The Big Red Couch RPG Podcast

Craig’s at GenCon, the mad bastard, so we checked in on him yesterday to see what he’s been up to!

He doesn’t appear to require medical evacuation yet, so we chatted about a few games and events.

People who vilify Britain will be treated as extremists and referred to the Government’s deradicalisation Prevent programme under plans by Rishi Sunak. https://t.co/ukgih4RgeU pic.twitter.com/yTr3q289cd

Tales from the Floating Vagabond by Avalon Hill

Alexandria RPG Library “We are a nonprofit charity based in Washington State. We travel with a lending library to events to share role-playing games with others. When we are not at events we run games for at-risk youth, military service members with PTSD, senior citizens. The best part is that anyone that plays RPGs can help.”

Crossroads Carnival by Magpie Games

Film – Freaks (1932)

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast by Possum Creek Games

Activate The Goose-ducer! – Descendants of an end-of-days science experiment battle the descendants of a different end-of-days science experiment through the use of yet another end-of-days science experiment.

The Dream Police Want To Make Sure That Nothing Is Inside Your Head – Dreaming is illegal, Science Rays ensure that nobody dreams, and Z-Leggers smuggle stolen dreams through sleepeasys. There’s a reason for this, and the Government say it’s a neccesary thing, but … Is it a good enough reason?

A Mobster Calls – Telepresence work shifts aren’t fun, but the rest of prison life here is OK, the counselling staff seem nice, and the guards are weirdly unconcerned about what you’re up to. It’s a nice place to serve your time, but those older counselling staff, the ones who give off the ‘former inmate’ vibe, keep dropping hints that you can’t even see the real prison.

IVAR chair, by IKEA

Tarot

Terry Pratchett

The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee 2022

Monsters Inc.

Untitled Goose Game

Episode One Hundred And Sixty Two – Ruins Of The Ancients

The Secret of NIMH
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O’Brien
Land of the Lost ( The one with dinosaurs & Sleestak ~ T. Jones )
Land of the Giants ( The one with tiny people ~ T. Jones )

Transducer

The Fly
Jeff Goldblum

Old World Blues (Fallout DLC / Add-On)
Fallout: New Vegas

Kalawan Rising, by William Dymock-Johnson
The Uplift Universe Series, by David Brin

Harry Harrison

Ogre (board game)

Welcome To Night Vale (show)
Welcome To Night Vale (wikipedia)

Eliot Ness
H.P. Lovecraft
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, by H.P. Lovecraft

Dark City
Fringe

The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray, by Chris Wooding

Hellboy

Jacob’s Ladder

Silent Hill

Stranger Things
Locke & Key

Dark Conspiracy

Episode One – Alcatraz
Episode Two – Mexico Is Missing An Island
Episode Three – Star Dot Star

Telepresence

Alcatraz Island

Clarence Anglin / Frank Morris ( June 1962 Alcatraz Escape )
Al Capone
( “Due to his good behavior, Capone was permitted to play banjo in the Alcatraz prison band, the Rock Islanders, which gave regular Sunday concerts for other inmates” ~ T. Jones )

Sleep Dealer
The Matrix
A Monster Calls

Twistaplot Novel

The Amazing Criswell
Plan 9 From Outer Space

To My Esteemed Undersea Colleague – Beneath the ice of Europa, isolated Mecha Pilots on long patrols stay in touch by writing letters back & forth

Aquapastoral – Flooding can be expected after a storm, but nobody expected the water to be 30 feet above the farmhouse roof, and they certainly didn’t expect the water to politely stay outside of the house itself.

Jousting ‘Neath The Waves – Once the submarine battles between the sea-dwarf & human kingdoms came to an end, the various rulers needed to find something to keep their combat-ready & easily-bored warriors from breaking the peace.

