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Episode 679: His Frequency is Powerful
December 12th, 2025 | Robin
Beloved Patreon backer Ben A. takes the Gaming Hut to New York’s Chinatown in 1973 for tips on a game that mixes triads with the Bruce Lee legacy.
Estimable backer Philip Masters gains access to the Tradecraft Hut for an account of a recently busted spy ring run by previous subject Jan Marsalek.
How to Write Good provides tips on cutting an rpg submission when you’ve run over the assigned word count.
Finally the Consulting Occultist fills us in on Douglas MacArthur’s role in Korean shamanism.
Want to pose a question to the show? Get your priority question asking access with your support for the KARTAS Patreon!
Our Patreon-backed Letterboxd list of all films mentioned on the show is now up and running.
Also check out the Goodreads list of books mentioned on the show.
Snag Ken and Robin merchandise at TeePublic.
The official CatStronauts board game features cooperative play that’s only 30-45 minutes long, for 1-4 players ages 10+. Designed and illustrated by CatStronauts comic book creator Drew Brockington and available now from Atlas Games!
Make room on your shelf and in your heart for Page Turners, Robin’s game of dramatic interaction for one player and one GM, coming soon from Pelgrane Press. Explore the intensity of emotional storytelling driven by a single protagonist with scenarios ranging from Shakespearean comedy to tragic vampire love, written by Robin, Sarah “Sam” Saltiel, Ruth Tillman and Wade Rockett.
Get caught in the spiral with God’s Teeth, a new set of pulse-pounding Delta Green scenarios dripping with the once and future corruption of a nation swirling into cruelty and spite. From a government panopticon to alien worms to an app-driven mass shooter, your agents have nothing to fear but every screaming headline.
Play spies, skirmishers, and saboteurs in the battle for the future of the Thirteen Colonies in Flagbearer Games’ thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated 5E compatible roleplaying game Nations and Cannons. Jump into the early actions of the war with the new campaign guide The American Crisis, available as a PDF or for print pre-order. For a limited time use promo code CANNON at checkout for 17.75% percent off and free PDFs of your books.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: New Tim Powers, The Dirty Dozen with Samurai, and the Quest for Kim
December 9th, 2025 | Robin
Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.
Recommended
11 Rebels (Film, Japan, Kazuya Shiraishi, 2024) Condemned prisoners accept an offer of reprieve to defend a fort long enough for a double-dealing clan to play both sides of the Boshin War. Ensemble cast samurai war film combines classical storytelling with contemporary gore effects.—RDL
Juliet, Naked (Film, US, Jesse Peretz, 2018) Quietly discontented museum curator (Rose Byrne) stumbles into an online epistolary relationship with the obscure retired indie rocker (Ethan Hawke) her lunkhead professor partner (Chris O’Dowd) obsessively idolizes. Hawke reminds us what a brilliant naturalistic actor he is in this winning Nick Hornby adaptation.—RDL
The Mills of the Gods (Fiction, Tim Powers, 2025) In 1925 Paris, American expat artist Harry Nolan gets embroiled with Vivi Chastain, the victim of a Moloch-worshipping body-jumping cult. The narrative ramps up almost too abruptly, and unusually for Powers from only one perspective, with his famous supporting cast (Hemingway, Stein, Picasso) less finely drawn. But the occult doings remain scary and cool, even if this installment reads more as alongside history than within it.—KH
Mountain Onion (Film, Kazakhstan, Eldar Shibanov, 2022) With his mom about to leave his dad for dragging them to the countryside on a disastrous back-to-nature impulse, an intense preteen (Esil Amantay) enlists his unflappable younger sister (Amina Gaziyeva) on a quest to save their marriage by acquiring a box of knock-off Viagra. Refreshes the portrait of rural life genre with bright colors, a comic outlook, and a winning narrative throughline.—RDL
Quest For Kim: In Search of Kipling’s Great Game (Nonfiction, Peter Hopkirk, 1996) Great Game historian Hopkirk follows the path of Kim and proposes specific models for the main characters in Kipling’s Pinnacle spy novel. Reading Kim put Hopkirk on the trail of the Great Game in the first place, and the combination of love and knowledge in this book makes it an irresistible and rapid read.—KH
