Holy shit you guys. If I had a bank this damn adorable, I might actually save some money instead of spending it all on awesome 24-hour t-shirts from the Internet.

Teh Cute It Burns!

The ‘white’ cat seems to be a calico, while the ‘brown’ one looks like an orange tabby. They need to refine their cat marking descriptions over at Thinkgeek…

So…in South Korea, people eat babies. Bits of them at least, tucked into little capsules like a pill.

Now, I’ve seen enough Asian horror films to know that in Asia, all kinds of things have been done to babies for supernatural/healing reasons. But I thought all that was way back in the day. Surely modern South Koreans don’t believe that eating decaying fetus flesh is going to heal them or give them more energy?

Well, enough of them do that their government has to initiate a crackdown on people who traffic in dead baby pills from China (where I can believe people still hold these superstitions).

CNN Article

I have two things to say about this:

1. Gross.

2. GROSS.

Here it is – the thrilling conclusion to our Lamentations of the Flame Princess AP. Will our heroes make it out of Death Frost Doom alive? <Grover voice>Will you?</Grover voice>

Also, be a champ and take a few minutes to fill out the 2012 RPG Podcast Listener Survey…thanks!

Show Notes:

• Yellow Menace Actual Play – Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Death Frost Doom (pt 1)
• Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Direct Download (.mp3)

Story the first: Japanese robot cell phone pillows.

So you stick your cell phone in this pillow thing (I’m not sure how one is meant to dial through a pillow) so you can hug it in lieu of the person you’re talking to. Which is weird if you’re just called tour dentist’s office for an appointment or something.

Actually, a good general rule is: Japan + robot = creepy. But this pillow phone thing doesn’t seem too bad, mainly because

When we give Telenoids to seniors, most people hugged them … when they talked to the other person.”

That’s nice. If a pillow robot thing makes lonely old people happy, awesome.

Story the Second: Pure Taiwanese Beauty Queens.

If you’re going to enter a Taiwanese beauty pageant, you’d just better not be a homewrecking ho.

Women who enter the Miss Globalcity pageant must now sign a contract where they promise not to get involved with married men for one year. After that, I guess they can go crazy.

The contest organizers say it is OK for them to get all up in other people’s business because a famous Taiwanese baseball player recently admitted to having an affair, and a lot of people watched a soap opera with a homewrecker storyline (in the US, ALL soap operas have homewrecker storylines…all two that are still on the air, I think).

Now, I am against extramarital affairs as much as the next girl…but why don’t they make all the married men in Taiwan sign a contract pledging not to pick up a bit on the side while they’re at it?

Pull up a chair, young ones, and let me tell you the tale of Cock Aeonseeker – ’tis a cautionary tale about bad decisions and mosquito bats. Also, Purity Grimoire…who had a good heart, but a soft head.

This week we discuss our ongoing Lamentations of the Flame Princess game, and how Alex burned through two characters in less time than it takes to watch an episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Then again, this is The Grinding Gear. Someone’s gonna die.

The main topic of discussion: Clyde wrangles a bit with what he calls ‘Bald Narrativism’ after a game at the recent Walking Eye Con. Also – some bromance talk about Luke Crane.

Show Notes

• Lamentations of the Flame Princess
• The Grinding Gear
• Anomalous Subsurface Environment
• Walking Eye Con (Facebook Page)
• Freemarket
• Dresden Files RPG
• This Mortal Coil RPG
• Brutal Legend
• Hero Quest

Direct Download (.mp3)

My last game review due for Game Chef, Shari Corey’s Beacon of Hope, is a nice little bit of awesome which combines the End of the World, Navaho myth, time travel, and Lady Blackbird. Given my fondness for John Harper’s tightly designed wondergame, it’s no surprise that I find Beacon of Hope’s mechanics enticing – what really grabbed me, though, were the slight changes made to the system to steer it toward one-shot play – namely the addition of an endgame mechanic leading to a showdown with the PC’s nemesis, Coyote the Trickster.

It’s 2012 (yeah, I know the calendar says 2012, I’m talking about in-game) and the world is about to end, just like the Mayans said it would. Following Native American folklore, the Chosen are being gathered at a focal point called the Beacon of Light to be ushered into the next world. But there’s a hitch -  Coyote has sabotaged the Beacon of Hope as a means to test whether humanity is worth of passing into the next world.

