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 Five – The Case Of The Accidental Battered Sausage
Best Served Cold / A Sweary Murder She Wrote – A Celebrity Chef solves murders while attempting to drag failing restaurants back from the brink.
The indentured staff of a Dark Kitchen try to call for help via the only means available; Inexplicable items in the orders they send out.
Technicians trying to fix a fully-automated Fish & Chip shop find themselves in the middle of a drug distribution operation.
By pure fluke, your massive order from the auto-takeout perfectly matched a shipment of contraband. Now you’ve got an enormous bag of something illegal, the bad guys have a catering-size order of deep-fried food, and things are about to get very exciting.
Produce Noir – In the grimy spray-misted aisles of The Big Shopping Cart, lit by flickering flourescents, sentient food items investigate a murder.
Battered Sausage
Corn Dog
Tempura
VeggieTales
Gordon Ramsay
Heston Blumenthal
Murder, She Wrote
Miss Marple
Jonathan Creek
Criminal Minds
Hercule Poirot
Independence Day
Who Is Killing The Great Chefs Of Europe?
Dark Kitchen (might be paywalled in some areas)
Dark Kitchen (site may be flaky)
( Interestingly, and appropriately, there aren’t a huge number of articles out there on Dark Kitchens – Those that are seem to tend towards the ‘Deliveroo Puff-Piece’ end of the scale ~ T. Jones )
Dark Matter
Dark Energy
Dark Web
Shock: Social Science Fiction
Misspent Youth
‘Hide a spoon in your underwear’, charities tell women fearing forced marriage
Shadowrun
The Wire
Omar
Brazil (movie)
Rosemary & Thyme (gardener detectives)
Gravity Falls
The Adventure Of The Speckled Band
MacGuffin
Midsomer Murders
The Brokenwood Mysteries
Automat
Markov Chain
Guy Ritchie
Fiasco
Mad Max 2
Film Noir
Episode Eighty One – Banana Warriors of Dimension X
Pink Slime
QAGS
Inspectres
Michael Bay
God Of Cookery
Forbidden City Cop
Shaolin Soccer
Stephen Chow
Isekai Shokud? / Restaurant to Another World
Food Wars! / Shokugeki no Soma
R?men Daisuki Koizumi-san / Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles
Taish? Yaky? Musume / Taish? Baseball Girls