42: Special Corpse Storage, K-Pop Satan, and Extreme Dabbling

D&Daniel: D&Daniel here, friendly neighbourhood stud-muffin and sole guardian of the podcast. I’ve been plotting on how to get revenge on Tabletop Tim. I might sneak into his house, open his fridge, and delicately finger all of his delicatessen meats. But I’ll need accomplices. Hedwig, Carlo, A Socialist Hobgoblin, and some new friends, (inaudible over music), and Will. You’re terrible

(opening music)

Pencil: Hello, and welcome to the Probably Bad Podcast, a podcast which is definitely bad. I’m Pencil:

Paper: I’m Paper, and today’s probably bad RPG idea is

(dice rolling noise)

Paper: “In the age of social media, omnipresent cameras and global communication, the Guardians of the Vale have had to try a new method to hide the supernatural from humanity: they’re putting big cardboard boxes over all the supernatural creatures. It’s flawless”

Pencil: It’s just…so, the fundamental problem with urban fantasy is that it’s really hard to justify how a secret society of werewolves is still in hiding, especially when you’ve got big global conspiracies of werewolves, vampires and stuff, so just lean into it. Every time you shapeshift into a werewolf, a big cardboard box appears over you, and that’s how no-one notices

Paper: See, ‘cause I’m generally the one that picks what ideas to do on the podcast, and I picked this one out purely because it just makes me think about Metal Gear

Pencil: Whenever someone discovers the supernatural, just a little exclamation mark dings over their head

Paper: But I do like the idea of just putting things in cardboard boxes, ‘cause no-one looks in those boxes. If someone comes to your house and it’s full of little boxes with goblins inside

Pencil: Like mine is

Paper: They’re just going to assume you’re a hoarder, it’s great

Pencil: This isn’t a vampire conspiracy, this is just my hoard of cool memorabilia. “All of this is Star Trek memorabilia”, I say as two vampires fight on the wall

Paper: Those tiny things with pointy ears are not pixies, they’re Spock funko-pops

Pencil: All supernatural creatures are disguised as being different funko-pops

Paper: It would make a lot of sense to me if funko-pops were possessed in some way

Pencil: Yeah, funko-pops animate on the full moon

Paper: You just can’t tell ‘cause people tend to keep them in the boxes

Pencil: Yeah. If you hold a funko-pop up to your ear on the full moon, you can hear it quietly shrieking “help me”

Paper: Doesn’t this suggest that this idea is perhaps real, and people hide the supernatural by pretending that it’s toys and models

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: Like the mothman statue, that’s not a statue, they just paint mothman in bronze paint and get him to stand really still when he’s not busy

Pencil: Yeah, little known fact, there’s actually no such thing as statues, they’re all supernatural creatures covered in paint or stone or something

Paper: Yeah, the statues of men on horses are actually centaurs with a fake horse head strapped to their bellies

Pencil: I just love the idea of centaurs hiding by strapping a fake horse head to their bellies. “Hello, it is I, a normal horse rider with my papier-mâché horse face”

Paper: “Get off the horse you say? Nah, actually, I like it up here, I’m good”

Pencil: “Sorry, I’ve only learned how to get on a horse yet, I’ve not yet had the lesson on how to get off it yet, so I’m gonna have to stay on the horse. Where are my legs you ask? Rude”

Paper: They’re also papier-mâché. Well yeah, you have the getting on the horse lesson, then you have a week of getting used to being on the horse, then you have the getting off the horse lesson

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: Everyone knows that, right?

Pencil: Yeah, that’s how you learn to ride horses. The way you learn to ride a horse is you get on the horse, and you’re not allowed to get off until you’ve learned to ride the horse

Paper: They’re just really committed horse girls

Pencil: Yeah. All horse girls are centaurs. If you know one, then you now know her dark secret. All skyscrapers are giants wearing big fabric cover-alls so they look like buildings. Sometimes they sneeze. That’s where wind comes from

Paper: (giggles) Course in the olden days they just disguised themselves as hills

Pencil: Yeah, that’s why there’s no hills any more, they’re skyscrapers now. All lizards are dragons, they’re just doing that thing where you, what’s the word, hunch your shoulders so you look small. So they’re all dragons doing that

Paper: Are you suggesting that lizards are just the Clark Kent to the dragons’ Superman?

Pencil: Yeah, if you take off a lizard’s glasses you will go “oh my god, that’s just a dragon”

Paper: (laughs)

Pencil: And all oceans are oozes

Paper: That’s true, ooze conglomerate

Pencil: That’s why if you touch the ocean even slightly you will melt

Paper: I mean, it’s a long time since I’ve been to the ocean

Pencil: Exactly. Prove me wrong, fuckers, no-one’s leaving their houses. So, we’ve said a lot of very true facts, I think we should get back to the RPG idea

Paper: Possibly. So, the other thing I like about hiding them in cardboard boxes is, a lot of films with supernatural, they always have that scene where you go into a warehouse, and then in one of the boxes there’s…I’m gonna have to call it a frankenstein

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: You know, Mr Adam Frankenstein, or a coffin with a vampire in it or something, and I like the idea that that’s entirely…that’s just what happens

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: That’s where they go to sleep. They’re hidden in their little boxes

Pencil: Yeah, it’s not a warehouse that stores monsters for the government, it’s just a supernatural B&B. This is the dark and edgy Hotel Cali…Transylvania reboot we’ve all been waiting for

Paper: I mean what is a coffin if not a special storage box for a corpse?

Pencil: Mmm. (inaudible) Each vampire must go to sleep in their original corpse-storage box

Paper: (giggles)

Pencil: I also like the idea of a horror thing where you’re being slowly chased by a cardboard box

Paper: It has to be full Metal Gear, where if you turn around and look at the box, it has to stop

Pencil: Yeah

(crosstalk)

Paper: Playing Grandma’s Footsteps with a werewolf in a box

Pencil: I feel that could be legitimately unnerving if you play it right

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: There is just a cardboard box, and every time you look at it it is still, but every time you look away it is moving, and obviously you don’t want to look inside the cardboard box, because who knows what terrifying thing will be in the cardboard box?

Paper: Yeah, it’s like mimikyu, if you look inside the box, you lose it

Pencil: Yeah. It is a frankenstein, but don’t tell your players that. Yeah, if there’s just a box, and when it’s still, when you look at it it’s still but there’s scratching noises coming from inside it and when you turn around and look back at it it’s moved, that could actually be a legitimately good horror concept

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: Especially if you’re in a building full of cardboard boxes

Paper: I mean, I have spent a lot of time in rooms full of cardboard boxes

Pencil: Mmm

Paper: Oh god, vampires could even have the special kind of cardboard museums use that’s meant to not rot for ages

Pencil: Mmm, like vampires

Paper: Just to save on rebuying the boxes. Exactly! Like vampires, who also don’t rot for ages

Pencil: Only if they’re special museum vampires, though. Yeah, you’re in just a box…

Paper: You walk into the museum warehouse, and you look in all of the special boxes, and you look in one, and there’s just a guy in there

Pencil: Yeah one of the starting ideas, this is a slight detour, one of the starting ideas for an RPG I’ve always wanted to do is you’re archaeologists, you just dig down, and you just dig up a dude, and he just waves at you

Paper: Not an obviously supernatural guy, there’s just a guy

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: Just like “hey, you made it”

Pencil: “I’ve been waiting 6000 years, you fuckers”

Paper: “I left a map and everything”

Pencil: But yes, anyway, you’re in a building full of cardboard boxes, there are scratching coming from inside of the cardboard boxes, and when you look away the cardboard boxes move. I feel that’s definitely…the issue is most players would set fire to the cardboard boxes, but

Paper: Mmm

Pencil: And that’s why the monsters inside the cardboard boxes are bombs

Paper: That’s why the monsters are coated with asbestos, which is even scarier

Pencil: But then you just need to wait a bit for all of the monsters to die of asbestos poisoning

Paper: Ah, but vampires don’t need to breath, therefore they cannot get mesothelioma

Pencil: I like the idea of vampires exploiting this by just filling their house with asbestos

Paper: (laughs) When the attractive Victorian lady starts coughing up blood it isn’t vampires or consumption, it’s just asbestos

Pencil: It turns out people were just really unhealthy in the past

Paper: I’ve heard this

Pencil: And today. But yes. I also feel like, I think possibly the best way to do a masquerade is to just straight-up parody it. Vampire…just massive nine-foot werewolf with a small cardboard box on its head and everyone is like “ah, a dog”

Paper: Ok, that’s not where I thought you were going. I thought you meant…’cause I’ve had an idea for a while of doing a comedy World of Darkness type thing, where instead of looking, having various monstrous forms, the different kinds of vampires just look like different goth subcultures, just hiding in plain sight, some of them are goths, some of them are vampires

Pencil: Goth or vampire is my favourite RPG. Yeah, I feel like vampires…I feel like at least some of them should be hiding as other subcultures (trips over words)

Paper: Yeah, werewolves are jocks, obviously

Pencil: If the Camarilla are goths, and the Sabbat are preps

Paper: Mm-hmm

Pencil: Then you’ve successfully made My Immortal as a vampire RPG, and it’s a fun game to see how long it takes your players to figure that out

Paper: The real question is what subculture are Nosferatu?

