Author Archives

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A Kickstarter we like: Storium!

Storium is a platform for online storytelling, and it looks very interesting indeed.

It’s open to asynchronous/play-by-post games, and really the Kickstarter page does a fantastic job of explaining things itself – and other people are writing about it too, such as Helen Barker.  There are two good videos on that page, one of them under “The Game” heading.

If that’s not enough for you, look at the worlds which have been unlocked during the Kickstarter.  I was hard-pressed to limit my selection of examples to five!

Shoshana Kessock: THE RISING – Being dead can’t hold you down in this urban fantasy game about life after the afterlife.  The gates of the underworld are open and it’s time to make a run for your second chance.  Find a body, find a purpose, and find your way home.

Ursula Vernon: WEIRD FRUIT – A village of brave rodents face down carnivorous vegetables, explore ruined jungle temples and confront other dangers in this playful world.

Andrea Phillips: THE DARING ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN LUCY SMOKEHEART – A swashbuckling adventure for the young at heart, with daring pirates, carnivorous mermaids, socialist lizard-people, and ruthless anachronism!

Saladin Ahmed: A THOUSAND NIGHTS AND A NIGHT – The rich cultural history of the Arabian Nights blended with the great pulp traditions of Fairbanks and Harryhausen.  Sail the seas, explore teeming cities, and cross ghoul-haunted deserts.

Richard Dansky: SQUATCHTOWN – Walk the mean streets of a city where Bigfoot’s not a legend and private eyes might be nine feet tall.  Take a walk on the real wild side where big heat meets big feet, and human and sasquatch worlds collide.

So that’s a taster.  The other big cool element of this is how transparent the entire platform is designed to be: people who buy subscriptions ($25 annually post-Kickstarter, $20 currently) will be able to create their own worlds.  And, if they want, attach prices to them – and the majority of profits go back to the creators.

That’s just glorious.  We recommend checking it out.

– Kev.

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Podcast Crossover Adventure!

The kindly folks of The Gutter Skypes invited us to playtest a Fiasco scenario with them, and Tonya and Kev were able to attend.

If anyone is interested in hearing us play an Actual Game with real live humans (rather than Craig and Ben, though that just raises more questions…) the show is Session 127 available here.

Mark Kinney from All Games Considered was our guide and native-bearer for Fiasco, which was particularly relevant given we’d never played the game before and Kev in particular had No Clue.  (You can tell.)  Anim, Nikki, and Andros from The Gutter Skypes leant their talents to the escapades, and Fun Was Had.

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Updates!

Hi everybody!

Some more changes have gone live, with more to come over the next few weeks.

Our Game Resources page has updated with some new content, including more characters adapted into Fate Accelerated Edition, some characters adapted to Fate Core from FAE as a comparison, and some archived transcripts of play.

We also have a new hub page for RPG reviews. The plan is to migrate reviews done years ago for other sites onto this page, while also creating new reviews for newer games.  We have a new review of Fate Accelerated Edition up now, along with comparative reviews of both the One Roll Engine and Strange Fate editions of The Kerberos Club from a few years ago.  More reviews will appear as we go.

As ever, any responses or feedback will be greatly appreciated!

– Kev.

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So who wants Unknown Armies?

The answer to that question is: All Right-Thinking People.

The folks at Bundle of Holding have figured that out and want to help: their current bundle collects a huge amount of the Unknown Armies game line, and will likely add more before the sale closes in slightly-less-than-70-hours (less than 3 days) from the time this post goes live.

You get both the Core book and the One Shots collection of modules, which includes the infamous “Jailbreak” scenario that everyone should experience once, along with a bunch of other goodies.

If you also participated in the earlier Fate-themed Bundle of Holding, you’ll have The Kerberos Club.  That means if you get in on this bundle, you have everything you need to use the BRC’s adaptation of “Jailbreak” into Strange Fate.

You know.  Hypothetically speaking.

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Behold! A Refurbished Game Resources Page Featuring New Content!

Greetings all!  In the background for the last while, we’ve been working on reorganising the Game Resources page in response to feedback.  The new version has more structure we can use to grow in future without it becoming unwieldy, and has a bunch of extra content.

On the page, you will find:

– A Questionable Content hack of Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE) with Approaches designed for a QC context, along with a bunch of character write-ups using the hack.
– FAE characters from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Gravity Falls and Homestuck
– Rules meaning you can use Strange Fate from The Kerberos Club to run the infamous “Jailbreak” scenario from Unknown Armies, and all you need is the book that contains the module itself.
– Character and City Generation for a Dresden Files RPG game that members of the BRC are playing/running together.

Plus many other gems. We plan to keep adding to the Game Resources section, and if you see something interesting listed as a bulletpoint but there’s no link yet, it’s a sign we’re working on adding it in future.

Curious to see what you think!

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Sale!

Hi folks!  The good people at Arc Dream publications are having a sweeping 30% off sale at the moment, and since we discuss a lot of their stuff in the podcast where relevant, we thought you might want to know. Here’s the link.

The sale includes all One Roll Engine products (Barring Better Angels which is in preorder), together with the FATE and Savage Worlds ends of the spectrum.  Plus, all products are available print+pdf from what I can see.

This means that the series on sale include:
The Kerberos Club (Strange FATE, Savage Worlds and One Roll Engine flavours available)
Monsters and Other Childish Things
Wild Talents (including the fantastically ambitious and well-done Progenitor)
A Dirty World
GODLIKE
eCollapse
And other sundries.

My particular favourites would be The Kerberos Club (Strange FATE edition), Monsters and Other Childish Things, and Progenitor, though Progenitor requires the Wild Talents system to run.  Fortunately there is Wild Talents: Essential Edition which is normally available for something like $10 USD, and hey, 30% off sale.

But pretty much everything there is worth a look.

– Kev.

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Game Resources

Hi everybody!

As part of playing around with learning new systems, we at the Big Red Couch build experimental characters, and put together other stuff that we find useful.  We’ve put up a new page called Gaming Resources where we’re going to archive that kind of material, just in case it’s useful to anyone else as well.

Currently it has character sheets for Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE), featuring such characters as Veronica Mars, Dexter Morgan, Kim Possible, Ron Stoppable, and the Mane 6 protagonists from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

We’ll add to it as new things are developed, and if anyone wants to ask questions or make suggestions about how the characters work or how we’ve built them, that’d be a conversation we’d love to have.

Hell, if we get time, we might even take requests!

– Kev.

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Refurbishment!

Eagle-eyed users of the site will notice some changes in the way things work; there are also some visual cues to inform our Reader about the current state of the podcast.

All part of our Serious Commitment to you.  Yes, you.

You’re welcome.