# Character Creation Challenge 2025: Day 17 - Community Radio - KDMT, The Trailer-Park Choice tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2025 #game/rpg/community-radio > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2025]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice It's time to dig into particularly strange corners of the collection, though strange corners which please me at a deep and abiding level for multiple reasons. - How do you feel about *[Welcome to Night Vale](https://www.welcometonightvale.com)*? - Did the mixture of perverse and occasionally whimsical horror with the necessities of the structure of a radio broadcast tickle something in your brain that made you feel a particularly pleasant rush of endorphins? - Have you ever wanted to work in radio? - Or have you ever actually accomplished that goal? - Do you like heavily improv forward RPGs? **[[Community Radio]]** is *that* game. It's not really designed to have a random resolution mechanic. Things don't get resolved in the sense that they usually mean in a classical RPG. Things evolve and shift and mutate in the context of the story and the experience. ![[Community Radio (cover).jpg|400]] Truly resolved? Well, not usually. If you've ever wanted to play out *[War of the Worlds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q7tN7MhQ4I&pp=ygUmd2FyIG9mIHRoZSB3b3JsZHMgcmFkaW8gYnJvYWRjYXN0IDE5Mzg%3D)*, the radio series, live with your friends helping provide the action on the ground and you providing the radio commentary interspersed with music, this is exactly the game you've been waiting for your entire life. Seriously, *your entire life*. By way of example, the list of inspirations go well beyond Welcome to Night Vale to shows like *WKRP in Cincinnati*, *NewsRadio*, *Northern Exposure*, and *Pump Up the Volume*. I would add *Pontypool* to that list because it's dead perfect in that position.  *What's the game like?* I know that you're asking, and I have to say that it's a little bit weird. All the stories are of an isolated and strange community. In the play of the game, you alternate between playing out *"slice of life"* stories as a member of the community with a two-minute timer running and then switching over to the public radio host, who has announcements and commentary on those scenes to present and is probably beholden to a sinister and mysterious city council. Who's on the city council, you might ask? Everybody that's not the host. Every turn, everybody else puts in a list of city council directives, from which one is chosen at random and completely cannot be opposed. Whether the council tells you that there is no zombie apocalypse going on even as you just watched people get eaten by zombies or they simply determine that the aliens are invading our planet and want to take our women, whether or not it's true, that's the random storyline. The host doesn't have a time limit but does have a structured set of things to get out and few radio segments go beyond a few minutes. *"Between songs."* Yes, you're going to need some way to play music because that's what you do between events. Put on the next track for the station. This does have the added bonus of giving people time to think about what might be cool for the next slice of life scene. Are you intrigued? Do you have an eight-track player? How about a stopwatch, a pile of index cards, and three dice to help resolve things on the handful of tables that exist? Do you want to create a character? Well, too bad — we don't actually create any characters in the process of playing this game, but we can create our *radio station*. Let's do that. ## Acts of Creation Technically, that was a bit of a lie. The council directed me to tell you that while we don't actually create characters, and we do actually create our radio station, we do need to talk about who the host is on this show. ### Host-Ile Behavior There's no proper and structured way to put our hosts together. They don't have any skills or stats; there's nothing in particular that is mechanically important about them. However, it's helpful to know who they are, and to that end, there's a series of questions to run through real quick. - What is your host's name? Does he have a nickname he uses? Douglass Brandon Austin, aka "Digger". (*"Digger in the Morning"* isn't the most listened to show in the East Texas town of Gothinburg, but it is the *only professional* morning show.^[*"Cock Rock"*, as the locals refer to it, the sound of roosters greeting the sunrise with raucus squawking, is rated \#1 by a country mile. ]) - What is your "radio voice"? Down-home, comforting, a little slow-witted. Like your second farm-hand who's just trying to do the best he can.[^fhc] - What do you want to portray as your personality? Digger is a know-it-all trivia geek, overflowing with useless factoids that don't get sprinkled so much as dumped wholesale into the show. His particular field of expertise seems to be local farming / agricultural knowledge. - What are you really like when no one is listening? A quiet man struggling with years of trauma from time serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the war on terror. He's done terrible things, seen worse things, and keeps enough scotch on hand to sleep soundly enough to get up and do the show every single day. He considers it a form of therapy.