Episode 186: You Need Canapes To Have a Secret Society
April 15th, 2016 | Robin
Ask Ken and Robin gets especially educational as Patreon supporter Brent Brown asks us for tips for using RPGs to teach history, home school style.
Tradecraft Hut peers into the espionage scene in Brussels.
How To Write Good looks at influences and how to incorporate them well.
Finally the Consulting Occultist slakes the hankering of Patreon backer Stewart Robertson for info on the Black Dragon Society.
Bend reality to your will, but be ready to pay the price, as Atlas Games’ Unknown Armies bubbles up from the supernatural underground for a weird and majestic new Kickstarter campaign.
Ken fans who did not partake of the Kickstarter can now sink their fangs into the general release of the Dracula Dossier from Pelgrane Press, consisting of the Director’s Handbook and Dracula Unredacted. 
If you’re like every roleplayer we know, you strive to outshine others in showing your love of dice. Well, now you can arouse the envy of friends and foes alike with Askfageln’s dazzling coffee table photo art book dedicated to all things pipped and many-sided, Dice: Rendezvous with Randomness. Luxuriate in the photo artistry of Mans Danneman. Grab the book or gorgeous prints through their Kickstarter! 
When you assemble your bug-out kit, make sure it includes a copy of Delta Green: Need to Know, the everything-you-need quickstart kick for the classic game of covert agents against the Cthulhu mythos, from our fine friends at Arc Dream Publishing.
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For the educator — look at the Magic Tree House series and Hockensmith’s Smithsonian Secrets for a couple of models for how to structure a series of time-travelling investigating kids. Fate Accelerated (FAE) is a fast, easy system. GURPS certainly has tons of material to use — note that much of it is for 3rd Edition, so one might want to look at G3 Lite, rather than the current GURPS Lite for minor rules differences.
I think a Gumshoe variant of “Where in Time is Carmen SanDiego” would be a fantastic way to do history lessons for kids.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’s idea of meeting figures through history to do a presenatation on them could be fun.
Brussels is not the capital of the EU. It’s not that kind of place.
Boy, what a great Ask Ken and Robin question! I especially like the concept of having one person play a historical figure while the rest play time travelers.
Maybe the campaign conceit could be the “Time Inc. Advance Research Team”, which explores various time periods in order to recommend things for the advanced agents to change.
I don’t know enough about GURPS to judge that system recommendation, but I would think that either FATE Accelerated or a stripped down version of GUMSHOE would be good lightweight systems to use.
Alas, many of us homeschoolers who grew up in the 80’s and early 90’s had to wait to discover the educational joys of role playing until later on, thanks to the pernicious influence of Jack Chick and company. If only someone could travel back in time and change that particular bit of history…
I can’t help but feel a little silly for my assumptions about the Black Dragon and Black Ocean, but hey, the non kooky-occult truth of the matter is all the more interesting.
And I look forward to throwing that same red herring at some players. When an NPC murmurs darkly that a local gambling den is a front for the Black Ocean Society, I’m sure PC getting-into-trouble senses will start tingling.