Good
Ready or Not (Film, US, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, 2019) Orphan Grace (Samara Weaving) has finally found a family when she marries Alex le Domas (Mark O’Brien), estranged scion of a wealthy games publishing dynasty. As the words “wealthy games publishers” should warn us, they’re in league with Satan, and the resulting bloody game of Hide and Seek provides all the thrills and most of the interest in the film. Watched as a live-action cartoon, it’s fun while it lasts; Weaving isn’t given enough to hang a character on, so that’s all it really can be.—KH
Okay
Nobody 2 (Film, US, Timo Tjahjanto, 2025) Government assassin/wage slave Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) takes his family (Connie Nielsen, et al.) on vacation to his only good childhood memory, a Wisconsin water park, which turns out to be a front for a murderous smuggling ring led by Lendina (Sharon Stone). The first film worked when it did by contrasting its state-of-the-art violence with a relatively mundane life background embodied by Odenkirk’s schlub character. This one deliberately plunges into a cartoon world almost from the jump, stepping on its few good setups, and even Tjahjanto’s gore-loving camera can’t force much more than the occasional chuckle.—KH
Not Recommended
A Perfect Couple (Film, US, Robert Altman, 1979) A doormat at home but pushy on dates, an eccentric schlub (Paul Dooley) pursues a wan pop singer (Marta Heflin.) With its bizarre gap between the response to the characters it expects from the audience and how it portrays them, and interminable stretches of screen time devoted to an unbearable, untethered-in-time, Broadway-infused MOR band, this might be the weirdest movie Altman ever made. And he made Popeye.—RDL
Episode 678: A Word for All the Chairs
December 5th, 2025 | Robin
In the Gaming Hut we look at a core part of the rpg designer’s skill set, table sense, or the ability to predict what players will do with your material.
The Mythology Hut tells the story of a historical figure reputed to turn invisible, Qin Dynasty consort Zhongli Chun.
The Word Hut hosts a game of Jonson, Marlowe, or Shakespeare, in which Ken must guess which Elizabethan playwright claims the first attested use of various common words.
Finally Ken’s Time Machine answers the question: which of Morton the Regent’s murders would, if prevented, exert the greatest change on the timeline?
Want to pose a question to the show? Get your priority question asking access with your support for the KARTAS Patreon!
Our Patreon-backed Letterboxd list of all films mentioned on the show is now up and running.
Also check out the Goodreads list of books mentioned on the show.
Snag Ken and Robin merchandise at TeePublic.
The official CatStronauts board game features cooperative play that’s only 30-45 minutes long, for 1-4 players ages 10+. Designed and illustrated by CatStronauts comic book creator Drew Brockington and available now from Atlas Games!
Make room on your shelf and in your heart for Page Turners, Robin’s game of dramatic interaction for one player and one GM, coming soon from Pelgrane Press. Explore the intensity of emotional storytelling driven by a single protagonist with scenarios ranging from Shakespearean comedy to tragic vampire love, written by Robin, Sarah “Sam” Saltiel, Ruth Tillman and Wade Rockett.
Get caught in the spiral with God’s Teeth, a new set of pulse-pounding Delta Green scenarios dripping with the once and future corruption of a nation swirling into cruelty and spite. From a government panopticon to alien worms to an app-driven mass shooter, your agents have nothing to fear but every screaming headline.
Play spies, skirmishers, and saboteurs in the battle for the future of the Thirteen Colonies in Flagbearer Games’ thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated 5E compatible roleplaying game Nations and Cannons. Jump into the early actions of the war with the new campaign guide The American Crisis, available as a PDF or for print pre-order. For a limited time use promo code CANNON at checkout for 17.75% percent off and free PDFs of your books.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Ken and Robin Consume Media: Fantastic 4, The Ax, and a Cozy House Explosion
December 2nd, 2025 | Robin
Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.
