This Is Not a Podcast

Talking about some favorite things

Strangers on a Bench and the Bastionland Podcast and me

Do you like talking about yourself? I sure do, though my assumption is that that’s a close-to-universal desire.

I’ve recently been listening to a couple of podcasts in which the hosts talk to people, who then get to talk about themselves.

(I’ve also been listening to plenty of other stuff, from The Town to The Silt Verses to Eleanor & Alistair Read That and beyond. But hey, those aren’t the subject of this post.)

One is Strangers on a Bench, in which the singer-songwriter Tom Rosenthal simply goes up to people on park benches and talks with them. He manages to draw out some very powerful emotions and anecdotes from people with gentle and compassionate discussions.

He then, at the very end of the podcast, plays a new piece of music that restates something about what the interviewee said. That’s a pretty weird and unique part of the podcast.

(If you don’t know Tom Rosenthal, you may have heard his biggest hit: )

One of the things that I’ve found interesting about the podcast is that despite the great compassion that the host has for the people he interviews, I don’t always feel the same about them. I have often found myself thinking, “Oh, this person is an idiot.” But that doesn’t take away from the depth of the material that is being presented, in part because the host isn’t an idiot and in part because even real jerks often have interesting emotions and situations to share.

I do think that there’s a lot of compassion baked into that show, but I think it is also interesting to see your own internal response to the interviewees.

The other podcast I mentioned was the Bastionland Podcast, a podcast sporadically put out by famed RPG designer Chris McDowell, usually in some conjunction with the release of one of his games. (This season coming out after the release and success of his game Mythic Bastionland.) He has continued with his Rule of Three series, in which he asks a game designer (not necessarily an RPG designer) or someone related to games in another way to tell him about three games that influenced them.

It’s a good format. For one, you often get to hear about interesting games you may never have heard of, or you get to hear people talking about a game you love (which is very pleasurable). You also get to hear people’s stories about their lives in gaming, and that is also often very enjoyable. People have fun stories, if you listen to them.

This of course isn’t the same kind of emotional content as Strangers on a Bench. I’ve never weeped uncontrollably when listening to the Bastionland Podcast. But it’s still good stuff.

And I will say that during both of these podcasts, I’ve had the wish that someone would interview me in the same way. I can imagine telling all the interesting and hard things from my own life to Tom Rosenthal, or describing my gaming influences to Chris McDowell. Like lots of people, I think, possibly delusionally, that I have interesting things to say.

Now, I will never appear on either of those podcasts. But since I do have this blog, I can at least play pretend and relate some things that I would have said on a podcast were I invited on one.

I will not (likely to your great relief) engage in a Strangers on a Bench-style emotional outpouring here. Besides the question of exactly who wants to hear that kind of thing, much of what I would say would impinge on other people’s privacy.

(One of the great thing about Rosenthal’s podcast is that it is anonymous. People never give their names or any identifying details, and he doesn’t ask for them. They just pour out their stories.)

But I am going to indulge in a Bastionland Podcast Rule of Three list here. No emotions or secrets will be spilled, but you may find my (really quick, since I’m talking to myself here) notes about the games that have influenced me of some interest. Listen, they’re games. People love games.

Chris usually asks how his interviewees how they decided on the three games they were going to discuss. For me, these three games are ones that both influenced how I run RPGs and how I think about designing adventures (I don’t design games) and possibly how I edit games and adventures.

Game 1: Vaults of Vaarn

Vaults of Vaarn is a post-apocalyptic game that is very influenced by Gene Wolfe’s novels, as well as a bunch of other things. I ran this online, in play-by-post, for months, and it is a game I think about a lot.

(There was a recent Kickstarter for a new version with added material. Since I have the old hardcover, I didn’t participate, but it made a huge amount of money, so hopefully the game will be available for purchase for quite some time.)

