The Vintage RPG Podcast

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with our pal Mark Sable about his imminent comic series  Miskatonic , which takes on Lovecraft, cosmic horror, racism, the Red Scare and more. We chat with Mark about all that, plus the  Call of Cthulhu  RPG, the symbiotic relationship between playing RPGs and being a writer and plenty more! Miskatonic  #1  is on sale digitally and in comic stores on W...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Kathryn Hymes of  Thorny Games  about  Xenolanguage . Thorny Games makes games about language (see the rather sublime  Dialect  for example) and their latest effort, currently on Kickstarter, draws inspiration from  Arrival ,  Contact  and "The Story of Your Life" to create an experience that is about first contact with an alien species, but also...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we travel the dark and twisting paths of the Ravenloft campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. Prepare yourself for horrors beyond imagining, diabolical villains and a lot of near-hysterical praise for the art of Stephen Fabian!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we slip into the shadows of  Vampire: The Masquerade , a topic far too sprawling for just one episode. We try to cut to the heart of the game's early era, the wild lore, the Storyteller system, the LARPing, the Tim Bradstreet art, Milwaukee. We probably just scratch the surface. But we manage to find time to also discuss  Near Dark  and the vampire courts of t...

In the latest episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast this week, we look at Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey's gritty, shared-world fantasy anthology series, the Tim Sale graphic novel adaptations and the magical moment in roleplaying history when Chaosium convinced the designers behind all the major RPGs (including Traveller!?) to collaborate on their  Thieves' World  box set. It was a glorious momen...

Join us in the latest episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast as we investigate the extremely earnest  World Action and Adventure  RPG, a universal RPG system from 1985 that codifies the real world into a semi-playable game. There is poetry. There is clip art. There are so many charts. Most importantly, the creation of  World Action and Adventure  scored author Gregory L. Kinney (right) credit for five...

Friend of the show Jim Zub is back on the Vintage RPG Podcast this week, with a bag full of fun new projects. First off is the  Skullkickers Kickstarter :  Caster Bastards and the Great Grotesque , a comic and RPG supplement that celebrates the 10th anniversary of his love letter to pulp and D&D. We also talk about the forthcoming  Beasts & Behemoths , the latest installment of the Young Adventure...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we walk the shadowy streets of  Lankhmar: City of Adventure , one of the greatest RPG city sourcebooks. Based on the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber, Lankhmar is both a city and a larger campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons (using a modified character creation system) that captures the atmosphere of the original stories. The real genius of th...

Steal your strength and guard your soul: this week, the Vintage RPG Podcast looks at Chaosium's  Stormbringer  RPG. Designed by Ken St. Andre,  Stormbringer  is a high power and high risk RPG set in the world of Michael Moorcock's Elric stories (for our money, perhaps the greatest fantasy series ever written). One of the more straightforward of the games using Chaosium's Basic Role Playing system,...

This week, the Vintage RPG Podcast travels back in time to the 80s that never were with  Tales From the Loop , an RPG where extraordinary science fiction mysteries crash into the dreariness of everyday life. Based on the mesmerizing artwork of Simon Stålenhag, this Year Zero engine game from Fria Ligan is one of our favorites – easy to pick up and play (especially for beginners), gorgeous to look...

This week, the Vintage RPG Podcast cracks open  The Green Knight: A Quest for Honor . Don't let the fake scuff marks fool you: this is a brand new box set from @A24, a marketing tie-in for their forthcoming film  The Green Knight . We talk a bit about the original 14th century poem (and how perplexing its intricate commentary on the dueling systems of knightly and chivalric honor might be to moder...

