Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for February 1st, and the episode title is “Locked in the car/planet”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #273]
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Dunderdagar won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month.
You know the drill. I’ll get in touch. Dunderdagar is based in Sweden; after we’ve successfully navigated the horror of this 8-week-long January, we now have three weeks of February to pull the Q&A off, but we’ll try.
The candidates for the March RPG Publisher Spotlight are;
- Stonehome Games
- Wendigo Workshop
- Original Frontiers
- The Quicksilver Adventuring League
- Cabal of Enchantment
Patrons can vote via a private pole from the RPG Publisher Spotlight page.
Geek Native’s creative director, Bronwen Winter Phoenix is a recovering LA journalist and once interviewed Stephen Knight about a thriller called Locke.
10 years later and, there’s a different Locked coming out, and it’s also entirely almost entirely filmed inside a car.
This time we have Anthony Hopkins who used an SUV as a honey pot to catch Bill Skarsgard looking for his Holywood breakout. It’s about the rich taking justice into their own hands.
Fantasy, right? It’s not as if billionaires will buy their way into our lives.
Bronwen also dug up Hulu’s poster for Alien Earth.
It’s great. It uses the domed head of the Xenomorph to suggest a planet. On the note of our weird planet, Alien Earth is on Hulu is you’re in the States. Everywhere else, it’s on Disney+.
This is not just important to help you find the show, but it’s more evidence that the alien queen is a Disney Princess.
What have I been up to? I wrote up Red Markets 2e. Red Markets is a horror RPG by Hebanon Games in which zombies have taken over huge chunks of Earth, and this has upset the capitalists because it gets in the way of free markets.
Dare I say it; the Republicans aren’t so fond of free markets any more, but I think they would approve of the quarantine zones in Red Markets.
You can get the second edition as a pay-what-you-want, and if you’re willing to give Hebanon Games feedback and insight on the game, then the suggestion is the game is free.
Also in TTRPG news is the launch of Sidekick. Sidekick is a digital platform from Evil Genius Games that lets you access Everyday Heroes RPGs like The Crow, Highlander and Pacific Rim online. It’s the first indie RPG challenge to D&D Beyond.
Evil Genius Games have had a terrible PR 2024. They suffered staff leaving and saying there was something toxic in the company. Evil Genius said they definitely wouldn’t use NFTs and then were part of a web3 conference. They had a whole battle with Netflix.
However, that battle with Netflix was because of a loss of money, and now there’s no evidence at all that Sidekick uses any web3 technology at all.
Here I’m using web3 in an old way to mean blockchain, crypto and NFT. I think in hindsight, the world will agree that the third evolution of the web was all about artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence was giving the ENNIE Awards a headache last week. The internet was being loud and angry about their decision to accept work that included AI. You couldn’t win a category due to the work an AI had done in that category but you could win an award for a game that had used AI.
Next year, in the new rules that is now impossible.
I don’t disagree. If the ENNIES want to reward only human-created games, then that’s the rules they need. My only note of concern is that they ban AI-modified games and, perhaps I’m being too strict, but surely that includes spelling and grammar checkers, art filters, and other almost background features.
That connects to our outro as the Bundle of Holding has a quick sale on CBR+PNK, which is a cyberpunk TTRPG.
There’s also a deal on Dusk City Outlaws and that’s a fantasy heist.
On that note, keep safe, and don’t get locked in with a Xenomorph.