Featured Image

This episodes featured image contains the logo for the Gold Mountain Games; go check out their stuff, we’re pretty sure that RPG fans (both table top and video game) will love it.

Players

Squidge

Jay

Rob

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Content Warning

Usually, we’ll add warnings here about swears and such, but with this episode, there was some background noise on Rob’s audio. Squidge (our hard-working editor, and audio engineering expert) did everything he could to isolate and remove it, but there’s one part where it’s a little rough: 23:16 when Rob is describing the game SCUM.

We hope the background noise doesn’t take you out of the episode too much.

Show Notes

Squidge's Avatar Squidge:

From active timer battling to zombie slaying, Waffling Taylors covers video games beyond.

In part one of this episode, we are joined by Rob from Gold Mountain Games. We reminisce about gaming as we grew up, as well as covering everything from ram-raiding shop windows as pirates-for-dummies to the dangers of horny warlocks. Yeah, you’ll have to wait for that one.

So, without further ado, sit back, grab some snacks, and get ready for this episode entitled "A Catch-up with Rob, No Bards Allowed - Part One"

Enjoy.

For this episode, Rob from Gold Mountain Games made his second-ever appearance on the show and wanted to talk about all things video games. You might remember him from his previous appearance where both he and his business partner Tim discussed the (then) impending changes to the Dungeons & Dragons license agreement - the Open Game License of OGL

here’s a link to that episode

But before any of that, it was important to have Rob talk about Gold Mountain Games in his own words:

vhorza's Avatar Rob:

So, Gold Mountain Games: we are a small tabletop RPG production studio. And one of the things that’s changed since last time we spoke is that we are now a tabletop production company rather than a [D&D] fifth edition production company, which is quite… I think that lots of people have done that because of what happened.

But yeah, so we have our own setting, as you’ve mentioned, the Salt Reach Isles. We’ve had a successful Kickstarter for a Zine… And that focuses on one of the cities that we’ve written. It’s got some species in it, it’s got some monsters, some spells, and we are currently editing the second magazine for that. So that’s going to be coming to Kickstarter in a couple of months.

We’ve got some streams being recorded, so we’ve got one in our setting. We’re about to start Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, partly because Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming out, which is very exciting. I’m desperately stopping myself starting another playthrough before they release it fully. And that’s also interesting because we’ve got two complete noobs playing it. So they know nothing about D&D at all.

…

And then the other thing we’ve got going on at the moment, which I’m really excited about, is Dark Legacies is an amazing franchise written by Chris McCauley and Claudia Christian from Babylon 5 fame. And they’ve got two comics out of four out so far. There’s going to be a miniatures game, there’s going to be, apparently an animated TV series. There’s a card game.

And we’ve just signed a contract with them to publish their RPG, which is like Dark Legacy’s Corporation Wars, it’s called. I actually got some of the content yesterday and had a read through it and it’s really good. It’s a mixture of that kind of the Cyberpunk that you know and love with a bit of that really Dark Judge Dredd style in it. It’s got bits of the Expanse in there as well. It’s really interesting and I’m really excited that we’re going to be publishing that… We’ll be publishing the main book and then we’ll also be creating more content for it. We’re going to have a live stream of it as well. There’s a lot of exciting stuff coming out of it.

So if you’re interested in tabletop gaming, Babylon 5, Cyberpunk (the tabletop RPG game, that is) and/or the futurism and grim dark of Judge Dredd, then you should be checking out Gold Mountain Games.

Dungeons & Dragons, Tabletops, and Novels

And speaking of D&D, at the time of recording Jay was reading through Aaron A Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon - which he was a Kickstarter backer for - and talked about how interesting it is that a lot of the earliest PC games where based on either D&D or the tabletop war games that inspired Gary Gygax to come up with D&D. Which reminded Rob of his first video game memory:

vhorza's Avatar Rob:

I was in Great Ormond Street Hospital when I was six or seven. And in there they had, like, a play area on the children’s ward, and they had a computer in there and they had this text based game where you were walking through the woods and you had to find the witch’s hut and avoid getting killed by the witch. And that was all.

I’d completely forgotten it until you started talking about that. But yet that’s probably my earliest memory of a computer game is exactly that. It’s sitting there in a hospital of all places going, "oh, choose your Own adventure."

I wonder how much fighting fantasy had to do with it as well.

And Squidge summed up video games history and D&D’s involvement quite succinctly:

Squidge's Avatar Squidge:

It’s like: early D&D is sort of like the Rosetta Stone to everything that came afterwards.

What’s interesting about Rob’s earliest video game memory is that it reminded Jay of the opening scene of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin - which is an amazing book and filled with references to video games.

Recent Games

The Recent Games segment will not be new to listeners, but in case you’re new to the show here’s how it goes: we go round the table and discuss one or more game that we’ve been playing recently, and whether we think it’s worth the listeners checking it out. We continue to do this until we’ve run out of games to discuss.

And this episode was no different.

Robs’s Recent Games

  • SCUM
  • Deadside
  • Baldur’s Gate 3

The discussion on Baldur’s Gate 3 brought up the whole “you can have sex with a bear” thing, and the conversation went off the rails from there - as it usually does with Squidge.

Squidge’s Recent Games

  • Hyrule Warriors

Whilst discussing Hyrule Warriors, Squidge mentioned that (at the time of recording, July 12th, 2023) he was eagerly awaiting delivery of the Resident Evil board game. In between recording the episode and releasing, Squidge has received the board game, and has been having a huge amount of it with close friend of the show Ik. When asked about it, Ik had this to say

missingNo's Avatar Ik:

…

Jay’s Recent Games

  • Resident Evil (PC)

Jay used both Lutris (which is a game launcher) and Apple of Eden’s Resident Evil Classic REbirth mod to play the PC release of the original Resident Evil on his Linux-on-the-Desktop computer.

  • WCW vs nWo Revenge
  • Baldur’s Gate

And the discussion on the original Baldur’s Gate lead to Rob confessing that he just can’t play older titles because of the memories involved.

vhorza's Avatar Rob:

But I tried to go back and play [Planescape: Torment] and there’s nothing but good memories. And I’m just like so I always like in my head, I’m kind of going, "why don’t you just play a new game?" And I don’t know why my brain does that, but I can’t. I want to. There are so many games on this little list of games I’ve got in front of me that were important to me, going, I couldn’t go back and play them now.

Music

Links to the music used in the podcast can be found below. Definitely check them out, because they're amazing tracks by awesome musicians.

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Games Covered

We mentioned 20 games in this podcast. In the following order, those games where: