Messages

1

General Chaos / Re: What are you reading?

« on: May 29, 2015, 08:26:52 PM »

My recent cramming's been pretty much all RPPR inspired. I was nnnot a huge fan of Milkweeds 1 and 2--I get that Gretel basically engineered the entire plot, but it wasn't like things dovetailed so interestingly that it was mind-blowing to see it come together. Just started the third, and while I appreciate the insight into Gretel's mind, the "I must be in love with Marsh" angle is a weeeird place to start. That's on hold for the moment.

I also read Last Call on EthanC's recommendation re: Unknown Armies and thought it was pretty great, although I'm not sure if I'd've liked it as much if my brain weren't constantly sparking with OH MAN THAT'S TOTALLY CONNECTED TO XIDEA IN UA. Audible denied me EthanC's other Tim Powers recommendation, Three Days to Never, so I got The Stress of Her Regard. ...don't read The Stress of Her Regard. It's cosmic horror meets vampire fiction. Characters behave in incoherent ways, it's all over the place, and the few moments of good cosmicidity are overshadowed by the hundreds of pages of nothing. Then again, I quit about three hours before the end, so maybe the conclusion was good?

Then I bamboozled Audible into letting me grab Three Days to Never, which I'm a couple hours into. I definitely like the exposition--a succession of cryptic infodumps, and I'm not sure I've ever read a book that was focused on Kabbalistic supernaturalness before. Been slow going, though, I get sidetracked by podcasts because I'm often multitasking or drunk (or both) and prefer not to listen to books I haven't heard before in at least some of those states.

Aaand I picked up The Disaster Artist on a whim the other day, in spite of not having seen The Room. It's interestingly weird so far. So yeah, really all of my recent books have been encouraged by RPPR stuff.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: The Mitchum Cleary Time Loop?

« on: March 02, 2015, 08:31:13 PM »

Wait, was Lucille in Tribes of Tokyo? How did I miss that? I just listened to it again a month or two ago.

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General Chaos / Re: What Vidja games are you playing?

« on: January 30, 2015, 04:29:50 PM »

Apparently I'm playing Destiny on a PS4 now? I'll be completely useless until this keyboard/mouse adapter shows up in the mail, because twin sticks oh no. I think uptohisneck is the ID they're sticking me with, because crawlkill is too powerful. Add me, any of you whoevers.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)

« on: January 22, 2015, 03:40:15 AM »

so this is retro as fuck:

after Caleb's first-run game ever, AKA the best game ever, Andrew's Fortune, he mentioned on a talk podcast that he'd been inspired by the Burke novels of Andrew Vachss, child advocacy lawyer by day, child abuse neonoir PI expy by novelistic night. I read his first few books and mostly liked em--problem was usually the femme fatale-of-the-month being way too prominent and annoying and Burke-is-insta-into-this-chick-y for me to buy it. I have to admit I wondered for a while if he really did have the experience he claimed with kids, or if he was making it all up.

Then I discovered his interview with Oprah from 1992. http://www.wallsofsilence.com/watch.php?vid=de8bac478

I'm still not completely sure Vachss is really as educated and dedicated as he sounds, but that's just because I'm not sure any words ever spoken aren't lies. the rhetorical hammers he breaks out are peerless. his narrative still sounds a little "Satanic preschools" sometimes, but I urgently prefer to hope that he's some semimythical figure, dispensing truth with one hand and indomitability with the other.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Ideas for quick games to design

« on: January 16, 2015, 03:11:51 AM »

Listening to the first Killsplosion playtest on the B-Sides, I thought it was in some ways more a "boardless board game"  than a pure RPG. the absoluteness of the settings and definiteness of what could be accomplished in a turn put me in that headspace. I think it could work great as a card game, if you've got the stats to work it out. maybe players would draw from powerpoint decks to keep track of their pools at the start and when they got refreshes in-game, and some of the cards would be wild surprises? I imagine you've given this some thought already.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: B-Sides 2!

« on: January 07, 2015, 09:13:16 PM »

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to! I've gotten through most of em by now and they're all pretty great. I will say, though, that Gumroad appears to hate my connection--sometimes I'll go on there and some of the files just refuse to download. While others are willing to? It's a lil mysterious.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)

« on: January 02, 2015, 06:28:32 PM »

Hey! Most of us play next to our meth houses, not in them. We're not idiots.

I've never had a regular tabletop group, so all my WoDery is on MUSHes, where there are a lot of, um...not...so happy and overcompetitive players, which makes the "we let the writers write all the rules and didn't playtest this at all" factor stand out. Flimsy mechanics are fine in tabletop with friends, but around internet strangers who wanna WIN, it can get a little tense.

