News: Just to clarify something about RPPR B-Sides: each volume will be released for free after a 1 year delay. Volume 1 will be released to the public on August 14, 2014. If you want to listen to the 20 AP episodes contained in Volume 1, then you can donate $20 to RPPR. Simple as that!
I also want to give a shout out to comic artist David Faught for his contributions to Base Raiders, which is now in layout.
Also, Hebanon Games is now blogging about game design and RPGs on a regular basis.
Synopsis: The Heroes of New Arcadia campaign is now concluded. In 29 episodes, a ragtag group of self-made superheroes saved the world and ultimately determined its fate. Find out how the concept came to be and what the players thought about it – highlights of the games, surprises, and more. No shout outs or anecdotes this episode because our discussion went long.
Song: We Heroes by Within the Giants
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:38:44 — 67.8MB)
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No shout-outs, anecdotes or a Tom letter? 🙁
A couple of questions.
1. Was Norms name a joke about him wanting to be normal?
2. Do you (all) think that the Eclipse Phase campaign caused an injection of transhumanism into this campaign?
I believe yes and yes. I think Caleb intended Norm to be just your average Joe that got thrown into the bizarre and fantastical world of superheroes.
And yes, EP definitely influenced the ending as well as possibly some stuff along the way, such as our egalitarian goal of not limiting access to these abilities like the Ideal and the government. Or our plans to make New Arcadia self-reliant with a fabber to meet basic needs like food, shelter, etc.
I think I like tier 2 better in light on Caleb’s interpretation about the skittering nature of the plot, with all of the “main” story just having been accidentally compressed into the end. I think part of what made tier one so strong was the clear sense of having a villainous~ infrastructure to sabotage. supercoherent.
all in all, whatever bugs there might’ve been and however turrible Wild Talents is for high-level characters, I loved it, and am thankful now as ever you dudes choose to share this stuff with us!
This was very interesting to listen too, especially with me running my own Wild Talents campaign, which I was led to by the HNA episodes. I borrowed a couple of major thematic pieces (DIY Transhumanism, for example. None of the PCs were born with apparent metahuman powers), but it’s much more akin to being “inspired by” since I didn’t go with what I think was the fundamental conceit of the campaign as run at RPPR, which is “Heroes go away”.
My out, as it were is that superheroism in the setting is cyclical. Starting in the 40s with WW2, superhero activity kind of grows and then peaks at some critical world-threatening crisis, then drops back down as all the major heroes of the time retire or die off, and mass-production catches up with some of the stuff that made previous generations of heroes unique. So my current batch of PCs is forming the leading edge of a new up-swell of heroes. If this becomes a permanent spike as befitting with rising metahuman concentration (Since I named the Campaign “Metahuman Renaissance”) and the world goes permanent transhuman singularity like HNA, I don’t know yet.
Listening to everything out of order, I just realized that this episode references Ross turning the guard into uranium in episode 3 of Better Angels – which isn’t released until seven month after this came out. Spooky.