Big Red Couch Podcast - Turning Bad Ideas Into Games

[Pruthian Caveman]

Episode One Hundred And Forty Three – Malevolent Immediacy



The so-called Department of Malevolent Immediacy are those people who turn up right when you’re about to make a life-changing mistake, asking whether, maybe, they can help you to choose a different path.
They’re here to help you to be a better person.
Question is; Are they right, and are they lying?

A game system where the big important things you do refine the character down to who they really are, at the expense of who they could have been.

The adventures of a racing crew keeping their team in the championship with increasing ill-will towards the driver, who’s … kind of a jackass.

[Pruthian Caveman]

Episode One Hundred And Forty Four – Your Vile Human Secretions



“But Secreted By What?” – How do you make Humans the terrifying monsters, make the game human-playable, and have there be any point in doing so?

Refined and elegant alien races aren’t actually interested in our culture; They’re just getting unimaginable highs off of our sweat.

Superheroes based on the ancient Hippocratic(?) humours battle to protect the Earth.

Humanity has been locked away at their own behest, and for their own protection. Everyone knows that.
Nobody, including the robotic systems keeping you in, can remember why.

[Pruthian Caveman]

Episode One Hundred And Forty Five – The Case Of The Accidental Battered Sausage



Best Served Cold / A Sweary Murder She Wrote – A Celebrity Chef solves murders while attempting to drag failing restaurants back from the brink.

The indentured staff of a Dark Kitchen try to call for help via the only means available; Inexplicable items in the orders they send out.

Technicians trying to fix a fully-automated Fish & Chip shop find themselves in the middle of a drug distribution operation.

By pure fluke, your massive order from the auto-takeout perfectly matched a shipment of contraband. Now you’ve got an enormous bag of something illegal, the bad guys have a catering-size order of deep-fried food, and things are about to get very exciting.

Produce Noir – In the grimy spray-misted aisles of The Big Shopping Cart, lit by flickering flourescents, sentient food items investigate a murder.

[Pruthian Caveman]

Episode One Hundred And Forty Six – T’is A Pity She’s The Queen

A member of a high-level adventuring party becomes Royalty, and discovers that it’s made their life terrible.

The Kingdom is in deep trouble, the newly-crowned King & Queen are still teenagers, and the King is, at best, totally useless.
In the early hours after a long drinking session, a member of the Guard remarks that Queen would be a much better ruler, and a terrible plan forms.

When there’s a conspiracy against the King, but the King simply won’t believe it, it’s up to the Queen & her Guard to counter the threat to the Realm.

When the Queen takes an interest in the entirely fake Pagent of the Dead, and commissions a Command Performance to contact her beloved late husband, the very real supernatural entities running the show have a fine line to walk between exposure as frauds, and exposure as undead.

Mac has an awesome idea for how to do the ‘multiple iterations of the same team in the same time period’ time-travel game.

[Pruthian Caveman]

Episode One Hundred And Forty Seven – From Me To You; A Free Gift Of Soul Dust



On stage at a club, interrupted by the occasional solo, the band recount the tale of their experience with the supernatural.

For safety’s sake, nanotech is very tightly limited in scope, and will shut down if it goes out of bounds; So the container of unconstrained nanobots you’re holding is something that everyone wants, and that could be a problem.

An insidious Alien conspiracy plots to blow up the Sun, because it’s the only way to make our TV transmissions stop.

Sentient food items mount a daring rescue mission for a comrade who’s due to be cooked before their time.

The Queen is easily enough of a bad-ass to defeat intruders & rescue the court all by herself. The tricky part is getting enough of her adventuring gear together quickly enough that she can do it with style, instead of losing her temper and tearing the attackers apart with hands and teeth.

[Pruthian Caveman]

Episode One Hundred And Forty Eight – Space Hobboes

Once access to the Earth was taken out of the picture by orbital debris, the travelling workers known as Space Hobos became a vital part of the community, who help to solve problems & keep things running out there.

Space transport is cheap enough, and space survival technology ubiquitous enough, that hitching a ride on a string of cargo containers going somewhere useful is a viable, if unauthorised & illegal, way to get around if you don’t have the money.
It also means that you’re in a place that nobody expects someone to be, and that can cause problems if folks are up to things they don’t want people to see.

Once you’ve shifted some asteroids into regular orbits, moving around the system becomes a whole lot easier; Assuming you can match vector, or course.

A fantasy setting of little worldlets, each just big enough for a single field or Hobbit burrow, floating serenely in an endless sky.

Vast cargo ships ply the spaceways. Too big for anything other than full automation, they don’t seem to react when people climb aboard for free transport, or even make their homes there. It’s not clear whether they don’t notice, or they just don’t care.