The Vintage RPG Podcast

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look back at Paul M. Sammon’s coverage of the making of Conan the Barbarian in the April 1982 issue of Cinefantastique. The double issue has three features by Sammon — a lengthy piece of reportage on the filming and interviews with designer Ron Cobb and director John Milius — and lots of behind-the-scenes photos. It’s a charming bit of work that contrasts in surprising ways with Sammon’s later coverage of Conan the Destroyer, which we also discuss.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Tyler Vance, the fine artist behind Void: The Frontier. Tyler’s been exploring Void for a while now, having published three rules-agnostic setting zines that pair his enigmatic narratives with his equally mysterious paintings. Now he’s concocted a gorgeous card game, now on Kickstarter. We talk about the game, his process and his often unsettling art, and more!

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Check out Tyler's zines and things!

Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Megan Dawson Jaffe about the new Nerdy City RPG Holomatixx: A New Wave Order. Spinning out of their other Omni System games like the kid adventure Rememorex and the game of transforming robots, Commandroids, Holomatixx takes on pop star superheroes in the vein of Jem and Holograms and Barbie and the Rockers. On Kickstarter now!

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Check out Nerdy City's other rad games!

Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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Stu was tied up with lots of crap this week, so have a re-run!

Original show notes: Make ours Marvel! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at TSR’s massive, 8-volume compendium of Marvel comics lore, The Gamer’s Handbook of the Marvel Universe (1988-1992). They’re like a monster manual of superheroes and villains, some awesome, some doofy, some downright perplexing. They also amount to being an interesting in-universe history for one of the most important transitional times in the comics industry

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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Stu’s ongoing West Marches-style Old-School Essentials campaign is a year old, so this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we thought we’d see how things are going (and how many characters have died). And since you can’t really trust the Dungeon Master, we invited two of the players — Justin Wigard and Clay Fleischer — on to share their impressions of the 34-session “mystery crawl.”

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Wanna play? We've got ten spots open. Sign up at the D10 tier on the Vintage RPG Patreon!

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Check out Justin's interview with the 321-Action lads and his review of Stephen Graham Jones' latest, The Angel of Indian Lake.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at Shadowgate (1987, 1989), the point-and-click fantasy adventure videogame. Explore a mysterious castle while trying to find a way to stop the Warlock Lord from destroying the world! Tremble in fear as your torch burns low! Get eaten by every monster! Have a soundtrack-induced panic attack! All this and more awaits you in Castle Shadowgate.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Gavriel Quiroga about his new game, Black Rainbow Society. A sequel of sorts to Hell Night, this game doesn’t feature players in the roles of fiends from hell, but rather normal humans grappling with the knowledge that there is more to existence than the mundane world (a staple theme of ’90s RPGs, many of which are clear inspirations here). Gavriel brings his signature intensity to the project, with heaps of random tables, gnarly zine art and buckets of blood. Now on Kickstarter!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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At the very end of last year, Bryan Ansell, a man who played a pivotal role in the world of tabletop games, passed away. To understand just how important Ansell was, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Timothy Linward, Wargamer staff writer and author of the forthcoming Grimdark: A Very British Hell. Tim walks us through the early days of Citadel Miniatures, his rise to prominence at Games Workshop and his role in shaping the various flavors of Warhammer that emerged during his tenure from 1985 to 1991, culminating with Realm of Chaos. We also nearly spin off into a tangential discussion of the Horus Heresy, but luckily we pulled back from tumbling into that abyss. Another time!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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Where does the game end and real life begin? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at Gameplayers, Stephen Bowkett’s 1986 novel. At first blush, it seems to belong in that silly microgenre of panicky novels dedicated to wondering about how kids can cope with fantasy as powerful as tabletop RPGs (see Mazes & Monsters and Hobgoblin, both 1981). What we get, though, is a coming of age story in which a D&D-like game plays a prominent role in helping the grade-school protagonist deal with the increasing complexities of real life. And not in a corny After School Special way, believe it or not! The kids talk like kids, the game feels like a plausible game and the forays into fantasy are peppered with clever monsters and interesting encounters.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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Set phasers to stun! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out FASA’s 1982 Star Trek RPG. It’s an interesting game in it’s own right — a hack of Traveller, when it comes down to it — but is also super interesting in regards to fandom, IP canon and licensed RPGs. Climb on board as we explore these strange old worlds!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to John Patrick Cooper about Get in the Van, his live music-themed Troika hack. Form a band (hardcore, hair or thrash) in the year 198X, hit the road, do battle with the audience, rock their faces off and get to the next gig. A tight, fun little ode to the road dog life. Also, surprise, Cooper designed Dead Mall, our favorite Tunnel Goons hack about exploring monster-filled abandoned malls, so we talked about that some too!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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There may be a million ways to die, but you’re probably only going to see the first two or three. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re remembering the classic coin-eating arcade game, Dragon’s Lair (1983). That’s the one that features the cell-shaded, professionally animated (by Don frickin’ Bluth!) adventure of Dirk the Daring that was hidden behind an endless series of near-impossible reflex tests. An exercise in beautiful frustration that nevertheless contributed much to the visual language of fantasy in the ‘80s and beyond!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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If the Colour is out of Space it should maybe consider weeding some of its shelves, amirite? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re going back to witch-haunted Arkham, Massachusetts by way of Chaosium’s latest edition of the Arkham sourcebook (previously known as Arkham Unveiled, H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham and The Compact Arkham Unveiled). This is a ground-up renovation of Keith Herber’s original text by Mike Mason and it is everything you’d want from such a project. The old stuff feels new, the new stuff blends in, the whole package feels fresh and exciting. A new street map! A genuine newspaper! A social reputation system! Ghouls! What more could you want? A better lead-in joke? Hambone doesn’t have a monopoly on bad jokes, sorry.

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Stu's pretty sure that at one point in the show, he says The Lurker at the Threshold when he meant "The Thing on the Doorstep." His confusion is understandable.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re checking out Caverns of Thracia (1979)! Considered by some to be the late Jennell Jaquays’ finest work, we talk about some of the ways it differs from her previous Judges Guild module, Dark Tower, the cool way it handles random encounters and its place in the high trinity of ’70s adventure design. Fun Fact: while folks, particularly in the OSR, think Caverns is top, Jennell considered neither that nor Dark Tower as the best examples of her work — and there are plenty of other gems in that bibliography.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re continuing our talk with Anthony Meloro about Mystic Punks! This is Part the Second, so be sure to check out last week’s jam to get the full experience. On tap: the imminent Kickstarter for the multiplayer Mystic Punks RPG, the majestic art of Benjamin Marra, trash culture, the healing power of reefer and so much more!

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Mystic Punks is Kickstarting soon!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re talking to Anthony Meloro about Mystic Punks! This is Part One, because we got to gabbing so long that we got two episodes worth of chat. Within, we talk about the original Mystic Punks solo game, the imminent Kickstarter for the multiplayer Mystic Punks RPG, the majestic art of Benjamin Marra, trash culture, the healing power of reefer and so much more!

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Mystic Punks is Kickstarting soon!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re talking about Roger Zelazny’s 1971 novel Jack of Shadows. Gygax included the novel — a high-concept blend of fantasy and science fiction — in Appendix N, but it isn’t one that gets talked about all that often. Perhaps because it is such an unrelentingly ugly book, featuring a protagonist who embraces his dark side and never lets go, to the sorrow of everyone around him, and even unto the end of the world as he knows it. This one is DARK. And yet, because it is Zelazny, still incredibly readable and entertaining. That dude could write.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to Chuck Kranz and Adam Rose about their forthcoming RPG, Teenage Odyssey. Set in a small town in the early '90s, the game casts players as teens navigating humdrum lives that are periodically thrown into chaos by bizarre supernatural events. Featuring art by Marie Enger and a light and flexible system based on Chris McDowall's Into the Odd, the game is on Kickstarter RIGHT NOW!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at the Cold War curiosity The Price of Freedom (1986). Basically Red Dawn (or Red Scare) the RPG, it seems like a serious attempt at creating a game in the mode of similar military-focused, conservatively minded box sets that were coming out at the same time. On the other hand, it’s by Greg Costikyan (Star Wars, Paranoia, Violence, Toon) and because of his work on those games, I feel like it is very much taking the piss. Just look at that gloriously ridiculous cover!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to Luke Gearing and David Hoskins, the creative team behind the new RPG Swyvers, from Melsonian Arts Council. In a fictionalized, horrible sort of fantasy London full of corruption and wild magic, the only way to get yours is to take it from somebody else. Rules light, with a focus on collaborative play fueled by novel mechanics and decorated in an amazing portfolio of art by Hoskins, Swyvers is gonna knock your socks off (and steal your wallet while you’re lying there). On Kickstarter now, go back it. Or else.

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You can grab the art-lite quickstart rules for Swyvers on Drive-Thru for a buck.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Joey Royale about the new adventure in Ninja City: Drug Demon Disco, for DCC. A new drug is hitting the streets and turning people into demons — can you and your ninja pals save the city? Can you do it while busting out the best breakdancing moves? Find out on Kickstarter, now! We also chat a little bit about all of Get Haunted Industries projects, including Weird Heroes of Public Access.

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Back the Ninja City: Drug Demon Disco kickstarter!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re looking back through videogame history at The Temple of Apshai Trilogy (1985), the classic remake of the original 1979 game and its two expansions. Apshai is maybe (depending on the criteria) the first dungeoncrawler videogame and one of the earliest videogame interpretations of Dungeons & Dragons. The Trilogy also has a rad instruction manual full of great art that, all these years later, is still worth the price of admission on its own.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast we welcome back friend of the show Mark Sable, who is about to start teaching a class called Writing Adventures for Tabletop RPGs. Seems like something y'all might be interested in. We talk a bit about game design, about teaching games and the nebulous ways we've approached how-to in RPGs. Marks class is eight sessions starting February 6 and is part of the School of Visual Arts' continuing education program, meaning anyone can sign up!

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Mark's comic book/adventure module Chaotic Neutral is also out now. You can grab a copy from Backerkit!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu's crowing about one of his Christmas gifts, The Meints Guide to Glorantha, by Chaosium president Rick Meints. The books amounts to the definitive guide to all publications to include material on Glorantha in existence (well, all the ones Rick knows about, which is certainly most of them, if not all of them). Entries consist of product photos as well as notes on production and design. He even has entries for Glorantha books that don't exist. How's that for exhaustive? There should be a book like this for every RPG line.

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Grab a copy from Chaosium!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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And we're back! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Hambone's got the reins and talking about two books from Goodman Games: the Dungeon Crawl Classics Reference Booklet and How to Write Adventure Modules that Don't Suck. Spoiler: he loves them both!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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Hello friends! We're running remastered repeats for the holidays. I can't tell you why I thought Black Angel worked for the holidays beyond being similar to that vague, dreamy vibe of The Green Knight (itself a Christmas movie of a sort). Maybe it's just because I got my first Pendragon books for Christmas circa 1991, who knows? Anyway, happy New Year!

Original notes: This week, we check out the famous lost (and found) 1980 short film by Roger Christian, Black Angel. This gorgeous little jam occupies a neat place in Star Wars history and also happens to be a mighty fine bit of early '80s sword and sorcery cinema in its own right. And after you listen to our take on it, you can check it out for yourself on YouTube for free (with a brief intro by Christian).

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This episode was supposed to be an interview with our pal Levi Combs, whose latest kickstarter, the John Carpenter-inspired Assault on Witchgate 13 for DCC, is live now. GET IT. 

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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Hello friends! We're running remastered repeats for the holidays. I thought the Coloring Album would, in some way, speak to warm memories of childhood Christmas gifts. Whether or not that's apt, we hope your holidays are rad!

Original notes: This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we flip through the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album (1979), 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 [Note: Stu has since learned that Gygax wrote the storybook portion of the album, but Lawrence "White Plume Mountain" Schick designed the game]. We hadn’t ever heard of this until a few months ago, but it instantly became one of our favorite Dungeons & Dragons books of all time.

Bonus Fact: The map for the game portion is a modified version of the Tower of Zenopus dungeon from John Eric Holmes D&D Basic Set (1979).

