Around the Tower

We've spent a lot of time getting ready for Christmas this year and work is still a daily thing until Christmas weekend so there have not been a ton of updates this month.

• Movies:
• I saw Force Awakens last week and I'm still trying to decide how much  I like it. No spoilers here - I'll likely post about it next week while I am off.
• New trailer for Batman vs. Superman - Well that is a new wrinkle. Still not feeling Affleck as Bruce Wayne but I did like the snarky comeback in his conversation with Clark. Call me old school but I am also not thrilled about this interpretation of Lex Luthor either. I like Jesse Eisenberg but I am not liking what I see so far of the character.
• X-Men Apocalypse - Like what I see so far. 
• Independence Day - no idea. I liked the first one, not sure what this one is going to be but the trailer didn't really give me a "wow" feeling like the blowing up landmarks trailer of the original movie did.
• Star Trek Beyond - Looks like we lose the ship right off the bat - great. Then we have Kirk or someone jumping a motorcycle - great. Lots of jumping in general - it's the X-games edition of Trek! And as much as I like the Beastie Boys I will say I never expected to hear them as the backing music in a trailer for a Star Trek anything! Very mixed feelings about the next Trek movie.

• Games
• Next session of Wrath of the Righteous will happen in January so all quiet there
• Played another session in Paladin Steve's Kingmaker campaign - still having fun with that
• Will be running another sesison of Marvel Heroic after new years to hopefully close out the arc we started a couple of years ago in this very occasional campaign. 
• I've been focusing on 40K in the meantime so I will probably have some posts about that in the near future too.

• Kickstarters
• I was one of the many backers of the MST3K Kickstarter. I pretty much had to be as that was one of the mainstays of the 1990's for me. I'm glad that it did well and hopeful we will see something awesome out of it. Reality check: Yes, I will be watching everything they send me, old or new.
• I backed the Battletech computer game Kickstarter and I am hopeful that we get something out of that's awesome as well. More 80's -90's nostalgia there too but the computer games were usually pretty fun and the guys doing this one have some experience and the right leadership to make it happen. Reality check: Yes, I will be playing this.
• I backed the 1$ mystery RPG project Kickstarter  because ... what the heck - it's a dollar! I am curious to see what comes out of it - no specific hopes or wants on it, I am just intrigued enough to follow it. Reality check: Whether I play it or not really depends on what kind of game the creator makes. Regardless, I only spent a dollar, so even if he makes a game about nuns doing chores around the nunnery I won't feel too bad.
• Finally, I joined the Runequest Classic Edition Kickstarter, partly out of nostalgia, partly out of collector-itis, and partly to keep a good thing going. I played a fair amount of Runequest in the 80's and into the early 90's and while I was never one of the fanatics about it I did think it was a good game with an interesting and original mythology paired up with mechanics that were just different enough from D&D to keep it lively. I sold off my last copy of RQ3 years ago so the opportunity to pick up a hardback copy of RQ2 and some supporting material at a reasonable cost was very attractive. I also like that the plan is to keep the game in print and supported and even though it's not my "main" game and never has been, I like it and respect it enough to help out there too.

That's it for now - more to come!