The Vintage RPG Podcast

If we had a crazy budget, we'd probably have licensed Iron Maiden's song "Killers" to open this episode of the Vintage RPG podcast. We don't, so we didn't, so go ahead and just listen to it on Spotify before you hit play on this. Get in the mood, you know? Anyway, this week, we're talking about  Killer , the Steve Jackson Games codification of the live action college campus RPG  Assassin , in whic...

Remember the  Lord of the Rings Adventure Game  from Iron Crown Enterprises? I bet you don't! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at the short lived gateway game for Iron Crown's Middle Earth Role Playing. Published from 1991 to 1993, it is an odd little game that perhaps has more in common with pick-your-path gamebooks than it does a tabletop RPG of the period. At the very least,...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, in celebration of a weird made-up holiday, we take a look at a fun little one-on-one Star Wars game from West End Games: the  Lightsaber Dueling Pack . Relive the duel between Luke and Vader on Cloud City or in the throne room of the Death Star (depending on who wins) over and over again, from the comfort of you own home, without breaking a sweat! No lightsabe...

You'd think now that the world is stuck at home, there'd be more time to play tabletop RPGs, right? True enough for Hambone, not so much for Stu. We talk about what we've been up to during the pandemic, the games we've played and run and written, and how we've been playing. * * * We're All Gonna Die  is out now. You can  download the issue of The New-York Ghost here . Sign up to  The New-York Ghos...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we flip through the 1979 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album, written by Gary Gygax and illustrated by underground comic artist Greg Irons. Not only is this a gorgeous coloring book (with some content of questionable suitability for kids) but it also comes with a rules lite dungeon crawl game baked in, penned by Gygax himself. We hadn't ever heard of th...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Gavin Norman, the creator of  Old-School Essentials  and the forthcoming  Dolmenwood  campaign setting. Witness his dark mastery of usability! Learn whether he personally prefers the tome or the modular books! Wonder at the intricate and contradictory minutiae of the original B/X Dungeons & Dragons! Tremble at cryptic hints of what is in store for...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at  HeroQuest , the Milton Bradley/Games Workshop board game that proved to be one of the prime gateways in to tabletop RPGs for throngs of kids in the early 90s. In no small part because of the gorgeous miniatures. And the furniture. We kid you not.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we travel to the furthest reaches of known space to explore TSR's space opera RPG  Star Frontiers ! We give you an overview of the game, the setting, the intriguing alien races and the game's surprising connection to the Dungeons & Dragons Spelljammer campaign setting.  And more, including how TSR inevitably messed it all up! * * * After we recorded this episo...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we journey deep under the earth to read the novel  The Shadow People , by Margaret St. Clair. The bonkers 1969 sci-fi/fantasy novel was included in Appendix N of the  Dungeon Masters Guide , a list of literature Gary Gygax cited as being particularly inspirational to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. It is a clear source for the drow, the duergar and the gam...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat about a game about playing rabbits: Bunnies & Burrows! This 1976 RPG is surprising for the time period and offered up a ton of innovation for RPG design, including the first skill system and first martial arts system. Bunnies are surprising critters!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, author Jim Zub is back on the show. He tells us all about Wizards & Spells, the fourth volume of the Young Adventurer's Guides for Dungeons & Dragons. He might also (definitely) spill the beans about volume five!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a train ride into terror in  Horror on the Orient Express . We do an overview of what's in the massive Call of Cthulhu box set, discuss the scope of the campaign, Chaosium's famous attention to detail, Hercule Poirot and do a fair bit of compare-and-contrast with that other massive Call of Cthulhu campaign,  Masks of Nyarlathotep . We also make several...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we brave the unknown to explore the legendary Dungeons & Dragons hexcrawl,  X1 – The Isle of Dread . We discuss the allure of empty maps, dinosaurs, volcanoes, King Kong and more. We also touch on some parallels between X1 and Chaosium's  Griffin Mountain  for RuneQuest and the 5e D&D campaign book  Tomb of Annihilation . Best pack a lunch, no telling how long...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we crack the cover of Bruce Galloway's Fantasy Wargaming (1981), one of several games of the period attempting to make a more realistic (and therefore more complicated) version of Dungeons & Dragons. We chat about the mysterious, never released Leigh Cliffs adventure scenario for Fantasy Wargaming and we puzzle over the provided statistics for Moses, the Virgi...

