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In which Ben goes back to a Big Red Couch standard notion of “something on a spaceship”, despite Craig having taken the approach of deliberately NOT doing something set on a spaceship.

Not only is the ship fractured, but so is the crew, so turned against each other that they can’t save themselves. If you can just get these knuckleheads to work together, or even just get the hell out of your way, they’ll be rescued, the salvage prize is yours, and you’ll be set for life.

The crew are glad that help has shown up, and are keen to be rescued, but for some reason they’re not keen on doing the very things that would make that happen; Why?

An arcade lined with shops is fine to walk through, or even to hang out in and enjoy a cup of coffee; What if you found that you couldn’t leave?
Maybe you fell through the cracks and can see the monsters lurking outside.
Maybe you shouldn’t have belligerently declared that you’ll never leave while arguing with the Fae Lord of the Strand.
Or maybe breaking in at night to steal the fantastic items in the shops was just a really bad idea.

People trapped in a dimension-hopping shopping arcade, trying to trade with the folks outside for the things they need, hoping to one day make it home.

In The City, you can have every basic need taken care of … So long as you have the chip installed in your head. Somewhere outside the city is a place where the unchipped can live freely, however they want, and all you have to do is get there.
Somehow.

Links!

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You don’t call a place the “Witch Planet” because you like it, or the people who live on it, and you don’t do so without a cause. And you don’t go to live on the “Witch Planet” without a reason.
And while the original settlers of a place may be content with the ignore & be ignored status quo, their children may not feel the same way. And that’s when the ugly secret history of the Witch Planet starts to come into the light.

Actual witches rebel against their parents by attempting to play this strange non-magical sport called … soccer?

In an extremely magical world, having an entirely mundane football game is challenging. Each team has a squad who are constantly on the lookout for magical interference by their opponents. And maybe also on the lookout for opportunities to do some interfering of their own.

When what’s up for grabs is your teams chance to make it into the professional leagues of Galactic Witch Soccer, there’s plenty of room for skulduggery, match-fixing, and good old-fashioned shenanigans.
And that’s just the trouble that happens on purpose.

OK, Baba Yaga’s Hut can play in goal provided that it keeps its doors and windows open.

When magic left the world, it did so literally.
The fairy creatures and the trolls under bridges and the enchanted groves got together and went traveling among the stars.

What sort of person invents dimensional travel, and decides to use it to make money through sports franchising?

Dimension-hopping sports fans seek the universe where their favourite team didn’t get booted from the league.

LINKS!

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Programmable biological workers make it so much easier to set up a colony world, because you can reconfigure them as your colony develops.
Of course, if something goes wrong on the way there, the ship’s systems might find themselves trying to repair a starship with a worker build who think the telegraph is a pretty neat idea, …

When the colony ship fell out of orbit, it set the bio-workers to “Mental Evolution” mode, in the hope that this would compensate for the lack of central guidance. Years later, the remains of the ship are found, and the walls start taking to them …

Using bio-workers to raise the first generation of humans from the gene-banks is a fine solution to the problem of long spaceflights, but there will come a moment when the kids find out that their guardians really ARE robots …

Calling it an organic starship is over-simplifying things; It’s more of a space going coral reef, an ecosystem with a community on board, some of whom may be an integral part of the internal process.
How does the community react when the ‘ship’ suddenly changes course?
Or when the ship scoops up an entirely non-organic spacecraft, determines that it’s not edible, and dumps it out into the habitable areas?

If someone’s built a tomb which doesn’t rely on clever traps, and instead just flat-out tries to kill you, is it maybe worth considering that they had a really good reason to do so?

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The Imperial Tomb is a model of the afterlife, and holds the remains of Emperors, Governors, and Important People; It is, quite literally, the Tomb of the Empire. And when the conditions are just right, the model becomes real, and the Tomb becomes a gateway to the afterlife.
That’s when the gravediggers have to put back whatever leaks out.

How do you even make a Zombie Medical Drama RPG?

The Necropolis has been frozen for aeons, but it’s now starting to thaw out, and the residents are starting to thaw.
Somewhere in there are the secrets needed to freeze it again, but getting to them take a lot of planning, a lot of care, and will be a serious undertaking.

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When Will Dynamic Ad Insertion Take Over Podcasting? – Backyard Media
( Covers Dynamic Insertion without being too much of an ad in itself or having many many annoying pop-ups ~ T. Jones )

Welcome To Night Vale
The Daily Zeitgeist
Black Tape Podcast

Venom (movie)

Chernobyl Sarcophagus

Stalker (game)
The Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Mr. Vampire

Terracotta Army
Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor

Necropolis

Cremains

Ghostbusters
Coco
Day Of The Dead

Wraith

Technical Debt

Terry Pratchett

St. Elsewhere
Shortland Street

Episode Fifty – Ghostwatch

Ghostwatch (tv)