IKEA Ivar Chair

Inverness

Bette Midler
Beaches ( Movie from 1988, demonstrating that Craig has seen too many movies ~ T. Jones )

Episode One Hundred and Fifty Four – Drab Majesty

San Francisco
Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco

Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson
Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

D20 Go

Bad Taste (movie)

Waiheke Island
Motukorea / Browns Island

SIGNAL//r021 by Hexavexagon

Signal Seed by Hexavexagon

Epistolary

Europa

Iron Lung (game)
Five Nights At Freddies

De Profundis

Castle Falkenstein

Dugong

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
The Walrus & The Carpenter, by Lewis Carroll

Studio Ghibli
Spirited Away
Ponyo / Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea
Pom Poko

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast
Possum Creek Games
Wanderhome

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

Done & Been, by Gypsy Moon

Chuck Tingle
The Tingleverse: The Official Chuck Tingle Role-Playing Game ( Amazon Link )
chucktingle.com ( I’m honestly not sure whether this is NSFW or not ~ T. Jones )

Red November
Burning Wheel

Cool Runnings
A Knight’s Tale

America’s Cup

Blue Max
Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game

Archer

Donuts & Crullers – Ben starts to make a game about a TV Genre he hates, and ends up inventing a card mechanic for cooking competitions.

24/7 Coffee & Questions – Craig tries to come up with an explanation for the “high-level adventurer running a tavern” trope, and ends up with a mystery hiding in plain sight.

The Bangers & Mash Are Coming! – The International Food section of the Grocery Isles is under threat from the Anglican Food Empire, and the East Asian Pastries are all that stands to protect them from an endless beige buffet.

Kiwi RPG Week 2022

The Winter of Our Discontent
Bath, Somerset

Narrowboat

Cruller
Donut

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Ang Lee

Dunkin’ Donuts
Baker Street, London
Sherlock Holmes

Whenuapai Airbase
C-130 Hercules

Stephen Chow
The God Of Cookery

Masterchef Australia

Castle Falkenstein

Borough Market
Greenwich Market

Warren Buffet

The Dresden Files RPG
Shadowrun

Jackie Chan
Kung Fu Hustle

The Vegi-Verse / Big Shopping Cart / The Grocery Isles have come up in a few episodes by now ~ T. Jones
Episode One Hundred And Forty Five – The Case Of The Accidental Battered Sausage

Episode Eighty One – Banana Warriors Of Dimension X

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

Wikipedia list of Chinese Bakery products

Mascot-tan

Kantai Collection / Kantai Korekushon

OS-tan

UK Data Loader

Tsundere Beholder

Gunboat Diplomacy

Strontium Dog
The Munch Bunch

2000AD

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness
Gamma World

VeggieTales

Cherry 2000
Mad Max
Rollerblade Warriors
( One of a series of Post-Apocalyptic Rollerblade Action movies by Donald G. Jackson. Craig has seen some, but not all of them. We judge him for this, and we are right to do so. ~ T. Jones )
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn

Admiral Zeng He

Presley Event Overload – The timeline is fracturing under a cascade of divergence events, splitting faster than they can be investigated, let alone dealt with. There’s no clear pattern to what’s happening, though a certain 20th Century musician seems to be affected by more of the changes than mere coincidence would permit.

The Mystery Of The King Beyond The Stars – In the far future, at a multi-species gathering of devotees of Elvis, someone who clearly does not have Elvis in their heart (or hearts) (or decentralised circulatory system) has stolen one of the most treasured artifacts of The King.

Elvis: The Legendary Tours – Wandering Hero Elvis & his friends encounter more and more Elvis impersonators, people who heard rumors of the death of The King & have decided to take up the Sequined Mantle. Clearly his evil half-brother Abbot Costello is involved, but what other tricks does the pretender to the throne of Graceland have lined up?

Elvis Presley

Colonel Tom Parker

Dalek
Cult of Skaro

Timewatch

Loki (TV)

Gremlins 2: The New Batch

The Trousers Of Time

Priscilla Presley

Amphetamines

Looks like Craig remembered “Dark Futures” slightly wrong; Dark Future was a miniatures wargame from GDW. There was a novel, Comeback Tour, which is set in the world of the game & is the thing with Col. Presley that Craig remembered.
~ T. Jones

Clarke County, Space, by Allen Steele

Among Us

3000 Miles To Graceland
Almost Elvis (documentary)

Bubba Ho-Tep

Suspicious Minds (song)
Elvis ( a.k.a. ’68 Comeback Special )

Judge Dredd

Beyond 2000

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Captain Marvel Jr.

