Gaming Podcasts

I am going to do a series of reviews of gaming podcasts for Roleplaying Games, Miniatures, Card and Boardgames, the card games will not be the games played with a standard deck of cards instead being ones where the cards are specific to the game. I'm also ignoring gaming podcasts for console and computer games as this isn't a real area of interest to me.


I've listened to a lot of different podcasts lately, some where I have tried to get all the available material, others where I have only tried a limited range of the podcasts produced.

The views on the podcasts will be purely my own and reflect my own idiosincracies and tastes. However comments are welcomed.

A list of the podcasts I have listened to at time of writing is (in no particular order):

• Yog-Radio
  
• Meeples & Miniatures
  
• All about miniatures
  
• Pulp Gamer
  
• The Solo Wargaming Show
  
• Yog-Sothoth.com: Horror on the Orient Express
  
• Boardgames To Go
  
• The Dice Tower
  

There are plenty more that I will sample for the purposes of making this more comprehensive as a survey, more of that later and suggestions from readers are welcome.

Review No 1: Yog Radio
Yog Radio is a Cthulhu podcast or cephalopodcast that is quite well established having started in 2005 and reached 27 regular podcasts at the time of writing. It has three regular presenters which is a feature I prefer to the single presenter shows. The regular presenters Paul of Cthulhu (Paul MacLean), Fin Patterson and Neil Young clearly know each other well from gaming and it means that there is a good interplay between them. The website that this podcast comes from, Yog-Sothoth.com, is a well established Call of Cthulhu fan website that contains a lot of useful material for players of CoC or other horror RPG. Both the podcast and webite have been nominated for and won Ennies awards, which shows that they have met high standards.

Oh dear*

Yog Radio is a pretty regular podcast with the main podcast apppearing monthly, this is supplemented by a variety of different additional podcasts. The other podcasts include recorded gaming sessions, Horror on the Orient Express (which I will review later) and Masks of Nyarlathotep; readings of stories and recordings from conventions. I will do a separate review of the other podcasts soon. The usual length is around 1 and a half hours though it does vary with some episode exceeding two hours. Personally my preference is for a length of around 1 hour to 1 hour fifteen minutes, but with some of the content it is possible to lose track of time, particularly the interviews.

Moving swiftly on....*

The content includes regular news, the R'lyeth Report; feedback from email and audio; frequently interviews and smaller podcasts from other contributors. The interviews are not only with people involved in producing Cthulhu related games, but also with relevant film directors and authors. There is some review of products,but this is not a major part of the content.

Probably my favourite part of the content has been the interviews as it is nice to hear the views of people that have designed games, written books or been involved in creating films about the creative process. The interviewees have included some well known authors, such as Brian Aldiss and from the gaming side: Sandy Petersen, Adam Scott Glancy and Marcus L Rowland.

The segments from other contributors tend to be aimed at Keepers and I think have been useful in covering ideas that can help a keeper improve their skills or use fresh ideas. The only downside is the can be a little variable in technical quality making the sound of the show a little uneven.

The technical quality is high on the recent podcasts, having been variable on the earliest episodes. This has been due to acquiring new and better equipment and greater knowledge among the team. This is particularly pronounced on the shows where surround sound has been used and listening on headphones I've been able to hear that particular voices are coming from one side.

My conclusion
This is one of my favourite gaming podcasts as I like the interplay between the regular presenters, mixture of content and the indepth nature of the interviews. I recommend this strongly.

*Those who have listened will know that these are pretty much Paul of Cthulu's catchphrases

New Year Rising

So 2008 has begun with a lot of foreboding economically, particularly with Oil now going through the $100 a barrel figure. This is adding to the ongoing Credit Crunch to produce a pretty risky situation. This has led to a lot of downward movements in the stock markets, but I'm now getting more optimistic than when I started writing this post at the start of January.

The reasons that I've got some cautious optimism is due to the impact on commodity prices of the slowing US economy and the fact that this will help rebalance things. For the UK the declining exchange rate will help to make the economy less dependent on capital inflows from other economies and hopefully boost exports. The housing bubble starting to deflate will be good as long as it doesn't actually pop. I think the first couple of quarters will be painful, but because of low rates of unemployment the pain will not last too long.

Creating Conan Characters part 1 rolling dice

Well I've decided to start with the Conan RPG published by Mongoose. As an OGL game it probably is not something that appeals to all gamers, but I like it and consider it to be a good version of the Hyborian age using the D20 rules concepts. Enough preamble, now to use the dice.

In Conan character generation race (human subrace) and class are not rolled for, but selected by the player thought the DM may choose to restrict options, e.g. not many Vendhyan characters in Aquilonia.

Standard
Six rolls of 4D6 discarding the lowest gave me 14, 11, 11, 14, 10, 12 not superb, but no negative modifiers.

Heroic method
I don't know how it happened, but the D10 I selected for this seemed to be rolling very high so I ended up with 18, 15, 11, 17, 15, 18 for six rolls.

