Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for May 17th, and the episode title is “Spaceships and shipping”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #287]
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FGG Games won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month.
The interview with head designer Don Eccles is up and live in the blog. Don’s not backwards in coming forwards, and in the piece, we discover what FGG stands for.
Spoiler: FGG does not stand for anything, but Don is open to ideas and so if you’ve got a clever or a silly suggestion, then there’s a non-zero chance that you’ll get to name the company. There. I bet that’s not an offer you were expecting to get today.
I want to start with the Diamond Comic Distributor news since we’ve talked about it previously in the podcast. The company went bust but have been bought by Ad Populum after all. That seems to have been what Diamond was trying to do before the fights broke out and I guess Ad Populum, who own NECA and WizKids, knows what they’re buying.
On that note, we’ll be back discussing WizKids later. It’s a weird one.
Before we move on, though, I want to mention that Rebellion has struck a non-exclusive deal with Lunar Distribution for titles like 2000AD and Judge Dredd.
Rebellion are still with Diamond, but now they’re not all-or-nothing with the wobbling company. I imagine we’ll see this pattern repeat and publishers who can afford not to have an exclusive deal with one logistics company will ensure they have more than one way to get their products into stores.
Sometimes, despite best efforts, business ventures fail after all. Bronwen wrote up one such failure and this time it’s Netflix getting out of interactive content.
The streaming company has deleted its interactive choose-your-own Black Mirror adventure: Bandersnatch.
In good timing, we had a guest post from Sergio Slavador, who is doing a dissertation on power and privilege in American dystopian literature. Sergio takes a long look at the interplay between games and Black Mirror. It’s a heavy one.
We’re sticking with the topic of ‘things not working out’ as we return to WizKids. Within 24 hours of the first boxes of the company’s pre-painted Baldur’s Gate 3 minis reaching customers WizKids apologised, said they had let people down, had let Wizards of the Coast down, are investigating what went wrong and are offering refunds.
The problem? The painting on the pre-painted minis looks nothing like the product shots and is clearly subpar.
I’m actually impressed that the model maker acted so quickly, on a Friday, and so surely. I like them more, now, not less.
I think it was last week I mentioned how Bronwen was less than impressed with my mimic spotting game. I’m not sure my spaceship name generator is much better but I was inspired by both Iain M. Banks and John Scalzi’s knack for naming ships from songs.
My generator has a list of music – and please suggest more to me if you have them – and randomly adds sci-fi words to the start, end or both sides of the song title. That’s my musical suggestion for naming ships.
Thus I give you examples like;
- Forgotten Mr Roboto IX, from Styx’s Mr. Roboto.
- Quantum Overkill Alpha, from Motorhead’s Overkill.
- Breaking the Law Arrow, from Judas Priest’s Breaking the Law.
Okay, if it turns out that just maybe this generator is no good and you actually need to talk to talented authors about names and world building then let me mention the horror and sci-fi book festival Cymera here in Edinburgh next month. Geek Native will be going, and now it’s been confirmed that Chaosium’s Lynne Hardy is also going to give a workshop titled Hitting the Right Note.
I’ve not been able to get to Cymera before as it usually clashes with UK Games Expo but that’s not happening this year. Phew.
Now, we’ve a set of bundles for outros and this week I also whisked up a button to let you turn the write-up of bundle offers into links to DriveThruRPG. The idea is that you can the price and blurbs of games mentioned in the bundles, or even see if it’s already in your digital library already.
I couldn’t quite come up with a system that finds the exact matching book so the links are search results but I quite like this effect, as DriveThruRPGs search results show the publisher and price. It’s an easy to check.
The bundles include two from Catalyst Game Labs for Shadowrun, one from Raging Swan Press for Dungeon Dressing, the extended Delta Green Impossible Landscapes and one of Menagerie Shadowdark.
On that note, randomly generate something, and see you next week.
