For over the past month, I’ve been recording weekly discussions of the history of table top role playing games. I’ve wanted to rekindle my Geekerati Podcast for some time now, but I wanted to share the podcast on multiple formats rather than just as an audio file. This led me to begin recording the episodes as YouTube videos and sharing them with you when they come out. The YouTube videos are doing well and my audience there is growing, slowly but surely, but I didn’t want to forget my origins.
My old Geekerati Radio show has over 170 recorded episodes and includes conversations and interviews across a wide variety of geek and pop culture topics. My new show will feature similar content, but it will have a slightly more table top gaming and film focus.
My relaunch episode was an interview with Alan Bahr discussing his new “old school” role playing game Riches and Ruins. Bahr’s game has a relatively unique approach to old school design. Instead of attempting to be an update or modification of an existing old school property, like OD&D or Traveller, Riches and Ruins attempts to make an old school game from the ground up using miniature wargame rules as the inspiration. I’ll be posting the audio from that episode soon.
My most recent episode is a discussion of the long out of print Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo role playing game. It was published by Fantasy Games Unlimited and written by FGU publisher Scott Bizar and Lin Carter. If you are familiar with Appendix N, he edited about half the stories featured there and it’s interesting to see what he thought a role playing game should look like.
For your listening, or viewing if you watch the video below, pleasure here’s “Let’s Talk About the Flash Gordon Role Playing Game! The Critics were Wrong!” It’s episode 172 of the audio podcast and Episode 11 of the video show.
If you are interested in playing, I’ve created a couple of character sheets you can hand out to your players.
Episode 172: Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo is the First Licensed RPG and is Better than Most Think