Episode One Hundred And Thirty Six- “I knew there was something I was supposed to do, but I can’t remember what it was…”

A group of total strangers who are distresingly familiar to each other attempt to work out what disaster befel their city, why they feel like they had something to do with it, and whether it could happen again.

The Universe is broken, the backup is corrupted, and you’re trying to rebuild from your own hazy memories of what it was like.
And maybe sneak in some improvements at the same time.

The Social Collateral system rewards helpful deeds & improves efficiency by ensuring that nobody can forget a task.
And yet it feels like that’s what’s happening, even though the system says it isn’t.

The World’s Greatest Genius needs a retinue of people to keep them on track & remind them to wear pants, and to stop anyone finding out that this is the case.
That’s where you come in.

Auto-Targeting systems mean that if you look human, and are a combatant, you get hit; The only defense is camoflage which obscures the human form.
In these dark times, Furries are our only hope for survival.

Airship Pirates stage raids on the Politico-Corporate Empire of the Mouse, rebroadcasting IP to anyone with the will to watch it and concealing their identities by wearing the cartoonish heads of the oppressor.

Continue reading

Episode One Hundred And Thirty Five – Things Are Going Down At Disney Town

The AI cast members at the theme park became a vital part of the experience; A wild assortment of characters you could talk to who would always remember your name and were always happy to see you.
Then things fell apart, and the people stopped coming, and the cast members found themselves without anything to do.
So they went out to find out where the guests had gone.

Rather than put people in unconvincing suits, the Theme Park uses modified people, but for everyone who is convincing enough to be a star, there are many who just don’t make the grade. They can get some work, but they’ll never break out of the Park Ghetto of the not-quite-right.
Now that one of them has gone rogue and is committing unspeakable crimes in their shanty town, it’s up to a “goofy-looking” PI to find them and stop them.

“Camp”, by Faraz Shanyar

Faraz Shanyar’s Artstation Portfolio


Hot blob: vast patch of warm water off New Zealand coast puzzles scientists
Pelagic

Calypso Music

Mulling / Mulled Cider

Asimov’s Three Laws Of Robotics

Gaston
Wreck-It Ralph

Disneyland Park (originally Disneyland)
Walt Disney World

Westworld

Ellen Ripley

Lord Humungus
Immortan Joe
Mad Max Franchise

Defunctland (youtube)

Abandoned Mister Blobby Amusement Park
Footrot Flats
Footrot Flats: The Dogs Tale Tail
( I couldn’t find much of anything on the now-defunct Footrot Flats Leisure Park. Seems it only lasted a few years, got rebranded, and died. Here’s the best thing I could find. ~ T. Jones )

Rainbow’s End

Disneyland Paris

Avatar: The Last Airbender
Avatar (James Cameron/Giant Smurf)

Spirited Away

Bats Day

Kingdom Hearts

Vanellope Von Schweetz
Captain Jack Sparrow

Toy Story Franchise
Mad Max: Fury Road

Little Robots, Big World – The Gutter Skypes
This was a multi-episode game run by Trilobite; Links to the MP3 for the episodes as follows ~ T. Jones
190
191
193
195

The Brave Little Toaster
There Will Come Soft Rains, by Ray Bradbury

Zack Snyder
Justice League

The Snyder Cut

Blade Runner
Goofy
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Bill Watterson
Calvin & Hobbes
Berke Breathed
Bloom County

Underground RPG

Buck’s Fizz (drink)
Bucks Fizz (band)

The Witcher (TV)

Cool World

Blacksad (comic)

Donald Duck

The Dresden Files

French Foreign Legion

The Crow
Dark City

Walt Disney

Tank Riot (podcast) and their Walt Disney episode.

(Regarding the “crude graffiti”, there is a story from Walt’s youth (recounted above at 20:55) which often involves mentions of corporal punishment. The Tank Riot crew briefly infer that it was subject rather than the permanence of the medium that inspired his fathers wrath. And then they repeated it as a running gag for the following decade. They are a true inspiration. ~ T. Jones)

Jacinda Ardern
John Key and “that photo.”

