushes through what should be important parts in Kyle's development. That being said, it does what the best films of its kind do right, namely, putting the battle between the life lived in service and the live lived back at home at the forefront. Kyle, compelled to enlist after seeing the twin towers fall on September 11, 2001, leaves behind his wife, played by Sienna Miller, and children to lay prone on top of crumbling buildings in Iraq to lay cover fire for his fellow servicemen. By the end of his first tour, Kyle has earned the nickname "Legend" among his brothers in arms and has become a god among men. We see Kyle and his squadron as they attempt to gain intelligence on a local warlord known as the Butcher, all the while dodging RPG's and the long range bullets of a very lethal sniper in his own right whom Kyle sees as his own personal mission to eliminate, even at the expense of going off-mission. The film is about determination and obsession and hero worship. Kyle says at one point, "The only thing that haunts me is all the guys I couldn't save." He's explaining to a therapist and himself and the audience that he has no regrets. It's hard to not imagine Eastwood himself playing Kyle if he were 40 years younger, stoically grimacing through the entire affair. Is it worth a $100 million opening weekend? Probably not. But the film itself isn't the only reason it became such a behemoth.

Which brings us to the controversies.

As previously noted, there are three versions of the Chris Kyle story. The film is, frankly, a watered down, cleaned up version of the man's life. That fact should not be held against Eastwood and Cooper, as the abridging of an autobiography for the big screen is a common tactic. However, that glossing over of some of the more controversial aspects of Kyle's life has, in itself, turned into a controversy. It seems that the film has become a litmus test for ones political beliefs, with patriotic right wingers applauding the film as a piece of good old fashioned patriotic filmmaking and liberals complaining that the film glamorizes a war and a soldier, in particular a soldier who is a long-range sniper, which Michael Moore this week called a "cowardly" act, in a way that signifies American imperialism and American warmongering. There have been many blog entries and articles about the lies and lessons that the film is supposedly telling us dumb, impressionable American viewers but I'm fairly certain that nobody is coming into a viewing of this film with a blank slate, you've already made up your mind by now. The only thing to discuss is your already formed opinion. Eastwood has said that the film is not meant to be taken as a political statement but it's hard to separate the man and his well documented statements as a conservative Republican from his work.* A secondary aspect of the controversy that has followed the film is it's surprise appearance on the Oscar ballot, perhaps in lieu of the MLK biopic Selma. While both American Sniper and Selma were both nominated for Best Picture, David Oleyowo's name was absent on the Best Actor in a Leading Role ballot while Cooper's name surprisingly snuck in. The lack of diversity on the ballot this year^  happened at the exact time that the American Sniper hysteria was reaching a full boil and the film was in due course roped into the conversation; a film about a white man of questionable moral fortitude who killed hundreds of people achieving more acclaim than a film about the most important civil rights advocate in American history. Not to mention that the film's director, a black woman, was also absent from the list of Best Director nominees (as was Eastwood). Normally, awards show quibbles are meaningless but when the topic of race is at such a forefront in the national consciousness, this type of oversight becomes an issue. The final aspect of this whole story is the fact that {SPOILER} Chris Kyle was murdered in 2013 by a fellow veteran at a shooting range. The man, Eddie Ray Routh, suffered from PTSD and shot and killed Kyle and another veteran at a shooting range in Texas and led police on a car chase before being caught and confessing to the crimes. Routh is currently awaiting a trial in February where a jury will determine if he was sane or not at the time of the shooting. The problem is, the Kyle legend has become such a big story, both to local Texans and because of the book and film that prosecutors believe the trial may become tainted. It's rare that a major legal trial and a mainstream film based on the true events of that case run into each other at the same time like this. After the film's theatrical run is winding down and after the Oscar's are handed out, the results of the trial will again add a new twist in this complex, strange story.

Perhaps the only winner of this entire story is Hollywood. For an R-Rated movie to make $100 million in it's opening weekend in the barren wasteland of January is a major win for the industry. It won't win any Academy Awards but the fact that the film even made it into the conversation is interesting in itself. Recent films treading similar subjects in the same war such as The Hurt Locker are better but the film is still worth watching. If anything, Bradley Cooper is in top form and Clint Eastwood is still proving that he can make a big action movie with the best of 'em. Go see it and then do some reading, I'm interested in seeing where everyone lands on this. 

*The fact that an 84 year old man directed two major motion pictures this year is, in itself, something that should be noted. While American Sniper has turned into a major success, Eastwood's Four Seasons biopic Jersey Boys was somewhat of a flop earlier this year.

^All twenty actors nominated this year are white, a statistic that, while probably a big picture problem, only adds to the confusion of some of the nominations this year, in my opinion. 