But I have to admit I didn't associate prosey internet nerds with exploding drug dens until that story.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)

« on: January 02, 2015, 02:24:07 AM »

As for UA, Greg Stolze has been tweeting pretty regularly about his progress on the new edition, which is looking like it'll be 3 books! This is sounding like another Kickstarter to lighten my wallet already!

I KNOW RIGHT? I saw on one of those lesser forums that he was considering doing one earlier this year, then the other day I go to Twitter and check #UnknownArmies and Greg's most recent tweet is that he's, like, a thousand words from finishing each one. the text is supposed to be done now. ...but he had some other discouraging comments about having no idea when we'd see them. something like, "when you're writing it, you think that's the hardest part. but then you go on to the next hardest part, and then the hardest part after that." I'm sure he'll do it, but yeah, crowdfunding a high-production values book to a niche audience is no joke, specially if you're doin hard copies.

I keep trying to convert my World of Darkness friends to the UArk side, but it seems like a lot of people kind of just...decide on the game they're gonna do and do it forever, even when their meth labs explode.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)

« on: January 01, 2015, 08:59:44 PM »

he's mentioned on the talk podcast that he has a whole conspyramid written out for NBA...and that he wants to run Unknown Armies =| if Caleb ran UA for RPPR my world would end. too many favorite things all in one place

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)

« on: December 29, 2014, 01:42:09 PM »

He has felt a little absent from oneshots lately. And I guess he's not in Masks. He's all over the place in B-Sides 2, though, if you haven't gotten em yet! There are, like...five, seven Caleb-run games, and he plays in more.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: B-Sides 2!

« on: December 29, 2014, 03:45:21 AM »

omg just listening to Home Invasion now and I think it has the best single line of all time in RPPR, by Bill.

come with me and you'll see there's a world of eldritch sanitation

Bill is always great at the underattended quip but this was beautiful

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: B-Sides 2!

« on: December 23, 2014, 04:34:14 PM »

Killsplosion 2 is broken in the most terrifying way yet--at first it just skipped in iTunes after af ew seconds and did the usual screaming for a few seconds at a time in VLC, but at one point it started -singing at me.- Maybe thirty minutes in, I should've checked the timestamp, but this haunting -music- came on. I thought it'd just skipped to the next track or something, but no, after maybe five or ten seconds of ominous tunes, the game came back.

Your B-Sides are haunted, Ross!

I reeeally loved the first Killsplosion playtest, which wasn't damaged at all. I never actually did read the rules, but it's sort of like...an abstract boardgame, almost, combined with a roleplaying game. Really strong, explicit mechanics in a sort of FATE-like way, except what they enable is much more difficult, tactical and FUCK YOU than Fate could ever be. Best of the B-Sides, for sure.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: B-Sides 2!

« on: December 20, 2014, 05:12:31 PM »

I think you are letting him off to easily. Might be time send someone to SIBERIA!

ONE MILLION YEARS DUNGEON

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BbRffBCeYw

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: The Mitchum Cleary Time Loop?

« on: December 19, 2014, 07:56:43 PM »

Oh hell, we're really gonna have to draft up an RPPR multi/meta-verse wiki/flow chart aren't we? This is getting real SMT Amala network real quick.

I really wanted to hook it into that "all of daytime TV takes place in an autistic child's imagination" theory, but I'm not sure we've had a solid reference to make that connection yet.  There are links between a lot of the CoC games, but nothing quite good enough to make a conspiracy theory out of. I haven't listened to that inverted world game, but given that it has a Steel Centurion, if it -does- have any other connections to other RPPR games, that would connect the whole of New Arcadia to anything it links to.

one day there will be a grand unified theory of everyRPPR, but the evidence isn't there yet. PARTICLE ACCELERATOR

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: B-Sides 2!

« on: December 19, 2014, 07:50:36 PM »

RPPR-Killsplosion-Playtest1-Fixed should work.

I feel stupid for rushing this volume out. There's over 48 hours of content in volume 2 so I skimmed around and listened to a few bits and thought it was fine, for the most part. I should have listened to them more carefully to pick up on the mistakes before I launched it. I don't care if I have to redo the entire thing, you guys are paying for the episodes and you deserve the best we can put out.

don't worry bout it, it's great content and it's worth waiting on fixes for some damaged files. like I said in my first post, I can see why the stuff in the first bsides was in bsides, but this here is some quality shit. a couple injured files ain't no big thing. hope it doesn't take too long to repair! for your sake, not just my rampant need to consume.