Ask Me Anything: Aironfabio

What's your favorite Edu-taunment podcast these days; any that you must recommend?

Also, what is your favorite period of history to learn about?

What's your favorite music genre and favorite bands?

How prevalent is the RPG community in Italy? I live in a country where it's hard to just find a group to play with, so I'm curious how other countries outside of the US have fostered their communities!

Was going to ask the same thing. What's the gaming culture like for my southerly neighbors?

I'm sure you mean southerly Nabors

Silly me for misspelling, naturally that's what I meant

Uh, favorite is a hard one. I get bored periodically and charge subjects. Right now I'm listening to "Fall of Civilization" about... well... historical empires that crumbled.
A special place for me will always have season 1 of "Ear Hustle" about life in prison, produced and recorded by actual inmates.
Also, I know it's almost pointless to mention it, but Professor Barbero's history lessons and lectures are amazing. He is a great history divulgator. Of course it's in Italian.

Favorite period: I like pretty much everything, but probably from the Renaissance to WW1. Thirty Years War, French and American revolution, Italy's unification, just about everything about colonialism and de-colonization.

I'm ashamed to say I listen to very little music.
I was into classic rock and metal as a teenager, now I mostly listen to music if it's related to stories, such as songs with lyrics that have a "plot" or soundtracks that evoke a movie. Also a bit of classical music.
I'm pretty into rock covers of classical songs and love the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

It changes region to region, but it's pretty good overall. Groups of organized play pop up quite often and reach decent numbers; conventions are repopulating after lockdown; a lot of comic book and boardgame stores are expanding their RPG section; our Discord server had dozens of online games every week during Covid lockdown - and so did many others; the most popular radio station in the country recently launched Dugeons & Deejays, where celeb deejays play for the first time with an experienced DM; several games designed by Italian studios reach decent success on Kickstarters even for international releases (great example).

1. What are the most popular rpg games in Italy?
2. What is your RPG gamer origin story?
3. How and why did you decide to learn English? What's a great Italian word that doesn't have an English equivalent?

Chances are he learned it in school, mandatory English lessons are a common part of the curriculum all over Europe
Source

1. D&D 5ed by far of course. Other than that you find everything - PbtA fans, old style Vampire and Chtulhu LARPS, a ton of narrative games; I get the feeling that the OSR/OSE fanbase is much smaller than in the US. I have a hard time gauging how popular are Italian-designed games as I'm in a bubble that tends to play then more than the average, but they definitely had some success.

2. High School in the mid-2000, playing Morrowind, reading Dragonlance Books and Lone Wolf "choose your own adventure" Game Books. A friend told me there's this thing called D&D that was the amalgamation of all the best parts. Landed on a few websites and forums, TOTALLY LEGALLY OBTAINED D&D 3.0/3.5 rulebooks and tried out with classmates occasionally. Then I found a stable gaming group in 2008 through one of such forums – my first real campaigns were with M&M 2nd edition, Call of Chtulhu and Pathfinder.

3. High school, a friend did a year abroad in the US and when she came back I realized we were learning nothing in school. So I proceeded to TOTALLY LEGALLY OBTAIN Friends and Scrubs episodes and watched at least one every day for 2 years, twice in a row if I missed a lot of words.
Most Italian words I can't translate are regional. I more often find myself consciously using an English word in place of an Italian one. I guess I do the opposite as well but it doesn’t register in my mind. I’ll try to notice it.

Ah, the universal experience of technically learning English in school but getting your real practice/knowledge from media

That's why I asked lol. I teach English in South Korea and learning in school usually doesn't get people much farther than very basic conversation skills. It takes outside study and motivation to get good in a language.

Tell us more about Italian-designed RPGs! I'm woefully unexposed to them.

What about history attracts you? Is there a favourite era or event? Perhaps a particular writer or strain of thought?

How much air can you fit on one fabio?

There's been a ton lately!

Two Little mice is probably the most successful publisher; Broken Compass is an absolute gem recomended to everyone who loves pulp adventure;
Household has an amazing setting and great art (the system is a bit unfocused and lackluster)

in Broken Tales you play a redeemed villain in an upside-down fairytale - again, incredible art style and good system.

The publisher I work with has several titles: Not The End is a universal narrative system aimed at making every action and every decision have very powerful consequences. Knights of the Round: Academy is an anime-inspired Mecha-shonen game that really gets the core of its reference genres.

Some honorable mentions that so far lack an English translation.
- Valraven is pretty much Berserk: Golden Age with the serial number filed off, a game about war and how it either breaks you or makes you stone cold.
- Memento Mori is a low low fantasy set in the plague-ridden European Dark Ages, all about corruption of your body and soul, and has been successfully hacked to play Bloodborne.
- Green Oaks is about the crazy adventures of retirees in a cursed nursing home, it has mechanics for gossiping and complaining; and in a standard session you may expect to defeat a cabal of cultists in order to get back your favorite brand of candy in the vending machine.

I feel histoy falls at the perfect intersection of educational and narrative content. I like tech and science and economics, but nothing like a history lesson can be told as if it was a tale.

I love pretty much every era and place - I have a preference for periods of change - such a the transition from Renaissance to Modern Age.

I love Alessandro Barbero's lessons and conferences. He is a gifted divulgator, very skilled in keeping the allure the Great Leader narrative while contextualizing it in the realities of socioeconomics and mentality of the time, so that the legend of a single person doesn't overshadow the real causes of change. I never read his historical novels though, I don't know how good a writer he is.

I'd say that my surface, lying down, is of about 0.5 squadre meters. At my latitude there's about 12 km of troposphere above.
So 6000 cubic meters of air?

Though that's the air I can fit above me rather than on me.

If we talk about a very large Fabio lying down at the equator, then we get vastly larger measurements.

Don't know if I nerded out enough on this answer.

Ah, but did you consider the temperature? It is, as we all know, proportionally linked to the volume of a gas such as air.

... speaking of hot air, haha.

Aironfabio, what intellectual property do you wish was converted to an official RPG, but you have not yet seen?

I'm not a fan of playing in established universes (except from stuff incredibly vast such as Star Wars). I find that the charm of most IPs comes from the characters rather than the setting.

What I would love to see is a system that facilitates playing the specific "weird anthropomorphic creatures fight crime" genre of cartoons so popular when I was growing up: TMNT, Biker Mice, Gargoyles... a game that helps you create your own "Humanoid Rocker Dogs from the future" and a cast of colorful villains, with GM suggestions on how to run one-off episodes with recurring villains or bigger arcs.

I guess you can call it a sub-genre of superheroes, but I would love to see it in focus.

What's the most niche game (either system or concept) that you'd love to play on here but could never get the players for?

Have you ever played TMNT and Other Strangeness by Palladium Books? It's not in print any more.

I would totally play this. As Joshua says, there is a TMNT game from the 80s/90s that could scratch the itch!

Yeah, no. I find old school game design (mostly) terrible. Palladium, Rifts, all that nonsense about MegaDamage etc... is one style of game that I doubt I'll ever want to revisit.

I think here there's enough active and curious players for every system and concept. What's lacking is time to set it up and folkow through, system adaptability to asynchronous play and perhaps dice/cards/token support in the dice roller.

A setting I have published and would love to play but just have no time is a Military Academy for monsters and magical creatures, in 1890 Germany, where Kaiser Wilhelm tries to indoctrinate drakes and banshees and werewolves to fight for the Second Reich, and the players are conscript cadets against their will.

Sounds a lot like Castle Falkenstein