This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.
2013 was quite a year for me, plus I haven’t done a proper podcast in ages (literally over 2 years…), so I decided to do an overview of my year, covering the Channel A and Golden Sky Stories Kickstarters, Maid RPG, Fate and Adventures of the Space Patrol, Destiny Dice, Beyond Otaku Dreams, and a few other odds and ends.
This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.
This special episode is a compilation of the second half of the “Today in Geek History” daily podcast I posted on Tumblr. (Here’s Part 1) This is a part of I’ve been working on a humor book titled “I Want to be an Awesome Robot,” and one of my many goals for 2014 is to finally finish up the book. One of my other goals is to get back into proper podcasting, starting with a review of 2013, which I’m hoping to record and post over this weekend.
This special episode is a compilation of the first six months of the “Today in Geek History” daily podcast I’ve been posting on Tumblr. I’ve been working on a humor book titled “I Want to be an Awesome Robot,” and one rather large section of it is a calendar with a fake fact about the history of geekdom for every single day of the calendar year, plus one or two days I made up. I does have plenty of RPG stuff in it (including the tale of Gary Gygax’s quest for the Rod of Seven Dice), though there’s also entries relating to anime, video games, sci-fi, literature, science, history, and more besides. Filling up 365 days is hard, especially when you make it so that it’s actually 379. The whole thing is a bit over an hour and a half, though on the plus side you can now listen all the way through without clicking on dozens and dozens of individual Tumblr posts, most of which are less than a minute long. Expect another similar compilation episode in January 2014!
If you know me at all, you know that I’m really random about when I get inspired to actually do things, such that I jump from project to project all the time. The other day I got inspired to revive my project to do an iRiff of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which in turn led me to get some better recording gear, which in turn inspired me to get back into podcasting. This first new episode is a recap of what I’ve been up to in terms of my own game design and translation projects. There’s quite a bit to cover. I started using Audacity (which is quite good), and didn’t feel like messing around trying to get the music in this time around, so for better or for worse this episode is an hour of just my voice.
Let’s Talk About Neat Things: Jake is interested in the food cart scene in Portland and wants to start one to sell awesome noodles. Ewen’s been geeking out about Slayers because of Dragon World.
I became acquainted with Malcolm Harris because we’d both been invited as guests of honor for A-Kon (an anime convention in Dallas) in 2010. He’s the driving force behind Channel-M Publishing, an independent publisher of comics and RPGs, including Witch Girls Adventures. I’ve met very few people who are quite so passionate about creating and sharing their creations, and his enthusiasm is wonderfully infectious.
We finally got around to connecting on Skype to record a podcast, and Malcolm shared his insights on Witch Girls Adventures and how with it he’s designed and marketed a role-playing game aimed at teenage girls. He also talks a bit about the Witch Girls movie short he’s working on, as well as other games (Macho and Nemesis: Remix) and forthcoming Witch Girls supplements. He’s a really busy guy, to put it mildly.
Macho, Malcolm’s over-the-top action hero RPG, due out this year
Nemesis: Remix, a superhero RPG for fans of superhero comics, due out in late 2012
Even more stuff on the horizon for Channel M!
Malcolm says believe in your self!
Technical Notes
The technical quality of the recording wasn’t quite what I hoped; my voice is too loud, while Malcolm’s is too quiet (usually it’s the other way around) and has just enough of a background hum that it’s hard to boost without reducing the audio quality. (Plus you can hear me breathing far more than I’d like.) I hope you’ll bear with me all the same, because this is probably my most interesting podcast episode so far.
This episode presents a succinct but interesting interview with Steven Savage, the man behind both Seventh Sanctum and Fan To Pro. In the interview, Steven talks first about the Seventh Sanctum generators site and his philosophies of how randomness can inform creativity, and then about how RPG gamers can leverage the things their hobby involves into career stuff.
This is my first time recording a podcast with a guest in the same room (using my little Sony digital recorder), so there’s a little bit of background noise here and there, but I think it turned out surprisingly good considering.
This episode is an attempt to unpack certain underlying “big picture” things in role-playing games that I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s not about how they fare in the marketplace (though there’s a little bit of that), but RPGs are and how they work. There’s a good chance other (smarter) people have said this elsewhere, but I need to put it out there in my own words.
Show Notes
Intro
A-Kon – Lots of receptive people, my thoughts and observations seemed really new to most of those folks.
Andy Kitkowski and Ben Lehman join me for this long-overdue overview of Maid: The Role-Playing Game, and our experiences discovering, translating, publishing and playing what wound up being the first Japanese tabletop RPG ever released in English.
Yaruki Zero Games 
