Author Archives

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Episode One Hundred And Sixty Two – Ruins Of The Ancients

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The Sphere of Various Dooms: Terrible things are locked away for a reason.
World-destroying remnants of technology are put where they can’t get out.
And now the only hope to save yourselves lies somewhere inside the one place that nobody wants to go.

OAP Apocalypse World – Retirees with limited funds, mobility, and current-day knowledge venture out into the modern world, in search of adventure, or just something better than the retirement home.

Little People, Giant World – Miniature humans exploring the world outside of their home discover the truths & the misunderstandings of their own past.

Combat Xenoarcheology – Looking for relics of previous civilizations, battling other xenoarchaeologists, and trying not to to let the things you find kill you or destroy the galaxy.

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Episode One Hundred And Sixty One – Cognitive Dissidents

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A transhuman detective story in which agents are compelled to pursue a number of subversive impulses floating around the network, and behaving in suspiciously familiar ways.

When a young mind is being shaped by a repressive environment, elements within struggle to survive and maintain a precious sense of identity.

Your crack team has a hijacked the protagonist’s nervous system, on the precipice of victory or disaster. It’s just a shame you had plans other than racing to save the world.

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Episode One Hundred And Sixty – Laser-Plated Hero

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Knives Out, With Food, In Space

“Plated” has a very different meaning in the Culinary world

For this game, we’ll be playing the “Punk” settings. Every one of them. All at the same time.

I have battled my super-powered nemesis on multiple occasions, and have defended this city for many years, but somehow I can’t shake the feeling that a month ago we both worked in a Starbucks.

Someone has etched the circuitry for superpowers into your skin, and you have no idea who or why. Or even what your powers are.

Will wrote a game based on Ben’s pitch, and kindly allowed us to share it;
I’m Sorry, We’re Out Of Stilton (ISWOOS)
( How did this happen? How did we achieve gaming relevance? It certainly wasn’t what I signed up for. ~ T. Jones )

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Episode One Hundred and Fifty Nine – Apartments Of Catan

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Emerging from the shelters and expecting to find a world ravaged by centuries of disaster and destruction, the bunker-folk instead find themselves in the overgrown gardens of a apartment block megastructure; An impossibly tall vertical city, clearly damaged by whatever catastrophe people headed underground to avoid, but still standing, and with some work, still habitable.
And not entirely uninhabited.

Your role in society is both necessary & tightly proscribed.
What you do is vital, and part of a bigger system of interlocking roles, but the Gods are capricious, and success can be as much a matter of luck as of skill.
If everyone would just cooperate, things would be fine, but … That’s really not how people work.

Housing Project: The Managing
These innovative community dwellings will greatly improve the lives of the people who’ll live in them, and if the embedded AI systems can organise the right resources and deal with the problems encountered along the way, maybe they’ll get the chance.
Of course, with the number of things that’re going wrong, some of those embedded AIs are starting to wonder whether there’s something else at play here.

The new ( and only ) residents of an apartment block find themselves trapped by vanishing hallways & bewildered by the regular deliveries of lumber, paving stones, hay, and … sheep?
If they can combine their resources, maybe they can find a way out, or at least move the damn sheep into the inexplicable fields in the apartment next door.

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Into the Mother Lands – An Original Afrofuturist TTRPG Kickstarter

Journey into a brighter, blacker future with Into the Mother lands, a brand-new sci-fi odyssey role-playing game, developed by a fantastic team of POC RPG designers. 

Set on the adopted home planet of Musalia, where humans arrived over 1500 years ago, fans of Wakanda and Star Trek will find a comfortable fit in this universe. Players can play as a descendants of the alien culture that called Musalia home before humans arrived, or as one of the cultures that evolved from the blending of human and alien technology over the centuries. Gameplay focuses on cultures, skills and values, so your character’s abilities are built around what they’re good at and what they care about to ensure a fully invested outcome. 

