The Vintage RPG Podcast

You'd think now that the world is stuck at home, there'd be more time to play tabletop RPGs, right? True enough for Hambone, not so much for Stu. We talk about what we've been up to during the pandemic, the games we've played and run and written, and how we've been playing. * * * We're All Gonna Die is out now. You can download the issue of The New-York Ghost here. Sign up to The New-York Ghost while you're at it! Some indie love: check out Casket Land!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we flip through the 1979 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album, written by Gary Gygax and illustrated by underground comic artist Greg Irons. Not only is this a gorgeous coloring book (with some content of questionable suitability for kids) but it also comes with a rules lite dungeon crawl game baked in, penned by Gygax himself. We hadn't ever heard of this until a few months ago, but it instantly became one of our favorite Dungeons & Dragons books of all time.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Gavin Norman, the creator of Old-School Essentials and the forthcoming Dolmenwood campaign setting. Witness his dark mastery of usability! Learn whether he personally prefers the tome or the modular books! Wonder at the intricate and contradictory minutiae of the original B/X Dungeons & Dragons! Tremble at cryptic hints of what is in store for us in the wilds of Dolmenwood!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a look at HeroQuest, the Milton Bradley/Games Workshop board game that proved to be one of the prime gateways in to tabletop RPGs for throngs of kids in the early 90s. In no small part because of the gorgeous miniatures. And the furniture. We kid you not.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we travel to the furthest reaches of known space to explore TSR's space opera RPG Star Frontiers! We give you an overview of the game, the setting, the intriguing alien races and the game's surprising connection to the Dungeons & Dragons Spelljammer campaign setting. And more, including how TSR inevitably messed it all up! * * * After we recorded this episode, I read Bill Slavicsek's memoir about developing the West End Games Star Wars RPG, Defining a Galaxy. Slavicsek's recounting of the bidding war around the Star Wars license leads me to believe that TSR shuttered the Star Frontiers line in anticipation of developing a Star Wars RPG. That's a gut feeling, though. You should read his book (which is EXCELLENT) and decide for yourself!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we journey deep under the earth to read the novel The Shadow People, by Margaret St. Clair. The bonkers 1969 sci-fi/fantasy novel was included in Appendix N of the Dungeon Masters Guide, a list of literature Gary Gygax cited as being particularly inspirational to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. It is a clear source for the drow, the duergar and the game's preoccupation with vast underground labyrinths, but that's just scratching the surface…

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat about a game about playing rabbits: Bunnies & Burrows! This 1976 RPG is surprising for the time period and offered up a ton of innovation for RPG design, including the first skill system and first martial arts system. Bunnies are surprising critters!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, author Jim Zub is back on the show. He tells us all about Wizards & Spells, the fourth volume of the Young Adventurer's Guides for Dungeons & Dragons. He might also (definitely) spill the beans about volume five!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we take a train ride into terror in Horror on the Orient Express. We do an overview of what's in the massive Call of Cthulhu box set, discuss the scope of the campaign, Chaosium's famous attention to detail, Hercule Poirot and do a fair bit of compare-and-contrast with that other massive Call of Cthulhu campaign, Masks of Nyarlathotep. We also make several painful jokes. Hop on board!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we brave the unknown to explore the legendary Dungeons & Dragons hexcrawl, X1 – The Isle of Dread. We discuss the allure of empty maps, dinosaurs, volcanoes, King Kong and more. We also touch on some parallels between X1 and Chaosium's Griffin Mountain for RuneQuest and the 5e D&D campaign book Tomb of Annihilation. Best pack a lunch, no telling how long this trip will be. (20 minutes, give or take, actually)

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!

Because Star Wars is hitting the critical mass point for 2019, we figured we'd add to the fun with an episode that looks at the Galaxy Guides series of sourcebooks for the West End Games Star Wars Role Playing Game. We take a quick tour through each of the twelve volumes and chat about what they added to the RPG experience and how they formed the backbone of the greater Star Wars Expanded Universe.

This week, we chat about the new monster art book Dungeons & Drawings, by Blanca Martinez de Rituerto and Joe Sparrow, which collects a little bit of folk lore and pop culture, a little bit of tabletop RPG context and a whole lot of beautiful original art. We also touch on the tradition of monster books beyond RPGs, particularly in the 70s and 80s. Daniel Cohen forever! * * * Stu mentions two books used by Mike Mignola as inspiration for the stories in the Hellboy comic universe. They are The New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, by Felix Guirand, and The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, by Rossell Hope Robbins.

