Messages

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: The Strangest Places You've Listened to RPPR?

« on: May 25, 2016, 12:03:16 AM »

I'm an avid hiker, so both on the Appalachian Trail and the John Muir Trail. Duck Pass in Mammoth Lakes, CA was my highest at over 10,800 feet above sea level from around 9100 5.5 miles earlier as I started before the trail head. Plants refuse to grow at some point and its all rock. Descend a few hundred feet and you have gorgeous lakes and tree, grass and shrubs. I also live at sea level so being up there was this amazing slog because even after I got acclimated I wasn't acclimated. The air was just too thin.

http://www.hikingwalking.com/files/US/CA/duck_pass/lrg_ca_P1330833.jpg

Picture for reference. See all of those mountains in the distance? About on par for height with a few of those.

Also I went to Yosemite afterward but it's ridiculously full of tourists and boring now because the drought has made the lakes and waterfalls into trickles back when I went.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Red Markets Rewards

« on: May 23, 2016, 05:33:51 PM »

Part of me is hoping for for Aaron to run IP in his previous radio personality and have this brutally and completely unaware anime and j-pop radio station personality made worse by the fact that he's the only one who has a radio station in the area. Maybe with some callers.

"Steel Beam, you're on the air. How're you doing up there, Steel Beam?"

"Where's my fucking Waylon Jennings you son of a bitch?! You promised me!"

"Erm..."

Question. I saw much of the estimated delivery time as June and December of 2017 which is a year and a year and a half from now. Even the preview copies are marked for 2017. Would the PDF copies take that long to get out as well?

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Red Markets Alpha Playtest

« on: May 22, 2016, 01:44:28 AM »

So I'm gearing up by writing a few jobs for the kickstarer for a campaign I'm pulling together soon. One in particular I'm fleshing out.

The job is highly volatile and needs to be done quickly. It's just a few short legs away in a secured underground parking lot (read, urban warfare nightmare). The job, which is only revealed via scams, is that the client needs biometric data from a certain person holed up there. What he'll only tell them upon arrival is that the target is a full blown vector. The biometric data that is required is a drop of blood, a thumbprint and an optical scan. The blood is easy and the thumbprint can be gotten with the provided kit, but the eye is tricky because the man turned vector only has the one. They therefor have to capture it alive and scan its eye.

All the while though the "apologies" it's screaming out mostly concern betrayal, revenge, apologizing to a loved one and screaming how "it's mine" over and over. So after the capture they can just get the data and execute its ass or they can try to get it to apologize in the right direction by doing research. They'll learn from the vector between the insane screaming and babbling that the client is going to fuck them over, or at least they can infer that.

So if they try I launch immediately into a negotiation. At their end is "gibber insanely and try to murder" and its end is "give them the final pass code and try to murder". They do this by guiding the vector's apologies with memories from its past life via research while they're making sanity checks as it tries to break free of its bonds.

Anyway, the idea behind it was that if the terrifying sprinting murder zombie, maybe it can say something useful. If it can say something useful then it would have to be captured and capturing a vector is insanity.

Still trying to flesh this story out. Any suggestions?

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Red Markets Rewards

« on: May 02, 2016, 02:18:20 AM »

I'd like a 10k word short story. You're already familiar with the material and you can get it done in a few days after the fact.

::hysterical laughter::

Wow, man, assuming someone can churn out a publishable quality short story in a couple days seriously underestimates the amount of work involved in writing. Especially since 10k is, according to wiki, a novellette, not a short story.

For anyone one who can plot, write, and edit 10k in a few days, my hat is off to you, that is some serious productivity.

Normally when I wrote that size I'd only use outlines, not plotting, and maybe not even that. I'd write about 12k over the course of two days in six to eight hour chunks and gradually reduce that to around 10k. My biggest problem was editing. As a writer I could easily bang out 1000 words of rough draft an hour. Getting rid of that which didn't add to the story and then editing for grammar was a chore. 10k is the upper limit of what I could write without an outline. Something around 30k is a different animal and I wouldn't pants it.

I write fairly quickly, but I suppose it varies from person to person.

While I won't get it done that fast, there's a 30K novella planned into the campaign already. About 20K is already done, but I need to write 4 or 5 more chapters to feel comfortable with it. Finishing that last 10K -- while juggling art direction, writing the game, and editing previous chapters -- will take decidedly longer than a few days, but it will definitely be an add-on for the reward tiers. We might even do a print run if there's enough demand for it.

I'll probably post a sample chapter as an update during some part of the campaign.

