The Vintage RPG Podcast

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. * * * 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. * * * 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! * * * 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." * * * 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!