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 Thirty Seven – Telepathic Murder Ghosts Coming Out Of The Trees
Trees Hate Us; They’ve found ways to influence people & get into their thoughts, and now, not even paper is safe
The forests are desperately trying to redress an imbalance, but from a human point of view that looks a whole lot like people up and vanishing into the woods.
Big Paulie’s crew ended up owning the forest as part of a failed development scam, and when Carmine took over, he used it as a tax dodge and carbon credit scam, with a sideline as a Christmas Tree farm.
Turns out that Big Paulie monetised corpse disposal for half the state, and those justifiably pissed-off ghosts have started escaping from their unmarked graves by hitching rides on the Christmas Trees planted over their bodies.
Warhammer 40k
The University of Auckland
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Wales
Blades In The Dark
Edinburgh
Shortbread
Shadowrun
Cyberpunk
SLA Industries
Tribe 8
Vaster than Empires and More Slow, by Ursula K. Le Guin
War Against The Chtorr, by David Gerrold
All Flesh Must Be Eaten
Gaia Hypothesis
Taniwha
Ten Candles
Damnation Alley, by Roger Zelazny
Dogs In The Vinyard
Darkwood
Kids On Bikes
Meddling Kids, by Edgar Cantero
Money Laundering
Carbon Credit
The Mob
Freddy Kruger
Copland
One Corpse Too Many, by Ellis Peters