The Friday High Five

Dungeons & Dragons & Deadwoods

HBO

Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High Five. 🙏🏻

My brother was in town this week, which meant it was time to kick the tires and light the fires. By which I mean, assemble the crew and roll some funny-shaped dice.

We play a special game when he’s in town, one heavily influenced by Deadwood, the legendary HBO show about a literally lawless town during a gold rush in the 1800s. It’s actually the perfect backdrop for Dungeons & Dragons because the players are often motivated by gold, and Deadwood has enough scum and villainy to make Mos Eisley look downright quaint.

I renamed the town Deadrock but otherwise it’s largely the same. Al Swearengen is as conniving as ever, but in my version he’s a Tiefling—a human/demon hybrid, which totally works. The town is almost identical, and many of the characters show up with serial numbers filed off—E.B., Dan, Bullock, Wu. The players level up through the acquisition of gold, which fits the overall vibe. It’s a morally gray campaign. Everyone is out for themselves. It’s glorious.

We’ve played Deadrock 3 or 4 times now and it’s already my favorite setting/campaign ever. To the point that I’m starting to develop material for it, with the eventual plan to release it as a D&D supplement. You heard it here first!

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The Acolyte

Disney+

My feelings for The Acolyte are conflicted.

On one hand, I’m thrilled we finally got a Star Wars with entirely new characters. Nobody felt safe and the show pulled no punches. Lightsabers were deadly again, as the Maker intended.

The show also raised all sorts of juicy ethical questions about the Jedi and how they operate. Yes! Finally. Sometimes I feel like a weirdo because I ask complicated questions about stories that are intentionally uncomplicated—and sometimes I ask silly questions for which there are no answers. Point being: I got questions. It was refreshing to see someone pondering these kinds of things about Star Wars, to Star Wars, in a Star Wars.

I dig the cast—specifically Sol (Lee Jung-jae), Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith), and Qimir (Manny Jacinto). The fight choreography was stellar. The show looked great. And we got to see a Wookiee Jedi doing Jedi things. C’mon, y’all.

But as always, it comes down to the execution. And there the show stumbled.

The Rashomon-inspired story—where the same event is portrayed in contradictory ways by the people involved—was a cool idea. But in practice the show felt like it was drifting and directionless. And though we circle the same thing again and again—the twins, the vergence, the tragedy—we don’t get many answers. Much like with Ahsoka, The Acolyte is so busy seeding stuff for the future that it forgets to tell a good story that stands on its own merits.

I’m honestly bummed. There’s a lot of great stuff here, but it just doesn’t come together in a satisfying way.

The Legend of Zelda

If you can hear this picture, we should 100% be friends. Nintendo

Nostalgia Tour 2024 continues!

I’ve written previously about my renewed dalliances with the classic Nintendo games of my youth—as well as a prolonged infatuation with Tecmo Super Bowl—so I suppose it was only inevitable that I ended up here.

I have so many memories of playing The Legend of Zelda as a kid. The cartridge was freaking gold, which is an all-time flex. As I recall, the game manual included a map of the world. I used to sit crosslegged in front of an enormous Zenith TV that was 75% wood and had drawers with ornate dangly handles because it secretly aspired to be a dresser. I’d have the map spread out in my lap. I’d remain like that for hours.

It was my first experience completely disappearing into a game. The Legend of Zelda captivated me, in a way nothing had before, and maybe never had again. There are better games—A Link to the Past is my personal favorite Zelda—but there’s something wondrous about discovering a game like this at an age when magic still feels real.

I was always a bit skeptical it would hold up, and thus, stayed away so as not to sully those memories. But good games never go out of style.

I’ve been playing this game for a week, in the old ways. No looking up stuff online. I briefly googled the item list because I bought something that looked like salt water taffy and had no clue what it was. But that was it. No looking for secrets, or even where the dungeons lie. Discovery is part of the experience. Which is why I found the 8th dungeon before the 2nd or 3rd, and ran away screaming.

It’s funny how much of it comes back. I remembered the snakes in the 2nd dungeon charged when they were even with you. I knew I had to wait for the red knights to turn their back so I could hit them. I studied the dungeon map for places where rooms might be hidden in plain sight. I tried bombing every wall, burning every bush.

I haven’t played this game in 35 years but it’s like I never left.

Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills

I’ve owned this book for a couple of years and finally started reading it, for reasons that are probably obvious.

It’s written by legendary show runner David Milch, who also created Deadwood. Dude is a mad genius—look him up on YouTube sometime, it’s like listening to a prophet—and here he distills how he created the show, including a number of stories about the real Deadwood.

Yes, I’m totally mining this for D&D ideas.

Obi-Wan Kenobi

Disney+

I mentioned during the podcast episode on Revenge of the Sith that I was tempted to revisit the Obi-Wan Kenobi series on Disney+ because the former hands off to the latter so nicely. And so I have.

I’ve always been deeply fascinated by this period of Star Wars, specifically as it relates to Obi-Wan. I’ve written about it several times, even.

Obi-Wan remains at the height of his power; if age has worn the fine edge off his vigor, his mastery of the Force more than compensates. He could do great things still, but Tatooine is not a place for great things. Tatooine is where things dry up and die and are buried so completely as to have never existed. Tatooine is a graveyard.

I love the beginning of the show, when “Ben” blends in as a working class stiff and has forsworn everything from his old life, including his lightsaber, his name, even soap. You know you stink when Jawas start plugging their nose.

My hope for this series was a quieter Star Wars, a more inward-looking one. No external conflicts, no galaxy-spanning yarn, and certainly no Darth Vader. That was obviously off the table, for all sorts of reasons. Which is why one of these days I’ll write a thinly-veiled story about an exiled knight who buries his legendary sword in the sand and tries to live with the regret and pain of his past.

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That’s it for this edition. What are you digging at the moment? Drop a comment and let me know!