A podcast by Role Playing Public Radio which features actual people, actually playing Tabletop Games — mainly Tabletop RPGs; mainly Call of Cthulhu one-shots and an ongoing Eclipse Phase campaign recently. Listen to it here
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Players include:
- Ross Payton (main blog here)
- Tom Church
- Caleb Stokes
- Aaron Carsten
- Jason
- Thad
- Drew
- David
- RJ
- Dan
- Cody Walker
- Bill
Games played include:
- All Flesh Must Be Eaten
- Base Raiders
- Call of Cthulhu
- Cthulhu Dark
- Don't Rest Your Head
- Dungeons & Dragons
- Eclipse Phase
- Fear Itself
- Fiasco
- GURPS
- Little Fears
- Monsters and Other Childish Things
- New World of Darkness
- Red Markets
- Trail of Cthulhu
- Wild Talents
Tropes:
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New World of Darkness
- Came Back Wrong: Alex, after returning from the Hedge.
- Church Militant: Sister Mary Michael's order apparently involves combat training.
- Crowd Song: Common amongst the players. So far there have been performances of "Don't Stop Believing" and TLC's "No Scrubs".
- Jerkass: Connor's handler, Teresa/Natalie. Whenever he calls her, she makes sure to passive-aggressively remind him that she has more important things to be doing. Granted, he did tell her to "enjoy [her] passionless night of passion with [her] androgynous husband", but you'd think she'd get over it.
- Overt Operative: Connor will never live down the time he gave someone his business card."Hi, I'm Connor with Project Valkyrie. If you have a Project Valkyrie-related disturbance you'd like to talk to me, Connor, agent of Project Valkyrie—""DON'T ASK ME, DON'T— WAIT, NEVER MIND, WAIT, SCRATCH THAT, HOW DO I DELETE THIS, HOW DO I DELETE THIS!?"
- Many, many games later:Tom: DON'T GIVE HIM YOUR BUSINESS CARD!
- Many, many games later:
- Sword Cane: Sister Mary Michael's (non-supernatural) weapon of choice (it also serves as an actual cane). At one point she uses it to deal 8 damage to a guy's junk.
- Time Skip: The Slender Man campaign takes place 5/6 years after the Candle Cove one.
- Wacky Cravings: Once Alex comes back from the Hedge, he starts craving animal carcases.
General Tropes:
- An Arm and a Leg: Cross in the first session of the Red Markets campaign "The Grapevine". The arm thanks to an unfortunate encounter with a Vector, the leg from the Crusader doctor they hired to treat him after discovering he was The Immune.
- Bait-and-Switch Comparison: Thad in the Cthulhu Invictus episode, hamming it up for all it's worth and managing to make everything hilariously dirty. When discussing a chariot team:Mmm, yes, some fine beasts on that team — and the horses are good too!
- Casting Gag: Ish. In a Mind Screw-y twist, Drew's next character in Cthulhu Dark: Revelations turns out to be...Drew: Local writer and game runner Ross Payton!Caleb: Nice. What's your motivation in life?Drew: Getting published!
- Continuity Nod: Caleb loves to throw a reference or two to a previous game into a new one: referencing "Bryson Springs" both in "Lover In the Ice" and his Eclipse Phase campaign, for instance.
- Creepy Child: In "Bryson Springs". "She's singing a song about puppets!"
- Creepy Monotone: Tom employs this quite often (just listen to his centurion character in Cthulhu Invictus).
- Deadpan Snarker: Just about everyone has their moments.
- Department of Redundancy Department: Unintentionally in Cthulhu Invictus.Jason: "Illegal matches are illegal"?Ross: I know, yeah, thanks. Ross can't talk. Yay.
- Eldritch Location: The hotel in "The Night Clerk".
- Many of Ross' oneshots deal with the idea of Carcosa as a surreal prison space. There's little continuity between any two, but it's a fair bet a Ross Call of Cthulhu oneshot will have players trapped in weird cities or non-Euclidian complexes.
- Embarrassing First Name: Iroquoi Johnson from the Brutalists, Red Markets campaign. His family was both progressive and traditional.
- Epic Fail: Being a tabletop game session, sometimes hilarity results from the capriciousness of the dice causing misfortune for our heroes.
- Epunymous Title: The book titles Tom and Ross made up.
- Gladiator Games: Tom's character, a centurion, participates in an underground match.
- The Great Depression: Caleb's No Security horror scenarios are set in this period.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: The denouement of Cthulhu Dark: Revelations. Be Careful What You Wish For.
- Homage: Ross runs three (to Video Game/Prototype', Lone Survivor, and Hotline Miami), Aaron runs one (to The Secret of NIMH). Caleb has run a Wild Mad Guessing version of The Great Gatsby'' directly lifted from brilliant navelgazing by students in a high school English class he taught.
- In addition, Ross seems to really like The King in Yellow, writing at least three scenarios based on it, influenced by Delta Green's "Night Floors" take on Carcosa.
- Hurl It into the Sun: Early in the Base Raiders campaign Gate Nine the party were given the opportunity to recreate a pre-Ragnarok Energy Being superhero, they decided to shoot him into the sun instead.
- Hurricane of Puns: Bill is fond of these, but the whole party join in on “We Cannot Hallow These Grounds”
- I Call It "Vera": Dave's character's tommy gun, Lucille.
- Intrepid Reporter: "Sheldon Baykah, ace reportah." "Talk exactly like that, Ross, please."
