Episode 1: Vampires are A-holes
August 3rd, 2012 | Robin
Welcome to the inaugural episode of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, the new podcast from game designers and authors Kenneth Hite and Robin D. Laws. Join our thrilling audio adventure as we discuss games, movies, history, narrative and sundry concerns of the geekosphere.
Here’s what we talk about this week:
In our Among Our Many Hats segment, we talk about Ken’s new roleplaying game Night’s Black Agents, in which the spy thriller goes vampire, with logistics supplied by the GUMSHOE system.
In Travel Advisory, Robin recounts his recent trip to the Continuum convention in Leicester, England, where he performs a health-check on the hobby and marvels over future Glorantha mapping plans from Moon Design, publishers of HeroQuest and now RuneQuest. Along the way we detour to London’s John Soane Museum, an enduring monument to one man’s acquisitiveness.
Our Ask Ken and Robin segment tackles a question from Robert Scott Martin on the role of the GM in contemporary game design.
To round out the episode, Ken dons the mantle of Consulting Occultist to give us the 101 on The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, with a cast of characters including William Butler Yeats, Bram Stoker, and Aleister Crowley.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
An Epistle of Admiration:
Just got done listening to it- really excellent and fun. I laughed out loud several times.
Thoughts:
*The musical breaks are awesome and dramatic.
*Ken’s run through of Night’s Black Agents got me thinking about forms and how one might do a “Rotshreck Notice” game if you wanted to have a easy entry version for new players.
*I really enjoyed the switch back and forth of the Q&A and the tightly focused segments.
*Someone needs to do something on “Getting to Act IV Without Killing Your PCs.”
*”The Pure Stuff”…
*So if the Golden Dawn were essentially a bunch of LARPers, then the various memoirs would represent AP posts from a freeform?
Great podcast-looking forward to more.
Please make the podcast available via iTunes.
Working on it!
Nice podcast guys. Ken, you sound like you are in the sitting room chatting to Robin in the echoy bathroom!
Looking forward to the next one.
We agree that the sound on my end is less than optimal and are working on fixing that.
Oh dear Lord, that mapping project is awesome, isn’t it. My mouth dropped at the level of detail, and the potential for a 3d realisation from the map is so exciting.
You will be able to see that that mountain range over there really is a sleeping dragon!
Thanks for a great Podcast. Insightful and entertaining. My favourite quote: “… he certainly — like Adolf — knows a good logo when he sees one.”
Loved it. This is one of my new favorite podcasts. Hopefully this will be a regular thing.
Will you be adding this podcast to iTunes? It’s much more convenient for me, since I listen to podcasts in the car.
This is a GOOOOOD day for RPG podcasting, I enjoyed this immensely (despite less than perfect sound quality) I thoroughly look forward to many more episodes. Well done gentlemen, well done.
Is there an rss fed for the podcast itself? I see one mentioned for comments on individual episodes, but how to subscribe to the main thing?
As mentioned above, this is in the works.
Just listened, quite good, had some laughs too. I thought Gurps Cabal was esoterism for gamers book but it is described as a cabal of supernatural creatures to protect themselves. I remember reading a book for Gurps, Authentic Thaumaturgy, and found it quite interesting and tought Gurps Cabal would be similar.