Shroud of Turin
British Museum

Psi*Run
Paranoia
Dread (rpg)
Dread: Dredd (new edition of Dread)
Fiasco

SHINOBIGAMI: Modern Ninja Battle RPG

Diana: Warrior Princess
Elvis: The Legendary Tours

John had a lot of links ~ T. Jones

Chinese Elvis
Black Elvis
Heavy Metal Elvis
Female Elvis
Sumo Elvis

The Heavy Metal Fox deity worshiping kitsune, Yoji Metal (a.k.a. Baby Metal)

Techno Elvis wants to replace the organic version with his Cybernetic, Algorithmically Derived Music
And Goth Elvis just wants to see the world burn

The Flying Elvises

Red Elvises

Six String Samurai

Fallout: New Vegas

David Bowie

Major Tom

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Xena: Warrior Princess
Atlantis

Kevin Sorbo

Andromeda

The Emperor’s New Groove

Your Crimes Are Known. The Frog Council Sits In Judgement.

Image of Elvis Presley by George Hodan

KiwiRPG Week 2022

Be Our Guest? – Ever since the actual apocalypse, the Hosts at the Apocalypse World park really haven’t had a lot to do. Now that some Guests in dire need of help have arrived, a group of ‘wasteland marauders’ and ‘besieged remnants of civilization’ have to figure out how to bypass their own programmed scripts so that they can keep those Guests alive & get them to SOME kind of safety.

When The Wind In The Willows – Cute animals in their V8 Interceptors & War Rigs travel in search of a possibly mythical better place, with clean water and non-radioactive food.

Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Max World! – With his last breath, Max pointed everyone at the utopia somewhere over the mountains. Now the race is on to get there & claim it.

NZ Parliamentary Protest
Freedom Convoy
Ram Ranch (song) (wikipedia)

Utopia (concept)
Sir Thomas More
Utopia, by Sir Thomas More

Mad Max Franchise
George Miller

Babe: Pig In The City
Happy Feet
The Lord Of The Rings

Episode One Hundred And Thirty Five – Things Are Going Down At Disney Town

Westworld (tv)
Westworld (movie)
Futureworld
Shōgunworld ( Craig called this Samuraiworld in the show, presumably based on the SW logo seen in an episode in season 2 ~ T. Jones )

Apocalypse World

Fallout Franchise

Jericho (tv)

Sawney Bean

Wanderhome
Journey Away (Kickstarter link, because it’s all I could find ~ T. Jones)

The Bicameral Mind

Fellowship (rpg)

Samurai Jack

Big Rock Candy Mountain
Hobo
Railroad Bull

After The Bomb

When The Wind Blows, by Raymond Briggs
The Wind In The Willows, by Kenneth Grahame

Grave Of The Fireflies
Watership Down, by Richard Adams

Peter Rabbit (movie)

Zealandia

Mad Max Furry Road – image by Tumbler user Uncalar
Mad Max Muppets – image by DeviantArt user JoppaDoops

Wacky Races

Fiasco

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
A Boy And His Dog

Harlan Ellison

Misspent Youth

Snarfquest

Threads
The Hundred Acre Wood

TTRPGS for Trans Rights in Texas

Noirlandia
Space Train Space Heist
Jonathan Frakes Wants Your Attention, And You Must Not Give It To Him
Garfield ± You

Cruller

(Oh, and there’s a faint chance that Ben’s attempt at sporting humour at the start of the episode was something to do with Ricky Ponting, though they are Australian, a cricket coach, and proof that Ben is somehow in posession of negative knowledge about sports. Stick to your lane, will you? ~ T. Jones)

The Heroes are defeated, ground down by a controlling society. As the last remaining bastion of ‘otherness’, Mad Scientists reach out to children through the medium of educational television, trying to spark a sense of rebellion in the only people who can still hear them.

Educational Television in a world of Science Heroes, Supergenius Villains, and Pulp Adventurer-Explorers!

For any problem, there’s a technical solution. Even the problems caused by the previous technical solution.
And sometimes the people coming up with those solutions need to be reigned in, before their backyard nuclear reactor contaminates the whole neighborhood.

Alien scientists simultaneously guiding & observing ( and occasionally running from the catastrophic actions of ) the human scientific community.