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This episode was supposed to be an interview with our pal Levi Combs, whose latest kickstarter, the John Carpenter-inspired Assault on Witchgate 13 for DCC, is live now. GET IT. 

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

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Hello friends! We weren't planning to go to reruns this soon, but events conspired to prevent the recording of a new episode for this week. We're sorry about that, but also we're sure you'll enjoy revisiting this classic episode. We've got remastered reruns coming on December 25 and January 1 as well, because, well, holidays. We'll be back with a new show on January 8. Until then, stay safe, stay warm, enjoy your holidays and cram in as many games as you can with your downtime!

Original notes: 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 moment, and all too brief.

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This episode was supposed to be an interview with our pal Levi Combs, whose latest kickstarter, the John Carpenter-inspired Assault on Witchgate 13 for DCC, is live now. GET IT. 

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at (and listen to) First Quest: The Music, a double LP record of electronic music and narration for an officially licensed (and totally ridiculous) Dungeons & Dragons adventure printed on the sleeves. Is it a precursor to dungeonsynth? Sort of? Is it a precursor to the 1994 First Quest box set for D&D, which included an audio CD full of mortifying sound cues for the included introductory adventures? Probably? Is it way a better listen than it has any business being? Absolutely, yes.

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You can listen to the whole album on YouTube. 

The main source of information on First Quest: The Music is on Blogonomicon. If you scroll down into the comments, you'll find a lengthy one by David Miller, one of the key folks responsible for the creation of the album.

2 Warps to Neptune has some additional information as well.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Momatoes is back to chat with us about her new RPG, The Marvelous Children of Inang-Uri. It’s a worldmaking game that spans generations, has a splash of hidden traitor mechanics for flavor and involves a culture living in symbiosis with a gigantic creature/entity that they also call home — that’s the world that the players make and that the characters must safeguard (unless they’re a traitor, in which case they want Inang-Uri dead). As with ARC, a game that plays with both the idea of looming doom and also the embrace of hope in the face of it. It’s gorgeously illustrated and laid out, too! And best of all, its available NOW!

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Until December 12, 100% of all sales of The Marvelous Children of Inang-Uri will go to Doctors Without Borders.

You can follow Momatoes on Twitter or keep up with her projects on her official site.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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A couple weeks back, Stu talked about some books that came out in 2023 that he thought were notable. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Hambone’s got his own picks for books that are well worth your time. 

On tap we have the Fairhaven RPG universe from Get Haunted Industries; Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland, by Brian Shutter; Minacious Midway from Dandyline Games; Attack of the New B Movies, edited by Justin Wigard; Vorpal Almanac by Levi Combs and Sally Cantirino; and Three Curses for Sister Saren by Levi Combs and Mike Pike.

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When this drops on Monday, you'll still have all day to take advantage of Exalted Funeral's Black Friday sale!

If you're picking up Attack of the New B Movies, be sure to use code HOLIDAY23 for 40% off through November 27, after which it drops to 25% off. Get it!

You can snag The Legend of Sleepy Hollow for free in a variety of formats on Project Gutenberg. Washington Irving doesn't need your money, he's dead.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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We lost a real legend in Russ Nicholson this year. I can honestly say that Russ and his work sneak into my mind in short order whenever I talk about fantasy art at length, no matter the period. When we recorded this interview back in 2019, it was apparently his first appearance on a podcast, which seems bizarre considering how large his work looms over the hobby, then and now. I’ll never not be bummed about a lack of Russ Nicholson in the world. Anyway, we couldn’t record last week, so we thought it would be cool to bring this one out from the vault, a little in memoriam for his passing earlier this year.

Original Show Notes: 

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 his first podcast interview ever!

A few notes directly from Russ after the fact:

"Sorry about my memory and going off at side tangents so often but I enjoyed that...funny I have never talked in regards to the source of my artwork about the 'happenings' at our old house when I was growing up before. At least as I age, these awarenesses are rare and our present bungalow is so new there is nothing directly 'there.'

Now artists - there are a few I especially rate (although I made a point of never copying) - Albrecht Durer, the Brueghals, Rembrandt, El Greco, Hals, Velazquez, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mucha, Klimt, Toulouse Lautrec, Doré, Beardsley and Rackham, to name a few. Also pulps - Sax Rohmer, Howard, The Shadow, Weird Tales, Black Mask stories, Poe, Edgar Wallace, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Merrit, Hamilton, Jules Verne, Rider Haggard and the old pulp serials I saw at Saturday morning children's cinema - loved it all. From age ten on, when I left the countryside life for life in the city, I read a lot (up until then my mother thought I didn't read anything except comics).

And that silent film I was trying to talk about - it had something similar, where a man is sitting by a rock pool (?) and these squidgy tentacled things (similar to the Grell toy Stu sent me) come out of the water and drag him to his doom. Scared me as a lad but I was in my teens so no screaming attacks (laf) and am still not fond."

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re looking at some cool books that came out in 2023. Perhaps in a novel twist on frequency bias, Stu noticed a bunch of books hitting shelves that, like steak and red wine, seem to pair well with his own Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground in a variety of ways. So here we are, chatting about Adam Rowe’s Worlds Beyond Time, Astral Eyes’ Spell Bound, Aaron A. Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games, the two-volume Talking Miniatures from Shaggy Dog Publishing and the truly astounding Arik Roper retrospective, Vision of the Hawk. Call it a holiday gift guide - if you like our work, we bet you’ll like theirs!

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Worlds Beyond Time is available via Barnes & Noble (and Amazon, but ugh).

Your best bet for getting Spell Bound is to follow Bibliomancers on Instagram - they regularly post stock and shop links in their stories.

The offset printed edition of 50 Years of Text Games is sold out, but you can still get print-on-demand editions.

The best bet for Talking Miniatures, in the US at least, is probably Amazon (sign).

In the US, you can get Vision of the Hawk through MIT Press. In the UK, buy direct from Strange Attractor.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

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In January, the Vintage RPG Podcast is going to the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo (PAGE) to sell some books and play some games, so we thought we’d talk to the expo organizer, Ron Meischker, to see what to expect. Stu’s never been to a game expo! New things are fun and exciting!

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PAGE runs January 5-7. When buying your pass, be sure to use coupon code VintageRPG to take $15 off the price!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

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In the tradition of Ozzy Osbourne asking the long-dead Aleister Crowley what went on in his head, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we ask the very much alive Max Moon what’s going on in his. As it turns out, he’s working on a third volume of The Abyss of Hallucinations, his RPG setting that merges MÖRK BORG with themes pulled from Crowley’s Book of Lies. The first two volumes, as well as a reprint of Book of Lies were produced as gorgeous zines, but the third will be a frankly stunning hardcover that also collects the contents of those first two volumes. How do you get such a beguiling bauble? On Kickstarter, of course, launching on October 31 in partnership with Exalted Funeral. Happy day!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at The Ancestral Trail (1993), a serialized fantasy fiction released in fortnightly intervals in the UK. Every issue a new environment and a new, monstrous foe. It’s a pretty standard, if sometimes surprisingly gruesome, story, but the real draw is the art by Julek Heller. Amazing stuff!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at Beyond the Supernatural (1987), Palladium’s horror RPG that anticipates a bunch of mechanics and lore that would be important for Rifts and the Megaversal system. Richard Corben on the cover, Steve Bissette doing tons of interiors, this books is worth it for the art alone.

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Rest easy, Shane.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about dungeon tiles, specifically Halls of Horror (1986), the set of haunted mansion tiles produced by Games Workshop. We also talk briefly about the board game Mystery Mansion and the fact that Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is pretty much IN STORES NOW.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

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It’s just a game, right? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Hambone talks to Charlie Menzies about the found footage solo RPG Don’t Play This Game. I was busy with book stuff so I couldn't be on this show, and weirdly, I haven’t seen nor heard from Hambone since. It’s weird. I’m sure he’s fine. Anyway, coming to Kickstarter soon. What’s the worst that could happen?

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Buy it now!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re getting into the spooky season a little early with The Dare (2020), a scenario for Call of Cthulhu that pits some costumed kids against a haunted house and the thoroughly horrific witch that lives there. Originally written by Kevin A. Ross as a somewhat legendary tournament module in the late ‘80s, this modern renovation featuring kid-sized Call of Cthulhu rules brings the game to modern audiences for the first time. It’s notable for being one of the very first RPG scenarios to cast players as kids (though it is emphatically not for children) and it will surely be a welcome addition to your Halloween one-shot arsenal.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Buy it direct from Penguin Random House with code READMIT15 for 15% off!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we explore the Realm of Chaos, the two-volume opus from Games Workshop dedicated to all things chaotic. Slaves to Darkness (1988) and The Lost and the Damned (1990) detail the four lords of chaos, their armies, the mutations they inspire and so much more, in terms suitable for all the Warhammer games of that period. Even more exciting is the collection of vibrant (if often gross) art by a who’s who of killer Games Workshop illustrators. A high watermark for Warhammer!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Buy it direct from Penguin Random House with code READMIT15 for 15% off!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

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Pull up a stool and name your poison! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with W. F. Smith, the mastermind behind Barkeep on the Borderlands! This Ennie Award-winning zine is the product of over thirty collaborators, including 11 guest writers and 17 artists, who worked together to reimagine the classic D&D cavern crawl B2: Keep on the Borderlands as a BAR crawl. You see, in the centuries since the original adventurer’s cleared out the Caves of Chaos, a festival celebrating that achievement — the RAVES of Chaos — came to dominate the town every year. Now the king is sick, a cure is needed and to find it, players must brave the raves and visit the many different pubs of the keep. It’s delightful!

Buy it!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Buy it direct from Penguin Random House with code READMIT15 for 15% off!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Dillon Morton, the creator of Bloodsport Gambler, a game betting on horrifically brutal arena combat. And, because of all that debt, you can’t afford to lose those bets, so it is also a game about lying, cheating, rigging, sabotaging, sneaking and otherwise finagling any advantage you can scrape together so as to make your wagers count. Avoid the guards, pay off the syndicate, try not to lose everything, or you might wind up in the fighting pits yourself!

Back it on Kickstarter September 5!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Buy it direct from Penguin Random House with code READMIT15 for 15% off!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re opening up the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet, from the prop maestros at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. It’s a real leather wallet, stuffed with ‘20s-style IDs, paperwork, newspaper clippings, a trolley coin, a mysterious key and much more. The props tie directly with the scenario book The Dog Walker, which is included and can be run for a group or solo using a special PDF. Other items promise to be of use with Chaosium’s forthcoming guidebook to Arkham for Call of Cthulhu. One of the most fun RPG products I’ve ever laid eyes on, full stop. Get it.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Get in Regular or Deluxe, but maybe consider getting it via Bookshop, yea?

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

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Climb into the Titan’s ear! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re talking about Swordthrust (1984), a particularly wild scenario from Mayfair’s Role Aids line of D&D supplements. Despite the generic sounding title, this adventure sees players exploring the brain of a hibernating Titan and navigating his dreams made flesh in order to find an artifact of incredible power (sort of). While it is sort of unusually weird for the period, it is also a great example of how a certain amount of “gonzo” is baked right in to the standards of the hobby. We also chat a little bit about Role Aids generally, something that will be helpful for folks reading the Instagram feed next year (spoiler: I’m doing posts on ALL the Role Aids books in 2024; get read for lots of Boris).

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Get in Regular or Deluxe, but maybe consider getting it via Bookshop, yea?

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

Contrary to Mick's claim, time was not on our side this past week, so we had to dig into our archive for another remastered rerun. When we redid the fairly recent Erol Otus interview last time, I made a mental note to stretch further back and pluck our interview with Tony DiTerlizzi out of the mists of time. It remains one of my favorite RPG chats, public or private, and certainly deserves a second moment in the spotlight.  

Original show notes from June 24, 2019:

We have a very special guest this episode: illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi graced us with a full length interview. We chat about his influences, Dragon Mountain, the Monstrous Manual, Planescape, Magic the Gathering, the Spiderwick Chronicles, Hong Kong dinosaurs (you can read Tony’s post on these and their influence on Dungeons & Dragons here) and so much more – and we barely scratch the surface, honestly.

* * *

Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Get in Regular or Deluxe, but maybe consider getting it via Bookshop, yea?

