Just before I stopped listening to the Letters Page, Christopher made a other podcast, which I am only just now discovering. Since the episodes don’t appear to have discussion threads, I’ll just put any and all thoughts I have here.
Episode 1: I’m guessing the 32st credited playtester is one of Christopher’s cats, either Sil or a previous one. Also, while “gaining additional inputs” is probably accurate, I don’t know that it’s accurate to say that the purpose of a game is to impart feelings, I think it can just abstractly be a use if time, and you could well be pretty emotionless the whole time without invalidating the experience.
“One and done” itself was a one and done topic, that was great. Poor Paul’s mouth.
I loved Paul completely dropping the ball at the end there, that cracked me up a little there. That whole podcast was surprisingly great for having effectively no subject matter.
Omfg, episode 2 is like instantly better. Paul’s thanksgiving “dinner” situation is incredibly charming to hear about. And of course there’s the Elf-Dwarf Spectrum. And Paul mammalsplaining dinosaurs.
Episode 3. When life gives you lemons, sadly begin peeling them halfway through class and then put them away.
Didn’t have much else to say until the end, which I loved. Paul made a great bit of pretending to not quite know the thing he was supposed to say. Maybe he didn’t have to pretend very hard. Regardless I loved it.
I am not up for a re-listen but when they mention it could you let me know about the Sci Fi setting / game Dave Chalker is making / owns
His grandfather wrote a (pulp-ish?) sci-fi novel and Dave inherited the IP
The first (and only, to date) Gathering of Heroes was in Feb 2014 at the GTG office in St. Louis. They invited folks to come, meet them, see where they work, and get some glimpses of things to come.
AFAIK, Dave is the son (not grandson) of Jack L. Chalker, who was a prolific scifi and fantasy author throughout the mid-70s, 80s, and 90s and died in 2005. If there was an older generation of authors in the family I don’t know about it, but I had the misfortune of reading a lot of Jack’s work in my younger days and there wasn’t anything I’d call even slightly pulp-ish. Maybe I missed something, but looking at his bibliography I can’t identify a likely suspect. There was an obscure and remarkably bad RPG based on the Well World series at one point, but that was maybe four decades ago.
I know Cam banks and Dave Chalker are working on a scifi game with a “PC shooter game” vibe called GYRO Shooter (go figure) but that’s not based on a book and uses a variant of the SCRPG’s GYRO engine. You can find more about that in the free section of Cam’s patreon, Rusty’s House of Swords. Probably completely unrelated to whatever you’re asking about, given the timing of the podcast and the start of the GYRO Shooter project.
A caution: I am not recommending anyone read Jack Chalker’s work. A lot of it is going to be problematic from a 2026 POV, with some stomach-churning examples of non-consensual sexual torture mixed with body horror/mind control fantasies that just keep cropping up over and over again. He’s one of very few authors I truly regret having read while still too young to know what I was really looking at.
If that’s true, I’m even more saddened by Dave’s passing, as I’m a fan of Jack’s books (the more popular ones at least), and I fact I corresponded with him by email several times about a fan project. I almost decided to go to my first ever out of state convention, OddCon in Wisconsin, be cause he was a guest of honor there. And a year later he was dead. Easily one of my ten biggest missed opportunities in my life.
The thursday wedding thanksgiving question from Akash’Menards was awesome, because it made me think of an episode of an old-time radio show I just listened to (not “just” as in last Thanksgiving, it was a Thanksgiving episode, but it was featured on my OTR podcast like a week ago), where the Man of the House character finds out that his kid and her friends are ignorant of the traditional Early American Thanksgiving, and takes it upon himself to tell the kids what the first Thanksgiving really involved, to the substantial chagrin of another parent. It’s a really cool episode from a past era’s version of pop culture, and anything that makes me think about it again is a wonderful experience to have.
Three is many? Oh these guys didn’t stay on top of their lore, one of their first three episodes was about how three or four are a few, but five is many. Or maybe I’m mixing up what they said, because “five=many” is the Watership Down rabbits, and I didn’t think they were in alignment with that. (I do know they had the notion that “several” is a larger quantity than “many”, which I thought was a spectacularly bizarre flex.)
Ep’eete, as I would say if I were Christopher’s foil.
When Christopher said “I am like unto a prophet”, I really wanted Paul to go “So your revenue exceeded your expenses?” This joke doesn’t work nearly as well in written form.
The lirpa and the taiaha are the two weapons I would add to a D&D weapons table, possibly as the same single weapon but possibly as separate ones. D&D has several cool double weapons that are different at both ends, like the gnome hooked hammer and the dwarven urgrosh (spear-axe), and adding the lirpa as an axe-club and the taiaha as maybe a spear-club, that’d really flesh it out.
PS, I disagree on Rogue One being as good as Empire. It’s fine at best, it isnt as bad in places as the prequels, but also isn’t as good in places, I find it very disinteresting, similar to the original movie, but way short of Empire and Jedi.
I think I listened to Ep 9 and just didn’t have comments I felt like making. I do have commentary out the proverbial wazoo for ten, but I haven’t had the time to set it all down yet, so I’ll edit this comment when I listen a second time, not at work.
Episode Ten Point Pi, the GenCon Live. Rest in Beef, Sugarfire Indianapolis. I am more likely to visit Indy than most other parts of the world, because of Kurt Vonnegut, and it’s sad I don’t get to try Kansas City barbecue when I’m there.
“You get your name on the wall, and they’re free.” “Cause you’re gonna die!” Classic.
What is Christopher’s compulsion to have near death experiences? That’s two in two years that we know of!
Elevenses! The thing about the Best Roleplaying Games company having bad leadership decisions is either an actual diss, which seems out of character, or a strange in joke which I don’t understand at all.
Russ missed an obvious opportunity to say “Have a greater one!”
Travvor Castarline does great work on this podcast.
Honestly that’s a great idea. Unfortunately, “Have a better one!” has been a thing I say since … ever. I probably could have changed it up, but it would never have occurred to me.
Episode One Dozen. To the idea that every game should have lore, I present a one word counterargument: poker.
Definitely the person, over even ten roaches let alone a thousand. Admittedly it’s not really my attic, it’s the attic of an apartment building which I live on the top floor of. But still, the number of possible person scenarios, where as little as one roach was preferable, is very small. In most cases I could just ask the person to please leave, and if that doesn’t work I call police. Calling an exterminator for roaches is much more of a boondoggle.
One of the banter of the episodes they ever actualized, though really not THAT bant in the grand scheme of things.
I probably could have changed it up, but it would never have occurred to me. 