RPGBOT.Podcast

Monks are supposed to be serene masters of body, mind, and spirit, which is adorable because in 2014 DnD 5e they mostly begin life as a lightly dressed Dex-Wis-Con spreadsheet sprinting toward danger with 10 hit points and a dream. This week, the RPGBOT crew enters the monastery to ask the big questions. Can you punch your way to enlightenment? Is ki a precious spiritual resource or just a tiny ba...

Once the table finally escapes the opening chaos and cat crimes, Tyler, Randall, and Ash dive into Pathfinder 2e rogues, proving that the class is not just a sneaky knife gremlin. It is also a walking toolbox, a social menace, a battlefield problem, and so much more Show Notes This episode begins the RPGBOT.Podcast breakdown of Pathfinder 2e rogues, covering levels 1 through 10 and exploring how t...

Welcome to  Forgotten Odysseys , the game where surviving the Trojan War is apparently the easy part. Adam Bradford, also known as BadEye Adam, has created a MÖRK BORG-compatible Greek fantasy nightmare where the gods hate you, the sea hates you, the dice hate you, and sometimes your own party decides that prophecy is just a polite suggestion to commit murder. In this episode, the crew sets sail f...

Welcome to the Abyss, the multiverse's least relaxing vacation destination, where every layer is somehow worse than the last, the locals are made of teeth and bad decisions, and the gift shop only sells trauma. This week on the RPGBOT.Podcast, we descend into the infinite chaos of demonic nonsense to ask the important questions: how do you survive a plane that actively hates zoning laws, why are d...

Welcome to Part 4 of our  Ravenloft: The Horrors Within review, where the real horror isn't Strahd. It's Ash's campaign. In the span of ten minutes, his players accidentally created Baba Yaga, nearly invented a magical nuclear weapon, tried to break the multiverse "just to see what happens," and immediately asked if they could automate it with a Rube Goldberg machine. At this point, the Dark Power...

Ravenloft is a setting built on fear, tragedy, and impossible choices. Naturally, we spent the first ten minutes arguing about whether Florida is its own Domain of Dread, listening to Ash tell a story about getting magically demoted from noble to peasant, and debating whether "lofting ravens" is a real phrase. Honestly, the Dark Powers couldn't have written a better introduction. Show Notes In Par...

So today's episode is about the Help action, the mechanic that exists so your party can finally contribute after rolling three consecutive natural 2s. We'll answer life's toughest questions: Is sacrificing your turn to give someone advantage actually worth it? Can an owl legally become the MVP of every combat? And how many class features can be stacked before your DM quietly starts targeting the f...

The real horror in Ravenloft wasn't ghosts, vampires, or eldritch patrons. It was Riverside updating its interface five minutes before recording. Suddenly the buttons moved, the fonts shrank every time someone mentioned the layout, and Tyler entered a state of existential panic usually reserved for failed concentration checks. By the end of the night, we had learned two important lessons. First, c...

Ravenloft is supposed to be full of gothic horror, tragic villains, and creeping dread. Instead, we somehow spent twenty minutes imagining a Midwestern Strahd saying You betcha before drinking your blood, arguing about wet burritos, and debating whether North Dakota counts as a real place. By the time we actually opened the book, the greatest horror wasn't the Dark Powers. It was realizing that so...

Warlocks are the only class where the phrase "I signed a terrible contract and somehow came out ahead" counts as a character concept. By level 20, your patron has become equal parts sugar daddy, eldritch therapist, and extended warranty scammer. Somewhere between your third Eldritch Invocation and your fourth existential crisis, you stop asking whether the power is worth the cost and start asking...

The Plane of Water episode started exactly how you'd expect an episode about endless oceans to start: with stock prices, GTA 6 rumors, GameStop drama, and Randall suggesting you could solve inflation by storing barrels of oil in your apartment. Eventually everyone remembered there was supposed to be a podcast, which unfortunately meant confronting Ash's greatest weakness: deep water. What followed...

Nobody expected the second half of the cleric episode to begin with a discussion about wolves conducting hate crimes against coyotes, crows acting as aerial bounty hunters, and the lasting trauma of Game of Thrones season eight. Somehow this naturally transitioned into Pathfinder clerics, giant dragon towers, vampire bat transformations, and a godless revolutionary whose greatest enemy remains org...