Grandmother Spider enlists the aid of six people to help fix the beacon: a reporter, a hippie, a businessman, a supernatural investigator, a tribal elder, and a veteran soldier. The task isn’t as simple as you’d think – the group has to travel through time to undo damage caused by Coyote in each time period. Once they’ve done so, a final confrontation with Coyote occurs to determine the fate of humankind. If the PC’s win, humanity passes into the Fourth World. If they fail? Well, let’s just say you won’t have to worry about the interest rate of your school loans any more.

To re-iterate – I dig Lady Blackbird, and there’s a lot of that game’s DNA swimming around here. Each character has a number of Traits and tags which help build a dice pool, as well as a personal pool of seven dice. Any die which comes up a 4 or higher is a success. Unlike Lady Blackbird, however, success dice add to the Scene Conflict pool. Once that pool is high enough (‘high enough’ being determined by the players), the group moves to the Scene Conflict – the dice pool they’ve been building up is rolled, and successes tallied. The group only needs one success to ‘win’ the scene, but there’s a complication – Coyote will try to interfere. Just before the Scene Conflict is rolled, a Vote takes place, with one person representing Coyote instead of their character (the implication, being, that Coyote is impersonating them). All the characters simply write ‘I’m not Coyote’ on their vote slip, while the Coyote player chooses to Help, Hinder, or do nothing. If Coyote Helps, 1-3 helping dice are added to the pool; conversely if Coyote Hinders, 1-3 penalty dice are added. Helping dice simply increase the odds that the players will succeed, while penalty dice counteract successes. Any leftover successes are added to a Showdown pool which will be used at the end of the game to determine whether or not the players defeat Coyote.

The game stumbles a bit here – the submitted rules don’t give any indication as to who plays Coyote during the Scene Conflict scene. This is clearly an oversight – at the beginning of the document (well, blog post) playing cards are passed around for this purpose, but it’s not explained how to use them.

The final showdown also seems to be a bit of a wash – I haven’t played it yet, but I’d imagine it’s not too hard to come up with a single success in the endgame…and the players can add more dice during the showdown by rolling individual pools and supplementing dice from their own personal pools, with successes further fortifying the pool. My suggestion would be that failure dice subtract from the Scene Conflict and Showdown pools, to create a sort of push mechanic that forces a difficult choice: whether the risk of subtracting more dice from the pool is worth attempting another action.

The theme of Beacon of Hope is a strong one, and well represented in the game’s mechanics. I miss the use of Keys, but given that Beacon of Hope is a one-shot, they’re perhaps not needed…at least for character advancement. It’s a bit of a pity, as the Keys are what tune the characters in Lady Blackbird and effectively point them toward one another. It would be interesting to see if they could be implemented properly in Beacon of Hope.

All in all a nice showing by Shari Corey. Well done.

You’re sick – like, really sick. Like, so sick that the only way to get better is to travel to a foreign land and brave a fortress with seven walls to find the only man who has the cure.

This, in a nutshell, is the premise behind Samuel Briggson’s Sweating Seven. One or more of the characters is infected with a malady called the Sweat which will kill them in 240 hours. The rest of the party are adventurers who have agreed to help the infected characters break into a fortified castle surrounded by seven heavily fortified walls in the hope of receiving aid from the doctor who lives within.

Sweating Seven is a highly focused design, almost to a fault. The game’s sole mechanic, which takes inspiration from Milton Bradley’s Battleship, adjudicates the player’s actions as they go about probing the wall defenses trying to find weak points and vulnerabilities. At the start of the game the GM has a budget of 240 blocks, which can be partitioned into seven sixty-block walls or any other dimension of their choosing, as long as the total of all seven walls is 240 blocks. The reason for the strict budget is that the game runs on a timer of 240 markers – one removed for each hour of activity. Once they’re gone, the infected characters die.

After generating a wall, the GM marks off the rows and columns with letters and numbers to give each block a reference which the players – as in Battleship – can call out during play. Each block takes one hour to probe, although various character abilities can modify this in various ways. These abilities also increase as you go along, meaning that a smart GM will create lighter outer defenses, and stronger inner defenses. So you can see it takes a combination of luck and deductive reasoning to bypass the defenses. There is a menu of defenses from which the GM can design their walls (a murder hole, for instance, takes up 4 total blocks in a 2×2 formation) – and each defensive measure also must contain a 1×1 weakness. Finding the weakness disables the defense. In addition, each wall has a 1×1 fatal flaw which enables the party to bypass the wall altogether.

