Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for February 15th, and the episode title is “Recycling and dungeons”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #275]
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Dunderdagar won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month.
I’m just back from Capital Sci-Fi Con in Edinburgh. That’s two weekends of conventions in a row, and usually, there isn’t an Audio EXP podcast on a convention on a Saturday. So, I’m pleased to be sitting here with a gin and the chance to record this.
The RPG Publisher Spotlight with Jörgen Karlsson is live. Now I know that Dunderdagar translates to Days of Thunder.
We’ve lucked out on the interview as Jörgen is making the brave move to walk away from the day job to go all in on Dunderdagar. You can read the interview on Geek Native.
Also, this week, I got to talk to Jared Rascher who has also made a brave move. Jared has stepped out of the RPG reviews scene. He can’t do it according to the schedule he wants, and there’s pressure from publishers, so the sensible and mental health-wise move is to down tools.
Jared reassured me he is okay, but reading between the lines, it’s not a great time for many people in the USA right now.
It was Bertrand Russell who said,
The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
That’s not all; there is a third interview this week with ANVL’s new owner, Derek Kean.
Derek has big plans for the 3d mini-making site. If you don’t know how it works, you have an interface in which you design your character or NPC and then, if you want, get it 3d printed and sent to you. It’s so simple that I even managed it.
The tease from Derek is that maybe in the future, ANVL will support resin or metal models.
I was thinking of ANVL as I got a tour of Demiplane. Now part of Roll20, the digital toolset released the Cyberpunk RED character sheet builder.
It’s impressive. You can build your character through the Lifepath system, have it help a little with character builds or take control to place every building block yourself if you’re experienced with Interlok.
The character sheet tracks your humanity, ammo, contacts, and vehicles. In Cyberpunk RED, some characters could have customised fleets of vehicles and extensive networks of contacts so this is impressive.
The two came together in my head. Let me explain. With Demiplane, you can upload character art. But, imagine if it had an ANVL-like model builder in it. Those models could then be used as character portraits or VTT tokens. However, Demiplane could also let people 3d print their minis.
I think the two are sensible bedfellows, and I predict Roll20 would be open to making such a purchase.
As for Cyberpunk RED fans who now have an improved Nexus, there’s extra good news as the character sheet expansion includes Edgerunners: Mission Kit details, too. That’s a good but rather brutal Netflix anime.
Speaking of animations, Bronwen wrote up the 52nd Annie Awards.
The Wild Robot came out tops with eight awards, but the Netflix and League of Legends animated series Arcane won seven. Bronwen’s a fan. I cancelled my Netflix so I may never know how good it is.
The other awards of the week come from Snowbright Studio, who completed the second Nonbinary Tabletop Awards. There are three winners;
- CONVICT-ION: W.H. Arthur
- Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast: Jay Dragon & M Veselak
- Nectar: Kay Marlow Allen
I had a celebration of my own on the site this week, and for Valentine’s Day, I launched the abandoned ring dungeon emulator.
Let me explain the concept. You have two adventurers in love and exploring a dark dungeon together; one plans to propose to the other and offer up a magical onyx ring. Except, tragically, both die.
The emulator imagines what life would be like for the semi-aware magical ring left to sit for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years on the pile of bones that was once the two lovers.
All you have to do is follow the link to the blog in the show notes, find the emulator, press the “Begin the Ring’s Saga” button, and sit back. No two stories are the same.
Okay, it’s not super advanced, and you might even call it proof of concept, but I rather like the dark humour of the fragile grasp of reality the ring might have.
It’s a shame the engagement ring might go to waste, though. Atlas Games announced a lovely new program designed to cut back on waste, except it doesn’t deal with magical onyx but with plastic sprues.
The company will collect recycled sprues from retailers in the Twin City area and accept mail from further afield. The plastic is used in their Replay Workshop accessories line.
In mainstream media news is another recycling story. Paramount+ passed on the D&D TV, but reports are in that The Forgotten Realms has been picked up by Netflix. Did I say I had cancelled my account? I did and I have. Let’s see if my willpower holds out.
I’ve one more bit of TTRPG news for you before we get into our outro of three bundle deals.
Evil Hat Publications are playtesting Blades’ 68, and you can get the quickstart from DriveThruRPG for free.
This is an official Blades in the Dark supplement and is set 100 years after the main setting.
The first of our three bundles is Queer Love, which urges supporters to burn injustice in a call to arms and is available on DriveThruRPG.
In the Bundle of Holding and from Triple Ace Games, there’s some steampunk action with a League of Adventures deal.
Lastly, and with limited supplies of hardcovers available, on Humble, there’s Pathfinder Kingmaker bundle.
On that note, keep safe, support your local geeky conventions and see you next week.
