Open Game Table: Anthology
Our friend Jonathan over at The Core Mechanic has announced the release date for his first Open Game Table project, The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs. This anthology is a great collection of RPG blog posts, chosen by members of the community, that represent some of the best in roleplaying game information on the internet.
The anthology will be released on March 23rd, 2009 and will retail for $22.95. You’ll be able to pick it up from Lulu, Amazon, and Indie Press Revolution but I don’t believe it’s listed on any of those sites yet; we will provide links to once it’s listed. In the meantime, I highly recommend going over to The Core Mechanic where you can see progress updates as the project came together along with peaks at the cover and much of the interior artwork. It truly is a great collaborative effort of the RPG Blogging community!
Chatty's Megadungeon: Foundations
Aptly enough, Monte launched his new Megadungeon project, have a look here.
Like lightning, inspiration struck me over the weekend. Last Friday’s musings on Megadungeons has left my brain splattered all over the place with a ton of ideas for adapting the old concept to my current way of playing the game.
I’ve got so much feedback and detected so much enthusiasm around the idea of making a 4e Megadungeon-themed campaign that I’ve decided that my following mini-campaign will be used as a testbed of the idea. If it looks fun and feasible, we’ll see where we can take this baby.
First and foremost, since I’m going to be creating this for my players, I have to take their preference and play styles into account. My group (myself included) is driven by the following key motivators (in decreasing order)
- Kicking Butts
- Accumulating Cool Powers
- Being an influential part of the Story
- Planning tactical foray into hostile areas
- Making things happen
- Psychodrama
- Getting to look and feel Super Cool
- Play favorite roles
- Exploration
But most of all
- Hang out with buddies and not overheat the tired, Friday evening brain
This means that I’ve got a pretty average group but that I’m also blessed to know what my players are after in our games.
Armed with this knowledge, I can now answer some of the questions that were asked in the last post:
Will the Dungeon be fully mapped (like the ones from the seventies) or will it remain mostly abstract like ThunderSpire Labyrinth?
It will not draw a detailed sprawling dungeon map up front. I’ve realized that much like a ‘start with a small town and grow from there’ campaign, a Megadungeon can also be like that. I’ll identify a sprawling underground complex as the focus of the next campaign and I’ll define a ‘homebase’ but I’ll build everything bit by bit, as the campaign progresses.
Heck, Grandad Gygax never finished Castle Greyhawk.
So I guess I’ll borrow the Thunderspire model, but I’ll add a little twist on it.
Huge levels to explore or linked 5-room dungeons?
My players (one in particular) grow weary of spending long sessions through the same dungeon, exploring the same themes and/or pursuing the same goals. Part of this stems from the 18 straight months we spent playing Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil earlier in this decade.
So what I’m thinking is that I’ll likely go with the 5-encounters dungeons (with added empty rooms to round it out to a 10-15 rooms dungeon). In fact, I expect PCs to leave the area and return to ‘Civilization” between each thematically-linked forays.
For example, they might explore the Kuo-Toa Cisterns Shrine-Tombs then come back to ‘base”. Based on lore found there, they might decide to infiltrate the Minotaur-King’s Outpost to find the lost Skull-key that can close the Tempest Portal to the Elemental Chaos the Kuo-Toa Priests have been opening up on top of Frozenrock Spire in Light-Bane Lake.
After each adventure, I’d keep each dungeon in a campaign binder (virtual or otherwise) and build my Megadungeon like that.
Will it embrace Old School dungeon design lore or player psychology-driven controlled encounters? Are both mutually exclusive?
I’m not even sure what old school means anymore (and I’m not asking for an answer), however if by this I mean following the guidelines presented here, I will definitively be hitting a few of them, at least on occasion when they can be used in a way that my group will enjoy.
As for my pompous sounding “psychologically-driven bla bla”, let’s just say that I’m going to design the campaign for my players first. Whenever I create a section of the dungeon, I’ll pick and chose from their motivations and mine.
