The Functional Nerds Podcast

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Michael R. Underwood , author of Menagerie of Mayhem: Volume 1 . About Menagerie of Mayhem: Volume 1 : Menagerie of Mayhem: Volume 1 introduces 35 new adversaries for the Daggerheart fantasy tabletop roleplaying game, including multi-phase foes like the Blood Mage and adversary groups such as the ferocious Umbral Hunting Pack and the nihilistic C...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Damien Ober , author of Voidverse . About Voidverse : When the Sinker was a child, all she knew was violence. To survive, she fled into the Void—a seemingly infinite nothingness where people live on “rocks,” individual lands spread out in all directions, floating in the vast empty space. Some rocks are giant magnets, others burn with eternal flam...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Aubrey Sitterson , author of Free Planet Volume 1 . About Free Planet Volume 1 : In the wake of a grueling war of independence, a team of revolutionary heroes is tasked with defending their home and its uniquely potent energy source from multiple intergalactic superpowers intent on domination. But though they are each deeply committed to the drea...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Laura K. Maurer , author of THE RENEGADE AND THE LODESTAR . About THE RENEGADE AND THE LODESTAR : Persephone is living a nightmare. Waking up on a cold, hard ground with air that smells like rot, the young goddess fills with horror as she remembers her sudden and unexpected demise. And now trapped in the realm of the dead, she clings to the dwind...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Seamus Sullivan , author of Daedalus Is Dead . About Daedalus Is Dead : Daedalus of Crete is many things: The greatest architect in the world. The constructor of the Labyrinth that imprisoned the Minotaur. And the grieving father of Icarus, who plunged into the sea as father and son flew from the grasp of the tyrannical King Minos. Now, Daedalus...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Katie Cook , author of NOTHING SPECIAL . About NOTHING SPECIAL : In the grand scheme of the worlds at large, Callie thinks she’s nothing special. Sure, she’s friends with the ghost of a radish and her dad owns a magical antique shop–but she’s spent her life in the human world. Her dad won’t let her join him on his collection trips in the magical...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy look back on 2025 and towards 2026 in a rare and very special Just Us episode. We chat about our favorite episodes from 2025, our favorite authors and more! If you like what we do, and enjoyed this very special Just Us episode, consider joining The Functional Nerds Patreon Page ! We put out a Patron’s Only Just Us episode very month. Thanks for lis...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Emily Mitchell to talk about her new short story collection The Church of Divine Electricity . About The Church of Divine Electricity : Delightfully blending literary fiction with speculative genres, the stories in The Church of Divine Electricity somehow manage to feel as though they could take place today. In Emily Mitchell’s created worlds, as...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Jordan Marshall , who backed the Uncanny Magazine Year 12: Fly Forever, Space Unicorns Kickstarter at the THIRD NERD level! Jordan is working with a group of game developers on a new TTRPG: WE BEGIN AT MIDNIGHT! This week’s picks: Jordan: London Fog Tracy: G-shaft candy Patrick: Southern Comfort Eggnog Links: Jordan Marshall on Instagram Tracy To...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Marie Lu , author of RED CITY . About RED CITY : Alchemy is the hidden art of transformation. An exclusive power wielded by crime syndicates that market it to the world’s elites in the form of sand, a drug that enhances those who take it into a more perfect version of themselves: more beautiful, more charismatic, simply more. Among the gleaming s...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Daniel H. Wilson , author of Hole in the Sky . About Hole in the Sky : On the Great Plains of Oklahoma, in the heart of the Cherokee Nation, a strange atmospheric disturbance is noticed by Jim Hardgray, a down-on-his-luck single father trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter, Tawny. At NASA’s headquarters in Houston, Texas, astrophysicist D...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Sara Raasch , author of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards . About The Entanglement of Rival Wizards : Sebastian Walsh: Evocation Department. Human. The first of his family to pick college over the military. Elethior Tourael: Conjuration Department. Half-elf. Pretentious asshole. The latest legacy Tourael at Lesiara U. Both: Mageus Research Grant...