Starburst Magazine Issue 490!
It’s another Star Wars issue, and Starburst’s long relationship with the Galaxy Far Far Away continues. The Revenge of The Sith 20th Anniversary issue let us have council of contributors, include Abigail Thorn and Force Majeure‘s very own Adam. Everything from toys to burlesque. There’s also a smashing feature on The Murderbot Diaries and so much more. It’s a great issue. (I always say that.)
My main thing for the print magazine is books and games, so it was a delight to get to talk to the Mantic Games team about Halo Flashpoint, and I love the pun title of the piece ‘ Say Halo To My Little Friends ‘. (So much so that I couldn’t help but show it off to the Mantic Team when I visited them at UKGE. ) My Brave New Words column was a pick of cool new books, include Ben Aaronovitch’s latest, Stone and Sky . Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent, Aliya Whiteley’s Three Eight One and I couldn’t resist taking a look at Critical Role spin off book, Tusk Love. There’s more, you should read the whole column.
Roll for Damage covered the UK’s amazing miniatures scene. Obviously we talked a bit about Games Workshop, but shout outs also included Bad Squiddo, Warp Miniatures, Crooked Dice, Loke Battlemats and so much more.
As always, you can buy the latest issue here.
Starburst Magazine Issue 489!
It’s that time again, and issue 489 of Starburst Magazine puts it’s heart on it’s sleeve by having a memorial cover for David Lynch. Suffice to say that Lynch had a massive influence on movies, and the Starburst crew takes the passing of this titan of cinema very seriously.
It’s a great issue, of course. In addition to a comprehensive and quality feature on David Lynch and his works, we also get a 70th Anniversary special on the Muppets. It’s really good.
My bits include a smashing interview with Bionic Man, V and Alien Nation TV Series creator Kenneth Johnson. I interviewed Kenneth on the eve of the US election, so it was a very interesting (and slightly tense) chat. A lot of the best stuff made it into the issue. Fascinating chap.
We also have tenth anniversary look at Critical Role. This is peppered with comments from the likes of Ginny Di, Liv Kennedy, Jasper Cartwright and Professor MacCallum-Stewart. I hoped to talk to some LA based folk for the piece, but I picked the wrong time to arrange that. It worked out well though.
Brave New Words was mostly about source material style books; movie books etc, and Roll For Damage was filled with some of the most exciting indie games, plus a little bit of commercial stuff like D&D and Games Workshop.
Starburst Magazine Issue 488!
It’s always nice when I get to write about fantasy movies, and issue 488 has a full top 50 feature. The way we do these things that the team pick a handful of favourites and write about them. I got to write about The Seven Voyages of Sinbad and Dungeons and Dragons Honour Among Thieves as well as a few others.
We also have a really solid feature about Kieron Moore’s movie, Secrets of a Wallaby Boy, written by Kris. It’s a fun piece on a fun and bawdy indie movie. (The Guardian didn’t understand it, which is high praise indeed.)
This issue’s Brave New Words column talks about the fun I had Glasgow Worldcon 2024 and a whole host of science fiction and fantasy books. Roll For Damage lets me talk about the Aliens boardgame, space dwarves and a host of fun party games for your christmas present list.
Starburst Magazine Issue 487!
Scary clown on the cover means that this issue all about Terrifier. It’s really not my sort of thing, so unsurprisingly I didn’t help with the cover story. (I love a good horror movie, but the Terrifier moves just aren’t fun or interesting to me. As big a fan as I am of all things genre, even I have limits.
My feature in this issue is called Beyond The Dream Park and talks about all the interactive theater you can find in the UK right. It focuses especially on Lemon Difficult’s Key of Dreams, which is more my speed for horror; I like the mix of the mundane, the mystic and the cosmic. Also, Beyond Dream Park was also the name of one of the first convention panels I ever moderated.
Brave New Words focuses on women writing modern science fiction, from speculative climate fiction to shooty bang explosions in space. Roll for Damage gives Wizkids some love, talks about the end of Fantasy Flight’s X-Wing game and cover’s Gale Force Nine’s Alien’s game, Another Glorious Day in the Corps. We also look at the Darrington Press edition of For The Queen and Bright Eye Game’s storytelling game, The Plot Thickens.
Starburst Magazine Issue 486!
I’m a sucker for the Alien franchise. (Fun fact, the Alien on the cover isn’t the one from Romulus. The issue came out round about when Romulus came out, but this is from an earlier movie. Because the rights were easier to get. Tricks of the trade and all that.) In addition to a brilliant feature on all things Xenomorph, there’s plenty of coverage of the criminally under-rated Star Wars: The Acolyte. It was fun to work on this issue.
My Roll For Damage column talks about the excellent Star Trek skirmish game, Star Trek Away Missions from Gale Force Nine. I also get to talk about Free League’s Alien RPG. (Sometimes, the column matches the cover. Sometimes.) Brave New Words is about cook books. Seriously, I have so many genre focused cook books, so I have to write about The Game of Scones, Flavours of the Multiverse and of course, Wookie Cookies.
