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Saladin Ahmed continues his Daredevil run by keeping Matt firmly still in his role as a Catholic priest while... I spent a summer in discernment for the priesthood, and I have to say, this storyline is driving me nuts. Priests are not free-lancers. Is Father Murdoch a diocesan priest? Then he reports to a bishop (presumably Archbishop Timothy Dolan), and the archdiocese would absolutely be interested in talking to Father Murdoch and his fellow priest about being outed for running weapons. (If he's not a diocesan priest, then he's a member of an order, like the Franciscans, and again he has a superior who'd be asking what's going on.) Does he have a confessor? (If he's a priest, the answer is yes.). What has he told his confessor about this demon attacking him through his ex-wife? Drives me crazy.
Regarding the current drama in Gotham City: am I the only person wondering why Selina decided the right thing to do with the former henchmen was to teach them skills and then use them to (a) continue to commit crimes, (b) in Gotham City? Why not send them to Boston, or New York, or, hell, Bludhaven? I am, however, enjoying the sight of the rest of Batman's rogues struggling to find help.
Ah. Here we are.. Missed that bit. Thanks.
Yeah Chris I know it seems weird but consider this: Until recently Wanda wasn't a mutant but ... Thomas, hasn't she been a mutant since her first appearance as a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants? the last I checked -- and for what that's worth -- she was a mutant who was trained by Agatha Harkness to also practice magical witchcraft, which she combined with her mutant probability-affecting hex power to good effect.
"Resurrect her as a mutant"? Man, I'm sorry these forums don't allow me, just this once, to post a big ol' "The Hell?" gif. I didn't think that's how the Terragen Mists work. I must have been mistaken. -- Someone else has pointed out that "disguising yourself as someone else, changing your skin tone and hair color, and changing the color of your clothes" is a novel application of Kamala's power set. So, it wasn't just writing bent to a bad end, but bad writing to boot. -- Too bad there wasn't a character present, who had demonstrated healing powers earlier in the issue. -- The bad guy wasn't shy about killing random people before. I'm surprised that killing the wrong person in this instance destroyed him.
This has all the hallmarks of a "wait six months" sort of death, but I'm hearing editorial comments that, no, this is one of those "Uncle Ben" / "Gwen Stacey" / "Mar-vell" deaths. If so, I think that's a shame.
Spoilers, you bet: .Over the last year or two, Marvel has put a lot of effort into making Kamala Khan a character we should care about, with deep connections throughout the Marvel universe.
So, after a good long run of everyone knowing that Clark Kent is Superman, that's now been "fixed" so that only the Kents, the JLA, and presumably anybody who was off-planet or currently dead, knows. Anyone else who finds out, dies. (If Superman were more ruthless, he'd probably be tempted to use that as a weapon. Pop on the glasses, hold up a Pulitzer, and watch the villain keel over with a heart attack.) (Luthor, of course, could probably pull the same stunt. "Officers of the court, Clark Kent is Superman.") I admit, I'm tired of Luthor being behind every crappy thing that happens to Clark or Jon on Earth.
Spoiler: I like Karrin, and I'm sorry to see her go, but every novel thus far has increased Harry's supporting cast by one or two important new people, to the extent that the first half of Peace Talks was just re-introducing the couple dozen or so that have roles in this episode of Harry's saga. With that size of a cast, and with the increased level of threats that everybody is facing, I can't say that I'm surprised that a character like Karrin -- brave, quick to fight people far above her weight class -- might not make it to the last page.
I read a bonkers story that either Boyle or Fukunaga wanted No Time to Die to take place at Blofield's desert base. That the needle mind eraser thing actually happened and that the entire third act of Spectre was just in Bond's mind... That would be cool. To be fair, I was hoping that, after the surgery, Bond would have been incapable of, say, recognizing anybody. That there might be several innocents held hostage in the building at the end, and Bond couldn't tell which one was his sweetie.
Over the last five days, I binge-watching the entire first season of Picard. I haven't made up my mind about some of it. Spoiler: I thought that the series was true to the continuing characters. I thought the new characters were engaging and a good fit into the Trek canon. I thought the last couple of episodes were something of a train wreck.
So, the synthetic horrors killed all organic life in the galaxy, set up an eight-star system, and left, waiting for organic life to grow again, which might then build synthetic life that would reach the planet, receive instructions, and summon them with a big subspace antenna / portal? Do I have that right? I was disappointed by the apocalypse machines. Metallic tentacle things that hiss in space. Who can't come if the portal is closed. I am dismayed by the sheer coincidence that of all the people that rescue the La Sirena is Our Old Friend, Seven of Nine. Or, that the single person in the Federation who can recognize Soji as the woman killed by Captain Vandemeer years ago, happens to be the captain of the La Sirena. I would think that a glow-stick wand that can tell how old something is, would tell how long ago it was transported.
