Having successfully recovered from The Towel Incident last week, we return to discuss two “Powered by the Apocalypse” games: Monsterhearts and Dungeon World. What does a high school monster love story game have in common with a throwback to old school D&D? Studded leather.

After listening to the episode, Lyal felt that Chris and Wayne didn’t really explain how the Dungeon World game works. There is now a write-up of the session we played both here in the Idle Red Hands forum and here in the Dungeon World subforum of the Barf Forth Apocalyptica forums.

Let’s look 100 years into the future to see what 2012 will bring!

A pneumatic tube messaging craze will sweep the country!
Science will find the cure for racism: all babies born in 2012 will be white!
Automatons will do all domestic chores! Women will stay in the kitchen for the fun of it!
Man will teach dogs and cats to talk! Will learn that they never really had much to say!
The Idle Red Hands, a radio program about Marxism, will win best show of the year!

In this Literature Lesson, we look at the science fiction of Verne, Wells, and Burroughs. Despite having an outline that includes colonialism, eugenics and xenophobia, we’re actually surprised when the show gets dark.

No one knows how it happened. To understand, you’d have to go back to a time before D&D Next or Monsterhearts. In a blaze of madness and surrounded by the hum of computers, we tried Apocalypse World. It was a world and there had been an apocalypse. I guess it was too much to ask for a more creative name.

In this episode, we talk about Apocalypse World. We played it over Skype, so we share our experiences with that as well.

Plus: Our next entry in our D&D Next Diary

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
– Winston Churchill

Was Churchill talking about World War Two or a game of Axis and Allies?
With an apocalypse, the end is not really the end either. In fact, it’s where the fun really begins, if radiation sickness, starvation and sterility could be called “fun”.
In this episode, we talk about the post-apocalypse, including zombies, vampires, farmers, and Sam Gamgee’s second favourite topic.

Special Note: The Novel which Chris refers to, in which weapons are used to remove information from matter, is titled “The Gone-Away World” by Nick Harkaway.

In the first of two parts, we discuss running games set before and during an apocalypse. In this episode, it’s Wayne’s turn to read out the difficult words. Unlike Lyal’s struggles with Icelandic, though, Wayne struggles with English words. Fyndið!

In part 2, we’ll look at playing in a post-apocalyptic setting and the role zombies really play in a zombocalypse.

Lyal knew a guy who gave his girlfriend a picture of himself for Christmas. In that spirit, here’s our gift to you: an episode of us talking about what we want for Christmas. We discuss what games we’d like to receive, what games we’d like to see made and what games we’d like to actually play next. So, listen to find out what RPGs and board games you need to get this Christmas.

Merry Christmas! (We had to talk Chris out of dropping the t.)

Correction: The new expansion for the Privateer Press miniatures game Hordes is “Hordes: Domination“, not Dominion as incorrectly stated by Wayne. Let’s hope Santa puts the correct thing under his tree anyway.