Starburst Magazine Issue 485!
485 is out! And can be found in all good bookshops. It’s a horror focused cover, and I wrote some bits for the main feature about horror themed games, including Blood on the Clocktower.
I also got to write a piece called Taking It To The Next Stage, which mostly talks about the stage version of My Neighbour Totoro, as well as stuff such as 2018’s production of Astro Boy Pluto and the My Hero Academia musicals.
Brave New Words focuses on luxury editions of popular books, so I get to fill the page with photos of lovely Folio Society, Black Library and The Broken Binding books. Roll For Damage focuses on TTRPG books that help Dungeon Master’s run a game, from Sly Flourish’s series to Matt Colville‘s advice.
More a Digital Bothy than a Home Page
Just a very quick and friendly reminder that though this website is, technically, where I store all sorts of things, it’s not really my home page. It’s a place for me to, digitally, drop something off before exploring again. You’ll find more of my work either via Starburst Magazine or in various popculture reated websites and journals. This is the place I stick some sort of rambling piece when I feel like social media simply won’t do.
Which given recent events, may mean I’ll use it more. Or less.
Those looking for an update – yes, I run a lot of D&D online, yes I’m still editing all sorts of scripts and yes, I still hang out with the Starburst team, even though they are in Manchester and these days I can be mostly be found in Edinburgh or London.
Starburst Magazine Issue 484!
This issue celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Toxic Avenger. (If you don’t know who that is, or what Troma is, blimey you’re in for a very specific treat.) I met Lloyd Kaufman a whole bunch of years ago, fascinating chap. The magazine has covered all things Troma in the past, but it’s nice to revisit themes.
This issue’s Roll For Damage Column is all about Play By Mail, and yes, that includes IT’S A CRIME, a game that was heavily marketed to geeks in the 80s. It was a blast researching this; I recall playing En Garde! as a student and having more fun writing the letters and the like than actually playing the game.
Brave New Words looks at women in horror, Sci-Fi and fantasy, so I get to talk about Jen Williams, Silvia Moreno Garcia, Cassandra Khaw, Kiersten White and whole bunch of other exciting authors.
Features wise, there’s a lovely tribute to works of Terry Pratchett written by myself, specifically his non-fiction and non-Discworld fiction. A lot of this about reprints of his earlier work, many of which are fascinating in terms of seeing how his work evolved.
Finally we have a piece called What They Did In Shadows, which talks about the Stranger Things stage play, First Shadow. It’s an amazing show (go see it while you can), It was an interesting set of interviews to do, and as always I asked some standard ‘silly’ questions that didn’t go into the feature but let me gauge tone and clarity (as well as establishing rapport, to be all mechanical about it.) One of those was ‘Webber or Sondheim’, which one of my standard ‘stagey’ questions, but it did get quite a response from one of the actors, who was surprised I’d compare the two.
Space Hamsters To Return
So it looks like Spelljammer is coming back.
In case you missed it, Spelljammer was a setting for second edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons1 which introduced wooden space-ships and let players ‘set sail’ to other worlds (other D&D settings).
Now you may wonder how that works. Most D&D worlds are pseudo-medieval after all, how does all the space stuff work? The answer is magic. Powerful devices called spelljamming helms ‘power’ the wooden ships and gravity works in a way convenient to the plot. They also borrowed ideas for 2nd Century AD astrophysics2 to add phlogiston and crystal spheres; basically oceans and mountains but ‘in space’. Because fantasy.
The setting blends 1950’s era pulp sci-fi with age of sail style fantasy. So we get pirates, buccaneers, mysterious ports and so on. The setting came out in 1989, a messy time for D&D. The company owned the rights to Amazing Stories3and Buck Rogers4at the time and this informed the game. They’d taken the things that had inspired Star Wars such as John Carter of Mars and added swashbuckling pirates and high fantasy magic. It was an amazing idea.
Of course, the initial boxed set was a mess. Not enough setting and too many rules, lots of cardboard. The supplements where better and it’s big move was to give the brain-eating squid monsters known as Mind Flayers their own evil space-ships, that looked like horrific sea beasties. On the other hand, it had Giant Space Hamsters. Which worked exactly the way you think they would, big tubes to crawl in and everything.
It did well enough. It also almost became it’s own ‘Video Interactive Boardgame’ – TSR had produced one for vanilla D&D called DragonStrike and Spelljammer: Wildspace would have been next, had the company not headed into financial difficulties. Instead all we have is this:
Spelljammer sort of went away as the game moved on, but was not forgotten. Later editions couldn’t resist dropping it in as an Easter Egg here and there and Third Edition did get a mini-supplement in an issue of Dungeon Magazine. Spelljammer ships have appeared in a couple of the adventure supplements for D&D Fifth Edition as well (I won’t say which ones because of spoilers). The new Baldur’s Gate video game also features something very familar to fans of Spelljammer.
