Yaruki Zero Podcast #23 (26 minutes, 51 seconds)

Listening to way, waaaaay too much of The Bugle (a comedy news podcast by John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman), I wound up doing a YKZ podcast that’s a weird mix of my usual blather and some weird attempts at humor. I talk in silly bullshit mode about the Super Bowl (be sure to check out the Breaking Madden Super Bowl) and some weird stuff from the news, and in normal mode about i.hate.everyone and Kickstarter stuff. (And you should totally check out The Whispering Road, Dice Empire, and Japanese: The Game.)

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

Caricature of Ewen courtesy of C. Ellis.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #22 (39 minutes, 42 seconds)

2013 was quite a year for me, plus I haven’t done a proper podcast in ages (literally over 2 years…), so I decided to do an overview of my year, covering the Channel A and Golden Sky Stories Kickstarters, Maid RPG, Fate and Adventures of the Space Patrol, Destiny Dice, Beyond Otaku Dreams, and a few other odds and ends.

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

Caricature of Ewen courtesy of C. Ellis.

This special episode is a compilation of the second half of the “Today in Geek History” daily podcast I posted on Tumblr. (Here’s Part 1) This is a part of I’ve been working on a humor book titled “I Want to be an Awesome Robot,” and one of my many goals for 2014 is to finally finish up the book. One of my other goals is to get back into proper podcasting, starting with a review of 2013, which I’m hoping to record and post over this weekend.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #21 (1 hour, 30 minutes, 5 seconds)

Caricature of Ewen courtesy of C. Ellis.

This special episode is a compilation of the first six months of the “Today in Geek History” daily podcast I’ve been posting on Tumblr. I’ve been working on a humor book titled “I Want to be an Awesome Robot,” and one rather large section of it is a calendar with a fake fact about the history of geekdom for every single day of the calendar year, plus one or two days I made up. I does have plenty of RPG stuff in it (including the tale of Gary Gygax’s quest for the Rod of Seven Dice), though there’s also entries relating to anime, video games, sci-fi, literature, science, history, and more besides. Filling up 365 days is hard, especially when you make it so that it’s actually 379. The whole thing is a bit over an hour and a half, though on the plus side you can now listen all the way through without clicking on dozens and dozens of individual Tumblr posts, most of which are less than a minute long. Expect another similar compilation episode in January 2014!

Yaruki Zero Podcast #20 (1 hour, 36 minutes, 32 seconds)

Caricature of Ewen courtesy of C. Ellis.

If you know me at all, you know that I’m really random about when I get inspired to actually do things, such that I jump from project to project all the time. The other day I got inspired to revive my project to do an iRiff of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which in turn led me to get some better recording gear, which in turn inspired me to get back into podcasting. This first new episode is a recap of what I’ve been up to in terms of my own game design and translation projects. There’s quite a bit to cover. I started using Audacity (which is quite good), and didn’t feel like messing around trying to get the music in this time around, so for better or for worse this episode is an hour of just my voice.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #19 (62 minutes, 16 seconds)

• Golden Sky Stories (And since I recorded this the Tenra Bansho Zero Kickstarter began and took off like a rocket!)
• Magical Burst (3rd Draft)
• Dragon World (Dragon World Hack v0.1)
• Raspberry Heaven (Practice Test)
• Entanglements
• Some Ideas: Beyond Otaku Dreams and Divine Machine
• Channel A (and Cards Against Humanity)
• I Want to be an Awesome Robot (Studio UFO)
• Future Podcasts

Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #18 (45 minutes, 19 seconds)

This is Jake Richmond’s second appearance on the podcast (the first was Episode #11, back in late 2009), and he joined me to talk about Cel*Style, his new games, and his experiences selling and promoting those games at anime conventions like SakuraCon. I’m also a contributor to the tabletop gaming news site MiniEnt, and a more succinct written article is available there.

1. Let’s Talk About Neat Things: Jake is interested in the food cart scene in Portland and wants to start one to sell awesome noodles. Ewen’s been geeking out about Slayers because of Dragon World.
2. What is Cel*Style?
3. Some other neat Cel*Style Games; Anima Prime, Tulip Academy
4. Girl x Boy
5. Panty Explosion Perfect
6. The infamous head-punching incidents (also recounted on Found in the Alley, but this is the extended version)
7. Selling at Anime Cons

• Ben Hsu of Dubious Company joined them at SakuraCon.

This podcast uses selections from the song “Time Machine” by To-den from the Grünemusik album of the same name, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website or via Jamendo.

Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #17 (60 minutes, 13 seconds)

I became acquainted with Malcolm Harris because we’d both been invited as guests of honor for A-Kon (an anime convention in Dallas) in 2010. He’s the driving force behind Channel-M Publishing, an independent publisher of comics and RPGs, including Witch Girls Adventures. I’ve met very few people who are quite so passionate about creating and sharing their creations, and his enthusiasm is wonderfully infectious.

We finally got around to connecting on Skype to record a podcast, and Malcolm shared his insights on Witch Girls Adventures and how with it he’s designed and marketed a role-playing game aimed at teenage girls. He also talks a bit about the Witch Girls movie short he’s working on, as well as other games (Macho and Nemesis: Remix) and forthcoming Witch Girls supplements. He’s a really busy guy, to put it mildly.

1. Introduction
2. What is Witch Girls Adventures?
3. A Drama Diaries Game
4. Marketing to Girls
5. Daytrippers; volunteers who hand out fliers at events
6. Witch Girls as an (introductory) RPG
7. How do girls play RPGs?
8. Witch Girls as YA fiction
9. Witch Girls: Beyond Convention, the forthcoming Witch Girls short film, plus forthcoming WGA supplements
10. Macho, Malcolm’s over-the-top action hero RPG, due out this year
11. Nemesis: Remix, a superhero RPG for fans of superhero comics, due out in late 2012
12. Even more stuff on the horizon for Channel M!
13. Malcolm says believe in your self!

Technical Notes
The technical quality of the recording wasn’t quite what I hoped; my voice is too loud, while Malcolm’s is too quiet (usually it’s the other way around) and has just enough of a background hum that it’s hard to boost without reducing the audio quality. (Plus you can hear me breathing far more than I’d like.) I hope you’ll bear with me all the same, because this is probably my most interesting podcast episode so far.

This podcast uses selections from the song “Time Machine” by To-den from the Grünemusik album of the same name, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website or via Jamendo.

Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #16 (24 minutes, 48 seconds)

This episode presents a succinct but interesting interview with Steven Savage, the man behind both Seventh Sanctum and Fan To Pro. In the interview, Steven talks first about the Seventh Sanctum generators site and his philosophies of how randomness can inform creativity, and then about how RPG gamers can leverage the things their hobby involves into career stuff.

This is my first time recording a podcast with a guest in the same room (using my little Sony digital recorder), so there’s a little bit of background noise here and there, but I think it turned out surprisingly good considering.

This podcast uses selections from the song “Time Machine” by To-den from the Grünemusik album of the same name, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website or via Jamendo.

Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #15 (34 minutes, 58 seconds)

This episode is an attempt to unpack certain underlying “big picture” things in role-playing games that I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s not about how they fare in the marketplace (though there’s a little bit of that), but RPGs are and how they work. There’s a good chance other (smarter) people have said this elsewhere, but I need to put it out there in my own words.

Show Notes

1. Intro

• A-Kon – Lots of receptive people, my thoughts and observations seemed really new to most of those folks.
• Got to meet Malcolm Harris of Channel M Publishing, Jonathan Thompson of Battlefield Press.

• Old-School D&D
• The Perrin Conventions (Word doc)
• Traditional RPG play
• Are skilled GMs really that common?
• Structured RPG play

• Non-Commercial Gaming
• Gaming as Consumption
• Structured RPGs and Creativity
• Consumption as Shortcut

• Redrawing the Lines
• “Missing” Rules
• Naked rules vs. Clothed Rules (Guy’s posts on Blinders)

This podcast uses selections from the song “Time Machine” by To-den from the Grünemusik album of the same name, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website or via Jamendo.

Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

Andy Kitkowski and Ben Lehman join me for this long-overdue overview of Maid: The Role-Playing Game, and our experiences discovering, translating, publishing and playing what wound up being the first Japanese tabletop RPG ever released in English.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #14 (72 minutes, 7 seconds)

Show Notes

1. Introductions
2. What is Maid RPG?

• Penguin Musume Heart

• Yellow Submarine, one of the major tabletop gaming stores in Japan.
• Ryan Macklin in Tangibility in Mechanics
• A prior YKZ podcast where Jake Richmond mentioned getting punched in the head over Panty Explosion.
• Urusei Yatsura, a classic anime series you need to see.

• Ewen’s Gen Con Indy 2008 photos, including the booth and crazy guys from Kentucky.
• Emma, a fairly serious and historically accurate manga about a maid.
• We shared a booth with Jerry Grayson of Khepera Publishing and Mike Fiegel of Aetherial Forge

• JGC (Japan Game Convention), Japan’s major tabletop gaming con.
• When all is said and done, haters gonna hate.

• After we recorded the podcast I decided to start posting my original Maid RPG material online: Maid RPG 120%.

This podcast uses selections from the song “Time Machine” by To-den from the Grünemusik album of the same name, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website or via Jamendo.

Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.