Nacarbac

Godzilla X Kong was just dumb cyborgmonkeypunching fun: "he hurt his arm, luckily we made a punch-gooder-arm and it's right here, like a hundred metres away".

And well, I enjoyed the impersonal force of nature that Godzilla was when responding to threats - straight line to target, not even noticing the cities in the way.

The Easter Island episode of Fall of Civilizations was quite eye opening on the western habit of casual extermination, mythologisation as cautionary tales of "inferior savages", and commercialisation to sell plastic moai as cute garden toys with no history whatsoever.

too big, no kit

OBSOLETE is pretty good about that. It handwaves the need for technobabble to explain why not just better tanks with "aliens trade unarmoured superscience 8ft tall mecha skeletons for limestone" - so weaponised mecha rely on "RL" technologies being adapted to those skeletons, and access to mecha is pretty much global, rather than them being for superpowers only.

Cannot remember the politics of it though...

You mean you don't find rolling the Iconic d20^TM^ fifty times in an hour to be a thrilling visual experience that engages you with the Iconic brand and makes you want a t-shirt expressing your enjoyment of said dice rolling?

But another part is ironically the decentralization of research effort as it is privatized.

A negative decentralisation of research into redundant and insular walled gardens, alongside techbro cults? Clearly this is a precursor to the Adeptus Mechanicus.

I do that, erratically.

Most of the time I just do the usual reflexive "good, you?" exchange. But it's good to be a little bit mercurial or playful about playing along - if they're weirded out, well, it broadens the mind and all that so it's good for both of us. Amusing either way.

Semi-serious, because I would like it: The most anarchic of creatures are the cat and the various cephalopods, and thus the highest awards possible are a lil' sleepy cat pin, octopus tentacle holding a hammer, or cuddlefish.

Yeah, after getting past them past that frontloading it quickly becomes pretty straightforward even for players that haven't read the rules.

There are many GURPS genre books which can help with building nonhuman characters - Space, Fantasy, there's even a recent Furries book for anthropomorphic nonhumans, the old 3e Monsters/Shifters books are, well, less helpful but neat.

The Technomancer setting (really neat modern day magic setting, albeit one that drops the line "a resurrected Stalin fights to take back control of the USSR" and barely follows up on it - the Penguin Hivemind gets more attention) has a half dozen human-animal chimaera races that were updated in a later issue of Pyramid.

Earth Defense Force 6. It's great - wave after wave of mysterious monsters (ants, wasps, spiders), basically humans (frog-people), and hideous non-humans (greys), now with more robots and terrifying demon gods.

But it's one to play after playing Earth Defense Force 5, because it does have an actual plot - well, a mashup of monster b-movie tropes that somehow manages to be impressively grim and cheerfully absurd. It's just that it mostly assumes you've played EDF5 as it only cherry picks a few notable line. A lot of levels are some of the better levels of EDF5 with a twist, and since the game itself isn't a dramatic upgrade in mechanics (though there are a lot of little improvements) it's not worth skipping 5.

It does need more Crazy Space Laser ~~Lady~~ GOD though. She's the best.

British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch reportedly missing after yacht sinks off Sicily

The name of that ship? The Bayesian.

Sortof, but I think of it more as a part of the cooperative storytelling element. Players figuring out puzzles or locations or how things make sense can offer a better idea than you had originally - and even if not "better" they're their ideas and therefore automatically more engaging. Them not being overtly made aware that they're shaping the story in that way is, I think, good for immersion. Though there are some popular games that make that kind of interaction an acknowledged part of the game mechanics, I just haven't really explored those myself.

All adventures and plots and whatnot could be drawn out as a vast and total map of every possible option (megadungeons be crazy), but any particular group will only ever take one of those possible paths (well, megadungeons be crazy). It's an immense saving in mental energy to not have to juggle a dozen different options, and put some of that saving into making fewer, better, events.

Going "left" or "right" and them leading to the same event isn't really deceptive, it's part of a relationship where the GM manages narrative flow to enable players to play around with an interesting subset of that vast and intimidating space where "you can do anything" - and it isn't really a railroad unless they're then prevented from going back and choosing the other direction. I've had my group get ten minutes into a dungeon, find a few neat bits of loot and then just... lose interest in it and go track down the flying city that made the items because I was a fool and gave them a more interesting origin - ended up pretty neat.

Though this is all informed by my style of mostly winging it and how my group plays. I make a small network of elements in play and how they interact and then adjust things on-the-fly. I ignore things that my group aren't interested in (random encounters, encumbrance, various rules), no longer expect them to slog through twenty rooms in a crypt, and I make quiet notes of any random comments that indicate a desire for something to happen later so that I can include an opportunity for it.