[Live. Love. Die.]: RESE Mission 3

The final episode of our mini playtest with Alex and Ryan.

This week we telegraph hard that our desire to explore one of the death moves, and we do deliver.
Our pilots run their newly improved mechs through their paces. The ground crews engage in some bonding. And then everything burns.

Content Warning: this episode depicts the emotionally charged death of a player character. We all were pretty moved by it, so I wanted to warn y’all that it could get emotional.

[Blades In The Dark]: Arcus

Welcome to Arcus, an island city. Floating in the sea of clouds. Populated by refugees, academics, mystics, criminals, and entrepreneurs. All of them survivors of a shattered world. We join a group of scoundrels fresh out of Bedlam, looking to carve out a place for them and theirs. Hopefully we’ll see them grow into a powerful organisation, and overcome daring obstacles. We might also see them suffer. Strife from their past, their relationships, and their ambition will all test their resolve.

Should they endure, glory awaits them!

Join us, in our longest series to date. In a world of our own creation; built using The Quiet Year, and run using Blades In The Dark. This is Blades In The Dark: Arcus.

Guest Appearances

Every now and then we send Raymond off to play games with other Actual Play podcasts. So we thought we’d make a place for you to find all of those.

Actual Play one shots:
Delta Green with Technical Difficulties.
Laser & Feelings with RPX.
What Could Go Wrong? With the TechDiff crew.
World Wide Wrestling Tri-podcast event.
A War Story told with the folks at Rag-NERD-Rok.

Campaigns:
Red Markets – 10K Lakes. This is a campaign that is hosted on multiple podcasts, but you can find the first session here and follow the links on through to each session.
If you just want the episodes Raymond has been in, well we’ve got that too.
PooPower.
Master of the Skies, Master of the Globe.
Spoil The Whole Bunch.
Moving day.

Streaming:
The Splintering Wheel hosted by I Am Not Trying To Kill You. The Splintering Wheel has a rotating cast of various gamers, streams, and RPG Developers.
Ray can be seen in the first episode of The Splintering Wheel.

What about stuff that isn’t actual plays?
Raymond has been on 2 episodes on the comedy discussion podcast I’d Rather Not.  Bully Timeshare vs. Weird Work Picnic, and Doing Drugs with the Clowns vs. Drawing Fursonas in an Alley

Magical Creator Girls: A Magical Fury Campaign

3 teenage girls are about to encounter something that will change the course of their lives forever.
In this mini series we’ll explore the nature of power, identity, and belonging.
Our 3 heroines will explore a new world of possibility.
They’ll deal with complicated and unfamiliar histories.
And of course learn the true power of friendship.

Adventure Base Raiding – a Base Raiders Campaign

Our second FATE campaign, and our first base raiders campaign.
In this campaign run by Raymond we explore the human nature, heroism, greed, and power through the lens of superpowered adventure.
Base Raiders is set in a world where all the heroes and villains have disappeared, but they have left their secret bases behind. Base raiders are the people that loot these places.
In our campaign our players are part of a international adventure race, where they break into, you guessed, abandoned super bases.Each adventure of this series is called a Heat, and each Heat has 2-4 parts/episodes. you can find all those episodes above in a nice big playlist, or in the ABR tag.If you’d like to read our setting primmer you can find it here.
Below we also have some reflections on the campaign from the players.

Fin(Yurei): This turned out to be an amazingly human story given it was about a ghost, a demon, and a sentient cloud. Amid all the drag races across the Nile delta, raiding of undersea hot labs, and duels with Valkyries on tropical beaches of the Hollow Earth; we found some genuine moments of companionship and vulnerability. As we kicked up dust on the moon and punched Nazis over Paris, we really explored what it was that made each of us feel at home amongst this roving semi-illegal super-sport that we lacked elsewhere in the world. The game had a real warmth in the moments we were just sitting around talking amongst our characters or with the other teams and marketing execs that Raymond gave life to. Not to say that we didn’t absolutely tear it up when the action kicked off. Boy is there some wild stunts in this! Also some excellent camping.

Alex (Gregg): I’m so glad I got the opportunity to experience and explore the incredible and extraordinary world of Base Raiders. While I feel the system is designed to be a high-tech, abstract dungeon crawl, this campaign shied away from that. While there were definitely some amazing set piece moments (like the Nazi UFO rising up from underneath Paris), this campaign was really about three non-humans finding their humanity. I loved how Raymond gave every character a chance to shine and played upon everyone’s strengths and weaknesses at various times. Every character had a chance to grow, even my ridiculous sentient fart cloud.

Ryan (Amriel):First, there were the characters. We started off as an oddball bunch—a demon, a ghost possessing a robot, and a super intelligent cloud of nano-machines that smelled vaguely like a fart—and we just got weirder as the game progressed. Each of our characters had an arc that allowed us to explore their personalities and motivations.Beyond that, the evolution of the party relationship was fun to play out. With the volcanic explosion and the lost teammate in our backstory, not to mention our wildly divergent character concepts, we got off to something of a rocky start. By the end we’d developed a real rapport with each other as players, and our in-character banter and downtime role play became my favourite parts of the campaign. Heat 5, the section of the campaign where we went camping in the Hollow Earth, had me grinning as we played, even though we got very little accomplished aside from throwing a barbecue for the other competitors.Finally, Raymond did a stellar job of weaving together all of our weirdness into a coherent story. From the huge cast of NPC competitors to the charming one-offs, he peopled the world with compelling characters who were fun to interact with. Even the Valkyr, who seemed to be the campaign’s heavies for most of the runs, were more than they appeared. In an imaginary space, you can never go over budget, and Raymond took full advantage of that as GM, taking us to various dangerous, odd and exotic locations across the globe (and on the moon). The locations, set pieces, and action sequences were all great.

