Spence

Yeah, and I think all three were included in the final product we saw in theaters.

I grew up during the 1970s loving Godzilla. But for me the Legendary Godzilla is the design my adult self sees as the "way he should have looked all along", conceding of course that it benefits greatly from exceptional CGI production. But Edwards' movie was the first time in 60 years that, to my eyes, Godzilla and the monsters he fought looked 100% real. I also really enjoyed the entire aesthetic of the 2014 movie along with its patient storytelling, and the decision to be sparing with showing the monsters.
 
We had decades of Godzilla movies that were non-stop monster slugfests. For me, that had become old hat and I wanted something different. By the end of the Showa era, I had outgrown Godzilla and the silly rubber suited action and low-budget stop-motion animation that came to define the look of the franchise. I had grown up and, without realizing it, wanted Godzilla filmmaking to grow up too. In my view it didn't do that until 2014. I kinda feel that for those who want to bathe in the cinematic tradition of previous eras, there are still Godzilla movies coming out of Japan that scratch that itch. I was hoping that the Legendary version would continue to be distinctive, modern, and American in the sense that it wouldn't feel quite so beholden to nostalgia for Japanese-derived tropes, traditions, and conventions.
 
But I am obviously in the minority here. One of the few who feels Gareth Edwards' film was the standard that should have set the tone and direction for the franchise going forward. In some ways it did, but I just feel that too much of the realism and nuanced storytelling was discarded in favor of "big dumb monster action" because, ostensibly, that's what audiences were demanding. Well, not this audience member.

Working on that myself.
 
I want to see if I have any questions for Christopher about it, as I would like to do a review and have that information available when I do.
 
 
 

Godzilla went from being an unfathomable, destructive force in 1954 to a paragon of rubber-suit farce by the end of the Showa era. Any sense of "higher awareness" or intelligence he may have displayed was, in my view, purely a by-product of the declining level of realism and increased anthropomorphism heaped upon the character throughout the 1960s and 1970s. During the Heisei and Millennium eras there were occasions when Godzilla returned to his "force of nature" form, but it was never very consistent. I really thought that the 2014 Legendary Godzilla would set a new tone for the character that would be more like his original incarnation, but perhaps a bit more nuanced. I'm disappointed that Legendary Godzilla seems to be more or less following the same trajectory he did during the Showa era.

That is because I really have no clue about what the cities are.  I mean I have TA that I read 20 (?) years ago?  Maybe?  I can't remember. 
But I never circled back. To this day I cannot tell you what real world culture each "nation" is near to. 
All I can say is I have had far too much "mega-urban zone inflicted with political intrigue" inflicted on me to look for more.  I have yet to see a smaller city get a high production product treatment.   By high production I mean that the maps need to be better than what I produce for myself.   
 
But to my point. TA, just like many Hero products was not written from the "let's make this a easy for entry as possible where a GM can begin play within hours and then add more detail as they have time" perspective but from the "all real gamers will be able to dedicate as much time as as necessary to learn this because they are all either independently wealthy or have no other lives than gaming". 
 
For large fantasy cities I have a couple versions of Citystate of the Invincible Overlord and Waterdeep.  I pretty much ignore the "official" political and guild information, but the versions them I own made that pretty easy as separate chapters that can be ignored.  The big draw for me was the maps, enough detail to be useful, both to players and GM's, while not so detailed as to cage people in.  I have the old 1e (maybe 2e??) giant wall map of Waterdeep.  The one that looked great, not the newer bland all browns one.
 
I would love a smaller frontier town with the same level of production.  One that looks good on the table or wall and can get the players going. 
 

Well, just my 2 cents.  In a very broad sense, cities/towns have two types of details.  Physical and Political. 
 
Physical details are things like locations such as shops and such with any needed maps.  A short description of streets, sewers, and so with any illustrations or diagrams/maps.  A new GM can quickly assimilate enough of this type of information to begin a game and then read up on anything else they may need as required.
 
The other part, Political, sounds great but is the major reason that 99% of those kinds of products gather dust on the shelf. 
Most modern gamers hold full time jobs (40 to 60 hours a week) and then have to deal with family issues.  This leaves them MAYBE an hour a night, but not every night, to use for gaming.  Say 4 to 5 hours a 7 day week.  Indepth political intrigue of the type alluded to above is easy when you are making it up yourself,  but a grueling exercise when you are trying to commit to memory someone else's creations. 
 
Ask the question: can a GM read and understand enough to actually run the city in a game with a cumulative total reading time of 4 hours? If not it will be a niche collectors item and gather dust. 
 
TA was a great read as I recall from when I read it years ago.  But Hero has always written from a "coolness/let's be unique" angle instead of a "let's make it easy for a GM to use in a game" angle.  None of the nations or cultures ever stuck with me because they have no real world analog.  
A GM doesn't run a world, they run an area of a world, but trying to filter through the "oh God let's not make this easy" mode to locate an area that will fit the intended game becomes work instead of play.
 
Are there dwarves? Call them anything you want, but add dwarf in the description so they can be easily located. 
 
