Peter Jackson Directing Doctor Who?

There have been rumours for some time about Peter Jackson (director of The Lord of the Rings movies and many more) directing Doctor Who. Jackson is well-known to be a life-long fan of Doctor Who and a couple years ago, it was confirmed that he was interested in directing the show—just so long as he received his own Dalek as payment.

Well, Peter Jackson has recently uploaded a video to his Facebook page, which many people are seeing as a confirmation that he is now officially directing an episode. The video certainly seems to imply that, although it never actually comes out and directly says as much. It's possible that he and Peter Capaldi (who appears in the video) are just having a bit of fun with the rumours. But it could well be a tease before an official announcement.

Assuming it is happening, I am very intrigued. I love The Lord of the Rings movies, but I'm much less enthralled by The Hobbit movies, so we'll have to see—but I suppose that's true of any situation. Nevertheless, I look forward to it.

Apparently, I can't embed a Facebook video without a Facebook account, so I'm embedding a copy someone else put up on Youtube. You can watch the original at this link if the Youtube one gets taken down.

Champions of Corruption

At its heart, Pathfinder (and many other fantasy roleplaying games) is about playing heroes who go on great quests to vanquish the forces of evil. Along the way, the heroes develop great powers and acquire awesomely powered magical items. Of course, there can be a lot more to it than just this: the heroes form relationships with other characters, both other heroes (the other player characters) and various other people (the non-player characters); the heroes can create items of their own; they can open businesses; they can fall in love. The breadth of possibilities is huge, but for the most part that heart of good heroes fighting evil remains.

Yet even that doesn't have to be immutable. Not every character a player creates in the game is necessarily good. There are nine alignments and only three of them are good, after all. Three fall in the neutral range, and many players will choose those alignments for their characters. They allow for characters who may not be bastions of goodness, but still rise up to fight against evil and save the day. But what if players don't want to save the day? What if they want to be the ones the heroes would normally fight against? What of the three evil alignments?

I'm not a big fan of evil campaigns myself, though I can see the draw. After all, the game is about pretending to be someone you aren't, and playing evil is perhaps the ultimate expression of that. And even if it's not the sort of thing you want to do all the time, playing an evil character just once to give it a try is a tempting lure (I have certainly done it). The difficulty with evil campaigns is that evil characters can have a hard time working together. It only takes one PC to turn on the others and suddenly the whole game falls apart—and possibly even the gaming group if some players aren't happy with what has occurred. But if you can get past the difficulties, then an evil campaign can have its own rewards.

Champions of Corruption is the third Pathfinder Player Companion book to take a close look at the alignments in Pathfinder and offer options for players playing those alignments. I was very impressed with the first two books, Champions of Purity and Champions of Balance, and so was greatly looking forward to this book. Even if evil campaigns are not my cup of tea, a discussion of evil in the game is an important thing, especially when there has already been a discussion of good and neutrality.

Iron Gods - The Choking Tower

There is a downside to every adventure path being the same length. While having six adventures per adventure path creates a consistency so that players and gamemasters know what to expect, it also forces every story into a predefined length whether the story really works at that length or not. This is certainly not an uncommon problem. Television programmes have to fit every episode to set number of minutes and seasons tend to run the same number of episodes. It's ultimately something of an unavoidable problem, but it can lead to individual instalments feeling rushed or like filler.

The Choking Tower by Ron Lundeen feels a lot like filler. Of course, as it's only the third part of Iron Gods and I haven't read the remaining three volumes, it's hard to judge the adventure path as a whole, but this adventure doesn't seem to add a lot to what we've had so far. While its overall goal is important to the rest of the adventure path, the events of the adventure itself are rather peripheral.

The Choking Tower is certainly not a bad adventure. It will likely provide hours of entertainment for any group. But there's also little about the adventure that really stands out. On the whole, it's run-of-the-mill, with a fairly linear plot and NPCs who are mostly forgettable (although the main villain is a notable exception). It also lacks the vibrant setting of its immediate predecessor, presenting instead a setting that is pretty standard despite its science fiction trappings.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Doctor Who - Face the Raven

As the end of Series 9 approaches, it's not surprising that events on Doctor Who are beginning to build towards the finale. The overall direction and theme of the series has not been as clear this year as in other years, but there have been a few hints and they are starting to play out.

