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Episode 406: The Mystical Land of Hat

July 31st, 2020 | Robin

Beloved Patreon backer Manfred convenes us in a camouflage-covered Gaming Hut to ask how to run Fall of Delta Green agents through the Vietnam War. Complicating factor: his players are ex-military; Manfred is not.

Esteemed Patreon backer Dan O’Hanlon unfurls the Crime Blotter for a briefing on Toronto’s tow truck wars.

In How to Write Good, we wonder which words are too laden with earthbound cultural reference to use in texts concerning other worlds.

Finally astute Patreon backer Rolfe Bergstrom attaches a telescope to the Eliptony Hut so we can look at that most anomalous of asteroids, ‘Oumuamua.

Want to pose a question to the show? Get your priority question asking access with your support for the KARTAS Patreon!

Snag Ken and Robin merchandise at TeePublic.


You know your dance crew is the hottest around… but now it’s time to prove it. Breakdancing Meeples is a real-time dexterity game of, you guessed it, breakdancing meeples, designed by Ben Moy and published by Atlas Games. Two to four people, ages six and up, compete for dancefloor glory, in five exciting minutes.

You’ve heard him talk about it. Now you can get it at retail or in the Pelgrane Press store: The Yellow King Roleplaying Game. Shatter your world with this eerie, physically imposing GUMSHOE game of decadent art and multiple existences. For a limited time only, enter the voucher code YELLOW at the Pelgrane shop to get 15% off all Yellow King items when you combine the core set with Absinthe in Carcosa and/or The Missing and the Lost.

The treasures of Askfageln can be found at DriveThruRPG. Get all issues of FENIX since 2013 available in special English editions. Score metric oodles of Ken Hite gaming goodness, along with equally stellar pieces by Graeme Davis and Pete Nash. Warning: in English, not in Swedish. In English, not Swedish. While you’re at it, grab DICE and Freeway Warrior!

Suit up, agents of Delta Green. Your battle to save humanity from unnatural horrors is going beyond the Beltway. Delta Green: The Labyrinth is now shipping to a secure dead drop near you. Written by Delta Green co-creator John Scott Tynes, this all-new collection of organizations dives deep into the fissures of America in the new millennium.

2 Responses to “Episode 406: The Mystical Land of Hat”

  1. Tim Emrick says:

    Another case of modern English vocabulary that seems out of place in a period game: I have been running a solo Greek myth game for my wife using BESM for many years. Her character has become involved in the Trojan War, and had an epic showdown with Achilles. BESM has an Achilles’ Heel defect, but I decided that not only did it sound weird putting that phrase on his stat block (even if I was the only one who would ever see it), it also didn’t model his almost-total invulnerability as well as I liked.

  2. The more you know the harder it is to maintain suspension of disbelief in created worlds.

    This is probably true in all fields but you can’t get any discussion going without words.

    And for me the hardest problem is the problem of names. I found myself falling out of a fantasy series I enjoyed greatly because in a world with a pagan pantheon there were people with names like Michael, Timothy or (Gawdelpus!) Christopher.

    And since we are not all Prof Tolkien or Prof M.A.R. Barker it’s a problem for role-playing games as well. The best solution I’ve seen is what Jonathan Tweet did with EVERWAY: give characters names that mean something. Fortitude Elephant*, Potbearer, Salamander, Flameskin. Since those words themselves have derivations it probably just pushes the problem back a step but at least I don’t have to make up a ConLang to run a simple game.

    * Fortitude Elephant is a scion of the rich, land-holding Elephant family. Unless she’s a scion of the poor but notably martial Fortitude family. I forget which.

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