Pencil: I feel like Nosferatu are, I’m gonna throw it all for…I can’t remember the phrase. What phrase am I thinking of? I’m gonna go off the beaten track and say that Nosferatu are all the rich kids

Paper: Rich people do have that kind of face sometimes, don’t they

Pencil: Yeah, just this skeletal thing weeping spiders shows up in its fancy new ferrari and brags about

Paper: And it’s Prince Phillip

Pencil: Yeah, exactly

Paper: (giggles)

Pencil: Of course, as a British person, I am very sad Prince Phillip has died, I wish they’d kept his phylactery safer

Paper: I’m over it by now, I’m waiting for the Queen to die now. We’ll probably get a bank holiday when that happens

Pencil: All comedy is gonna be…stop being broadcast for 14 days when the Queen dies. That’s an official thing that’s on the table

Paper: Oh

Pencil: Yeah, all TV shows that have a comedic theme are delayed for 14 days when the Queen dies

Paper: I think in defiance of that we should put out an extra Probably Bad Podcast episode, because we are every 14 days

Pencil: So if you really want to screw over Ricky Gervais

Paper: I thought you said comedy

Pencil: Aaay. Don’t kill the Queen, if there’s FBI agents listening

Paper: I would be more worried about MI5, but sure. Shall we move on from treason to the first question?

Pencil: Yes

(music)

Paper: So I’m going with krios-vee, because I don’t think I could pronounce the move from an s to a v, asks “What kind of music do you have on during sessions, and, follow up, what would be the worst music to have for a session?”

Pencil: I have only deafening silence. I don’t even speak, I just sit there and stare intently at my players

Paper: Serious answer: I don’t tend to put music on during my sessions, because I find it distracting, but that’s mostly auditory processing stuff, but I know a lot of people use video game music, or you get various 1 hour atmosphere-type stuff on youtube that a lot of people use

Pencil: Yeah. My main issue is that I don’t plan my RPGs a huge amount, I’m pretty improv-y, so I feel like I find it hard to get the music to apply thematically. I’m not great at going “ok, what kind of songs will happen in the sessions that I think are going to happen?”. But, what music is the worst kind?

Paper: Caramelldansen 1 hour

Pencil: Kazoo cover of a kazoo cover of this podcast

Paper: The soundtrack to High School Musical 2

Pencil: Just screaming. Another…

Paper: I don’t think that counts as music

Pencil: Depends how you scream

Paper: (laughs) You scream a melody. That’s just death metal

Pencil: Death metal

Paper: (giggles)

Pencil: Another…songify the entirety of Critical Role and play that, just to confuse people about what’s actually being described at the table

Paper: I like that. That would particularly confuse my players, I think, ‘cause I have a habit of singing sentences instead of saying them sometimes

Pencil: Yeah. Have your GM and your GM’s four friends show up and do a barbershop quartet. (imitating a barbershop group) You fought the ogre, you fought the ogre, you fought the ogre. I can’t do a barbershop quartet by myself but imagine four other mes there

Paper: I’ve imagine it, it’s terrifying

Pencil: Statistically, there are at least four Mod Pencil:s in your room with you at any given time

Paper: You’re never more than 6 feet from a Mod Pencil:

Pencil: It’s true. If you’re listening to this, I do live in your walls

Paper: (chuckles)

Pencil: Yeah, I’m sorry that we don’t have a particularly exciting answer to what music do we have on during sessions

Paper: I think what would maybe be interesting, and I think it’s a submission we get a lot is, you did say you like doing quite improvisatory DMing

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: Just put a playlist on shuffle and try and keep to the tone of whatever’s playing

Pencil: Yeah, I feel like, I feel like there’s an interesting RPG in there. What you need is songs to be radically different tonally different, I think, so your having a sweet character building scene, then the music changes and immediately you’re bludgeoning a man to death

