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 Forty Three – Malevolent Immediacy
The so-called Department of Malevolent Immediacy are those people who turn up right when you’re about to make a life-changing mistake, asking whether, maybe, they can help you to choose a different path.
They’re here to help you to be a better person.
Question is; Are they right, and are they lying?
A game system where the big important things you do refine the character down to who they really are, at the expense of who they could have been.
The adventures of a racing crew keeping their team in the championship with increasing ill-will towards the driver, who’s … kind of a jackass.
Diverticulitis
Maps Without New Zealand (reddit)
Blades in the Dark
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Dungeons & Dragons
Fate of Cthulhu
Grand Union Canal
Timewatch
Minority Report
Conspiracy Theory
Dayworld Series, by Philip José Farmer
Storyteller System (White Wolf’s Game System)
Apocalypse World
Ten Candles
Psi*Run
Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple
Spiral Series, by Michael Scott Rohan
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison
Chaosium BRP System
Call of Cthulhu
Bell Curve
Ravenloft Module
Speed Racer
Michael Schumacher
The Cannonball Run
Wacky Races
The Italian Job
Metalocalypse
The Good Place
Sapphire & Steel