Welcome home.
It’s September 27th, and the episode title is “Zombies and other good news”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #302]
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Than Gibson and DMing the World Press are in the Spotlight, and we find out that they’ve recently released a DarkSpace 3rd party license so that people like you and me can create, sell and profit from DarkSpace content. You can read the full interview on the blog. An easy way to find it is to navigate to the Spotlight page and follow the link from there.
We’ve also upgraded the Spotlight page. Each month’s honouree appears in a bold banner at the top of the page, and alumni now have a headline fader at the top of the archives as well. We started in 2019, so there’s now more than six years of interview content.
You can vote for next month’s honouree if you’re a patron through a private voting link, and the candidates are;
We wrapped up another vote on Geek Native this month, too, and that was a competition to win a copy of the family therapy RPG Adventuring Family. The question was “How old should children be before they can play tabletop RPGs without adult supervision?”
We had some experts answer, and they agreed; any age, but without adult supervision, young kids were unlikely to get any extra learning and development from it. The public vote of readers placed the recommended age between 10 and 13, with approximately a third of the votes.
Definitely not suitable for kids is the latest The Toxic Avenger movie. It’s been lost in distribution limbo for too long, but might now be coming to a streaming platform near you.
What caught my attention was the news that the movie wiped out $7 million of American medicial debt. The United States does not have much in the way of a public health service so medicial bills can get out of hand. However, third parties can buy this debt at a rate of about 1 to 100, according to expert Daniel Lempert. Imagine if every American movie did this. If they spent $5,000 on each release, then half a million dollars of struggle would simply vanish, and I’d be much more likely to support movies. On the other hand, I fear capitalism would kick in and 1 to 100 rate on buying medicial debt would also simply vanish.
An American production I’m looking forward to is Predator: Badlands, as I think Predator is one of my all-time favourite action movies. I’ve been saving up MCM Comic Con London news for a while, but when the PR agency sent the news that seat reservations had opened, I knew it was time to put all the drip-fed headlines together into a single post. When I did it was clear that Badlands and the D&D actual play High Rollers had to be the headline news. I think that’s a testament to the still high popularity of actual play TTRPG shows. Aliens and TTRPGs, anyway.
Speaking of which, I got an early look at Steve Dee and Tin Star Games‘ Five Years After TTRPG. It’s looking great, but not out yet. The premise is that you start five years after the apocalypse and work backwards to find out what happened. In my play through, it was aliens, aliens who treated Earth as an investment they had the right and authority to stripmine for resources. Your end of the world may be different.
Paizo are not facing the end of the world but their e-commerce operations will go through big changes. The Pathfinder publisher is ditching Presto, their in-house e-commerce platform, aka their shop, in favour of one powered by BigCommerce. That’s a powerful system used by companies too big to get away with Shopify.
However, it means two days of offline time; pre-orders being cancelled, and the end of PDF+Foundry bundles, since BigCommerce doesn’t support the idea of buying one thing, namely the Foundry module, and getting access to a different product, namely the PDF. Paizo say they’ll come back to this later once the new shop is live, but BigCommerce is a hard beast to wrangle into shape, so I wish them the best of luck with that!
Another new store is in Lee High Road in South London, it’s called Iglootree and is co-run by the Melsonian Arts Council. That’s the company that publishes Troika! The opening party is on right now. Let me know how it went and whether there are any sore heads in the morning.
A significant digital store deal has emerged at DriveThruComics. They’ve secured another deal with Dark Horse and now stock an extensive Hellboy catalogue. We’ve been seeing comic book publishers actively expanding their presence on additional platforms in recent weeks, and I wonder if the old Comixology exclusive deals are nearing the end of their duration.
You don’t need to be a shop to be interested in this next bit of tabletop gaming news but you may need to have a hefty budget. Heritage Auctions have a large collection of rare and high-quality original roleplaying games, including FASA’s Dr Who, TSR’s Indiana Jones and a lot of first and second D&D. We’re expecting records to be set.
This week, Geek Native looked at Slavic-inspired monsters in a very deliberate attempt to steer away from classic first edition D&D encounters. We turned to Gardar Realm for many of them and found a whole set of undead that weren’t always evil, but were often absolute horrors.
For example, the Opir are vampires in service to a god, but can become corrupted and more like the nightmares we’re used to.
That said, we also embraced a bit of D&D this week, with a review of the board game from Ravensburger’s Horrified Dungeons & Dragons. Honestly, I think it’s a quick way to get into a dungeon crawling oneshot. Sure, there’s nothing in terms of in-character play, but it feels like encounters in Waterdeep.
We just had a nightmare trying to arrange our review playthrough sessions. I call it the curse of D&D game night logistics.
In another nod to D&D, we also created the Wasted Wizard’s high-quality, stackable condition rings for miniatures. Condition rings, I think, are essential if you’re using minis for combat and not the theatre of mind and I find conditions are like buses; they come along in groups, so having a system that does not break when a character has more than one condition is a must.
As a bonus, though, that write-up has a little D&D 2024 rules quiz. You start with five points of health, which I call lore points; each wrong answer costs you d4 damage.
I also took a look at Magpie Games’ card-based Zombie World roleplaying game. It’s not new, except this week, the core rules were added to DriveThruRPG for free. I liked it a lot, especially the Bite Deck, and I wish I had a physical copy. It’s one to look at if you’re planning any gaming for Halloween.
It’s not just Halloween that’s coming. Roll20Con is here, and there’s a superb charity bundle to support it. There’s 90% off and downloads include Masks, the superhero game, and Legend in the Mist. During the virtual con there are even free copies of games like D&D, Cyberpunk RED and the Alien RPG.
SmiteWorks, the company that runs Fantasy Grounds, have their own convention coming up later and FG Con 25 has been announced for early November.
Or, if you’re looking for a straightforward good bundle, Humble has a range of Warhammer RPGs, from Fantasy to 40K, available right now.
Thanks for listening. Take care. And when the stranger walks out of the dark woods under the blood-red moon, keep your door closed.