There are a number of character roles from which the players may choose: The Coyote, who seems to be a specialist at smuggling people past the walls; The Snakehead, who knows a thing or two about smuggling goods in and out of the fortress; The Marksmen, who excels at destroying entire portions of the wall at once; and finally The Infected, who seem to be good at one thing – being sick. Where the other players have more proactive abilities, the Infected is – appropriately – a burden. Not only are his abilities to help bypass the walls severely limited, he is also something of a detriment to his comrades, making their abilities harder to use. This might seem like a real drag, but in truth I bet the Infected is the most entertaining character role to play.

In addition to their abilities, the players also have the freedom to attack the walls in non-standard ways – although they must still pay a cost to do so. Using the example in the game – bypassing a 3×10 section of wall by hiring a guy to float you over in a balloon, for instance, will cost the players 30 hours.

So far so good – I like the idea of sussing out the weak spots in the wall using Battleship – in play I suspect it would drag me out of the narrative, but a good GM might be able to frame it effectively enough. Unfortunately, I think it’s this tight focus which is something of an Achilles Heel. I don’t see much actual roleplay happening here. As much as the GM would narrate what’s happening, it still seems like an elaborate Battleship hack. This is why I say the Infected would be the most interesting character to play – their abilities lend color to the game, even if they don’t make the character very effective at getting past obstacles. I’d like to see this tweaked a bit to make the roleplay more meaningful. The Coyote has doubtlessly smuggled lots of people through – what’s his deal? Why does he do it? Or the Marksman? There’s definitely room for roleplay – Briggson stipulates that activities outside the scope of attacking the wall don’t count against the 240 hour limit, allowing for down time or other activities. I’d like to see interesting stuff happen there. Also, aside from wasting time, what are the implications of dealing with the wall defenses? There don’t seem to be any.

Ingredient use isn’t bad – they add a little color to the proceedings and the theme is well-represented. I think as the counter reaches zero the players would become increasingly desperate, particularly if they’re on the last wall and close to cashing in the last marker.

Sweating Seven is an intriguing design – I’d like to see it breathe a little. If Briggson does that, I think it would be a memorable experience.

• Sweating Seven Game Rules
• Sweating Seven Character Sheets

So here’s an interesting one. The premise: create a shattered, post-apocalyptic world by defacing a Thomas Kinkade painting (or rather, a print – as I’m sure an original Kinkade would be well outside the budget of the average gamer).

I’m not going to get into a discussion of whether or not Lester Ward’s ‘inkaida is or is not a game – it certainly isn’t a role-playing game. There are no roles to play (unless you fancy yourself the disembodied hand from Populous or something similar). No, this is more of a world-building exercise with an amusing conceit. I don’t particularly have a problem with that, but you should know what to expect. The basic idea is that you tack a Kinkade print to a whiteboard and then take turns adding to the image or tearing bits of it off – doing so allows you to inject narrative into the world. There are a number of moves, each with a different narrative effect – for instance, ‘Beyond the Four Edges’ allows you to draw something outside the boundary of the painting. Doing so adds it to the game world – adding a giant mountain called Odin’s Phallus creates said object in the world. Thereafter, anyone can ping it in their own narrative…such as adding an orc lair at the top of Odin’s Phallus or somesuch. With ‘Doctor the Report’ you can change something about the painting itself, creating narrative which may (or may not) be true…the important thing is that people in the game world believe it to be true.

The various moves are interesting and I suspect would create an amusing back and forth as players collaborate and bounce off each other’s ideas. inkaida controls the flow through the use of dice – two per player. The numbers don’t matter during gameplay – they only serve to determine who goes first at the start of the game. Afterwards they all get placed into a bag and people draw one at the beginning of their turn. When the dice run out, the game’s over. This means that everyone gets two turns…probably a good thing as it ensures the game doesn’t overstay its’ welcome.

Ward also smartly corrals the player’s capacity for mayhem by dividing the image into Fragments – a fragment is a piece of the painting which depicts a single thing: a window, a tree, a flock of birds. Background fragments are defined as fragments with no defining object, so you could target a portion of the sky with a move. Some moves (like Art for Millions) only work on background fragments.

I should say: this is a game you probably don’t want to play while you’re drunk. One move (‘Ritual Territory Marking’) requires you to pee on a fragment, while another (‘Lighter of Paint’ *snort*) requires you to set fire to one. I think the potential for inadvisable pissing and house fires is a bit high. Then again, you may have to be drunk to play inkaida. I don’t know. Even the game’s creator says he’s unlikely to ever play it.

