Disappointment

I know I said I was gonna try to blog about RPGs more and media less, but I gotta put something up on the blog here. Sorry to disappoint.

We watched the first episode of the new Disney+ Willow show. It was a disappointment as well. 

I gotta say, when the movie first came out, and the commercials and trailers said the name, I was not interested. It sounded too soft and silly, not like the badass fantasy I wanted to watch. But my best friend saw it, told me about it, and I checked it out (later, on home video). And loved it! 

Back in the 90s, Chris Claremont of X-Men comics fame wrote a trilogy of novels as sequels to the movie. But he basically blew up the world of the movies and changed everything, just keeping a couple of characters (Willow, Elora Danan, the brownies Franjean and Rool) and shoehorned them into what I assume was the fantasy novel trilogy he wanted to write that had nothing to do with Willow. 

I don't remember if I even finished the second novel or not. 

Despite knowing that the new Disney+ show is just the latest of the relentless 80s/90s nostalgia cash grabs, I had hoped it would be better than those Claremont novels. After the first episode, I'm not so sure. 

The episode, despite having Joanne Whaley as Queen Sorsha narrating the opening explaining what's happened since the movie, felt nothing like the movie. The tone was off. The dialogue from everyone but Sorsha (and later Willow & Meegosh) was too modern. It felt like watching one of those old Disney Channel programs my son would watch sometimes when he was little. Wizards of Waverly Place or something. Well, it had a more serious tone than that, but the whole "cool teens doing cool teen stuff" vibe was off-putting. There was nothing like the mythic, classic fantasy vibe of Lucas's movie. And that was before the crappy pop song end credits. 

Now, to make sure there are no misunderstandings...

 

-- spoilers ahead, be warned -- 

 

I wasn't bothered by the lesbian romance. The inversion of the prince of Galadorn being the educated, intelligent but worthless in a fight character was interesting. There were some cool monsters to fight in one sequence. But other than that, that's about it. It was even pretty obvious all along who was secretly Elora Danan. 

I'll probably check out next week's episode to give it a second chance, but if this episode is equally bad, I probably won't finish the series. What a let-down after the entertaining She Hulk and excellent Andor (yeah, probably more on this soon, since it really knocked it out of the park after the first two so-so episodes).

Hey, that's my baby, bring it back! (March Madness Day 21)

21 What is the narrowest genre RPG you have ever played? How was it?

Again, that would probably be Kobolds Ate My Baby. You can play a kobold, a kobold with a wooden spoon, or if you're lucky a kobold with a sharp stick. You can get killed fighting chickens, village children with sticks can pound you to death, and you have one mission and one mission only... King Torg (All Hail King Torg!) wants to eat that baby!

Now, this is probably not the sort of game you build massive campaigns around.  But if you don't have a quorum in your gaming group one night, or the DM has the flu or whatever, it's a nice little game to whip out and play.  It doesn't take a whole lot of prep, I would think (having only been a player, not the GM).  Char-gen is minimal and random and really in the big picture not that important.  Like I said, no matter how lucky you get with the random rolls, you're likely going to die quickly anyway.