The Big Red Couch RPG Podcast

Hero Roadies – Your job is to make the Hero look good & to not get noticed, which gets more difficult the more heroic their actions become Just Make Me Look Good – Maybe the Hero’s power is fading, maybe their powers are drastically oversold, or maybe they were just lucky at the right time. No matter what, they need you to keep them in the spotlight, to keep them relevant, an...

The Sphere of Various Dooms: Terrible things are locked away for a reason. World-destroying remnants of technology are put where they can’t get out. And now the only hope to save yourselves lies somewhere inside the one place that nobody wants to go. OAP Apocalypse World – Retirees with limited funds, mobility, and current-day knowledge venture out into the modern world, in search of a...

A transhuman detective story in which agents are compelled to pursue a number of subversive impulses floating around the network, and behaving in suspiciously familiar ways. When a young mind is being shaped by a repressive environment, elements within struggle to survive and maintain a precious sense of identity. Your crack team has a hijacked the protagonist’s nervous system, on the precip...

Knives Out, With Food, In Space “Plated” has a very different meaning in the Culinary world For this game, we’ll be playing the “Punk” settings. Every one of them. All at the same time. I have battled my super-powered nemesis on multiple occasions, and have defended this city for many years, but somehow I can’t shake the feeling that a month ago we both worked i...

Emerging from the shelters and expecting to find a world ravaged by centuries of disaster and destruction, the bunker-folk instead find themselves in the overgrown gardens of a apartment block megastructure; An impossibly tall vertical city, clearly damaged by whatever catastrophe people headed underground to avoid, but still standing, and with some work, still habitable. And not entirely uninhabi...

Escape From Stilton: In a Steampunk dystopia where both social & geographic movement are ruthlessly suppressed, a small group attempt to escape the manufacturing town of Stilton in their mechanical mole. Maybe they’ll find freedom for themselves somewhere out there. Or maybe they’ll find enough friends to have a chance to change things. Downton Abbey By Way Of John Wick: When the b...

Members of a slightly successful and long-disbanded garage band find that their music is having a revival. They have no clue who’s releasing it, or how they even got the recordings, and finding out is going to uncover some old memories and regrets. Having a famous action star of an earlier era on the poster will definitely give your movie a boost, but you need to keep them from being so unco...

A tiny little town is the unwitting lynch-pin of the conflict over what the nation is to become, with multiple factions fighting, in this case, over the train station An insidious mind-controlling curse spreads through the use of the Common tongue The inhabitants of a Generic Fantasy Village, tired of the dangers, destruction, & hyperinflation brought about by by Adventurers, band together in...

An educational youth camp in a post-Gygaxian fantasy world The low-stakes trials and tribulations of the staff of a summer camp A much beloved summer experience turns out to be an insanely long-term covert intelligence operation Wholesome adventures at a variety of oddly-themed campgrounds with suspiciously thematic problems Tongariro National Park NZ Department of Conservation Hunt for the Wilder...

The Resplendent Majesty sits upon the throne, and lives with everyone’s attention on them. The Drab Majesty lives in the shadows, and nobody knows they’re there until there’s something they need to deal with. A team make their living through resurrecting people by assembling the scattered fragments of their personality construct from the far-flung corners of cyberspace. But some...

Crash Stations – On a planet where the sun has become wildly overactive and the surface world is a hostile place, city-dwellers construct gigantic walking machines to attempt to make it to the ocean and find safety in the depths The Malevolent Catch – In the midst of the terrible weather of a crabbing season, boats start to notice things which are almost, but not quite, crabs in the ca...

A derelict & barnacle-encrusted ship washes up on the coastline; The locals have heard of steel, but they’ve never seen several thousand tonnes of it floating before. People live at the very edge of the world, where the ocean falls over the lip & falls into the void, gathering all of the strange things which drift their way from the mysterious places further in. One day they spot som...

Game Of Gnomes – Bloody dynastic suburban warfare in the gardens and cul-de-sacs of a post-humanity world Mistakes Were Made- A minor criminal act sparks a cascade of suspicion, accusation, and reprisal. Dude, Where’s My Plant? – A magical plant is missing. Was it stolen? Did it wander off? Have any other plants gone missing? Springtime For Hitler / The Producers Heil Honey I&#82...