“Face the Raven” by Sarah Dollard begins the move towards the finale quite dramatically and even a little shockingly. It starts as a seemingly standard stand-alone adventure for the Doctor and Clara that then turns into something much different. It's a very good episode and very emotional. Unfortunately, it's let down—not by its own faults (mostly) but by the episodes that have come before it. They have failed to effectively bring the series to the point it reaches here. As a result, it's not quite as affecting as it could have been.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Occult Bestiary

While reading Occult Adventures, some people may be surprised that it doesn't contain any new monsters. Roleplaying books of this sort will often contain a selection of new monsters that serve both to illustrate how the new rules are used and to provide GMs with some ready-made opponents for PCs built with the new rules. Mythic Adventures, for example, has a small selection of mythic monsters for just these purposes, yet Occult Adventures has none.

The introduction to Occult Bestiary reveals that the original plan was to have a few monsters in Occult Adventures, but the limits of space meant that it just couldn't be. To have included the monsters would have meant leaving out something else. As nice as new monsters can be, it's a decision I'm glad they made as there is so much flavourful material in Occult Adventures, that there's very little I could imagine leaving out. Nevertheless, the new rules cry out for monsters that use them, and Occult Bestiary answers that cry.

Occult Bestiary contains all the monsters originally planned for Occult Adventures, plus dozens more. Now, the book is part of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting line, which means that the monsters within are tied to Golarion, whereas Occult Adventures is setting-neutral and thus any monsters that had appeared there would have been setting-neutral as well. However, it makes little difference in the end. While Occult Bestiary does use a few Golarion terms and locations, all the monsters within are easily divorced from the setting. Indeed, most of them make no explicit reference to Golarion at all. As such, this book is easily used with any campaign setting.

Technology Guide

Advanced technology has been present in the Pathfinder Campaign Setting since the very beginning. The old Pathfinder Chronicles: Gazetteer contains a 1-page entry on Numeria and its crashed spaceship (albeit referred to as a “great metal mountain”). It was inevitable that more detail would be forthcoming. Eventually, Numeria got its own dedicated book, Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars, and an adventure path, Iron Gods, that takes place there and exploits its science fiction aspects.

But adding technology into a fantasy game like Pathfinder takes more than just including some guns and computers in an adventure book. Not only do these things need statistics, but there also need to be consistent rules governing their use. Much like with magic items and spells, players are bound to be interested in having their characters acquire more of such items or even create them themselves. The game needs to have ways to cover such eventualities. Yet a book like Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars simply doesn't have the room to detail these kinds of rules in any extensive manner—not and have any space left over to talk about the setting. The same goes for Adventure Path volumes. Technology needs its own separate book.

That's where the Technology Guide comes in. It provides both rules necessary for integrating technology into a Pathfinder game and a plethora of sample items—big and small, low-powered and high-powered—for villains to use and player characters to acquire. Although the Technology Guide is published as part of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting line of books, this is actually a relatively setting-neutral book. It does focus on fitting its content to the flavour of Numeria and does have occasional references to places in Numeria (and elsewhere on Golarion), but for the most part, the material is generic enough for use in any campaign setting that features technology of any kind. And it's for good reason. As much as I praise world-specific content, there needs to be a baseline for the world-specific to build on. The baseline also allows people to create their own campaign worlds that use technology. It's therefore not surprising that the rules and items from the Technology Guide have been added to the Pathfinder Reference Document, which is usually reserved for material from the setting-neutral hardcover rulebooks.

Doctor Who - Sleep No More

I've commented many times before on Doctor Who's ability to do just about any style or genre. It can be something completely different from week to week. Sometimes it sticks to old formulas; other times, it tinkers with something new; still other times it dives head first into the experimental to come up with something completely different and bizarre. I love this aspect of the show, but that doesn't necessarily mean I love every experimental episode. Some try really hard, but don't quite succeed (see “The Rings of Akhaten”, for example).

I will admit that I was expecting “Sleep No More” to be one those ones that fails. This was partly because of the found-footage format, which is a style I'm not fond of. The second was because it's written by Mark Gatiss, whose past contributions to Doctor Who I've generally found to be mediocre at best (although “Cold War” is pretty good) and sometimes downright bad (“Victory of the Daleks”). The combination of the two left me with low expectations for this episode. That was, perhaps, unfairly biased of me—especially considering I ended up enjoying the episode somewhat.

