Tuesday, March 01, 2011

You Know About The Suppressed Transmission, Of Course?

It all started with a bit of dialog from the criminally underappreciated movie Slacker by indie film auteur Richard Linklater

“You know about the suppressed transmission, of course? No? Oh, well,” a manic beatnik (Jerry Delony) raves to a student he’s buttonholed on the sidewalk. He careens through a unified field theory of paranoia that links government cover-ups of extraterrestrial contact, the space hoax (“Antigravity technology. We stole it from the Nazis after the end of World War II. It’s perfectly obvious.”), the greenhouse effect, CIA intervention in everything, the Medellín drug cartel, and missing children. Things are speeding up here at the end! (via the Criterian Collection website)
What that quote created was a body of essays from game designer Ken Hite about a variety of topics from Horror to alternate history to H.P. Lovecraft to super-heroes to werewolves to vampires to conspiracy theory to Emperor Norton to...well, I think you get it.

The Suppressed Transmission was an ongoing column/essays written by Hite and published in the online version of SJ Games' Pyramid magazine (now reborn again as a PDF magazine) on a semi-regular basis. These essays were jam packed with so many ideas that SJ Games published two volumes collecting some of these columns: The First Broadcast and The Second Broadcast. I proudly own both of these books because they have more ideas per square inch for GMs of horror, modern, conspiracy, alt.history or pretty much any RPG campaign. I even have The First Broadcast autographed by Hite. (Little bit of a geek squee there!)

You'll notice this really isn't a review. The reason that I'm mentioning The Suppressed Transmission to my readers is because Phil Reed at SJ Games has expressed an interest in a larger collected edition of The Suppressed Transmission essays (mostly for selfish reasons of having one for himself), but the only way this is going to happen is if the sales of the book show enough interest. Unfortunately, those sales have never been all that great, probably for a number of reasons. So, the point of this post is to nudge you in the general direction of the two Suppressed Transmission links above and encourage you to buy one or both of the PDFs. This way, if enough people see about them and buy copies we can get a big fancy collected edition (that I also want purely for selfish reasons as well).

So, if you have some discretionary gaming money to spend and are looking for something that'll give you a lot of bang for your gaming buck, check out the Suppressed Transmission collections about. Now you know about the Suppressed Transmission.

What are others saying about The Suppressed Transmission?
If you like this post, check out my post on non-gaming books that can inspire your gaming as well.