Big Red Couch Podcast - Turning Bad Ideas Into Games

[kedamono]

Looking at the current prompt: "Survivors of WW III living on an Abandoned Colony" I've already done it.

It's the setting of my game, Kid's Last Tour.

Humanity has fought its last war. People are thin on the ground, but you do find some. Some like Grandpa. He took care of you and your friends. He kept the machines running, made sure everyone had at least one meal a day. That everyone had a warm place to sleep.

But then he died.

It wasn't a surprise, he was old. And he made sure that you knew what to do when that day came. So you buried him in a pile of rubble, loaded up your vehicle and off you went into the ruins of the city...

I've run it several times and I really like how the players invariably go looking for someplace that they can set up a colony. So yeah, it's my submission for this prompt!

[Pruthian Caveman]

Looking at Taz's entry, I would like to know what happens when the green tide hits a town. If it's in the middle of the Sahara, that puts it in Eastern Algeria, probably between Tassili N'Ajjer National Park and Ahaggar National Park. There are lots of little villages dotting the desert. What happens when the green tide overruns them?

In about 4 days it would have overrun 8 villages. So, what happens to them?

I like the idea that the plantlife just grows up through the buildings, steadily and remorselessly, so that over the space of half an hour or so you get grasses sprouting, then ground covering plants, then small trees, and finally the really big ones.
The end result is a village with displaced walls where a tree shoved them aside, and the odd building where a tree just came up through the middle of it & grew around the roof beams as it pushed them aside.

I found myself thinking about what happens as it approaches countries with oppressive governments & shitty conditions for the general population.
In that sort of circumstance, I can see people thinking "Trees? Streams? An environment where most of the asshole in charge's military equipment won't work? ... I'll get my hat."

That might change if it turns out that the whole reason for this happening is that some folks came along to check on their terraforming project, wondered what the hell happened to all of those dinosaurs they put there, and decided to use an accelerated technique to get things back on track before the colonists arrive.

[kedamono]

My take on the Green Tide hitting a village is poor Hakim staring at the wave of green heading towards him at 40mph(65kph) and closing his eyes. Now, it's not actually moving, it's more like grass and trees and flowers growing up around him as it passes. No wind, no "whoosh", just green grass and trees. Then he turns around and looks at his home. It looks like his home, but it's now detailed like something out of an Algerian fairy tale. He's now dressed like someone out of the same story.

Remember, it's a "fantasy + post apocalyptic" setting. He's now in a fairy tale. To misquote a certain Captain Barbossa:

"You best start believing in fantasy stories, Hakim... you're in one!"

[zircher]

I like that angle, but that unfortunately invalidates the F-16 crashing, it would have turned into a dragon or magic carpet. Dead electronics, check. Guns and heliographs, check. Humans surviving unchanged? That might be fun to play with because you could have some of your party start feeling a wee bit Orky or start seeing magic.

I see the green tide washing over villages and because a village is made of things, it would remain partially intact. Just some of those things would be dead as a door knob. Petty warlords might have a field day since their AK-47s and machetes would work just fine. Given that chaos and magic are fun, it would be a hoot if the wave when it hit Egypt restored the pyramids to their former glory and re-animated the mummies that had not been removed to foreign lands.

- - -

"Survivors of WW III living on an Abandoned Colony" Wow, that immediately conjured up some of those old cold war stories and most of them did not have a happy ending. WW III implies near future, abandoned colony implies that it was an inhabited colony at one time. That usually means a remote island. "Everyone, it's Lost the home edition."
You could also take a tip of the hat from Charles Stross's A Colder War where the abandoned colony is not on Earth at all and this pocket of Humanity has to survive in an alien place where the Old Ones once walked. Yeah, that would be the way to go. Make it a sim using Microscope, Kingdom, Mars Colony, or Shock and play a bunch of stressed out people trying to cope/survive and then toss in the Weird.

[kedamono]

Well, one justification of the Fantasyfing of Hakim and his home, but not the F-16, is that Hakim and his home are native and natural to the location. Hakim's cellphone and TV? Not so much. They are still there, but non-op. The F-16 flies in and poof, it's not working. The pilot... he's now dressed in the Dragon Riders armor and thoroughly stuck in the cockpit...

