Reading D&D Aloud

Happy Canada Day & July 4th! In honor of the holidays, we are dropping one of our greatest hits from the past. Enjoy! Kevin Kulp & Jeff Grubb have, between them, created entire cosmologies and entire timelines. Kulp is the award-winning creator of Timewatch and the investigative fantasy game, Swords of the Serpentine. Grubb, a legend in his own time, is the engineer of the Forgotten Realms, creato...

First up, we have fellow D&D historian Michael Calleia. For years, Dave Arneson & Gary Gygax hinted that they could not speak freely about the creation of D&D for legal reasons. Michael followed up this hints, searching archives and court documents all across the United States until he found a gem in Chicago. The July 1973 draft of Dungeons & Dragons. He is a master researcher and has been kind en...

In which Producer Chris continues to mess with all our minds by leaving at least one obvious error in the show! Today, I have two masters of their craft, two gaming greats whose work is capable of standing on its own two feet and maybe even punching other games in the face, or gutting them like fish, or blasting them out the airlock depending on your genre. First up is Luke Gearing. He is one of t...

This week, in honor of crossing 100 episodes, we take a peek behind the curtain of the show to have a chat about the pod itself. Where we're going, and where we've been, are both chewed over. Enjoy!

Episode 100! And is this our best episode ever? A thing Wizards of the Coast has said is that 2024 D&D was the fastest selling version of that game ever produced. I predict that Wizards sold 50,000 copies in the first couple weeks and then made that boast. I would also predict that the other two people we have on the podcast beat that record, because we have Rowan Hall & Spenser Starke here. Stark...

First up, we have the gamer's friend, Seth Skorkowsky! Seth is a novelist, YouTuber, multiple ENnie winner, and nerd about town. His YouTube channel is a smorgasbord of RPG goodness, with a tentacle in practically every foetid pool of our beloved hobby. As a historian, I thought his piece on the three waves of moral panics around RPGs was particularly excellent and if you're listening to me, you s...

Today we are diving deep on the demonic, and imagine what if, instead of running away from demons and devils in Dungeons & Dragons, creators and companies ran towards it? Recently, we had Gavin Norman of Old School Essentials fame to talk about the Demonic Grimoire which is funding on Backerkit as you hear this. But May is Old School Essentials month on Backerkit, and Gavin Norman and the other Ne...

We're trying something different this week. I spend a lot of time talking to game designers and, of course, I'm a historian and history teacher watching the news every day. A thing I have personally become convinced of is that the United States is going to need a new constitution, and of course, I also spend a lot of time talking to game designers. Game designers, it would seem to me, have a lot t...

Two games enter! One game leaves! And the YouTube algorithm dances in the blood! But seriously, this is a great conversation with Gavin Norman of Old School Essentials and Mike Mearls of 5E D&D. Gavin is the mind behind Old-School Essentials and Dolmenwood. Fellow Ben, Ben Milton at Questing Beast, praised Dolmenwood as the best release of 2025. Gavin's work is famous for taking the wild, dangerou...

This week we talk to two cartoonists who are making a name for themselves in the TTRPG space, Jason Lutes and JP Coovert! Jason Lutes is the designer of The Perilous Void, which Ben "Questing Beast" Milton named one of his best products of 2025. The Perilous Void is on Bundle of Holding right now for dirt cheap! JP Coovert is a brilliant designer and cartoonist whose STAR BORG takes the slammin' l...

Today, we pick the brain of the creator of the Forgotten Realms, Ed Greenwood! Ed is a man who needs no introduction, but who will be subjected to one anyway, a man who's bibliography is longer than his already lengthy beard. Ed is the original creator of the Forgotten Realms, which has been translated into hundreds of novels and one pretty good movie.  Joining him is Jon Hage. Jon is the designer...

Today, we have two remarkable designers here to share with us their insights and thoughts. Alex Roberts is the winner of the Diana Jones Award, and the designer of STAR CROSSED and FOR THE QUEEN. Joining her is Graham Walmsley, creator of CTHULHU DARK and a TRAIL OF CTHULHU designer with many credits to his name. Back Graham's current Kickstarter for PLAY UNSAFE here: https://www.kickstarter.com/p...

