Have you ever wanted to get involved in running tabletop roleplaying games and thought “But I have no ideas!”? The Big Red Couch is designed to show exactly how easy it is to get from random notions that stick in your mind to playable concepts, all through the medium of the kind of casually weird spitballing that gamers engage in at the best of times. In every issue, the intrepid contributors to the Big Red Couch brave the noisome wonders of The Mystery Box to produce a randomly-selected seed idea, then return Some Time Later to share what they came up with and discuss how those concepts might work as games. If we can do it, anyone can: that’s the whole idea. Along the road, we discuss what RPG systems might work for implementing different concepts, together with reasons how or why. This frequently involves adaptation of systems from their original settings to the point where they creak under the strain.
https://hoarde.net/bigredcouch
Episode One Hundred And Twenty Four – Everything Is Alive On This Starship
Programmable biological workers make it so much easier to set up a colony world, because you can reconfigure them as your colony develops.
Of course, if something goes wrong on the way there, the ship’s systems might find themselves trying to repair a starship with a worker build who think the telegraph is a pretty neat idea, …
When the colony ship fell out of orbit, it set the bio-workers to “Mental Evolution” mode, in the hope that this would compensate for the lack of central guidance. Years later, the remains of the ship are found, and the walls start taking to them …
Using bio-workers to raise the first generation of humans from the gene-banks is a fine solution to the problem of long spaceflights, but there will come a moment when the kids find out that their guardians really ARE robots …
Calling it an organic starship is over-simplifying things; It’s more of a space going coral reef, an ecosystem with a community on board, some of whom may be an integral part of the internal process.
How does the community react when the ‘ship’ suddenly changes course?
Or when the ship scoops up an entirely non-organic spacecraft, determines that it’s not edible, and dumps it out into the habitable areas?
If someone’s built a tomb which doesn’t rely on clever traps, and instead just flat-out tries to kill you, is it maybe worth considering that they had a really good reason to do so?
Episode One Hundred And Twenty Three – Tomb Temperature
Proxima Centauri
50 Nautical Terms and Sailing Phrases That Have Enriched Our Language (Owlcation)
A Canticle For Liebowitz (Walter M. Miller Jr.)
Prednisolone
Amoxicillin
Killjoys in the care of Lucy
Passengers – aboard the Avalon
Heart Of Gold – (The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy)
Starship Titanic
Grim Fandango
WALL·E with the ship, Axiom
Executor-class Star Dreadnought
Stargate Universe
System Shock 2 with the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker
Vincent Price
Star Trek: Voyager
Westworld
Bluetooth
NFC
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Sid Meier’s Civilization (game series)
Ascension (tv miniseries)
Goosebumps (R. L. Stine book series)
The Twilight Zone
Kids On Bikes (rpg)
The Midwich Cuckoos (John Wyndham)
The Famous Five (Enid Blyton book series)
Expedition To The Barrier Peaks (D&D Module)
Moya – Farscape
Lexx
Babylon 5
Saga (Brian K. Vaughan comic)
Event Horizon (movie)
28 Days Later
Flotsam: Adrift Among The Stars (rpg kickstart)
Pitch Drop Experiment
Standard Diving Dress
Nile Red (youtube channel)
Torg Eternity
Taishō Baseball Girls
Questionable Content (webcomic)
The Maltese Falcon
Gen Con