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 Fifty Nine – Apartments Of Catan
Emerging from the shelters and expecting to find a world ravaged by centuries of disaster and destruction, the bunker-folk instead find themselves in the overgrown gardens of a apartment block megastructure; An impossibly tall vertical city, clearly damaged by whatever catastrophe people headed underground to avoid, but still standing, and with some work, still habitable.
And not entirely uninhabited.
Your role in society is both necessary & tightly proscribed.
What you do is vital, and part of a bigger system of interlocking roles, but the Gods are capricious, and success can be as much a matter of luck as of skill.
If everyone would just cooperate, things would be fine, but … That’s really not how people work.
Housing Project: The Managing
These innovative community dwellings will greatly improve the lives of the people who’ll live in them, and if the embedded AI systems can organise the right resources and deal with the problems encountered along the way, maybe they’ll get the chance.
Of course, with the number of things that’re going wrong, some of those embedded AIs are starting to wonder whether there’s something else at play here.
The new ( and only ) residents of an apartment block find themselves trapped by vanishing hallways & bewildered by the regular deliveries of lumber, paving stones, hay, and … sheep?
If they can combine their resources, maybe they can find a way out, or at least move the damn sheep into the inexplicable fields in the apartment next door.
Blades in the Dark
Last of the Summer Wine
Garry’s Mod
The Yogscast
Settlers of Catan
Craig made me put this one in ~ T. JonesBicycle Repairman, by Bruce Sterling
The Concentration City, by J.G. Ballard
Report on an Unidentified Space Station, by J.G. Ballard
Shark Ship, by C.M. Kornbluth
Xenozoic Tales, by Mark Schultz
Cadillacs & Dinosaurs
Numenera
Monachies of Mau
Pugmire
Paternoster
Legacy: Life Among The Ruins
Warhammer 40k
Kowloon Walled City
Judge Dredd
Tribes of Europa
Rammstein
Dungeons & Dragons
Earthdawn
Legend of the Five Rings
Vampire: The Masquerade
Mark Rein-Hagen
Paranoia
Battleship (movie)
Bijlmermeer – Amsterdam, Netherlands
Danchi Apartments, Japan
Milton Keynes
Sayer (podcast)
High-Rise, by J.G. Ballard
NIMBY
House 2: The Second Story
The Cabin in the Woods
Cube
Zombie Cinema
Office Space
Delvers To Grow
OutsideHow – Things to Know Before You Hike the Appalachian Trail
Episode Sixty Four – Swamp Alligator Hoe-Down
Scrum Poker