So why am I saying it’s back? Well there’s two massive clues. One is that Wizards of the Coast recently released an article on their ‘Unearthed Arcana’ blog heavily features beasties from the old Spell Jammer game, as well as a few things from elsewhere. (You can find it here if you fancy a quick look.) These articles tend to ‘test the waters’ before a book comes out.
The other massive clue is a lovely sneak peak we got recently in a “Future of D&D” panel. It seems that one of the books features Boo on the cover. Now Boo is the hamster companion to Minsc, one of D&D’s iconic heroes. But he’s not just any hamster. He’s a miniature giant space hamster.
It also doesn’t hurt that lead designer Chris Perkins admitted to having written screen plays based on another old property, Star Frontiers. Which is Spelljammer adjacent, sharing a lot of the feel and mood of the setting. So it really looks like D&D Fifth Edition is about to boldly go into some sort of wild space like setting. It’ll be fascinating to see how this effects more up-to-date D&D settings like Eberron and Ravnica. Will we see the Vox Machina crew take on Space Pirates? We’ll have to wait and see.
1: Nothing terribly advanced about AD&D – the ‘advanced’ was added so Gygax didn’t have to share royalties. Confused the heck out of me when I was 11 and put loads of kids off. Nice one Gary.
2: The word astrophysics is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
3: Amazing was a big deal when it came to science fiction back in the day. Deserves it’s own post.
4: TSR produced a Buck Rogers RPG. It was much better than it had any right to be.
Brian Blessed – Timelord
I note with interest that the UK tabloids have picked up on the fact that Brian Blessed hasn’t been out of the house in a while and is freely available to chat away online. Namely, there’s a headline floating around stating that Brian ‘shocked the BBC’ with his pitch for Doctor Who.
They are several problems with this. One is that it’s pretty hard to shock the BBC. Partially because corporations aren’t people1 but mostly because the people working for the Beeb have pretty much heard it all. The general public have many ideas and aren’t backwards about sharing them.2. Also this is an anecdote from the 1960s. But my main problem is this is a gag taken way out of context. And before we get started, yes, Brian has frequently made the point that name Who sounds like the Chinese surname Hu. It’s one of his standard celeb stories and he’s been telling it for decades.
I’ve seen Brian Blessed on stage quite a few times and have chatted away with him more than once, mostly back-stage3. It is possible to have a normal volume conversation with the man and he’s a very interesting and well-travelled chap.
Brian is a regular on the UK sci-fi convention scene and he has a ‘routine’, which is a highly charismatic ramble about the state of the world, science fiction and science in general. It’s something of a ‘feel good’ rally; Mr Blessed is a kind man with a wealth of life experience and mostly what he says is practical motivational stuff in which he tells us that the world can still be a bright and good place.
The Brian Blessed impersonator helpline is currently experiencing a very high call volume.
I once had the total pleasure of watching professional insult merchant John Robertson interview him on stage and goodness me was that fun; the two riffed on each other very well indeed and Blessed was a delight. John was in his element; he fed the lines and Mr B kept producing the funnies. All of which came with an added measure of joy, rude-words, mischief and love. Blessed’s bombastic nature is tempered by wisdom and respect.
Brian doesn’t simply swear; he produces artisan crafted profanity designed to delight. One of the few true Profanomancers, a wizard with the pun and the naughty word. Which brings us to ‘the Doctor Who thing’. Inevitably whilst on stage some member of the general public will ask if Blessed would ever play Doctor Who and you will get one of two responses; he’ll either talk about Blake’s 7 (which is close enough and he was actually in that), or he’ll claim that he wanted the character to be called Doctor Hu. Because that’s a Chinese name. And that’s the whole bit, a pun on Hu/Who4. Sometimes he’ll then point out that if they actually did that it should of course go to a more appropiate actor5. We would see Brian’s serious face. Then he’ll talk about his travels across the world. Then he’ll talk about Tibet and kicking the Dalai Lama in the bum. Which is a whole other story which again, taken out of context sounds terrible but is actually just a very silly story told by an elderly actor who’s been doing that all his life.
Because that’s the gig, and that’s the act. And a little thing like a global pandemic isn’t going stop Brian Blessed from telling ridiculous stories.
1: Let’s recognise corporate personhood for the nonsense it is. Though the idea of Amazon Prime suddenly manifesting a body and going to parties does amuse me. I’d imagine he’d be able to transform into a truck.
2: All I need to say is “Mrs Brown’s Boys”.
3: Be under no illusion; he has no idea who I am beyond ‘oh yes, Starburst.’
4: He also once declared he’d quite like to play The Corsair6 in Doctor Who, but of course that was a run up to some jokes about The Pirates of Penzance.
5: Not that anyone asked me, but let’s have Jessica Henwick as the next Doctor.
6: Once someone explained to him what a TimeLord Space Pirate was. Did you know Brian has trained to go into space? Because of course he has.
Ed Fortune 