“Sleep No More” is a bold experiment and not the kind of thing Doctor Who should be doing every week. But once in a while, bold experiments are exactly what the show needs. Intriguingly, aspects of “Sleep No More” are actually very formulaic and follow paths seen in the show many times before. But it takes those formulaic aspects and plays around with both the presentation and the viewers' expectations of how they will resolve. The execution isn't perfect and there are many flaws in the story—but oddly, some of those flaws actually help enhance it. “Sleep No More” is an episode that many people will dislike, some of them intensely. It's certainly not an easy episode to digest, or make heads or tails of. However, I suspect it will be an episode that is talked about (for good or bad) for a long time as it defies attempts to categorize and rate it.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Occult Origins

Pathfinder products are published under several different lines of books. There's the Roleplaying Game line, which consists of the hardcover rulebooks. There's the Pathfinder Campaign Setting and Pathfinder Player Companion lines, and of course, Pathfinder Adventure Path amongst others. Each line gives an indication of what people can expect from the books published in it—rules material, adventures, etc.

However, within the lines, there are sometimes smaller series—not generally officially marked as such, but with naming patterns to indicate them. There are the Revisited and Unleashed books in the Campaign Setting, or the Blood of... books in the Player Companions. One of the smaller groups like these is the Origins books, with Mythic Origins, Advanced Class Origins, and now Occult Origins. These books are companions to rulebooks (Mythic Adventures, Advanced Class Guide, and Occult Adventures respectively), with each one introducing the concepts of their respective rulebooks in the world of Golarion and, primarily, offering lots of new player options. I've commented in my reviews of the last two that Origins is a bit of a misleading name, as they don't really discuss the origins of the new material or even the origins of characters using that material. That said, Occult Origins is better in this regard and actually does briefly discuss how characters become some of the occult classes.

In fact, Occult Origins is definitely the best of the Origins books to date. Paizo has refined the series with each successive book. Occult Origins is a book of mostly “crunch” (i.e. mechanical rules options for characters), but it is the best kind of crunch—the kind that supports the flavour of the setting as well as giving characters fun new options. The material in this book is full of flavour that both expands the world of Golarion and expands our understanding of it. And this only serves to enhance the gaming experience.

Iron Gods - Lords of Rust

Setting is an important part of any roleplaying campaign. Different people may like different levels of detail, but there is always, at the very least, an implied setting, a place where everything is happening—even if it's just the dungeon the characters are currently adventuring in. Setting grounds the characters in a certain reality. It creates certain expectations and lays down certain limits. It helps define where the characters come from, who they are, where they're going, and what they want. Generally, a well-defined and memorable setting paves the way for memorable adventures.

Adventures can use settings in different ways. Sometimes, the setting is little more than window-dressing, with little effect on the adventure itself. It might also be a relatively generic setting, one that can be easily modified or inserted into another more detailed setting. It's important that there be adventures like this. Gamemasters often need adventures that they can grab on a moment's notice and use with little to no adjustment. These adventures need to fit in regardless of the setting any particular GM needs.

But sometimes, adventures are tied much more closely to their setting, to the point that the adventure really couldn't happen anywhere else—not without some major changes, at any rate. Obviously, adventures like this will only work if the GM is using the particular setting, and they're not the sort a GM can just grab at a moment's notice. They need to be a planned part of the campaign. Yet, these adventures are often amongst the best and most memorable of adventures. That's not to say adventures with a more generic setting can't be great and memorable—just that those with a highly detailed setting enjoy a bit of an edge in the race.

Lords of Rust by Nicolas Logue, the second part of Iron Gods is an adventure where the setting is all important. It is a sandbox adventure in pretty much the truest sense of the term (something that is difficult to do in an adventure path). The player characters can pretty much proceed however they want and the setting is almost entirely what drives the action. A poorly detailed setting could break the whole adventure. But this adventure doesn't have a poorly detailed setting. Instead, it has one of the most memorable settings I've seen in a fantasy RPG adventure, and it makes for what will likely be an extremely memorable adventure for any group of players.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Doctor Who - The Zygon Inversion

Click here to read my review of “The Zygon Invasion”, the first part of this two-part story.