Welcome to the Megaverse, folks. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at Palladium's Rifts. Introduced in 1990, Rifts is like all of 90s nerd culture smooshed into one gonzo RPG. Mixing genres with wild abandon it is perhaps the ultimate form of the age old comic shop game "Who Would Win in a Fight?" Sorcerers and aliens and superheroes and biomechanical aliens and interdimensional...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we return to Appendix N and check out Poul Anderson's  Three Hearts and Three Lions . Even though it starts off in World War II and features lots of scientific theories to explain magical effects, this 1961 novel is a formative text for Dungeons & Dragons. It establishes many of the feels of a D&D adventure, with its travel and towns and non player characters...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we crack open David Hargrave's  Arduin Grimoire ! The eight book series, started in 1977, is a treasure trove of house rules and hacks for the original Dungeons & Dragons. There's insect people and laser guns and the dragon from  Neverending Story  in here – if Hargrave had a design ethos, it was probably "IDGAF," for better or worse. One of the earliest gonzo...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look back that the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan films, Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Conan the Destroyer (1984). They're great fantasy films (OK, one of them is great) that certainly influenced RPGs, but there are some indications that Dungeons & Dragons might have had a little bit of influence on Destroyer. We discuss the high points of both films, nearly...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out the infamous White Plume Mountain , by Lawrence Schick, one of the greatest fun house dungeons of all time, featuring a strangely seafood-centric assortment of foes, now that I am thinking about it. Anyway! We chat about how the module came to be, revel in its glorious ridiculousness and drop an interesting factoid about what Schick has been up to...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, instead of focusing on a particular game or book, we're looking at a specific villain, the demon prince Orcus, lord of the undead. The big guy has some interesting real world history and folklore to delve into regarding monsters in general. Then we check out how his story unfolded across the first three editions of Dungeons & Dragons, primarily in the  Bloodst...

This week, we talk to game designer  Banana Chan  about their latest tabletop RPG,  Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall  (co-written by  Sen-Foong Lim  and developed in collaboration between  Wet Ink Games  and  A Game and a Curry ). Players take the roles of members of a Chinese immigrant family in the 1920s. By day, you collaborate to run the family restaurant. By night, you fend off attacks by...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at  Tunnels & Trolls , the earliest Dungeons & Dragons competitor. Designed by Ken St. Andre ( Stormbringer ),  T&T  was developed as a simpler, less expensive alternative to D&D, with a focus on solo play (solo  T&T  modules were the first adventure gamebooks, paving the way for series like Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf). Back in the day, folks said ...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at HeartQuest. Back in 1982, TSR launched a series of Dungeons & Dragons-based interactive novels called Endless Quest. Aimed at children, they were an immediate success. In 1983, they followed up with HeartQuest, which introduced romance into the formula and courted women readers. It was a dismal failure. Why? Well, for the answer to that, you'...

Stu and Hambone did something stupid. They watched the 1982 made-for-TV movie  Mazes and Monsters , based on the Rona Jaffe novel of the same name, which is based loosely and idiotically on the totally not related to Dungeons & Dragons disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in 1979. It is notable for being Tom Hanks' first major role, a shockingly poor understanding of RPGs, some atrocious one-l...

Not all gods are mighty. This week we look at  Petty Gods , a collection minor divinities, genii locorum and otherwise trivial powers created by the OSR community from 2010 to 2015 and collected in a massive tome in the style of the original Deities & Demigods. At turns silly and serious, there is a little bit of everything in here to spice up any flavor of dungeon crawling game. Even better, you...

Something a little different this week: we speak to Chris Leder, lead designer of Ravensburger's forthcoming game  Back to the Future: Dice Through Time . Chris shares his overwhelming enthusiasm for the franchise and walks us through the novel way the game handles time travel mechanics, among other things. Pre-sale started yesterday, in stores June 21, exclusively at Target.

Polish up your chrome, chummer: this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about  Shadowrun , FASA beloved cyberpunk fantasy RPG. Within, you'll find much love for the world building and art, awe for how the game predicts a lot of modern internet stuff, lukewarm reactions to the system and inevitable comparisons to  Vampire: The Masquerade ,  Rifts ,  Torg  and  Cyberpunk 2020 . A pivotal game...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we visit Greyhawk, one of the earliest RPG campaign settings. Despite being Gary Gygax's own homebrew world, Greyhawk struggled to capture the public's imagination. We talk through the various attempts by TSR to tweak the setting, some dull, some interesting, all weirdly in the shadow of other D&D campaign settings.