Paper: Yeah, it would…you’d have to pick the playlist carefully. It’d have to be someone’s random Spotify top 100

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: Rather than any thematically coherent playlist

Pencil: Yeah, you have to…your game has to correspond with the top 100 in the charts, and as soon as that changes, so does the RPG

Paper: I’m gonna open up the Billboard Top 100 right now, and just see what we’ve got if you were to do that. I guarantee I’m not going to have heard of most of the people on this

Pencil: We are very uncultured. This, personally, is the first time I’ve even heard of music

Paper: Ok, the top five has a BTS song and also Montero, so I feel like just those two would be an interesting tonal shift

Pencil: I don’t know who either of those people are

Paper: K-pop, and the song where he gives the devil a lapdance and then kills him and becomes the devil

Pencil: Ok, yes, I do think that that would be an interesting campaign. I feel more campaigns should end with you killing the devil and the becoming the devil and giving the devil a lapdance

Paper: Yeah, I feel just a campaign based on Montero would be quite interesting

Pencil: It’s a good warlock arc

Paper: Yeah. It’s attack and dethrone God, but evil. Or maybe good, maybe you’re attacking and dethroning Satan so that you can rule hell nicer?

Pencil: I am bringing democracy to hell via lapdances

Paper: I’m gonna be honest, I’m kind of unclear what Satan’s job is beyond being a generic evil force

Pencil: In the bible he does really…he’s a prisoner in hell, and he’s basically just lashing out at other people in hell

Paper: So yeah, you make him stop, and then you start being nicer to the people in hell so they can have their redemption arcs

Pencil: You’re gonna use lapdancing to implement prison reform in hell

Paper: By which we mean give people lap dances

Pencil: Yes

Paper: Depending on how good at it you are, either as the carrot or the stick. Either “if you be nice, I’ll give you a lap dance” or “if you don’t stop being mean, I’ll give you a lap dance”

Pencil: The world’s first only lap dance based outer plane

Paper: See, The Good Place didn’t think of that, did they

Pencil: No. And that makes this a better show than The Good Place. Come at me

Paper: (laughs)

Pencil: We should probably go on to the next question, before I get beaten up by the cast of The Good Place. I can’t remember the dude’s name

(music)

Paper: Friend of the show Blatella is back in our inbox. “Do any of the rules of being a fantasy dad change when applied to ducks?” I like this, because this is a callback which in turn references an earlier callback

Pencil: We’re forming a deep and complex continuity

Paper: So I think the way to do this is to go through the eight rules of being a fantasy dad, and figure out if they can apply to ducks

Pencil: Ok

Paper: Number 1: tell your kids things

Pencil: No, you’re a duck, you can only quack

Paper: Yeah, I feel like number one we’ve already fallen down, because duck dads don’t really hang around. So maybe for ducks we’ve gotta reverse this

Pencil: Don’t tell your kids anything. Which makes rule 2: don’t turn evil, into do turn evil, which, again, works out pretty well for ducks

Paper: I’m not saying we have to flip all of them

Pencil: Rule three is ogre babysitter

Paper: The standard of good duck parenting is very different to the standard of good human parenting

Pencil: Yeah. Rule three is ogre babysitter, so flip that and instead your baby has to look after an ogre

Paper: I feel like that might be a problem

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: I think an ogre could still babysit a duck, ‘cause it could pick up all of the ducklings just in its hands and give them a little snuggle

Pencil: Hmm. Yeah, I think…ok, yes. So yeah, with don’t turn evil, I feel like in this context it’s that’s don’t become a goose

Paper: ‘Cause geese are evil ducks, it’s well known

Pencil: Geese are wereducks. Every full moon, a duck turns into a goose and you have to put a cardboard box over it. But yeah, I think the ogre would do well at looking after l’il ducks

Paper: Yeah, it’d just need to be careful, and I mean, if the ogre babysitter accidentally kills the ducklings then you get to be a sad dad, which is a hero

Pencil: Yeah, you get to go on a campaign to avenge your children

Paper: Yeah, you wait the duck equivalent of a decade, which is probably about a year, and then you find some poor abandoned ducklings, you take them in, under your wing, sorry, and you save them from the terrapins

Pencil: Yeah. So, rule four is don’t leave your kids, which I think we’ve already established doesn’t quite work here

Paper: Mm-hmm

Pencil: (inaudible)

