Posts Tagged ‘History Hut’

Episode 33: Bring Your Own Goat

April 5th, 2013 | Robin

We kick off with another Travel Advisory, this one centered on Ken’s quest to Las Vegas and the Gama Trade Show, to prise from it premonitions of the new hotness.

Then History Hut takes a turn for the glandular as we examine the careers of quack testicular transplanter John R. Brinkley and perfectly respectable testicular transplanter Dr. G. Frank Lydston. Guess which one installed bits of dead prisoners between his skin and his ribcage. For more, see Pope Brock’s splendid Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam.

Ask Ken and Robin fields a query from listener DVanZandt. How do you avoid the minefields of player disbelief when running a game in the real world?

With a tip of the mitre to the newly elected Francis I, we enter the Conspiracy Corner to look at the role of the Jesuits in conspiracy lore.

Episode 31: Love, Gerald Ford

March 22nd, 2013 | Robin

In the Gaming Hut, we consider the soul of the orc. How do you present this classic fantasy trope without letting in the toxin of real world racism?

History Hut returns to crime in Chicago for a consideration of its gangland, then and now.

In Ask Ken and Robin, Robin is asked to further expound on a Thing He Always Says, the nature of the iconic character.

Finally we activate Ken’s Time Machine in a chrono-traveling effort to prevent the pardon of Richard M. Nixon.

Update: We’ve re-uploaded the file. Apologies to those inconvenienced by the earlier file error.

Episode 25: Finally, the Woodrow Wilson Throwdown

February 8th, 2013 | Robin

In the Gaming Hut, we mull the economics of game design. Will the Kickstarter wave usher in a new era of component-driven play?

Then it’s off to the History Hut for Ken’s long-anticipated final showdown with the historical legacy of Woodrow Wilson. Was he really America’s worst president?

In Ask Ken and Robin, we are asked the most basic question of our craft: why do people game?

Finally the Consulting Occultist considers the silver-shirted biography of American screenwriter, vision-haver and fascist William Dudley Pelley.

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.

Episode 6: The Mystic Power of Indexing

September 14th, 2012 | Robin

This week’s stuff-talking kicks off with another Among My Many Hats. Here Robin unravels the circuitous design history of  his Dying Earth Revivification Folio, as Ken orders his sandestin to provide him with perks and snails.

In Ask Ken and Robin, we ponder cases in which D&D fights are better off without a battle grid.

Then we journey to the History Hut to consider Neil Armstrong and the passing of the space age.

Finally we call upon Ken in his capacity as Consulting Occultist to introduce us to H. P. Blavatsky and the Theosophists.