Poliglocia

To begin to imagine the impact of Watchmen on a die-hard superhero comics fan like me, visualize a train-wreck taking place in twelve monthly installments. I may not have recognized Watchmen as a deconstruction of the hero, but certainly I realized (with a combination of horror and fascination known to rubberneckers everywhere) that there my precious heroes were being shattered before my very eyes, taken apart from the inside-out, in the pages of the medium that had always loved and cared for them, and in a style that demonstrated an obvious mastery of the medium that it now set out to implode. Thomson, Iain: "Deconstructing the Hero". In: . Superheroes and Philosophy . Open Court, Chicago 2008, P. 102. As for me, I never experienced superheroes as part of my childhood. When I was around 7 years old, everybody was crazy about "Batman Returns", but my parents wouldn't take me to watch it because it was too dark for a kid. In a way, they were right. I must ha...

This weekend the Europe's largest game fair, the Spiel, took place in my neighborhood. Since it has proven impossible to fully describe events that cover several days, I will focus on the Roleplaying Games I met on the fair this time. Of course, there are many others I didn't get to know enough about even to mention them, but here's a report on the bits I learned. Meikyu Kingdom: I had one more chance to try what calls itself a "cynical pop dungeon fantasy" with an experienced GM. The setting is a world consisting in its entirety of a massive dungeon and full of every random eclectic cliché of fantasy you can imagine, only even a little weirder because Japan. Characters are rolled together to produce absurd, but somehow consistent combinations. This time I was a butler called "Champion of the Messe" who had a constant itch for fighting. The system is confirmed for hilarious, random story driving and fun adventuring. In a long run, the party should a...