Episode 161: The Horse Had It Coming
October 9th, 2015 | Robin
The Gaming Hut features an ill-advised open bar as we mull campaigns in which player characters have to be married.
Ask Ken and Robin tackles a question posed to us by approximately 75% of listeners: hey, what about that Nazi Gold train?
Vegetables return to the Food Hut, demanding to know how we will roast them.
Finally the Eliptony Hut turns its laser scalpels on the topic of cattle mutilations.
It blew up Kickstarter. It slid into Gen Con on a gurney with both guns blazing. And now Feng Shui 2: Action Movie Roleplaying is laying down the kung fu, the gun fu, and the cybernetic primate fu, and rocketing its way to a retail store near you. Join our friends at Atlas Games in celebrating the long-anticipated release of Robin’s classic game, accompanied by the GM Screen: Fistful of Fight Scenes and Blowing Up the Movies.
Ken fans who did not partake of the Kickstarter will want to sink their fangs into the pre-order for the Dracula Dossier from Pelgrane Press, consisting of the Director’s Handbook and Dracula Unredacted.
You say that’s still not enough Ken for you? Very well, my friend. His brilliant pieces on parasitic gaming, alternate Newtons, Dacian werewolves and more now lurk among the sparkling bounty of The Best of FENIX Volumes 1-3, from returning sponsors Askfalgen. Yes, it’s Sweden’s favorite RPG magazine, now beautifully collected. Warning: not in Swedish.
It’s not easy teaching in America’s second worst school district and being a wizard on the side. But Nathan Kulwicki thought he had it covered. Until he received news of the worst kind. Inoperable cancer. He’ll be dead before the start of the next school year. Now, he will have to scour time and unheard of dimensions to find a magical cure to save himself. But what will he be willing to do to find it? Find out in Terminal Magics, a novel by Plot Points impresario Ben Riggs.
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Why do aliens like the same cow parts as vultures?
Well, have you ever seen an alien in the same room as a vulture? I mean geez, how creepy are vultures, anyway? They’re clearly not from around here. And they’re just the right size to fit into a gray alien disguise. Or perhaps the gray aliens are just strongly sexually dimorphic.
It’s important to keep an open mind. Or an open brain pan.
One of those.
The truth is out there.
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Hey, I can feel qualified to comment on the food hut!
Roast cauliflower doesn’t actually need a lot of extra flavouring to be remarkably palatable. A little bit of caramelisation balances the normal sulfurous taste, and a slightly crisped surface improves that fibrous texture no end.
And I have run a game in which two PCs actually married each other in the course of events, to useful effect without radically changing the point of the campaign. It was an Elizabethan-period Mage campaign, and the female PC who secretly went out adventuring in male drag could only carry on getting into screaming fights with her parents over her treatment of suitors for so long. And we had a male PC who was a bit of an adrenaline junkie. So we ran their relationship as a background sub-plot, and Queen Elizabeth gatecrashed their wedding.
Which was also attended by Bill the young guy from Warwickshire (who I think was there as Kit the Spy’s plus one), though he wasn’t visibly taking notes for his future career.
“…the normal sulfurous taste…”, while perhaps a good name for a band, is entirely sufficient to justify my disdain for all varieties of B. oleracea.
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I’m not a huge fan of the brassica family myself – but it really does turn out that the usual standard cooking methods for those things seem almost designed not to show them at their best.
I tied cattle mutilations into the Cthulhu Mythos (and directly into Lovecraft’s fiction) with my article “Saucer Attack 1928!: The Dunwich ‘Horror'”
http://theunspeakableoath.com/home/2015/09/mysterious-manuscript-saucer-attack-1928-the-dunwich-horror/
My medieval society favours roast winter veggies with a honey glaze on them. Yum.
I’d like to suggest a segment or topic; you choose if it’s best Elliptony, Consulting Occtist, Ask K & R, or even a lightning round if that’s all it warrants.
I’d love to hear a discussion on Weird WWII Italians please. The other Axis powers are relatively easy, even some of the minor ones, and of course Ken’s Osprey and the segments hyping it are invaluable but very focused on the Nazis.
Swingin’ for the fences, I need to hear about things that could make a hard-core fascist a scarier villian but also ideas for a grayer NPC who is a rival in early war but may re-apear post-surrender as an ally.
Weird / Super science and or occultism / magic of any flavor will be appreciated. My Wierd WWII game is very much a “throw it all in the blender, adds kitchen sink, and purée ” affair. (Mixed metaphor intended)
Love the show, thanks for sharing your talent and the results of all your hard work.
Best Regards,
Abbner Home Actual
So Ken — what did Marlin Perkins really discover in his 1960s expedition to find Yeti and how did you persuade him to cover it up? Is there an alternate universe where Jim and Marlin talked about Crypids and the importance of life insurance on Wild Kingdom?
(And does your reading shelf include Loxton & Prothero’s Abdominable Science! (2013)?)
In my gaming experience, the likelihood that a given game will have married PCs seems to depend primarily on the age of the PCs. F20 style games generally push player to create heroes who are just past adolescence. Suggesting that players create older PCs (possibly also not starting at first level) might be the simplest way to encourage more married characters.
Of the four PCs in my last ToC game, one was being courted by one of her sources of stability, but she married a different NPC in the epilogue; Two were gay and in committed long term relationships (not with each other); and one had a wife, a mistress, and several kids.
And of course our Gothic Victorian Superheros and Comedy of Manners game ended in a triple wedding. Two PCs married each other, two married NPCs.
Ah, yes, that game. It helped that one PC was attempting to find marriage prospects pretty much from the start.
Brian Rogers’s Mech & Matriomony is all about the PCs, young ladies all, getting married, and at Metatopia just past, Kat Miller was testing Touch of Scandal, likewise about an all young lady group of PCs searching for an ideal husband (cue Wilde).
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