What I'm Enjoying Lately

BBC RADIO DRAMAS - Existing somewhere between an audiobook and a live stage play, full cast dramatization radio plays are kind of like listening to a movie without watching it. Where a standard audiobook will have one voice portraying all dialogue and narration, presentations like these BBC Radio Dramatizations I've been listening to lately employ an entire voice cast along with sound effects and music to create an entire piece. This type of radio play goes way back to the time before television where audiences would tune in to serialized weekly radio shows with recurring and popular characters in all genres. Orson Welles famously adapted H.G. Wells' The War Of The Worlds into a radio production that was produced to sound so realistic that audiences actually believed that they were hearing a radio report of a real-life alien invasion. These shows I've been listening to lately include a series of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett adaptations as well as various H.P. Lovecraft stories, which are particularly enjoyable. I don't drive as much as I used to so the thought of getting through a 10 disc audiobook is now a chore rather than a treat but these fun and different 1 to 2 hour abridged stories are perfect to add to the daily playlist.

WHIPLASH - At this point, it takes a lot for a movie to stick out in my mind in a film landscape awash with movies that are cookie-cutter retreads of the same stories over and over again but every year there are a couple that make the cut. Among all the biopics and controversial films this awards season lies an arguably underappreciated, underseen film made by a first-time 28 year old director called Whiplash. The film gives you the titular sensation as it follows 19 year-old Andrew (Miles Teller) as a talented but troubled music student at a prestigious music academy in New York as he goes from practice room to classroom to stage practicing and practicing and obsessing and bleeding and crying and practicing, practicing, practicing. He wants to be great, not just great at playing the drums, but literally one of the Greats. He stares at photos of his idols tacked to the wall and listens to CDs trying to imbibe their brilliance straight from the speakers. He curses himself and sweats and bleeds all over his kit attempting to perfect his music. His dysfunctional relationship with teacher, tormentor and timekeeper Fletcher (Oscar nominee J.K. Simmons) exists as the classic protagonist v. antagonist until they inevitably realize that they are exactly what they were both looking for, even perhaps they are two sides of the same coin; Andrew wants to be Charlie Parker, Fletcher wants someone to prove they have what it takes to be the next Charlie Parker. Like the song "Caravan" that Andrew plays in the climax, the film slowly builds to a screaming boil until it finally erupts into a brilliant cacophony that literally left me in awe and short of breath. This was the film I've been waiting for Miles Teller to make, something away from the YA adaptations and frat boy schlock he's been associated with for the past few years. Like Jennifer Lawrence was able to do, I think he might be ready to become a real movie star.

THE LONG AND FARAWAY GONE by Lou Berney - The Long And Faraway Gone is a novel that explores the mysteries of memory and how it plays a part in the way we see the world and remember what is important to us. The story consists of two stories told in two different time periods, the summer of 1986 in Oklahoma City and 2012. Wyatt, the only survivor of a massacre at the movie theater he worked at as a teenager and Julianna, whose older sister disappeared at the state fair never to be seen again. Wyatt, now a wiseass private detective in Las Vegas, is forced to return to Oklahoma City on a case and inevitably confront his past in an attempt to find out what really happened that day at the theater and try to find out why he was the only one spared. Julianna, now a nurse struggling to live a normal life, is thrust back into that summer years ago where she was left sitting on a curb eating cotton candy waiting for her sister to return from a chat with a carnival worker. The carny from that day has resurfaced and she is compelled to finally talk to him and find out what he really knows after all these years. What Berney excels at is finding a Dennis Lehane-type way of drawing the reader into a world that is built on the memory of events long-past, where a single act of violence continues to ring through the lives of people struggling to move past it. These two people still in limbo finally and briefly cross paths and in reminiscing about their lives long ago, they might finally be able to uncover what it takes to move on.

THE MARTIAN by Andy Weir - The Martian is a book that I was able to sit and finish in the span of two days, which is rare nowadays for me. The science, math and jargon was way over my head but Weir concocted a story so compelling and interesting that I couldn't stop reading. Mark Whatney, the 17th person in history to set foot on Mars, becomes it's sole inhabitant after his Ares 3 mission goes awry and his crewmates are forced to evacuate the planet after believing him dead. Equipped with a MacGyver-like set of skills and a gallows sense of humor, he survives for over a year and a half on the red planet by cannibalizing his habitat and using the equipment and vehicles like a mechanic uses old cars for spare parts. He builds and takes apart and re-purposes just about everything in his HAB in order to put off the inevitable day where he would run out of food, water, power or all three. The book shifts between Watney's mission logs and the goings-on of NASA back on Earth as they deal with the PR nightmare that erupts after satellite imagery reveals that Watney is, in fact, not dead and that they must now figure out a way to get him home. I have no idea how accurate the tech talk in the book is and frankly I don't really care. It's a very fun and interesting read and will hopefully become a fun, interesting film in the hands of director Ridley Scott and writer Weir. Matt Damon, playing a character noticeably similar (on paper) to the one he played in Interstellar, will anchor a cast that includes the ever-amazing Jessica Chastain as well as Michael Pena, Kate Mara and Sean Bean.