Good show, all!

(so who’s going to be in charge now that the GM grand poo bah will be in Paradise, China?)

On a side note. I can’t get the MP3 link to work.

I fondly remember the first time when I picked up the Cthulhu green perfect bound book in 1990 in Bellingham, WA.

It was my first experience with dice pools.

And it led eventually to mainlining gaming, LARP. I found LARPing to be quite intense.

The Camarilla LARP was relatively simple, but as it grew, the tiny little rules became more and more complex and the club became a kind of place for Lifestylers to hang out in, or a place where people can form their own tribe and get involved in non consenual BDSM (ie bullying, attempted rape, etc etc).

So I mainly played online because then I could control the type of gamer I gamed with — the ones who loved making stuff up. There was really just 1 fundamental rule in the whole game system, well 2: 1. Everything has a cost & 2. All challenges are a social contract — both sides have to agree on the terms and if they can’t, then they should try something else which includes not doing the challenge.

The world of the game was quite detailed and my favourite was MAGE — here it was all aboot how you could fiddle with reality. Werewolf was reality-travelling storytellers. Vampire was all aboot humans who have lost their free will to gain a bit of power. Changeling was awesome — being a child again, then getting older. I didn’t get into wraith as much but I saw it had a lot of potental — the coinage of the realm was delightfully twisted. My favourite supplement was Gypsies.

The mood of the system itself I never found to be horror — it was very much romantic. “gothic punk”. And I chuckled at people’s attempts to say it was like the real world but darker. Yeah, right :3

Eventually, most of the time in the LARP consisted of me trying to teach newcomers aboot the game and protect them from the rl predators in the game. It grew too exhausting and I left also because I saw where the game was going, getting too bureaucratic and official and trying to fit creativity into tiny little boxes. I used to joke that creativity would eventually become a High Approval item (explanation: in order to get some goodies that were too rare or too powerful for the game, one would have to go through an approval process, that was classfied from Low to High).

The game system was very open and free form, which fit perfectly with my likes and dislikes. The world as it was written, however I agree with one of my friends, wasn’t emotionally realistic.

So I am glad I got out of the LARP when it changed (esp. since it’s got ‘more dark’ *giggle*) That Gehenna storyline was intense and marvelous — I’m glad I was there to be a part of Clan Malkav being saved by getting to leave the doomed universe and I am also glad I was heavily involved with the Malkavian Madness Network, a very awesome online storytelling medium that we thought of as a kind of dream space but, of course, it wasn’t physically real. So the players who could write well and had good imaginations did quite well :3

Oh, and I don’t consider HP Lovecraft’s mythos to be horror — I think his mythos is nihilistic.

Ass-kissing aside, and speaking of dark worlds, any hopes of a discussion on Unknown Armies? I’d love to hear the group’s opinions.

Your expose on the World Of Darkness games reminds me of when I bought the first “Vampire” book in the early 90s. The concept of “larping” was so alien to my D&D sensibilities, but I really liked the idea of dice pools and I thought the game mechanics seemed pretty straight forward. My friend Saul was really into the idea of playing the game. We then managed to rope his sister and her boyfriend into a test run of the game. Let’s just say our first attempt was our only attempt and the game fizzled and went poof…

Great to hear some of the RPPR regulars on this episode. Jason and Aaron provided some really helpful information regarding the different World Of Darkness game systems. I think I might have revisit the updated WoD books and perhaps run a game for my crew sometime!

I always threaten the players with the “and it was all a dream” ending. Fate worse than death.

also what is with Tom’s habit of taking statements other people have made and repeating them v slowly with an inverted sentence structure just to say he agrees =\

It was nice to hear from Jason, even if that dastardly Aaron was riding in on his coattails. I would agree with Tadanori about getting a NWoD player for a sharper review.

This review seemed a little muddled, too much darkness, too much material that had to be covered. It smothered you guys too much, you couldn’t properly aim at the darkness to shoot it.

Still, good episode.

In the interview Greg talks about a sandbox Progenitor campaign that he ran; By coincidence I found his write-up of those sessions on RPGNet forums (PROGENITOR: Fourth Tier, Last Chance), its an interesting read.

I’m loving your shows! Keep up the great work!

