It belongs in a museum! Oh, wait, that doesn't work here... This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Thousand Year Old Campfire, also known as Old Morris Cave: A Continuous Use Campsite in Mammoth Cave National Park. A descendant of Thousand Year Old Vampire, this game examines presence, absence and time through the excavation of an archa…

Send in the clones! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Jessica Fletcher guest stars in a very special episode about Murder, She Wrote: A Board Game of Strategy and Pursuit. In fact, six Jessica Fletchers have shown up. Join us, as we dig into a surprisingly decent retro board game based on one of our favorite old shows (sad there's no Magnum boa…

Remember the twist ending of the Arthurian romances when Bruce Lee appears at Camlann to kick Mordred's ass? Me neither. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out The Future King, a stand-alone adventure/system by Tom Moldvay. It spins somewhat out of his earlier bat-shit RPG Lords of Creation and sees the players trying to wake King Arthu…

Brian Colin becomes an ink-stained wretch. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Vast Grimm creator Brian Colin is back. He's got a new crowdfunding campaign for Vast Grimm in zine form, but he's got something even more exciting that we wanted to talk to him about: a printing press! * * * Instagram? Old news. Join the Vintage RPG Newsletter! That's…

The end was nigh! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we welcome the apocalypse(s) with The Stars are Right! (1992), an anthology of scenarios for Cthulhu Now (AKA Call of Cthulhu Modern). As these things go, its a solid set of cases, but the book has a surprising legacy of censorship and controversy over one of Blair Reynolds' fantastic illustra…

Blurring the line between mythology and roleplaying games. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at the first six (!) of ten (!!) volumes of Chaosium's Cults of RuneQuest series of sourcebooks. Taken together, they form an important foundation for bringing mythology to life in RuneQuest campaigns. Important stuff, since RQ is essenti…

That is not dead which can eternal lie...wait, no, that's the wrong franchise. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu learns that there are more than four modules in D&D's S-series. After a brief recap of the originals, we chat about The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga and Labyrinth of Madness, which revived the line for one brief and brutal moment in …

A videogame? On the Vintage RPG Podcast? Yes! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk Space Marine II, an excellent, pleasingly violent shooter and how it manages to be an entertaining experience despite being propaganda for the shriveled, impotent husk of the so-called Emperor of Mankind and the follies that the Adeptus Astartes commit in hi…

There's no time machine quite like an old catalog. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about Wargames West, a games mail order catalog from the late '80s and early '90s. Extremely hard to find, but a precious snapshot of the past. We also talk about collecting, and not collecting, and more! * * * Instagram? Old news. Join the Vintage RPG …

More plastic for the sculpture gallery. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu's playing with toys again! First, an amazing rarity, the Tara Toys Roll-A-Mat Dark Adventure play set (1983). Next we talk about MUSCLES and Monsters in My Pocket. Finally, there's Arrizak, a recent toy from Four Horsemen's Mythic Legion line who looks surprisingly li…

You bring a suitcase with your clothes, and an empty suitcase for all the crap you're gonna buy. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu sifts through the gigantic pile of stuff he bought at GenCon, including The Sutra of Pale Leaves for Call of Cthulhu, Age of Vikings, Bunny Borg, Kala Mandala and one zine that arrived while he was away, Tiger's…

Once again, Stu journeys to the biggest tabletop gaming convention in the US. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu reports back from GenCon 2025. How was the train? Did he survive his panel? Did he play any games? Did he make it back without having to take the bus? Listen to learn the answers to all these questions, and much more! * * * Listen…

Are you ready to turn into a extraterrestrial angel? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu is feeling nostalgic about Dark Suns past, so we take a look at Dragon Kings, the best-worst book in the line! Also, a fair amount of discussion about our late Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne (Correction: Sabotage came after Sabbath Bloody Sabbath). * *…

In which the horse, the rider, or both can be dangerously inebriated! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out two cool things from the mailbox! First up, Nick Boreli's amazing minature kitbashing art book Mold Mold Mold which is hideously beautiful. Second is Tabletop Cowboy's very funny Drunk Jousting, an unusual skirmish game featuring…

An RPG inspired by the TV show Millennium? SIGN ME UP! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out the primer for Midnight of the Century, from By Odin's Beard! It's a lightweight game in the mode of Cairn, but tailored around investigating supernaturally tinged murders in the mode of Millennium, Seven, Twin Peaks and so on. The rain is alwa…

What lies beneath the Mucklands? The Underlands, naturally! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we welcome the creators of Land of Eem, Ben Costa and James Parks! Eem is a bit of a multimedia project, currently consisting of a series of graphic novels, young readers novels and a shockingly massive RPG. It mixes light and dark in perfect proportio…

The local library has fantasy books and air conditioning, what else do you need for a great summer? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Hambone's cracked into Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea novels and asked for more fantasy fiction recommendations. On tap: Fritz Leiber, Lloyd Alexander, Margaret St. Claire, Roger Zelazny and Manly Wade Wellman. Tol…

