The Lost Bay Podcast

Sean McCoy is the author of the SciFi horror tabletop role-playing game Mothership. Winner of a 2019 Gold ENnie Award for Best Game, and heavily inspired by classical horror movies like Alien or Event Horizon, Mothership is redesigning, and giving a new youth to the SciFi horror genre in TTRPGs. In this episode we talk about specific game design choices, building a company, community support, bein...

Seb Pines is the designer of the solo journaling horror RPG Dwelling. The book is amazingly beautiful and playing it literally gave me the chills, both in a scary and in a pleasant way. In this episode we talk about an old spooky haunted house, insomnia, notebooks, mourning, solo RPGs, game design and much more.  You can buy Seb's game in its digital form on itch.io or as a physical book from...

Discover the lineup preview for the upcoming The Lost Bay Podcast season 2. The show becomes weekly, and will give space to talented creators, writers, designers, artists, who make amazing games and zines. You can help The Lost Bay Podcast grow by becoming a patron. Check the Scissors and Glue TTRPG Jam , it's running until November the 23rd.

Ava Islam is the designer of Errant a med fan rpg she has successfully kickstarted during Zinequest 3 - The system totally rethinks and rebuilds the D&D game engine in a fascinating and innovative way. In this episode, we talk about power, race, game design, bets and wagers, Neapolitan pizza and much more. You can preorder Errant here  Or read Ava's blog here  Support The Lost Bay Po...

Perplexing Ruins is an illustrator and a writer. This episode might be a little different from the previous ones, maybe a little longer, and a little more intimate. Because Perplexing is a friend. He is one of the first members of our little indie RPG scene that I’ve met.  In this heartfelt episode, we talk about ancient German castles, gouache paintings, witches, the Midwest, bigfoot and so...

Anamnesis is a journaling RPG for one player designed by Sam Leigh. In the game, you wake up with no memory whatsoever of who and where you are, and through a series of beautifully designed questions, and with the help of a deck of tarot cards you recover bit by bit your memory. In this episode, we talk about the Rider Waite Colman tarot deck, memory loss, solo gaming, walking downtown on a sunny...

John Battle, aka Batts is the designer of the RPG My body is a cage. In the game, there are two worlds, the one you live in during the daytime, very much like the one we live in ourselves, and the one you dream of. When you dream, you go exploring dungeons, you fight monsters, you collect treasures, you try to make a better life for yourself. In this episode, we talk about the inescapable duality...

Ian Yusem is the designer of the Mothership rpg adventures Moonbase blues, Picket Line Tango, The Drain. Ian has also a great blog called Uncanny Spheres in which he writes with a lot of honesty about his experience as an indie rpg designer. He posts detailed postmortems of his games where he addresses the financial reality of being an indie TTRPG designer and he writes a lot about community. What...

Anna Blackwell is the designer of the solo RPG Delve , or rather the solo RPG series Delve , Rise and Umbra. Delve is a map-drawing game in which you run an underground dwarven hold. As you dig underground you encounter magic, treasures, evil forces. The game is played with dice and a standard card deck. It involves exploration, resource management, and drawing, and it's built to create a strong e...

Vi Huntsman runs a Crazy youtube channel called Collabs without permission . They do great video reviews of TTRPG zines. In March they shared a review of the game Mothership filmed at Bonneville Salt Flats. It’s a super brilliant review of the game, and it looks amazing, like a short Sci-Fi film.   Vi has been collecting zines for years. We did the interview via a conferencing app. And a...

Chris McDowall is the creator of the RPGS Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland . Both games share a fascinating weird industrial early XXth century setting and have been extremely influential to the indie RPG scene for the way they handle game mechanics. As a matter of fact, if you’ve listened to previous episodes of this podcast you might have heard other designers mention Chris’ games a few tim...

Ben Milton is behind the popular YouTube channel Questing Beast where he does reviews and flip throughs of RPGs and OSR books and zines. Watching his reviews, I've been struck by the constant attention he has for the layout or the design choices of the books, and how these choices might affect the playing experience. Ben is the author of Maze Rats and Knave , two rules-light RPGs, that had a great...

Leo Hunt is a multi-faceted creator. He wrote four novels, and in the last year, released two issues of VAULTS OF VAARN , a science-fantasy rpg. In this episode we talk about his inspirational sources, the difference between writing a novel and an rpg, game design, the American anthropologist David Graeber, and above all, about the colorful, fascinating world of Vaults of Vaarn. Vaults of Vaarn &n...

In October 2020, Yochai Gal released CAIRN , a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. Cairn is, among other things, inspired by Yochai's love for the forests and forest-fantasy fiction. Actually, from the window of his own house, one could see the edge of a forest. Cairn is available as a printed booklet from online stores, find the full list here: cairnrpg.com/print.html Or in pdf: yochaigal.itch.io/...