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re talking about Champions, from Hero Games, a major evolutionary step in point-buy RPG systems, one of the best regarded superhero RPGs of all time AND the cornerstone of the broader, semi-universal Hero System. It’s a whole lot of four-color fun!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Get in Regular or Deluxe, but maybe consider getting it via Bookshop, yea?

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at The Monster Overhaul, by Skerples, a book that looks to reimagine not just the monsters but the book that contains them and the way we use them in play. It's hugely ambitious, largely successful and full of amazing art by a heap of talented artists; basically a must have for your shelves, folks. (Sorry, wallets).

Grab in on Indie Press Revolution!

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Get in Regular or Deluxe, but maybe consider getting it via Bookshop, yea?

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu finds a book he didn’t know he owned: The Armory’s 30-Sided Dice Gaming Tables. It’s weird and mostly useless, but has some nice (though odd) illustrations (by Greg Barrett, who did the cover of The Dragon #1), and, bizarrely, anchors a small line of increasingly useful sourcebooks. Who’d a thunk?

* * *

Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Get in Regular or Deluxe, but maybe consider getting it via Bookshop, yea?

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at The Complete Warlock, one of the earliest hacks of the original D&D — the rules were compiled from a homebrew California-area game in 1975 and finally saw print in 1978, only to be buried by the then-fresh Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It’s still an interesting system, especially considering it corrects OD&D in a lot of similar ways Gygax did with AD&D. It also has a number of mechanical innovations that anticipate systems seen later in RuneQuest and Rolemaster and many other games. It’s an interesting time capsule!

* * *

Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Get in Regular or Deluxe, but maybe consider getting it via Bookshop, yea?

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

Toys, toys, toys. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at the new Dungeons & Dragons toys released as part of Super7’s ReAction Figures line. As with other ReAction toys, these are old style figures with five points of articulation, in the mode of Kenner’s original Star Wars toys. Deliciously, these figures are based on some iconic characters from the covers of D&D books — the Efreeti from the Dungeon Masters Guide, the Sorceress from the Erol Otus Basic Set and the Githyanki from the Fiend Folio. We also chat a bit about The Worst line and their recent Pre-Code horror comic figures. Its a good time to love weird ass toys!

* * *

Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Get in Regular or Deluxe, but maybe consider getting it via Bookshop, yea?

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

Stu's got a full plate, so that means a rerun! This week, please enjoy a remastered version of our 2021 interview with legendary RPG artist Erol Otus!  

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Keep up to date on Erol's RPG work by following him on Facebook. Definitely keep an eye out for restocks of his currently sold out line of tees and prints at Bay Merch!

Big thanks to Skinner for putting us in touch!

* * *

Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Get in Regular or Deluxe, but maybe consider getting it via Bookshop, yea?

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at the strange world of the unknown. We chat about a bunch of books (like Time/Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown) and television shows (somehow In Search Of didn’t come up?), and how the “Unknown” as a topic seemed to have wafted away or transmogrified into “New Age” at the turn of the millennium. And then we get to the main course, Adam Allsuch Boardman’s glorious Illustrated History of Ghosts and Illustrated History of UFOs. Hopefully these recent and gorgeous books mark the start of an Unknown revival!

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Stu's book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is up for pre-order now! Get in Regular or Deluxe, but maybe consider getting it via Bookshop, yea?

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at The Dragon #1 (1976), the first issue of one of the most important RPG-focused magazines (also known as Dragon and Dragon Magazine, on and off through its run). We talk a little bit about the magazine’s run, but focus mainly on the issue itself, how simultaneously amateurish and professional it is, and how sad it is that there is nothing really like it in the world anymore. Stu also takes a minute to explain just what a house organ really is.

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Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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Waaagh! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at orcs. Particularly pig-faced orcs, but also monstrous humanoid orcs and mushroom people orcs. We also talk about Pig-Head from the Yla Eason’s Sun-Man toy line, the swine-things from House on the Borderland and door-shaped shields. It’s another odd-ball episode!

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We only scratched the surface here. Of particular further interest, Stu neglected to mention William Blake’s diabolical character Orc, who likely also influenced Tolkien in the creation of creatures that wholly embody conceptual evil. Also missing is the demon Orcus, who has interesting folkloric connection here, though we did cover that in a previous podcast episode.

And while we discussed some of the ways orcs can be seen as perpetuating racial stereotypes, we totally neglected to talk about how some folks, particularly in queer communities, have reclaimed the orc. Grant Howitt’s Big Gay Orcs is a good example of, well, gay orcs. It’s right there in the title.  

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Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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Turn on all the lights! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we delve into Reach of the Roach God, the new, massive hardcover installment of the Thousand Thousand Islands series. It’s pretty gross (in the best ways?) and, unlike the previous ATTI publications, Reach is structured like an RPG books, which clearly defined adventures and source material (it’s all still system agnostic, though, never fear). The result is something that seems pretty groundbreaking and exciting!

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Reach of the Roach God will be available for purchase in the US at Spearwitch, once Kickstarter fulfillment is finished!

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Stephen King and Bernie Wrightson’s Cycle of the Werewolf (1983). Born as a concept for a novelty calendar, it blossomed into an illustrated novella that is one of the finest modern werewolf stories and contains some of Wrightson’s best illustrations. We also talk more broadly about King’s career and unearth a surprising fact or two about the 1985 film adaptation of Cycle, Silver Bullet.

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Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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Which flesh is your flesh? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, well, we don’t find out the answer to that question, but we DO check out the mysterious RPG-inspired art book Vermis I, by Plastiboo. This gorgeous artifact takes the form of a strategy guide for a videogame that doesn’t exist and draws clear inspiration from the Souls games, early videogame RPGs like Shadowgate and a whole wealth of tabletop games. It’s gorgeous and unsettling and deeply intriguing and, hands down, one of my favorite things I’ve added to the shelf in a long time.

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Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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The best of the first wave of TSR-produced D&D modules? Certainly the quirkiest! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. It’s the one with the crashed spaceship full of aliens that, wouldn’t you know it, look and act like classic D&D monsters! Even though this was published in 1980, it actually saw play as early as the summer of 1976 at conventions, so as outside the norm as Barrier Peaks may seem, it also shows how early silliness had come to be core to the D&D experience. We dig into that, scratch at the complex legacy of Gary Gygax and even talk a little bit about the spooky stuff that happened down by the railroad tracks when we were kids. Check it out!

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Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we discuss the concept of the West Marches, a style of play for large groups of players and on-demand GMs (mostly intended for D&D and its derivatives). West Marches was developed by Ben Robbins (Microscope, Kingdom) and offers a pretty unique framework for RPGs that puts a lot of the onus of play on players rather than GMs, and weaponizes the dread Fear of Missing Out. Stu’s starting up a West Marches game for Patrons, so it’s been on his mind!

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There are tons of resources for and musings about West Marches games, but the place to start, if you’re interesting, is Robbins’ own blogs on the subject.

Note: while Stu has personally decided that the “Marches” part of the name refers to military walking, and refers to it as such in the episode, a march in this context is actually a kind of borderland. In medieval Europe, these were used as neutral zones between regions, often for military purposes. A whole lot of names and words derive from the concept (including marquis and Denmark), to the extent that once you’re aware of it, you see a lot of Europe differently.

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Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Fred Saberhagen’s classic science fantasy trilogy. The last volume, Changeling Earth, got name-checked in Appendix N, but all three provided plenty of clear inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons. And they’re pretty great reads on their own!

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Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about Amazing Tales, a simple RPG designed to introduce children into the hobby. And that’s just what Stu did with his son a couple of weeks ago. How did Amazing Tales hold up in their first play through? Listen and find out!

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Our friends at Cadabra Records are excited about their imminent Nightlands Festival. Come to New Jersey and join in a celebration of some of the greatest weird fiction through words, music and art. Tickets are on sale now!

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Matt Johnson about Portents of the Degloved Hand, a kinda gross and very risky card-based omen supplement for everyone’s favorite doom-ridden RPG, MÖRK BORG! We talk about how it works, how it looks, why you’d want to add more death and disaster to MÖRK BORG and more!

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Portents is on Kickstarter right now! You can keep up to date with Matt on Instagram or on the Raven Portents site.

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New year, new Noble Knight discount code! Use VRPG23 for 10% off all your purchases online or in the store!

Our friends at Cadabra Records are excited about their imminent Nightlands Festival. Come to New Jersey and join in a celebration of some of the greatest weird fiction through words, music and art. Tickets are on sale now!

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Hambone and Alex (our long-suffering editor), go to see Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves so Stu doesn’t have to! They weave a compelling tale of being entertained by a movie that, against all odds, seems to not suck. Maybe Stu will see it after all.

* * *

Our friends at Cadabra Records are excited about their imminent Nightlands Festival. Come to New Jersey and join in a celebration of some of the greatest weird fiction through words, music and art. Tickets are on sale now!

New year, new Noble Knight discount code! Use VRPG23 for 10% off all your purchases online or in the store!

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Michael Monaco about his new book excavating the history of Fantasy Wargaming called The Highest Level of All. The game is a very idiosyncratic RPG created in the late ‘70s in the UK. I’ve talked about this game before, both in a previous episode of the podcast and in a post a million years ago — this is one of the RPGs from the early days that’s interested in “realistic” simulation. It has a reputation for being unplayable (which Mike dispels) and for having silly things like stat blocks for the Virgin Mary. But it is also a deeply intriguing game, partly because it was one of the first to hit shelves in mainstream bookstores, partly because it’s primary creator Bruce Galloway died not long after its publication. We try to get to the bottom of Fantasy Wargaming’s unusual, but enduring appeal!

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Buy the The Highest Level of All, or grab a free PDF from the publisher. You can also check out Mike's blog, Swords & Dorkery for more on Fantasy Wargaming and other RPGs!

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Our friends at Cadabra Records are excited about their imminent Nightlands Festival. Come to New Jersey and join in a celebration of some of the greatest weird fiction through words, music and art. Tickets are on sale now!

New year, new Noble Knight discount code! Use VRPG23 for 10% off all your purchases online or in the store!

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Merlin Publishing’s BattleCards, a neat, if doomed, combat card game that came out in 1993. Design credit goes to Steve Jackson (UK) and has players picking cards to square off, then scratching off hit locations to see if they score wounds. The winner claimed the defeated card (they have a gold value) and could send it in to “purchase” special treasure cards. There are puzzles and quests as well, but the real star is the artist pool, which includes heavy hitters like Iain McCaig and Led Edwards. Even then, it didn’t stand a chance against Magic: The Gathering.

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This week we shout out Dean Browell: check out his in-development space exploration RPG, Response!

New year, new Noble Knight discount code! Use VRPG23 for 10% off all your purchases online or in the store!

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out A Time to Harvest, a recently released campaign for Call of Cthulhu where players take the role of Miskatonic University students on an ill-advised field trip to Vermont. We talk in vague terms about why it is a cool campaign, the after a clear “beyond this point is spoilers” warning we get into some of the nitty gritty. A future classic of the system, I think!

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New year, new Noble Knight discount code! Use VRPG23 for 10% off all your purchases online or in the store!

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

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This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we descend into The Maze of Peril (1986), a fantasy novel by Dr. John Eric Holmes. Holmes is best known for creating the first D&D Basic Rules box set (1977), but he also wrote fantasy fiction (in addition to his day job as a neurologist). At a glance, Maze of Peril doesn’t inspire much confidence as to its quality, but it winds up being a fun adventure that captures something of the spirit of the early days of Dungeons & Dragons — something countless other hard-trying fantasy novels have failed to do.

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New year, new Noble Knight discount code! Use VRPG23 for 10% off all your purchases online or in the store!

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re talking to James Wallis about his forthcoming book Everybody Wins. It’s a fantastic book that charts the recent history of board games through the lens of the forty-three winners of the German Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award, from 1979 to 2022. We also talk a little bit about RPGs as well — how could we not, as James was behind Hogshead Publishing and their New Style series of RPGs (we’re going to have him back to talk at length about The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, promise).

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Everybody Wins is in stores on March 14 — pre-order it now on Amazon (and pretty much everywhere else, too). You can also check out the Everybody Wins Podcast.