- - -

I do agree with the desperateness of a post WW III setting. It can be like On the Beach or Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and the countryside is chockablock with mutations and monsters spawned by that war.

[Borborygmus]

Well, one justification of the Fantasyfing of Hakim and his home, but not the F-16, is that Hakim and his home are native and natural to the location. Hakim's cellphone and TV? Not so much. They are still there, but non-op. The F-16 flies in and poof, its not working. The pilot... he's now dressed in the Dragon Riders armor and thoroughly stuck in the cockpit...

- - -

This mental image reminded me immediately that I just saw two episodes of "Dragon Pilot: Hisone and Masotan" in which a young Japan Air Self-Defense Force rookie discovers she's one of the few qualified to help guide Japan's secret Dragon allies while they operate cunningly disguised as air-craft.



Well, it's more convincing once they've transformed.

The down-side is the cockpit is basically a decorative hat and the actual "embarkation process" is a bit traumatic.



Apparently, bailing out is worse?

[Burning]

I was thinking along somewhat similar lines to kedamono, and it occurs to me that the reality shift can explain why the plane stops working without requiring that the laws of physics somehow change without making human life impossible. The spell changes everything into the nearest equivalent that could exist in the fantasy world. For a human or an animal, that's no change whatsoever. For simple manufactured or constructed things, you get a cruder but functionally equivalent thing. For complex technology, the spell doesn't quite "know" what to do with all those fiddly bits.

So you get a plane-shaped thing made mostly out of hammered steel instead of modern composites. There's some kerosene or whale-oil sloshing around in a tank somewhere in there, but there's not really a working system to ignite it, let alone everything you need to control the burn correctly. Oh, there's things in roughly the right shape for an engine - as close as a skilled smith could get with hand-tools at least. I'm not sure what the electronics turn into, but whatever the integrated circuits are made of all the actual circuitry is gone leaving you with an undifferentiated slab of whatever ceramic/glass thing the spell comes up with that will hold roughly the right shape.

Crossing back out of the Green does not undo the transformations because anything that can be crafted in that world could be crafted in ours. And the functional equivalent of something useless is, well, something useless.

How much you want to let the players know about this beforehand is a question. And you need to decide what happens in marginal cases. Could a rifle get changed to a blunderbuss, or would it baffle the spell?

[Pruthian Caveman]

Episode One Hundred And Six – Survivors of WW III living on an Abandoned Colony



A handful of children explore the crumbling, deserted ruins of a world torn asunder by conflict.

Returning to an evacuated orbiting O’Neill colony after the “hot” finally war cools, it’s original inhabitants find it it overgrown… …and overrun?

Would-be diplomats from space recount their escape from the doomed planet below, and the sacrifices of the people that helped them return home.

In an ash-smothered nightmare world, those preparing to survive on other planets have the best chance of saving this one.

[Pruthian Caveman]

Episode One Hundred And Seven – “Accessing the Memory Bank”



In a transhumanist post-mortality world, it makes sense to store memories and knowledge in a secure cloud, bringing them into local storage only when needed.
And that works fine until something goes wrong, the cloud is rendered inaccessible, and neither you nor the vaguely-familiar folks you’re stuck with remember how to get your memories back.

Post-Mortality doesn’t mean post-scarcity, so not everyone is alive at one time. Which becomes a problem when the information you need is locked up in the memories of one person who’s currently dead, and isn’t due for instantiation for another 50 years.

Every time you ‘access’ your memory, you change it, so to preserve those precious moments, you need to remove them & put them somewhere safe.
Which leaves the question of what fills the hole left behind.

A group of people wake up in a beautifully appointed memory treatment spa, feeling refreshed, and with absolutely no idea why they’re there. Or where the staff are.
And then they find the bloody handprint.

It was only by pure fluke that the storm disrupted the Signal enough for you to realise that your memories were false, being beamed out to overwrite the whole history of the world.
Now, with the Storm of the Century bearing down, you’re planning to find out what’s being kept from you. And why.

[Pruthian Caveman]

We thought we'd try doing a bit of a promo of the next episode's prompt a few days before recording, in a blatant attempt to gather Audient Ideas so that we can cunningly disguise how crap ours are, ...