Coming Soon

Releasing In 2026…

Our latest project is finally ready to talk about and I have been wanting to discuss this one for a while now.

Back in October 2024, on a particularly slow day at work, I got out the old pen and paper and started brain storming ideas as I have often been known to do when the shower has failed to stir up the creative brain juices. When inspiration struck (well sort of) you see it all started as a bit of a joke that me and my brother/co-founder of Caffeine Addled Minds often play, where we bounce jokey ideas off of each other. Most of these are plain nonsense as Alex and Shannon will attest to however every so often we throw the creative spaghetti into the tornado that is our text chat and something comes out looking like a shirtless Jeff Goldblum in the middle of an island full of dinosaurs. (As if an island of dinosaurs wasn’t already cool enough).

Anyway I digress, so there I was thinking up goofy ideas for jokes when I thought of something that on the face of it was just a stupid, immature idea that would make for a pretty funny text. But because its me and my brain loves to play the what if card I got to thinking.

“What if we did try this?”

So I returned to the pad of paper and instead of looking at it as a joke, I outlined a few ideas and thoughts, worked it out a little more and two or three cups of tea later I texted Luke and this is word for word (as I scrolled back to the original text) how I pitched my idea.

Hear me out:

A one shot where we are sentient acorns trying to rescue a fellow acorn from a squirrel.

The one shot name…

Nut Busters.

Now to be fair both Luke and I had been playing around with the idea of doing an actual play podcast project for a while now. However we had some big issues to deal with:

Firstly Shannon had never played a table top role playing game before, although she had shown interest.

Secondly, although D&D is a great game and hugely popular I didn’t necessarily want to go down that route. D&D can be daunting to new players and with it just being a shorter story I didn’t want to get too bogged down in the mechanics.

The solution was to create a game based on the Powered by the Apocalypse system, which basically requires 2 D6 dice (The most traditional dice shape that you find in every board game whenever you need to hunt for them).

So we had an idea and a way to play it next we had to design some characters.

Looking around the internet I found there were some 3D printing options available but not really for what I had in mind, and then I found a wonderful seller on ETSY who crochets little acorns and I knew we needed them. So I purchased four of them gave one to each of the group and basically told them to create a character, design the acorn using whatever they could at home to try and match that character’s aesthetic and vibe and gave everyone explicit instructions not to give anything away until we met up to record so we could all see them for the first time together.

The results were…

Disturbing in some ways, but no one disappointed.

The characters of the first official Nut Busters recording were ready and with some character sheets focussing on the two all important modifying stats that would affect everything the players tried to do we were all set.

For those of you who have not heard of Powered by the apocalypse, the game basically works by rolling two D6’s adding that number together and then taking in any modifiers a character might have.

The modifiers I had come up with were of course:

Nutting up (anything strength based to physically overcome a problem)

and

Squirrelling away (the more stealthy, indirect solutions)

Once you take your modifier into account your total number will determine the success of your action.

1-6 means you have failed and something bad will happen as a result.

7-9 means you pull of what you were trying to do but at a cost.

and 10-12 is a complete success and nothing goes wrong.

Now I won’t lie there are a couple of other things that we make use of but you get the gist of it and we explain the full rules in the first ten minutes of the recording.

So if you are interested stay tuned for the first official NutBusters trailer soon to be dropped (if it hasn’t already by the time you are reading this) and check out the episodes which will be ready to drop in the New Year.

Jordan (Co-founder and creator of the Caffeine Addled Minds).