I'm happy for the novella. When I read the beta my biggest problem was the lack of fluff. There was some setting that I got from reading it over and the forums post, but it was hard to get that initial direction without it.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Red Markets Rewards

« on: April 15, 2016, 02:41:25 AM »

I'd like a 10k word short story. You're already familiar with the material and you can get it done in a few days after the fact.

Also people are talking about GM sheets and other physical peripherals, but if you can make laminated place mats for cheap enough that'd be great.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Red Markets Alpha Playtest

« on: March 12, 2014, 09:15:28 AM »

Hackers are definitely a thing. The main metaplot NPC is a hacker (Gnat). They can have a big effect on getting leverage over clients and competition in the negotiation part of the game. They're technical skills are somewhat limited out in the field without abundant electricity, but I'm finding that I need some crafting mechanics so they could useful there. Finally, if the job site has power or security, having a hacker makes things a LOT easier. So think Deckers in Shadowrun; they might not be spec'ed for maximum utility in a fight, but they definitely have spotlight moments where the team uses their skills to survive.

If you're talking about shadowrun, you could always put in drones. If this is the near future and drones are a prevalent thing I could see corporations having money dumped into R&D so they can supplement their own small, private armies. This means that your hackers would have more to do out in the field, but have the drones simple enough that they don't make the rest of the team redundant or prohibitively expensive to send into dangerous situations.

IE: This drone is cheap. It rolls on tank treads and has a camera attached to it for scouting.

This drone can open simple doors, but is delicate and prone to break if any weight drops on its manipulators. Don't send it into the house.

This drone is actually a twenty year old model airplane with roman candles strapped to it. It fires off its flares as a distraction.

Or your hacker is up against an expert team and has the ability to shut down their drones by hacking them or jamming them, or s/he can hack their communications to give tactical bonuses.

On the downside it's hard to pay attention to what is going on around you when you have your nose buried in a computer screen. And combat drones haven't been around half as long as surveillance drones, so ironically the ones that shoot guns instead of enormous missiles are expensive and primitive.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Red Markets Alpha Playtest

« on: March 01, 2014, 12:59:16 PM »

I made an account because I like this game idea so much. I actually ran a session in d20 apocalypse since I was so familiar with it. I hope you don't mind.

Don't know how much I want to get into it. While currency exchange rates is something I have no doubt a certain type of grognard would get into, I can't think of a way it would be fun at the table. That's why I'm currently leaning towards just expressing everything in Bounty.

I suggest corp scrip. Money that is only useful for buying products from one company. Inferior in every way and products that aren't covered by said corporation are subject to availability. So you may have a month's worth of hot and ready pizzas, but Pizzahutco is not in the business of selling bullets.

Since I ran the game outside of St. Louis I thought about how the city would look after a good ruining. Quite a few of the once large buildings are now not so large and no one really calls it St. Louis anymore since a million or so zombies still roam the place. The arch has actually fallen in the middle and is now one of the tallest structures in the entire place, but it didn't fall entirely. So now due to the jutting blackened structures are now referred to as "The Horns", which then everyone started calling the city that. Only old timers and a few people actually from there actually call it St. Louis anymore.

Capitalism enjoys a good status quo. Status quo is good for business. I imagine that they would be quietly sabotaging the government's ability to reclaim land west of the Mississippi or better yet, profit from them by purchasing land plots from people at better prices than what the gov is asking for, consolidating said land into large plots and then selling it to the government at the premium.

Oh wait, Farmer John had a living descendant and we purchased the rights? We can just give her a pittance or litigate her poverty stricken self into oblivion. Or if worse comes to worse, sometimes the house that those kind of people burn down with everyone inside of them. You know how squatter houses are these days...

Essentially it would be cut throat capitalism. A return to the sort that was common in the guilded age, but now more technologically advanced.

We need you to escort these 100 strike breakers 50 miles past the river to an enclave where the workers no longer want to work 16 hour days for little pay and dangerous working conditions. What do you mean that you're being fired at? Those are just local insurgents. Mark their locations and we'll send in the pacification drones.

Lastly, and this came up a few times in the last game, I imagined that old zombies are usually so low on the totem pole of threats that they're not killed on sight, but often ignored. So there would still be a fair number of them walking around. I imagine that herding dozens, hundreds or in the case of enclaves, even thousands of them to push on an enemy to waste their strength would be a standard tactic. Sure it's dangerous because of the odd aberrant, but there's no better way to deal with moving or pinning entrenched forces. Then they go back and loot the then cleared (or mostly cleared) area when the only other force besides zombies that could threaten them are on the run or under siege.