Will it be a static exploration environement (keyed rooms), a dynamic dungeon environment or a mix of both?
Since I’m going to settle for a non-sandbox approach (i.e. player choices will influence what I prep in future sessions, but I won’t give players a huge canvas to play in) each area of the dungeon the PCs explore is going to be rather limited in size. I aim to make each area be big enough to have both keyed and unkeyed elements that can interact with the PCs (and possibly, if I can pull it off, each other).
One thing’s for sure, I’m bringing wandering encounters back into my game! Something needs to exist to possibly break those 5 minutes rests once in a while (or, more likely, threathen the PCs when they are foolish enough tospend 8 hours resting in a dynamic dungeon).
Will it have a big bad evil guy, or is the dungeon and its ecology itself the enemy? (From Wyatt)
I’m definitively making the dungeon the enemy, in fact I’m planning to make the dungeon an actual NPC and the main villain in the campaign (or at the very least, make the dungeon be a manifestation of the core villain of the campaign).
So what does that give me?
The foundation of my next campaign will be:
A short D&D 4e campaign focused on a sprawling dungeon environment. Adventures will focus on exploration of discrete areas of the dungeon based on choices made by PCs interacting with NPC factions. The Dungeon will play a role in the campaign based on a variation of the Chaos vs Law trope.
Some will likely ask ‘Where’s the Megadungeon in that?’. The way I see it, it will manifest in three ways. First the campaign will focus around a single sprawling underground complex. There just won’t be all that much of it defined when we start playing in it. Second, if my group and I enjoy this campaign model, we’ll explore more and more dungeons making the whole bigger. Lastly, if this thing really flies, we could open it up (or a variation thereof) as a bigger online collaborative project and make the whole thing truly Mega.
But first, I’ll focus on my gaming group.
My friend Yan and I have already discussed his and we came up with a campaign concept, a backstory and even some campaign elements. I also doodled a little one-page dungeon and it already gave me enough ideas to stage a one evening game in it.
Up next, I’ll start sharing some of this with you.
DM Chronicles: Session 11, Foray into the Well of Demons, part 2
See part 1 here.
With all that shared narrative and roleplaying out of the way (just kidding…mostly), the players were ready to start exploring the Well of Demons.
I must say that I really like this part of the adventure. It was the first one that reads like a true dungeon crawl. It’s made up of several sections with varied encounters and challenges. During prep, I had read and prepared Minis and drawn battlemaps for the 4 most likely encounters.
The PC’s followed their map and got deeper into the labyrinth. They came up to a very large square room with pillars and a Well. As soon as they entered, some minotaur masks on the pillars animated and welcomed the party as pilgrim of Baphomet, the Demon lord of minotaurs and then talked about some sort of test…
…Which the party kinda didn’t hear because at that time a bunch of humoungous tentacles covered with fanged mouths (New Monster) burst out of the floor tiles and attacked the PCs. It grabbed one of the PCs on it’s surprise attack. Then a trio of opportunistic monsters moved in on the party. A pair of Chokers (long armed climbing monsters that… well choke their prey) and a ghoul attacked at the same time.
The encounter was well designed. The PCs could have gotten in trouble, with all monsters having controller elements this could have degenerated with most of the party immobilized and being choked/eaten/melted by all 4 monsters.
However it wasn’t to be so because I systematically failed to roll anything over 10 for the whole fight. In fact, that trend was maintained all night long, to a point that even my players were making comments about how unlucky I was. I didn’t mind because I strongly believe that players need such ‘everything went well for us’ encounters once in a while to top their ‘feel good’ tanks…
I hope they enjoyed it because there’s harsh stuff coming in the next sessions for them.
The fight lasted about 30 minutes or so, and the PCs were ready to explore the dungeon further. They managed to recall the Masks’ full message which invited worshipers of Baphomet to a series of test to gain the Demon Lord’s boon.