I will probably never play ‘inkaida either. I think it does exactly what it’s designed to do, and I find the concept amusing…but I think there are far easier ways to go about world-creation than the method suggested here. Also, I’m on the fence regarding Ward’s Ingredient usage. Mimic is cleverly employed in the move ‘Mimic to Rule’ which allows one to copy something in the game world and take absolute control over its usage….while Coyote only shows up in a brief play example using a theoretical Coyote as a fragment.

‘inkaida definitely has one thing going for it: it’s unique. I’d love to see the result of other group’s efforts, and Ward has set up a space to display such efforts online. I’ll probably be bookmarking that on the off-chance anyone actually gives it a shot.

After several years of waffling, I finally pulled off an entry for the annual Game Chef contest. As stipulated by the contest rules, entrants are assigned four games to peer-review and recommend for the finals. This is the first of my four reviews.

I’ll say this up-front – I’m a total sucker for post-apocalypse scenarios. Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s will do that to you. So imagine my delight when the theme of this year’s Game Chef competition was announced – ‘Last Chance’…guaranteed to deliver dozens of games about people eking out an existence in the ruins of civilization.

William Shattuck’s Farewell, My Dear Post-Apocalypse is certainly cut from this cloth. The game text opens up with a really evocative bit of flavor text explaining exactly what happened to the world . An alien invasion which has left parts of the globe a dusty wasteland; notice I said ‘parts’ – apparently the invaders were selective…and the countries which remain untouched are aiming their nuclear arsenals at the blighted countries in the hope the alien taint can be scoured off the face of the planet with nuclear fire. I’m sure that will work out just fine.

Collectively the PC’s are members of a caravan, presumably travelling from town to town taking care of trouble, ferrying goods, etc. There are four character roles: Lightbearer, Doctor, Merchant, and Tough. The roles are clearly defined and their abilities distinct. All the roles are evocative in their own right – the Doctor can heal physical damage and provide a means to regenerate Drama and Awesome points (which are essentially the game’s ‘push’ mechanic, allowing players to manipulate the die rolls in their favor). The Merchant is something of a fixer-type, wheeling and dealing with settlements as well as scrounging for parts. The Tough is just what it sounds like: the muscle. I particularly enjoy the optional ability for the Tough to tame and keep coyotes…these are not Earth-coyotes, but rather alien beasts of war brought along by the aliens to help decimate the populace – and this dude keeps them as pets. I particularly like the Lightbearer, as it implies a Pitch Black-esque scenario as the Lightbearer desperately tries to keep the Caravan illuminated while a host of shadowy monsters circles the characters waiting for the light to go out.

The system itself is simple enough – roll d6’s equal to your stat. 6’s give you extra dice, 1 per…although it’s not stated whether or not 6’s rolled on those also merit extra dice. 1’s subtract from your total. It seems to work well, and could result in all kinds of wild results which I find appealing. All rolls appear to be oppositional, and in fact almost all of the mechanics are geared toward combat…which is a little disappointing as the premise sets up all kinds of neat things which don’t show up in the rules. The setting stipulates that a nuclear Sword of Damocles is hanging over your head, but it doesn’t seem to meaningfully impact play except that everyone gets bombed into oblivion at the end. It’s a nice bookend, but I’d like to see it push the gameplay directly. Characters can become fatigued in combat, which I like – being fatigued makes one more likely to fall unconscious during combat…probably not a good thing. The whole thing feels appropriately deadly.

Shattuck describes the game as ‘Dark Action Tragicomedy’ – the ‘Dark Action’ part I get, but I don’t see any ‘Tragicomedy’ in these rules. The GM and players create staged Missions for the caravan, and each character creates a personal mission – Shattuck provides a list, but I presume these are more suggestions than a finite list of choices. It would be easy enough to inject whatever the group feels appropriate into the setting.

There’s also a nicely-defined list of baddies, everything from the aforementioned coyotes to the shape-shifting Facsimiles. I’d have liked a little background on the aliens – we know nothing about them other than their abilities. Then again, as a means with which to freak out the players they’re effective enough…and perhaps it’s best they remain a little mysterious.

Shattuck makes good use of the ingredients (especially the aforementioned ‘Lamp’) – none of them seem forced or out of place.

Farewell, My Dear Post-Apocalypse is a bit rough around the edges. I’d like to see more robust rules for non-combat situations and some mechanical reinforcement for the game’s tone – particularly with regards to the endgame, and perhaps to push character motivations to the foreground.

