Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for the 29th of July, 2023, and the episode title is “The calm before the storm”
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #206]
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The Grinning Frog is in the Spotlight this month, as voted for by Patreons.
Would running your own indie RPG studio like The Grinning Frog be cool? Stephen Hart, the boss there, says that doing so is at least 60 hours of weekly work.
One of the coolest things I’ve seen online this week is the 1:2 scale cardboard TIE fighter that Bronwen found.
The whole build was captured in timelapse, and it’s hypnotic. A 1:2 scale shows the spacecraft’s size, but what a big model it makes!
Hats off to Bronwen because the other collection of totally awesome discoveries I saw this week are Pokemon terrariums.
I’ve been wrestling with buying a terrarium for a while. These are plants and moss behind glass, little self-contained ecosystems that need little maintenance.
On Etsy, KetchumKraft are selling Pokeballs that look like, but I don’t think are, little terrariums with Pokemon inside.
They are adorable.
Geek Native even went in search of cool at SDCC, and that project was led by Jill, who then helped compile 8 cosplay trends. There are photographs.
You’ll have predicted many of these. The trends we saw are;
- Barbie costumes
- Other dolls – Monster High characters had a good showing
- The Addams Family – lots of Wednesday, of course
- Loki Variants – I hope this idea persists as it seems creative and relatively easy to do!
- Mario
- Men doing genderswaps
- Funny costumes – Jill called out a Pop Funko still in the box of the cosplayer himself
- And, weirdly, there were plenty of inanimate objects
Now, in RPG news, who will win the Fifth War in the iconic sci-fi RPG Traveller?
Mongoose says that they are giving fans a vote, and there’s a poll on Reddit.
Fans might not be doing Mongoose any favours though, as, at the time of the Podcast, the Third Imperium is in second place.
Right now, the winner of the entire Fifth War is shaping up to be a random Far Trader crew who probably caused the whole thing in the first place.
Moving from the Fifth War to 5e lets continue with FiveEvil.
FiveEvil is a new project from Handiwork Games and Morgan Davie. It’ll hit Kickstarter and its a 5e-powered horror RPG. I’d suggest 5e isn’t the easiest to do horror with, I mean, there are detection spells and healing.
However, the strapline for FiveEvil is “subverting the expectations of the world’s greatest RPG”.
If you’re wondering what the world’s greatest RPG is then that’s one of the legally permissible ways to reveal to Dungeons & Dragons’ 5e. Humble, right?
I look forward to seeing what they come up with!
Another tabletop RPG which has my interest and that I’ll have to wait for is The Magnus Archives.
Monte Cook Games are taking that to Kickstarter. I know it’s a horror game using the Cypher System, which I like a lot, but I don’t know anything about the original The Magnus Archives podcast that it’s being made in conjunction with.
Looking to the future, just a bit closer, is Issliss.
Now, that’s on Kickstarter right now, and I don’t often mention Kickstarters on Audio EXP. They get enough love on Geek Native and are rarely the highlights for this weekly digest.
Veronica Ripley’s elevator pitch for the spooky RPG won me over. It goes;
A thousand years ago, humans tried to invade a land of monsters. They failed…
If all goes well, Fablescraps will have the game out early next year.
Fed up waiting, got the Star Wars Adventures RPG? Good news. You can now grab Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide from DriveThruRPG.
It’s about 250 pages long and, we’re told, can be adapted for other Star Trek eras.
Willing to wait just a little bit? Jamie Lee Curtis’ Mother Nature is out on the 8th.
Mother Nature began life as an eco-horror film script. That didn’t happen back then, but it might now, as the horror icon has helped convert the story to a graphic novel. You can pick that up at Forbidden Planet and e-commerce players on the 8th.
I’ve had a read and found it a bit slow despite the gore in places, yet that slowness is a powerful building of crisis.
Now, at the end of the podcast episode, let’s address that storm in the title. It’ll be August soon, and there won’t be an Audio EXP podcast for two weeks.
Yes, a whole fortnight and then we’ll skip the end of the month as I’m out at Tabletop Scotland. The month’s opening will have the entire team in the Edinburgh Festivals chaos and writing for sister site Edinburgh Reviews. The schedule is… intense. If I’m home, it won’t be to record a podcast. It’ll be to be lying on the floor and whimpering. Er, I mean, writing up reviews.
Let’s finish with a reminder of the August candidates for the RPG Publisher Spotlight. If you’re a patron, you can vote.
Candidates are;
And on that note, let’s wrap up there, subvert expectations, and I’ll see you when the chaos clears.
Thoughts? Can you contribute to this article? Share your insight in the comments below.
