I listen to a fair number of podcasts on my commute. Here’s a run down of what I’ve been listening to this month.
What Would The Smart Party Do?
episode 68: Roleplaying games of the 90s
What Witchcraft did was it tried to fulfil the need that the World of Darkness players had to do crossovers
Great year by year list of 90s games including Over the Edge, Nephilim, Castle Falkenstein, Amber (but not Everway — come on, chaps).
Fear of a Black Dragon
This is my favourite show among the Gauntlet’s broad offering of quality podcasts. Their main podcast and +1 Forward are good listens but FotBD raises the bar with its structure, focus on utility and insightful comments. The Operation Unfathomable episode is typical of this high standard. Also Tom uses my favourite word (liminal).
The Grognard Files
Paranoia (episode 19) and Golden Heroes pt. 1 (episode 20)
More gaming nostalgia! The Grognard Files goes from strength to strength. Golden Heroes is the most recent episode but I wanted to mention Paranoia too, for the comment about how that game never really settled on one coherent theme or presentation — I would have loved to run it as a grim Brazil-esque satire, but our games always devolved into backstabbing and grassing each other’s clones to the computer within minutes. Actually I always thought the 1st edition system had some genuine innovations like the damage columns and skill trees, it’s just these were totally out of place when the PCs were so ephemeral.
Also check out the Golden Heroes unboxing:
Welcome to Night Vale
A door ajar pt 3 (episode 126)
Twin Peaks, Pontypool, Al Amarja, Royston Vasey, Night Vale.
Come on down to the pancake house, check if any of your loved ones have been affected by this horrible disaster, and enjoy free hot cakes. One hot cake per missing loved one.
The Good Friends of Jackson Elias
And finally the perennial favourite returns with a discussion of cats. Which reminds me, I must re-read The Cats Of Seroster.