2026 08 21 Sinners the Movie and the Dreamed of Tabletop Rpg

This post has sat in my drafts folder for almost a year, so forgive the hot takes on Ryan Coogler’s film—no, scratch that, forgive the hot takes, full stop, but not with an em dash.

I liked the movie; that’s the baseline from which everything else here proceeds. Two things are worth chasing beyond that baseline. The first is that Sinners gave a wide, and largely white, audience a palatable and relatable way into the supernatural mystery and richness of the spiritual world the Africans brought with them to populate the Gulf Coast: a world that doesn’t often get this kind of leading-role treatment on screen. The second is that Coogler built his world so thoroughly, so lovingly, that I could easily see the whole scenario as the grounds for a tabletop RPG, something in the vein of Dungeons & Dragons.

I really enjoyed this movie. I haven’t seen the ads and wasn’t too thrilled about seeing already acknowledged good actor, Michael B Jordan do the Haley Mills bit. Or the Jeremy Irons in dead ringers, but. But then I found out a little bit about the set up of the film as a night of the living dead ask outlast till morning kind of story set in the Jim Crow South and I was intrigued. Earlier reviews appeared to be positive so Lauren and I went and really enjoyed the film. There’s so much to say about the excellent performances from the entire cast. But for me, it was great to see some of those tropes and themes and cultural values that exist unspoken in the golf coastal south that I reckon from my own youth.

Smokes, love, interest is straight up a healing woman, a woman, a voodoo one someone deeply rooted in the African traditions that recognize that food is medicine to have a true Nigerian woman play. This sorceress was a wonderful dimension.

The film makes a wonderful reference to the notion of being dispossessed by dent of property or cast or race. I’ll always remember that the biggest critics against they are parted regime when I was a boy were U2 the Irish sense of displacement the African sense of displacement. There’s a deep delicate cord between those communities that recognizes something in common.

When I saw porches with paint blue on them, I could see Cobbler tipping his hat to Gulag Culture. I remember those paint blue effects in and around the New Orleans in my childhood. I remember thinking that the ceilings look like the sky.

If you don’t know, southern or African cultural tropes, it’s a great movie, highly entertaining. But if you can see that Coogler is using this movie to tell you something deep and something rich about Gulf Coast and black culture there’s so much more to enjoy. I’m sure I’m not aware of 1/10 of all the messages that the community speaking to itself says, but where my upbringing touched ever so slightly into that world, I love seeing it on screen the second point I’d like to make is that this movie would make an amazing tabletop role-playing game.

I grew up in the 90s playing Steve Jackson games RPG‘s and the one that sinners most reminds me of is rift. You had a sprawling gathering of types of beings and a sprawling collection of occupations, and nothing so much reminded me of the opening third of this movie as building your RPG party. You have the leaders of the party who are going through and recruiting the occupational character classes required to throw an amazing party. You need a bouncer, you need a head chef you need a witchy woman, you need liquor runners, you need party supplies, you need musicians, and all that is driven by the plot action of the story. But I can easily imagine inhabiting this rich world that Cobbler created. You can imagine building a character sheet of fire and brimstone, southern preacher, train line worker Bouncer Returned G.I. Vendor. Spirit, channeling musician.

In the same way that rifts played with living in the world where there’s ambient psychokinetic energy everywhere that could feel magic or spiritual effects, the world of sinners is Layden, and it’s very humidity with that psychokinetic burden. The vampire is a part of it, the time Ben musicians are part of it, the sorceress giving who do pouches is part of it. It’s all part of a rich supernatural world set in this tiny southern town against an imposing forest escape, and Cottonfield world. Oh, and don’t forget the idea of Choctaw warrior spiritual warriors that had faced the white man, but it also faced some other sort of demon that they knew the wiser of.

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