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| Robert Bohl posts 61 7:33 pm August 25, 2009
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01:05:25 long & 59.9 MB big
This episode is the first in a new endeavor by Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), wherein they create a new roleplaying game before your very ears! Over the course of the next howevermany weeks, for one hour each week, Joshua and Rob are going to design, develop, test, and publish a brand new roleplaying game from start to finish.
In this first episode, we talk about what the show's about, and decide what game we're going to design. Linkworthy stuff we mention:
- Joshua's earlier game, which makes you cry, Under the Bed
- Kurt Vonnegut
- Primetime Adventures
- R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)
- The Penny Arcade series Automata
- Luke Crane's Burning Sands: Jihad
- John Wick's Houses of the Blooded
- HBO's Deadwood and Rome TV series
- The Mob Justice RPG
- Emily Care Boss of Black and Green Games
- George Carlin on "servicing the account"
- The Shockwave Rider
- Guns, Germs, and Steel
- Sons of Liberty
- Neill Blomkamp
- PALEO-FUTURE
- Dogs in the Vineyard
- COINTELPRO
- The Project Orion engine
- Fritz Lang's Metropolis
- Eclipse Phase
- Charles Stross's Accelerando and Singularity Sky
- Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon
- The Joss Whedon TV series Dollhouse
- The Cyberpunk RPG
- The question of whether squids have brains, revealed
- The game may take place over the course of the technological singularity
- Bruce Sterling
- An episode of my other podcast where I talk to Ron Edwards about finding who the protagonist is in play
- Ron's game Spione
- The Blomkamp film District 9
- The Big Three game design question
- Gardner Dozois edited Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future
- GURPS Transhuman Space
The intro and closing music for this episode is "Gotta Whizz" by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal.
 Read original blog post
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Guest
| xenomouse 12:37 pm August 26, 2009
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Sounds like you guys have a plan. I have a suggestion that I think would make a big difference for minimal effort: in the blog post related to each episode, write-up a cliff's notes version of where you are at the end of the episode. There were a lot of ideas floating around, and I'm finding it difficult to remember which ones you kept.
Right now, I can recall: paleofuture, the end of Mel Gibson's Apocalypse, robots as second class citizens, transhumanism, surviving the singularity, and bodies optional. Other than the last three, I'm not sure what else you kept.
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Admin
| joshua posts 217 5:00 pm August 26, 2009
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You Ask Far Too Much!
Well, OK. Maybe. It already took Rob an hour and a half or something to do those story notes. But maybe if he gets reeeeally into the notes-taking.
I think we're liable to find ourselves in a format-related bind as we get down to the nitty gritty of the rule details, and a full description will be staggeringly tedious.
My guess is, we'll jack some relevant mechanics and tweak until we're disgusted with the outcome.
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Guest
| xenomouse 6:15 pm August 26, 2009
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Jah, I get it. That's why I qualified "Cliff's Notes." I assume that you guys are writing something down as you develop the game (i dunno – maybe you just have massive cranial capacity for that sort of thing), and maybe if you could distill it into a handful of sentences – or at least fragments – and drop them into a bulleted list.
Don't make me crack my whip. 
p.s. – I like you're anti-spam control.
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Admin
| joshua posts 217 6:41 pm August 26, 2009
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I was actually thinking of just scanning my notebook.
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Admin
| Robert Bohl posts 61 7:30 pm August 26, 2009
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Phil:
Basically all we really decided is:
1) We're going to do a Transhumanist rpg designed to support narrativist play.
2) We have a bunch of reading we have to do.
I suspect in future episodes we'll have more "status of the game" things, but since what we decided on was kind of an "easter egg" for this episode, I didn't want to nail it down too clearly in the show notes.
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Member | Josh Crowe posts 7 10:35 pm August 26, 2009
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For your reading let me recomend "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." It's a quick read, Transhuman and goes to making a world where fighting is not the primary conflict.