- Kill It with Fire: Aaron's defence against a Scary Scarecrow. It (ahem) backfires when the orange grove around him burns up.Aaron: I start backing away from it —
- This is usually part of an even more extreme kill it attempt on the near-indestructible antagonists in Ross' Night's Black Agents campaign.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Tom's and Ross's characters mercilessly beat a rapist to a pulp.
- Literal Genie: When Yog-Sothoth answers a priest's wishes to live in a time of biblical truth and Ross's wish for things to "go back to the way they were yesterday".
- Murderous Mannequin / Perverse Puppet: Artists' marionettes in "Bryson Springs". (As illustrated by Ean Moody here◊ and here◊.)
- Non-Residential Residence: One of their Red Markets campaigns is based out of an Enclave built in a mall called "Grapevine". The derelict cars in the parking lot have been assembled into a makeshift wall to keep zombies out and those who can't afford the rent on one of the ex-stores live in tents out in the emptied lot.
- Out of the Inferno: Aaron's character, against all odds. See Kill It with Fire above.
- Out with a Bang: How many of the victims in "Lover in the Ice" died.
- Please Put Some Clothes On: "Why is your toga off?" "Why isn't yours?"
- Plot Tailored to the Party: Operate Heavy Machinery was a Call of Cthulhu scenario designed to facilitate the use of the skill of the same name, being set in a slaughterhouse with construction equipment around, after several prior episodes have them mention how that skill goes unused. As it turns out, the party never thinks of operating any heavy machinery.
- Police Brutality: The cop in "Bryson Springs" gets his comeuppance.
- Porn Stash: Made horrifying to the point of inducing SAN loss in "Lover In the Ice". See Room Full of Crazy below.
- Better Angels: No Soul Left Behind features an especially exciting version. A man capable of making copies of himself with a demonic Xerox machine travels with VHS tapes of a dozen copies of himself getting it on. Some might consider the fact that this is used to ruin his reputation and life problematic. But it's explicit in the text that the guy is also a horrible murderer, so it can also be interpreted as a comment on the hypocrisy of conservative media culture.
- Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: Plenty of them.
- In "The White Stairs", Aaron takes a level in badass:
Gang member (NPC): Hey, nice car. Let us borrow it.Aaron's character: I'd like to, but there's a problem with the bloodstains. PUNCH (Knocks the punk out.)- In "Lover In the Ice" Jason gets an epic one-liner when fighting an old woman with an alien entity's appendage covered with serrated bone protruding out of her mouth.
Jason: I go, "Granny... what big teeth you have."Caleb (over players' uproarious laughter): I'll say you kill her outright with that. You kill her with wit.Thad: That was not rapier wit. That was fully automatic wit. - Room Full of Crazy: In Caleb's "Lover In the Ice". As the crew enters a suspect's house...Caleb: Pretty much. I'm not lying.
- Running Gag:
- Someone, usually Tom, playing a celebrity, a German, or involving dinosaurs.
- A player complaining about losing immersion or the podcast's long, long backlog.
- Tom's amazing luck with dice."Tom Church, ladies and gentlemen."
- Aaron playing a techie.
- Shout-Out: Saying "a lot" would be an understatement. See also Epunymous Title above.
- "First rule of Gladiator Club is..."
- "He's like Kif, like, 'the jackass wants to see you now...'"
- "He has ceased to be! He is no more!"
- "I'm Jason Bourne. I'm his dad. Or his granddad."
- "It seems that it's Bigger on the Inside — " WHIRRRRRR
- In Caleb's latest Halloween special, "Preemptive Revenge", the antagonist's getup at the prom scene includes elements from loads of films, foreshadowing at its true nature.Aaron: Oh my God, all the memes have collapsed into one.
- "I AM THE LAW!"
- Thad on Ross's fightmaster's voice: "My God, it's like Sean Connery ate another Sean Connery."
- "Wait 'til he puts on his sunglasses! 'Deal with it. YEEEEAAAAH — '"
- "Bow ties are cool."
- "I'll turn that frown upside down." "Let's put a smile on that face."
- Shown Their Work: The amount of research Caleb did for "Revelations" is pretty dang impressive.
- Averted in the use of chloroform to solve every problem. Rendering people usefully unconscious without killing them is basically a superpower, and it's not clear whether the troupe's constant use of completely unmeasured amounts of chloroform to sedate people instantly is a running joke, an acceptable break from reality or a failure to do the research.
- Although as of games published in 2014, probably as a result of this particular troper's mumbling in the comments, Caleb has started calling for medicine checks on chloroforming. Both times, the subject has died.
- Averted in the use of chloroform to solve every problem. Rendering people usefully unconscious without killing them is basically a superpower, and it's not clear whether the troupe's constant use of completely unmeasured amounts of chloroform to sedate people instantly is a running joke, an acceptable break from reality or a failure to do the research.
- Special Guest: On occasion game writers, such as A. Scott Glancy, Greg Stolze, and Shane Ivey have played or ran games with the usual RPPR players.
- The Stoic: Often Tom, usually combined with Heroic Comedic Sociopath, Creepy Monotone, and Made of Iron.
- Took a Level in Badass: Aaron is generally regarded as having done this. See also Pre-Asskicking One-Liner above.
- You Cannot Grasp the True Form: "Though the lure is alien, offensive to his eyes, the fish sees food, and bites, and dies a death beyond his imagining."
- Your Mom: "Your face is stupid." "Your mom's face is stupid." "Ooh, snap."
