Welcome home.
It’s January 10th, and the episode title is “Woosh”
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #316]
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d20play won the RPG Publisher Spotlight. We’re no further along with Gear Games or d20play’s interviews than we were this time last week. This is a unique situation, but we’ll crack it and push on.
The biggest news on the blog this week is LEGO’s Smart Bricks. There are no wires or iPads to Bluetooth connect to, but these new LEGO blocks are packed with tech so they know where they are and what they are near. The result will be LEGO sets like a Star Wars Throne Room that plays The Imperial March on cue and makes lightsaber noises.
It sounds cool to me, but I’m decades through my learn by play years. Is it good for young kids to have a LEGO set like this? Will it stifle their imagination, or will it help create budding young engineers?
Like AI technology, LEGO has stumbled into the ‘just because can does not mean we should’ debate.
Let me know what you think over on Discord or by leaving a comment on the blog.
Bronwen found a tech battle of her own this week with the trailer of Sam Rockwell’s “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die“, in which there’s already been an AI-apocalypse, but a time traveller has made it back to try and rewrite the future.
It’s Gore Verbinski’s first movie in ten years, and it premiered last year at the Fantastic Fest and Beyond Fest.
Bronwen has also been listing the green flags we have for the new Tomb Raider live-action series, which will feature Sophie Turner, who we might remember from Game of Thrones.
The green flags Bronwen’s picked out are
- It’s been developed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
- The cast includes Jason Isaacs and Martin Bobb-Semple.
- A big green flag, and one I can’t disagree with, is that Sigourney Weaver is in talks to join. Let’s hope she does.
I’ve not blogged a trailer this week, but I did have the gameplay demo for Starfinder: Afterlight. Paizo’s sci-fi TTRPG is being made into a PC game by Epictellers Entertainment, and it’s channelling a Guardians of the Galaxy and Firefly vibe.
The strategy is to avoid looking like a virtual tabletop and to enable players to explore as many dialogue options, including romances, as possible.
There’s also some notable voice talent, such as Roger Clark, who was Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption. If you want to give players a space western vibe, then Arthur Morgan’s voice is a sly move.
The other sci-fi TTRPG I noticed getting some love this week was the Genesys-powered Embers of the Imperium. I don’t recall seeing any Genesys games while compiling the best-sellers list in December, and I wondered whether Ships of the Shattered Empire would just sail off into the void.
At the time of recording this podcast, Edge Studio’s latest supplement for the Twilight Imperium RPG is DriveThruRPG’s hottest seller. So, there you have it: people are still playing Genesys.
In other TTRPG news, I liked and reviewed Hillside Games’ dark but cute Fate Forlorn quickstart. It’s a generous quickstart with loads of pages.
There’s no setting as such, but it’s a world where the Gods are gone, and the Feymothers of the deep woods have replaced them.
You can run a grimdark game with the quickstart tonight, and it’s free to download too.
It’s barely the new year, but the first convention are on the way. This week I wrote up What’s Your Game‘s move to the GL1 Leisure Centre and their new mead sponsor.
Thanks, now I want some mead!
I bought my first convention tickets for 2026, too, and they were for Conpulsion, Scotland’s oldest gaming convention. It’s certainly not the biggest, but this year, as well as TTRPGs, wargames and LARP, they’re organising megagames.
What’s Your Game is in February, and Conpulsion is in April.
There are loads of bundles out, and we’ve written up three. Two are at the Bundle of Holding: the Dread Thingonomicon, which is full of GM help, and the Old Gods of Appalachia, which I’m delighted to see after not having the money to support the Kickstarter.
The last bundle is a huge dungeon collection from Goodman Games, available through Fanatical. It’ll be interesting to see what Fandom does with Fanatical and tabletop games this year.
That’s a wrap. So, whether it’s smart bricks or sci-fi RPGs giving you your woosh, keep safe, fight the good fight, and see you next week.