Hi gang! This week, we're getting ready for the holidays and wanted to help give you a leg up on your gifts for your friends and family around the gaming table (and maybe yourself too, let's be real). Below you'll find link to everything we talk about on the show, plus info on the coupon codes. Han Cholo (ha, that name) for all your nerd jewelry and apparel needs. Dellamorte & Co. (whoops, said that wrong on the podcast) and Black Rider Industries for sculptures and decorative housewares. (see coupon code info below!) Ice Cream Dice and Level Up Dice for, well, sweet dice. Exalted Funeral, for all your weird, dark, indie, occult, metal RPG needs (see coupon code info below!). Zweihander (For the other books in the line, check this link) The Young Adventurer's Guides Chaosium – RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu Starter Set, Miskatonic University – The Restricted Collection, Khan of Khans Noble Knight Games, for all your tabletop needs, new and old (see coupon code info below!). Invisible Sun (Stu said on the podcast that it was a relaunch and he has no idea why he did that – it is a new, original game)

We are back with the second part of our epic interview with Jim Zub! This time, Jim chats about his work on Dungeons & Dragons comic books, as well as the Dungeons & Dragons vs. Rick and Morty box set, and we learn he does a pretty good Rick Sanchez impersonation. For more from Jim, you can head to his official site or follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Learn all about Jim's Young Adventurer's Guides for Dungeons & Dragons in Part One.

Hey, we're weekly! We talk about what that means for the podcast going forward (forget that we say its December in the episode. It isn't. Schedules change, OK?). It would be rad if you joined us on our Patreon, because that definitely helps keep us going. We also talk about the classic D&D monster, the rust monster. It was born from a cheap Hong Kong "dinosaur" in the 70s and has since become the bane of adventurers everywhere.

Well hello there, intrepid adventurer. We have quite the podcast for you today! We had the great pleasure of chatting with Jim Zub about the new Young Adventurer's Guides for Dungeons & Dragons. We explore all the nooks and crannies, learning how the series came about, what's inside, and what to expect from the forthcoming volumes. Weapons & Warriors and Monsters & Creatures are both out now. Dungeons & Tombs is hitting shelves on November 26 and Wizards & Spells is on the way in March. For more from Jim, you can head to his official site or follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Or you can come back here on Tuesday, November 19, for the second part of this interview, in which we discus Jim's D&D comics and the forthcoming Dungeons & Dragons vs. Rick and Morty box set. * * * Big news! If you've ever said to yourself, "Gosh, I hate to wait every other week for fresh and exciting Vintage RPG Podcasts," then you're going to be over the moon: starting now, we're officially going weekly! See you next week!

This one was a long time coming. This week, we take a long and hopefully definitive look at the moral hysteria of the late 70s through the mid-90s, generally referred to as the Satanic Panic (CW: suicide, sexual abuse). We focus on the controversies around Dungeons & Dragons, but also talk about the larger phenomenon and how it spilled over into heavy metal, children's toys and cartoons and even a couple criminal cases. Its spooky, but maybe not the way you think. Links of Interest The original BADD pamphlet. Jack Chick's Darkest Dungeon. The 60 Minutes interview. Rob Halford singing court here. The Chicago Police Department document on ritualistic criminal activity. Michael Stackpole's "Pulling Report."

Gather round, Chill Masters! This week, we're discussing the horror roleplaying game Chill (1984), by Pacesetter Games. Is it scary? Is it campy? We don't know, because Chill never really figured that out for itself. We also welcome game designer Nathan D. Paoletta of Worldwide Wrestling fame. We chat about wrasslin' briefly before turning to his latest, the psychological monster hunting game Imp of the Perverse, set in Jacksonian America.

This week, its all about artist, writer and game designer Luka Rejec. We discuss Witchburner, Luka's system agnostic witch hunt scenario. Then we dig into the forthcoming Ultraviolet Grasslands, a psychedelic heavy metal road trip RPG powered by Luka's ultra-light, ultra flexible SEACAT system. Finally, we talk to the man himself (for not nearly long enough).

This week, we're talking TSR's Endless Quest gamebooks. They're like Choose Your Own Adventure, but with D&D and, well, boring. Sort of! Maybe we're being too hard on them. We dig in to the first few, the history of the series, the unusual places it goes and there is, perhaps, a surprising turn-around of opinion. We learn a lot about ourselves on this podcast, folks. We're already getting excited for Halloween (what, its after Labor Day) so we've got a couple games we're excited about. Stu finally got a hold of the rulebook for Mummy: The Resurrection, which tickles his funny bone. Meanwhile, Hambone is amped for Horrified, a new board game from Ravensburger.

