Random RPG Night

So, I've managed to coerce my friends into having a second weekly game night, dedicated to trying out new stuff in one-shots and mini-campaigns, which in practice will mostly mean a mix of crazy indie stuff and me subjecting everyone to playtests of my games. Hopefully it'll also mean other people running stuff now and then (including but not limited to the Ghostbusters RPG I ordered for Elton), and maybe even new people (or old friends who don't normally roleplay) joining us sometimes.

So, here's the list of game's I'm contemplating running. The first week is going to be the second episode of the Tokyo Heroes playtest mini-campaign (Shadow Hunter Akuranger).

My Games
Tokyo Heroes
Halo: The Covenant War
Thrash 2.0
Mascot-tan

Published Games
Panty Explosion
The Mountain Witch
Mister Lincoln eXperiment
Cat
InSpectres
octaNe
Prime Time Adventures
Schauermarchen
Dogs in the Vineyard
My Life With Master
Exosuit A-ok
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Toon

Games I'm Thinking About Getting
The Shab-al-Hiri Roach
Don't Rest Your Head
Shock:
The Dictionary of Mu
Hero's Banner
Faery's Tale
Orbit
(Your Game Here, Maybe?)

Setting Ideas (To Be Paired With An Appropriate System)
Magic Shop (Slayers meets Are You Being Served?)
Angel Soul (Scryed, but with angels)
Kitsune (fox-spirits in modern-day Japan)
Full Metal President (inspired by Metal Wolf Chaos)
Black Hole Girls (normal schoolgirls with extremely powerful alien symbiotes)

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episodes 21-22

I don't even know where to begin. Things are moving way too fast for me right now, and I feel like I'm about ready to snap and either kill someone or just curl into a ball and hide. And as usual, Raz has placed himself at the center of it. Caring about him drains me, and I think I'm just about dry. Every time I think he's growing up a little and acting like a decent human being (though now that I think about it, from his genetic structure I doubt he could produce live offspring with a human, one of the most important tests of whether two organisms are the same species), he manages to turn around and find some way to be infuriating. One step forward two steps back. If not for him, I think even with the bad business with Ryo, the dark future and everything, I could handle this superhero thing. Right now it's hard to be strong, much less civil.

Anyway, I should talk about what actually happened yesterday, with BAIN and all that, and how it gave me something new to worry about, more dark dreams pressing me flat against the ground, making it hard to breathe.

The battle against the giant robot that BAIN put together out of tank parts and such came down relatively easily once Raz got inside of it. BAIN himself, who resided at the center of it, was a whole other problem. His near indestructibility made it almost impossible to do a damn thing to him. I couldn't even knock him over, much less immobilize him. And then the nonsense with the rocket happened. The warhead-less rocket was programmed to launch, presumably somewhere calculated to cause World War III. Raz wanted to put him in the top of the rocket, ensuring that he'd land in some foreign country and roam free (he later explained how he had a plan -- one that couldn't possibly have been carried out in time), while Jack for some reason decided to put BAIN under the rocket, making sure we'd lose track of him. In the end Glenn and I wound up doing our combination move -- his acceleration to launch my Rider Drill -- through the rocket. My suit normally protects me from motion sickness and loud noises and such, but it was still unlike anything I've experienced before. The pressure wave of the exploding rocket knocked all of my teammates unconscious, leaving me with a choice between (a) doing nothing at all to BAIN, or (b) taking steps to keep my teammates from dying of sunstroke and such. I went with B.

When we regrouped, they recovered relatively quickly. The problem was that BAIN had disappeared, and the satellite that had been tracking him went down somehow. I really didn't want to come crying for help, but I wound up calling my grandfather for help. It turned out that what I thought had merely been interference to my sword had been a hacking attempt, and probably responsible for the business with the satellite. We wound up using it to locate BAIN, and having Raz use his super-strength -- with a few wrestling pointers from Sam -- to break BAIN's internal mechanisms without too much concern about the invulnerable armor. In the end he managed to completely disable BAIN, but it kept staring at me.

When we got back, my grandfather's teleport didn't work at first, and once it did, I was unable to contact him. He also had some odd news about future Ryo's memories being scrambled, remembering things that never happened. So, something else to worry about, something that could change everything.

And then Jack's churchy friend showed up with a mission, and it turns out that the facility they want to raid to free metahumans who are being used as guinea pigs apparently has Raz' mother. Hence Raz is determined to go off half-cocked and run off to Utah, never mind that even Jack hasn't been given the location and such, and that a coordinated raid with actual intelligence will probably do his mother more good than detective work and a smash-and-grab. I can't imagine what it'd be like to know one's mother is being held hostage and experimented on. I mean, I really can't imagine it; at the moment I don't have enough left in me to be capable of that kind of empathy. Am I turning into High School Hikaru again?

Web Search II: Electric Googleoo

So, once again I got bored enough to do some ego-googling, and I actually found some interesting stuff.

On an Italian RPG message board there's a thread about Mascot-tan, including illustrations for D&D-tan and SeventhSea-tan.

On Wikipedia there's something that's just pain odd. The list of fictional expletives article mentions an RPG by yours truly called F.U.N.C. (Furutistic Urbanized Needless Combat). The thing is, I don't actually remember putting it out on the net or anything anywhere. It was something I made back in high school -- cynical, satirical, ultra-violent cyberpunk with bits of Robocop and Project A-ko thrown in. I've toyed with the idea of reviving it, but it'd need to basically be redone from the ground up. I've gotten that much more cynical, and I've got a lot more sources of inspiration to draw on (Metal Wolf Chaos, for example) and topics to explore/satirize (violence in video games).

(BTW, it turns out that, not surprisingly one of my friends stuck the FUNC reference into Wikipedia...)

Go Go Tokyo Heroes!

I've been watching the original Power Rangers. Yes, I'm serious. The things I get into because of roleplaying games. I just had to decide to make Tokyo Heroes more accessible to MMPR fans, which actually is looking to be easier than I thought -- mostly a matter of tweaking some of the flavor text. Guy Shalev pointed out that I coupld pitch the game as "Remember how fun Power Rangers was before it started sucking? This game is like that." I never watched it when it first came out (I was in high school... though I did still watch some cartoons), so it's a new and rather surreal experience for me. I should sit down and watch Power Rangers SPD some time too.

Early MMPR is even more awesomely bad than sentai, partly because they're trying so hard to make it kiddified, wholesome, and politically correct, hence most of the episodes I've seen so far have a blatantly obvious moral attached (recycling is good, deaf people can be cool). I also love how in the first episode Zordon says to Alpha 5, with a straight face, "We need to recruit teenagers with attitude." That and every now and then they use footage of stuff that's blatantly, obviously Japanese (like, you know, Tokyo Tower) and hope no one will notice.

...There's also the thing that very few people besides me will find funny, that during WWF's "invasion" storyline for a little while Stephanie McMahon started to sound a lot like Rita Repulsa. "Rhyno is going to defeat your pathetic Chris Jericho! AHAHAHAHA! Make my wrestler GROW!" (And now I just remembered JR saying how "the Million Dollar Princess has become a Dairy Queen").