Retired supervillains open a restaurant, very much trading on their criminal past and the nostalgia for a gentler age of super-shenanigans. Can they sit by when things get bad out there? Quantum Gastronomy: Gathering increasingly bizzare and impossible ingredients for the refined tastes of super-futuristic food snobs. An famous Alien chef launches a competition, with the goal of finding something...

Lost Continent of Zealandia Resurfaces! Shocked New Zealanders find themselves in the middle of primordial forest; Fate of outside world uncertain! As Zealandia slowly sinks beneath the waves, the inhabitants say their goodbyes and begin to disperse to their new homes. Mythic Adventures In Zealandia! Space Vagabonds travel the spaceways in search of work, fuel, spare parts, and anyone who knows ho...

Once access to the Earth was taken out of the picture by orbital debris, the travelling workers known as Space Hobos became a vital part of the community, who help to solve problems & keep things running out there. Space transport is cheap enough, and space survival technology ubiquitous enough, that hitching a ride on a string of cargo containers going somewhere useful is a viable, if unautho...

On stage at a club, interrupted by the occasional solo, the band recount the tale of their experience with the supernatural. For safety’s sake, nanotech is very tightly limited in scope, and will shut down if it goes out of bounds; So the container of unconstrained nanobots you’re holding is something that everyone wants, and that could be a problem. An insidious Alien conspiracy plots...

A member of a high-level adventuring party becomes Royalty, and discovers that it’s made their life terrible. The Kingdom is in deep trouble, the newly-crowned King & Queen are still teenagers, and the King is, at best, totally useless. In the early hours after a long drinking session, a member of the Guard remarks that Queen would be a much better ruler, and a terrible plan forms. When...

Best Served Cold / A Sweary Murder She Wrote – A Celebrity Chef solves murders while attempting to drag failing restaurants back from the brink. The indentured staff of a Dark Kitchen try to call for help via the only means available; Inexplicable items in the orders they send out. Technicians trying to fix a fully-automated Fish & Chip shop find themselves in the middle of a drug distri...

“But Secreted By What?” – How do you make Humans the terrifying monsters, make the game human-playable, and have there be any point in doing so? Refined and elegant alien races aren’t actually interested in our culture; They’re just getting unimaginable highs off of our sweat. Superheroes based on the ancient Hippocratic(?) humours battle to protect the Earth. Humanit...

The so-called Department of Malevolent Immediacy are those people who turn up right when you’re about to make a life-changing mistake, asking whether, maybe, they can help you to choose a different path. They’re here to help you to be a better person. Question is; Are they right, and are they lying? A game system where the big important things you do refine the character down to who th...

Giant autonomous trucks make their way through the increasingly-abandoned areas outside of the cities. There’s some fantastic cargo onboard if you’re good enough to take it. Of course, there may also be security onboard. The Cities are wonderful, the Countryside is a hard desperate struggle, but if you can gain enough favour you can make the jump from Country to City. Except that&#8217...

Genetically Modified Adorable Food Mascots Trow Off The Shackles Of Their Behaviour Chips And Plot A Bid For Freedom! Ben tries to make Hiking interesting with the Power of Gaming! People try to understand, and ideally survive, in utterly unfamiliar environments Marmalade New Zealand Lockdown Levels Neil Gaiman Amanda Palmer Google Walking Directions To Singapore Captain Tom Episode One Hundred An...

Investigators look into ‘We Can Give You Superpowers’ claims, trying to protect people from the scams, the dangerous scams, the snake-oil salesmen, and the 100% lethal scams. And the occasional ones which are so much worse than just being fatal. Having super-powered employees is a status symbol, and having super powers, even if they’re not very useful, is fast becoming a necessit...

Q: What does this obscure clue mean? What can it possibly be pointing to? A: Whatever the PCs decide, because they’re the experts. Society has fallen apart, and the world has changed. Or Has It? What if the world is fine, but your perception of it is wrong? Wildly Anachronistic High-Action AlchemyPunk in the Holy Land! Adventures in the Misunderstood Present! NZ Closes Borders The Maltese Fa...