『Geekerati Radio 2.0』のカバーアート

Geekerati Radio 2.0

Geekerati Radio 2.0

著者： Christian Lindke
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Geekerati is the relaunched version of Christian Lindke's Geek Talk show aimed at every kind of geek. We talk movies, novels, comic books, video games, board games, rpgs and more. If someone can geek out about it, we will. Subscribe to The Geekerati Newsletter at geekeratimedia.com and help support this podcast.

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  • Christian Talks Game Books as RPGs and Recent Half-Price-Books Finds

    Christian Talks Game Books as RPGs and Recent Half-Price-Books Finds
    2026/03/12
    Another week and another live chat. I wasn’t able to run the live chat on Sunday, so I rambled on about recent finds at Half-Price-Books as well as my hopes of running a series of articles that transform the loose rules contained in gamebooks into complete role playing games. While many of the classic gamebook series have stood the test of time and remain in publication (I’m looking at you Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf), there are a number of interesting and innovative gamebooks that have faded from the market and memory. As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t have a regular gaming group when I was in middle school and early high school, so a lot of my “role playing” was done on computer or using gamebooks. To this day, I own a lot of the gamebooks I played as a child and I am constantly surprised by the unique mechanics or ideas that many of these books contain. Back in 2024 (ironically on March 11 of 2024 and thus exactly 2 years before last night’s live video), I wrote an article examining whether the rules in the Gary Gygax and Flint Dille book Sagard The Barbarian: #1 The Ice Dragon were complete enough to form the foundation of a role playing game. I had hoped to do a full series on game book mechanics that attempts to make complete role playing games based on their rules, and I think it’s time that I followed up on that idea. I’ll be including the full text of that older article below, so that we’ll have a frame of reference for when I design a full role playing game based on the rules in this book next week.Before I get to that though, I do want to say that what I am writing here is not a description of the video above. That live video has some interesting moments…I think…and it was great to see Mark Finn stop by. It made it less lonely and his questions helped inspire me for some future articles, articles that will require a bit more reading. So please check out the video and please forgive the awkwardness. I am also in the process of scheduling some interviews/formal discussions that I hope to share with all of you in the future.And now…on to Sagard.Barbarians at the GatesBack in May of 2023 J.Q. Graziano wrote a post about Flint Dille and Gary Gygax’s Sagard the Barbarian series of fantasy gamebooks. I came across the article today when J.Q. shared the item on his Facebook page and since I’d missed the article the first time around, I hopped right on over and read it. It’s a fairly good review of the book and series and highlights an often overlooked Gamebook series. It’s a shame that the series is overlooked because not only do they feature excellent Richard Corben covers, they were written by Gary Gygax and Flint Dille.I interviewed Dille and David Marconi regarding their Agent 13 character back in 2013 and during that conversation there were a couple of asides that mentioned Dille’s relationship with Gygax, including a mention of the Sagard books series.It seems natural that Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game, would dive into the adventure gamebook craze and he did so in 1985 with the Sagard the Barbarian series of gamebooks. Players of Dungeons & Dragons might notice where the books are set because this series of four interactive novels took place in Gary Gygax’s signature World of Greyhawk campaign setting.Sagard’s adventures in The Ice Dragon begin in a mountain range called The Rakers which make up the border of Ratik and the Theocracy of the Pale. Because Sagard’s adventures are set in the World of Greyhawk, there’s a ton of published setting material a GM can use, even if they chose to use the gamebook mechanics instead of D&D.Gygax co-wrote the Sagard series with Flint Dille. Dille’s other works have included the Transformers and GI Joe TV series, as well The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay video game. Gygax met Dille while he was in Hollywood working on the Dungeons & Dragons animated series, and his relationship with Dille led to Gygax asking Dille’s sister Lorraine Williams to help save a floundering TSR in 1984. The Williams saga is its own story, one which has left Lorraine’s name an epithet in some gaming circles. That story is ably covered by Ben Riggs in his book Slaying the Dragon.Needless to say, by the end of 1985, the same year that The Ice Dragon was published, Gygax sold his stock in TSR to Williams and ended his relationship with the company.All of this leaves one to wonder what Gygax thought of Dille and whether the Williams affair is one of the reasons why the Sagard saga is limited to the four existing volumes. Based on the interview I had with Dille, I think their relationship remained strong as Dille describes the years he got to hang out with Gygax as some of the best years of his life.The Ice Dragon is an engaging gamebook, but is its game system sufficient to support game play outside of the game book environment?Let’s have a look at the rules.Game ...
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    45 分
  • Weekly Geeklist and Live Chat on Some Books I Love

