Monthly Archives: March 2020

New Roll for Topic episode: “Romance and Shopping”

Episode 32 of Roll for Topic is out! This time we were joined by Donn Stroud, an RPG designer and freelancer. Of the various things Donn has worked on, Mothership and Dead Planet are the two I’m most familiar with—I fell in love with Mothership last year at Gencon. It’s a lightweight RPG designed to emulate space-horror games in the vein of Alien, and it’s set apart by a combination of great writing and fantastic visual design.

The topic for this episode is an odd one that was added to the list of topics at least partly as a joke by a past guest. It is often the case that Chris and I (and our guests, when we have them) look over the table before we begin recording and wonder aloud what on earth we would have to say about, say, romance and shopping in RPGs. But those slightly weird topics often end up being the most fun to discuss, and that was the case here. Anyway, give it a listen and let me know what you think!

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Disadvantage: Enemy (Secret Service)

Cover image of GURPS Cyberpunk

Here’s a nice writeup of a famous tale from the game industry: the 1990 Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games in which they confiscated the manuscript for GURPS Cyberpunk.

It was perhaps not our country’s finest hour:

In spite of the fact the rulebook contained rules for having your consciousness transferred to a gender-swapped clone, when [Steve Jackson] spoke to them the day after the raid he was told that his company was publishing “a handbook for computer crime”. When he protested that it was clearly made up, he was repeatedly informed: “This is real.”

I’ve heard versions of this story retold over the years. According to this article, GURPS Cyberpunk was a target of opportunity, not the official reason for the raid: the Secret Service was poking around, equally ridiculously, for evidence that Steve Jackson Games was connected to some suspected BBS shenanigans. They grabbed the GURPS book when no other nefarious evidence presented itself. From a SJ Games post about the raid:

Their agents were very critical of [GURPS Cyberpunk], and on March 2 in their office, one of them called it a “handbook for computer crime.” Since their warrant was sealed, and they wouldn’t comment, our best guess was that they were trying to suppress the book. They did suppress it, but apparently it was through bureaucratic inertia and stonewalling rather than because it was a target of the raid.

Imagine if terrorists had gotten hold of the information in that or any GURPS tome—they’d know exactly how many one-inch hexes away from a target they can be before they get a -4 penalty to pickpocket attempts unless they paid 50 character points to replace their arms with telescoping cybernetic limbs. I feel safer already.

You know, it’s crossed my mind over the years that the game-prep Google trail of a typical gamemaster probably sets off all kinds of red flags in the various Orwellian surveillance systems keeping tabs on us. “Siri, how much C4 would you have to use to topple the Statue of Liberty onto a shoggoth that’s rising from New York Harbor?”

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Encountering Cthulhu in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum

I recently decided to re-read Umberto Eco’s strange, dense novel Foucault’s Pendulum. I was pleased to discover that it not only holds up over the decades since I first read it way back in high school, but that I found much more in it to appreciate now that I’ve had a few dozen additional years of, well, “life and stuff” to color my perspective.

Much of the book consists of a very convoluted tour of occult beliefs and conspiracy theories—at times it’s just a firehose of information from Eco’s very widely-read mind. It’s hard to imagine any bizarre historical belief, no matter how obscure, slipping by without at least a brief mention in Pendulum.

And so as I read, I found myself waiting hopefully for a mention of… Cthulhu. While most of us read Lovecraft for the cool slimy monsters, bits of the Cthulhu mythos (or at least, its infamous tomes) have been co-opted by real-world belief systems. Mostly (I presume) in a winkingly self-aware postmodern kind of way. That’s exactly the sort of oddball thing that should crop up alongside all the other crazy beliefs Eco explores. And anyway, it’s hard for me to imagine that Lovecraft wasn’t represented in the pulpy pop culture that Eco appreciated.

Friend, I was not disappointed. In the final pages of Foucault’s Pendulum, a shout-out:

Iä, indeed!

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Did I mention I have a podcast? I have a podcast.

The biggest gaming-related project I’ve worked on over the last year has been the Roll for Topic podcast, which I co-host with the inestimably talented Chris Salzman.

It’s a bi-weekly podcast about running roleplaying games with a simple gimmick: we don’t decide on each episode’s topic of discussion in advance. Rather, we roll a ten-sided die at the beginning of each episode, check the result on a random table, and determine what we’ll be discussing. The goal is to simply have a friendly, casual conversation about topics of interest to gamemasters. Thus far, joined by an array of different guests, we’ve discussed topics ranging from handling GM anxiety to running convention games and, well, lots more. You can find all the past episodes at the Official Website(tm) or on iTunes/Google Podcasts/your favorite podcast service.

We’re coming up on episode 32 (this Thursday)! This episode features a fantastic new guest who hasn’t been on the show before.

It feels odd to post this announcement a year into the podcast’s life. But I’m honestly still a bit stunned that the podcast is still going strong over 12 months in; and I wanted to correct the inexplicable lack of mention of the podcast here on the blog. If you haven’t listened to Roll for Topic yet, tune in this Thursday when the episode 32 drops, and please let me know what you think!

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