D&D is still dominant because it gives people what they want, not what they say they want.  Playable supplements that are easy to absorb in small bite sized morsels. 
 
TA is like Midgard.  A cool book that we simply didn't have time to actually use. 
 
A book about Aarn could be great.  But if running Aarn requires making sense of (begin ridiculously overly large examples) 32 political factions with all 2317 nobles fully stated out with agendas. Well doorstop it is. 
 
Ask the question, how many fantasy large metropolises are currently out there? I Don't know exactly, but I have 7 on my shelf. 
 
How many fully realized small towns suitable for beginning parties (1st thru 3rd level in D&D speak) are there?  Ones that are not Built around some bizarre "the author thought this was cool" concept. I can't answer that one because I have yet to find one.  I do have a few partially completed small towns. 
 
Give people the COMPLETE physical layout of the city, town, what have you, and then an overview (high-level overview) of the political arena with some suggestions.  But make the political stuff easy to separate and ignore such as a separate chapter that will not impact the rest of the book if ignored.
 
Have great ideas for a politically driven game, that is called an Adventure Module. 
 
Want to show gangs and guild territories on the map.  DO NOT put them on the main city map.  Add a smaller scaled low detail map with the territories shown. The GM may want to toss the them for his own creations.  Which is hard if they are printed everywhere.
 
The long and the short of it is too much detail is just as deadly to a product as too little.  And a city is not a location for the writers campaign, it is a location for the purchaser to build their campaign.
 
Aarn looks to be a popular choice.  Built to be digested in small bites. 
 
For myself, I have come to the conclusion that a simple small town will never happen, so I am building my own in my painfully slow way.
 
 
 
 

I am using two formats for my intro game.
 
1st is one of the Hero Designer sheets for 5th.
The second is a stripped down, no points version for play.  It will not be a template for HD, but I will just update it manually. 
 
This way the players will be able to see the full sheet when they reach a point that they want to.
 
I am still trying to get a design for the play sheet that I like enough to use. 
 

I think 3rd would probably be better for introducing new players.  But I like the 5th better for myself. 
 
A question though.  Why remove all the build annotation and point values but leave the point totals? 

A smaller city in Vestria.  Large enough to have resources a party of adventurers need, but not large enough to rival 20th century metropolises.  The prevalence of those in fantasy RPG's is a real turn off.
 
A smaller city that new players can be introduced to without requiring them to expend more effort to read the background material than some do getting a degree. 
Enough info and locations (inn's, stores, weaponsmiths, magic related shops, etc.) to be helpful, but light on politics and the nobility.  It is far easier to build intrigue and factions from scratch than it is to digest pre-existing nobility, family lines and plots.  To name the influential houses is one thing, but adding all the past and ongoing feuds and bickering is an obstacle rather than an aid. Too much information is actually worse than not enough. 
 
Maps.   MAPS.   A real map of the city.  If the Inn is named it the book then include a usable map.  No map, no named inn.  Maps.   MAPS.   A real map of the city.   This will keep the locations to something useful, rather than just another block of text that get s ignored.
 
Somewhere with the frontier feel and room to actually explore in the surrounding region.
 
A city that a beginning group can actually base out of and have a plausible level of influence.
 

There's also no central popular magazine to use to advertise your new game or gaming supplement anymore.
 
Not even anything like Space Gamer anymore.

Hostess episode is hilarious and fun, great job guys
 
Here's Frank Miller's offering mentioned, with the Ice Master.  Great art for a Hostess ad.
 

Not at all.  Or maybe for you.
 
But a campaign with a strong overall arc is not hard to make and doesn't really rail road anyone.  Though lousy GM's can certainly achieve that end.
 
I have run many campaigns and never had that issue.  The key is to establish the threat, get player buy in, and then let the players decide how to achieve the objective. 
 
This is how you do it.  You design the campaign and then ask your group if they would like to play and outline the campaign requirements.  I ran one where everyone was a chivalic knight (think really good guys) defending the Realm from evil.  All PC's had to be some flavor of Good.  No evil and no evil masquerading as neutral.  The Knights would be traveling on Quests and and a lot of the adventure would be things encountered on the way. 
 
Now here is the really cool thing that makes it all work.  It's a game and no one is forced to play. 
 
If you are a GM and propose a campaign and no one likes it, then do something else.
If you are a player and agree to a campaign then play the campaign. 
If you are a player and start a campaign and discover you don't like it, then let the GM know and bow out.
 
In very broad strokes their are two types of games.
 
Sandbox worlds where PC's just wander around "doing stuff" and the GM is pretty much just a slave chained to the table to keep the books and let the players do weird stuff while enduring the repetitious cry's of "Aaaahhhh I'm being railroaded!!  Waahhhh!!!" every time the don't get their way..
 
Campaign Worlds where the game has an actual story for the PC's to to become immersed in.  A live world where things are happening.  The fun is the PC's reacting and making choices in the world. A major campaign arc can be about a secret slavers ring in the city.   What do the PC's do?  Try to shut it down?  Try to take over the ring?  Did discovering the ring place them in the crosshairs of the slavers? of Nobles? Of the City Watch?  Is the City Watch corrupt?  A first adventure could be the PC's witnessing a kidnapping.  How do the PC's react? 
 