We dive right into it, talking the history of Dragonlance – the modules, the novels, the…animated movie? It is the first major metaplot in tabletop RPGs and catapulted Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss onto the bestseller list, but never quite coalesced into the major D&D campaign setting it should have. We talk about the reasons why. After that, Hambone sits down with Craig Bergman, assistant manager of the Fantasy Flight Games Center about, well, the awesome Fantasy Flight Games Center event space. If you're in Roseville, Minnesota, drop on in!

We start off with a videogame! We both logged a lot of hours in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Lots of videogame food was made. The main course is the LJN Dungeons & Dragons toy line. We run through an overview of the entire line, talk about some of the toys that were never produced and even discuss the amazing concept art by comic artists Timothy Truman, Steve Bisette and John Totleben. And more. We go deep on this one, folks. [Hambone is a wrestling fan of the sort who uses wrestling lingo in real life. When he says "job" as a verb, as in "jobbed out by a unicorn," he means losing, usually in a fashion that puts the winner in an unusually favorable light] Finally, we chat about the new Young Adventurer's Guides: Monsters & Creatures and Warriors & Weapons. They're geared towards kids, entirely lack rules and focus on how the world works and teaching players how to roleplaying. They're pretty great.

Welcome back to the Vintage RPG podcast! We kick things off with the super-appropriate-for-July, Target-exclusive board game adaptation of Jaws. Its fun! The main course is Forgotten Realms, Ed Greenwood's classic campaign setting. We walk through the creation of the world, its absorption into Dungeons & Dragons and just barely scratch the surface of all the stuff that has happened with the Realms over the years. The Realms are huge, so we'll be visiting them again, no doubt. We wrap things up with a look at Things From the Flood, the follow-up to Tales From the Loop, the RPG about the 80s that never existed. Flood moves things up to the 90s and now your kid characters can die, because the 90s are gritty!

We made it one year! To celebrate our anniversary, we talk about some of our favorite things, and ramble through a number of seemingly random topics, like our love for sniveling cowards, whether Lord Soth listens to Sisters of Mercy, the glorious badness of the D&D cartoon, murder hobo average intelligence and jeeze, that's just the first 15 minutes. We also have a chat with Levi Combs of Planet X games. We talk about his first 5E D&D module Jungle Tomb of the Mummy Bride and learn some of the secrets in his new one, An Occurrence at Howling Crater, now on Kickstarter! (The video Stu mentions is the video at the top of the campaign page).

We have a very special guest this episode. Tony DiTerlizzi graced us with a full length interview. We chat about his influences, Dragon Mountain, the Monstrous Manual, Planescape, Magic the Gathering, the Spiderwick Chronicles, Hong Kong dinosaurs (you can read Tony's post on these and their influence on Dungeons & Dragons here) and so much more - and barely scratch the surface, honestly. Tony's retrospective art show, Never Abandon Imagination, opens June 22 at the Mint Museum Randolph, in Charlotte, North Carolina, and runs through November 3. If you're in the area, be sure to check it out. You can also follow Tony on Twitter and Instagram.

We start off with Hambone's experience playing the classic fantasy themed board game Talisman for the first time. He played the recent fourth edition from Fantasy Flight. Did you know there was an unofficial 1.5 edition of Dungeons & Dragons? There was! Beginning with Unearthed Arcana and following through Oriental Adventures, Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide, it was partly a natural evolution of the system, partly a desperate attempt to save the company from financial ruin. Stu walks us through the history. Finally, we started playing Pendragon and we chat about character creation and the first introductory session. (Stu never explicitly states it, but the tedious bit was not the character creation itself, but rather working through the family histories).

A double meat episode! First off, Stu gives an overview of Keith Herber's series of Lovecraft Country sourcebooks for Call of Cthulhu: Arkham Unveiled, Return to Dunwich, Kingport: City in the Mists and Escape from Innsmouth. They are an important piece in the puzzle of how to present large regions in a way that is helpful and engaging for roleplaying games. Second, Hambone is a-glow for the new Dungeons & Dragons adventure compilation, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, which reprints a number of classic D&D scenarios, including the U-series: Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh, Danger at Dunwater and The Final Enemy. Surprising no one, Stu is less enthusiastic. Don't let that grump stop you, though. Ghosts of Saltmarsh is for sale now at our sponsor, Noble Knight Games. From May 27 to June 15, use the promo code CLASSICS, in store or online, to get $5 off purchases of $25 or more!

