It feels to me as though the role of the Games Master in gaming has been lessening for some years and in two directions. On the one hand there are some games - such as D&D4 - that are so codified and clear-cut in their rulings and systems that the Games Master might as well be a games console, running along a set little track nice and efficiently. On the other hand, the reaction to these kinds of systems has been the 'soft', narrative type games where player input plays a much more significant role in the game - directly rather than through play - than it used to. Case in point being the character/team creation rules in Spirit of the Century.

In some ways this is good, the more set and codified games are easier to prepare for, they're 'plug and play' in a way. You can just slot in a gang of goblins, treasure option B2 and some environmental hazards and you have an 'encounter'. With the softer games the shared burden of coming up with plot hooks and character buy-in relieves the Games Master of a great deal of the weighty burden of coming up with something everyone wants to play and finding reasons for the group to be together. In other ways it's bad, the GM becomes less of an interpreter and gets to put less of a personal spin on what's going on, or they succumb to being a wish fulfilment engine with less of their own narrative engagement with the game and the story.

Of course, you can always ignore both and do your own thing, damn the torpedoes, but it's nice when a game works with you rather than against you, where the system, setting and theme harmonises with the way you want to play. Speaking for myself I'm caught in the middle of the whole ideological 'gaming battle'. My happy place is somewhere between the two extremes.

So, I re-watched the 1996 series the other day. It's amazing, and frightening, to think of how many years ago that was now. Overall, the film has held up well, in no small part due to being set amongst timeless craziness and homeless squalor that doesn't age so badly as high octane, high fashion series. The only thing that sets it in the past like that are the mobile phones which are, mercifully, only briefly seen. Seeing it again floods me with nostalgia, laying in bed watching the series with my girlfriend at the time, time spent in London at the Electric Ballroom or around Camden, which frankly often looked like The Floating Market at the time and many of the extras in the market scenes are people I recognise from those days!

The series takes a lot of flak for being like the Old Style Doctor Who, shaky sets and so on. Personally I found it still looked really good and the restrictions of budget and the type of cameras used gave it a sort of honest verisimilitude that makes it seem more real and helps me suspend my disbelief. Really the only thing that lets it down terrible are the fight scenes which are poorly cut and choreographed. Even though they're not meant to be high-flying wire-fu spectaculars and there's not many of them, they really do make poor Hunter look dappy.

I managed to find a few little details I missed before and which I'll now incorporate into the game A-Z, so it was useful and also reminded me what a tour-de-force the performances for Croup and Vandemar were. Now I need to re-watch it again with the commentary on. I also found myself a DVD player with a very good screen-capture capability. I'm not going to use screen caps for the new book, but it does give me the opportunity to really peruse the detail of certain scenes, which is very helpful.

Feel free to offer any suggests of places/people that might be found in London Below as some people have!