Recommended
The Ax (Fiction, Donald E. Westlake, 1997) Laid off from a middle management job at a paper company, Burke Devore decides to end his two-year stretch (with no end in sight) of unemployment by killing a middle manager at a paper company, along with the six people with better resumes for that job than his. One of Westlake’s most successful straight psychological thrillers touches Raskolnikovian depths with an uncanny first-person voice, along with Westlake’s untouchable skill at plotting.—KH
Christmas Pudding (Fiction, Nancy Mitford, 1932) To gain access to the journals of a Victorian poet he intends to write about, an indolent writer conspires with a raffish young friend, his subject’s grandson, to pose as his tutor over the holidays . Hilarious, knowing dissection of gentry folkways.—RDL
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Film, Japan, Nagisa Oshima, 1969) Standoffish book shoplifter (Tadanori Yokoo) and angry store clerk (Rie Yokoyama) circle one another in an ambivalent quasi-relationship. Brechtian essay film made in collaboration with an experimental theater company wrestles with sexuality as a force that surfaces from the id to attack the certainties of male intellectuals.—RDL
The Fantastic 4: First Steps (Film, US, Matt Shakman, 2025) Ex-astronaut couple (Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby), her brother (Joseph Quinn) and their best friend (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) use their superpowers to save her unborn child, and the world, from the planet-eating giant alien Galactus (Ralph Ineson.) An (almost) self-contained story and sure sense for the right tonal notes give third-time’s-the-charm status to the MCU version of the foundational comic books.—RDL
Ikarie XB 1 (Film, Czechoslovakia, Jindrich Polák, 1963) The crew of an interstellar exploration ship endures the deadly rigors of space travel. Humanistic depiction of a community under pressure tells a story without antagonists.—RDL
Sky High (Fiction, Michael Gilbert, 1955) When Major MacMorris is blown up with his house, Mrs. Artside has lost a tenor for her church choir but gains a mystery to unravel. Gilbert has fun with the “cozy village” mystery in this one, distributing the investigations between Mrs. Artside, her ex-commando son Tim, and eventually Inspector Hazlerigg. Not especially difficult as a whodunit, a bit of a howdunit, but mostly a chance to follow Gilbert through his felicity with small dramas.—KH
Good
The Tender Bar (Film, US, George Clooney, 2021) Abandoned by his deadbeat disk jockey dad (Max Martini), a thoughtful (Daniel Ranieri) kid grows into a Yale student with literary aspirations (Tye Sheridan) under the substitute tutelage of his autodidact bartender uncle (Ben Affleck.) Affectionate character portraits take center stage in an adaptation of a memoir without a strong narrative line.—RDL
Vera Cruz (Film, US, Robert Aldrich, 1954) Ex-Confederate colonel Ben Trane (Gary Cooper) teams up with outlaw gunman Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster) and they sell their services to Emperor Maximilian, who commissions them to escort the Countess Marie (Denise Darcel) to Vera Cruz through the Juarista rebel forces. Intermittently gorgeous shots by Ernest Laszlo and plenty of gunplay and betrayal punctuate a proto-spaghetti Western in which not even Gary Cooper is immune to greed and situational ethics. The timing and rhythm of the film seem off (too many rewrites and too many cuts), and Burt Lancaster’s endless mugging gets a tad old as even Lanc later admitted: "There I was, acting my ass off. I looked like an idiot, and Coop was absolutely marvelous."—KH
Okay
Topaz (Film, US, Alfred Hitchcock, 1969) In the days preceding the Cuban missile crisis, a French intelligence officer (Frederick Stafford) sidesteps his own bosses to freelance an operation for his US counterpart (John Forsythe.) Although it’s interesting to see Hitch tackle a more topical and realistic spy story than usual, and to see him working with French stars Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret, the multi-protagonist Leon Uris source novel leaves him mostly serving its complicated plot.—RDL
