Posts Tagged ‘Food Hut’

Episode 38: Driving Bananas Around

May 10th, 2013 | Robin

We start with a visit to the Gaming Hut to discuss the play utility of illustrations.

In the Food Hut we explore the legends and lore of packaged goods, including the secret origins of Cool Whip, the Twinkie, and Gatorade.

Conrad Kinch Asks Ken and Robin how one guides a playtester to greatness. Michael Cule adds a supplemental: have we ever regretted not implementing a piece of playtester advice?

Finally, Ken’s Time Machine takes us to the intractable yet little mythologized tragedy that was the Trail of Tears.

Episode 28: Possibly an Anagnorisis

March 1st, 2013 | Robin

That Vitamin D sheen you see on Ken’s glossy coat shows that he recently escaped Chicago’s frigid embrace for the sunshine of California’s Bay Area, necessitating another Travel Advisory as we review his trip to Dundracon.

An unusual clatter of gunfire punctuates activities at the Food Hut, as we parse press reports of connections between Europe’s horsemeat scandal and the shadow financial empire of Russia’s most notorious arms dealer.

Andrew Brehaut prompts this week’s Ask Ken and Robin with a question on  structure in game and scenario design.

Then we flash back to San Francisco for an elegiac installment of Ken’s Bookshelf, in which our intrepid traveler hauls home the fruits of his last epic plundering of that legendary occult bookshop, which is soon to migrate to the etheric spheres in an online-only capacity. Follow along at home with his list of books mentioned.

Episode 18: Conspiracy To Commit Ophthalmology

November 28th, 2012 | Robin

This week’s episode  commences with a trip to the Gaming Hut to consider Robin’s dichotomy of rewards versus incentives, which segues into a discussion of the co-designer syndrome in playtest feedback.

Ask Ken and Robin fields a question from Brett Evill on how one might bend history to add Ruritania-style postage stamp states back to the map of Europe.

We swap the key cooking tips we’d wished our time traveling present selves had told our neophyte incarnations as the Food Hut tackles minimaxing in the kitchen.

Then a recent report on the decoding of the Copiale Codex sends us to Conspiracy Corner to consider the history of secret societies through the obscured lenses of the Great Enlightened Society of Oculists.

Episode 13: That Time We Burned Down the White House

November 2nd, 2012 | Robin

This week’s Ask Ken and Robin asks us to turn a previous thing that Ken always says on its head. When is it better not to base your setting on the real world?

Then Robin and Ken square off in the History Hut for their long-planned reenactment of the War of 1812. As in real history, the Canadian battles the American to a standstill and therefore achieves resounding victory, as graded on a curve.

At the request of beloved sponsor Dork Tower, Ken and Robin then establish yet another new hut, this time the Food Hut, in which a discussion of our favorite recipes and shopping haunts leads us to a sense of place, waves of immigration to Toronto, and the death of the Chicago meat packing industry.

Finally we drop in again on the Consulting Occultist for an introduction to Kenneth Grant, whose role as Derleth to Aleister Crowley’s Lovecraft went as far as incorporating Shub-Niggurath into his ritual practices.