Noircana - a campaign toolkit?

Imagine a world where magic bleeds out raw, and infuses all within. Where arcane is mundane and lines between living and dead thin. A civilisation of sorcerers all the way up, from the newborn to gods that pass unseen, a landscape gone mad, and now MAD - with Mutual Assured Destruction.

Conventions, contracts and pacts abound, but out where the rules don't apply there's radicalism and exponential growth. Ever more subtle forms of power and means to exercise it. Mysteries in mysteries, but faint trails back to puppeteers for any who dare look, and know how - or can learn.

A world where wealth is redefined and anything really will be possible. If it isn't already...

This is one possible take on a project JD and I have been talking about here at his blog, The Disoriented Ranger. It's essentially a themed toolkit for tactical roleplaying*, but could also go beyond, into other game types too: imagine a wargame where units are unnecessary and battles fought with arcane power only, but orders of magnitude greater.

It started with JD's subsystem for personal magic weapons and my mind still on Read Magic. One of the major ideas we've been discussing is the near-universal magic item, formed naturally, and the concept of a magical signature unique to a particular source, and linked with that the idea of casters having a magical fingerprint and leaving it behind.

Not a noircrawl so much as a noircana to deepen a campaign, building on lesser-used spells like Detect Magic and maybe leading to whole new sets like those in Space-Age Sorcery. It plays to dark classics, but also more recent reference points like The Matrix and the so-called singularity. Hereticwerks and others already work with material like it.

Review - Minority Report

What an interesting film this is. I deliberately catch up with big movies and books years after release so it was the first time I'd seen it. I think a delay helps balance the gadgets and gimmicks better with the more subtle themes, and this seems like a film to benefit.

On the whole I enjoyed it. In terms of inspiration it's got lots to take away. The concept and accumulation of detail are impressive, exactly as we'd expect, although for me it's not as profound as it seems to want us to think it is and there's plenty that doesn't work, is too loose, oddly tired or silly, and all the obvious laughs felt somehow out of place.

It does still manage to surprise though, on many levels, and there's a feeling of a natural development despite the railroading, with plenty of observations to make and layers to peel back. I'm still thinking about the construction, the relationships of the characters, the painful ambiguity, especially of the ending, and the very human, honest approach.

Appropriately, given the water theme, it's the immersion in the world that really grabbed me, though more the subjective world or worlds of the central figures than what I saw as a rather uneven near future setting. It also has one of the best shots I can remember in a blockbuster, downstairs at the hotel, 10 to 15 perfectly realised seconds of cinema.

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