Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for August 31st, and the episode title is “Chainsaw Man and Potatoes”
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #253]
[Also on Stitcher | Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Schwalb Entertainment won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month.
The interview with Rob is live on the blog and we touch briefly on future plans for PunkApocalyptic: The RPG, When the Wolf Comes, Shadow of the Demon Lord, BlackStar, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, Godless and Shadow of the Red Moon.
These are fleeting visits, yes, but at least confirm what Rob will be working on. What a busy guy!
Since it’s the 31st let’s do one last nudge on who patrons can vote on and who we might feature in the next podcast. They are;
On the blog this week you may have noticed Bronwen writing up the flop that The Crow has become. A few podcasts back I said, “hey, give it a chance”, so I put my time where my mouth was, went and wrote up my own Crow review. Here’s the summary; I wasn’t impressed.
What looks better, but much harder to actually see, is the Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. Bronwen spotted this, and as the name makes clear, it’s all about the former Superman actor Christopher Reeve.
There’s even a cameo from James Gunn, the man behind the upcoming reboot. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is more challenging to see as it’s only getting a limited cinema release, and then it might go to Max, which does not have much of a presence outside the US.
A trailer I noticed is for The War of the Rohirrim, which will be an anime feature-length due out for Christmas.
It’s directed by Kenji Kamiyama, who did Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, co-directed Blade Runner: Black Lotus and, obscure fact, did the backgrounds for the original DuckTales.
This is a Lord of the Rings anime, and I am happy to return to Middle-Earth, but I also went off on a bit of a thoughtful rant on how this story-perhaps-only a mention from Appendix A about a failed marriage proposal triggering a war changes focus. Tolkien never bothered to even give the woman a name. The trailer seems to make her a main character. Good. I’m sure we’ll see lots of Wulf and Hammerhand, but we can’t have Miranda Otto return, as she’s expected to do, with a sausage fest of a plot.
Another anime but this time also fashion story on the blog this week is the Crunchyroll and Bershka collab. The latter is a Japanese fashion brand.
Together they’re doing a Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End range for women and a Chainsaw Man fashion collection for, you guessed it, men.
I don’t know why gendering of clothes is so strict, but it seems to be common in Japan. Surely a man could have the Frieren phone case, and a woman could have the Pochita sling bag?
The man/woman fashion divide is so strong that once the site thinks it knows what your preference is the homepage adapts. You can override, but that’s a weird
Rolling with weird and interesting decisions did you notice Geek Native’s D&D potato story?
It’s a true one, and the potato won an award, albeit a silver, not a gold medal.
Lays, the chips brand, which is the same as the Walkers crisps brand in the UK, teamed up with Wizards of the Coast for the D&D movie. The result was a D&D character potato in a chest and D&D-branded chips. What award did it win? It was a packaging one. But hey, packaging is important.
Notice how I put the D&D potato ahead of Sigil too. Did you watch D&D Direct, where we found out about some plans for the tabletop RPG?
One of the updates was for Sigil, the name currently associated with the Unreal Engine-powered virtual tabletop that Wizards of the Coast is working on. It’s more like a traditional computer game than the current market leaders. If you have a D&D Beyond account, and you can get those for free, then you can play with the Sigil beta right now.
As usual, links are in the transcript accessed via the show notes.
The RPG news isn’t all D&D potatos and virtual tabletops, though. I also got to talk to Rick Hershey about Kids in the Attic Games.
Rick and Lucus Palosaari set up Fat Goblin Games, started off selling content for D&D and Pathfinder and started to drift away from those big titles and towards indie RPGs over time. Ultimately, with Fat Goblin Games known for one thing but the team wanting to do another, they’ve recently sold the company. Kids in the Attic will soon launch a folk horror RPG about Sleepy Hollow.
Okay, before we get to the outro there’s some interesting bundle deals and freebies to tell you about.
Firstly, there’s a Dying Earth offer from the Bundle of Holding. That’s a series by Jack Vance the author responsible for a view on how wizards manage their spells that’s used by RPGs to this day. This particular offer is for the Goodman Games and Dungeon Crawl Classics version of the Dying Earth.
There’s also one for the occult-fantasy-history mashup Historica Arcanum from Metis Creative, a Turkish publisher about to launch a new Kickstarter.
Also, through the Bundle of Holding, you can get for no money at all Phones of Glory. This freebie is intended to persuade people to get out and vote in the United States of America election.
Time is running out on the Humble and Modphius Star Trek Adventures deal, but Bronwen has written it up with nearly a week left to go.
The Humble I picked a fight with was the Lost Works of Gygax. I’m being pedantic because I argue that titles like Gord the Rogue are not lost, and nor are they making their debut, as claimed, in the bundle. They’re available in digital for the first time.
The freebies I found for you this week are 9th Level Games’ Free RPG Day offering of a quickstart to Return to Dark Tower and the internet creepypasta inspired SCP The Tabletop RPG which has a second edition.
The last bit of news is that the Audio EXP podcast is now available on YouTube. Google has killed off Google Podcasts but if I’ve wrestled the tech gremlins correctly then the RSS feed is successfully connected to the replacement feature on YouTube.
Not to be mysterious either, and I normally tell you when the next week has a gaming convention conflict, this week I’m not sure. Tabletop Scotland is on, but it’s on at the very edge of this city, and even if I get home at midnight or 1am, I could still do a podcast. Maybe there will be an Audio EXP, maybe there won’t be or maybe it’ll just be late.
On that note, keep safe, and maybe see you next week.
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