The Giant Beastcast: Episode 240

This is my favorite part of GOTY 💙

I somehow always forget that these year-end tabletop sessions are a thing, which is fine because they continue to be a delightful surprise every time.

Also, it's kinda funny that Lakeith Stanfield ends up criminally underused even when he's pretend-cast. To any filmmakers reading this, the man deserves to shine like the treasure he is!

The Beastcast is definitely the only podcast where leading off about a "tale of trains" can get me so hyped up.

Save me from this GOTY talk

This is so good, I'm very happy to see this return once again.

Trains?! Oh boy, looking forward to another year of beautiful bullshit

YESSSS.

Thanks Austin.

Yes! Austin!

My favourite podcast of the year is back again. I will happily listen to these as long as you keep making them.

Love these things. Thanks Austin!

Beasts at the Table

Abbey's first turn in this is just *chef's kiss*

My new favorite holiday tradition is hearing the reason Dan just happens to not be participating in the Austin Walker RPG this year.

I love that they do this, but I can never bring myself to listen to these. Can't deal with people I know roleplaying for some reason.

EVERY! YEAR!

If anyone else gets partway through the episode and decides they want to check out the game being played, but doesn't want to skip back in the episode and lose their spot, you can find the game here:

https://sniperserpent.itch.io/anomaly

Just started the podcast; the cast is wrong in the description, right? Should be Alex and not Dan.

Thanks for the show!

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRD MARKINSONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

austin saves us from lousy goty 2019. Thanks austin.

I have that token in the thumbnail as a necklace! Cool!

Thanks to Austin for running this game, and to everyone else for contributing. Been a shitty holiday for me, and this was really fun to listen to, got me through the day today (as has a lot of the GB content). Just wanted to comment that I particularly enjoyed this :)

A highlight every year for sure! The New York Train cinematic universe is definitely my favorite!

Every year I challenge myself to follow closely and comprehend exactly what's going on in these stories...

And every year I'm doing so great until somehow I suddenly lose the thread and no longer have any idea what's happening lol

These guys just love trains so much!

At least there was something really entertaining put out this week on GB. Thanks Austin!

I've only listened to 45 minutes so far but I think I found your song:

I hope I can follow this one because the others went way over my head. Anyways, it's really awesome that you put so much effort into this, Austin.

So great, thank you!

i look forward to these end of year roleplay beastcast episodes every late december. thanks for taking the extra time to do these, Austin!

YYYYYYYYYYYY

It's always a delight when Austin swings by, and never more so than for these yearly traipses into fantasy land.

How deep do these trains go....

Giant Bomb, Giant Bomb Alumni, and Giant Bomb Auxilliaries NYC Public Transportation Support Group Theater continues!

Yo guys this fucking rules! Thank you have a good new years :)

Always am interested in these end-of-year Beastcasts. These types of TTRPGs are ones I would probably never play, since I prefer the more stat-oriented ones. But hearing them be played briefly is a nice look into them.

This was amazing.

I just had an awful stomach bug, and I just kind of wrapped myself in a blanket, stuck on a pair of headphones, and for 3 and a half hours felt way less terrible. Thank you.

This was my first time actually listening to one of these end of the year tabletop podcasts and I loved every second of it! Making plans to play Anomaly on New Year's Eve with my friends! :)

This is an interesting RPG system, and I think they told yet another very NYC wintertime tale with it (a bit of a nice return to form after the space setting last year).

But I miss each person having fixed characters. I feel like people are a little more committed to thinking of how their character would contribute to a scene and preparing something, whereas this system is all players constantly having any and all named or unnamed background characters at their disposal to be used in any scene. What I’m trying to get across with this criticism is a lot of this podcast was describing a lot of scenes and plot developments as a neutral narrator, and only a few times did anyone embody a character and actually deliver any dialogue as them. For example, JB Smalls and Patty (or Patti?) are both a great character setup, but were critically under voiced by anyone on the podcast.

I guess for my own point of view, this isn’t roleplaying. It’s like, collaborative plot creation or something? The whole podcast was less like any previous Christmas roleplaying podcast, and more like that 10 minute Beastcast bit where Vinny/Austin/Jeff B have the idea for “The Iron Grid” and outline half the plot of their robot football movie.

If you told me that each season of Lost was produced by this RPG system in the span of 2 hours, it would explain a lot.

Also, big ups to them for establishing the final scene of the “movie”, then the credits and post-credits sequence, then Mike introduces the “second credits” followed by ANOTHER post-credits sequence. That gave me a good chuckle.

Was thinking about this all year, these Roleplay podcasts are some of my favorite. Would prefer the "Everyone has their own character" format, but this was still awesome! Thanks, guys.

Austin is so fucking good at this.

With the thunder snow, weird paranormal shit in NYC, and ritualistic murder this game ended up very Indigo Prophecy-esque. Hate to be the guy.

The best podcasting crew is back together again! I miss Austin

Abby seemed to disappear by the end. I don't blame her lol. I did enjoy the story though.

Indie RPGs got weird. This is definitely not an RPG I'll be interested in playing (feels more like a colab writing class). I much prefer my stats, character, and gobs of dice, but I do appreciate these podcasts giving some good insight of how diverse the hobby is.

I am about an hour into this and I love it, great effort again thanks everyone

Alex spends a week of GOTY talking about how bad the story is in Death Stranding....spends an entire podcast trying to create a story that's basically Death Stranding.

@bisonhero: I did enjoy this episode overall, but I sort of feel like it was missing a middle, and the structure of it (along with the inexperience of most people there) probably contributed.

I feel like the biggest lost opportunity there was that they never seemed to take the bad option on the tarot card when the opportunity presented itself, or straight out ignored it when that came up. The potential upside of not playing a specific character is that you can potentially be a lot more risky with the story, especially with it's supernatural setting. I feel like a few more failures and personal investment in the story would have made the story more engaging all the way through, but it was also fun to listen to a group of friends just having a nice time, and I like being introduced to more games through Austin.

#RehireAustin

lol That intro comment about discarding Dan is pretty funny now. Whoops. We'll miss ya Dan!

(I also miss Austin, Austin is great.)

I always love these year end RPG-casts, it's kind of wonderful they have on of the GOAT DMs as GB alumni.