First up, we talk about Miskatonic University: The Restricted Collection, the latest Chaosium board game. It's a great companion to 2016's Khan of Khans. The main course this episode is the first edition Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide. We discuss how the book is a peak into Gary Gygax's brain and how that echoed through tabletop roleplaying games for a long time and marks a kind of frontier for game design circa 1979. We get pretty meta with it. Finally, we chat with Michael O'Brien, vice president of Chaosium about Miskatonic University: The Restricted Collection, some Call of Cthulhu conventions, RuneQuest and more Chaosium news!

We start off this week with Monarch, a set collecting game about sisters vying for the throne. It has very lovely art. We also announce our partnership with Noble Knight Games. You can use the coupon code NOBLEVINTAGE online or in-store to get $5 off any purchase of $25 or more. Offer expires May 12, so get on that! The main event is Skyrealms of Jorune, a very strange RPG from the 80s, created by Andrew Leker with gorgeous illustrations by Miles Teves. It is weird and wild and I bet if you are a certain age, you for sure remember the advertisements for it in Dragon Magazine. We also talk about weird dice and the lost art of paste-up work in the age before digital layout for publishing. This one goes places, folks. We wrap up with a chat about the games that never grabbed us and the games we never want to play again. Let us know which games you hate! Drop us a line at the email below!

We start by blowing the dust off an older board game, Cyclades, a deceptively straightforward, combat light strategy game with lots of cool miniatures that riffs on ancient Greek mythology. For the main event, we discuss GURPS - Generic Universal Role Playing System - from Steve Jackson Games, the RPG that can be any kind of game you want, so long as you have the sourcebooks. And dear god, there are a lot of source book. We look at a couple of the stranger ones, talk about the appeal of the generic and reveal some of our old Supers characters. We wrap up with Stu giving the rundown on character creation for his upcoming King Arthur Pendragon campaign.

First up, we talk about Mixtape Massacre, a fun little independently produced horror board game that riffs on classic slasher movies and 80s pop culture. Our main course this week is the iconic Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set red box. We talk about its place in popular culture, where it sits in the larger history of D&D, touch on the other BECMI boxes, talk cartography, the importance of indexes and more. The Isle of Dread inevitably comes up, as does the Goodman Games reissue. Finally, Stu is excited about his great mail day and walks us through some of the cool stuff he picked up from Exalted Funeral. They sell very cool indie TTRPG stuff and occult books. Couple cool Kickstarters to hip you to, as well. The first, through Exalted Funeral, is The Ultraviolet Grasslands, a psychedelic road trip RPG. The second is Welcome to Tikor, the setting book for the Afropunk Sci-fi/Fantasy RPG Swordsfall. Both campaigns have crushed their goals and we're sure to be talking about them a lot in the future, so consider getting on board now. Couple cool Kickstarters to hip you to, as well. The first, through Exalted Funeral, is The Ultraviolet Grasslands, a psychedelic road trip RPG. The second is Welcome to Tikor, the setting book for the Afropunk Sci-fi/Fantasy RPG Swordsfall. Both campaigns have crushed their goals and we're sure to be talking about them a lot in the future, so consider getting on board now. * * * Join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! If you want to buy any of the stuff we mentioned on the show, there's a pretty good chance our sponsors at Noble Knight Games have it in stock! Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast! Available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients. Send questions, comments or corrections to [email protected]. Follow Vintage RPG on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. Learn more at the Vintage RPG FAQ. Follow Stu Horvath, John McGuire, VintageRPG and Unwinnable on Twitter. Intro music by George Collazo. The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter. Tune in two weeks from now for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

Long episode for you this time around! We kick things off with a couple of unusual Beginning Readers books from Chaosium, R. J. Ivankovic Dr. Seuss-esque adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu and Dagon. We also discuss the new Call of Cthulhu Starter Set, a box set packed with short scenarios and an introductory version of the rule meant to be a gateway for beginning RPG players. Finally, we have a long chat with James Lowder (Ring of Winter, Prince of Lies) about his work at Chaosium, as well as his long history in the RPG industry as an author, fiction line editor and game designer. Interesting anecdotes abound! * * * Join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! If you want to buy any of the stuff we mentioned on the show, there's a pretty good chance our sponsors at Noble Knight Games have it in stock! Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast! Available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients. Send questions, comments or corrections to [email protected]. Follow Vintage RPG on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. Learn more at the Vintage RPG FAQ. Follow Stu Horvath, John McGuire, VintageRPG and Unwinnable on Twitter. Intro music by George Collazo. The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter. Tune in two weeks from now for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