The room had 2 other exits, they chose the one to the left and arrived in a Gnoll barrack! Ensued a fight against 4 Hyenas and 3 gnolls in cramped quarters. Once again players shredded the monsters easily and the fight was completed in less than an hour. A gnoll archer fled, likely to another gnoll-held area of the dungeon.
The PCs rested a few minutes, collected their extra action point for hitting a milestone and forged on deeper in the dungeon.
They reached a long corridor with 2 sets of double doors on the right and one, much further, on the left.
When they opened the first set of double doors, they saw a group of Hyenas running around a chained Dire Boar trapped in a pen. At that point I somehow jumped the gun and mentioned a group of gnoll archers waiting at the other end of the room (near the second set of double doors). Not wanting to face both hyenas and a firing squad at the same time, the party returned to the corridor, closed the door and went for the second entrance to the room.
So the party entered the room from the opposite end, catching a bunch of gnoll archers jumping over a wall made of bales of Hay, while the hyenas were jumping over said wall to attack the PCs.
The fight went fast, some PCs got bloodied while the DM continued playing atrociously bad rolls (and I was rolling behind a screen for once!)
Then followed a skill challenge to try to calm the Dire Boar. The poor animal had been harassed by the Hyenas while the 3 gnolls archer were using it as target practice. The challenge featured only 2 primary skills and was very short of details. The PCs failed it and decided to let the boar calm down on its own before trying to calm it.
Earlier in the evening, Franky’s PC had asked the old dwarven trader for a piece of equipment the animal was familiar with in order to let it recognize the party as friendly. I gave a +2 bonus to the skill roll used with the object. In hindsight, I should have made this into an automatic skill roll success to reward Franky’s for thinking about this.
Hell, I should have made the whole challenge an automatic success just to motivate players to do more stuff like that.
Double hell, I’m going to retcon that scene into a success and tell Franky it was because his idea was worth being properly rewarded.
We stopped the game at this point. Players were satisfied and seemed to have enjoyed themselves.
Lessons Learned
- When faced with a Skill challenge, take the time to properly reward good playing and creative ideas. Don’t hesitate to give free successes.
- No matter how well designed an encounter is, an unlucky dice streak can trash it either way.
- If you are going to give narrative control to players but want to maintain some control, you need to set the rules in advance and not change them as you go..
Thanks for reading!
Inq. of the Week: Who Watched the Watchmen?
We wanted to know the order of operations when a book becomes a movie. The answer was pretty clear with 65% of you saying: read the book, then see the movie. This is a philosophy I certainly support, but it doesn’t always happen, even in cases where I’m told just how much better the book is than the movie.
However, in the case of the Watchmen, I read the book, oh, at least 20 times before seeing the movie. It helps that they came out over 20 years apart (though as Chatty pointed out after reading my review, I was 3 when the original came out, so my experience is even different than the diehards who had read it when it first came out).
My sense when it was being advertised, and especially after seeing it, is that the movie is something of a tough sell. It’s long, it’s R rated, and it’s fairly high concept as far as movies with this kind of advertising budget go. Early box office receipts are panning that out, and I’m not confident in its word of mouth to those who aren’t fans of the original.
Regardless of how the movie does overall, I’m interested how our audience feels about the movie, and also I want to know:
Loading ...DM Chronicles: Session 11, Foray into the Well of Demons, part 1
Previously in Chatty’s game:
Our heroes, with a treacherous doppelganger in their ranks, faced the Duergar leader in his abode. When failure seemed imminent, the wounded grey dwarf leader sought help from his minions stationed in a nearby room and like a horde they poured in and surrounded our wounded, tired heroes.
Against all odds, the party was victorious. They saved the imprisoned slaves and bartered an agreement with the shapeshiter: It would trade the captive rogue hero and the whereabouts of the missing 2 slaves for its life.
Our last session went really well. That week, Eric, playing the Eladrin wizard was missing, so were had 5 PCs.
