Radio Active #13: Battlestar Galactica Soundtrack, Monster Manual III

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Radio Active Podcast

The Battlestar Galactica Season 1 Soundtrack takes centerstage in Radio Active #13, with four songs from the new album featured in the podcast.

There’s also a bunch of news about the mothership, Nuketown.com, including the launch of our new online message forum and Radio Active’s new logo. I also talk about the Random Signal podcast and review the Monster Manual III source book for Dungeons and Dragons.

Getting the Podcast

Show Notes

  • Sweeper: Battlestar Galactica Intro
    • Well on its way to becoming one of the most distinctive intros in sci-fi fandom.
  • Intro
    • Battlestar Galactica Teaser
    • Nuketown’s Big Move
      • Everything is now on the new server, and most of it’s functioning properly. Yippie! The only lingering problem is with the RADIATIONS newsletter, but that should be fixed in a few days.
    • New Forum
      • The move allowed me to launch Nuketown’s very own online forum, which is something I’ve wanted to do since about 1997
      • The Griffin’s Crier
      • The Science Fiction Podcast Network
    • New Logo!
      • Nathan Lilly, a friend of mine from college, and my co-conspirator in GreenTentacles.com, has created a logo for Radio Active. And it kicks ass.
    • Next Task: Expanding the “Podcasts” links category to include subcategories for all my favorite podcasts. Which a legion.
  • Sweeper: Skepticality “Real Skeptical Heroes” Promo
  • Podcasts of Note
    • Random Signal
      • A podcast by Jason Adams, a friend of Mur Lafertty of Geek Fu Action Grip Fame.
      • A music oriented podcast, featuring geek tunes and alternative music from bands local to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
      • Other geekiness also shows up from time to time, including discussions of movies, podcasts, and more.
      • Random Signal Podcast
      • Geek Fu Action Grip
  • Sweeper: Battlestar Galactica Title Song
  • Battlestar Galactica Soundtrack Audio Review
    • Buy it from Amazon.com
    • Wonderfully diverse sound that is very unlike much of the hyper-space opera sound you see in a lot of other scifi shows, which seem to think that if you can’t have a theme like Star Wars or Star Trek, you might as well die.
    • Battlestar chooses a different path. All sorts of different cultures impact on the soundtrack: celtric, african, italian, united by militant beat.
    • Very different sound that manages to evoke the entirety of human culture, which works perfectly for Battlestar Galactica, which is about the slightly less than 50,000 humans who’ve survived an attack by the robotic cylons.
    • Soundtrack has 30 — count ’em 30! — tracks from the series. And it’s only alternate track is the UK Main title.
    • Sample Tracks:
      • Starbuck on the Red Moon
      • Passacaglia
  • Sweeper: Homer Dinosaur Quote
  • Monster Manual III
    • Wizards of the Coast
    • 224 pages
    • Buy it from Amazon.com
    • As I’ve said many times, I’m a sucker for monster books, so unless it’s the “fuzzy pink bunnies from heck” monster book (or from the Forgotten Realms), I’ll probably buy it.
    • MM III offers dozens (like I’m going to count them all) of monsters for Dungeons & Dragons. It is heavily inspired by the Eberron campaign setting, and could easily be used as an official monster book for that setting.
    • Many of the book’s entries include information about how to adapt the monsters to Eberron, including what their roles are, where they are likely to be found, etc. This information is also included for the Forgotten Realms.
    • The book also includes monster entries for many of Eberron’s new races and creatures, including the warforged and changling races classes and its new dinosaurs, as well as new monsters obviously inspired by the setting (namely the rakasa).
    • Useful for those who like the setting, because there’s so much good supplemental info here (the monster reprints are no so frequent as to be annoying for these folks).
    • Also good for people who’d like to import sentient golems like the warforged into their campaign, but don’t want all of Eberron’s campaign baggage.
    • Favorite monsters include:
      • Eldritch Giant: good magical abilities that giants often lack (as I found out in my “Against the Giants: The Liberation of Geoff” storyline from a few years ago.
      • Drowned One: Scary zombie that can drown PCs just by standing next to them (their lungs begin filling with fluid, and underwater this causes them to drive very quickly).
      • Rakassa: Good variety of monsters here, offering all sorts of evil cat people to threaten your party with.
    • Particularly like how it offers “tactics by round” breakout for higher CR creatures, which will probably only be run once in a campaign.

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