Paper: Yeah, five is don’t delegate, which, I think in context we meant don’t let other people rule your kingdom and things like that, which, I think that one does still apply to ducks, ‘cause, you know, most animals are territorial, I assume that applies to ducks

Pencil: Yeah, don’t let your ducks rule your duck kingdom

Paper: Make sure that you are the top duck

Pencil: Top of the pecking order, one might say

Paper: You could

Pencil: Ducks are territorial

Paper: Don’t let your duck vizier act as the surrogate parent to your ducklings

Pencil: Hilarious fact I learned: if you put a mirror in a duck enclosure, the duck will assume it is another, hostile duck, and fight the mirror, so rule six of being a good duck parent is to stay away from mirrors, in case you’re too busy fighting your own reflection

Paper: See the problem with this is that it implies that ducks don’t understand mirrors, so how do they know

Pencil: Just stay away from all other ducks, especially your children

Paper: May be contradicting ourselves a little here

Pencil: Check your baby for prophecies regularly. Do people make prophecies about ducks?

Paper: Maybe duck wizards?

Pencil: Yeah but, you know

Paper: We’ve established the existence of duck warlocks, maybe some of them have prophetic powers

Pencil: I guess, yeah, make sure no-one has made a duck prophecy about you

Paper: 7 is train your kids, so presumably introduce your children to mirrors early so they get plenty of combat training before they face an actual enemy

Pencil: Remember, ducks are well known for their never ending war against mirrors

Paper: That’s why they swim in water so much, they wanna destroy that mirror reflective surface

Pencil: Yeah, you want to train your kids just in being a duck. Train your kids to be just a little bit of a dick. Not quite at goose level, but a little bit of a dick

Paper: Teach your ducklings the difference between kind and nice

Pencil: Flip your ducklings upside down

Paper: Why flip your ducklings upside down?

Pencil: So they can swim upside down. Most ducks can’t

Paper: We’re going beyond the dabble

Pencil: Yeah. We’re going into high-level dabbles

Paper: The double-dabble

Pencil: The double-dibble-dabble

Paper: (laughs) Dabble Extreme

Pencil: Make sure to put little sunglasses on your ducklings and teach them to ride a motorbike. This doesn’t really help with the parent thing, but it is really cool

Paper: If a duck dabbed while dabbling would it help it dive?

Pencil: Dabbling diving duck, you say?

Paper: A dabbing dabbling diving duck

Pencil: I only dabble in dabbling dabbing dive ducks

Paper: But you’ve got to get really good at it, you can’t just dabble in dabbling

Pencil: Rule 8: clear communication. I think we’ve already fucked up that one

Paper: (cackles)

Pencil: Only communicate in elaborate tongue-twisters about dabbling dab ducks who dab dabble

Paper: Quack loudly and clearly

Pencil: Directly into someone’s ear. So yes, in the event, and I can only assume this is why you ask the question, that you are a new duck father looking to raise your ducklings, I feel we’ve helped

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: This is the general soundtrack to our RPGs

Paper: Have you considered using tongue-twisters as the background to your RPGs, to replicate the experience of being a nothic?

Pencil: Just have a weird man in the corner of your RPG room just doing tongue-twisters and dabbling their dab ducks dibbling

Paper: This is gonna be a fun one to transcribe

Pencil: In the event you’d like to dabble support our dabble dab dabs…it’s very warm, in case you’re wondering

Paper: It is very warm. Anyway, yes, we have a patreon. If you want to join our discord server where we play one-shots, so you can get the experience of being a human trapped in a cats body possessing a headless Ronald McDonald statue while fighting a skeleton, you can go to patreon.com/probablybadrpgideas. At higher levels you get access to bonus episodes, including reviewing possibly the edgiest RPG of all time, and homebrew races, subclasses, enemies, items, all that jazz, which I think is probably going to end up including sentient ducks soon, after a conversation with some of our patrons

Pencil: I think sentient ducks are coming, both in terms of a patreon reward and just as a general warning

Paper: Be ready. Yes, join our patreon at the 10 dollar level to get access to the sentient duck patreon, and therefore learn their weaknesses. If you have a question you can email probablybadrpgideas @...no. No you can’t

Pencil: Fuck you

Paper: You can email probablybadpodcast @ gmail.com or message us on twitter or tumblr. We also have a redbubble, which, among other things, includes a rules of being a fantasy dad shirt. That’s redbubble.com/people/probablybad. And

Both: Remember to have a probably bad day