I’m a fan of film noir myself and watched Rififi a while back based on your shout out. Thanks for that, and I’d like to return the favor with a few recommendation of my own that you might have missed and may appreciate: Night and the City (also by Rififi director Jules Dassin), Kiss of Death, Out of the Past, Le Cercle Rouge (or anything by Melville), Laura, and Odd Man Out.

Loved this episode.

I’ve been waiting for this! Glad to see you were able to get Stolze involved, I hope to start my own Wild Talents game soon, i’m just teaching the game to my players, this episode was helpful in the regard.

Love the interview with Senior Stolze! And I’m thinking about buying Ross’s new book.

What is the “biaki” software you guys say is good for quickly rolling characters and legally free? You never spell it, and my spelling has proved fruitless on both internets.

I really enjoy your serious Cthulhu adventures as well as your discussions of the mechanics of making a game. This nerd is really enjoying your podcasts.

Phtagn!

~Rhesus

this might be up your alley

http://www.dailygrail.com/Interviews/2011/11/After-the-Carnivale-BlackBxx

for the first run of the show, he’s only accepting the first 5,000 who sign up

http://blackbxx.com/

ep72 Ramblings upon World of Darkness
ep73-4 (have no idea too)
ep75 RPPR Episodary (review of past episodes, best moments from the thus-far aired episodes, tons of anecdotes that are actually funny, whole “crew” should be present I think… and do some neat intro with voice acting and cheesy music)

And be careful Tom, I’ve heard you can go blind if you role play with yourself too much.

I had it set up that way so Zoltron wouldn’t be a neat and easy solution.

Next episode is Wild Talents – not sure what we’ll do after that.

Will you also be doing an episode on Dirty World? My brain just seizes when I think about scenario writing for that game.

but yea, glad to see my group pull through with their creativity and come up with the spoiled rich kid and her monster Rhett (the butler; get it?), a giant crawling hand with mouths for fingernails that each speaks in its own unique accent and personality, an australian chronic liar with a bunyip (water spirit manifesting as a sabretoothed bear-otter-tiger), and the good-natured dope with Carl, the cycloptic tentacle monster from the realm of knowledge who speaks in riddles and hordes secrets (we’ve reasoned out its a mix of Carl wanting to encourage his kid to grow smarter and the fact that he’s basically a god of cosmic secrets, so it’s genuinely hard and frustrating for him to dumb these down to human capacities)

but anecdote aside, always wondered: why is it that the Red Ranger is not effected by Zolton’s katana? just the means of letting him kill Zoltron so he won’t tail the kids and help fix their problems, or some underlying thing that was failed to be mentioned

Which one did you get?

You should check out the Amazon App Market. They offer up a new free paid app every day. There’s a lot of junk apps these days but they do occasionally offer good ones.

I too have an android phone. I’ve been using an app called Pocket Casts to listen to RPPR. I got it on a free day from Amazon. It’s actually how I found RPPR to begin with. I happened to be bored at work and decided I wanted to see if there was any D&D podcasts. Lo and behold, RPPR was one of the first to pop up. I’ve stopped listening to music at work since.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that Pocket Casts pulls RPPR from.. somewhere and is already available through there. I assume it’s pulling the RSS feed somehow for the regular feed and the actual play.

It’s a very good app and I’d highly recommend it for your podcasting listening needs.

Oh, and if you don’t like misspelled character names, update your Wiki.

specific question though. heard about you guys from Drunk and the Ugly, and noticed both in that and my copy of Road Trip both refer to the fact that Zoltron’s magic won’t banish the Red Ranger’s sword. any particular reason for that? or just a means of making sure the kids don’t have a friendly wizard tailing them doing whatever they may need?

i know how much you like the slender man;

someone has written a pretty neat article aboot the phenomenon http://darklore.dailygrail.com/samples/DL6-IV.pdf

and someone has done a ‘documentary’ on an investigative team who tried to investigate the slender man…it’s up on youtube…

I had much the same reaction in the game Hide when I met the flashlight mumblers for the first time :3

you might enjoy this indie horror game called Hide

Here is a review http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/12/this-weeks-best-free-pc-games-12/

play it alone and in the dark

At this point, everyone I know uses some to oodles of house rules when they use Cthulhu and often the Big Book o’BRP.

Also, people use the inter-war period because it’s awesome.