James has a couple other audio/visual projects of interest. Ludonarrative Dissidents, with Greg Stolze and Ross Payton, is a podcast that looks at a different RPG every episode, while Inside the Rookery, is a weekly stream on RPG and storytelling in geek spaces. 

You can further interface with James on Twitter, on Mastodon, through his outdated website or on Drive-Thru.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re looking at The Unspeakable Oath, the Call of Cthulhu fanzine from Pagan Publishing (and later, Arc Dream). Debuting in 1990, the zine feel emblematic of its time, while also illustrating a continuity of DIY tradition from the early days of the Amateur Press Associations into the current RPG zine scene. All that plus tentacles!

Stu took a sick day so this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Hambone called in Tony Vasinda of Plus One Exp, Adam Vass of World Champ Game Co. and Levi Combs of Planet X Games to chat about what’s going on and what’s cool this Zine Month. Hot damn!

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New year, new Noble Knight discount code! Use VRPG23 for 10% off all your purchases online or in the store!

Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!

If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

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Send questions, comments or corrections to [email protected].

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Intro music by George Collazo.

The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter.

Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

Old friends, new looks! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re looking at NECA’s Ultimates versions of the LJN Dungeons & Dragons action figures Warduke and Grimsword. We also check out Hasbro’s Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series figures — Venger, Dungeon Master, Hank, Diana, Bobby and Uni. All these toys are honkin’ BIG, but are they all GOOD? How much nostalgia is too much? Find out wherever pods are cast!

Dying malls and office buildings corrupted by extradimensional entities? Sounds like this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re talking about Liminial Horror. A hack of Cairn from Goblin Archives, Liminal Horror takes the barely-there D&D framework of that earlier game and applies to the tropes of investigative horror. It works shockingly well! We also touch on The Mall and The Bureau, two scenario zines. The Mall has intriguing mechanics for introducing stress-related agendas in play that are particularly exciting.

Here we are in the brambles. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re looking at Cairn, Yochai Gal’s ultra-lite hack/remix of Into the Odd and Knave. How few mechanics can you have and still have a D&D-esque RPG? It’s both more and less than you expect, probably. Cairn actually highlights Into the Odd’s differences from D&D by pulling the Odd mechanics in a more old-school direction (Into the Odd lacks a recognizable spellcasting system, for instance). We run it all down. Next up: Liminal Horror!

We’re embarking on a tour of ultra-lite RPGs for the next few weeks on the Vintage RPG Podcast. Up first: Into the Odd Remastered, Chris McDowall’s extremely streamlined D&D-esque ruleset that is so distilled it becomes a sort of commentary on the tropes of roleplaying games broadly. Next up: Cairn!

Back the third party publishing of the 80s — this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at GameScience’s Fantasy Gamer’s Compendium (1983), a collection of six smaller books originally created by the short-lived Little Soldier Games (in the mid-70s). Which is also the short-lived Phoenix Games (in like, 1980). It’s a little confusing, and we iron that out. The books themselves, though, are an inspiring collection of monsters, demons, skills, magic systems and new character classes, kinda sorta for D&D, but also for other fantasy RPGs of the time. It’s a great example of the DIY nature of the hobby that’s been with us from the start, and will continue on well into the future.

And we’re back! Hope y'all had an excellent holiday season. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we sort of tackle the third edition of D&D. Not so much the system (though we hit the broad strokes), but the idea of it, where it came from, where it went, what it inspired. It’s sort of a ruminating ramble that seems even more relevant now with the recent kerfuffle over the OGL (though we recorded before that bomb dropped, believe it or not).

We decided to take a couple weeks off for the holidays, so we remastered a couple older episodes for your enjoyment. We'll be back with a new episode on January 9.

Original show notes:

Hey, we're weekly! We talk about what that means for the podcast going forward (forget that we say its December in the episode. It isn't. Schedules change, OK?).

It would be rad if you joined us on our Patreon, because that definitely helps keep us going.

We also talk about the classic D&D monster, the rust monster. It was born from a cheap Hong Kong "dinosaur" in the 70s and has since become the bane of adventurers everywhere.

We decided to take a couple weeks off for the holidays, so we remastered a couple older episodes for your enjoyment. We'll be back with a new episode on January 9.

Original show notes:

Happy holidays, folks!

We’re breaking from format this episode to dig deep into the nostalgia and look at the Sears Wish Book, an important part of our childhood Christmas experiences. Specifically, we’re looking at the catalogs from 1982, 1983 and 1984, which contained, you guessed it, Dungeons & Dragons stuff. They are so much more than that, though, as you’ll discover when you listen!

And, while we have you, let us offer our tremendous thanks for following Vintage RPG on Instagram, listening to the podcast and making this whole project fun and rewarding on a daily basis. All the best this holiday season!

War hedgehogs! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Dragonroar, the first major fantasy RPG out of the UK, and boy is it British. Beware, for man-eating penguins lie in wait. And war hedgehogs!

Fighting Fantasy? That's for babies. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at Advanced Fighting Fantasy, the full-fledged RPG rules derived from the (not really for babies) Fighting Fantasy gamebook series. There are three delightful volumes - Dungeoneer starts things off with dungeons rules, Blacksand! takes players to the city streets and Allansia explores the great outdoors. Lots of fantastic art by John Sibbick and Russ Nicholson, plus a lightweight and versatile system with a surprising modern legacy!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at the amazing fantasy RPG-inspired art book, Down in the Dungeon (1981), by Don Greer. This amazing collection of art retells the adventures the author experienced while exploring Zarakan’s dungeon after discovering it on a camping trip somewhere in the American Southwest. We talk about the enduring appeal of this sort of art and speculate a bit about what a book like this said about the broader RPG scene at the time of its publication.

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A large number of the paintings from Down in the Dungeon can be viewed at the Monster Brains blog.

And hey, you know what is awesome? The ownership of Noble Knight has agreed to recognize the union! We’re firm believers in the non-controversial idea that all workers should be fairly compensated by their employers. Unionization and collective bargaining are an excellent way for workers to ensure they get that fair share, and we’re psyched the NKG owners came around.

Horror stories on vinyl! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we digress a little bit to talk about Cadabra Records and their “nightmares on vinyl.” These are spoken word readings or full cast audio plays of classic horror stories, set to atmospheric soundscapes and wrapped in evocative sleeve art. They’re part of a larger tradition of (often horror-centric) storytelling recordings but, primarily, they’re just plain cool as heck! Pick one up, dial the lights down low and have a spooky evening!

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Our friends at Noble Knight are organizing a union and we support their efforts whole-heartedly! We're firm believers in the non-controversial idea that all workers should be fairly compensated by their employers. Unionization and collective bargaining are an excellent way for workers to ensure they get that fair share. For updates on the process, follow the union Twitter and put "We Roll Together" in the notes field of your online orders to show your support! (And just to be clear, we're speaking from the heart on this - no one is paying us for our solidarity)

Back to back heresy, just like we like it. Last week, we did Heirs to Heresy, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re talking about John’s new adventure Heresy of Rot, co-authored by Levi Combs and published by Necromancer Games. We talk a bit about horror in RPGs and we also briefly discuss Lodestar to Karamouska, a system agnostic RPG setting zine by Matheus Graef that Stu published through Unwinnable. Go buy the things!

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Buy Heresy of Rot! You can also get it at DriveThru.

Buy Lodestar to Karamouska!

They seem to be at the center of every occult conspiracy mystery ever written, so of course they have an RPG! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at Heirs to Heresy, Allan Bahr’s RPG centered on the Knights Templars (and their persecution in 1312). We also talk a bit about Osprey Publishing’s whole RPG line and some of the many surprises contained therein!

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Our friends at Noble Knight are organizing a union and we support their efforts whole-heartedly! We're firm believers in the non-controversial idea that all workers should be fairly compensated by their employers. Unionization and collective bargaining are an excellent way for workers to ensure they get that fair share. For updates on the process, follow the union Twitter and put "We Roll Together" in the notes field of your online orders to show your support! (And just to be clear, we're speaking from the heart on this - no one is paying us for our solidarity)

In 2021, Call of Cthulhu turned 40 years old! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re looking at some of the print products that came out in 2022 to celebrate that mind-blasting anniversary — the sinister-looking 40th Anniversary edition of the Keeper Rulebook, the Kickstarted reprint of the first edition Call of Cthulhu box set with its accompanying stack of scenario books and, mostly, the advice-filled Keeper Tips book, full of little anonymous koan-like thoughts on how to run good games. (Stu forgot all about the revamped 40th Anniversary Starter Kit and its handsome new cover, to his eternal shame. Whoops!)

FLASHBACK to October 29, 2018. Two friends in a remote club house. Lightning flashes. Thunder roars. The rain hammers the window in torrents. Within, they discuss…I6: Ravenloft! Yep, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re airing a remastered repeat. One of Stu’s microphone cables died under mysterious circumstances and we couldn’t replace it in time to record a new jam. We’ll be back next week with the Halloween episode Stu had been planning, and that’s all right, since everyday is Halloween if you want it to be. 

The original, laborious show notes, featuring now inaccurate timestamps, follow:

The guys start off with Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters, a co-op board game about finding treasure in a haunted house (01:33). Stu explains how it reminds him of another co-op game, Flash Point, about fighting fires (03:03). Hambone talks a bit about the games two expansion (04:41).

Hambone introduces the main course of our feast, D&D module I6 - Ravenloft (06:23). He declares it the best stand-alone module for D&D, though Stu disagrees (06:42).

An unexpected hypothetical interlude about the 1979 cult classic film, The Warriors (08:38).

Back on track. Hambone explains how much he loves the idea of a dungeon crawl through Dracula’s castle (09:55) and goes ga-ga over the maps (10:28). They discuss how experimental the module was for the time (12:00) and what kind of music Strahd is probably into (13:49).

Stu breaks down how important Strahd is in terms of villain design (14:53). Hambone talks about how difficult it is to run Strahd as a master tactician (17:00). Curse of Strahd for 5E comes up (19:20). Stu offers his final thoughts on the module (21:00) and touches on House on Gryphon Hill, the sequel to Ravenloft (22:00). Castlevania: Simon’s Quest comes up (24:10) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, too (25:34).

Hambone briefly gets excited about Mixtape Massacre (28:00) and the guys say their farewells.

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Clarification: Let’s talk dates. Ravenloft came out in 1983. House on Gryphon Hill came out in 1986. Castlevania came out in Japan in 1986 and North America in ‘87 while Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest came out in Japan in ‘87 and North America in ‘88. Judging from the art on the cover of Simon’s Quest, it is pretty clear that Ravenloft was at least on the radar of the videogame developers.

There were terrors lurking in the shadows when the world was young! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at Time/Life’s classic series, The Enchanted World. Over 21 lushly illustrated volumes, the books portray a world of magic and monsters in a delicious, in-universe style. Perfect for pillaging for roleplaying games!

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We mentioned the television spots for the books on the show. Here’s four: a general overview of the series, the “I’m a witch” commercial and both of the Vincent Price ads (one with just his narration, one with him on camera (no cat, though). There are a bunch more!

Game over, man! Actually, wait, no, as usual, we can’t always trust Stu’s first impressions. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at the Colonial Marines Operations Manual (2021) for Free League’s Alien RPG. This sourcebook introduces campaign play to the system and continues the metaplot established in the cinematic adventures along in a big way. Game on!

And now for something completely different! Well, not completely, but it has been a while since we did an interview. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Brian Saliba and Craig Schaffer about Monty Python’s Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme (which totally isn’t an RPG at all, no sir, not one bit).

Hambone is setting the pace this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast as we talk about WHPA-13: Weird Heroes of Public Access (2022) from Get Haunted Industries. It’s an RPG zine about strange goings on around town and the romance of UHF TV, what’s not to love?

Deeper and deeper we go. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at the first issue of DNGN (2022), a megadungeon zine for Old-School Essentials from Singing Flame. We also discuss the one-page dungeon format and a little bit about the infamous Stonehell.

Chaos lurks just under the surface. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about the Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. We recap the original, theorize about where it went off the rails, enthuse over Cubicle 7’s five-volume remaster and discuss the perils of satire.

Chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarge! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at the Battlesystem, TSR’s mostly failed attempt to shoehorn wargaming back into the Dungeons & Dragons experience. We also talk a bit about TSR’s failed foray into making miniatures. Mess after mess. But at least it gave us that amazing Jeff Easley painting!

Nothing is what it seems! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at the classic Dungeons & Dragons monster, the Mimc. Or do we? Here be twists and turns!

Lost, now found. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at NECA’s “Lost Wave” of Dungeons & Dragons toys. When LJN Toys shut down the D&D toy line, these four toys — Valkeer the Barbarian, Skylla the Sorceress, Pulvereye the Cyclops and a Kelek variant — were in various states of completion, but unreleased. Now, thanks to some miracle or the blackest of magic, forty years later they’ve been released as a San Diego Comic Con exclusive. Fancy that!

For years I’ve said I wasn’t going to paint miniatures. No talent, I said. No patience, I said. Too expensive, I said. I have enough hobbies, I said. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about how I’ve started painting miniatures!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at The Bestiary (1987) for Bard Games’ Atlantis RPG. While I’m fond of the stuff Bard Games made generally, this book is over-the-top awesome because it is primarily illustrated by legendary comic artist Bill Sienkiewicz. Page after page of gorgeous, scratchy inks! Join us as we wax rhapsodic!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Luka Rejec’s special Halloween scenario Let Us In (2021), a lean, mean, system agnostic horror zine that uses a timetable to keep play at a tight three hours. Black, white and orange goodness, all the way through.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re lost in Christopher Manson’s Maze (1985). This is an unusual book, part armchair treasure hunt (for a $10,000 prize), part pick-your-path gamebook. The aim of the game is simple: find your way to the center of the maze and back in the least number of moves, then answer a riddle. The deeply enigmatic art in the book is meant to transmit both question and answer, but it also creates a compelling dungeon-like environment of interest to RPG hobbyists.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out the classic board game Dungeon! (1975). The origins of the game are entwined with the origins of Dungeons & Dragons, and all the dungeon crawling board games since owe Dave Megarry’s creation a debt of gratitude.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Chaosium’s new Call of Cthulhu sourcebook, Cults of Cthulhu. Despite the big squid being in the title of the game, the Great Old One is oddly absent in the majority of the RPG’s material, partly because he’s snoozing on the job, mostly because Nyarlathotep, that ham, steals the spotlight. This book aims to correct that by sketching the history and structure of a global Cthulhu cult that’s a worthy foil for investigators. Who cares if he’s asleep when his agents lurk in every shadow?

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at TSR’s massive, 8-volume compendium of Marvel comics lore, The Gamer’s Handbook of the Marvel Universe (1988-1992). They’re like a monster manual of superheroes and villains, some awesome, some doofy, some downright perplexing. They also amount to being an interesting in-universe history for one of the most important transitional times in the comics industry.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we travel down the darkened hedgerows of British folk magic traditions with a look at Of Shadows: One Hundred Objects from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (2016), from Strange Attractor Press. As the title says, this is a collection of objects selected by photographer Sara Hannant that present in all their shadowy glory a kind of whirlwind tour of occult and folk traditions of the British Isles. Beautiful in its own right, we talk about the ways it might resonate for folks who play RPGs.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat about Monstrous Arcana, a series of sourcebooks and adventures late in the D&D 2E days that explored three of the game’s most iconic monsters in alarming detail. The series is one of several crystal balls through which we can see some inkling of what 3E might be — in fact, the sourcebooks lead pretty directly to the excellent Lords of Madness sourcebook in a couple years.

Another week, another discovery of some weird ass bootleg D&D toys! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu discovers Arco’s dime store line of little plastic monster dudes, Dragons n’ Monsters. This one is more bootleg than most! We also chat a bit about Arco’s weird tie-in toy line for the movie The Sword and the Sorcerer and the forthcoming “lost wave” of LJN Dungeons & Dragons toys from NECA.

Desert power! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at the classic strategy game Dune (1979 from Avalon Hill, though Stu played the 2019 reprint from Gale Force Nine). There are a lot of cool things in Dune that have become staples of modern board game design, but it still manages to deliver a unique, spice-flavored experience.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a turn at being the villains in Reverse Dungeon. An adventure from very late in the 2E D&D line, it is very much the D&D-ification of the classic videogame Dungeon Keeper, but with some unexpected twists and turns.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we do some urban exploration and investigate Dead Mall, a neat Tunnel Goons hack about the ruined temples of capitalism. We also discuss Nate Treme’s Tunnel Goons and  Satanic Panic at Crowley Place Mall, a zine scenario for Dead Mall.

If you like tables, we’ve got some books for you! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Jennell Jaquays’ series of Central Casting books, for use creating both player and non-player characters of alarming depth and, sometimes, bizarre circumstances. There are three flavors: Heroes of Legend (1988), our focus, which tackles fantasy backgrounds; Heroes for Tomorrow (1989), for science fiction characters; and Heroes Now! (1991), for characters from worlds not unlike our own. 

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we run to the border…lands. OK, never mind, I’ll leave the jokes to Hambone. For real: this week we’re talking about the RuneQuest box set Borderlands (1982), an excellent campaign about getting a job and doing it well. There’s no real narrative arc, no cackling villain, no dark plot. Stuff happens and the players take care of it, but the real point of Borderlands is to build and maintain a home in a strange land, a pretty unusual concept, then and now!

Aaaand we’re back! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at the horror storytelling game Dread and its unusual method of task resolution (hint: it involves a Jenga tower). And heck, let’s make it a double: we also discuss the storytelling game of doomed romance, Star Crossed, which also uses a Jenga tower!

A re-run? Yep, sometimes you just gotta rest the brains. So have a remastered Players Handbook! Originally aired to a whole different world, on December 23, 2019.

Original hype text: 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!

Coming from an era of RPGs in which you could still get away with just naming your game Wizard, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast we’re looking at Melee, Wizard and the larger Fantasy Trip RPG. We focus on its innovative use of point-buy mechanics, but also get into the game’s larger place in RPG history.

Strap in, cuz we got bootleg toys! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, direct from the five and dime, we check out Stu’s Dragonriders of the Styx toys from the early 80s. For a bunch of cheap fantasy toys, they actually have a fun and weird intersection with Dungeons & Dragons!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at another board game: Return to Dark Tower. This is Restoration Games’ new sequel/revamp of the 1981 Milton Bradley electronic board game Dark Tower that…if not a classic, certainly has a compelling mystique born from the intersection of its rarity, its D&D-like fantasy theming and its place at an exciting and highly nostalgic early era of consumer electronics. How does the new version hold up in comparison? Well, you’re gonna have to listen!

The ring of invisibility is one of the most iconic magic items in RPGs. But where does it come from? (Hint: it isn’t Tolkien!)

Getting lots of actual playtime in lately. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu’s fresh off his first session of Troika and he’s keen to share his impressions. It’s weird and easy and did we mention weird?

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’ve got an after action report for the first half of the Dungeon Crawl Classics 67: Sailors on the Starless Sea, which Zog is running us through. Granted, we’re only on the edge of the really weird stuff, but we’ve seen enough to start ruminating. And there are plenty of corpses already. Honor the fallen!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re back on RuneQuest, talking about some of the stuff that makes the world of Glorantha special, specifically its approach to mythology, time and its surprising meta-commentary on roleplaying games themselves! That’s two RuneQuest episodes and we’re still barely scratching the surface.

Scream for me, Fae Wray! This week, the Vintage RPG Podcast travels to Skull Island to discuss some of the surprising influences of the greatest monster movie ever made: King Kong! The 1933 version, of course, get that remake trash outta here.

You can see the still from Son of Kong mentioned in the episode at the bottom of this post.

I recently came into possession of like five feet of Traveller and it made me realize, holy crap, there is a lot of Traveller! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at the span of the Traveller RPG through the 20th century. That’s a quick look at both versions of Classic Traveller (1977 and 1983), MegaTraveller (1986), New Era (1993), T4 (1996), GURPS Traveller (1998) and even the not really Traveller, Traveller: 2300 A.D. (1986). So many Travellers!

We also chat with friend of the pod, Levi Combs, about the upcoming kickstarter for Phylactery #4 and the Phylactery Omnibus!

You know what kind of sucks? Awards. Oscars, Grammys, whatever. RPG awards are no exception. But Joe DeSimone doesn’t think they need to be that way. So he’s starting his own awards for RPGs called The Awards. And you know what? They might suck, too! He’s upfront about that. But if they do, they’ll suck in a completely new way and maybe even pave the way for something good. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to Joe about awards, The Awards and how we might be able to do better.

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You can bother Joe on Twitter pretty much all the time.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we barely scratch the surface of RuneQuest (1978), Chaosium’s classic first foray into RPGs. We talk about the games origins in the earlier wargame, White Bear & Red Moon (1975), the skill-based RPG, the limitations of class as a concept, the different sorts of magic and, seriously, that’s more than enough for one half hour. We’ll be returning to RQ several times in the coming weeks to cover it all!

Ever buy an old RPG box set and find some maps or a character sheet inside? For me, it conjures up a specific sort of warm feeling. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at some of Tim Hutchings’ efforts to preserve that sort gaming ephemera in The Habitation of the Stone Giant Lord, a book collecting homebrew D&D adventures written and illustrated by kids. We also look at Hutchings’ reprint of the short-live gaming zine The Oracle. A thrilling expedition into the dusty archives of our hobby’s past!

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You can check out more about both projects at Hutchings’ Play Generated Map & Document Archive. Physical copies of both can still be had at his shop, as well!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Hambone talks to Charlie Ferguson Avery and Alex Coggon of Feral Indie Studios about ZiMo 2022, their indie RPG zine showcase, running the whole month of February! ZINES! Get ‘em!

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Stu will be back next week, promise!

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” That’s the first line of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer and, just like that, he pretty much codified the aesthetic of cyberpunk. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we go ga-ga over the novel and look at the way it influenced cyberpunk RPGs. Or was ripped off by cyberpunk RPGs. We’ve heard it both ways.

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In the episode, Stu mentions a post by Gibson about Shadowrun. If you have access to the text of that, drop us a line!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we go way over the top and check out the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. It’s got gonzo for days, horrible dooms, epic spell failures, weird ass dice and enough old school style art to fill a museum with. What’s not to love?

It ain’t just D&D that’s getting hacked and cloned! Want to play a system that retains the flavors of 80s-era British fantasy? Warlock, from Fire Ruby Designs, has you covered by being a bit more robust than Advanced Fighting Fantasy and a lot less cumbersome than Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. We check it out on this week’s Vintage RPG Podcast.

Happy New Year! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we return to Appendix N and check out The Broken Sword, a novel by Poul Anderson. Unlike Three Hearts and Three Lions, it’s a fantastic, violent and often unparalleled work of influential fantasy.

We got you some monsters for Christmas! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about the Monstrous Compendium (1989) for second edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. You know what else we talk about? Office supplies and how great they are. Join us for another thrilling episode!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about the Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide (1990), the first Dungeon Masters Guide expansion for second edition Dungeons & Dragons. That might sound dull, but I promise you, it is a wild ride into the substrate of the RPG psyche — it’s one part deconstruction of the hobby and one part a kind of everyperson’s treatise on RPG design theory, written largely by the always engaging Jennell Jaquays. A lot of folks think the blue and silver books are just 2E bloat, but this one should be on the shelves of anyone who thinks deeply about RPG design.

Back in October, Stu ran “Chariot of the Gods,” the cinematic scenario in the Alien Starter Set. Not once, but twice! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast we talk about how it went. Who survived? What was left of them? Well, we aren’t telling because that would spoil the fun. But we do dig into Stu’s general impressions of how the game works and the experience it delivers.

It’s a little late for a holiday gift guide, even without the worldwide supply chain issues and shipping delays, so let’s call this episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast “Cool RPG stuff that came out this year (and is maybe made by our friends).” While it may be too late for the December holidays (though PDFs make for fine gifts, too!), the monopoly December has on gift giving is silly. Give your tabletop pals a cool book in January or February, it’ll make their month! Those dreary months need some good cheer too!