Howard's already in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But, come to think of it, Man-Thing is not. If I were writing a palette-cleansing story about a Multiverse of Madness, I might set a few scenes in the Nexus of All Realities, in the bayou swamp where walks a muck-encrusted mockery of a man.
Charles, Except that the villains are throwing around the idiot ball. If you've got a surgeon on-staff who can do what they did to her eyes, then (a) why make it repairable with a touch of a button, (b) why bring her into a room with said button, and (c) why not also put a blood-constriction device leading to her brain, to shut her down in case she tries anything? And at some point, she needs to make a firm line-in-the-sand: if you have hostages, you can make me do this, but nothing further. "Give you the tech keys to the world's computers, after you tell me you'll use them to crash whole economies" seems like the greater evil, compared to "some kids will be blown up."
About two years ago, I took a break from Pathfinder Society to focus on those elements of home campaigns I missed the most. My players wanted a system that was intuitive to learn and didn't have Pathfinder's opportunities for system mastery. And I wanted to build my own campaign world. I'm just about to start the campaign, in a system about 75% Fantasy Flight's Genesys game engine and 25% Green Ronin's AGE system.
How is this a PFS question, you ask? Well, in a home campaign, if someone is using a rule, or a feat, or a spell, from the wrong edition of a game, you stop the game, back up, fix the problem, and move on. You're all friends, and everything's good to go. In PFS, you can be halfway through the second combat before someone realizes that their whole schtick is based on a game element not appearing in this edition. (The same thing keeps happening in a Core Campaign game, right?) (And yeah, I had people accidentally playing with the Pathfinder beta rules during Season 1.) I haven't had that many players confuse Pathfinder with D&D versions of the rules, but I'm sure it happens, too. You'd think that it's only low-level characters, but I have sad news to report. Compared to a home session, getting game systems mixed up is a much more serious problem in PFS, because (1) we're under tight time constraints and (2) there isn't the same level of trust and friendship built up at a convention game. Everybody at the table wants everybody else to have a fun experience, but we also want the games to be legal. We don't have time to audit a character in the middle of a game. My inclination is to immediately swap in the closest tier-legal iconic I can and promise that (a) their PC will still get all the gold and experience, and (b) we'll check things over carefully after the game.
For the record, I hate Kang. As a villain, as a motivator of characters, as .. just about anything. He's a megalo-maniac who *could* if he were willing to invest some consideration and effort, win any battle he chooses. So he has to bounce the Idiot Ball into his face over and over, and if even that's not enough, the nature of space-and-time have to bow outwards so that he can be defeated again. We just had a massive storyline with time travel that didn't follow its own internal logic. And if we have Kang in the batting box, I'll guarantee there'll be another. Right now, there's no canonical team. It would probably be led by the Black Panther, but maybe not. Spider-man would probably be a member, but who knows? I'd like to see Morgaine Le Fay as the villain, with ancient magic, intrigue, and an end-of-the-day save by the Scarlet Witch.
What does sound fun? Stretchy powers. And that's one of the reasons that Mr. Fantastic endears himself to me. Even back in 1962, the heroes with stretchy powers were all pretty goofy: Elongated Man was Flash's sidekick and Plastic Man was, well, Plas. So, Stan Lee creates his first super team, and he gives the dopiest power to the least dopey guy on the team. And everybody plays it straight. Yep. Mr. Fantastic. Stretches. Sure.
Throughout the last two movies, I was wondering, what happened to Adam Warlock?
Observation: It's been five years since the Snap, what is Ned still doing in high school? Presumably, he got snapped, too. Pity the passengers of the plane that crashed, having lost their pilots. Pity, too, those lost souls brought back, both pilots and passengers, five years after their plane left that airspace. -- Upon reflection, Bruce used the gauntlet to bring people back, to save lives. Tony used the gauntlet unnecessarily. He could have flown off with it, turned Thanos into a big pile of cubes, and sent the entire army into a decaying orbit 25,000 miles from the sun. He died because he was expeditious, rather than cautious.
All of which is to say that, in the universe that began the movie, with cranky Tony and head-lopping Thor, everybody stays dead. Natasha dies so that an alternate universe can branch out. Moreover, *every* Avenger who went into the Quantum Realm just vanished from the original trunk-line and never returned. (They came back to a different branch.) Yes? Well, that's almost the most depressing thing I've heard today. The most depressing thing is that, if the Ancient One is correct, then both the original time-line (in which Thanos destroyed the Infinity Stones) and the "time heist" timeline (in which the Avengers took the Infinity Stones) no longer have the stones' guidance corrections, and will both spiral out into chaos and woe.
Not that I want to persuade anyone, but I don't think Steve landed back in time just for Peggy. I think he went back for his world. Yes, he's been in the 21st Century for ten years or so. But he's been a man-out-of-his-element for the entire time. Sometimes he asserts himself in the world, and sometimes he just watches the wonder of it, but he's rarely comfortable in it. He outlines this in one of his last conversations with Natasha. He's not the kind of person to just move on. Not with Thanos' mass murder, and not with his original skip into Times Square.
So they said, Hama, but that simply can't be true. Spoiler:
in the new reality, Thanos senses a disturbance with Nebula and goes to investigate. He finds an older Nebula, sends his daughter to the future, and then follows behind with all his forces. They are never heard from again.
Can someone walk me through Spoiler: why Stark had to die at the end.
Once he uses the gaultlet, he's dying but conscious. Bad news for anyone not bearing the Reality stone. But he is. It can turn Drax into a bunch of boxes; it can heal his wounds. Or the Mind stone could have created a duplicate of his memory and personality to share space in Pepper's head. Or the Soul Stone could have ... Or the Time Stone ... Or Mantis or Scarlet Witch ... (If you say he was too weak to affect such things, there's a whole host of people standing around him, who could have taken one of the stones and done the same thing.
I blame it all on the Year of the Shadow Lodge interactive adventure. In that adventure, the villain uses the Cage of Soul-echoes, stored on the grounds of the Society headquarters, to duplicate himself a hundred-fold, with some duplicates more powerful than others. (This way, each table of characters gets to fight him.) The machine doesn't last out the adventure, but who's to say that it hasn't had permanent repercussions? This is my explanation when someone is playing an iconic. Seoni was one of the Pathfinder agents too close to the machine, and she's been duplicated hundreds of times, at 1st, 4th, and 7th level. And it's been my explanation for the gamist elements of item purchase. "Remember the Cage of Soul-echoes? That explosion was right below the commissary."
Am I alone in suspecting that Goose is influencing Fury's attitudes towards it? It seems grossly out-of-character from a dyed-in-the-wool SHIELD professional to get all caught up with a cuddly cat during a life-or-death mission in enemy territory, or to keep the flerken in his office, uncaged, after he knows how dangerous it is and how it contains the glowing cube thing.
Besides the iconography of the Pathfinder goblin, it also firmly sets in people minds that "Evil races aren't always evil" which is a convention that Paizo has been trying to get away from the whole time. With respect, Albatoone, which "whole time"? The idea of "evil races aren't always evil" filled D&D 3rd Edition, from Eberron, where evil gods weren't always evil, and alignment was kept in the background, to products like "Ghostwalk" and "Savage Species" that allowed players to run all sorts of wicked monsters as party members. Paizo reset the bar on evil races. Undead in Golarion were always evil. Drow were always evil. Chromatic dragons, hill giants, and, yes, goblins. Evil. Perverse. Nasty. "We be goblins; you be dead." There are plenty of campaign worlds out there with shades of moral gray, where paladins can get away with breaking their vows and vampires are sometimes good guys. Where morally pure characters have to think twice when ogres and a manticore raid their supply train -- maybe the monsters are just defending their own territory, and isn't the term "monster" a little prejudicial, to be honest? I appreciated that Golarion was a little simpler.
I've run the first level of Thornkeep over a dozen times, and I think it's a blast. I've also watched it run in Pathfinder Society by other GMs, and their decisions can make or break the adventure. My suggestions: (1) Use the town. It has resources in it that the party can use, and hints about the puzzles, and back-story that helps the players put the dungeon in context. I understand that PFS GMs can't use the encounters in the town, but a lot of GMs start their players at the mouth of Level 1, Room 1, with maybe a sentence about the town on the surface. Thornkeep is in many ways Paizo's contribution to the tradition begun with the village of Hommlet and Shadowdale. (2) Take your time. I've seen people power-run the dungeon - because if you can get five levels done in one day, your 2nd-level PC levels all the way up to 7th! I've seen people try to get through Level 1 in 3 -4 hours. That's doable, I guess, like power-walking through a museum, but I think it deprives the dungeon of its power, its mystery, and much of its enjoyment. There's a door. It's a mystery and a puzzle. Relative to, say, the World of Greyhawk, Golarion doesn't have many of those. Relish it. (3) Yep, there's a couple of very powerful encounters there. For the wight, remember that it starts the encounter lying down, and needs to take an action to stand up before it advances. The party should always have an opportunity to act. But the PCs have also just encountered some skeletons and met some big-ol' warnings about undead, so they should be prepared. The shadow is another really tough fight, particularly if the party encounters it in flight from the wight. The bugs are a strong fight, but a party that meets them fresh and has good tactics should be okay; I'm pretty generous here about the things being territorial and not pursuing if the party retreats.
