The Vintage RPG Podcast

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. * * * 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!