Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for May 24th, and the episode title is “Towels and time travellers”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #288]
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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. In the piece, Don explains why there’s no AI involvement in FGG and why he does not think computer minds can match humans for creativity.
In that respect, we and Tori Struder took a bit of a gamble in the guest post Why I introduced my daughter to D&D using ChatGPT.
Tori’s article is an honest write-up of an attempt to use an AI to stand in for a DM. Why? Life is busy and finding time to prepare an adventure and run it can be challenging. Not wanting her daughter to miss out, Tori gave ChatGPT a try and the conclusion is clear – this was a fun 30 minutes.
I suspect we’ll be returning to this topic again and again over the next few months and years.
Here’s another thing that we keep coming back to.
Paradox is taking the development of the World of Darkness back in-house, which applies to computer games, tabletop games, and everything else.
They’ve tried that before. This time, though, it feels like a more dramatic change. The company has said goodbye to some partners and they’ve even said goodbye to the World of Darkness as a publishing brand. They’re bringing White Wolf back as the publisher.
There are gamers today who won’t recognise the name, but for me and many others it still has equity. I remember it fondly.
Let’s stay in the past for a little bit. Do you remember Rifts: Promise of Power?
I don’t and I like the RIFTS world. Rifts: Promise of Power was a computer game and it launched on the N-Gage just before the N-Gage died. The N-Gage was Nokia’s attempt to make a handheld gaming console.
Palladium Books are calling Rifts: Promise of Power the lost Rifts game. Now they’ve teamed up with publisher TransPerfect and will be crowdfunding a remake for the game. It’ll be targeted at PCs first, but if the crowdfunding goes very well, it could expand to consoles.
If we move forward in time, but not quite to 2025 then you might remember a campaign setting called The Red Opera. It was a great looking Kickstarter run by Apotheosis Studio and that’s a name now tarnished.
However, the creative talent behind The Red Opera was never the now controversial Apotheosis leadership. These creators are now together in an indie studio called Storyteller’s Forge and Geek Native has learned that they’ll be bringing The Red Opera back in 2026 as The Red Opera: Reforged.
I got that from co-founder of Storyteller’s Forge Rick Heinz in a pre-UK Games Expo interview. He won’t be there, but some of the team will be and the setting The Black Ballad will be on show. If the Storyteller’s Forge is beginning to sound rather musical with Operas and Ballads, then yes, that’s exactly it.
While UK Games Expo is on next week, this weekend there’s MCM Comic Con going in London.
Geek Native isn’t there, although comic creator, Dave Cook, a friend of the blog is there and taking part in a Titan Comics panel. We also had a write up of David Tennant, he of Good Omens, Jessica Jones and Doctor Who, in which he makes it clear he was interested in playing Reed Richards in the Fantastic Four. Do you know, I think he could have made that work.
Did you know David Tennant was in the horror Fright Night, the 2011 remake.
The original Fright Night is pretty famous but not as famous as Return of the Living Dead. I think the Kickstarter for the forthcoming TTRPG might be a bit late, or I’ve got my wires crossed on the start date, but Bronwen has uploaded a video of herself with ghoulish eyes reading an excerpt from the book.
I mean, just because the military is moving into parts of the hospital without explanation, there is no reason to be worried. Right?
Bronwen also wrote up the out-of-the-blue decision by Sony to scrap the PlayStation Stars loyalty programme.
I say it’s out of the blue but it makes sense. If you have a PlayStation then you’re going to buy PlayStation games, and if not, if you have two consoles, I doubt the Star Program affects your choice of platform at all. Ergo, the result is that it’s just a discounting program.
Nevertheless, taking things away from gamers is never an easy thing to do and I bet people are annoyed.
We move on from PlayStation and cybershopping to cyberpunk and hacking.
Inspired by the release of Nightpath’s definitive edition of Entromancy, their 5e-powered cyberpunk game, I took an abstracted version of their hacking rules to make a widget on Geek Native.
So, if you want a bit more fanfare than a dice roll for a hack, but don’t want to wait more than a few seconds, this widget has three questions to set the hacker’s skill and the challenge before rolling virtual dice with some attempted ASCII art to make it look dramatic.
Before we get into the outros, let’s move forward in time again and to some present-day sci-fi. DeLorean, the car company famous from Back to the Future, has an EV coming called the Alpha5, and they have Patrick Stewart in the ad campaign.
It looks all very Star Trekky, but I do wonder whether they’ll ruffle people the wrong way by using Blockchain tech to run an auction on the waiting list for the car.
In bundles, we have EN Publishing’s Awfully Cheerful Engine at the Bundle of Holding. You’ll be able to meet them at UK Games Expo, too.
There’s also a double-feature from Necrotic Gnome for Old-School Essentials.
On Humble, there’s a megabundle deal for the Savage Worlds weird west setting of Deadlands.
Lastly, May 25th is Towel Day in honour of Douglas Adams, whom we should not forget to happy Towel Day.
There won’t be a podcast next week as I’ll be in the whirlwind of the UK Games Expo, but follow us on social media for updates from the event, and then I’ll do a catch-up podcast the week after. Keep safe.
