The Vintage RPG Podcast

We made it one year! To celebrate our anniversary, we talk about some of our favorite things, and ramble through a number of seemingly random topics, like our love for sniveling cowards, whether Lord Soth listens to Sisters of Mercy, the glorious badness of the D&D cartoon, murder hobo average intelligence and jeeze, that's just the first 15 minutes. We also have a chat with Levi Combs of Planet X games. We talk about his first 5E D&D module Jungle Tomb of the Mummy Bride and learn some of the secrets in his new one, An Occurrence at Howling Crater, now on Kickstarter! (The video Stu mentions is the video at the top of the campaign page).

We have a very special guest this episode. 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 barely scratch the surface, honestly. Tony's retrospective art show, Never Abandon Imagination, opens June 22 at the Mint Museum Randolph, in Charlotte, North Carolina, and runs through November 3. If you're in the area, be sure to check it out. You can also follow Tony on Twitter and Instagram.

We start off with Hambone's experience playing the classic fantasy themed board game Talisman for the first time. He played the recent fourth edition from Fantasy Flight. Did you know there was an unofficial 1.5 edition of Dungeons & Dragons? There was! Beginning with Unearthed Arcana and following through Oriental Adventures, Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide, it was partly a natural evolution of the system, partly a desperate attempt to save the company from financial ruin. Stu walks us through the history. Finally, we started playing Pendragon and we chat about character creation and the first introductory session. (Stu never explicitly states it, but the tedious bit was not the character creation itself, but rather working through the family histories).

A double meat episode! First off, Stu gives an overview of Keith Herber's series of Lovecraft Country sourcebooks for Call of Cthulhu: Arkham Unveiled, Return to Dunwich, Kingport: City in the Mists and Escape from Innsmouth. They are an important piece in the puzzle of how to present large regions in a way that is helpful and engaging for roleplaying games. Second, Hambone is a-glow for the new Dungeons & Dragons adventure compilation, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, which reprints a number of classic D&D scenarios, including the U-series: Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh, Danger at Dunwater and The Final Enemy. Surprising no one, Stu is less enthusiastic. Don't let that grump stop you, though. Ghosts of Saltmarsh is for sale now at our sponsor, Noble Knight Games. From May 27 to June 15, use the promo code CLASSICS, in store or online, to get $5 off purchases of $25 or more!

First up, we talk about Miskatonic University: The Restricted Collection, the latest Chaosium board game. It's a great companion to 2016's Khan of Khans. The main course this episode is the first edition Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide. We discuss how the book is a peak into Gary Gygax's brain and how that echoed through tabletop roleplaying games for a long time and marks a kind of frontier for game design circa 1979. We get pretty meta with it. Finally, we chat with Michael O'Brien, vice president of Chaosium about Miskatonic University: The Restricted Collection, some Call of Cthulhu conventions, RuneQuest and more Chaosium news!

We start off this week with Monarch, a set collecting game about sisters vying for the throne. It has very lovely art. We also announce our partnership with Noble Knight Games. You can use the coupon code NOBLEVINTAGE online or in-store to get $5 off any purchase of $25 or more. Offer expires May 12, so get on that! The main event is Skyrealms of Jorune, a very strange RPG from the 80s, created by Andrew Leker with gorgeous illustrations by Miles Teves. It is weird and wild and I bet if you are a certain age, you for sure remember the advertisements for it in Dragon Magazine. We also talk about weird dice and the lost art of paste-up work in the age before digital layout for publishing. This one goes places, folks. We wrap up with a chat about the games that never grabbed us and the games we never want to play again. Let us know which games you hate! Drop us a line at the email below!

We start by blowing the dust off an older board game, Cyclades, a deceptively straightforward, combat light strategy game with lots of cool miniatures that riffs on ancient Greek mythology. For the main event, we discuss GURPS - Generic Universal Role Playing System - from Steve Jackson Games, the RPG that can be any kind of game you want, so long as you have the sourcebooks. And dear god, there are a lot of source book. We look at a couple of the stranger ones, talk about the appeal of the generic and reveal some of our old Supers characters. We wrap up with Stu giving the rundown on character creation for his upcoming King Arthur Pendragon campaign.

First up, we talk about Mixtape Massacre, a fun little independently produced horror board game that riffs on classic slasher movies and 80s pop culture. Our main course this week is the iconic Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set red box. We talk about its place in popular culture, where it sits in the larger history of D&D, touch on the other BECMI boxes, talk cartography, the importance of indexes and more. The Isle of Dread inevitably comes up, as does the Goodman Games reissue. Finally, Stu is excited about his great mail day and walks us through some of the cool stuff he picked up from Exalted Funeral. They sell very cool indie TTRPG stuff and occult books. Couple cool Kickstarters to hip you to, as well. The first, through Exalted Funeral, is The Ultraviolet Grasslands, a psychedelic road trip RPG. The second is Welcome to Tikor, the setting book for the Afropunk Sci-fi/Fantasy RPG Swordsfall. Both campaigns have crushed their goals and we're sure to be talking about them a lot in the future, so consider getting on board now. Couple cool Kickstarters to hip you to, as well. The first, through Exalted Funeral, is The Ultraviolet Grasslands, a psychedelic road trip RPG. The second is Welcome to Tikor, the setting book for the Afropunk Sci-fi/Fantasy RPG Swordsfall. Both campaigns have crushed their goals and we're sure to be talking about them a lot in the future, so consider getting on board now. * * * Join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! If you want to buy any of the stuff we mentioned on the show, there's a pretty good chance our sponsors at Noble Knight Games have it in stock! 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 info@vintagerpg.com. 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 two weeks from now for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

Long episode for you this time around! We kick things off with a couple of unusual Beginning Readers books from Chaosium, R. J. Ivankovic Dr. Seuss-esque adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu and Dagon. We also discuss the new Call of Cthulhu Starter Set, a box set packed with short scenarios and an introductory version of the rule meant to be a gateway for beginning RPG players. Finally, we have a long chat with James Lowder (Ring of Winter, Prince of Lies) about his work at Chaosium, as well as his long history in the RPG industry as an author, fiction line editor and game designer. Interesting anecdotes abound! * * * Join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! If you want to buy any of the stuff we mentioned on the show, there's a pretty good chance our sponsors at Noble Knight Games have it in stock! 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 info@vintagerpg.com. 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 two weeks from now for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

We start off discussing the tile placement/currency exchange game Alhambra, which is themed around the 14th century construction of the Alhambra palace in Granada. The main course this week is Spelljammer, the space fantasy setting for D&D released in 1989, in which players sail ships into space. It is exactly as weird and silly and bizarre and absolutely awesome as you imagine. We wrap up answering questions from our listeners!