We did Fighting Fantasy last week, so this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, it seemed like a fun idea to take a look at a board game inspired by Fighting Fantasy, the spectacular Escape the Dark Castle, from Themeborne. So many great things about this game: the gnarly throwback art, the punishing difficulty, the narrative focus, the incredible ease of learning it. Snag it, throw it on the table, learn while you go and die, repeatedly. Fantastic stuff!

We also chat with Henry Taylor about his psychedelic, system agnostic RPG sourcebook about Bronze Age Celts, Caer Mundus: The Lost Realm. Here be magic mushrooms, folks! Buy a physical copy, housed in a handsome slipcase, direct from Henry’s store, or check out the sneak peek PDF Votive Offerings on DriveThru for a taste of what the main book offers.

On the Vintage RPG Podcast this week, the guys talk about the famed adventure gamebook franchise, Fighting Fantasy, developed by Ian Livingstone and (English) Steve Jackson. Hambone also has a chat with Ryan Verniere about his forthcoming RPG, Blackbirds, now up for pre-order on BackerKit.

This forthright post is brought to you by Stu’s head cold. We’ll return to our regular number of exclamation points next week.

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Correction: Ryan discovered Berserk in 1992 not 1982.

Did you know that there’s a Rocky and Bullwinkle RPG? Yup: the Bullwinkle and Rocky Role-Playing Party Game! Do you even have a clue who Rocky and Bullwinkle are? Did you get that the first line of this post is a reference to their cartoon? Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that this particular cartoon license is a bit of a head-scratcher for TSR circa 1988, and doesn’t get any less odd here in 2021. We get into that and check out the game itself, which has some surprising similarities to modern game design, particularly in storytelling games. Only on the Vintage RPG Podcast, folks!

Ships and desert islands and sea shanties and secret treasures: we’re getting nautical on this week’s episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast. First up, N4 — Treasure Hunt (1986), one of the finest introductory scenarios for first edition Dungeons & Dragons. It’s one of the only modules to successfully pull of the “you’ve been captured and lost all your stuff” trope and introduces the underloved idea of zero-level characters (at least until Dungeon Crawl Classics came around). Good stuff all around!

We also chat with Tristan Zimmerman about his unusual nautical RPG, Shanty Hunters, in which you attempt to preserve sea shanties that magically defend themselves by manifesting the subjects of their songs to stop you. It’s pretty wild and on Kickstarter right now!

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Be sure to check out Tristan’s Ennie-nominated RPG blog, Molten Sulphur.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re talking 3, 2, 1… Action! with 3, 2, 1… Action! creator Hambone! You probably remember Hambone kickstarted an adventure for the system, Rocket to Russia, back in February during ZineQuest. That scenario is a prelude to Point Nemo, which is hitting Kickstarter on Tuesday. Follow now to be notified on launch! We chat a little bit about Point Nemo and a lot about the underlying system, which is rules light and aims to be welcoming for players of all levels of experience. Check it out!

Halloween is nearly upon us! For the last few years, we’ve reserved this week to chat about Ravenloft, but this year we thought we’d talk about a game that seems truer to the spirit of the season: Babes in the Wood, from World Champ Game Company. It’s a delightfully spooky game about being a child lost in the woods on an endless Halloween. What could be better? 

But that’s not all! Comic writer Mark Sable is back for a chat, this time to tell us about his new comic, Chaotic Neutral, which ponders the question: what if Dungeons & Dragons was everything the Satanic Panic thought it was? It’s on Kickstarter now! 

Have you seen the Yellow Sign? We sure have. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we tackle the massive new Delta Green campaign Impossible Landscapes (2021). It instantly takes its places as one of the definitive RPG takes on Robert W. Chambers’ infamous King in Yellow, delivering an unprecedented, mind-bending experience — and that’s just reading the book. Playing the campaign is likely something the folks at your table will never forget. A solid gold modern classic.

Stu doesn’t generally care about spoilers but in this case tried to minimize discussing them. Still, if you’re planning on playing this, or think you might down the line, maybe be ready to stick your fingers in your ears while listening.

We’ve also got a new Indie Elevator Pitch! Sadia Bies and Banana Chan pop on to chat about their anthology of live action horror RPGs that tackle themes of suburbia, food and consumption. Coming to Kickstarter soon!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we have such sights to show you. Wait, no, wrong horror franchise. But pretty close — we’re talking about Kult, the mature existential urban horror RPG imported from Sweden by Terry Amthor and Metropolis Ltd. The designers clearly had Clive Barker on their minds. We honestly barely scratch the surface, though, talking more about the edginess of the 90s, the trend of investigating secret histories in RPGs and all that pre-millennial tension that was in the air. We’ll be taking another, closer look at Kult down the line for sure.

We’re excited to have game designer and artist Amanda Lee Franck back on the Vintage RPG Podcast this week! Amanda’s got a big old pile of exciting projects to chat about, from a zine about vacationing vampires (Vampire Cruise!) to another about exploring a mysterious domed habitat (Mouth Brood!). And that’s just the start!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re taking a look at Goodman Games’ series of alphabet sourcebooks: The Dungeon Alphabet, The Monster Alphabet and The Cthulhu Alphabet. These are system agnostic design tools, full to brimming with random tables and amazing art, all aimed at helping you stoke your imagination to make cool things for your players. A must for every GM’s shelf.

Space is a place that wants to kill us, be it with the vacuum, the cold, the hostile exo-environments, the hubris of humanity or a good old fashioned xenomorph. That’s right, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at the Alien RPG. The latest permutation of Free League’s Year Zero Engine is refined to be even deadlier. It boasts frameworks for both traditional campaign play and more directed cinematic play. There’s a pretty excellent stress and panic system. It all comes together as a pretty excellent survival horror/sci-fi RPG!

“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble!” This week, we’re doing a bit of black magic and calling up demons. Specifically the demons in the Ars Goetia, the 72 kings, dukes, presidents and barons of Hell. We run down the history of this notorious book of demonology, its unlikely origins and its connections to pop culture and roleplaying games.

Choo-choo! Stu recently wrapped up running the Call of Cthulhu campaign Horror on the Orient Express after about a year and a quarter of weekly sessions. A momentous occasion! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we thought it would be cool to chat about it. Who survived? What was left of them? Just how on rails was it? Were the flashback scenarios as good as advertised? We discuss, and manage to do it relatively spoiler free.

We also check in with Tony Vasinda from Plus One Exp about Down We Go, a new game currently crowdfunding on Gamefound.

They say forever is a long, long time and, if Thousand Year Old Vampire is an indication, forever sure does suck. Is that a pun? That might be a pun. Sorry. Anyway, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at Tim Hutchings’ solo journaling game about memory, tragedy and confronting things you’d rather ignore. It is maybe the most intense solo games ever published.

Also, Drew Cochran gives us the Indie Elevator Pitch for his forthcoming RPG, Epic of Dreams!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to legendary RPG artist Erol Otus! What more can I say? 

“I will find a city, find myself a city to live in.” That’s the chorus of the Talking Heads song “Cities,” and it kind of speaks to how RPG designers approached city design in the early days of the hobby. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re talking about Midkemia Press and their signature approach to cities, called, appropriately, Cities! They were interested in finding ways to create the bustle of city streets and do so largely through piles of random tables — the method was so compelling that Chaosium hired Midkemia to put together a similar system to form up the heart of the Thieves’ World box set!

Echoing the success of Chaosium’s recent Call of Cthulhu Classic collection Kickstarter, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast we take a look at the first Call of Cthulhu campaign: Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. Which has very little to do with good ol’ Yoggy and much more to do with waking up Cthulhu well before the alarm. As the first, it’s now really what you’d expect from a CoC campaign, but it still has charm to spare. Let’s plumb the depths of madness, yea?

What happened to Cthulhu? Was it a curse? Did TSR finally go to far? Did Chaosium steal the fire of the gods? Was it banned? Was it burned? On this week’s Vintage RPG Podcast, we reveal the shocking true story behind Deities & Demigods and the removal of the Cthulhu and Melnibonean mythologies. Actually, we don’t, because it was never a big secret and most of the details have been floating around the internet for decades, but there are lots of misconceptions about this book and its history and it seemed like we should do our part in helping to clear them up. The truth isn’t scandalous at all but, ultimately, it’s probably more interesting!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at the first book of monsters for D&D. The Monster Manual? Oh, no, not that — the first D&D monster book was All the Worlds’ Monsters (1977), from Chaosium! We talk about how salty that made TSR. More interesting, All the Worlds’ Monsters is sort of the first step in a long legacy of collaboration in the RPG industry on Chaosium’s part, so we talk about that a bit too. Also on tap: Alarums & Excursions and the Perrin Conventions.

A few weeks back, we talked about the Pagan Publishing Delta Green sourcebooks for Call of Cthulhu. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re chatting about the standalone Delta Green RPG from Arc Dream (2016). Based on Call of Cthulhu sixth edition, the game makes some key modification to the sanity system. It also finds ways to reinvent the mythos while keeping the focus of the horror human — in a lot of ways, Delta Green is about alienation and trauma. Mulder and Scully this is not.

Clarification: In the episode, Stu mentions that Delta Green is based on Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition. That’s not accurate! While the underlying mechanics are inspired by that game, Delta Green’s system stands alone and features several unique additions, including Bonds (mentioned in the episode) and Lethality. Arc Dream and Delta Green are completely independent from Chaosium and Call of Cthulhu.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about the Encyclopedia Magica, a four volume collection of every magic item created for Dungeons & Dragons, from 1974 to 1993. It is a massive and intricate undertaking, pulling from every TSR publication — including the magazines! In the days before the internet and searchable digital databases, the fact that this exists (and missed just one magic item) is astonishing. Easily one of the best things TSR ever produced, an epic imagination stoker and one of the few products that unified first and second edition D&D.

On this episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about the book. In its current, unedited form, it is 165 chapters long, each chapter focusing on a specific book or product, and spans five decades of RPGs. The focus is on how RPGs have developed and changed over the years, so while D&D is in there a lot, the hope is to introduce folks to the wild and crazy world that waits beyond the world’s oldest RPG. Plenty of books out there on D&D already, right?

Oh, and Stu’s not entirely sold on the working title, so be sure to send any and all ridiculous suggestions you may have his way.

Get to level 100, fight 10,000 zombies, beat up Orcus, steal his stuff and murder Tiamat in H4 — The Throne of Bloodstone, one of the most ridiculous D&D adventures ever published. Is it good? Is it bad? YES! Join us as we check it out.

Plus, something a little different and a lot charming: in our Indie Elevator Pitch this week, we chat with Jonathan Sacha about his Goblins & Gardens tarot card set. He (gasp) cuts up and collages art from old D&D books and old gardening reference books to create surprisingly whimsical scenes of monsters on their days off. Now on Kickstarter!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Andrew Walter, one of the key artists defining the look of RPGs for the contemporary era. You’ve seen his art on the covers Old School Essentials and Troika. He wrote and illustrated Fronds of Benevolence, co-designed Slipgate Chokepoint. He’s all over the place! We talk about all those things, melty art, the glory of Russ Nicholson, death metal and more!

You can see more of Andrew’s work on Instagram and buy prints on his Big Cartel store.

These are the end times, my friends. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Momatoes about her forthcoming RPG ARC, a game played at the edge of the apocalypse. We chat a bit about the synthesis of OSR and storygame philosophies present in ARC, countdown timers and why so many games lately seem to be about the end of the world. And more! 

ARC is on Kickstarter right now (it funded in less than 23 minutes, so its all about those stretch goals)! You can read more about the game on the official site or check out the quickstart rules to get a feel for how it all works. And follow Momatoes on Twitter!

Rise up, dead RPGs, rise! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chart the origins of the Old School Revival, specifically the Old School Reference and Index Compilation, or OSRIC, the retroclone of the first edition AD&D rules that kicked it all off (sort of). We also talk a bit about Castles & Crusades, the D20 System, the Open Gaming License and more!

Clarification: Gary Gygax, didn’t create Castles & Crusades, Mac Golden and Davis Chenault did. However, they smartly showed it to Gygax early on, he gave advice and publicly endorsed it, after which they positioned the game as what 2E D&D should have been had he not left TSR.

Are you afraid of the dark? You’re gonna be after you play Campfire. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to Adam Vass and Will Jobst about their Kickstarter for their new storytelling horror game, featuring art by the one and only Trevor Henderson. Check it out!

