RPGBOT.Podcast

What happens when you take old-school D&D, remove darkvision, put your torches on a real-world timer, and make every spell a potential disaster? You get Shadowdark, a game where poor planning kills you, good planning might save you, and your biggest enemy is a one-hour countdown. This week, Tyler, Randall, and Ash explore a dungeon crawler where treasure earns XP, inventory space is precious, and...

  The fate of La Gorge hangs in the balance. An army is approaching, the ancient defenses are broken, and the only thing standing between civilization and total destruction is a guy who can't roll above a five, a robot obsessed with harvesting brains, and Ash hitting things until they stop moving. What could possibly go wrong? In the explosive finale of our Numenera actual play, we discover that s...

For years, martial characters in D&D have had one job: hit things until they stop moving. Wizards rewrite reality, clerics summon divine power, and fighters get to swing a sword. Again. Well, the 2024 D&D Player's Handbook finally gives martial characters something interesting to do with all that stabbing. Weapon Mastery lets you cleave through enemies, knock them down, shove them around, and even...

Last time, we opened a door that had been sealed for thousands of years, murdered a dinosaur, adopted its baby, and turned a crank we probably shouldn't have touched. Now the village is flooding, the ancient machinery is waking up, and our only hope is building weapons from whatever junk we can find. Oh, and Tyler wants to dismantle a horse for spare parts. Welcome back to Numenera, where saving t...

  RPGBOT.Quickstart: Numenera Actual Play, Part 1 What happens when a mysterious cowboy rides out of a deadly desert, introduces himself, and immediately falls off his horse? Naturally, you trust his god, open a door that's been locked for thousands of years, and discover your entire village might be living inside a dead monster. Welcome to Numenera, where the birds are terrifying, the technology...

You've slain dragons, defeated liches, and saved the kingdom. But now an NPC is flirting with you, and suddenly everyone at the table is making death saves against awkwardness. Romance in D&D can be terrifying, especially when the GM's idea of flirting involves a Persuasion check and prolonged eye contact. Fortunately, Sebastian Yūe and Friday Strout are here to help us navigate love, relationship...

So you've survived character creation in Numenera. Congratulations! Now it's time to level up, rummage through ancient garbage, and build a giant murder robot that might eventually decide you're the problem. What could possibly go wrong? In this episode, we're spending XP, scavenging the ruins of forgotten civilizations, and exploring the joys of community development. Because nothing says heroic...

Welcome to Numenera, where ancient technology is magic, character creation is an adventure, and Tyler is already looking for something dangerous to invent. This time, Randall walks us through building characters in the Ninth World, where your personality, abilities, and questionable life choices all become part of your character sheet. Ash wants a loyal adventurer. Tyler wants a reckless inventor....

Today on the RPGBOT.Podcast, we're talking about secret rolls, the wonderful tabletop RPG mechanic where the GM rolls your dice for you and then refuses to tell you what happened. Pathfinder 2e actually built rules for this. Dungeons & Dragons 5e mostly hands the problem to the DM and quietly backs out of the room. So grab your dice, hand them to the GM, and try not to look nervous. Apparently, no...

In Part I of our Starfinder 2e Tech Core review, we covered the new ancestries, the Mechanic, cybernetics, Junkomancers, armed starfish, and hoverboard shields. Now we get to the Technomancer, emoji magic, weaponized guitars, giant robots, streamer builds, and finally, after a very long wait, actual Starfinder 2e starship combat. Starfinder 2e: Tech Core ( affiliate link ) The Technomancer is a pr...

Starfinder 2e Tech Core is here, and apparently the answer to "How much weird science fiction nonsense can Paizo fit into one book?" is "Yes." In Part 1 of our Starfinder 2e Tech Core review, we dig into the player-facing side of the book, starting with new ancestries, moving into the Mechanic class, and then wandering through a pile of new archetypes, companions, augments, grenades, junk magic, a...

Creating a D&D character used to be simple. Pick a race, choose a class, roll some dice, and invent a tragic backstory involving dead parents. But the 2024 Player's Handbook has other plans. Now your background determines your ability scores, everyone gets feats, and apparently there are three-ish types of feats because counting to four was too complicated. Tyler, Randall, and Ash dig into the new...

