Big Red Couch Podcast - Turning Bad Ideas Into Games

[zircher]

Funny thing how that topic didn't strike a chord with me. But, I did enjoy your takes on the theme.

Dimensional tourism twist for those dangerous worlds, suicide tourism. Perhaps dimensional travel is expensive or even one way. The only people that go are those that don't plan on going back. Of course, they're not supposed to bring any future/alt-world tech with them, but sometimes things get through anyway.

Sculptors of Time the role playing game? Tsk, have you forgotten about Microscope? The PLAYERS are literally time travelling body hoppers that assume the role of pivotal people in the time-scape that they have crafted.

Love the phrase 'Irritable Geography', let's add that to the mystery box please.

I'll have to ponder 'Emila' for a bit. Got some tasty fragments but not a whole pitch yet.

[Pruthian Caveman]

Funny thing how that topic didn't strike a chord with me. But, I did enjoy your takes on the theme.

Dimensional tourism twist for those dangerous worlds, suicide tourism. Perhaps dimensional travel is expensive or even one way. The only people that go are those that don't plan on going back. Of course, they're not supposed to bring any future/alt-world tech with them, but sometimes things get through anyway.

I'm glad you liked them.
my usual response when I'm just not struck by an idea from a prompt is to go literal & lunge wildly for a dictionary.
that said, it's the approach which got us my idea for Cenobite Scooby-Doo, so I'd be the last to say it's a good idea

Sculptors of Time the role playing game? Tsk, have you forgotten about Microscope? The PLAYERS are literally time travelling body hoppers that assume the role of pivotal people in the time-scape that they have crafted.

Love the phrase 'Irritable Geography', let's add that to the mystery box please.

I'll have to ponder 'Emila' for a bit. Got some tasty fragments but not a whole pitch yet.

How in the hell did we miss Microscope?

It's times like this that branding ourselves as know-nothing talentless hacks really does pay off.

[Borborygmus]

Episode Seventy Five – We call her “Amelia”, but we don’t know why.



The Undead flee in terror from the most ravenous horde of all.

Your village is built around a mystic… …something. Who stands between you and this source of power?

Megalithic Inc. needs troubleshooters to find out what happened to it’s venerable “Artificial Memory Encoded Linkable Intelligent Archive” system. All you need to do is go down to the sub-sub-sub-(etc)-basement to find it.

The town’s gigantic stone protector is motionless in the face of a impending threat. Is it broken, depressed, or just waiting for the other inhabitants to step up and protect themselves?

Thanks to Will of AAW Games (@AdventureAWeek) and Episode Forty 48 – Eliquid fame for being an awesome guest!

[kedamono]

Another good show, eh wot?

I tried to come up with a way to use Tazz's The Trouble with Rose setting and realized you just replace Rose with Amelia.

But for this current one, I have an idea.

The Tragedy Of Miss Muffet

I'd borrow a setting that already exists, from Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime Division stories, The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear. Set in Reading,Berkshire, England, DI Jack Spratt, AKA The Giant Killer, works for the Reading Police in the NCD, where he has to deal with the various crimes committed by and to characters from fairy tales. (Read the books, they are proper mysteries and very noir in their tone, and great cracking fun!)

So we have the NCD with a missing person's report of one Miss Muffet, last seen on her tuffet, though it was more of an ottoman than a proper tuffet, having a meal of curds and whey. To cut to the chase, she's later found, completely drained of blood, wrapped in spider webbing. It's now on and DI Spratt and his cracked, err, crack team of investigators now have to find out who did it, and why they are framing the Spider for the crime!

Obviously, I'd use Gumshoe for this with almost no modifications, as it's the best system for doing mysteries in.

(Oh, and why did I say the Spider is being framed? Spiders typically inject digestive juices into the bodies of their captives, let them do their work, and suck out all the goodness from the corpse. All that should have been left behind of Miss Muffet is a leathery skin bag surrounding her bones.)

And the for the obligatory Story Pitch:

Final Exams at the Emperor's School of Assassins.

[zircher]

Another good show, eh wot?

I tried to come up with a way to use TAZ's The Trouble with Rose setting and realized you just replace Rose with Amelia.

I just got done with the show, fun stuff. Amelia Earhart was of course the first thing that came to mind and it's damn funny that Kedamono mentioned TTwR since I was thinking the same thing (... again.) However, I was thinking more of a scenario where you're all patients in a mental hospital and the mystery is to find Amelia's real identity.

I was also pondering about the prompt "The Tragedy of Little Miss Muffet" and how do to that as a play set. The crime detective thing might work out rather well in TTwR, if you didn't want to use Gumshoe. Better yet, make it into something like Clue (Cluedo) where all the PCs are gathered at the Muffet Estate and one of you is the guilty party. Was it Jack Sprat with a platter in the study? Play to find out.
--
TAZ

[If the time and mood strikes, I'll actually see about writing that one up. Hopefully it won't take as long as the Style Brothers play set did.]

