Episode 183: Eaten By a Ghost
March 25th, 2016 | Robin
Pull your swords out of your stones and step into the Gaming Hut for a consideration of the Chosen One trope.
How to Write Good explores a phenomenon Robin calls Nigeling, when you make one character look good by painting others as rubes.
You’ll place great stock in… no, I’m sorry, I can’t. Let’s just say the Food Hut is talking soup and leave it at that.
Then we close on an most unusual Ken’s Time Machine mission: getting a notorious criminal cast as James Bond before he commits his famous crime.
Ken and Robin have oft been accused of being cards. Well, we can deny it no longer. We have become super-limited promo cards for Murder of Crows, Atlas Games’ fast-paced card game of murder and the macabre, for two to five players in the mood for something a little morbid. It’s Edward Gorey meets Caligari, by way of Edgar Allan Poe. Wait a minute, what does that graphic say? I’m not so sure about this… 
Ken fans who did not partake of the Kickstarter can now sink their fangs into the general release of the Dracula Dossier from Pelgrane Press, consisting of the Director’s Handbook and Dracula Unredacted. 
If you’re like every roleplayer we know, you strive to outshine others in showing your love of dice. Well, now you can arouse the envy of friends and foes alike with Askfageln’s dazzling coffee table photo art book dedicated to all things pipped and many-sided, Dice: Rendezvous with Randomness. Luxuriate in the photo artistry of Mans Danneman. Grab the book or gorgeous prints through their Kickstarter!
In a move that surely violates someone’s security clearance, this episode is also brought to you by our friends at Arc Dream Publishing. The Kickstarter for Delta Green: the Roleplaying Game has come to an end, but don’t let that stop you from indulging your fever for this classic game, or that pinnacle of the Cthulhu game zine world, The Unspeakable Oath. 
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A History Hut subject I’d love to hear about would be the “Bone Wars” of the 1870s through 1890s. Rival paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Marsh engaged in a no-holds-barred fight to outdo each other in prestige of finding and naming dinosaur species. As well as expeditions to find fossils, tactics included bribing the other guy’s diggers, sabotage, stealing specimens and furious badmouthing in scientific journals.
Are there gamable elements to be found in wilderness expeditions digging for long-dead remains in ancient strata and then taking time out to dynamite a rival’s site?
Really, Ken – dumping that on Joanna Lumley? You do know that she has National Treasure status in the UK, don’t you?
I think Ken is being unjust to the English aristocracy (a thing that is hard to do). I’m fairly certain that they feature more as victims of murder, both in literature (Agatha Christie wrote LORD EDGEWARE DIES not LORD EDGEWARE’S NANNY dies) and in real life. The latter is because they are both rich and annoying. An example (all right the only one Wikipedia could find) is in the link below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Ashley-Cooper,_10th_Earl_of_Shaftesbury#Confession_and_arrest
Try not to stick with just using one manufacturer.
Ken claimed that in his youth, Lord Lucan somewhat resembled Pierce Brosnan. (And after a quick visit to Google, I can’t disagree.) Might that resemblance actually help Brosnan get the role earlier in his career–say, instead of Dalton?