Welcome to Mechanus, the only plane in the D&D multiverse where showing up five minutes early is considered dangerously chaotic. Everything is perfectly balanced. Everything runs on schedule. The gears are the size of countries. The locals are geometrically ranked bureaucrats. And somewhere, a Modron is absolutely furious because you filled out Form 27-B instead of Form 27-B-1. This week, we visit...

Welcome to the Ninth World, where civilization has ended eight times, nobody understands how anything works, and sufficiently advanced technology is mostly an excuse to point at a laser pistol and yell, "Magic!" In this first part of our How to Play Numenera series, Randall attempts to explain a billion years of lost civilizations, Ash discovers that physics are apparently optional, and Tyler star...

Welcome back to the Underdark, where the mushrooms are telepathic, the fish can invent gods, and magical radiation apparently has the terrifying power to give you a headache and ruin your wine. This week, Unearthed Arcana Underdark Options 2 gives us a Freedom Cleric that desperately wants you to move around, a Spores Druid that has discovered the tactical value of exploding zombies, and a Faerzre...

Last time, we built Wizards who could survive long enough to become dangerous. That was apparently a mistake. Treantmonk is back as we take our 2014 D&D 5e Wizard builds from level 8 all the way to 20, where spell selection stops being a question of how to win a fight and becomes a question of how creatively we would like to ruin reality. Tyler is operating his floating spellbook like a magical Pr...

Welcome to Thay, where the dress code is red, the government is run by homicidal wizards, and your spy agency's severance package is either magical memory loss or death. Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall takes D&D 5e from cloak-and-dagger espionage to rebel wizards, pirates, demon-powered skeletons, legendary magic items, and eventually a full-scale assault on Szass Tam's evil wizard lair. Along the way,...

We survived the subclasses. We survived the wizard subclasses. Now Arcana Unleashed Part 3 asks the truly dangerous questions: What if every wizard got a Pokémon? What if every magical faction agreed that the Ninth Quill sucks? And what if an invisible imp could carry your entire adventuring party through a wall while you relax inside a genie lamp like the world's most heavily armed first-class pa...

Treantmonk joins us to talk about Wizards, which means we're about to spend an unreasonable amount of time discussing concentration saves, initiative bonuses, spell selection, and why standing anywhere near the enemy is a terrible lifestyle choice. We're taking the 2014 Wizard from levels 1 through 7, starting with a fragile academic who can be killed by an aggressively thrown sandwich and ending...

Four Wizards walk into Arcana Unleashed. One teleports around insisting that swapping places is exciting. One looks like somebody's tiefling dad going through a stage-magic phase. One brings an army of disposable skeletons specifically so he can blow them up. And the last one turns into a T-Rex and starts casting Disintegrate. Somehow, this is still a more functional party than most adventuring gr...

Arcana Unleashed is here, bringing new subclasses, spells, feats, magic items, and—most importantly—fresh opportunities for Tyler to find loopholes Wizards of the Coast absolutely did not intend. In Part 1, we discover that Clerics can apparently wizard better than Wizards, the Arcane Archer has finally been upgraded from "why?" to "okay, I guess," Monks can punch people and cast spells at the sam...

At level 5, the Barbarian unlocks a revolutionary new combat technique: hitting the problem twice. From there, things escalate exactly as responsible game design intended. Randall gambles his way through Wild Magic, Tyler perfects the ancient martial art of being an unbearable pain in the ass, and Ash becomes a house-sized fairy with tiny butterfly wings, a returning elemental pike, and enough rea...

Most RPG rules questions start with something reasonable, like Can I jump over this pit? or Does fireball set the curtains on fire? This one starts with a much more dangerous question: How many adventurers can we cram into one five-foot square before the rules collapse? Tyler digs into decades of D&D and Pathfinder rules looking for an answer, while Ash does increasingly questionable celebrity imp...

Welcome to the Underdark, where the sun doesn't shine, everyone wants to murder you, and Wizards of the Coast has apparently decided what this place really needed was more light. Sorry, Unlight. Totally different. We've got a glowing Barbarian who can't turn off the high beams, a Rogue whose subclass starts working sometime around retirement age, a Wizard with healing powers and questionable workp...

Today we're building Barbarians, the D&D class for anyone who looked at tactical combat and thought, This needs fewer tactics and significantly more upper body strength. We've got Rage, Reckless Attack, enormous hit points, questionable wardrobe choices, and an ongoing debate over whether a shield is sensible equipment or an admission that you lack confidence in your own face. By level four, Ash h...