Love What's Weird
The Curseborne Player's Guide, the Green Hornet, and the need for absurdity in our lives.
It’s been extremely tempting to just put a link to this video and call that my newsletter done for the month: A CMLL event promoting Pokémon Z-A.
(Note: Audio is only in Spanish.)
However, I suppose I should give more context. Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre is the oldest wrestling organisation still in existence today. Pokémon Z-A is set in Not-Mexico, and the big character of this game is Hawlucha. I mean, look at this cutie.
So, since the new game is in not-Mexico and the big character is a bird luchador, Pokémon Latinoamérica decided to make a YouTube video to promote the game by teaming with CMLL to create a two-and-a-half-hour wrestling show.
And it’s a straight-forward event with several trios matches (i.e., tag team matches with three wrestlers on each side) that require winning two out of three falls, except that the main event is “Team Hawlucha” (i.e., the good guys) against “Team Machamp” (i.e., the bad guys), with the captain of the winning team getting a bespoke Pokémon belt as a reward.
It’s bonkers. It’s a thing that simply should not exist. And yet it does. Which got me thinking about The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
RHPS is also a thing that shouldn’t exist. I recently chatted with Chris Spivey about it for a Patreon-exclusive podcast episode of Genreless, and the one thing we kept coming back to is that it’s really hard to pigeonhole the movie, or deconstruct why it’s so successful. It’s a Hammer horror movie/satire of 50s genre films/sex farce/science fiction/musical? No, it’s just this chaotic weird thing that exists, and I love it (although, admittedly, it took a while for me to warm up to it).
But honestly, I think there should be more weird things in the world, especially now that David Lynch is gone. There should be things like baseball player demon hunter video games and soap operas that also feature vampires and tabletop RPGs about modern history written as if we were trying to reconstruct it five thousand years in the future.
It doesn’t even need to be surreal or deep or challenging or artistic. Bad, weird things should also exist. Dumb, weird things should exist. More specifically, your bad, dumb, weird thing should exist. Hell, I made a game based around playing talking dogs cosplaying D&D in a post-apocalyptic environment, and some people seem to think it’s pretty okay.
Not every weird thing is going to be to my taste—quite a lot of it might not be—but I want it to exist. In the current environment of huge media companies trying to play it safe to avoid offending fascists, there’s a real weirdness vacuum.
For all the people that want yet another heterosexual dating show to mindlessly consume, there’s going to be someone who wants to watch old Northern men doing raunchy and depressing hip hop. Someone really does want to hear your Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction about blowing up the world. And yes, someone wants to watch a couple of hours of luchadors wrestling in a Pokémon-themed wrestling ring.
Because I know I do.
News
The biggest news is that the Curseborne Player’s Guide is either about to go live on Kickstarter or has just gone live (depending on when you read this).
I’m one of two developers on this book, and I’m really excited to see it go live into the world! Here’s a brief summary of what you’ll find:
In this book, we introduce grounding concepts for playing the Accursed, providing role-playing hooks and touchstones rooted in the world they find themselves. These are intended for both brand-new players looking for a place to start and for players in the middle of a story who are open to new angles and complications. We expand on all the types of Accursed introduced in the Curseborne corebook, including those who don’t have a family to call their own, but also provide even more ways to express and wield the power of curses through new spells. We even add a new angle to the world of Curseborne as we present playable rules for the monster-hunting Venators, who contend with the same supernatural forces as the Accursed without Damnations of their own.
Speaking of monsters and things I’ve worked on, another of the Scarred Lands Creature Profiles is out: The Night-Touched!
Night-touched are unholy horrors created though the union of demonic energies and the essence of the shadow realm. In their natural state, night-touched have extremely smooth skin with a rubbery feel to it. Their skin is a deep midnight blue, aubergine, or obsidian color that seems to absorb any light that touches it. The night-touched have internal organs, but like those of undead creatures, they do not really function. They have thick, dark green blood that oozes slowly out of wounds, rather than spurting or pulsing like that of a living creature.
Finally, my character Shelby Shattock is (somehow) still alive in the Red Moon Roleplaying actual play of Masks of Nyarlethotep. Here are the latest episodes!
My Media
Much of the month has been taken up with reading my Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium comic PDFs which compile all the Marvel comics material in story order, so I can complain to friends and the Internet about it while secretly deeply enjoying owning them. But when I’m not reading that, I’ve been reading the Green Hornet comics from Dynamite.
I only knew a little about the Green Hornet before I started, and to be honest I was a little concerned about how they’d handle Kato (the Hornet’s Japanese chauffeur/sidekick). I started with the Year One stories, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed that run. They really made Kato a partner rather than a sidekick, and the creative team doesn’t shy away from the problems around being Japanese in America in the late 30s and early 40s.
There are actually a couple different continuities. The Year One material leads more-or-less into the Mark Weid run, and together they cover what is basically a version of the radio Green Hornet. The Kevin Smith run (with a few prelude volumes) assumes a version of the Green Hornet from the 60s TV show, but actually introduces a second generation of heroes set in around 2010. There’s also a near future Green Hornet (Green Hornet Strikes!) and some other one-shot books like a remastering of the original Golden Age comics and a team-up between the TV version and The Spirit.
I’ve generally enjoyed Dynamite’s Red Sonja comics (particularly the Gail Simone run), so I was pleased to see they did a similarly high-quality job on a very different classic hero.
Anyhow, it’s time to get back to robot dinosaurs masked heroes work, so I’ll leave it there. See you next month!