Tonight's first guest is a hunter of hunters, a designer who seized upon the monster-of-the-week TV formula and used it as the bones of a horrifying gaming monstrosity of freakish limbs, a brutish head, a harsh brow, a criminal brain, and yes, it's alive!! Michael Sands is the creator of Monster of the Week, the game that turned supernatural investigation, bad decisions, and glorious improvisation...

My first guest tonight is one of the great mad scientists of tabletop gaming. Epidiah Ravachol helped create Dread, the game that made a horror RPG out of a Jenga tower. It's brilliant, cruel, elegant game design that makes players sweat before anything terrible has even happened. He's just launched a sword & sorcery RPG called Swords Without Master. Please welcome Epidiah Ravachol! My next guest...

5E + dragon mounts = :) Chris Lindsay is the godfather of the DM's Guild, and that institution brought us titanic names in the world of game design, such as Kelsey Dionne & MT Black, to name just a few. He is now at Goodman Games, and is crowdfunding THE DRAGONRIDER'S PRIMER, a 5E supplement for winged mounts, everything from dragons to dung beetles. Click here to see more!  

Tonight I'm joined by W.F. Smith, the mind behind Prismatic Wasteland, one of the sharpest OSR blogs in the game. And if you've heard of Barkeep on the Borderlands , that's him too: the barhopping, pubcrawl-fantasy fever dream that took home a Gold ENnie. W.F. writes like a man with a notebook full of bad ideas he's somehow made playable. We're going to talk about design, tables, taste, and why th...

Apparently, snakes have something called "hemepenes," something I only know because of Emily Allen.  Emily is a designer, writer, and the mind behind The Gardens of Ynn , one of those RPG books that feels less like a "setting" and more like a living dream you accidentally walked into and now can't stop exploring. Emily's work has that rare combination of elegance and danger: it's imaginative, it's...

If you know Infinity of Ships , you know their vibe: big imagination, tight design, and the kind of tables-and-ideas toolkit that makes a GM's brain start sprinting. Their latest release, 100 Strangers , gives us NPCs with story fuel, despite how incredibly clipped they are. That's right. Today, I've got Adam Good and Jaimie Perez, the creative engines behind STATIONS.  Adam and Jaimie build for t...

The Wild 90s in TTRPGs! This conversation was a great one! First up today is Wolfgang Baur, a creator and businessperson whose fingerprints are all over the hobby. He can write fantasy like Tolkien and run a business like, uh, someone whose geeky, good at running a business, and not at all ethically challenged in this year of 2026. He's the creator of the MIDGARD campaign setting and the founder o...

Today we welcome back Joshua McCrowell, designer of His Majesty the Worm, a game that looks at the classic dungeon crawl and hits it with a Tarot deck. The Worm won ENnies for best rules and best game this year. Josh has a gift for taking old-school adventure DNA, labyrinths, delving, danger and giving it a new spine. Welcome Josh! Pick up Josh's work here! On Patreon, I posted my Gamehole Con sem...

This conversation was incredible.  The participants in today's talk designed the following games: D&D 3rd Edition, Apocalypse World, Ars Magica, Over the Edge , and even an "Additional Writing" credit on Daggerheart .  You have to check this out.   First up: Jonathan Tweet! A legend with a designer's designer résumé, the kind of mind that can build a rules engine and make it sing. Lead designer of...

Tonight on D&D Outloud, I'm joined by Joseph Laycock, a scholar of religion who explores what happens when belief, culture, and controversy collide. Joe is an associate professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University, and he's written some incredibly relevant work for anyone who remembers when D&D was treated like a portal to perdition, including Dangerous Games , his sharp look at the mo...

Jim Lowder is a writer, an editor, a lore architect, and if we're being honest, a kind of Indiana Jones of shared worlds. From Ravenloft to Forgotten Realms to the trenches of TSR itself, Jim has chronicled the industry, shaped it, and occasionally had to wrestle it into coherence with nothing but a red pen and stubborn Massachusetts resolve. He brings history, insight, and the kind of war stories...

Today, we converse with two firehoses of the human imagination: Mark Diaz Truman and Jay Dragon! Some people play games. Some people publish games. And then there are the people who change how the whole industry works. Mark Diaz Truman is one of the architects of the modern tabletop renaissance; designer, publisher, organizer, and strategic mastermind behind Magpie Games, one of the forces that he...

Happy Thanksgiving Americans! Here's a seminar from Gamehole Con 2025 about why YOU should be writing geeky nonfiction.