Enter: the Neon Lord himself! This week on the Vintage RPG podcast, we talk with Brian Shutter, the radioactive brain behind Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland. He's got a pair of massive goodies coming to a BackerKit: Deities & Demi-Bros, a guide to the gods of the squared circle, and Deadly Dudez/Toxic Creeps, a massive monster manual! Plus some more surprises. Listen up, or Lord Randy will drop an elbow on you that your descendants will never forget!

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Hey, come here, we got a secret to tell you: you can go back Deities and Demi-Bros right now! Even though the campaign hasn't started yet. Don't tell anybody we told you.

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Stu's book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG podcast, we check out Brindlewood Bay. It's a little bit Murder, She Wrote, a little bit Golden Girls and a little bit "The Call of Cthulhu," wrapped up in a Powered by the Apocalypse package. Can you meddle your way to the solutions of these TV-style mysteries?

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Stu's book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look back at Paul M. Sammon's coverage of the making of Conan the Barbarian in the April 1982 issue of Cinefantastique. The double issue has three features by Sammon — a lengthy piece of reportage on the filming and interviews with designer Ron Cobb and director John Milius — and lots of behind-the-scenes photos. It's a charming bit of work that contrasts in surprising ways with Sammon's later coverage of Conan the Destroyer, which we also discuss.

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Stu's book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

Hambone is setting the pace this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast as we talk about WHPA-13: Weird Heroes of Public Access (2022) from Get Haunted Industries. It's an RPG zine about strange goings on around town and the romance of UHF TV, what's not to love?

Deeper and deeper we go. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at the first issue of DNGN (2022), a megadungeon zine for Old-School Essentials from Singing Flame. We also discuss the one-page dungeon format and a little bit about the infamous Stonehell.

Chaos lurks just under the surface. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about the Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. We recap the original, theorize about where it went off the rails, enthuse over Cubicle 7's five-volume remaster and discuss the perils of satire.

Chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarge! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at the Battlesystem, TSR's mostly failed attempt to shoehorn wargaming back into the Dungeons & Dragons experience. We also talk a bit about TSR's failed foray into making miniatures. Mess after mess. But at least it gave us that amazing Jeff Easley painting!

Nothing is what it seems! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at the classic Dungeons & Dragons monster, the Mimc. Or do we? Here be twists and turns!

Lost, now found. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at NECA's "Lost Wave" of Dungeons & Dragons toys. When LJN Toys shut down the D&D toy line, these four toys — Valkeer the Barbarian, Skylla the Sorceress, Pulvereye the Cyclops and a Kelek variant — were in various states of completion, but unreleased. Now, thanks to some miracle or the blackest of magic, forty years later they've been released as a San Diego Comic Con exclusive. Fancy that!

For years I've said I wasn't going to paint miniatures. No talent, I said. No patience, I said. Too expensive, I said. I have enough hobbies, I said. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk about how I've started painting miniatures!

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 chat with Tyler Vance, the fine artist behind Void: The Frontier. Tyler's been exploring Void for a while now, having published three rules-agnostic setting zines that pair his enigmatic narratives with his equally mysterious paintings. Now he's concocted a gorgeous card game, now on Kickstarter. We talk about the game, his process and his often unsettling art, and more!

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Check out Tyler's zines and things!

Stu's book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

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.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a turn at being the villains in Reverse Dungeon. An adventure from very late in the 2E D&D line, it is very much the D&D-ification of the classic videogame Dungeon Keeper, but with some unexpected twists and turns.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we do some urban exploration and investigate Dead Mall, a neat Tunnel Goons hack about the ruined temples of capitalism. We also discuss Nate Treme's Tunnel Goons and  Satanic Panic at Crowley Place Mall, a zine scenario for Dead Mall.

If you like tables, we've got some books for you! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Jennell Jaquays' series of Central Casting books, for use creating both player and non-player characters of alarming depth and, sometimes, bizarre circumstances. There are three flavors: Heroes of Legend (1988), our focus, which tackles fantasy backgrounds; Heroes for Tomorrow (1989), for science fiction characters; and Heroes Now! (1991), for characters from worlds not unlike our own. 

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Megan Dawson Jaffe about the new Nerdy City RPG Holomatixx: A New Wave Order. Spinning out of their other Omni System games like the kid adventure Rememorex and the game of transforming robots, Commandroids, Holomatixx takes on pop star superheroes in the vein of Jem and Holograms and Barbie and the Rockers. On Kickstarter now!

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Check out Nerdy City's other rad games!

Stu's book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we run to the border…lands. OK, never mind, I'll leave the jokes to Hambone. For real: this week we're talking about the RuneQuest box set Borderlands (1982), an excellent campaign about getting a job and doing it well. There's no real narrative arc, no cackling villain, no dark plot. Stuff happens and the players take care of it, but the real point of Borderlands is to build and maintain a home in a strange land, a pretty unusual concept, then and now!

Aaaand we're back! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at the horror storytelling game Dread and its unusual method of task resolution (hint: it involves a Jenga tower). And heck, let's make it a double: we also discuss the storytelling game of doomed romance, Star Crossed, which also uses a Jenga tower!