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at Gavin Norman and Necrotic Gnome's  Old-School Essentials , a modular restatement of the 1981 Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons rules. This is about as perfect a set of old school rules as we've encountered – light, fast, streamlined, concise and polished to gleaming. After reading it, we're not sure we need any more retro clones or hacks.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out the super weird, super niche RPG sourcebook from the Melsonian Arts Council, Fungi of the Far Realms, by Alex Clements and illustrated by Shuyi Zhang. This gorgeously illustrated guide to over 200 types of strange and magical fungi is 100% delightful and might be, if we're lucky, a hint at the future of the indie RPG scene.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we enter a neo-noir world of conspiracies and horror thanks to the forthcoming storytelling RPG  Cobwebs , from  World Champ Game Co . We chat with designer Adam Vass and illustrator  Sally Cantirino  about the game, how it works, the inspiration behind the game and how well-suited North Jersey is as a setting for stories about dark doings.

This week, we take a look at the famed Dungeons & Dragons module  B2 – The Keep on the Borderlands . We discuss how easy it is to find the module, even forty years later, the importance of beginner modules, the weird fact that it isn't an AD&D module and its inclusion in the 5E playtest packet. We also draw some comparisons to RuneQuest's  Snake Pipe Hollow  and make a surprising number of referen...

You can't have Dungeons & Dragons without the dungeons! When you stop and think about dungeons as we understand them from fantasy roleplaying games, they're pretty weird places. We talk about some of that weirdness (where is all the construction debris?), random dungeon generators – particularly Task Force Games'  Casting Call: Dungeons  – and the joys of exploring underground death traps with you...

This week, we talk to the incomparable artist Russ Nicholson. Russ has created countless iconic illustrations for tabletop RPGs – you probably best know his work from the original Dungeons & Dragons  Fiend Folio  or from countless fantasy gamebooks, like the Fighting Fantasy series. We chat about his work, his career, Ouija boards, Scottish accents and more in what, as far as Russ can recall, is h...

A short and sweet look at Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Cards from 1981 – these are four sets of 20 cards with original full color illustrations by an all-star team of TSR artists on the front with stats on the back. These cards introduce a number of monsters to the game and are the first (and sometimes only) time many of them were depicted in color. They're a beautiful, lesser known slice o...

We crack the cover of the classic Players Handbook (1978) for first edition Dungeons & Dragons. We talk a lot about Trampier's iconic, forbidding cover, of course, but also dig into the equally iconic interior illustrations, the philosophical state of the game at the time, the D&D multiverse, the previous owners of our personal copies (who left their names in the front covers) and much more!

We dig into the original  Monster Manual  (1977), which is the dividing line between the old white box and the new first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Along the way, we talk about how we organize our shelves, the mysteries of Dave Sutherland's shifting artistic style, the incomparable Dave Trampier, monster nudity, wood burning, the perils of slickness and more. Monsters!

Because Star Wars is hitting the critical mass point for 2019, we figured we'd add to the fun with an episode that looks at the Galaxy Guides series of sourcebooks for the West End Games Star Wars Role Playing Game. We take a quick tour through each of the twelve volumes and chat about what they added to the RPG experience and how they formed the backbone of the greater Star Wars Expanded Universe...

This week, we chat about the new monster art book  Dungeons & Drawings , by Blanca Martinez de Rituerto and Joe Sparrow, which collects a little bit of folk lore and pop culture, a little bit of tabletop RPG context and a whole lot of beautiful original art. We also touch on the tradition of monster books beyond RPGs, particularly in the 70s and 80s. Daniel Cohen forever! * * * Stu mentions two bo...