Big Red Couch Podcast - Turning Bad Ideas Into Games

[zircher]

I'll put my pondering cap on.

[zircher]

The Boy was a spouse of Justice and a slave to Science.

Strangely enough, the first thing to hit me was a game mechanic. Take Fate Accelerated or any other aspect driven game and mandate two aspects as part of character creation; 'Married to:' and 'Slave to:'. For example, the Captain is married to his ship and a slave to his Ego. The First Officer is married to Logic and an slave to Cold Emotion. A normal boy might be married to School and a slave to Hormones. Our Boy with a capital B sounds like a super hero sidekick (maybe with cybernetics that allow him to function.) It would be good fun if his mentor was a slave to Vengeance.

[Pruthian Caveman]

Episode One Hundred And Eight – The Boy was the spouse of Justice and a slave to Science



Quarreling Gods look for arbitrators among the very mortals they are supposed to guide.

In a society that worships rational concepts as if they were competing supernatural powers, a disruptive and mercenary acolyte is tampering with a delicate balance.

Justice can be automated. And now he’s got the tools to do it, that’s just what the Son of Justice plans to do.

Between the machinery that keeps him alive and mentor that is erring on the side of vengeance, this side-kick has a lot to deal with.

The latest celebrity super-power-couple are from across the divide between hero and villain. City-wide peace requires that they get along, but their friends are left to mange the fallout.

[kedamono]

"The survey team’s last contact filled me with elation … and dread"

Hmm, I'm of a mind of my obsession with Xenoarcheology and finding something interesting on a former home to a Forerunner culture. Interesting as in "Oh my god, oh my god, we're all going to die."

Almost all forms of archeology and anthropology deal with sorting through trash looking for nuggets of interest. Barring ancient curses and various ancient Egyptians, the worse thing you could find is an old virus that still finds us tasty.

With alien Forerunner trash, you find things that can bring down your entire civilization. Or worse, you find something still working. Like a Great Machine or Ancient Doomsday Weapon. But in keeping with the prompt, the survey team has found a Krell Great Machine, and not a Star Trek Lead Pipe of Doom.

Now, I've talked about this before on our podcast, the series starts here: https://tritacsystems.podbean.com/e/epi ... -ftl-2448/

In this case, the players are a Xenoarcheological expedition sponsored by a big Interstellar Corporation koff Weyland-Yutani koff on an ancient Forerunner world. So far, all that they have found is Forerunner trash. 99% of all archeological finds are trash. (There are several branches of archeology devoted to the things you find in latrines and the contents of human coprolites.)

Poking around in some fairly intact ruins, maybe on the world's moon, they find that they are still operational and want to serve its new masters. What that means, as the natives were carnivores with culture akin to feral cats, is up to the players.

This would be a game where the players and maybe a GM work out what's up with this Great Machine using a system either like Kingdom, Microscope, or Questlandia & Beyond, where they work out what's going on and how they need to deal with it. It maybe better GMless, so the players can have more control of what they find.

[kedamono]

Oh, and for a pitch, something from Inspirobot.

[zircher]

A doomed Xenoarcheology game? I'd play that. Heck, it might make for a good The Trouble with Rose play set as well.

[kedamono]

Wouldn't that be more like The Trouble with The R.O.S.E.?

Actually, that would make for a good playset for TTwR or Fiasco.

[Pruthian Caveman]

"The survey team’s last contact filled me with elation … and dread"

Hmm, I'm of a mind of my obsession with Xenoarcheology and finding something interesting on a former home to a Forerunner culture. Interesting as in "Oh my god, oh my god, we're all going to die."

crosses Eclipse Phase game off ideas list

[Borborygmus]

New episode! Thanks for the prompt goes to Thunderstep.

Episode One Hundred And Nine – The survey team’s last contact filled me with elation… and dread.



The Temporal Survey team SHOULD have reported back by now. They SHOULD have been back a moment after they left. But they’re not, and while the standard dead-drop messages they left prove that they made it, they also give no sign that they ran into trouble.
Which means you need to send ANOTHER team back to see what happened to them, haul them out of trouble, and not screw up the timeline.

Xenoarchaeologists digging through alien trash find a still-working device from an ancient culture. It wants to serve its new masters, but there’s the little question of what that might mean in practice.

Ben rants about how difficult it is to build a trap that’ll last long enough to endanger someone exploring the ruins of your civilization, to the extent that it’s almost like everyone is working towards the same goal.

Humanity goes out there, finds horrifying stuff, and makes use of it; It’s just what they do.
The dread that comes along with it is really just a by-product.

When your best option is to miniaturise the rest of your team and inject them into your own body to keep them safe, you’ve got problems.
When you’re trying not to dies from your injuries, while your miniature team-mates battle the equally miniature causes of those injuries, you’ve all got problems.

The Antarctic survey team are on their way back, working along the chain of supply drops.
They’re making suspiciously good time for people on foot in a blizzard, and their reports are … kind of creepy.

Mapping out ruins is very much a part of archaeology, but according to the survey, those two rooms overlap, …

[zircher]

Said 'lead pipe' was from the Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine". The great machine was built with a neutronium hull and was impervious to the Enterprise's weapons. The only way to defeat the planet eater was to attack it from the inside.