Games and Media I Enjoyed in February 2018

We are now in the month of April so my monthly recap of the things I enjoyed in February is long past due. I spent most of February in nightly rehearsals for the musical Cabaret (which ran successfully in early March to good reviews and audience reception), so I had a few false starts on some of the things I began to consume (Lovecraft Country I am looking at you) but intend to return to those in the near future. I still managed to finish a few things I started and present my favorites below. (Spoiler: I spent most of March in rehearsal for Arsenic and Old Lace opening next weekend.)

BATES MOTEL SEASON 5

Bates Motel has been one of my favorite shows since it first premiered, so when the final season finally dropped on Netflix in February, I stopped watching everything else and jumped right in. I rarely have enough time to binge-watch a show in an entire day or weekend, but I will do mini-binges of two or three episodes at bedtime (I usually fall asleep by the middle of the third or fourth episode and pick up from where I left off the next night). With Bates Motel, I found myself staying up later than usual, eager to jump right into the next episode.

This season did not disappoint. I am going to avoid any spoilers, but I have to admit the temptation is great. As always, the acting was first rate. Freddie Highmore (Norman Bates) is as intense and believable as always, and Vera Farmiga (Norma Bates) is probably one of my favorite American television actresses of all time, right up there with Edie Falco. Without really giving anything away, my favorite part of the season was when the events of the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film adaption of Robert Bloch's novel Psycho began to unfold (money stolen from the bank right before the weekend up to the infamous shower scene), and were then turned completely on their head. Really well done!

All in all, the series conclusion left me satisfied with no loose ends or disappointments. I'm glad to see Freddie Highmore having continued success with his new series, The Good Doctor. 

CRIME SCENE d20 SOURCEBOOKS

Back at the start of the new millennium when Dungeons & Dragons was still in its third edition, British RPG publisher Hogshead Publishing released Crime Scene, a series of sourcebooks focusing on modern criminal investigation. All you needed was a copy of the D&D Players Handbook and you were good to go—the books included character classes, skills, and feats appropriate to the genre. Oddly, Hogshead never jumped on the d20 Modern bandwagon when Wizards of the Coast released that game based on D&D.

Crime Scene titles included Police Investigation, Feds, and Forensics, but there were two titles that particularly grabbed my interest at the time: Supernatural and Sheriff's Office: Red Pine Hollow. Red Pine Hollow is a fictional small town in the Pacific Northwest. You could use it for straight up drug/vice squad action and organized crime, but you were also encouraged to combine it with Supernatural to give it a Twin Peaks vibe. Similarly, Supernatural let you decide if psychic abilities, aliens, dark magic, etc. really exist in your campaign or are merely the delusional beliefs of cults on the FBI watch list. I decided to revisit these, particularly Red Pine Hollow, because I've been toying with the idea of formally writing up my personal default modern horror setting that I've used in many of my games over the years.

One of the criticisms of the Crime Scene line was the proliferation of skills, many seeming to cover similar ground. While there is some overlap, I never saw this as a huge problem. In a crime scene/police procedural game, you are going to have player characters who all do similar things and the increased number of skills helps to differentiate them and give everyone something to do and a specialist area to shine in. Pelgrane Press's GUMSHOE games do something very similar with their investigative abilities today (and do it very well). And while the Crime Scene titles are set in the United States, the authors unwittingly let some British-isms sneak in. A common colloquial unit of measurement in America is the football field—describing something as three football fields in length, for example; Crime Scene Supernatural amusingly used football pitch instead. Still, the books were well researched for the time but are now almost two decades old so "modern" might not fit as a descriptor anymore.

Crime Scene PDFs at DriveThruRPG

That's all for now. I hope to have a blog post about my March media consumption soon. Thanks for reading!