I had spent little time prepping as I wanted to play the next part of the adventure called ‘The Well of Demon” pretty much as is. However, I was not satisfied with the adventure’s way of linking both chapters. For those just tuning in this series, I’m currently running Thunderspire Labyrinth.
In fact, the interlude between both chapters of this adventure is the weakest part of the whole product I found so far. As written, the PCs were to get a letter from a Kobold NPC (a harmless pest) that explained that a ‘unnamed benefactor’ from the Duergar faction wanted out of the organization and proposed to meet with the PCs. Of course, said meeting was an ambush. If the DM could get the PCs to go and they defeated the bad guys, they would find enough documents to lead them to the last part of the adventure.
Talk about a plot bottleneck!
Anyway, I had reworked it so that the foiled doppleganger NPC had the necessary info and would provide it to the PCs (along with the captured PC rogue) if they let it live.
During prepping for the game, I asked myself how I would play out the prisoner exchange. The scene didn’t inspire me much but I didn’t want to skip it outright. I therefore decided to let my players tell me how it would go, shared narrative style.
It was a bit more awkward than expected (We all floundered a bit here and there) but here’s the story the players gave me:
The PCs freed the slaves, reassuring them that they would be escorted back outside of the mountain. They then scoured the duergar stronghold for weapons and armed the newly freed captives. In relative chaos, making sure that none of the civilians tripped on their own weapons and such, the group set out to return to the Seven Pillared Hall (the adventure’s underground homebase).
Thinking about feeding the freed men and women on their journey back to the nearest surface town , they retraced their steps to the spot where they had abandoned the food caravan they were escorting 2 sessions ago. However, when they arrived the carts had lost their horses and the 2 duergar captives were nowhere to be found.
The duergar were actually freed by some brethren and an ambush of the PCs was planned but when they were spotted with a group of 12 armed men and women, the duergar decided to leave them be and sneak away undetected.
The captives were brought back safely to the Hall and an expedition back to the surface was organised without the PC participating in it. Our heroes then manhandled the doppleganger to get him to bring them to the captured rogue and the PC was freed and the dopplegangner was allowed to live, vowing eternal gratitude for sparing its wretched life. It then gave the players directions to a compound called ‘The Well of Demons’ where 2 slaves (including the Dragonborn Diplomat, cousin to the party’s warlord) were delivered 24 hours ago.
As I said, It was awkward to get there. I had some trouble structuring how I wanted the narrative to go, giving players alternative turns and asking for complications along the way. Still, it gave us a nice little story that allowed us to move on to the next part of the adventure.
Before they left for the Well of Demons, the PCs were invited to a banquet organized by the ‘good’ segment of the Hall’s small population. A group of dwarven traders, very happy to see the duergar going “out of buisness” in the area fronted the bill.
During the festivities, the head trader tried to approach the party but seemed too embarrassed to actually talk to them. Bjerm, the gruff elven Fighter started saying something along the lines of “you wanna talk to us, do so!” Fortunately, Naquist the diplomatic Eladrin cleric of Bahamut told Bjerm “Let me handle it, I’m better at this” and got the dwarf talking with a resounding “Out with it Dwarf, we haven’t got all night!”
Shocked by such exquisite Fey diplomacy, he nonetheless explained that one of his work crews were massacred in the labyrinth’s mines earlier this week. All members were savagely killed but no traces were found of the old trader’s pet Dire Boar. He asked the players if they could be on the lookout for it in their forays in the labyrinth.
(That part was fun to play out!)
I also squeezed in another quest by having a representative of the Mages of Saruum (the evil wizards running the Hall) ask the PCs to discretly inquire about the recent activites of one Paldemar, one of the Mages of Saruum gone missing a few weeks ago. According to some reports the mages received, Paldemar was up to no good. The players, not missing a beat of making this powerful NPC feel like a schmuck, clicked on ‘Accept Quest’ and got ready to leave for thier next foray.
Up next: 3 Combat encounters in 2 hours.
Watchmen…
…is to become Saturday morning cartoon… !?
