System Mastery

It was about time we discussed the Cortex engine, and what better way to have a discussion than driving 45 minutes to a Kansas farm so I can say one sentence about how I’m upset and then drive away again to reset before I do it two more times next episode?  Smallville is a game all about building out a whole season of genre soap television, and also keeping Clark from flying.

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It’s post-apocalypse OGL gaming here so it may seem like something we’ve done before, but is it?  I hope not, but honestly 171 is a lot of episodes to go back through and I think we’re all a little tired right now.  It’s mutants, running around an irradiated post-war Earth, and they call women “furniture” in it, so you know.

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The year is 1975.  The hair is stupid.  The clothes are stupid.  The music?  Mostly stupid.  The movie scene was okay (Rocky Horror?  Jaws?  Come on now).  And the RPG scene was… heartbreakers already!  Tunnels and Trolls sure was an attempt to fix D&D by doing things differently for once.  Let’s look back, shall we.

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Someone tweeted about this, someone else linked it to us, and now we’ve reviewed it.  The DragonRaid Adventure Learning System:  A Roleplaying Game for Courageous Christians.  It’s probably safest to just link to the review now.  Happy quarantine!

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Lightning bolt!  Lightning bolt!  Lightning b… you get the idea.  It’s a LARP game!  And for us, a weird one, since we’ve never actually encountered one before that just looks like local park dress up goodtimes with boffer weapons, and yet here we are!

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Timelord!  Would you like to play an RPG as yourself and then, you know, get rewarded for showing up to the table with weapons and German soldier uniforms and stuff?  Well here you go!  Timeship is a mad game from the early 80s where yeah, there’s not much in the way of stats, because you’re playing as yourself!  What do you do as yourself?  Well, you head to the end of time to solve the murder of Count Dracula, then… wander around Gomorrah, just, you know, gettin’ involved.

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A fun side effect of doing what we do is that listeners send us stuff.  All the time.  We have just tons of books.  Jef’s room is basically two used RPG bookstores with a hidden bed in it.  And we don’t just get core books.  Heaps of fascinating supplements arrive from time to time as well, like so many Garfield phones washing up on the beaches of England.  We occasionally (very occasionally) do pileup reviews of these things, and here’s one of those times.  Books covered:  Giant Psychic Insects from Outer Space, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook, various After the Bomb supplements.

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This has been on Jon’s to-get list for most of the time we’ve made the show, and who should suddenly show up with a copy of the thing but our network head?  He always gets us the best stuff.  Dream Park has a PEDIGREE.  Based on a Larry Niven/Steven Barnes sci-fi novel series and written by Mike Pondsmith for Talsorian, there’s a lot of promise here.  Does it stick the landing?  Well, come on it, won’t you?

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Time to tackle some more Steve Jackson stuff.  No GURPS still (somehow we still don’t have a copy) but I do have Toon so here we go!  Play as a cartoon character, do cartoon stuff, and honestly it’s not half bad!

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This thing is huge and bizarre and we have come back to finish it because you are not prepared… for more Glyphs.

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