Having often heard it invoked on the RPG.net forums as having the tone of the Unknown Armies RPG, I finally watched The Lost Room miniseries. The premise involves the existence of about a hundred magic artifacts associated with a hotel room that ceased to exist (even ceased to have ever existed) in 1961, and the various obsessives, secret societies and cults that have formed around them.

While I’ve liked Peter Krause in Sports Night and Six Feet Under, I think he was miscast in this role – he remains too jovial for the gritty setting. And Julianna Margulies is a good actor, but her character here was too blank for her to have much to work with. But there were several great supporting roles by Kevin Pollak, Peter Jacobson, and Dennis Christopher (the star of Breaking Away, I just realized.)

I frankly expected to be disappointed by the climax, having been burned so many times before by Big Mystery genre series, but it succeeds in offering something big and satisfying that’s true to the series. If the comic follow-up ever appears, I’ll be reading.

It makes we want to blatantly rip off the premise for a role-playing game.