Watchmen is a serious, serious bit of graphic novel, even with meta-powered individuals populating its story. Written by psychedelically charged soul-delver Alan Moore, it is a seminal piece of literature, and I might almost be excited to see them release a movie of it this week. But I can’t believe it’s going to be made into a saturday morning cartoon, for f’s sake.
link: see a sneak preview of the saturday morning cartoon opening credits.
I’m just kidding, just some dude taking a piss, but a quite good spoof if you have read it and watched cartoons as a child. If you haven’t? Well go do it. It’s at home. Scott has it. Borrow it from him.
Let me give my shout-out to Marc Nathan at Cards, Comics & Collectibles in Reisterstown, who turned me on to this and many other substantial pieces of graphic literature.
(embedded a YouTube version for ease of play as well -Ed)
Critical Bits for the week ending 2009-03-07
- Fiery Dragon’s 4e Battlebox released
- A Design History of Pac-Man
- This month’s RPG blog carnival is WAR! Answer the question, “what is it good for?” [Read the rest of this article]
Catch that Wagon: Return to the Mega-Dungeon
I’ve been trying to write that post all day long and I keep getting distracted… I can feel it coming.. one of my dreaded/beloved consciousness-devouring, depression-killing creative surges…
I have dungeons on my mind. More precisely, I think about Mega-Dungeons, a lot. Those huge, multi-leveled sprawling complex that were at the core of the first fantasy campaigns of the mid-seventies and were revisited more or less successfully in the following years.
I also realize that I’ve reached that point in my gamer life where I weigh my current involvement (both gaming and blogging) in the game against both my perceived enjoyment and my rising sense of nostalgia about D&D. Mega dungeons feature a lot in such nostalgia.
Which, come to think of it is kinda weird since I never played in anything bigger than Gary’s (and later Monte’s)Temple of Elemental Evil.
Anyway, there’s a lot of buzz online both in the old and new schools about revisiting the Mega-Dungeon as the core of a campaign setting. In fact, Amityville Mike, getting a strong vibe from the old school community, called 2009 to be the year of the dungeon.
His feelings seem spot on.
Monte Cook took the online RPG world by surprise a few days ago with his announcement of making a subscription based website centered on a Mega-Dungeon called Dungeon Delve for the 3,5 ruleset. He even snagged the very cute http://dungeonaday.com/ URL for it.
Right afterward, James Maliszewski chimed in, claiming polite skepticism about the true old-school content of that project
Friendly word of warning dear grognards, I smell an unnecessary rise of orthodoxy coming (from both sides of the fence) and James and a few other bloggers are, willingly or not, steering that scary boat. Then again reading said old schoolers blogs, I think it might be too late.
They are games people, not some secret monastery codex that must remain untouched!
The next day, James posted his further thoughts about it and he proposed to launch a similar project for Sword and Wizardry (a OGL Retro Clone of the 1974 D&D game). He also mentions some other pre-WotC D&D MegaDungeon project going on in other Retro-gaming publication and websites.
Way to go man! I think this is the best way to go at it, offer a tangible alternative that people can get behind instead of throwing tomatoes to each other!
Now both 3.5 and pre-WotC D&D fans will get a taste of huge dungeons. Yay says I!
Please note that I make no assumptions about how Old School Monte’s project will really be like. In fact, I’ll just stick to saying it should be a Mega-Dungeon project, much like Ptolus was (with an added layer of very developed civilization over it).
I’m also glad to see that several other bloggers are running with the idea at different scales.
As I’m writing these lines, I’m of two thoughts about all of this.
First, I’m curious as hell to see what Monte will do. I’m more interested in the business model of the whole thing than the actual content since I have little to no interest in pre-4e stuff. There’s a good chance I’ll join the project as soon as it takes subscribers just to see how it goes (hurrah for blog revenues!).
Second, I can’t help but asking myself: What about 4e? I mean I’m a strong believer that 4e can do a honest tribute to Old School yet I haven’t made a tangible demonstration of it.