(Episode updated with actual audio! Apologies, the mad science is strong with this lot. I hope you didn’t strain yourselves trying to hear the absent data. ~ T. Jones )

Paleolithic

Blue Peter

The Tripods, by John Christopher
Logan’s Run
Michael York

NZ Covid Protesters – Convoy 2022 New Zealand

Equilibrium

Necessary Evil

Fallen Angels, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn

NZ Parliament Buildings

Cook Strait
Picton
Wellington

Atomic Robo RPG

Victor Von Doom / Doctor Doom

Kids On Bikes

Scooby Doo
The Venture Brothers

Inspectres
Flotsam: Adrift Among The Stars

Babylon 5
The Expanse

David Hahn – The Nuclear Boy Scout

A Miracle Of Science

Luddites

Earth Scientists Are All Doc Browns

Doc Brown
Back To The Future

Eureka

Paranoia

Robots Have No Tails, by Henry Kuttner ( & C.L.Moore )
( Craig misremembered this – Gallagher Plus is the name of one of the stories in the collection ~ T. Jones )

Fiasco

A safe but dull utopia has an unexpected need for people who can go outside of the norm and venture into dangerous situations.
They’re a bit light on those, as a society, but by relaxing the constraints a bit on the psych profiles, they’ve got some candidates who are within a few standard deviations of ‘Adventurous’.

Oneironauts journey into a patient’s psyche to guide them through constructed scenarios to a better mental state.
Unfortunately, pushing on one part of a personality has a tendency to make it push back from somewhere else, …

Auckland, NZ

Frostpunk (game)

Jack London
Farley Mowat

Futurama

Myers–Briggs Type Indicator

Star Trek: The Original Series
[FTL Y’all] The Age of the $200 hyperdrive
Radio Shack

Paranoia

Logan’s Run

Wanderhome
Flatpack

Fallout (game series)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (game)

The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke

( Ben is basically recounting the use case of the Mini DC from this film, but I’ll allow it ~ T. Jones )
Paprika (2006) by Satoshi Kon

Adventure Time

Calvin and Hobbes

Episode One Hundred And Thirty Two – (Big Red) Couch Surfing

Ludo

Fate Core

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum
The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)
Interpreting The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as an allegory for monetary policy
( now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d type ~ T. Jones )

Torg

Carl Jung
Sigmund Freud

Inception

The Road To Wellville
John Harvey Kellogg

Episode Ninety Seven – My story is essentially the tale of Juan Bobo, only dumber

Traveller 2300 / 2300 AD

Zardoz
Mad Max 2

Civilization (game series)

The Red Elvises

Craig tries to combine A Christmas Carol with Solo Shifts on a Spaceship, and fails, but Ben recovers the idea

Ben pitches the idea of a Clip Show Holiday Episode of an RPG campaign, as a way to look back on the game so far & a sneaky way to see which bits the players remember the most

The regulars at a dive bar are called upon, at Christmas Eve, to make a Christmas Miracle occur. It’s not going to be easy, the situation is probably already out of control, and it all has to happen by Christmas Morning

With Christmas looming, inexplicable anonymous helpful acts are being performed. Is it Elves? Kindly House Spirits? Or is something leaking through from the Gigantic Research Facility next to the town?

WanderHome
Apocalypse World
Exalted
Werewolf: The Apocalypse

RPG.net Forums

GURPS

The Muppet Christmas Carol
Cargo
Pandorum
Z Nation
Passengers

A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens

The Full Monty

Murderous Ghosts

Restless – Buffy the Vampire Slayer (S4E22)

Gideon The Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

Christmas Mince Pie

Kids On Bikes

Home Alone
The Santa Clause

Blades In The Dark

Prep & Landing

The 13 Yule Lads

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
Eureka

Tales From The Loop (RPG)
Tales From The Loop (Book)

Stranger Things

Episode One Hundred And Sixty Six – We can make anything into a dumpling. Anything.

Ben, Craig, & Special Guest Terry attempt to get to grips with the “pastoral fantasy” RPG Wanderhome, and probably succeed, in our first approximate actual play episode.

Wanderhome, by Jay Dragon, can be purchased from Possum Creek Games.

Wanderhome is a pastoral fantasy role-playing game about traveling animal-folk, the world they inhabit, and the way the seasons change.
It is a game filled with grassy fields, mossy shrines, herds of chubby bumblebees, opossums in sundresses, salamanders with suspenders, starry night skies, and the most beautiful sunsets you can imagine.

Wim Hof

Brian Jacques
Hayao Miyazaki

Hallow, Worcestershire