Some campaigns are a bit more directed.  One of my favorite campaigns I played in was a horror game.  Our PC's were swept into a conspiracy where failure would mean our deaths.  One evil organization was blackmailing the PC's into performing "missions" for them. The primary arc was our PC's breaking free from the organization and staying alive.  It was awesome. 
 
In a great campaigns players will find their choices limited, otherwise there is no tension or drama.  That great rewarding feeling you get when your party manages to win against all odds doesn't come unless they had a hard time getting there.
 
A great campaign sets up the background.
The individual adventures outline major events.
But just when the event happens, if at all, and how the event is resolved is always going to dependent on the players. 
And if you run that same campaign multiple times, it will never play out the same.
 
I haven't seen an actual railroaded game in probably 30 years.  But I have heard endless wailing and gnashing of teeth about how someone felt they were railroaded because they did get X or Y. 
 
Campaigns are great and it is why there are so many being published for pretty much every system except Hero.
 
 
 

Explain This, Hostess Guys!! is now live. We hope you enjoy this very special episode. Note: The cosmic cube can do anything. dw https://explainthis.podbean.com/  

I watched all their superhero cartoons the first week I had it.
 
Then I went through their entire library of movies and series trying to find something else to watch that I hadn't already seen repeatedly...with no luck.

I tried a trial of HBOmax when WW84 came out.  I have never seen or heard of a premium service before that had absolutely nothing to offer until that trial.  They have less watchable content than the local JoeTV. 
 
I understand why they put so much effort and resources into getting theatrical releases.  Without them they would be out of business.

I thought that already happened....

And how many stops?
 

 
On a serious note, it is definitely on target and a great book.
 
In addition to Boothill, Chaosium's Down Darker Trails and Shadows Over Stillwater are also great resources.  While CoC is a horror RPG, DDT can easily be played non-horror and Chaosium does good background work. 

It’s finally, officially announced!

Consider the mess they made with Man of Steel, Batman vs Superman and the Justice League movies. People know a lot about Batman and Superman and what they saw was not very good. Now consider what happened with Wonder Woman and Aquaman. Two characters that are not as well known or beloved and you get major box office with both. Why ? perhaps because Zack Snyder did not direct them. And that is maybe what DC needs. Zack Snyder not directing the films.

I used to have a running joke with my coworkers that most movies were love stories. Return of the King? It’s a love story! Die Hard? It’s a love story!  Fast and Furious? It’s a love story! Creepshow? It’s a love story!
 
It’s depressing how often this actually works. 

I may be mistaken, but it seems your objection is to something being in the novels and then either being excluded or changed for the movies, simply because it was excluded or changed. You appear to feel that was arbitrary, but as someone who's witnessed some of this process, I assure you that it's not. When you're dealing with a project this big, this important, and this expensive, there are reasons behind all these decisions. You may not recognize the reasons, and if you do you may not agree with them, and that's fair. But they're no more arbitrary than some of the things Tolkien himself did. Tom Bombadil was based on the appearance of a doll the Tolkien family had. The character did nothing to advance the story, in fact Tolkien had to later invent a reason why Tom couldn't just solve their ring problem himself. He admitted that when he introduced Strider to the story he had no idea of who the character was -- that came into focus much later. JRRT loved trees, and as a child he was bitten by a spider and became seriously ill. Guess what?
 
LOTR is a great novel, a landmark in the evolution of the fantasy genre. But it isn't perfect, and it isn't sacred. As someone who appreciates Professor Tolkien's work I thought Jackson and his team did an exceptional job preserving the essence of the story in its transition to another medium, all practical constraints considered. But it isn't perfect either, and I don't agree with all of it. That doesn't keep me from respecting the effort and result.

Yes, I apologize for my misreading in my haste. It's actually you I disagreed with, Spence.

Well what I have in mind is less a "campaign book" full of how to run the game and such than an actual campaign: a series of adventures in a setting for a GM to run as a campaign.  So less Horror Hero/Pulp Hero etc and more something not actually published since, I dunno, Champions in 3d

Hm. Spence makes some cogent points, though I think they apply more to how a citybook should be written more than which city should be chosen. In that vein, it might be a good idea to provide indices for what can be used for which purposes: like, if a GM needs someone to hire the PCs for a job, here's a list of NPCs who might do so, and what pages they're on. And the descriptions don't need to be long; better if they are not, to make them easier to slot in where needed, with just a few sentences about their motivations to help GMs pick which one to use.
 
I'll still say that originality matters a lot, though. Any FANTASY HERO supplement is likely to stay niche just for being FANTASY HERO. So you might as well swing for the fences and try giving gamers something they can't get from yet another D&D/Pathfinder supplement... and that is *not* just, "See, you can do it with Hero System."
 
Dean Shomshak

Midkemia Press did a handful of them back in the 80s.
 
They're still available in PDF through the above link.
 
I particularly suggest looking at Towns of the Outlands, which is free!