My biggest question is what would a 4e Mega-dungeon be like (once again, possibly but not necessarily old school as defined by James here)?
In fact, seeing some of negative reaction to Monte’s project and to a lesser extent Necromancer Games‘ Classic 4e, I feel the urge to step forward and do something about it.
Creating a successful 4e campaign based around a Mega-Dungeon would definitively be a daring challenge.
Making it into something bigger (amid the potential justified criticism and jerk magnet that the Old School/New School divide is) would be an unbelievably hard yet highly satisfying project too. But I’m getting way ahead of myself here.
Instead of getting drafted into a needless argument or being sucked in by an unplanned Nerd Project (i.e. one that seems awesome but crashes and burns when the flavour of the month changes), I will, in future posts, set the foundation under which I would design a 4e Mega-dungeon campaign, that my players and I would enjoy playing in (please note the emphasis here) and then go into more details.
I know my players and I know what I like. It’s a small enough subset that I can wrap my mind around. If the idea flies and I can get this to go further than a Nerd Project, I’ll see if this can be grown further out and maybe move this over to my Chatty Studios website (once I finish Kobold Love).
In fact, I’ve been spending the last 2 hours with my friend Yan and we’ve already laid the foundation for the Setting, the meta-plot and the “raison d’être” of this Mega-dungeon as a plausible campaign setting.
There’s a lot of questions to answer to get this thing started. Here’s a few I have on my mind. I invite you to add more if you have them.
- Will the Dungeon be fully mapped (like the ones from the seventies) or will it remain mostly abstract like ThunderSpire Labyrinth?
- Huge levels to explore or linked 5-room dungeons?
- Will it embrace Old School dungeon design lore or player psychology-driven controlled encounters? Are both mutually exclusive?
- Will it be a static exploration environement (keyed rooms), a dynamic dungeon environment or a mix of both?
One thing’s for sure, my current players would have no stomach for a ‘map as you progress’, count up your Iron rations and get killed many times type of campaign. As much as I’d like to try it someday, that’s not what my players expect of our shared game.
One of my design goals will be to try to merge what 4e does best with what I miss the most about huge dungeon crawls and see what comes out of it.
That’s why I know that some of the answers I’ll choose will lead some to say that it’s not going to be a true Megadungeon campaign. To this I’ll answer: So what? I have the freedom to define my own game and limited words in which to convey it to readers.
It will be centered around a huge sprawling underground complex and most of the campaign will be set in it. That’s a workable definition of Megadungeon for me. I don’t say it’s the only one or a better one… I’m just saying it’s mine… 
More to come!
Image Credit: Undermountain level, Copyrights Wizards of the Coast 2007.
Watchmen Weekend Critical Bits
Review: "Watchmen"
Before we start, this review will contain a number of references to the book, and as a result spoilers for the movie.
It’s funny for a movie that is supposed to be so faithful to the book (that I have read through many, many times) that I did my best to avoid spoilers. I wanted to dive in and make the comparisons myself, without hearing what critics (who, as we discovered, may be coming from an entirely different perspective than I am) have to say. I also try very hard to avoid being the nitpicky fan who dislikes any deviation from the source material: after all, different media have different challenges.
Watchmen does a very good job of conveying the story (and most of the important plot beats) of the original work, and for that, I really enjoyed seeing it onscreen. Yes, there are a few details that are changed, both large and small, to accomodate the film’s running time (which is already very long). An opening montage is added to provide some of the backstory into the divergent 1985 where the story takes place. Talking to some of the people I had come with, it seemed that this worked to add confusion instead of give a foundation.