Longer than Odysseus' journey home. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Max Moon joins us to chat about the latest expansion for 12 Years, the nautical 12 Years at Sea, coming to Kickstarter this week! We talk about art, fantasy touchstones, solo play, Max's new studio and more! * * * Go get 12 Years at Sea on Kickstarter! * * * Instagram? Old ne…

Tune in to the static and await news from the Station Manager. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we got our rewards from the Weird Heroes of Public Access RPG crowdfunding campaign and just had to talk about them. What a delightful pile of odd, creepy, spooky, quirky and lightly nostalgic stuff! Listen to us, then go on over to Exalted Funeral …

Don't play gray! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out some old catalogs from Grenadier Models. Funny thing, back when these catalogs first came out, they'd stop working after a while. But now, with the internet and the infinite store that is eBay, old catalogs work again. I can just flip through, find a rad minotaur I want and to the …

Bringing occult detective work to the common man! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we hang out with reporter Carl Kolchak, TV's most important monster hunter. Truly, you don't get stuff like The X-Files, Supernatural, Buffy and even maybe The Sopranos without Kolchak, not to mention a couple of Dungeons & Dragons monsters! * * * Instagram? Old…

Don't get too attached to those characters... This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we're joined by Justin Wigard and Clay Fleischer, two of Stu's victims...er...players in the Patron-only West Marches game that has been running for two years now. They share anecdotes about the adventures they've had, and a bit of the trauma. You should sign up! It…

Sometimes you just gotta shoot the breeze, ya know? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, it's a little bit of this and a little bit of that. There's Stu's new radio show, Games People Play (co-hosting with Unwinnable's own Sara Clemens)! There's Hambone's reaction to Sinners! There's the Rifts calendar! There's the Warriors of the Galaxy play set …

Embark on a quest for the most perfect green paper! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Clint Marsh, the man behind the Fiddler's Green Peculiar Parish Magazine and many, many other zines that intersect with esoteric pursuits, genre fiction and tabletop roleplaying games. We talk about his history with RPGs, the Shrieker newsletter, …

Let's get rich! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Games Omnivorous mastermind Andre Novoa about The Job: Boxset Edition! Now on Backerkit, this is the deluxe expanded edition of Andre's excellent 2023 heist game, inspired by flicks like The Italian Job and Ocean's Eleven. Unlike most Games Omnivorous game products, which hew toward…

A treasure trove of counter-culture! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Phil Hine and Rodney Orpheus about Delinquent Elementals, a massive book collecting the best material from Pagan News, the zine they ran from 1988-1992. As Pagan News' existence paralleled and lampooned the UK Satanic Panic, we talk quite a lot about that. Also …

Plan? We don't need a plan! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we make it up as we go along. We had a scheduling issue with an interview and couldn't come up with a topic on short notice, so we riffed for a bit. Stu talks about the monster book, Joseph Payne Brennan's short story "Slime" and the classic monster movie The Blob. Hambone runs down …

You never know what you might find down the old straight track. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at Through the Hedgerow, an RPG game steeped in a perfect brew of British folklore. Play as agents of the Light, moved through time to oppose the rising Dark in a brilliant extrapolation of stories like Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising seq…

Which sick witch is the sickest witch? You! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Justin Sirois of Severed Books stops in to tell us all about the Sickest Witch RPG. Born of both a now out-of-print board game and, sorta, out of an earlier RPG, Sickest Witch has you harvesting and salting body parts of their enemies to cast horrible spells in order …

Is that the streetlight buzzing, or an insectoid monster wanting to lay eggs in my eye? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we welcome the Goblin Archives on to chat about the Liminal Horror! A minimalist game spinning out of Cairn, LH has been wowing folks for a while with its sharp mechanics, spooky visuals and horrifying modules. And a Deluxe …

Still playing with toys after all these years. As promised, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast we chat about the latest Dungeons & Dragons toys from Super7. That giant Tiamat comes up again, as well as wave 1 of their 6-inch figures based on the '80s cartoon series (which means we also talk again about those crap Hasbro figures). Also on tap, the…

What's the point of painting all these miniatures if they're never going to see the battlefield? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu breaks down and admits he really wants to play a miniature wargame: Mike Hutchinson's Hobgoblin! It's a lightweight, minis agnostic, quick-playing set of rule to get your miniatures on the table and killing each…

Oh, the Libyan Gorgon. [Tries to look like he knows what he's talking about] This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we crack open an ur-Monster Manual, Ernst and Johanna Lehner's 1969 A Fantastic Bestiary. Essentially a Dover clip art book (and reissued by Dover under a different title) with some light historical context, there are textual clues tha…

