(Before my faux-meaningful commentary, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that I created music for this episode! Feedback welcome!)

Like many American TV shows, the competence of the villains fluctuates depending on whoever is writing the episode.

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This episode features a villain who hasn’t been mentioned before; War Squid. This name was casually thrown out there during a special ‘non-episode’ we recorded before this ‘real episode’, when I (Michael) was improvising super-villain names for Corvid to drop in a conversation to impress a girl. It makes sense in context. Maybe we’ll release that episode at one point. Who knows.

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In the distant future the world’s greatest thinkers will attempt to understand why Corvid thought it was a good idea to tackle Geyser through a sixth floor window.

Analytical philosophers will argue that the window and subsequent fall wasn’t important to the matter at hand.

The existentialists will decry the fact that Corvid and Geyser were merely characters on a obscure actual play podcast.

Platonist philosophers will dismiss the question as neither Corvid or Geyser are archetypes like Batman or Superman, and therefore don’t matter.

Pragmatists might point out that Corvid was singularly focused on subduing Geyser to the exclusion of rational thought.

Objectivists will scream and curse as they burn in the fire that anybody who thought that Ayn Rand’s pointless waste of ink and paper was meaningful should.

Then again we all know the answer. Corvid fucked up.

(Philosophy students will wonder why a Computer Science graduate is attempting to make philosophy jokes. Philosophy graduates will return to making coffee.)

Where do game campaigns come from? A careful combination of elements, mixed with an alchemist’s wisdom? Formed whole-cloth from a foundation, merely discovered like Michelangelo discovered David? From a flash of inspiration, the kind that makes you lurch bolt upright in the middle of the night?

Nay.

Every roleplayer knows the foul, disturbing truth; campaigns are wrenched from the milky darkness of chaos in a flurry of shouts and screams. The stinking offal of pop culture, personal preference and audacious imagination clash in a blood-sport of ideological supremacy. When you lock five twenty-somethings in a room and ask them to unleash their imaginations you must suffer the consequences.

Also, sorry about missing this week’s episode. As an apology here’s some random audio from the game creation session for PTA Superheroes (you might call it episode 0).

Geyser vs Gold Standard. LagSpike vs gravity. (more…)

With Sydbourne (Melborney?) inundated with rain, our heroes begin to suspect this is no natural downpour.

The Plot Train mob return with a new episode of PTA Superheroes, featuring their most exciting adventures yet: the trials and tribulations of domestic life. University essays. Twitch streams. Plumbing jobs. Mafia family meetings…? (more…)

In this, the inaugural episode of the Plot Train podcast, five friends in Melbourne Australia sit around pretending to be superheroes.