Matter, by Iain M Banks

The Mummy

HVAC

The Man In The Maze, by Robert Silverberg

Old School Renaissance

Gronan’s Guide To Gaming

Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG

Episode Sixty One – I Am Now The Proud Possessor Of A Haunted Demon Amplifier

Iron Maiden

H.P Lovecraft
Cthulhu Mythos

Spinal Tap

Bureau 13: Stalking The Night Fantastic

Fate of Cthulhu Kickstart

Grunge

Bill Hicks

Airheads

KEXP-FM
Doomtree

Marcel Proust

Conlon Nancarow

Kung Fu Vampire Killers
Dracula
Bloodgasm
( The only references I could find to this relate to a Horror Anthology called either “Hi-8” or “Horror Independent 8”, where Bloodgasm is a movie within a movie. ~ T. Jones )

( from The Gratuitous B-Movie Column )

The third story, by Tom Masiello, is called “The Tape” and involves Tim (Travis Hoecker), a video store employee who becomes infatuated with a weird as hell shot-on-video horror movie called “Bloodgasm.” As far as the employee can tell, “Bloodgasm” was never released to the public and the creator of it is a recluse of some sort. Tim is so obsessed with “Bloodgasm,” both watching it and researching it, he ignores his hot girlfriend Phoebe (Bobbi Beach). When Tim finally finds the director of “Bloodgasm” and goes to meet him, the encounter changes his life forever. In general, I liked the way this short builds to finding the “Bloodgasm” creator, but the way it ends is unsatisfying. Personally, I don’t think the ending makes any sense. With a different ending, “The Tape” would be a classic horror short. As it exists now, it’s a fun disappointment. Still worth watching.

~ my bad! – I meant Deathgasm (2015)

Alien Weaponry (band)

Six Feet Under (tv)

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Craig keeps thinking of ideas he really doesn’t want to make a game of.

What happens when the worship band for a Cthulhu Cult get noticed by a producer & start to make it big?
What about when the band start to see that there’s a much bigger world out there, and want to move away from the cult that’s literally in their DNA?

What happens when your quaint & folksy chant to Dagon goes Platinum.
And they left off the portal-closing hymn because it didn’t fit the back-beat.

Nobody know who the band Song Of The Old Gods were, nor why they chose to release so few pressings of their Colour Out Of Space album. What we do know is that odd things happen when you play more than one copy at once, and someone out there is trying to collect them all.

Here are some of the things we nattered about

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Becoming the Imperial Gardener is a huge honour, but maybe not a welcome one when all you really want to do is work alongside your colleagues to tend plants and create a beautiful space.

The Royal Gardeners don’t prune plants, but people, working in secret to weed out disloyalty. To stop them from getting too powerful, they’re sometimes ordered to find and eliminate another gardener.

Garden Royale: A team of intrepid gardener-adventurers seek to make THEIR garden the best, even if it means going to dangerous places to bring back exotic & predatory botany.

Garden Royale Fiasco: A game of lofty horticultural ambition and (probably) terrible outcomes.

The Emperor’s New Grove: Teams of Royal Gardeners have been out there terraforming worlds, creating new habitable planets for the Empire. It’s promotion time, and the Court is touring the new worlds, deciding which one will be the new Imperial Capital.

The Royal Gardeners are responsible for directly interfering with the time line to ensure the future of the Emperor, pruning timelines which could bring the Empire down. Promotion time is the moment where the Emperor needs to choose which future to pursue.

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Behind The Screens At An Ageing Arcade, Videogame Characters Try To Keep The Machines Running & Cover Up Glitches Before Anyone Notices.

In Desperate Times, A Psychic Blue Whale & A Team Of Sea Creatures Take To The Skies.

A Group Of Strangers Awaken, With No Memory Of How They Got There & Plenty Of Supplies, In A Tranquil & Cozy Environment Named Alitulo

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Audient Contribution! InSpectres hacked into a renovation contest show.

Will you race to repair and exorcise a spooky fixer-upper to sell it on, or…

…rejuvenate a legitimately haunted dwelling, taking both the needs of the living and the dead into account?

In a fusion of a reality TV shared house and an escape room, the contestants must work together to succeed. But there seems to be one more contestant than expected and more questions than answers.

Tune in to a local cable TV show about enthusiastic amateur exorcists. Is it comedy parody or a stealthy spiritual defense outreach program?

Battle Junky Vampires on the Mean Streets of Monstertown!

New Social Media Stream Announcements

MeWe – A candidate to replace G+, this platform is trying to focus on user privacy controls.

https://mewe.com/join/bigredcouchrpgpodcast

New Twitter Feed – This feed just has episodes and other announcements to allow listeners to keep up to date with the podcast.


https://twitter.com/BigredcouchE

Update: Also, a shout-out to James David Nicoll for coming up with the prompt (check out his book review site) and our tireless contributor, John H. Reiher Jr. for passing it on.

https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/

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Genre-themed Librarians battle the forces of evil. Quietly.

A venue shared between the Summer & Winter Courts of Faerie transitions from a generations-long reign of summer into an unexpected winter primacy.

A nightclub which serves as a refuge from the dark.

Plucky clubbers work together to save their beloved nightclub, without 100% understanding the backstory as to why it’s being sold.

Strange happenings at the all-ages venue need to be investigated, even though that place is totally lame. Also, that super-hot new kid might be there.

Is there a space for a Meddling Kids vs. Criminals game where harming the kids is simply not done, and the surprisingly ethical mobsters instead use social pressures to keep the little brats in line?

Richard III in the 70’s

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