Episode One Hundred And Thirty Four – Tempest Redeye Flight

Tempest Redeye Flight
Tempest Redeye Flight

Trapped by the snow, the handful of passengers on a stranded air-liner find themselves retreading a classic story.

A Jovian gas extraction platform unexpectedly loses communication with it’s drill-head deep in the atmosphere below. Has the far end met with technical malfunction, a mutiny by the crew (or machinery), or something more sinister?

The first summit between the zombie nation and the terrified world that quarantined it is already off to a rocky start, so when a conspiracy is uncovered by a bi-partisan team of organisers they realise they will have to act to preserve the fruits of their work.

Continue reading

Episode One Hundred And Thirty Three – Irritable Geography

Ben has a thesis on the role and point of travel in games, and the role and point of the encounters along the way.

Deities of the Land deal with a threat to their domain and the people living there; Possibly in between shifts at work.

Plucky youngsters save their home by enlisting the aid of the Spirit of the Town itself.

Teams of couriers venture through slightly alternate realities to keep their payload safe.

links to things we talked about

Episode One Hundred And Thirty Two – (Big Red) Couch Surfing

Big Red Couch Surfing

Couch-Hoppers – A mysterious ‘game’ found in a thrift store couch leads to hours of fun as you try to navigate alternate universes to find your way home.

Our Alternate Feed – A podcast discovers episodes they never made, in which people who sound and act just like them discuss events that never happened and things that don’t exist.

Remembering Big Red – A year after local surfing legend Greg “Big Red” Couch vanished while night surfing, people gather to remember him, and reflect on the year gone by.

Linky Goodness

Episode One Hundred And Thirty One – We HAVE Had Multiple Donkey Upgrades At This Point

episode 131 - We HAVE had multiple donkey upgrades at this point

Taz suggests a solo hex-crawler about exploring & prospecting to supply a newly founded colony.

“We have to remake the world in order to save it” isn’t a situation that anyone wanted to get to, but once we found ourselves at that point, it’s understandable that the panicked re-making might not go 100% as planned. Now, hand me that update for equine bio-accumulation & oxygen transport, and we’ll see whether we can get your donkey feeling better.

A group of folks transformed into beasts of burden come up with a cunning scheme to get greedy knuckleheads to drag them, braying and kicking, into the locations they’re cursed not to be able to approach.


Brexitcast
Parliament of Northern Ireland

Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction

M.U.L.E.

Opium Wars

Torchbearer RPG

Man Plus, by Fredrick Pohl

Mad Magazine

Dead Space

Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes

Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart

Yokohama Shopping Log / Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō

Geoengineering

Wall-E

Orbital Elevator

The Peace War & Marooned In Realtime, by Vernor Vinge
Dayworld, by Phillip Jose Farmer

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust

Pompeii

Thundarr The Barbarian
Thongor of Lemuria, by Lin Carter
( Oh Dear God, it’s one of a series. Craig, you are a monster for making me look this up ~ T. Jones )

Whangarei

Flatpack: Fix The Future

Numenera

Log Horizon

Red To Green: The Evolution Of A City’s Abandoned Acres
( Christchurch Suburbs being reclaimed by nature ~ T. Jones )

Apocalypse World
Masks

Diaspora, by Greg Egan

Sayer (podcast)

Paranoia (Wikipedia)
Paranoia (Mongoose Publishing)
Red Markets: A Game Of Economic Horror

Boston Dynamics Big Dog
( ‘Dynamics’, not ‘Robotics’ ~ T. Jones )

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

Feast Of Legends : Rise From The Deep Freeze
( Never thought I’d be show-noting The Wendy’s RPG ~ T. Jones )

Episode Thirteen – The President’s Earth Chakra Is Missing!

Episode One Hundred And Thirty – I Owe it All To My Digital Wristwatch

Time travellers attempting to blend in run into problems when they don’t know that they’re not using the right language.

Cheesy 80’s Kids Shows, where sly end-of-episode comments are a private joke between the protagonists and the audience.

Corporate executives combine the powers of their ludicrously expensive watches to form … Captain OfIndustry!