    Weekly Geeklist and Live Chat on Some Books I Love
    2026/03/08
    Before I get into this week’s Weekly Geeklist I thought I’d point out that I’m trying something a little different with this particular feature of the newsletter. For the past two weeks, I’ve launched unscheduled live chats on Substack. The first one, last week, was just me futzing around to see how uncomfortable it was to talk to a camera without any (or at least minimal) interaction from an interlocutor. The live videos are completely unscripted, though I did think up a topic that I wanted to focus on before I hit the button to go live.It was an interesting experience and both launches saw a couple of people join in to watch me ramble. I’m not sure how many stayed, because there wasn’t a lot of action in the chat, but I think it was worth doing. In part because it’s a great way for me to share some random thoughts and touch base on what I’ve got lined up in the future. Which, in this case, includes reviews of the movie Megaforce as well as the new documentary (still making the film festival circuit rounds) Making Megaforce. I do want to take a moment to thank everyone who tuned into my live video! Yes, I’m looking at you Kevin Vasquez. Since I’ll be doing these from time to time, if you’re interested in participating in a chat make sure you join me for my next live video in the app. You can join in while I’m live or we can schedule a live chat. I’m happy either way.It was tough to decide what to highlight as this week’s Geeklist Oddity. I’ve been wanting to share my thoughts on the Idaho Horseshoeing School and/or The Hoof GP for some time. I don’t know how they first showed up in my YouTube feed, but they did and they’ve become a little bit of an obsession with our household. I really like how they show how important regular care of animals is for rural communities. The Horseshoeing School videos, in particular, highlight how even minor neglect can lead to some pretty significant issues. Before living in Idaho, I never thought that people might have the same semi-neglectful attitude that we commonly see with Easter “Bunny” gifts or Dalmatian Christmas pets, but with horses. I thought everyone knew that horses were a significant investment of time and money. Similarly, the Hoof GP shows how there are fake videos with “crises” that are far more dramatic than what hoof-trimmers typically encounter.I think my favorite Idaho Horseshoeing School videos are the ones where the instructor makes his own horseshoes. Since finding the school (which is in Eastern Idaho on the far side of Craters of the Moon from me), I’ve watched some other farriers and they usually start with manufactured shoes and then fit them to the horse. This is good as far as it goes, but when Riley Mickelsen goes to make his shoes he starts with a piece of iron and gets to work. It’s amazingly soothing to watch. He’s skilled at the blacksmithing involved and makes some customized shoes, often to treat some orthopedic benefit to the horse. The combination of sound and visuals is one of my favorite ways to relax. On another note, that shows how amazingly connected our world is today, Riley is working on his Master’s Degree in Equine Science from the University of Edinburgh.Speaking of Edinburgh, okay of Scotland anyway, Graeme Parker is the “Hoof GP” and is probably the worlds most famous cattle hoof trimmer. His videos about hoof trimming are, like the farrier videos, soothing and meditative, but Graeme’s shows are about more than cow health. He also talks about his own struggles with bipolar disorder. The show is the bovine equivalent of Dr. Pimple Popper, but with added discussion about mental health and animal health and it’s got some beautiful shots of Scotland to boot.The Lamentations of Luke Y. ThompsonBack when I started the Weekly Geeklist (then Weekly Geekly), I made sure to include articles and reviews by Luke Y. Thompson. There were three main reasons for his inclusion and I’ll list them in order of importance. The first was that he’s a damn good film reviewer who knows his Bresson and his Corman and finds things to appreciate in both; he’s a true geek reviewer with a real love of pop culture and cinema. Second, he’s a friend and I care about him and his success. The film review circuit is a rough gig and he’s navigated those stormy seas for quite some time. Sometimes with pretty darn good success, but he’s been pushed aside at other times. Lastly, he was my editor when he worked for Village Media and ran their The Robot’s Voice website for a good amount of time. As society became less edgy, and more sensitive, he changed the title to The Robot’s Voice from its original title Topless Robot. He did so in part because the WWE, and other properties, didn’t want to promote their products on a publication with that name. I’ll admit that I winced a little at the website’s original title as a freelancer because I was working for a non-profit at the time ...
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    35 分
  • Greg Gorden: Designing Games Beyond the d20