Every Warlock player starts with the same innocent thought: I just want a mysterious patron and some spooky magic. Three hours later you're reading invocation combinations like you're optimizing a tax return and trying to explain to the party why your character absolutely needed a sentient book, a telepathic connection to an ancient horror, and a cantrip that solves all of life's problems. Somehow...

Somewhere in Golarion, a tiny halfling cleric stands on a battlefield declaring that war is bad and violence solves nothing. Seconds later, he charges into combat with a hammer-and-sickle-decorated glaive, threatening to enforce peace by force. Meanwhile, a dragon-worshiping kobold is handing out experimental body modifications like coupons, and an undead enthusiast is one bad day away from becomi...

After two actual play episodes, we finally sat down to answer the important questions. Why was there a demon in the basement? Why were people making drugs out of supernatural whale juice? Why did our cult immediately choose violence as a conflict resolution strategy? And perhaps most importantly, how many times can you accidentally make things worse before it becomes your crew's official business...

Every adventuring party has that one person who looks at an ancient magical artifact and immediately thinks, I can improve this. In this episode, we continue our journey through the Artificer and explore what happens when a character combines magical talent, engineering confidence, and absolutely no respect for reasonable safety standards. The result is a class that can solve problems, create new...

Every tabletop group eventually reaches a point where someone says, We should absolutely not do that. In this episode, that point arrives roughly every thirty seconds. Faced with a secret ghost-harvesting operation, a trapped demon, corrupt Bluecoats, and enough evidence to bring down an entire criminal enterprise, our heroes make a series of carefully considered decisions such as stealing haunted...

Every villain thinks they're the hero of their own story. This episode proves that sometimes they're right, and that's what makes them dangerous. Joined by James D'Amato and Dillin Apelyan, we set out to discuss villain backstories and somehow end up creating a supernatural cat-themed criminal mastermind based on Tyler's cat Cora. The result is equal parts masterclass, therapy session, and caution...

The Artificer is the only class in D&D where a player can confidently say, I have a solution for this, then spend forty-five minutes opening character sheets, checking infusions, reorganizing inventory, building a robot dog, enchanting a teapot, and accidentally inventing OSHA violations. Meanwhile the Barbarian solved the problem by hitting it with a chair twenty minutes ago. Show Notes This week...

Blades in the Dark is a game about daring criminals pulling off impossible heists. Our crew immediately used fire to escape the box we voluntarily hid in, assaulted two undercover cops, locked them inside our escape crate, stole accounting records, accidentally got high during evidence collection, and somehow convinced ourselves this was still a stealth mission. Honestly, I think the cult is thriv...

I love kobold adventures because they always lie to you. They start with the same sales pitch every time. Oh, it's kobolds. Funny little lizard guys. Maybe some traps. Couple slings. Tiny crown. Cute little dungeon crawl. And then six sessions later you're dealing with ancient dwarven grudges, undead labor theology, emotional damage, cursed relics, fantasy Vecna, and one kobold who should have die...

The fantasy world was doing just fine. Wizards were arguing about spell slots. Fighters were polishing swords. Rogues were stealing absolutely everything not nailed down. Then somebody invented firearms. Now the wizard wants an arcane revolver, the artificer is building a rifle powered by dragon crystals, and the fighter has spent twenty minutes explaining why attaching a bayonet to a musket absol...

Character creation in most games is where heroes are born. In Blades in the Dark, character creation is where we accidentally founded a sewer cult dedicated to a giant vampire bat god, befriended ghosts, picked fights with spirit traffickers, and collectively agreed that getting high on our own alchemical supply was a perfectly reasonable life choice. This was not a descent into darkness. This was...

Show Notes We dive into the latest villain-themed Unearthed Arcana subclasses and immediately get distracted by the Path of Lament Barbarian. The idea of a rage-fueled warrior powered entirely by emotional devastation is way too funny for us not to lean into, especially once we realize the subclass is actually pretty solid at crowd control. We spend a lot of time imagining a Barbarian loudly sobbi...

The descent into the deepest layers of the Nine Hells takes things from dangerous to existentially terrifying. This episode explores Baator's final four layers, where infernal politics, cosmic oppression, and impossible ambition reshape reality itself. The closer the journey gets to Nessus and the throne of Asmodeus, the less the planes feel like fantasy adventure settings and the more they resemb...