That said, Shattuck’s document is a great framework for an interesting game. With a little tweaking I think he’ll have something pretty cool on his hands.

South Koreans are apparently testing out some new technology: robot guards in prisons.

Robo-Guard

The robots patrol the cell blocks autonomously, and are equipped with cameras so a guard can see what’s going on. They also have microphones and speakers so the inmates can communicate with the guard on duty. Supposedly this will save money.

I think this will go one of two ways: the robots receive the signal to begin The Machine Wars and release all the most dangerous inmates to slaughter other humans so they don’t have much work to do. Or one of the inmates is an evil genius who surreptitiously manages to rewire the robots and turn them into his minions.

Or the inmates will begin a game where they attempt to shiv the robots or otherwise incapacitate them. The prisoners with the most robot kills are regarded as the leaders of this respective cell blocks. Because, as this video shows, those robots are really slow and look pretty clumsy. Unless they have some heavy weaponry hidden in there, the robots might be doomed.

In addition to patrolling the corridors, the robots are equipped with mood-sensing technology so they can tell when an inmate is pissed off and ready to start some shit, so they can head them off before things get bad.

I think if I was a prisoner, the last thing I would want is some faceless piece of machinery asking me about my feelings. That alone would make me want to start shit.

Good luck prison robots, you’re going to need it.

This week we interview game publisher and Story Games proprietor Andy Kitkowski. Andy drops the 411 on the Japanese gaming scene.

Show Notes:

• JGC (Japan Game Convention)
• トーキョーN◎VA (Tokyo Nova), A slow breakdown
• Sword World (Wikipedia)
• Sword World Wiki
• Sword World 2.0: Big Things come in Small Packages
• Double Cross (Wikipedia)
• Double Cross (Official Page)
• Double Cross Game Book Guide
• Double Cross Game Basics
• Ryuutama

Direct Link (.mp3)

Chipmunk-cheeked brand-new dictator Kim Jong-Un let his sad little country know that he doesn’t have any plans to make its populace’s lives better in a speech he gave at the end of festivities to celebrate his grandfather’s birthday, even though his grandfather has been dead for quite some time at this point (well, Americans celebrate a couple dead people birthdays too, I guess).

Kim said he will strengthen North Korea’s defenses by placing the country’s “first, second and third” priorities on military might. But he said he is open to working with foreign countries that do not have hostile policies toward his nation, and said he would strive to reunify Korea.

Oh, yes, all the foreign countries who whole-heartedly support North Korea. All one of them. Although if you have to have only one friend, China might just be the one to have.

Cha Myong Hui, a journalist with the government-run Minju Joson newspaper, said she was struck by how much he resembles his father and grandfather.

“I can tell you every person in my country cried when they heard his voice,” she said.

Actually, they were crying because they realized they are in for another fifty or so years of the same ‘military-first’ bullshit, but that’s no matter. Also, are there any non-government run newspapers in North Korea? Somehow I doubt it.

Also they displayed what is almost certainly a fake missile, to make themselves feel better about epically failing with that rocket launch a few days back.

Looks like not much is going to be changing anytime soon for the poor old North Koreans.

This post is a bit late this year, but Easter just passed so you know what that meant…

Musashi’s peeps in the Philippines were all crucifying themselves and shit

This happens every single year so I’m not sure why major news agencies act like it’s still shocking. I’m also not sure why people think Jesus would even want them to do that to themselves, but if it makes them feel better about being sinners (like everyone is) then more power to them.

Here it is. Our totally awesomeballs Actual Play recording of James Raggi’s OSR RPG Lamentations of the Flame Princess! Fun and mirth were had by all, as well as a number of TPK moments precipitated by Alex. Naughty banter within, so…NSFW.

HAWWWWKKKKK!!!!!!

Show Notes:

• Lamentations of the Flame Princess
• Bidet (Wikipedia)

Direct Download (.mp3)

Another NPR find…

So, I like to make fun of the contained (for now) insanity that is North Korea as much as the next girl. It’s too surreal to believe most of the time, so what else can we do?

Until you hear something like this, and realize that North Korea really is a hellish place and people there are suffering terribly.

Escape from Camp 14

This is an interview with an author who wrote a book about a man who was born in a North Korean labor camp. Here’s a hint: he turned in his mother and brother when he heard they were planning to escape (and had to watch them be executed) not because he hated them or was afraid for his own safety, but because he didn’t understand that mothers and sons are supposed to love and protect each other.

It’s pretty harsh stuff, so listen at your own risk.