A Catch-up with Rob, No Bards Allowed - Part One

Arrggh! A Video Game Podcast from The Waffling Taylors

Rob from Gold Mountain Games (who have been going from strength to strength) returned to discuss what they've been up to in the six months since the whole OGL debacle. We discuss Balder's Gate 3, Resident Evil, Bards (horny and non-horny), and Squidge's ideas for Apple stores.

Remember that you can always get in touch with us on our Facebook page, on Twitter, or with our Contact page.

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

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.

— Squidge

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:

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.

— Rob

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:

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.

— Rob

And Squidge summed up video game history and D&D's involvement quite succinctly:

It's like: early D&D is sort of like [the Rosetta Stone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone) to everything that came afterwards

— Squidge

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.

Full Show Notes

Check out the full show notes for the full list of Squidge's questions, some extra stuff, and some links to related things.

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