Ludonarrative Dissidents

Special guests Gareth Hanrahan (The One Ring RPG and too many games to count) and Ben Robbins (Microscope) join us for another live episode of LND to discuss game design and history. Back the LND Kickstarter today and join our book club on game design!

We hosted a live episode to talk about the launch of our Season 4 Kickstarter . Join me, Greg Stolze, James Wallis and special guests Meg and Vincent Baker (Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard and many more) as we discuss the history of RPGs, possible games we may review for Season 4 and many other topics!

The Season 4 LND Kickstarter pre-launch page is live! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rosspayton/ludonarrative-dissidents-podcast-season-4The Quiet Year is a map game. You define the struggles of a post-apocalyptic community, and attempt to build something good within their quiet year. Every decision and every action is set against a backdrop of dwindling time and rising concern. We were fort...

We recently completed season 3 and are going to launch a Kickstarter on October 13 to fund a fourth season! Follow the Kickstarter campaign to be notified when the campaign goes live! This live episode discusses what will be new for the fourth season. We plan to have shorter book reviews in our live episodes, along with special segments. To that end, I review the new Mothership bounty hunting supp...

IN OUR TRADITIONAL style, as we reach the end of the season we’re bringing you a couple of Actual Play sessions of games that we’ve covered in earlier episodes, putting some actual ludo-ing into the customary narrative. This episode is the first part of the Ludonarrative Dissidents Season 3 finale and we are delighted that Kevin Kulp, co-designer of Swords of the Serpentine, volunteered to adminis...

DIALECT: A Game About Language And How It Dies is a 2018 single-session RPG by Hakan Seyalioglu and Kathryn Hymes, published by Thorny Games. It’s a game about a small community, isolated from larger groups, that first creates its own verbal forms to describe its situation, and then must adapt or lose them as the community reacts to external threats. It is critically acclaimed and a winner of mult...

Our livestream discussion for August! Watch the episode on Youtube ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

SWORDS OF THE SERPENTINE is a game of fantasy shenanigans in a labyrinthine sinking city populated by rogues, schemers, cultists, swashbucklers and your player characters, written by Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner, and published by Pelgrane Press in 2022. It uses a variation of the Gumshoe system originally created by Robin D. Laws in 2007. Swords of the Serpentine at Pelgrane Press Swords of the Se...

Our livestream discussion for June! Watch the episode on Youtube ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

CHICAGO BY NIGHT is a 2018 city sourcebook for Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition , written by Matthew Dawkins and a host of others, and published by Renegade Game Studios, who have the rights to do all this stuff these days. The most recent iteration of a sourcebook that first appeared in 1991, this edition is by far the longest at 357 pages. It describes the vampire culture, clans, people, locat...

Our livestream discussion for May, featuring special guest Jerry Grayson of Khepera Publishing . Check out the Godsend Agenda today. Watch the episode on Youtube ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our April livestream! Watch the livestream on Youtube ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

IN MEDIAS RES is a short modern-horror scenario (‘adventure’ is the wrong word for it) by John Scott Tynes, originally designed for Cthulhu Now and first printed in The Unspeakable Oath issue 10 in 1993. It was reprinted in The Resurrected #3 – Out of the Vault in 2003. Thirty years after its publication, it still lives up to its reputation as an unflinching piece of modern horror RPG design that’...

Our March livestream! Watch the livestream on Youtube ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

MAELSTROM is a paperback-format RPG written by Alex Scott and published in 1984 by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Books in the UK. It contains rules for roleplaying in Europe, mostly England, at the time of the Tudors (the 1500s), with a solo adventure, a sample adventure and a herbiary. It is an interesting comparison to the other 1980s British RPG set in a faux-Europe of the early Renaissan...

We have a special guest, Adam Scott Glancy, one of the Delta Green co-authors! He clarifies a few points about Delta Green Countdown. Watch the livestream on Youtube ⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Sponsor: Technical Difficulties Podcast - check out an excellent actual play RPG podcast, featuring Delta Green, Eclipse Phase, and many other fine systems featured on LND. Delta Green Countdown is a massive sourcebook for the original edition of Delta Green. It blows the doors off the world of Delta Green, reaching wider and digging deeper to map the terrain of the twisted pulp apocalypse we call...

Our first livestream of the year! We talk about new games we played and a grabag of topics. Watch the livestream on Youtube ⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

ALICE IS MISSING is a self-contained one-session RPG for 3–5 players, designed by Spenser Stark and released in 2020 by Hunters Entertainment with Renegade Game Studios, after a Kickstarter that raised $138,000. It’s been described as ‘unique’, ‘sublime’ and ‘a little masterpiece’, and has won a bagful of awards including three 2021 Gold ENNIEs and the Indiecade award for tabletop design. Read the...

Our monthly livestream for December! Watch the livestream here. ⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Gradient Descent is a module/campaign setting/megadungeon for the SF-horror RPG Mothership , released in 2020. It is written by Luke Gearing, with art by Nick Tofani and layout by Sean McCoy, and was published by Tuesday Night Games. Dimensionally it is a tightly packed 64-page digest-sized booklet, and the PDF sells for $20, or as part of the Mothership deluxe boxed set . Mothership homepage The...

Our monthly livestream for November 2025. We talk about larping, new games in development and Dragonmeet! Watch the Livestream here . ⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

EABA (End All Be All) 2e is a generic roleplaying system with a core rulebook and a collection of sourcebooks designed by Greg Porter and published by his company BTRC (Blacksburg Tactical Research Centre). The first edition was released in 2003, the second – which is what we discuss in this episode – in 2012. Read the full show notes here. Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our livestream for October 2025! Watch it on Youtube. ⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our livestream for September 2025! Watch it on Youtube. Discuss this episode on our Discord.