^[What? It's not like you didn't know I have a dark side 16 kilometers wide and visible from orbit. Live with it. I do.] - How might your persona change over the course of play? It might be interesting to see the folksy, farmy persona begin to flake away, leaving a hard man with sharp edges, ready to do whatever it takes to deal with the situation given the tools at hand are *"a radio station."*^[Look, I told you I was dark, and you hung around. Who can be blamed for this? It's you. It's your fault.] I think we might be on to something. Or on something. It’s hard to tell. ### Communal Pool The rest of the players are members of the community. There is no character ownership; anyone can play anybody in the town on the fly as long as the scene gets played. And as a reminder, everyone is on the City Council except the host. Also, simultaneously, no one is on the City Council, not even the host. It's that random element of what gets pulled from the pile. Think of it like grabbing improv prompts from the crowd during a show. ### Stationary Revelations Now for the true character at the center of this experience, *the radio station*. There are a list of pre-generated stations with their own themes and styles, all of which are very interesting. But we can take some time to create our own because rules exist for doing that; not so much in the way of counting up points and assigning them to things but more as a guided imagination exercise which answers certain questions then generates a ton of elements. I appreciate the fact that one of the first things we generate is our callsign. Every radio station in the US has a four-letter (occasionally three-letter) callsign which specifically identifies that radio station and its broadcast license. [In our reality, whether it is prefixed with a W or a K is determined by whether it is licensed on the west side or the east side of the Mississippi River.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_call_signs) In **Community Radio**, the difference is that those prefixed with a W are focused on weirdness and oddities (with lighthearted wimsey), and those prefixed with a K are more creepy and grim. You see where this is going, of course. Before we get to that point, it's probably worth showing you what one of the pre-generated stations looks like. ![[Community Radio - KRME.webp]] Yes, those colors are the ones in the printed book. Yes, dark purple on teal smeared with orange to become a sort of baby shit brown is not the best and most contrasting read. It's striking. It definitely makes a statement, but definitely is not my favorite choice.^[Still better than **[[Mork Borg]]**.] If you do pick up the game, it comes with a more straightforward black and white version, which is far more readable and probably is the one that you'll want to print for yourself. In fact, do so with a coil binding so it lays flat on the table. This is a game that would be great for taking to conventions and throwing together a pickup game for a quick slot made of people who love to do improv. That's what I intend to do. I did think that you deserved to see how bad it can be visually. The actual color printed version has more contrasting colors on this exact page, so clearly the CMYK process is superior to RGB for that sort of thing, as it should be. #### Themeification Every station has a theme, whether it's offbeat and funny or super grimdark. How weird do you want to go? What elements do you want to be in play? Our first job is to write three aspects of a theme and put them on the Community Radio Station sheet. I think we'll go with the following three: - *Bleak and grimdark in the way that a dying town in a previously prosperous area can be* - *Interpersonal violence never escalates to that level but instead remains as a simmering disgust and revulsion between people* - *The council promotes a happy and upbeat mood in particular when it is absolutely inappropriate* If you're starting to get some really dark vibes off of this and think someone might say *"Close the beaches, but it's tourist season!"* then you're absolutely right. It's that kind of place. #### Elemental Transfiguration Now we need elements. In usual circumstances, this is where we would pass the sheet around and have every player provide a single entry, filling out one element list completely before going on to the next group. There usually are six entries per element, and there are six elements, so you can see how this could actually go much quicker with a group of even two or three. Most players will not be creating their own station, after all. They will be using one from the book, which will go much faster. For *our* purposes, however, I'm going to try and come up with all 36 off the top of my head. This would probably be even more impressive if I did it live, but if you want to see that sort of thing you'll have to catch me at a convention. ##### Innocents 1. The cute girl at the store 2. The legless vet on the corner 3. The lonely nun 4. The cheerful MILF 5. Gladys the beautician 6. The quiet guy at the bus stop ##### Terrors 