Episode 68: Weird Oogly-Boogly in the Bigger Picture

Role-playing games Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice
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This month, Roger and Mike consider demonstration scenarios, revisit the Infinite Worlds, and contemplate how to encourage new players.

We mentioned Continuum, RuneQuest Glorantha, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Starter Set, Torg, The Fall of Delta Green, The Keep on the Borderlands, The Isle of Dread, Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering, Paranoia XP, the book about someone who salvages spaceships, Empire of the Petal Throne, Béthorm, GURPS Infinite Worlds, GURPS Banestorm, GURPS Cabal, the Infinite Cabal campaign, 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars Simon Hawke’s Time Wars series, Dungeon Fantasy: Caverntown, and Maid RPG.

We have a tip jar.

Roger may have been thinking about a booklet that came in the RQ2 box, but really isn’t sure.

Music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.

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I’ve always thought that Adventure Module B3 - Palace of the Silver Princess was a better introductory module than B2 - The Keep on the Borderlands. It actually has a plot and has a lot more GM advice.

The first adventure in the Torg adventure trilogy was actually bundled with the GM’s screen, not the boxed set. The adventure in the boxed set had the problem that if the PCs failed it radically changed the game world - the Earth’s rotation relative to the sun stopped, making most of the planet uninhabitable!

I want to say there were a number of hexcrawl adventures for other fantasy systems besides D&D in the 80s and 90s, but the only one I can think of is Griffin Mountain/Island for Runequest.

The original Technomancer adventure was indeed in GURPS Time Travel Adventures, but it was an Infinity adventure; the PCs were a search & rescue team sent to find a missing first-in scout on a newly-discovered world. It always struck me that the secret of extradimensional travel was on the verge of breaking out at any moment in Technomancer; it could be a good choice for a “natives discover their world is in the Infinite Worlds setting” campaign.

For a world-of-the-week game, I’ve gotten pretty good mileage out of my on-again, off-again campaign using the GURPS rules and the setting of Tri Tac Games’ Fringeworthy. There is a limited (though fairly large) supply of explorers in Fringeworthy, and the nature of extradimensional travel means the ease of getting back to home base can vary quite a bit but explorers always know the native language. There are also some interesting limits on gear thanks to the admittedly very rubber science conceit that electricity-based technology (but not brain activity) is stopped and drained by interdimensional travel; whether those limits are good or bad is a matter of taste.

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Thanks, you’re right about the Torg adventure - the bundled one (“Before the Dawn”) does a mildly decent job of showing off the setting (I worked out that the required energy output of the tunnelling machine is on the order of Japan), though it also suffers from the standard Torg problem of introducing amazing stuff that will never be mentioned again.

I never actually saw B3 - whether it didn’t make it to the UK in any numbers or I just didn’t meet it, I don’t know.

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I believe that INFINITE WORLDS canon says that Merlin (the world of TECHNOMANCER) has detected the intrusions from Homeworld and has sent spies back to case them out.

Homeworld don’t know that yet.