Mutant Chronicles

[MortiS-the-Lost]

I was quite happily watching an episode of 'Ask That Guy With The Glasses' tonight and tagged on the end (as with all videos hosted by Blip, Revver and other such sites) there was a movie trailer.

At first it looked like it might be a war movie set in the Second or First World War, maybe about people trying to escape the conflict - it has gritty trenches, soldiers, piles of corpses, barbed wire, a spaceship taking off, a woman and child running through a bombed city ... HANG ON ... a spaceship taking off? WTF? ...no, I must have imagined it, I was quite stoned yesterday, maybe it hasn't all gotten out of my system yet ... hmm ... anyway as I was saying ... a woman and child running through a bombed city, frightened looking refugee children, nuns preying ... no wait there's that spaceship again! Whats going on here? Now there's a GC metal city ... this IS a Sci-fi film!  

Here's the YouTube link for the same trailer so you can see what I'm on about

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dv_nxnNKbDM&feature=related

yes thats right some one has unbelievably made a movie of  Mutant Chronicles. I've got to say I didn't see this coming at all.  So to check it wasn't just a film that happen to have the same name as the RPG I read a plot synopsis on Wiki-pedia  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mutant_Chronicles

Now I'm no expert on the Mutant Chronicles background - so feel free to slap me with a fish if I don't know what I'm talking about here - but I can't see Bauhaus and Capitol troops working together too well (that would be like having an alliance of Elves and Dwarfs in Warhammer)

RPG based films have about the same track record as computer game based films (ie, not very good)  and lets face it the Mutant Chronicles Games weren't/arn't very good to start with - my main memory of them was the Warzone miniatures which at best where just lame imitations of 2nd edition 40K figures. Although it never really caught on in the UK or US, apparently the Mutant Chronicles Games got quite popular in Sweden and other parts Europe for a while, and won some gamers over from 40k for 2 main reasons 1- it was slightly cheaper and 2 it was written in Swedish. (Scumdog47 might what to clarify some of this for us here)

Despite all the potential crappyness the film looks like it might have a chance of being good, even through the trailer looks like clips from Schindler's List have been randomly inter-cut with clips from Serenity after a terrible mix up in the cutting room, but at least it doesn't look like the Warzone miniatures.

I will do a review of the film if and when I see it.

[Scumdog47]

The game is stone dead, right?

I guess they'll try to make a revival though.

The old minis were...varied (ahem) in quality but perhaps they've learned?

[MortiS-the-Lost]

well ....

The Miniatures and Rulebooks for Warzone can still be found here:

http://www.connectstores.com/ralpartha/sp_35988.html

and Fantasy Flight Games (the current publishers of WFRP) make a Mutant Chronicles game with crappy pre-painted 54mm miniatures which I assume will ride the wave of the film's sucess (or not)

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/mutant-chronicles/

[Scumdog47]

Yeah, the game did get a small following of players in Sweden.
As did Chronopia, although I think Warzone fared slightly better.

Both games suffered from really, really, really lousy translation though. And poor use of Swedish in general...
(Written in English and translated to Swedish. Weird for a Swedish game but there you have it...)

The Mutant Chronicles RPG did better though. I even made a character for it once. A rather time-consuming process but not without it's merits since it partially helped creating the character's background as you went along.