[Burning]

So getting a new computer had a disproportionately large impact on my podcast listening, so I'm just catching up.

Time Sculptors and We Call Her "Amelia" are a great pair to have back to back. I think the only game idea between the two where I didn't have a "My God, I want to play that" reaction was the inverse zombie one, which was still amusing.

I don't really have a game idea for Time Sculptors, but I thought of a couple of works of fiction that kind of fit the concept with non-evil people doing the time manipulation. (Not really for aesthetic purposes, I'll grant. I'm at a loss for how you'd have someone manipulating time as a work of art that wouldn't be truly despicable.) Anyway, I thought I'd share them with the class to see if they made anyone else think of anything actually playable. This is going to be spoilerific. Look behind the tags at your own peril.

The first is Dinosaur Beach by Keith Laumer.

The first discoverers of Time Travel made a real mess. The main character is an agent of an organization dedicated to repairing the damage to the timelines. His opponents are members of different organizations with the same goal, except that they're convinced that their solution is the right one. Also, he's actually a covert infiltrator of the organization you first think he's a member of, and actually works for the ultimate fixer, who is the only one that recognizes that the fix must necessarily involve their own erasure from the timelines.

The actual time travel plot gets pretty confusing, but there are a lot of awesome set pieces along the way.

The second is the comic "Time Breakers" by Rachel Pollack.

The Time Breakers are an organization that create temporal paradoxes, both of the Grandfatherand Bootstrapkind. They do this because, contrary to how things usually work in Time Travel fiction, paradoxes are necessary to the health of the space time continuum. They are opposed by the Knowers, who are convinced that the Time Breakers are evil. The ultimate victory of the Time Breakers involves (a) giving the leader of the Knowers his "divine" mission and (b) giving him the means to prevent the Time Breakers from ever being founded. Resulting in the biggest Grandfather paradox ever, and permanently securing the health of all space time.

I do have an idea for "Amelia," which oddly enough (or perhaps not so oddly) involves time manipulation.

My starting point was taking the seed in what struck me as the most literal way possible. We of course know how often any two people agree on that proposition. Anyway, there's a woman. Her legal name is not Amelia. At no time in the past has she had the nickname Amelia or any association with the name Amelia. She does not resemble anyone named Amelia. There is absolutely no connection anyone can find between her and the name Amelia. Yet there is a group of people who feel compelled to call her Amelia, and she answers to the name without hesitation. What could cause this? Some residual awareness of an erased timeline, of course.

I carried this to the PCs being a group of people who have become aware that someone or something is messing with the timeline. Whether this actually involves the specific inciting incident of Amelia or something else that triggers the conviction that something isn't the way it used to/should be, is left up to the GMs discretion. The plot would be figuring out something is wrong, figuring out who's responsible, and stopping them.

Anyway, I've also enjoyed the little bit of travel-log that is accompanying Craig's peregrinations. I consider where I live to be "A nice place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there." Be that as it may, if, when you visit the States, you feel a compulsion to visit Madison, Wisconsin, let me know, and we can meet up.

[zircher]

Just listened to the Gutter Skypes (episode 169) and I MUST submit this as a card...

"Have you heard of our lord and savior, Craig Buchanan?"

(Blame Nikki if you need a credit.)

[Borborygmus]

Just listened to the Gutter Skypes (episode 169) and I MUST submit this as a card...

"Have you heard of our lord and savior, Craig Buchanan?"

(Blame Nikki if you need a credit.)

I am clearly missing a vital piece of information.... ...but consider it banked!

[Pruthian Caveman]

Just listened to the Gutter Skypes (episode 169) and I MUST submit this as a card...

"Have you heard of our lord and savior, Craig Buchanan?"

(Blame Nikki if you need a credit.)

I am clearly missing a vital piece of information.... ...but consider it banked!

Did I not mention the devotees to my religious works? Coulda sworn I had, ...

[Borborygmus]

This is a bit late, but here's our latest episode.



Episode Seventy Six – The Tragedy Of Little Miss Muffet

For small arts colleges in the cyberpunk dystopia, there’s a choice to be made between being free of any corporate influence, and dead broke, or climbing onto that gravy train of research into how to better control the world.

Rules about not interfering with developing life-forms are a fine idea, but when you finally find some folks who are almost at the point where you could talk to them, and there’s a threat inbound that they can’t deal with on their own, what do you do?

Who is framing the spider for Miss Muffet’s mysterious murder?

Miss Muffet lies dead at the Muffet Estate, and the assembled guests must determine which of them is the murderer.

Cyberpunk cities are bad enough, with the side-effects of corporate actions clearly visible in the streets and alleyways. But what’s happening out in the post-rural countryside?