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome back Beth Cato , author of A House Between Sea and Sky . About A House Between Sea and Sky : Grieving Hollywood writer Fayette Wynne arrives in Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1926 to finish her latest project in peace. All alone, save for the preternatural sourdough starter her family has nurtured for years, Fayette is also resentful. The proven healing po...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Lyndsay Ely , author of The Lost Reliquary . About The Lost Reliquary : The Devoted Lands was once home to many gods. Now, after centuries of brutal wars, only Tempestra-Innara, the Enduring Flame, remains. As a divine warrior, Lys is outwardly loyal to her goddess. If she dreams of deicide, that’s her business. When a routine heretical execution...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Auston Habershaw , author of Faceless Galaxy . About Faceless Galaxy : Throughout the gutters and sanitation systems of the civilized galaxy, amorphous, nameless blobs called Torrhoids digest other species’ trash to clean air and water. The Great Races don’ t consider Torrhoids intelligent. But when one Torrhoid receives a baffling kindness, its...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Mark Waddell , author of Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World . About Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World : Colin is a low-level employee at Dark Enterprises, a Hell-like multinational corporation solving the world’s most difficult problems in deeply questionable ways. After years of toiling away in a cubicle, he’s ready to climb the corpo...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Louis Sachar , author of The Magician of Tiger Castle . About The Magician of Tiger Castle : Long ago and far away (and somewhere south of France) lies the kingdom of Esquaveta. There, Princess Tullia is in nearly as much peril as her struggling kingdom. Esquaveta desperately needs to forge an alliance, and to that end, Tullia’s father has arrang...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome John Wiswell , author of Wearing the Lion . About Wearing the Lion : Sometimes a goddess’s worst enemy is her biggest fan. Heracles, hero of Greece, dedicates all his feats to the goddess Hera. If only he knew that his very face is an insult to her…as he is yet another child that Hera’s dipshit husband, Zeus, had out of wedlock. “Aunt...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Jakub Szamalek , author of Inner Space . About Inner Space : When an ammonia leak threatens the astronauts on the International Space Station, NASA directs Lucy Poplasky, one of the ISS’s first female commanders, to investigate the cause. Russia has just invaded Ukraine and tensions are running high—could the leak be a brazen act of sabotage? The...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Daphne Fama , author of House of Monstrous Women . About House of Monstrous Women : In this game, there’s one rule: survive. Orphaned after her father’s political campaign ended in tragedy, Josephine is alone taking care of the family home while her older brother is off in Manila, where revolution brews. But an unexpected invitation from her chil...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Jenna “Dingo” Woldenga and Avery Howett , part of the team behind the Fool’s Gold: Death by Karaoke Graphic Novel . About Fool’s Gold: Death by Karaoke Graphic Novel : Have you ever sung karaoke so badly that you unleashed the apocalypse? Well, that’s an average day for the Fool’s Gold crew: a group of traveling magical re...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Delilah S. Dawson , author of Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd . About Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd : Five strangers armed with steel and magic awaken in a mist-shrouded land, with no memory of how they arrived: Rotrog, a prideful orcish wizard; Chivarion, a sardonic drow barbarian; Alishai, an embittered tie...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Sam Kelly , author of Human History on Drugs . About Human History on Drugs : Did you know that Alexander the Great was a sloppy drunk and William Shakespeare was a stoner? Or how about the fact that Steve Jobs believed taking LSD helped him create the Apple computer, or that Sigmund Freud loved cocaine so much he took it all the time and prescri...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Margaret Stohl , Jeanine Schaefer , and Judith Stephens to talk about their new book, Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel Comics . About Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel Comics : Inspired by the hit podcast The Women of Marvel and cowritten by the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Beautiful Creatures, this eye-o...

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Paul Bradley Carr , author of THE CONFESSIONS . About THE CONFESSIONS : LLIAM is the world’s most powerful supercomputer, built to make the toughest decisions for its users. Where to work, who to marry, and even who should live or die. But when LLIAM suddenly goes offline with no explanation, the world is thrust into chaos, paralyzed by indecisio...