When we recorded this episode, I discovered my microphone was broken, so I fashioned a very large bullhorn using some bamboo poles and the sail cloth from an old schooner in the back yard. I pointed the bullhorn in the general direction of Hambone’s house and shouted very loudly into it. Meanwhile, Hambone had to scurry around with an ill-fitting baseball mitt in order to catch each individual word as it flew through the air. Once caught, he deposited the words into a disused aquarium for safekeeping until they could be reconstructed at a later time. The real amazing thing about this is that Hambone only had a vaguest idea of what I was saying and I had simply no clue what he was saying, but somehow, the episodes of the podcast came together as if we were sitting in the same room having a normal conversation. 

Oh, yea, this week’s episode is about The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1998), a storytelling game about tall tales.

Also, we’ve got Levi Combs of Planet X Games on our Indie RPG Elevator Pitch, presented by Exalted Funeral and he’s talking about his new Kickstarter for a brand spankin’ new, Dungeon Crawl Classics version of his module Jungle Tomb of the Mummy Bride. Check out the Kickstarter now! 

This week on the Vintage RPG podcast we enter a world of conspiracy, spycraft and cosmic horror with a look at the original Delta Green (Arc Dream’s stand alone Delta Green RPG and Pelgrane Press’ The Fall of Delta Green will each get their own episodes in the near future). We check the issue of The Unspeakable Oath where [redacted], the Pagan Publishing sourcebooks that lay out [redacted] and chat a bit about [redacted]. Have a listen, if your security clearance is high enough!

This week on the Vintage RPG podcast we check out Book of Vile Darkness (2002), D&D 3E’s super edgy overcorrection of the family friendly 90s era. It’s kinda weird! You’d think after decades of criticism about how D&D was a tool of the devil, you wouldn’t go and put out a book that A. is of limited utility to most games and B. makes the critics’ case for them. It’s still pretty cool, if you dig demons and devils, and can look past all the torture and stuff. 

Artist Nick Tofani joins us this week on the Vintage RPG podcast to talk about horror in RPGs, particularly the Mothership adventure he illustrated, the unpleasant-in-the-best-way Gradient Descent. It’s dark outside, something is howling in the wind and pale shapes with dead eyes are shambling nearer, so make sure the doors are locked and turn up the volume on this one. We’re sure you’ll make it till morning. 

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re talking time travel and that’s sure to result in a headache. Specifically, we’re looking at Yaquinto Publications’ Timeship (1983), but we also chat about a couple other time travel RPGs like Timemaster (1984) and Doctor Who (1985). Let’s get timey-wimey!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about a gritty, street level horror RPG in which you play creatures of the night making their way in the big city. Vampire: The Masquerade? Nope! Beating White Wolf to the punch by a full year is Stellar Games’ Nightlife (1990). We talk about the appeal of being the monster, the many similarities between the two games and the delightful way in which Nightlife captures the nightlife of New York City in the early 90s. Content warning, though: around the six minute mark, we have a brief and frank discussion about some casual racism in the game that includes some harsh language. 

This week, join us in welcoming the amazing David Hoskins to the show. You’ve seen his pen work in Acid Death Fantasy, The Isle of the Plangent Mage and, soon, in Through Ultan’s Door. We talk about how he got into RPG illustration, matters of style, some pretty fantastic black knights that have been creeping onto his Instagram and more! 

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You can see more of David’s work on his website, his Instagram and his Twitter!

Back in November, in our holiday gift guide episode, we talked briefly with Jess Carrier from Noble Knight Games about the weird stuff people trade in. Over the next couple months, we kept thinking about it: they must get strange stuff constantly! So we invited Jess and Noble Knight’s RPG tsar Andrew Branstad to come on and tell us all about the bazaar of the bizarre that is their warehouse. 

This week, we check out the famous lost (and found) short film by Roger Christian, Black Angel. This gorgeous little jam occupies a neat place in Star Wars history and also happens to be a mighty fine bit of early '80s sword and sorcery cinema in its own right. And after you listen to our takes on it, you can check it out for yourself on YouTube for free (with a brief intro by Christian).

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, minds are blown! Somehow, we haven’t done a Fiend Folio episode yet and this week is it. We talk about how the book’s difficult birth, the mixed reception on release and the quiet disavowal it got from TSR. We get cartoon hearts in our eyes talking about Russ Nicholson’s art, as usual. We make fun of flumphs and adherers. And that’s just scratching the surface! 

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re in outer space, paying off our starship mortgage and exploring the Third Imperium. That’s right, we’re finally cracking open the little black Traveller box. We talk a bit about what makes Game Designer’s Workshop’s classic science fiction RPG, well, a classic. It must be something special, because it forged a heck of a legacy despite there being all of two illustrations in the whole box set!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we journey to Jennell Jaquays’ Dark Tower, one of the best books Judges Guild’s produced and often considered one of the very best D&D adventures of all time. We chat a bit about why that is, touch on Caverns of Thracia (which will be getting its own episode shortly) and generally discuss the state of dungeon design in the late 70s. There’s also DUCKS!

This episode also includes our second Indie RPG Elevator Pitch, brought to you by Exalted Funeral, in which we chat with Amanda Lee Franck (Vampire Cruise, You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge). What’s she got cooking in the coming months? Does it involve a boat? Listen and find out!

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Follow Amanda on Twitter and Instagram. You can check out PDFs of her games on her Itch page or buy hard copies through Exalted Funeral (US) or Four Rogues Trading Company (Canada).

We are joined this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast by the fine fellows from Narrative Dynamics, Michael Dunn-O’Connor and Eric Swanson. They are the folks behind the Goblinville RPG zines and Rebel Crown – two very different but equally awesome games. We discuss them both, what it is like switching tones, the difference between designing your own game and using an existing engine (Rebel Crown is a Forged in the Dark game), the appeal of box sets and much more!

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You can snag Goblinville and Rebel Crown on the Narrative Dynamics site, or through their Itch.io page. Follow Michael on Twitter and Eric on Instagram.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we are joined by Peter Bebergal (Season of the Witch, Strange Frequencies), editor of Appendix N, a brand new anthology from Strange Attractor Press that explores the fantasy fiction that influenced the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. We have a far ranging, philosophical discussion about the stories Gygax overlooked, the ways literature does (and doesn’t) influence RPGs, other recommended reading lists and more!  

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Grab Appendix N direct from Strange Attractor!

It was bound to happen eventually: this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we discuss the disaster that was Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game. How did SPI screw up a game based on a license of a TV show at the height of its powers? A game that launched during an unprecedented eight month media frenzy about the show? The world just wasn’t ready. Which is a shame, because the character and narrative based system was actually unlike just about anything else available at the time.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out what is possibly the first ever silent roleplaying game. A silent RPG? Seems impossible, but that’s what Alice is Missing aims to be, with all the investigation, narrative and social interaction playing out over text messages. The game is also timed, has a custom soundtrack and designed to be played only once by a given group, adding to the intrigue and the feeling that this is an event as much as it is a game.

This episode, we also launch our new monthly segment, the Indie RPG Elevator Pitch, brought to you buy our friends over at Exalted Funeral. The first designer in our spotlight is Lucian Kahn (Dead Friend, Visigoths vs. Mall Goths), talking about their new project for ZineQuest 3, Hibernation Games: 5 Journaling RPGs for Solo Play.

We also chat about John’s RPG zine, Rocket to Russia, also on Kickstarter for ZineQuest 3.

This week, we chat with our pal Matt Kelley, the fellow behind Exalted Funeral, indie RPG publisher and distributor extraordinaire. We talk about how he got into the biz, where its going and some of the fantastic creators he’s met along the way. We also announce a new monthly segment that will showcase rad indie RPG creators who will be working with Exalted Funeral in the future. All good things to come!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we get chromed up and check out the two earliest iterations of R. Talsorian’s premier RPG, Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020. We talk a bit about cyberpunk as a genre, look at the particular (and surprising) inspirations for the RPG and dig into the fast and deadly system. There’s the obvious comparisons to make between Cyberpunk and Shadowrun, so you bet we make them, too!

As promised, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we visit James M. Ward’s Gamma World, a mutant-filled romp through the post-apocalypse! We talk about how Gamma World builds off Ward’s earlier game, Metamorphosis Alpha, the clever way it handles characters unearthing tech the players probably know about, the approach to world creation and the cryptic alliances that make me like there is a strong connection between GW and West End Games’ Paranoia a few years later. The secret ingredient is humor!

Mutants in space! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we dig into James M. Ward's Metamorphosis Alpha, the first sci-fi RPG people care about! Halfway through the massive colony ship's journey, it passed through a cloud of radiation, leading to waves of mutation and a breakdown of society. Now, centuries later, the human population of the ship have lost the knowledge of how to use the ship's technology, heck, they don't even know they're on a ship in space! Explore the world, crawl through the engineering ducts and try to avoid the man-eating plants! * * * Noble Knight is back with a new discount code for our lovely listeners. Use code LOVERPGS in store or online from now through Valentine's Day to take $5 off any order of $25 or more! Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord! If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going! Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast! Available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients. Send questions, comments or corrections to [email protected]. Follow Vintage RPG on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. Learn more at the Vintage RPG FAQ. Follow Stu Horvath, John McGuire, VintageRPG and Unwinnable on Twitter. Intro music by George Collazo. The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter. Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to Joe DeSimone of The Academy of Games! We talk about RPGs as a learning tool, Townes Van Zandt, sobriety mechanics and much more!

The world is dying. Will you rage hopelessly against the end or cower in robbed graves in your final days? That’s the central question of Mörk Borg, the heaviest metal RPG we have encountered thus far (which says something, considering the connection between Bolt Thrower and Warhammer). This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about the outlandish design of the Mörk Borg book, the grimmest of grim dark trappings and the surprising sense of humor at the center of it all.

This week we take a look at a thoroughly modern zine: A Visitor’s Guide to the Rainy City, by Rich Forest, illustrated by Bill Spytma and published by Superhero Necromancer. A product of ZineQuest 2, it is an entirely system agnostic setting book that details the strange and wondrous city where the rain never stops (and also a floating pirate stronghold island thing and some more rural areas surrounding the city). It is all caps GREAT, brimming with personality, overflowing with whimsy and drowning in ideas. Bill Spytma’s art, which merges aesthetics of medieval art with those of the Victorian era, is delightful and goes a long way to making everything feel cohesive. A huge, vibrant and exciting accomplishment. Zines are the future, folks.

Building off our recent episode on Chivalry & Sorcery, this week we look at another realistic medieval RPG world, N. Robin Crossby’s Hârn. Unlike C&S, though, Hârn was originally created as a system agnostic setting. That’d change later, with the HârnMaster system, but with or without the rules, the Hârn remains one of the the most ambitious and stunningly detailed ever created. Let’s take a look around, eh?

Most folks would say Steading of the Hill Giant Chief was the first published adventure for Dungeons & Dragons. And they’d be wrong! While Steading was the first D&D adventure published by TSR, it was Palace of the Vampire Queen from Wee Warriors that was actually the first adventure module. A bit thin by modern standards and definitely more gonzo, we take a look at this often overlooked piece of history on the new episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast.

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You can find the reprint of Palace of the Vampire Queen and all the other old Wee Warriors publications, at Precis Intermedia!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at Chivalry & Sorcery. One of the earliest RPGs, it is another example of D&D players feeling like D&D failed in some way and making their own game to correct it. In C&S’s case, Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus felt D&D wasn’t realistic enough, so they set about making a game that reaaaaally leans into simulation and is pretty tedious, even for its time. However! They also created not one, but three extremely detailed campaign settings, which no one was really doing at the time. We take a look at those, too. One has dinosaurs! Very realistic!

This year, instead of digging up gift suggestions ourselves, we’ve turned to the professionals. First up, we talk to Matt Kelley about the strange sights you can see at Exalted Funeral (as ever, they’re gonna have a big Black Friday sale). Jess Carrier fills us in on a small slice of the stuff you can find at Noble Knight Games (they’ve got it all, for real, and their sale is going on right now). Finally, Josh Look from the It Came From the Tabletop Podcast suggests some notable board games to consider putting under the holiday centerpiece of your choice (or right on the shelf, if the holidays aren’t your thing).