I commented last week that, of all the opening episodes of two-part stories so far this series, “The Zygon Invasion” was the most dependent on its follow-up episode. While this is certainly true, it is interesting that “The Zygon Inversion” is rather different in style. Where “The Zygon Invasion” is a world-spanning thriller with a large cast of characters, military action, and more, “The Zygon Inversion” is a much more personal tale, focusing on just the few key players. This is rather fitting, given the title. It inverts your expectations.

For the most part, it inverts them in a good way, too, for this is a strong story with a powerful message at its core, and, in one scene in particular, Peter Capaldi gives one of the most amazing performances of any Doctor ever. The story is not without its flaws. Indeed, there are quite a lot of them, but its good points are strong enough that those flaws are not very noticeable unless you take the time to analyse what is going on (admittedly, something that I just can't help but do).

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Occult Adventures

First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had a strange little add-on at the back of the Player's Handbook: psionics. Through a very lucky die roll during character creation, your character could get a mind power that made your character considerably more powerful than everybody else's characters. Psionics were an optional part of the game that I personally never used and I never played in a game that used them. However, they were clearly used by some people because later editions of the game kept bringing them back, and revising and refining the rules for them. Psionics were always mind powers, but it varied whether they were completely separate from divine and arcane magic, or just a third kind of magic. But whichever approach was taken, they always used completely different mechanics than spellcasters—such as the power points used in Third Edition.

Psionics have remained absent in official Pathfinder products (until now); however, that hasn't stopped publishers of Pathfinder compatible material from adapting them. Dreamscarred Press has released several very popular products on psionics, for example. But as popular as a third party product might get, there are always those players and gamemasters who want to see official support.

So along comes Occult Adventures, released this past August, which brings psionics—sort of—into official Pathfinder. The “psionics” in this book come in the form of psychic magic, which is a third form of magic controlled entirely by the mind. The thematic overlap between psychic magic and psionics is clear, even though the book never actually uses the word psionics. Renaming psionics as psychic magic separates this version completely from Third Edition—important as psychic magic uses completely different mechanics from Third Edition psionics, unlike core Pathfinder, which is a revision of Third Edition. In fact, psychic spellcasters use exactly the same mechanics as arcane and divine spellcasters, bringing psychic magic completely in-line with the rest of the game. This also has the added benefit of making it possible to use both psychic magic and psionics from companies like Dreamscarred Press in your games (there'll be a lot of thematic overlap, but the systems remain distinct).

Doctor Who - The Zygon Invasion

Note: Even though the second episode has already aired at the time of posting this review, it was written without seeing that episode. A number of unforeseen factors simply delayed posting it until now.

When I first started this blog in 2011 and first started writing my Doctor Who reviews, I debated with myself how I would handle multi-part stories. Should I review each episode individually, or should I wait until they had all aired and respond to them as a whole? I couldn't quite come up with an answer, but it turned out, I didn't need to—at least, not right away. My first review was of “Let's Kill Hitler” which began the second half of Series 6. There were no multi-episode stories for the remainder of the series. There were none in the entirety of Series 7 either. There were none until “Dark Water”/“Death in Heaven” came along at the end of Series 8. However, at that time, I was on my unplanned hiatus. At the time, as I was still hoping I could somehow get caught up, I figured I would review both episodes together to make my job a little easier. But I didn't get caught up. When Series 9 started, I noted that there were going to be a lot of two-parters, so I had to make a final decision. I decided to review every episode individually.

So far, it's worked out pretty well, I think. The opening parts of the two-part stories (“The Magician's Apprentice” and “Under the Lake”) have stood pretty well on their own, even if not technically complete. However, the latest episode, “The Zygon Invasion”, is considerably more dependent on its second episode, which is still to come. It doesn't stand alone in the way previous first parts this series have. As such, it's somewhat harder to review. That doesn't mean there's nothing I can say about. In fact, I have a lot to say about it. It just means that it comes with the caveat that I could end up reassessing large portions of it once I've seen “The Zygon Inversion”.

All things considered, “The Zygon Invasion” is a gripping story and highly enjoyable. It brings Doctor Who back to modern day Earth and straight into a political thriller. In some ways, the episode feels reminiscent of later Torchwood episodes, and some Russell T Davies-produced Doctor Who. The episode does have a number of flaws, particularly in terms of character development; however, it's a good start to what may turn out to be a great story.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

October Round-Up, K9 Movie, and David Tennant and Catherine Tate Return!

