Episode 104: Stabby Detective Stories
August 29th, 2014 | Robin
It’s Gen Con, Gen Con and more Gen Con as we issue our usual bumper Travel Advisory in the wake of the big show. Robin comes home wreathed in Hillfolk glory, Ken and Robin snag gold, Ken makes the flipper motions of supreme pleasure in the presence of Greg Stafford, and we limn unmistakable evidence of the Roleplaying Golden Age. All that and a slightly bleary much, much more.
Lead sponsor Atlas Games announces a project near and dear to Robin’s heart, not to mention a good chunk of his year so far. It fires off warning shots concerning the upcoming Kickstarter for Feng Shui 2! Click the link to be notified when the campaign goes live.
Stone Skin Press has a deal for you. Until September 1st, all hardcopy purchases of Robin’s action-driven Mythos fiction anthology Shotguns v. Cthulhu come not only with the expected free electronic edition of that book, but also an ebook of Schemers, Robin’s anthology of betrayal and conspiracy. Just buy it at the Pelgrane Press store, as you normally would, no special links or offer codes required.
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Congratulations! 🙂
I’ve got a question for the writers hut: Is roleplaying good or bad for your fiction writing? One the hand you learn something about drama and characters but on the other hand you see your fantasies on the gamingtable and not in your writing.
Cheers
Daniel Neugebauer
In thinking about the rpg renaissance, is there any indication that returning players from the boom era(s) are a significant factor? I’m running an original D&D game for the first time in years with old players and their kids, and I’m in a classic Traveller game that spun off from a historical miniatures club. (Also a Fate game online; I’m not entirely wedded to the past…)
An Ask Ken and Robin question –
As someone who’s only been to small (hundreds of attendees) local conventions, but has an urge to try one of the bigger (US) conventions, Gencon has always been the target. However, your observation that it’s annual growth is bigger than so many other cons makes me think that I should aim for something less ambitious. Do you have suggestions for more midsize conventions that can be fully (or almost) fully experiences without the benefit of Ken’s Time Machine?
I actually had good food luck if I just got out of the inner core. Had three good meals at Rook, Black Market, and Bluebeard. I think all of them were under 2 miles from the convention center.
Loved the GenCon recap – it was an insiders loving conversation of the biggest annual gaming Con in the world at possibly the height of the current gaming golden age.
Minor nitpick- your mp3s don’t have their tags all in order. Specifically no ‘album’ tag, which should be “Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff” (with the specific episode details (for instance KaRTAS #nnn) being the ‘song title’).
It comes up on my player as “Unknown Album” which has cost me incalculable anguish and harm and on occasion literally *seconds* of confusion and floundering. ‘Where’s Ken and Robin? I see the Miskatonic University ones and some mysterious ‘Unknown Album’, but no Ken and Robin…’
And, while we’re on the topic, would you do a segment on some of YOUR favorite podcasts? What do you listen to?
Oh, and where’s the Marie Antoinette segment you promised us a while ago?
While we’re nitpicking: could I trouble you gentlemen to fix a noun-verb agreement thing in the intro?
Specifically, “stuff we’re here to talk about in this episode include”, rather than “…includes”?
Yours etc.
Vernacular speech treats “stuff” as plural.
My shoes stink.
My shoe stinks.
My stuff stinks.
*My stuff stink.
While I would certainly not say that there exists no idiolect in which “stuff” is treated as plural, I will say that I would not allow plural “stuff” in anything I edit.
(FWIW, I suspect the problem in your intro lies in the complexity of the sentence, with an intervening “Ken and Robin” that confuses the issue of number. But in that sentence, “stuff” should take “includes”.)
Just wanted to say that I am a “roleplayer inexplicably tuning into the podcast for the first time” so I appreciate the breakdown of Feng Shui 2 (which is the reason I discovered this podcast).
Loved the discussion of where the hobby is right now. Congrats to you guys and the larger Pelgrane Press team on many deserved awards.
Hi! I’m working my way through the archives and discovered that this one is “forbidden,” or at least that’s what my pod app tells me. 103 and 105 both work fine (as have the many other fine KARTAS episodes I’ve enjoyed over the years, thanks). Did this one say too much? Are the above comments the work of crisis actors? How far am I willing to go to track down this mysterious episode, and what will I find at my journey’s end?