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay! Grab your axe, smear some mud on your clothes, strap on some desperation and delve with us into the grim and perilous Old World. Stu laments having avoided WFRP all these years (don’t hold your breath for 40k though). Then he delights in the game’s systems and world building and art. In addition to the main rules, we also chat, broadly, about The Enemy Within campaign. This is some grade-A roleplayin’ right here.

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Gonna drop some truth here: Tzeentch is the best and most interesting Chaos God. The end.

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 Wednesday, November 11.

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For more on Mark’s work, check out his author pages on Comixology and Amazon.

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 about learning to see the world differently.  And the game mechanic centers on a talking board!

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 the late 90s/early 2000s goth club scene! Weird!

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 moment, and all to brief.

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 college courses! Easily one of the oddest RPGs we’ve ever encountered.

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 Adventurer’s Guides, and the Stranger Things: Dungeons & Dragons comic book.

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 the book is the approach to the city, which uses modular geomorphs for the tangled and ever-changing back alleys. We also talk a bit about Leiber, his Lankhmar co-creator Otto Fischer and the stories themselves, which form one of the biggest influences on early Dungeons & Dragons.

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, it has piles of fatalistic atmosphere and dark themes, perhaps most notably the magic system that relies on mind altering substances and is entirely arranged around summoning and binding demons and other supernatural entities. Most Stormbringer games end in death or corruption – the fun is in figuring out which is the better fate.

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 at and full of enigmas. Check it out if you were ever a kid.

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 modern audiences). Then we dig into the surprisingly novel game system presented in the box, which is arranged around a sliding honor/dishonor scale that focuses on the motives and morals behind player action rather than combat. An easy knock-off of Dungeons & Dragons this is not!

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 beings and mutants and knights and the four horsemen of the apocalypse and mechs and more all rub shoulders with each other here, pushing each new sourcebook further over the top, so don your Glitterboy armor, pray to your gods and dive in. I hope you like explosions. * * * Through September 7, use the code ROLLDICE to get $6 off any purchase $25 or more at Noble Knight! Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord! If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going! Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast! Available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients. Send questions, comments or corrections to [email protected]. Follow Vintage RPG on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. Learn more at the Vintage RPG FAQ. Follow Stu Horvath, John McGuire, VintageRPG and Unwinnable on Twitter. Intro music by George Collazo. The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter. Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

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 and random encounters. Perhaps most importantly, it introduces a terrifying take on the troll that Gygax would essentially Xerox for the game. Interesting stuff!

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 RPGs and an important block in the foundation of the OSR.

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 forget to talk about the amazing Basil Poledouris soundtracks and totally forget to talk about that King Conan teaser that’s been tormenting folks for nearly forty years. Oops!

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 lately.

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 Bloodstone modules and Monte Cook’s two massive Planescape campaign books, The Great Modron March and Dead Gods.

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Before we get to all the delicious links, we mentioned a couple things in the episode that warrant the sharing of images. First, of course, is the Todd Lockwood illustration of Orcus from Dragon Magazine 42 (October, 1980).

Second, Stu couldn’t quite fish the name of this engraving out of his brain in the episode, but “Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council,” by John Martin (circa 1823) is the piece whose vibe reminds him of Lockwood’s Orcus.

Finally, here is the “Orcus Mouth” in the Gardens of Bomarzo, or the Park of Monsters.

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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 hopping vampires. Boasting an enormous number of collaborators, Jiangshi hits Kickstarter tomorrow, July 14. Get on that!

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 T&T was too simple to have much staying power, but the game is still with us and is an important first step towards modern attempts at streamlined rules systems.

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’ll have to listen to the podcast…

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-liners and a decent lizard man suit. Some movies are so bad they’re a blast to watch. Mazes and Monsters isn’t one of them. Buckle up and get ready to feel our pain.

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 can grab it for free in PDF or get it printed for cost through Lulu.

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 in the history of RPGs!

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.

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 which you stalk around a public space “murdering” your friends with water pistols. Sounds like a totally fun game that wouldn’t scare innocent bystanders or get you arrested at all, right?

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, it has some sick cover art by Angus McBride.

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 lightsaber toy necessary!

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.

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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 Ghost while you’re at it!

Some indie love: check out Casket Land!

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 this until a few months ago, but it instantly became one of our favorite Dungeons & Dragons books of all time.

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 us in the wilds of Dolmenwood!

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!

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After we recorded this episode, I read Bill Slavicsek’s memoir about developing the West End Games Star Wars RPG, Defining a Galaxy. Slavicsek’s recounting of the bidding war around the Star Wars license leads me to believe that TSR shuttered the Star Frontiers line in anticipation of developing a Star Wars RPG. That’s a gut feeling, though. You should read his book (which is EXCELLENT) and decide for yourself!

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 game’s preoccupation with vast underground labyrinths, but that’s just scratching the surface…

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 painful jokes. Hop on board!

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 trip will be.

(20 minutes, give or take, actually)

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 Virgin Mary and the big cheese, God Himself.

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 references to the 1979 cult classic film The Warriors before ruminating on human creativity. A little bit of everything, as ever.

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Stu owns three separate copies of The Keep on the Borderlands.

Corrections: Keep is for levels one through three. Bill Willingham does not have art in it – just Roslof, Otus and Diesel.

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 your pals.

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I am still unclear on the connection, if there is one, between Task Force Games, Flying Buffalo and several other small labels. I suspect someone (Task Force?) was acting as a distribution for a time, but that is just a guess. If you can lay it out for me, get in touch, I’d be obliged.

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 his first podcast interview ever!

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A few notes directly from Russ after the fact:

“Sorry about my memory and going off at side tangents so often but I enjoyed that…funny I have never talked in regards to the source of my artwork about the ‘happenings’ at our old house when I was growing up before. At least as I age, these awarenesses are rare and our present bungalow is so new there is nothing directly ‘there.’

Now artists – there are a few I especially rate (although I made a point of never copying) – Albrecht Durer, the Brueghals, Rembrandt, El Greco, Hals, Velazquez, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mucha, Klimt, Toulouse Lautrec, Doré, Beardsley and Rackham, to name a few. Also pulps – Sax Rohmer, Howard, The Shadow, Weird Tales, Black Mask stories, Poe, Edgar Wallace, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Merrit, Hamilton, Jules Verne, Rider Haggard and the old pulp serials I saw at Saturday morning children’s cinema – loved it all. From age ten on, when I left the countryside life for life in the city, I read a lot (up until then my mother thought I didn’t read anything except comics).

And that silent film I was trying to talk about – it had something similar, where a man is sitting by a rock pool (?) and these squidgy tentacled things (similar to the Grell toy Stu sent me) come out of the water and drag him to his doom. Scared me as a lad but I was in my teens so no screaming attacks (laf) and am still not fond.”

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You can see scads of Russ’ art on his blog, The Gallery.

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 of early D&D!

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!

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Stu mentions two books used by Mike Mignola as inspiration for the stories in the Hellboy comic universe. They are The New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, by Felix Guirand, and The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, by Rossell Hope Robbins.

Hi gang! This week, we’re getting ready for the holidays and wanted to help give you a leg up on your gifts for your friends and family around the gaming table (and maybe yourself too, let’s be real). Below you’ll find link to everything we talk about on the show, plus info on the coupon codes.

Han Cholo (ha, that name) for all your nerd jewelry and apparel needs.

Dellamorte & Co. (whoops, said that wrong on the podcast) and Black Rider Industries for sculptures and decorative housewares. (see coupon code info below!)

Ice Cream Dice and Level Up Dice for, well, sweet dice.

Exalted Funeral, for all your weird, dark, indie, occult, metal RPG needs (see coupon code info below!).

Zweihander (For the other books in the line, check this link)

The Young Adventurer’s Guides

Chaosium – RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu Starter Set, Miskatonic University – The Restricted Collection, Khan of Khans

Noble Knight Games, for all your tabletop needs, new and old (see coupon code info below!).

Invisible Sun (Stu said on the podcast that it was a relaunch and he has no idea why he did that – it is a new, original game)

We are back with the second part of our epic interview with Jim Zub! This time, Jim chats about his work on Dungeons & Dragons comic books, as well as the Dungeons & Dragons vs. Rick and Morty box set, and we learn he does a pretty good Rick Sanchez impersonation.

For more from Jim, you can head to his official site or follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Learn all about Jim’s Young Adventurer’s Guides for Dungeons & Dragons in Part One.

Hey, we’re weekly! We talk about what that means for the podcast going forward (forget that we say its December in the episode. It isn’t. Schedules change, OK?).

It would be rad if you joined us on our Patreon, because that definitely helps keep us going.

We also talk about the classic D&D monster, the rust monster. It was born from a cheap Hong Kong “dinosaur” in the 70s and has since become the bane of adventurers everywhere.

Well hello there, intrepid adventurer. We have quite the podcast for you today! We had the great pleasure of chatting with Jim Zub about the new Young Adventurer’s Guides for Dungeons & Dragons. We explore all the nooks and crannies, learning how the series came about, what’s inside, and what to expect from the forthcoming volumes.

Weapons & Warriors and Monsters & Creatures are both out now. Dungeons & Tombs is hitting shelves on November 26 and Wizards & Spells is on the way in March.

For more from Jim, you can head to his official site or follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Or you can come back here on Tuesday, November 19, for the second part of this interview, in which we discus Jim’s D&D comics and the forthcoming Dungeons & Dragons vs. Rick and Morty box set.

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Big news! If you’ve ever said to yourself, “Gosh, I hate to wait every other week for fresh and exciting Vintage RPG Podcasts,” then you’re going to be over the moon: starting now, we’re officially going weekly! See you next week!

This one was a long time coming. This week, we take a long and hopefully definitive look at the moral hysteria of the late 70s through the mid-90s, generally referred to as the Satanic Panic (CW: suicide, sexual abuse). We focus on the controversies around Dungeons & Dragons, but also talk about the larger phenomenon and how it spilled over into heavy metal, children’s toys and cartoons and even a couple criminal cases. Its spooky, but maybe not the way you think.

Links of Interest

The original BADD pamphlet.

Jack Chick’s Darkest Dungeon.

The 60 Minutes interview.

Rob Halford singing court here.

The Chicago Police Department document on ritualistic criminal activity.

Michael Stackpole’s “Pulling Report.”

Gather round, Chill Masters! This week, we’re discussing the horror roleplaying game Chill (1984), by Pacesetter Games. Is it scary? Is it campy? We don’t know, because Chill never really figured that out for itself.

We also welcome game designer Nathan D. Paoletta of Worldwide Wrestling fame. We chat about wrasslin’ briefly before turning to his latest, the psychological monster hunting game Imp of the Perverse, set in Jacksonian America.

This week, its all about artist, writer and game designer Luka Rejec. We discuss Witchburner, Luka’s system agnostic witch hunt scenario. Then we dig into the forthcoming Ultraviolet Grasslands, a psychedelic heavy metal road trip RPG powered by Luka’s ultra-light, ultra flexible SEACAT system. Finally, we talk to the man himself (for not nearly long enough).

This week, we’re talking TSR’s Endless Quest gamebooks. They’re like Choose Your Own Adventure, but with D&D and, well, boring. Sort of! Maybe we’re being too hard on them. We dig in to the first few, the history of the series, the unusual places it goes and there is, perhaps, a surprising turn-around of opinion. We learn a lot about ourselves on this podcast, folks.

We’re already getting excited for Halloween (what, its after Labor Day) so we’ve got a couple games we’re excited about. Stu finally got a hold of the rulebook for Mummy: The Resurrection, which tickles his funny bone. Meanwhile, Hambone is amped for Horrified, a new board game from Ravensburger.

We dive right into it, talking the history of Dragonlance – the modules, the novels, the…animated movie? It is the first major metaplot in tabletop RPGs and catapulted Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss onto the bestseller list, but never quite coalesced into the major D&D campaign setting it should have. We talk about the reasons why.

After that, Hambone sits down with Craig Bergman, assistant manager of the Fantasy Flight Games Center about, well, the awesome Fantasy Flight Games Center event space. If you’re in Roseville, Minnesota, drop on in!