Messages

16

Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Upcoming RPPR One Shot games

« on: November 26, 2014, 03:49:16 AM »

I'm kind of curious if RPPR has ever considered Shadowrun.

I'm not exactly recommending it. I've been trying to find an actual play of Shadowrun I can listen to that actually sounds like the kind of game I'd like to run, and I really can't. I've tried the Arcology podcast, Fistful of Misanthropes, Geek the Mage First, and more. The closest anyone gets is Gamer's Tavern, and that's because there's one player making it fun by playing a minmaxed yet personality-rich character who's sort of a meta-joke and pokes fun at all the tropes of the game - sort of gaming against the system rather than within it. If I could hear RPPR tackle it the same way they did Eclipse Phase or Wild Talents, I think I could use that to actually run an enjoyable game of Shadowrun.

On the other hand, it's a beast of a system. It's no Synnibar or RIFTS, but it's unnecessarily complicated and fiddly, with tons of stacking modifiers. Chargen takes hours unless you're very, very familiar with the rules. There are a whole lot of traps (like skills that no character should ever take) and broken things (like the rules for creating Free Spirits or AI characters in 4e - sorry, Aaron). I don't really want the RPPR crew I know and love to have to suffer through that.

So...yeah, I'm curious if anyone at RPPR has ever thought about trying Shadowrun.

17

Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Dying to know - is "Sunset of the King" one big Nabokov reference?

« on: November 26, 2014, 03:35:38 AM »

I've been wondering about this for awhile, and now I have to ask.

Even before the players decided to film the King's country in Russia, "Sunset of the King" felt like it might be getting to Carcosa by way of Nabokov, particularly his novel Pale Fire. By the end, I felt like it couldn't be a coincidence.

Consider this:

"Sunset" involves a strange old man hiring a crew to make a film about a king who lives in luxury and doesn't realize what a bad ruler he is until the revolution comes. Then he escapes the country and crosses the ocean, eventually finding personal truths in the new country that he can use as a weapon to reclaim the old. The old country has vague resemblances to many others, but is no country in particular. The strange old man uses enchanted mirrors as gateways, and the film even includes an assassin stalking the King, but killing someone else.

Pale Fire involves a strange middle-aged man explaining that he is the last king of a fictional country that has vague resemblances to many others. He once lived in luxury and didn't see the revolution coming. After the revolution, he escapes to America (an extended sequence, just like the strange old man asked the film crew to make, although not one with a car chase and machine guns), where he is hunted by an assassin who kills someone else instead. At the end of the novel, the king suggests that he may try to make a film that dramatizes his life and escape, to be called Escape from Zembla. Oh, and mirrors show up in significant places, but not nearly as much as in, say, Borges, who I know also influences Ross's architectural horror games. And the king is probably just a madman who thinks he's a king, Carcosa-style.

There are also a number of weird parallels that crop up which I know Ross can't have planned, so I'm not going to mention them.

18

Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Better Angels Campaign: The Spared and the Spoiled

« on: May 13, 2014, 01:07:58 AM »

I got curious after episode 8 and went to see if something like SalvationStarter was a thing. I found a lot more than I was expecting:

Three Christian crowdfunding sites, including FaithLauncher, which is particularly interesting because unlike Kickstarter, they keep the money even if they don't hit their goals:
http://crowdfundingwebsites.blogspot.com/2013/07/religious-crowdfunding-sites.html
http://www.faithlauncher.com/

Three Muslim sites:
http://www.ummahhub.com/
https://www.launchgood.com/
http://muslimcrowdfunding.com/#_

And "Jewcer" for the Jews:
http://jewcer.com/

It's too bad  but unsurprising that there aren't any Buddhist sites, and the evangelical atheists look like they prefer kickstarter and Indiegogo.

I'm also just going to leave this one here:
http://www.furstarter.com