Adventure Base Raiding was a blast to play, from the kick-ass fight on the side of the crashing flying saucer in Heat 3, to the fraught negotiation with the alien nebula in Heat 4. Every session had something new, exciting and interesting to offer.

Raymond(Game Master): I’m kinda touched by the wonderful things the boys have said. I wanted to take the opportunity to thank them for sticking with it and giving their best to the campaign. Make time for it every week and really focusing in on the play space.

They did an excellent job of portraying their characters and helping me bring the world alive.

I loved running this campaign, it was nice to return to superheroes (which is where this podcast started.) I liked exploring the relationships the boys built. By far my fav moments were when they had to deal with marketing people, or lawyers, reporters, or fans.
Of course there was stuff I would have done differently if I could. it was still an excellent campaign, and I think; a great series.

Apocalypse World: The Verdant Mountains Campaign

Our 2nd Powered by the Apocalypse campaign, this one went way better; we even finished it!
Set in a world over run by wild malicious forests, where ruins of the old world are being choked out and eaten away by plants. Nestled in the mountains of the this world is the dam our protagonists call home. A community divided, politically and physically.
Our characters will have to navigate the political waters of this world to try an accomplish their various goals.

We hope you enjoy listening, if you like to see what we thought of the campaign you can read more after the break.

3 Boys In A Barina: Go West!

Hey folks! It’s finally here!
We’re finally posting this years roadtrip. A magical journey of bonding, friendship, discovery, and petty arguments about swimming.

We’re going to be creating a virtual roadtrip with you guys by adding journal to the playlist every morning, and every evening for the next 8 days!
We’ll also be posting photos from the trip so be sure to check the gallery each day for new updated photos.
You can also see the photos on our Facebook.
If you want to listen to our first roadtrip, you can check it out here.

If you enjoyed this please share it with others, sharing is the best thing you can do to help grow the podcast!
If you’d like to listen to more of our content you can check us out on wordpress, or soundcloud.
You can also get the latest news about up coming podcasts and projects by following us on twitter, joining our new G+ community, or liking us on facebook.
If you have any feed back or requests, or even just want to say hello, feel free to leave a comment on any of our social media pages. You can also email us at insertquesthere@gmail.com.

Farewell from the past.

Wild Talents Campaign: Turnings Big Bang!

turnings big bang is a wild talents game with our own game world. the player characters have had their elemental themed superpowers thrust upon them. they live in the charter city of Turning; town created to foster the development of science and technology.

The first campaign we did for the podcast; it was a little rough, but it’s great gear.
Bec, Sofi, and Liam were the players. Raymond was GM.
One day we hope to return to Turning and see how it’s changed.

Eclipse Phase master post!

I know a lot of listeners love Eclipse Phase. We’ve been reorganising a lot of the WordPress site lately to make our content more accessible.

You can now find all our Eclipse Phase actual plays by clicking on the Eclipse Phase link at the bottom of each page, or by clicking on that piece of bold text.

And if you don’t want to get them through our WordPress site, there is also a playlist on our SoundCloud!

Please feel free to share our recordings with others. If you’d like to get in contact with us; leave a comment. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Arcanum Quest: complete playlist

Arcanum Quest was a campaign run by Kim. The goal was to transcribe the video game Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, into a table top role playing game. Kim tried to faithfully recreate the game, while also streamlining it into something manageable. He placed a lot of focus on the dialogue with some interesting results. The system we used was new world of darkness 1st edition; chosen because most of the players were familiar with it, and it had rules we liked.

Now I’ve got some thoughts from Kim, reflections from after the campaign was completed.

Arcanum Quest was, and still is, one of the most enjoyable role-playing experiences I have had. Whilst I am not an experienced GM, the sensation of bringing a world to life for the players is something that I crave to feel again.
The idea behind Arcanum Quest was to bring the world of the video game Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, to the table-top role-playing format. I purposefully asked players who were not overly familiar with the original game so that the plot would be fresh for them, and their experience of the world uninfluenced by any preconceptions that the video game might have given them.

The interactions that the players had with the world that I knew so well and loved was intriguing to say the least. My portrayal of the Arcanum world was not as accurate as I had hoped, and the feelings that I gave to the players were only slightly reminiscent of the original game. However, I think that the world which we created together, through my vision and planning, and their character ideas, personalities, and choices, was far more interesting, dynamic, and above all creative.
I often see worlds from video game RPGs that I wish I could interact with without the restrictions of the game. During Arcanum Quest I believe I tried too hard to make the players conform to the structures of the video game; something that video games can do very well by stipulating the way in which players interact with the world, which are far less effective for the table-top format.

The knowledge I have gained from Arcanum Quest warns me against trying to do such things in the future. However, I am not turned off adapting video games to table-top role-playing in the future, far from it. I am now resolved instead to try again with different worlds, but improve the experience for the players and myself by taking the theme of the world, some pivotal characters, and trying to re-create the ‘feel’ of the world, allowing it to ebb and flow and be moulded by the way in which the characters interact with it. Rather than trying to re-crate the game for table-top, take the idea that I love so much and give it a new voice, hopefully a stronger voice; and by doing so instil the same enjoyment and passion that I have for these worlds in my players.

I (Raymond) quite enjoyed the game, despite my frustration at times. I really look forward to more games from Kim in the future.
Farewell from the past, I’m Raymond.