Vaults of Vaarn is a game that I recommend all GMs try out. One well-known aspect of the game is how it gives you tools to create the setting, complete with dungeons and settlements and the faction disputes and local problems that a GM needs to run a compelling sandbox game. It’s really a masterwork in this regard, and only a few games have come close to this. Every GM can pull ideas from these tools for other games, as well.

The main aspect of VoV that really influenced me, however, was the way that the game made procedural GMing so clear and easy. The travel procedures and the combat procedures made GMing a step-by-step process that changed the way I looked at the process. There is always plenty of space for GM improvisation, but having a clear procedure to stick to and to fall back on is both a relief and a way of understanding the flow of GMing.

I have no great love of the post-apocalyptic genre, but Vaults of Vaarn is a work of art and genius that every GM (and game designer) should try out and study.

Game 2: Wanderhome

While Vaults of Vaarn gives you structure to GM with, Wanderhome goes in an opposite direction, giving you just enough to not have real structure. Essentially the game, about wandering animals looking for a place to call home, gives you PC playbooks with some interesting characteristics to choose from one each on, a token system for changing the narrative, a calendar and festivals, a list of characteristics that NPCs might have, and a list of characteristics that places you wander to might have. That’s all the structure that you’re going to get.

I will admit something: I so far have no really used the token system when I’ve played Wanderhome. It is possible that might come up more in a GMed game or in a game where there was more conflict within the players. But I’ve played the game GMless and with friends or my children, and the token system really hasn’t done much for us.

And yet some Wanderhome sessions have been some of the most memorable RPG sessions I’ve ever played. It turns out that riffing on your character and on some NPCs and places that you’ve rolled up randomly (and yes, that’s how I use the Wanderhome tables) allow you to construct a beautiful story. You might spend a night with your kid celebrating an in-game New Year’s Eve party, as animals, and it drags you into a different world for a few moments.

I will say that freeform connecting of one random place to another random place has created some of the most memorable travel in any RPG I’ve played. Travel in RPGs should feel like something, and many of them try to do that. There are a number of games that I haven’t played yet that I think may have something interesting to add about the experience of travel in RPGs, such as TEETH, The Electric State, and The Last Caravan. But they would all have to measure up to what the freeform experience of Wanderhome provides, at least to me.

Game 3: Planetfall (Infocom)

Boldly going where angels fear to tread.

As a kid, I didn’t play TTRPGs, but I did play a number of CRPGs, from The Bard’s Tale to Mines of Titan (to an abortive try at Wasteland, which killed the floppy disks I tried saving on).

But the games that probably had the biggest influence on me were Infocom’s text adventures, and among those, the one that I connected most with was Planetfall.

Steve Meretzky’s games are some of the best Infocom games, in part because his sense of humor was so strong. And Planetfall is funny. You start out as a space janitor, and you only survive a space disaster by realizing the silliness of your situation.

After crashlanding on an alien world and finding yourself in a strange deserted facility, you still are beset by that humor, in the form of the robot Floyd, who becomes your companion.

Here are two important things to know about Planetfall. First, it is a text adventure with action sequences, one of which is heart-pounding even though it is not happening in real-time. The second is that despite Floyd’s existence as a collection of responses in a database that could fit in my Commodore 64’s disk storage, he can still touch your heart. You may cry at the end of the game.

I think you can understand why this might be important for TTRPG GMs to think about. Just like the programmers of Infocom games, all you generally have to influence your players are your words. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t awe them or make them feel things, by creating resonant images in those words. You just need to do a little planning and a little thinking.

An honorable mention: Electric Bastionland

Chris seems to not be excited when his own games are mentioned on the podcast, but I do want to mention one thing about his strange city game, Electric Bastionland. There are plenty of lessons someone might learn from that game, but one that has stuck with me is that if the players start out with very different kinds of skills and tools, as they do in Electric Bastionland, with its 100 Failed Careers, then the same module you ran yesterday for one set of players can be very different today when you run it for another set of players. That’s an interesting design idea both for games and for modules, to make games that create very different experiences each time they are run and to write modules that are open enough to allow those different experiences to happen.