1. The Hillside Strangler 2. The group of Smash and Grab punks 3. A dirty cop on the take 4. A wrecking crew outside 5. The collapsing building 6. The existential horror that hides at the heart, in the heart of all men, and gnaws at their feelings of adequacy, competency, and individuality ##### Places of Interest 1. The nearly abandoned mall 2. The last Dairy Queen 3. Ronald's Bar 4. The rundown skate park 5. The beautiful grassy field over the reclaimed garbage dump 6. The grungy trailer-park ##### Moods 1. Quiet desperation 2. Drugged out bliss 3. A junkie's craving 4. Disgust 5. Schadenfreude 6. Satisfaction ##### Strange Items 1. The brand new Starbucks 2. A happy family 3. Green meth 4. A birthday celebration 5. A green glowing rock 6. $25 million in cash ##### Hosts 1. Always hustling to sell drugs 2. High as balls 3. Forced happiness 4. Focused and intense 5. Depressed but hiding it 6. The city planner *(Personally, I think that this would be better used as a Guest section for characters that you want to have on to be interviewed as part of a radio segment. In fact, that's probably how I will be using this in play. But you can use it however you like. I just love doing call-in shows.)* #### Calling Out to God All right, we've lined it up on the runway. Yes, I think I leaned pretty hard into the grim dark and the perhaps nightmarish in a way that is soul grinding and would take a particularly dark sense of humor to leverage, so it perfectly reflects my personality. Awesome. Now we just need the call sign and slogan for the radio station. Puns are encouraged. Clearly this radio station is going to start with a K; there's no way around it. We are definitely of the creepy bend. I think I can do a multi-level pun here by naming the station KDMT. How about a rotating list of slogans? - *”KDMT is guaranteed not to put you to sleep.”* - *”KDMT should not be listened to at loud volumes while driving.”* - *”KDMT does not come in a bottle but for $20…”* - *”KDMT, the best station west of the east side.”* - *”KDMT hasn't had a shed blow up in the last 12 hours!”* - *”KDMT, the trailer park choice!”* I think it's safe to say that I may have had way too much fun doing that. You guys should probably stop me before it happens again. ![[Community Radio - CCC2025 - KDMT, The Trailer-Park Choice.webp]] *(Why you might ask is the font choice on that Courier? It's because all of the things that I ever saw filling out a form when I was working at a radio station were either literally put there by a typewriter or deliberately made to look that way.* *If there's one thing that you can count on in an industry with as long a history as radio, it's that they will not change things no matter what until and unless they have to, and they will tell you readily that they don't have to.)* ## Exunt What a long, strange trip it's been. Obviously, this game is *originally* designed to be a little bit creepy at the outside, and mostly humorous, because when you get a bunch of people together and have them improv live, things get goofy. That's just the nature of humanity. If you've ever been part of an improv group or watched one, you'll know that it is far less likely for them to provide a serious, grounded set of performances than it is for even creepy premises to be taken further into darkness. That's the nature of the beast. I'm not fighting against it. In fact, it's one of the reasons that I strongly suggest everyone should pick up this game because it's just that kind of fun. All that said, by looking at what I've produced here, you can tell that my personal inclinations run to some pretty dark places. Some of you are already putting the email together that says, *"Are you okay?"* The rest of you already know I've *never* been okay. That's my nature. It's all right. If I had to deliberately draw a line between this game and another that I think really leans into a similar space, it would have to be **[[Fiasco]]**, which is another of my favorite game designs of all time.^[The first edition with the playbooks, not the second edition with the cards because that felt like a cheap cash grab to keep people from cheaply making expansions for the game that the creators weren't getting a slice of; sorry guys, that's just the truth.] They both have that sense of barely subdued manic creative energy that can get out of control in all the best ways, but there is still a structure linking these things together. **Community Radio** doesn't have a mechanism for judging outcomes, though it does have a semi-impositional mechanical arc. **Fiasco** very *much* has a mechanism that leads to character epilogues and determining whether their fate is positive or negative. Really, if you enjoyed **Fiasco**, you should be playing **Community Radio** right now with the same people. If you had no idea what to do with **Fiasco**, you're probably going to have even less idea what to do with this. I want to go to a convention and throw down this game with a bunch of absolutely mad convention people. I think it would be a riot. You know I'm always down for a riot. Tomorrow we have something bloody coming down the pipe. It might even be a bloody pipe, I just can't say; it is an engine. [^fhc]: See: