The Vintage RPG Podcast

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.