Category: Podcasts (Page 1 of 2)

Enter the Romulus – I Join Enter The Nerdom to Talk ALIEN: Romulus

Following our one-shot ALIEN The Roleplaying Game session, I was invited back to Enter The Nerdom to discuss the scenario, talk about the history of the ALIEN franchise in roleplaying games, and then discuss the new film, ALIEN: Romulus!

It’s a spoiler-filled discussion filled with our thoughts on not just Romulus but the entire ALIEN franchise across movies, books, games, and comics. We also touch on a few other recent movies and shows.

If you’re looking for more ALIEN discussion, some behind-the-scenes stuff about our game session, and some general nerdy chat, check out the latest episode of Enter The Nerdom wherever you listen to podcasts! Some of the more popular spots:

Reminder: This is a spoilery discussion, not only about our game session, but also about ALIEN: Romulus and a few other shows and movies.

If you enjoy Enter The Nerdom, follow them on Instagram or your favorite podcasting service to catch more episodes! They feature special guests from all walks of nerdom, including Christine Valada (Photographer, Lawyer, and widow of Len Wein, co-creator of Marvel’s Wolverine), and DJ MacHale (writer, Nickolodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark), they report on conventions (SDCC, D23, various horror and comic conventions), and much, much more!


After all this ALIEN stuff, I’ll be changing gears next week with a post about how Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince Roleplaying Game might be the best game system for D&D’s Curse of Strahd campaign. Stay tuned!

Enter The Nerdom Versus Alien the Roleplaying Game

Once again, I got to run a game for the Enter The Nerdom podcast, along with special guest Dan Mason.

Here’s where you can find Enter The Nerdom Ep. 46 – Alien RPG Tabletop; if you don’t see your favorite podcast venue of choice, check again in case I missed it.

There will be a video version of this episode with cameras on the battle maps and gaming table coming soon!

I ran Steve Hatherley’s Perfect Organism scenario with a few minor tweaks and it was almost a Paranoia-level hose-job for the players! I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a scenario that does a great job tying right into the first two ALIEN movies.

We’ll be doing a sort of post-session breakdown, explore some of the alternative events and some other actual plays of the scenario, and discuss ALIEN: Romulus later this week! I’ll make sure to really take you behind the scenes of the scenario when we do that.

 

Enter The Nerdom Plays ALIEN the Roleplaying Game

Update 8/5/2024: We pushed the recording to Sunday 8/18, so the podcast episode will be up sometime soon after that.

Last May, my friends from Enter The Nerdom — a podcast about all things fans love about movies, shows, comics, super heroes, gaming, and more, hosted by Chad, Stan, and Watson — invited me to chat about the origins of the tabletop roleplaying game hobby-turned-industry, and then I ran them through a one-shot dungeon crawl using the scenario Puzzle Dungeon: Seer’s Sanctum with the dead-simple rules of Knave (technically, I used a hack of the first edition). Joined by another friend of ours, Dan Mason, we had an absolute blast. (Check out all our antics in these posts.)

In celebration of the release of ALIEN: Romulus, I’m going to run ALIEN The Roleplaying Game for them. I found an incredibly fitting cinematic scenario to run. (I’ll post which one after the episode comes out; free cake* to anyone able to guess it listening to the episode before my reveal!)

As I often do, I spent some time revising the scenario and crafting some homemade props for it, so I’ll share those with the episode reveal, as well. Just to whet your appetite:

  • Custom xenomorph and other character pawns (in the style of Pathfinder Pawns)
  • Additional deck plans
  • Homemade agenda cards
  • Homemade initiative cards for ALIEN’s unique initiative and action tracking system
  • …and other handouts!

We’ll be recording the episode Sunday August 11th, and I’ll drop an update with the reveal and custom goodies once it’s live on all the usual channels!

*The cake is a lie.

Enter The Nerdom Plays OSR-style Dungeons & Dragons – The Complete Adventure

All episodes of Enter The Nerdom‘s foray into the old-school goodness of Dungeons & Dragons are out now! Follow along as hosts Stan Moroncini, Chad Cook, and Watson Bradshaw join special guest Dan Mason, and delve into the depths of the Puzzle Dungeon: The Seers Sanctum by Directsun Games! We used a hack of Ben Milton’s incredible Knave to keep the rules simple and straightforward, maximizing our play time and keeping the players on their toes with every death-defying encounter and mystery they faced.

Here’s the complete episode listing:

You can catch all their podcast episodes here. Be sure to tune in, because they cover many amazing “nerdoms”: Ghostbusters fans, the  incredible Star Wars-based charity organization known as The 501st Legion, professional wrestling, anime, and so much more!

I’ve also released some of the assets we used for the game:

I’ll put up a few more bits of information and perhaps some more adventure-specific assets I used in the following days!

Treasures Just Beyond – A Knave 1st Edition Hack with Gygaxian Flourishes

When the hosts of Enter The Nerdom approached me to run them through a game of “Old School style” Dungeons & Dragons, I knew I needed a lightweight ruleset to get us through what was likely to be a pretty fast one-shot scenario. It turned into two sessions, but we all agreed that the setup and “learning” time needed to be at a minimum to keep the podcast playthrough very fast and energetic. I turned to Ben Milton’s Knave to get what I needed!

I’d already worked on some hacks for Knave‘s 1st edition, so I just compiled those into a doc, stripped out some of Knave‘s more “lowlife, dirty bastards” stylings and replaced those with classic Gygaxian and Arnesonian flourishes: non-human PC ancestries, quick-playing dungeon and wilderness crawling rules, and a simple modification to make spellcasters a bit more of a thing via spellbook rules layered on top of the “anyone can use a scroll” magic rules. I topped it off with some Feat-like abilities to replace class abilities, and give the players their own little niche protection.

Here’s the final document I used, as a PDF formatted to be printed “Booklet” style in Adobe Acrobat, and stapled together. I used cardstock for the first page, to give it a sort of “cover” quality, and referenced it during play. Especially when the PCs started dropping to 0 hit points, or scoring critical hits and fumbles. (There were a lot more fumbles than hits, as I recall!)

Keep an eye on Enter The Nerdom to listen to our actual play of Directsun Games’ Puzzle Dungeon: The Seer’s Sanctum using these rules!

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