Maybe I've told you how I started collecting Marvel comics. In 1974, I was 12, and I'd been reading Harvey comics (Caspar, Richie Rich, etc.) and then Archie comics for years, but I'd considered superhero comics to be a bit too adult for my tastes. That Halowe'en, my brother and sister and I were trick-or-treating through our subdivision, and I found out that the man who lived two streets down from us, in the house on the corner with the big driveway, had the job of filling the comic book vending machines at the supermarkets. And so, that year, I got Sr. Strange #6 (Englehart and Colon, the beginning of a four-part story about Dormammu and Umar) and my brother John got Master of Kung-fu #25 (Moench and Gulacy). And John was not all that interested, so I stole it from him in due course. Last year, I saw the Marvel "Epic Collection" reprint telephone book of Master of Kung-fu, and picked up the copy. It included all the stories that featured that character, Shang Chi, son of the "devil-doctor" Fu Manchu, that Marvel published between late 1972 and 1975. Well, let's just say that, in hind-sight, John was very lucky. Overall, the writing for the series was painful to read, clunky even by the standards of the time. As might go without saying, by 21st-Century standards, every issue was impossibly racist. The arrangement Marvel had with the Sax Rohmer estate let them publish books featuring Fu Manchu, but not actually impact the character, so the plots were all: Shang Chi or his father attack each other, and both of them survive the encounter. Rinse, repeat. The comic used the conceit that all the narration was Shang Chi's thoughts, but they were pedestrian rather than philosophical. "The shaft curves below me, becoming a chute. Light intrudes upon the shadows and I burst out thru another grating, rolling as I have learned to absorb the impact of my fall." The art was blocky. Most of the artists working on the series -- Gil Kane, Al Milgrom, John Buscema -- didn't have any feel for what kung-fu was supposed to look like, and the page layouts were graceless and busy. The ink work was slipshod. Nobody knew how to draw Asian feautures. This was definitely a B-side book and was getting B-side talent. But Issue #25 stands out. The story is a stand-alone one-shot: the insidious Fu Manchu doesn't appear at all; the villain has used his helicopter to escape the jungles of South America, leaving Shang Chi and his allies to wait for their own transportation. While they do so, Shang Chi hears the cry of a human child in the jungle, and slips away to rescue it from a jaguar and then from a tribe of superstitious Jivaro natives. The narrative voice is suddenly somber and contemplative, appropriate the the character and the story. The choices of what to show us, and what not to show us, are artistic and confident. (For example, one of Shang Chi's father's assassins has a role to play. They fight near the end of the story, and Moench just zooms out from the assassin drawing a blade to the precipice where the fight takes place, with the assassin falling to his death a panel later.) And the art is amazing. Paul Gulacy had been on a few other issues, but the artists putting the finishing touches over his work had been ham-fisted and blocky. Here, in the jungle, the art opens up. There are a couple of fight scenes: martial arts against claws and fangs, or against waves of hunters and warriors, that are just amazing. The panel lay-outs, the positions of bodies filling space: they give us the impression of Shang Chi always being a man at peace within himself, exerting his will, his spirit, on those around him. And that's the second Marvel comic I read.
I think it would be reasonable to allow a character to shift his Renown during don time to the city in which the mission briefing takes place. If you meet in Absalom and get whisked off to Kaer Maga, no. But if the mission briefing begins with you assembling in the apartments of a Riddleport agent, why not?
<quote>Fantastic Four is uneven if only because it seems like Doom didn't EXACTLY plan for everything...but some how lucked his way into it.</quote> That seems consistent with most iterations of the good doctor: happy to take credit for good luck, while promising great things when bad luck hits. I am growing more interested in his brain-washed minion, and I'm interested to see how this storyline meshes with "Doctor Strange, newest Herald of Galactus."
Since 1987, if we want to be honest. Since her origin was wiped out in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths. |