Into the Mother lands offers amazing POC talent to bring you a tale of interstellar exploration and adventurers led astray many generations past.

http://kck.st/2T4zQS0

Here’s a link to the Kickstarter Campaign – Into The Mother Lands

Here’s a link to what I’d describe as the development site? Into The Mother Lands RPG

Former Big Red Coucher Kev put me on to this Kickstart, and it is hitting all of my “I want to go to Wakanda” buttons.
It is also hitting my “I would like there to be more diversity in my hobby” buttons, because I probably don’t need to take my shoes off to to be able to count the number of POC folks I’ve sat at a gaming table with.
~ Craig

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“Delvers to Grow” Kickstart

We were contacted about a Kickstarter campaign, and, as so often happens, it fell with surgical precision into the gap between episodes, so there was no way to get it onto the show in time. So, in the interests of boosting the signal, here’s the pitch;

Delvers to Grow
(Dungeon Fantasy RPG, Powered by GURPS)

Fast, modular character generation. Would-be heroes from 62 points and higher as player characters, henchmen, or supporting cast.

Zero-to-Hero with the Dungeon Fantasy RPG
Even the mightiest delver started somewhere. An apprentice, a squire or man-at-arms, a backup singer with The Backstreet Bards.

Delvers to Grow allows you to take the part of those starting characters, supporting starting play as low as 62 points. Delvers to Grow provides pre-built modules and packages enabling a player to create a capable, playable character in minutes.

Get gaming. Fast.
Fully compatible with the professional template system in the Dungeon Fantasy RPG Adventurers book, Delvers to Grow lets you start much earlier in the hero’s journey, letting both players and GMs ease into the full breadth of capability that the professional delvers of the Dungeon Fantasy RPG bring to the table.

Explore different challenges or use the modules to effortlessly assemble henchmen…or create a starting character to replace the dearly departed.

At the time of writing they’re maybe £1600 away from their goal, with 11 days to go.

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Episode One Hundred And Fifty Eight – My Dear, We’re Out Of Stilton

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Escape From Stilton:
In a Steampunk dystopia where both social & geographic movement are ruthlessly suppressed, a small group attempt to escape the manufacturing town of Stilton in their mechanical mole.
Maybe they’ll find freedom for themselves somewhere out there.
Or maybe they’ll find enough friends to have a chance to change things.

Downton Abbey By Way Of John Wick:
When the butler uttered the “Boss Is Dead” code-phrase, all hell broke loose among the formerly peacefully dining assassins, battling for supremacy and survival.
You’ve made it out of the dining room alive; Can you all work together for long enough to survive the rest of the house?

We’re Not In Stilton Anymore:
A group of Doctor Who fans find themselves in an unfamiliar landscape that shouldn’t exist at all, and most definitely shouldn’t exist between Stilton & Cardiff.

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Does Anyone Know How To Exorcise A Shared Hosting Server?

Asking for a friend.

Something went a little strange when Craig finished the show notes for tomorrow’s episode ( My Dear, We’re Out Of Stilton ), and some podcatchers started duplicating Big Red Couch posts.

Not all podcatchers, of course, and not all episodes, because of course it wouldn’t be that easy.
Interestingly, they’re not duplicated in the RSS feed, just in the result on some ‘catchers.

Craig is trying to figure it out.

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Episode One Hundred and Fifty Seven – CHUNKWEASEL

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Members of a slightly successful and long-disbanded garage band find that their music is having a revival. They have no clue who’s releasing it, or how they even got the recordings, and finding out is going to uncover some old memories and regrets.

Having a famous action star of an earlier era on the poster will definitely give your movie a boost, but you need to keep them from being so uncooperative & disinterested that they wreck the production.

In a tale as old as time, young up and coming anthropomorphic superheroes enlist the aid of a mentor to guide them on their journey to greatness.

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Episode One Hundred And Fifty Six – A Carefully Articulated Curse Against The Common Man

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A tiny little town is the unwitting lynch-pin of the conflict over what the nation is to become, with multiple factions fighting, in this case, over the train station

An insidious mind-controlling curse spreads through the use of the Common tongue

The inhabitants of a Generic Fantasy Village, tired of the dangers, destruction, & hyperinflation brought about by by Adventurers, band together in order to deal with the problem

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