Now to turn these into characters

Number 1
I decided to make this character using the standard method as an Argossean Pirate. In assigning the rolls to characteristics I thought that as this would be a lightly armoured character high Dex and Con would be good ideas. I assigned the rolls like this:
Str 12
Dex 14
Con 14
Int 11
Wis 10
Cha 11

Number 2
This one I decided to make a Stygian Scholar, as that is a combination that I haven't done so far for a character or NPC and it could be useful for my gaming. With the die rolls that I got for stats it would be easy to create an effective character for any class, and if a player had come to my table with these I would have been highly sceptical, but I saw the dice fall. This character was generated by the heroic method, but has ended up with much higher average statistics than the method would normally generate (15.6 as opposed to 13.5).
Str 15
Dex 11
Con 18
Int 18
Wis 17
Cha 15

To actually start fleshing these characters out I'll use separate posts for each one to avoid this becoming too much of an epic.

Geek books revisited

Now I've had some time to think about this topic - probably too much! I've actually got my picks and it's similar in some ways to the one that set me thinking about this, but with differences due to what I've read and obviously my perspective. Some authors are doubtless unjustly neglected by the simple fact that I've not read them, though I am trying to get more time to read fiction now and hopefully will be able to revist this list in some time and see what I think deserves to be changed. I've restricted my list to 10 choices in no particular order as I think this post would have taken all eternity to finish otherwise.

1. Cryptonomion by Neal Stephenson - not actually my favourite of his books, but probably the most geeky because of the sheer amount of research dumps into the text and the cryptographic themes. The Baroque trilogy also suffers a bit from the information dumps, which are more controlled in the earlier works like The Diamond Age and Snow Crash.
   
   
2. The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester. Largely here because Gully Foyle is one of my favourite characters from SF and I always enjoyed Bester's books.
   
   
3. Neuromancer by William Gibson. For the opening line at least: "The sky over the port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel". The visualisation of computer networks as the matrix in this was a real innovation at the time. The whole cyberpunk movement did help shake up science fiction in a way that was needed, but like most of these movements it turned into self parody after a while. The whole mirrorshades and leather trenchcoat, etc bit did make itself too obvious.
   
   
4. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. The three laws of Robotics and the introduction of Susan Calvin with a much more positive view of robots than most 1950's fiction. This influenced a lot of subsequent fiction with ideas of how intelligent machines act, especially the three laws of robotics which frequently turn up in other authors work.
   
   
5. The Shockwave Rider John Brunner. This is a book that I've only recently read and I'll have to look at Alvin Toffler's work that inspired it. It is in some ways prophetic of the current scenario of pervasive electronic communication and some of the ideas are still quite relevant. The basic idea of 'Future Shock' where people are unable to cope with the rate of technological and social change leaving them disorientated is increasingly relevant given the increasing pace of technological and social change in the developed world.
   
   
6. Earth Abides George R. Stewart. This is one of my favourite books depicting a post apocolyptic society arising from the collapse of western civilization. Its plague destroying society scenario is not necessarily impossible and probably more plausible than the post nuclear war scenarios in some books. As an early entry in the genre it has less development of some themes that become common such as struggles for resources and emergence of armed groups, but is still a powerful novel. David Brin's The Postman has a similar reason for society collapsing except for the plague being released through military action rather than nature and it also shows a greater number of survivors, some of whom's actions help to precipitate the decline of society.
   
   
7. Last and First Men Olaf Stapledon. This is included because of the sheer range of its subject with the continual evolution of new species of men. This was one of the books that I remember reading when I was a kid that really made me go wow in SF apart from the usual "its in space" bit.
   
   
8. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams. This is included because of the sheer amount of influence that it has had over the field of SF and humour writing. The first two novels are brilliant, but after that I did feel that the quality started to drop off a bit and I felt that Adam's often was struggling with getting past writer's block and the desire to work on other projects rather than keep putting out more Hitchikers books for all that they would be guaranteed megasellers. I was a fan of H2G2 from the original radio broadcasts on wednesday nights on Radio 4 back in 1978 and still have my vinyl records with the first two parts on as well as the paperbacks of H2G2 and Resturant at the End of the Universe.
   
   
9. Mort Terry Pratchett. The reason I've selected Mort out of the many Discworld books is because I think it is really the title that shows the tropes having really settled for many later books in the series unlike the Colour of Magic or the other early titles. Those characteristic tropes to me are the romance subplot between one of the main characters, who is a nebbish young male and a fairly independent young woman, the world being threatened by some form of device or main villain and the usual cameo appearances by a range of recurring characters. My actual favourites in this series are Small Gods, Nightwatch and Going Postal.
   
   
10. The Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkien. Mainly selected for its influence on the development of the high fantasy novel than for any particular love for it on my behalf. Now I've got older and read more widely I should perhaps revisit it as like many other books it may well have differences in meaning now I've changed. Probably the last time I read this was as a teenager, so many years ago before I had the understanding of the world that I have now, probably I'd try reading it after reading Beowulf and some of the viking sagas to have an appropriate knowledge of the literary traditions that Tolkein was trying to work in.