Bringing you the Links that are not about Role-playing…but really should be!

I am terrible for wasting time surfing the internet. In my travels I am always finding articles, new stories and snippets of idea that make me think “I have to run a game about that!”  This is clearly just a wafer thin excuse to justify my web addiction.

Here are my top articles for inspiring RPGS this week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19049254 – beautiful and yet haunting, abandoned City scapes in China.  If I described a vast city with no people in it during an RPG then no-one would believe that it was due to poor city planning and bad transport links, not the Apocalypse.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19248230 – Insects who have their behaviour programmed from birth by a song.  You cannot make this shit up!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19244888 – I can’t leave out some news from the Curiosity Rover. Funny thing, the idea of the Mars landscape is so embedded in my mind from films and sci fi novels that the first colour photo looks a bit cliched and derivative.

Read this wikipedia article about the family who invented Nutella very carefully.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrero_SpA

I have always thought that this phrase in particular…

“The company places great emphasis on secrecy, reportedly to guard against industrial espionage. It has never held a press conference and does not allow media visits to its plants. Ferrero’s products are made with machines designed by an in-house engineering department.”

had great potential for sparking ideas for a role-playing game. Okay, in my head it is obviously a Cthulu game where the Ferraro plant houses a Great Old One. But your mileage may vary.

If any of these ideas make it into your game then please comment below and let me know – I really want to know I am not the only one who thinks like this!

4 thoughts to “Bringing you the Links that are not about Role-playing…but really should be!”

  1. I always wondered what might be behind the Ferrero people’s campaign to introduce sickly bland deadliness onto an unsuspecting world.

    (first BBC link url is slightly wrong — should be:
    “http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19248230”
    you have:
    “http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19248230 – the nature/”
    )

  2. Insect link doesn’t work, sadly.

    Fun fact about Nutella: an italian colleague told me that French and UK Nutella doesn’t taste like Italian Nutella. Reason is that the French and English Nutella are made in one factory and the Italian in a different one. I think the Italian factory is near a hazelnut production centre whereas the French one isn’t so the raw material supply chain is longer and nuts aren’t as fresh. Alternatively it might be because the two factories represent rival nanite colonies at war and the aqueous nanites in the Italian Nutella have reprogrammed my colleague’s brain. He tells me it’s the first one, but then he would say that, wouldn’t he?

  3. Smiorgan – I have fixed the Insect Link now.

    I see huge potential in the oddities surrounding the nutella family 🙂 In my head it the next instalment in the Cafe Mongolifier and Hotel Fibonnacci series. Is the world ready for Ferraro’s Chocolate Factory?

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