Who needs the sky, anyway? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Yamil about When the Sky Comes Looking for You, a zine for both Weird Frontiers and Dungeon Crawl Classics. Hired by a luchador loan-shark to collect a debt, the characters need to stop an airship before it gets to the otherworldly Near to make good on the contract. Sorce…

Have you done all you can to prevent a würm infestation? I doubt it. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Brian Colin about Sqwürmish, a delightfully gross, over-the-top miniature skirmish game for his Vast Grim RPG setting. Derived from Forbidden Psalm, in Sqwürmish you build a crew, pop 'em on the table and do your damnedest to surv…

I think the horrible little spider guy might be up to no good. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Christopher Drellow joins us to discuss Glumdark, a collection of system neutral random tables that will inject plenty of darkness, terror, vileness, random teeth and silliness into your campaign. Yup, silliness too! Inspired by grim and perilous RP…

So an assassin, a dwarf and a goodie-two-shoes walk into a bar... This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we're catching up on NECA's Dungeons & Dragons toys that have come out since the last time we talked about NECA's Dungeons & Dragons toys: Zarak, Strongheart and Elkhorn Ultimates. We'll cover the Super 7 D&D toys soon, promise! * * * Instagram? …

Gotta build some muscles to swing a sword (and some cardio to run from monsters)! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to designer Tyler Welch and illustrator Graham Barey about their new exercise-oriented zine The Adventurer's Guide to Exercise. Tyler's a personal trainer and has created a work-out regimen tailored to your inner Fighter, …

Podcasters take a break, forget how to podcast. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu and John come back from the longest break they've taken from recording since the start of the podcast and find it difficult to knock the rust off and get back tothe normal format. Instead, they chat about games they're playing, places their going and play a si…

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu and John discuss their recent trip to Philadelphia for PAX Unplugged! The tabletop convention keeps the vibes chill and because of that, it was our favorite of the year. Cool games, good pals, a great way to close out the year. * * * Stu wrote about his PAX Unplugged trip as well. * * * Instagram? Old news.…

Adventure gamebook? How about an adventure gameworld? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at Fabled Lands, a seven-volume series of adventure gamebooks by Dave Morris, Jamie Thompson and Paul Gresty, featuring art by the legendary Russ Nicholson. Unlike most gamebooks, which tell one story, each volume of Fabled Lands is dedicated to a si…

Hone that tradecraft, or you'll find out what they do to spies around here... This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Hambone takes the lead, talking about running Top Secret: New World Order. He also played in a session of Renegade's G.I. Joe RPG, so we talk about that, too! Also: Ron Meischker chats with Hambone about PAGE 2, coming in January. Use…

Whimsical, but also dangerous. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to Jean deMers about Ballads of Oræd, forthcoming from Exalted Funeral. A setting book for Old-School Essentials, it's a 232-page gazetteer of a mysterious world full of music, talking animals and, of course, horrible monsters and dangerous locales. It's also a massive por…

Talkin' 'bout collecting! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to the Rick Meints, president of Chaosium! He doesn't just run the company, he's its biggest fan, with a collection of Chaosium games, art, documents and ephemera that likely dwarfs all others. We talk about collecting, RuneQuest (Rick's primary RPG passion, as he penned the wo…

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to the Benjamin Marra, artist extraordinaire! We're supposed to talk about INTERMEDIARY MUND, his new RPG zine from Exalted Funeral, and we do, and it makes good on the promise of a lot of those pesky Satanic Panic fears from the '80s! But the real meat of the chat winds up musing on the central appeal …

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy, the most straight-down-to-it art book I've ever encountered. Absolutely jam packed with amazing art from across all four decades of the gamebook series. Do you dig black-and-white fantasy art, particularly from the UK in the '80s? Then buy this book, you w…

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to our very own editor, R. Alex Murray about a little off-Broadway show he's in called Dungeons & Dragons The Twenty-Sided Tavern. Part actual play, part interactive theater, all rowdy-as-heck adventure, Alex and his colleagues are trailblazing a whole new (boozy) way to play with 499 friends. * * * Ins…

What RPG allows you to travel to the future to team up with the ghost of John Brown to violently overthrow corporate taskmasters? This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at Lords of Creation, my pick for the weirdest RPG ever made. Maybe. Designed by Tom "B/X" Moldvay, it's one of the first multi-genre RPGs and it marked Avalon Hill's (failed…

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at Eat the Reich, a beautiful game about reveling in the messiest annihilation of nazis imaginable. Become an anti-fascist vampire. Get air-dropped into Paris. Drink all the nazi blood. A one-shot(ish) of fun for adults of all ages, tuned to variable levels of experience, gorgeously illustrated. A glori…

Flip the switch to the UHF dial! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with the one, the only, Joey Royale about Weird Heroes of Public Access, coming soon in hardcover to BackerKit. Unearth strange mysteries, save your community and get it done in time to tape the next episode of your show. This is your chance to get into one of the best, …