Games Plus in Mount Prospect, IL

I just want to give a quick shout out to Games Plus in Mount Prospect, IL, for being the quintessential friendly local game store (FLGS) and my closet gaming location outside of home. The staff are knowledgeable and patient, the stock is vast, the game room is huge, and I always have fun there. Twice a year they have an auction so you can recycle some of your own stuff locally. Through EN World, Buzz organizes a gameday three times a year that we all started ten years ago (our 30th gameday comes up this Fall!). I currently run a couple of RPG camapigns and am in a Hordes of the Things miniatures campaign there which I will continue to blog about in coming weeks. There are some other stores in the region and some are quite good but hands down Games Plus is tops in the area, probably one of the top ten or even top five stores in the country.

Dwarves Photos from the New Hobbit Movie

Having seen Pan's Labyrinth (2006), I would have loved to see what Guillermo del Toro would have done with the Hobbit movies.  Yes, MOVIES (plural).  They are covering The Hobbit and other events leading up to The Lord of the Rings with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Hobbit: There and Back Again (2013).  However, I am even more pleased that Peter Jackson is back at the directorial helm.  His work on The Lord of the Rings movies was unparalleled in the fantasy film genre.

Well, to follow what's going on with the production you can probably do no better than to start with Peter Jackson's Facebook page.  But there have also been some photos released over the last couple of week of the various Dwarf characters.  I'll update more as I discover additional news around the web.

Discworld Disc-ography

If you are a Terry Pratchett fan, and a fan of Pratchett's Discworld series, as many gamers are, you might want to grab a one page PDF rundown of the novels and related publications from The L-Space Web put together by Krzysztof K. Kietsman (thanks to Joe Mucchiello, Head Honcho at Throwing Dice Games for putting the link up at EN World).  My own introduction to this series came when a friend suggested I read Guards! Guards!, the first of the Watch Novels.  I have since read many of the books and plan to read many more, perhaps all of them, someday.  If you don't take the fantasy genre of fiction too seriously, you can find hours and hours of enjoyment in them also.

D&D Documentary

There's a new Dungeons & Dragons documentary film in the works.  The filmmakers plan to complete it by 2013, in time for the fortieth anniversary (according to the linked Examiner article by Michael Tresca).  When the game came on the scene in 1974 there were a lot of skeptics about its viability.  Who would want to play a single character when you could play an entire army or, at least, a patrol of skirmishers trying to turn the tide of a great battle in your side's favor?  The success of the tabletop RPG style of play, I should say styles of play, has proven out over the years as compelling and fun, enjoyed by young and old, men and women, worldwide.  I wish the filmmakers, Anthony Savini & Andrew Pascal, all the same success in the making of this film and hope it becomes the definitive, balanced documentary the article predicts it will be.  Keep an eye on the Facebook page for the film for further details.  It does bode well that they are gamers.  They've got plenty of time.

The Tricky Trap Thread

I started what I am calling "The Tricky Trap Thread" over on EN World.  It's probably not what you would think just by the subject line, so please go over, check out the opening post, response following the guidelines (please), then read on through the thread (making sure not to jump in to respond to any other posts until we have reached a certain quota as described in the opening post).  I think it is proving to be very challenging and will yield some very interesting fruit on a number of levels before all is posted and done.

EN World Chicago Gameday 29!

Well, we're ten years plus into playing at these great gamedays, we do three per year, and it just keeps being a blast.  Here's a link to some morning slot pictures and more will be added  later.  I'll discuss some of the fun, added to this blog post when I return tonight or early tomorrow.

Lord of the Winds?

Before it falls too far into the past and the details are as such less fresh in my mind, I wanted to write something in these pages regarding The Lord of the Rings experience from this summer and how I was almost completely blown away, literally.

For the roll out of the Blue Ray extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies, the powers that be decided to run the extended editions of the movies on the big screens at select AMC Theaters.  One such location was on the Streets of Woodfield, down the road some distance from my home in Mount Prospect, IL.  They ran the three films, one each, on three consecutive Tuesdays in June, and only one showing for each at 7pm.  Peter Jackson's (exclusive) introduction for the Fellowship of the Rings included a mention of the Blue Ray editions but he was quick to point out that while he would appreciate any purchases of it, the best way to see the films was on the big screen and of the extended editions.  For Return of the King, enjoyed mentioning that seeing six thousand Riders of Rohan, if the full number only briefly, was going to be one of the big treats, and it was.  In fact, I think the Battle of Pelennor Fields was about the greatest film footage I have ever witnessed, particularly this time around.  Awesome is the only word!

I was in attendance for the Fellowship of the Rings and Return of the King but was thwarted in my efforts to see The Two Towers due to a tornado.  It happened to hit during the time I would have been in watching the film, and I would have been many more miles away from where it hit if I had gone, but the weather leading up to it convinced me not to go.  There was a great deal of storm damage, particularly near the post office, and mostly in the form of broken trees. Some ten thousand plus residents were left without power and even three days later half were still waiting for service.  A few years ago we had a big storm, though no tornado, blow through that knocked out our building but we were spared this go around.  That time, we didn't have restoration of service for five days.  I had fortunately not been shopping for food for a few weeks so very little was lost.  They also upgraded much of the infrastructure at that time or this year might have been far worse.

All in all, the other two movies were well worth watching on the big screen and I hope they do something similar during the lead up to the release of the Hobbit move(s).