Backwards & Ford: Gerald Ford travels through time, possibly with a team of plucky youngsters, righting wrongs & setting history straight. (Possibly battling Evil Nixon in an effort to restore Good Nixon, or maybe subtly influencing the timeline to produce the best possible Nixon )

A group of police officers notice that the weirdness they’re seeing matches elements from their theological or cultural backgrounds. Many different cultural or theological backgrounds.

When aliens issue a challenge for dominance, electric cart jousting is the only logical option.


Whenuapai Air Base

David Cronenberg

Cheesehead Hat
Cow Pat

Moore’s Law

Calculator Watch
Game & Watch
Pocket Watch

Hello Fellow Kids

TimeWatch

Timeless

Tales From The Loop
Kids On Bikes

The Goonies

The Jank Cast

The Kids From OWL

Never Say Never Again
Thunderball
Albert R. Broccoli

Power Rangers
Captain Planet and the Planeteers

Jimmy Hoffa

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
Skeksis

President Gerald Ford

Pulsar Calculator Watch

The Lost Chapter: A Concise History Of The LED watch

Digital Dust: What happened to the digital watch?

President Jimmy Carter

RPG.net
Time Travelling Teddy Roosevelt & His Time Travelling Rough Riders
( This link might work, or you might need to be an RPG.net member and be given access to the specific board ~ T. Jones )
Emperor Norton
Escrima

Time Cellist
Yo-Yo Ma

Quantum Leap
Twin Peaks

Misspent Youth
Steal Away Jordan

Episode One Hundred And Twenty Nine – Aliens have landed at Gen Con and only stalwart games can defeat them!

Episode One Hundred And Twenty Eight – Religious Cops Train To Fight Magic

The Strange
Monte Cook Games
Numenera
Cypher System
TORG Eternity

The Dresden Files

Grimm

Kung Fu Vampire Killers

Dunedin, New Zealand

Mister Vampire
Dracula

Atomic Robo RPG

Episode One Hundred And Twenty Nine – Aliens have landed at Gen Con and only stalwart games can defeat them!

Aliens have landed at GenCon and only stalwart games can defeat them!

Personifications of games emerge when the need is greatest to rally the forces of gamers in battle against an Alien Menace.

Alien Invaders arrive, looking for the most loyal representative of Earth to battle for dominance in a symbolic competition. Owing to poor translation skills and the inability to imagine that anyone might do things differently, they’ve found the Gen Con booth of Stalwart Games, who are about to have a very weird day.

A Meeple-Shaped spacecraft has crashed in through the roof of LucasOil stadium, and the invading forces are streaming out to take over. The MiBs are responding, but they need time, so it’d up to the Gen Con attendees to divert, confuse, distract, and possibly subvert the alien menace to buy that time.

Here are some things we talked about

Episode One Hundred And Twenty Eight – Religious Cops Train To Fight Magic

The woefully underfunded members of the TZMP (Tserkovnyye Zashchitniki Moskovskogo Patriarkhata) must walk a line between keeping a low profile, maintaining interdepartmental peace with the uncanny Night Watch, and the disapproval of the authorities, while still managing to thwart the forces of Hell.

Your multi-denominational precinct of peace officers work diligently to maintain law and order, though your task may find you crossing into “differently-Holy” ground.

Odd-couple detective partnerships are a classic trope, but when one of the pair is a literal angel the cases they handle tend to involve obscure prophesy and dire omens.

SHOW NOTES AND LINKS

Episode One Hundred And Twenty Seven – What Does “A Cheeky Nando’s” Mean?

What Does "A Cheeky Nando's" Mean?
What Does "A Cheeky Nando's" Mean?

In the post-Brexit dystopia, where any mention of the world outside of the Commonwealth is strictly forbidden, a shadowy folk hero emerged … Cheeky Nando.

Working the grill at Nando’s confers awesome martial arts powers via the precise repetition of cunningly-disguised spatula and tong based fighting moves.

Cheeky Nando is friendly, charming, helpful, and the local Necromancer.

The Cheeky Nano-Dose – Pervasive nanotech means, more or less, that you’re being watched from the inside.

When a group holiday goes terribly, terribly wrong.

What if someone out there managed to franchise & weaponise football in order to destabilise cultures in other dimensions?

Links, and maybe an explanation