A re-run? Yep, sometimes you just gotta rest the brains. So have a remastered Players Handbook! Originally aired to a whole different world, on December 23, 2019.

Original hype text: 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!

Coming from an era of RPGs in which you could still get away with just naming your game Wizard, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast we're looking at Melee, Wizard and the larger Fantasy Trip RPG. We focus on its innovative use of point-buy mechanics, but also get into the game's larger place in RPG history.

Strap in, cuz we got bootleg toys! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, direct from the five and dime, we check out Stu's Dragonriders of the Styx toys from the early 80s. For a bunch of cheap fantasy toys, they actually have a fun and weird intersection with Dungeons & Dragons!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at another board game: Return to Dark Tower. This is Restoration Games' new sequel/revamp of the 1981 Milton Bradley electronic board game Dark Tower that…if not a classic, certainly has a compelling mystique born from the intersection of its rarity, its D&D-like fantasy theming and its place at an exciting and highly nostalgic early era of consumer electronics. How does the new version hold up in comparison? Well, you're gonna have to listen!

The ring of invisibility is one of the most iconic magic items in RPGs. But where does it come from? (Hint: it isn't Tolkien!)

Getting lots of actual playtime in lately. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu's fresh off his first session of Troika and he's keen to share his impressions. It's weird and easy and did we mention weird?

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we've got an after action report for the first half of the Dungeon Crawl Classics 67: Sailors on the Starless Sea, which Zog is running us through. Granted, we're only on the edge of the really weird stuff, but we've seen enough to start ruminating. And there are plenty of corpses already. Honor the fallen!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we're back on RuneQuest, talking about some of the stuff that makes the world of Glorantha special, specifically its approach to mythology, time and its surprising meta-commentary on roleplaying games themselves! That's two RuneQuest episodes and we're still barely scratching the surface.

Stu was tied up with lots of crap this week, so have a re-run!

Original show notes: Make ours Marvel! 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

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Stu's book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

Scream for me, Fae Wray! This week, the Vintage RPG Podcast travels to Skull Island to discuss some of the surprising influences of the greatest monster movie ever made: King Kong! The 1933 version, of course, get that remake trash outta here.

You can see the still from Son of Kong mentioned in the episode at the bottom of this post.

I recently came into possession of like five feet of Traveller and it made me realize, holy crap, there is a lot of Traveller! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at the span of the Traveller RPG through the 20th century. That's a quick look at both versions of Classic Traveller (1977 and 1983), MegaTraveller (1986), New Era (1993), T4 (1996), GURPS Traveller (1998) and even the not really Traveller, Traveller: 2300 A.D. (1986). So many Travellers!

We also chat with friend of the pod, Levi Combs, about the upcoming kickstarter for Phylactery #4 and the Phylactery Omnibus!

You know what kind of sucks? Awards. Oscars, Grammys, whatever. RPG awards are no exception. But Joe DeSimone doesn't think they need to be that way. So he's starting his own awards for RPGs called The Awards. And you know what? They might suck, too! He's upfront about that. But if they do, they'll suck in a completely new way and maybe even pave the way for something good. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we talk to Joe about awards, The Awards and how we might be able to do better.

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You can bother Joe on Twitter pretty much all the time.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we barely scratch the surface of RuneQuest (1978), Chaosium's classic first foray into RPGs. We talk about the games origins in the earlier wargame, White Bear & Red Moon (1975), the skill-based RPG, the limitations of class as a concept, the different sorts of magic and, seriously, that's more than enough for one half hour. We'll be returning to RQ several times in the coming weeks to cover it all!

Ever buy an old RPG box set and find some maps or a character sheet inside? For me, it conjures up a specific sort of warm feeling. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at some of Tim Hutchings' efforts to preserve that sort gaming ephemera in The Habitation of the Stone Giant Lord, a book collecting homebrew D&D adventures written and illustrated by kids. We also look at Hutchings' reprint of the short-live gaming zine The Oracle. A thrilling expedition into the dusty archives of our hobby's past!

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You can check out more about both projects at Hutchings' Play Generated Map & Document Archive. Physical copies of both can still be had at his shop, as well!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Hambone talks to Charlie Ferguson Avery and Alex Coggon of Feral Indie Studios about ZiMo 2022, their indie RPG zine showcase, running the whole month of February! ZINES! Get 'em!

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Stu will be back next week, promise!

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." That's the first line of William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer and, just like that, he pretty much codified the aesthetic of cyberpunk. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we go ga-ga over the novel and look at the way it influenced cyberpunk RPGs. Or was ripped off by cyberpunk RPGs. We've heard it both ways.

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In the episode, Stu mentions a post by Gibson about Shadowrun. If you have access to the text of that, drop us a line!

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.

Stu's ongoing West Marches-style Old-School Essentials campaign is a year old, so this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we thought we'd see how things are going (and how many characters have died). And since you can't really trust the Dungeon Master, we invited two of the players — Justin Wigard and Clay Fleischer — on to share their impressions of the 34-session "mystery crawl."

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Wanna play? We've got ten spots open. Sign up at the D10 tier on the Vintage RPG Patreon!

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Check out Justin's interview with the 321-Action lads and his review of Stephen Graham Jones' latest, The Angel of Indian Lake.

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Stu's book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

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.