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 Seven – “Accessing the Memory Bank”
In a transhumanist post-mortality world, it makes sense to store memories and knowledge in a secure cloud, bringing them into local storage only when needed.
And that works fine until something goes wrong, the cloud is rendered inaccessible, and neither you nor the vaguely-familiar folks you’re stuck with remember how to get your memories back.
Post-Mortality doesn’t mean post-scarcity, so not everyone is alive at one time. Which becomes a problem when the information you need is locked up in the memories of one person who’s currently dead, and isn’t due for instantiation for another 50 years.
Every time you ‘access’ your memory, you change it, so to preserve those precious moments, you need to remove them & put them somewhere safe.
Which leaves the question of what fills the hole left behind.
A group of people wake up in a beautifully appointed memory treatment spa, feeling refreshed, and with absolutely no idea why they’re there. Or where the staff are.
And then they find the bloody handprint.
It was only by pure fluke that the storm disrupted the Signal enough for you to realise that your memories were false, being beamed out to overwrite the whole history of the world.
Now, with the Storm of the Century bearing down, you’re planning to find out what’s being kept from you. And why.
Southland, NZ
Gore
Al Gore
Amazon Web Services
Ouija Board
Jodrell Bank
Radio Telescope
Transhumanism
Eclipse Phase (RPG)
The Matrix
Psi*Run
Dark Matter
Overdrawn At The Memory Bank
Inception
Raul Julia
Rick and Morty
Futurama
Elder Gods
Dollhouse
System Shock
PTSD
Golden Hour
Doctor Who
Delta Green
Ocean, by Warren Ellis
Thanos
Episode 105 – Fantasy + Post-Apocalypse = ?
IPA
Dark Conspiracy
TORG: Eternity
Gen Con