It has now been exactly one month since I got things back up and running on Of Dice and Pen, and things have been going pretty well. I've actually had one of my most prolific months—which is good, considering I have a lot of catching up to do.

Talking of catching up, I've been developing a plan to get me through the high volume of Pathfinder material waiting for me. If everything works out, I hope to have myself fully caught up in about... 13 months. It's a long time, but considering I have about a year's worth of material to get through and there will be another year's worth of material released while I'm doing it all, another 13 months seems reasonable. As I mentioned a month ago, I plan to move about in the release schedule a bit, mixing up earlier and more recent releases. However, I will go through Pathfinder Adventure Path volumes in order.

In October, I got off to a good start, with reviews of the Strategy Guide and Monster Codex hardcovers, two excellent books (check out the links if you haven't already read the reviews). Other Pathfinder reviews were of People of the Stars, Inner Sea Monster Codex, Advanced Class Origins, and Iron Gods—Fires of Creation. I also wrote a review of the Pathfinder Compatible product, Monk Unfettered. Due to time and money issues, I don't get the opportunity to read and review very many 3rd-party Pathfinder books (my only other review of such a product was Random Urban Encounters in February 2013), so it was nice to do so this month. I hope to do more in the future as there are a lot of very good options out there.

Pathfinder reviews coming up soon will include Occult Adventures, Occult Origins, and the second part of Iron Gods, Lords of Rust. I had actually intended to have the first two of those out already (meaning that, technically, my schedule has already fallen a bit behind). They should be up in the next couple of days. I also intend to get to a few non-Pathfinder roleplaying reviews in the next month or two, including the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space Limited Edition Rulebook (published for the 50th anniversary).

Of course, Doctor Who returned to screens this month! Yay! I have reviews of the first six episodes: “The Magician's Apprentice”, “The Witch's Familiar”, “Under the Lake”, “Before the Flood”, “The Girl Who Died”, and “The Woman Who Lived”. Check them out if you haven't already. I'll have a review of this week's seventh episode, “The Zygon Invasion”, up in a couple of days. Regarding the remaining episodes of Series 8 that I still need to review, I will get to them after Series 9 has finished.

Earlier this month, the BBC announced news of a new Doctor Who spin-off series, called Class. See the link for my initial thoughts on that. More recently, news has come of a possible Doctor Who-related movie: K9—Time Quake. This is not a BBC production or something being made through license with the BBC, but rather through one of K9's co-creators, Bob Baker. This means that, like the Australian TV series K9, it won't be able to directly reference Doctor Who. However, it will also feature the return of Omega (from the Doctor Who stories, “The Three Doctors” and “Arc of Infinity”). Bob Baker is also co-creator of Omega, meaning, like K9, he retains some rights to the character.

I have my reservations about this movie. The Australian TV series was not very good (see this post for my more detailed thoughts on it), and while this movie may only be superficially related to the series, it doesn't give me high hopes. But also, part of the problem of the series was that K9 really doesn't work as a lead character. It's why even K9 and Company, a show named after the robot dog, was really going to be a series about Sarah Jane Smith with K9 as her sidekick. The later Sarah Jane Adventures also kept K9 as a side character and not a major focus. This is really what K9 ought to be. I just don't think K9 has what it takes to be the lead of a full movie.

All that said, that makes two Doctor Who-related announcements this month that I'm rather wary of, and it's a bit of an odd feeling. I remember well the wilderness years of 1990-2005, when there was only one new official filmed Doctor Who production. Back then, the news of any spin-off—K9, Class, whatever—would have had me and other Doctor Who fans jumping for joy. How times have changed.

So, for some exciting news to end off with this month, David Tennant and Catherine Tate are returning to Doctor Who! Not in the television series (although they featured in a flashback sequence in “The Girl Who Died”), but in Big Finish's ongoing series of audio adventures. For the longest time, Big Finish was limited to only Doctor Who from 1996 and earlier. But recently, they've acquired the rights to several new series characters, such as Kate Stewart and John Hurt's War Doctor. Now the tenth Doctor and Donna have been added to the list. I'm pretty excited! Now, I just have to find the means to afford to actually buy some. Sigh.

Anyway, it's been great to be back this month, and I look forward to great times to come! Thanks to everyone for your continued reading!