Series 86.2 - Strangers on the ‘Net with Allison K. Cole [Designer] (Creation Concluded)

·1 hr 23 min·5 clips

A teenager in Racine, Wisconsin turns to online role-playing because their small, blue-collar town offers no opportunity or acceptance for being different.

The table opens in a character-building knot. The host says the next step is a little out of order, because Strangers on the Net asks players to figure out why their teens care about favorite role-playing characters before they finish those fictional personas. So, layers on layers. Buffy and Spike shorthand gives way to a made-up magical-girl and necromancer fandom, and the joke works because everyone treats the nonsense like real game material. The group talks through attraction, archetype, and performance, then keeps pulling each answer back to what a teen player would grab onto. The fake fandom gets out of hand in the best way. A transformation saying, a moon-punishment-style catchphrase, Tetriarch Sacrum, General Nitric, and the Acid Boys stop being loose jokes and turn into shared canon. Then the table snaps the lens back into place. These characters are being imagined by teenagers, which means every grand title and dramatic archetype has to read as adolescent self-expression. Chosen one feels embarrassing. That embarrassment helps, because calling the character a cringy teen lets the table keep the fantasy without pretending it is cool. The mechanics stay loose and conversational. Anti-hero, chosen one, dark past, and tsundere work more like handles for behavior than rigid labels. When names get tangled, the group repeats them, cleans them up, and laughs through the pileup until the world is coherent enough to play with. Even choices that brush up against min-maxing come back to character logic, especially when someone wants their role-playing persona to be the leader or the smart one. The ending turns to promo, pointing listeners toward Star Wall Odyssey, an actual play about a tenement building that is also a spaceship, with the first five episodes in podcast apps and the full run on Patreon.

As heard by us

A character-building session turns magical-girl archetypes into a lively study of teenage fandom.

The second Series 86 installment brings Allison K. Cole back to discuss her online live-action RPG, Strangers on the Net, while the table finishes building characters, their in-game personas, and the fandom those personas have invented.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want character creation to start with the want underneath the role: why someone chooses this character at all.

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