    Greg Gorden: Designing Games Beyond the d20
    2026/02/18
    Greg Gorden: Designer ExtraordinaireWay back in September of 2019, I had the honor of interviewing award winning game designer Greg Gorden in Episode 164 of Geekerati Radio. Greg was on the design teams for DC Heroes, James Bond 007, Torg, and many other games. Given the amount of time I’ve spent playing games he designed, or worked on, I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that he is my favorite game designer. In the episode, we discussed a number of the game systems he's worked on in the past and some of the mechanical innovations he's come up with. Two of his major contributions discussed in the episode were "Exploding Die Rolls" and the development of Fate Chip mechanics in Deadlands, a mechanic that has evolved into the Bennies system in Savage Worlds. He was also on the design team that pushed for the incorporation of Die-Step game mechanics into role playing games.The mechanics that Gorden developed have had a wide reaching impact in game design across the table top role playing game hobby and are worth discussing in some detail. As interesting and wide reaching as the influence of the exploding dice mechanic of DC Heroes has been, that is an innovation that's been around since the first edition of Ken St. Andre's masterpiece Tunnels & Trolls and I’ll touch on that particular mechanic in a future post honoring the very underappreciated design work of Ken St. Andre. His design influences are huge (and include the Fallout series of games), but he is not as well known as he should be in part because people didn’t often cite his influence on their designs. This newsletter post will focus on the second innovation, die-step game mechanics, and why they are one of the best mechanical foundations for any role playing game.The Most Common Role Playing Game MechanicsThere are several common base mechanics for arbitrating the success or failures of character actions in modern role playing games. Some of the most frequently used are Difficulty Number/Target Number (or what Classic Traveller called a "Basic Throw"), Percentage Chance (as exemplified in Runequest), Success Threshold (which can use narrative dice like Genesys or die pools like Vampire) or a "you, me, or we" Shared Decision Mechanic like Apocalypse World, Inspectres, and many other indie role playing games.Many of these systems use a "Fixed Die" mechanic as a part of their resolution. For example, all rolls in D&D's Difficulty Number system are resolved using a twenty-sided die, Traveller and Apocalypse World use a roll of two six-sided dice, Vampire uses a pool of ten-sided dice, and Runequest uses percentile dice. The die type doesn't change to reflect the skill of the character or the challenges faced by the character in a fixed die system, only the modifier applied to the roll or the number of dice rolled changes.Die-Step games take a different approach. Instead of using a single die type for the determination of success or failure of an action, they use various die types that move up or down to reflect the skill/natural talent of the character. For example, a character's Strength might be reflected as a die value ranging from d4 to d12 with a character of d4 Strength being weak and a character with a d12 Strength being very strong.According to Rick Priestley (a major figure in the history of the wargaming hobby), in his book Tabletop Wargames, one of the first wargames to use a Die-Step system was StarGrunt by Jon M. Tuffley. StarGrunt was first published in 1990 by Ground Zero Games and it’s second edition is available in pdf for free at the link above. StarGrunt is a science fiction miniatures skirmish game that is inspired by fiction like Gordon Dickson’s Dorsai, David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers, the Alien films, and role playing games like 2300 AD. The rules are relatively easy to learn and one of the reasons this is the case is the fact that Tuffley decided to represent the effectiveness of individual troopers with something he called a “Basic Die.” In StarGrunt, each given trooper is rated as either Green, Regular, or Veteran. The rating of each individual trooper is determined at the beginning of play with Green troopers using a d6, Regulars using a d8, and Veterans using a d10 to determine how successful they are at a given task. StarGrunt uses a Target Number system, but does use a Step-Die modifier mechanic called “Basic Die Plus and Basic Die Minus” where the dice used by the troop levels is moved up or down one die type (from d6 to d4 or from d10 to d12) under some circumstances and modified by a additive/subtractive number in other cases (+1 or -1 to the roll).The first role playing game I can think of that used a Die-Step system is FASA’s Earthdawn First Edition published in 1993, with game mechanics designed by Greg Gorden and others. As stated in the Geekerati interview, Gorden was inspired to use a Die-Step system when his boss asked him to design a Fantasy role playing game that had its ...
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    1 時間 35 分
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