Eon is an interesting book, if you get past the misoginy and remember it was written in the 70's. It is also the grand daddy of all these other books.
Other then that I think you guys have read or are aware of every other TH book I know.
Also, as an Engineer/Scientist/Technologist let me comment on the concept of the "stack." In a computer the stack is an external hard drive for backup, your organic memory is the ram, your conciousness is the processor and your brain is a combination of processor, ram and rom.
The interface for your body is the rom (or more precisely prom: programmable read only memory). So human forms and squid forms need different proms.
The copy of your memory in your brain is delicate and destructable. But a stack keeps a copy, an incremental backup of your existance. But, just like a hard drive cannot execute a program, the stack is not a functional replacement of the brain, it is a copy.
Also your copy can be replicated back into a physical brain but it could also be emulated by some kind of software or could be functionally altered and moved to a different medium. Think PC to Mac or better Playstation to Playstation Mobile. You might be dumber but with a lower energy brain or something.
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Member | Simon C posts 90 12:21 am August 27, 2009
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This episode got me so excited because a) I'm always excited about transhumanism, and b) I recently had a conversation with a friend that totally explored some of this stuff.
We were having this conversation where he was vaguely joking around about a game where the characters were all uploaded folk exploring the dark recesses of the net looking for old archived information, warding off ancient viruses, spambots, and so on. But the conversation kind of sprawls as we started asking why these people would do this. In a world where all information is electronic, history becomes mutable, thoughts are searchable by web spiders, the entire world, including consciousness, becomes editable.
So it went to a pretty dark place, exploring possibilities, and the ramifications of those changes.
So I guess I was thinking that it would be exciting to have a roleplaying game of that conversation.
I also really connected to the idea that you're playing a character who will survive this event, the "singularity" as you call it (though I kinda think the idea of a singularity is kinda fairy magic), but you don't know what form the character will have by the end. That's an exciting question.
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Member | Simon C posts 90 12:42 am August 27, 2009
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Post edited 4:44 am – August 27, 2009 by Simon C
Post edited 4:46 am – August 27, 2009 by Simon C
Oh, also The Cyborg Handbook is an interesting read. Check out this list of key phrases: psychasthenic logic, fetal cyborgs, medical cyborgs, sentic cycles, cyborg textualities, prosthetic sociality, virtual body images, cybernetic automaton, cyborg anthropology, cyborg body politic, third world feminist criticism, military information society, robot doctor, genetic cyborg, book cyborgs, drafting automation, cyborg envy, experimental fetal surgery, essentic forms, reproductive frontier, cyborg society, technophilic body, cyborg feminism, cyborg consciousness, cyborg worlds
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Admin
| joshua posts 217 9:33 am August 27, 2009
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thoughts are searchable by web spiders
That's the prize idea of your post! The corollary is the physical web crawler, prototyped in the Google cars and trikes.
I mean, I've often wished I could Google my keys or the cardamom.
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Guest
| TadK 11:15 am August 30, 2009
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Saw this posted over at SG
I am a huge fan of the genre, read a book or two. Not so sure of your narrativist format being a pretty staunch Trad Simulationist at heart. But I would love to watch this unfold to the best of my ability.
At my desk right now that might apply/ give ideas in my own head perhaps include
Eastern Standard Tribe Cory Doctorow
Cyberhero Hero Games
Unknown Armies
The Soucebook of MagicL A Comprehensive guide to the technology of NLP by L Michael Hall PHD and Barbara P Belknap MSW
all 4 books to MythOS by Kelly McCullough (A stretch there)
Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder (However his book Lady of Mazes is pure AI/Singularity goodness own that also)
The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys by Mick Farren
The Little Blue Book of Advertising by Steve Lance and Jeff Woll
Sorry to dominate on your forums. Looking forward to Rob's stuff (a fan)
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Admin
| joshua posts 217 11:21 am August 31, 2009
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