Then by the time you get to Rorschach’s meeting with Dr. Manhattan and Miss Jupiter, you start to see the groundwork of where the story would diverge more, and also a bit of new dialogue clashing with Moore’s original. Still, the scenes are there, and by the time you get to the Comedian’s funeral, you REALLY feel the faithfulness of the work shine through. As the movie goes on, you’ll see the odd line that the film walks between staying true to the original and making a plot that fits within the confines of the movie. Sometimes it succeeds, and sometimes it doesn’t. I will say that the ending event, which as you’ve probably heard is different than the book’s, fills the same role well enough. Unfortunately, several other parts of the ending are chopped to bits, and was where I most longed for it to have stuck closer to the original.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed the actors in it, having a vague feeling of dread going in that it would be a “young, sexy” cast instead of an appropriate one. Jackie Earle Haley wins my top award for casting, especially when he is without his face in the prison. His gravelly voice always manages to stay menacing (unlike Bale’s Batman) and he delivers all the classic lines with a subtle but hard edge. His most powerful scene in Antartica is not to be missed. Night Owl could have been a bit more of a schlub for my tastes, but manages to be enough of a dork in his giant glasses to make up for it, and a totally different person while in his suit. Miss Jupiter didn’t wow me, but didn’t ruin anything either. Billy Crudup plays Dr. Manhattan as detached at nearly all times, which has an appropriately unnerving effect, but not in the same ways you’d expect him to from the book. (And by the way, you will see plenty of Dr. Manhattan, in more ways than one). The Comedian (NOT played by Robert Downey Jr.) also has the appropriate range for the character, and you do both hate him and feel sorry for him at various times. Ozymandias plays it mostly cool as well, and while he doesn’t get much screentime, he delivers the important lines very well.
There is one important distinction to note between the cast of the book and the cast of the movie: the cast of the movie are bona fide superheroes. Every one of them is a martial arts master, able to take on large numbers of opponents at the same time and snap their bones out of their skin with a flick of the wrist. (Note to the squeamish: if you see a fight starting to happen and it’s going in slow motion, look away. Also, look away any time Rorscach is doing anything). There are even a couple fight scenes that are way padded out from the book, which seems unnecessary, and in fact reminded me a lot of the treatment of V for Vendetta.
In addition to the main cast, there are a large number of celebrity 80′s impersonators. This is one of the movie’s failings hands down: the make-up is terrible. I found myself wondering if Nixon’s putty nose was going to fall off in the middle of a scene. It was also amusing to me to have fake Lee Iacocca and fake Henry Kissinger have extended parts.
Another major distracting point of the movie, and one that also caused unintentional chuckles, was the music. Various famous songs are used, which makes them almost instantly recognizable and don’t sink into the background. They also are too “on the nose“, too loud, and often mood-breaking. This may sound like a small issue, but it’s done in the most irritating way I can imagine. At no point when reading Watchmen did I envision hearing 99 Luft Balloons.
As mentioned before, I thought the dialogue was fine, except when it specifically was clashing between old and new dialogue in two different styles, and not just because I was used to the old dialogue. I was quite thankful that most of my favorite lines made it in, and were largely delivered well. It’s only in the ending when it starts to get muddled up by moving around the lines between different characters, and leaving out a few that I felt were pretty important to the story. Additionally, almost all my favorite scenes made the jump, as well as my least favorite scene from the book (which I’m happy to discuss with those who have seen it in the comments).
So what’s the verdict? They made a good movie based on Watchmen. It’s not perfect, both in terms of adapting the source material and just in making a good movie, but it’s well worth seeing both for die-hard fans and those who can get a glimpse into what all the fuss is about.
My favorite part of the movie’s release is entirely detached from the movie itself. I’ve gotten to talk to other fans of the book, and find out that each person takes something different away as what to appreciate about it. Just last night, one friend was telling me about how he appreciated all the effort that went into the alternate world it takes place in. Another talked about the tough choices that all the characters were placed in. The more visually-minded I’ve talked to have discussed the back and forth contrasting panels, and the use of an unusual panel grid. I myself love the twists and turns of the plot. Any movie that spurs on such great conversation has to be given some credit. Alan Moore may not like it, but ultimately, I think having more entry points to his world is a good thing.