We start off discussing the tile placement/currency exchange game Alhambra, which is themed around the 14th century construction of the Alhambra palace in Granada. The main course this week is Spelljammer, the space fantasy setting for D&D released in 1989, in which players sail ships into space. It is exactly as weird and silly and bizarre and absolutely awesome as you imagine. We wrap up answering questions from our listeners!

We start off talking about Steve Jackson Games' Munchkin, specifically the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle variant. It features art by Kevin Eastman and some rules variants that may surprise you if you're a long time Munchkin players. In the main segment, we talk about Masks of Nyarlathotep. What's that you say? We've already covered Masks on a previous podcast? Well, yea, that is true, but Chaosium released a new, updated version of the campaign last year and they changed enough of it that we think it warrants a revisit. Finally, we talk to Ryan Verniere and Carmen Acosta, two of the folks behind the upcoming Auction of Many Things, a Los Angeles auction of D&D-inspired art benefiting the surviving creators of Dungeons & Dragons. If you're in LA, you can attend the auction on March 2. Follow @DnDArtshow on Instagram to see all the awesome art and to keep updated on future events!

This week, we're playing Heimlich & Co., a modern issue of a clever espionage-themed game originally from 1984 (you may know it as Top Secret Spies, Under Cover or Detective & Co.). Over on our Patreon, folks who back us at the $25 level get to call the shots for an episode. This week, Sara Clemens asked us to cover Mouse Guard, Burning Wheel's RPG adaptation of David Petersen's beautiful comic series. Over the holiday break, we made some characters and ran the game so we could give you our impressions. It is pretty cool! We wrap things up discussing Stu's recent experience setting up a Blades in the Dark game on Roll20.

This show is entirely dedicated to the works of the late, great Greg Stafford, who we dearly miss. Stu takes the helm and starts us down Stafford's tabletop RPG history with the wargame White Bear & Red Moon (also known as Dragon Pass). From there, he touches on RuneQuest, the Ghostbusters RPG, the entire world of Glorantha, HeroQuest and Pendragon, all the while trying to convey how widely Stafford's work influenced the hobby. We'll be covering most of these games in more depth on the Instagram feed this week, so look for that.

Happy new year! For starters this episode, we check out the seance-themed board game Mysterium. It is sort of like Clue meets Dixit, but spooky. The main event is TSR's Marvel Super Heroes RPG. We revel in some 80s-era nostalgia, discuss the weirdness of the game and somehow wind up on the 1987 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Marvel float. Seriously, go watch that video. We also talk about Blades in the Dark, a dark fantasy heist RPG that Stu is preparing to run online for members of the Unwinnable staff.

Happy holidays, folks! We're breaking from format this episode to dig deep into the nostalgia and look at the Sears Wish Book, an important part of our childhood Christmas experiences. Specifically, we're looking at the catalogs from 1982, 1983 and 1984, which contained, you guessed it, Dungeons & Dragons stuff. They are so much more than that, though, as you'll discover when you listen! And, while we have you, let us offer our tremendous thanks for following Vintage RPG on Instagram, listening to the podcast and making this whole project fun and rewarding on a daily basis. All the best this holiday season!

It is Stu's Birthday! We lead things off with Chaosium's Khan of Khans (01:30), a fast-paced boom and bust board game about cattle thievery in Glorantha, by Reiner Knizia. The main event: Dragon Magazine (05:38). Stu gives a brief history of the publication (06:00). Hambone remembers seeing it in book stores in the mall (07:45). Stu reveals how Dragon Magazine gave him the collecting bug (09:41) and how his large run functions as a sort of history of the tabletop RPG hobby (11:00). Stu talks about how editor Tim Kask worked to keep Dragon semi-independent from TSR (13:00). Editor Roger E. Moore's tenure comes up (13:54) along with Dungeon Magazine. While Dragon slowly became an advertorial publication, Stu doesn't mind because it allows us to see D&D evolving on a month to month basis (15:00) and Hambone segues into the Dragon+. Stu gets into Dragon's experimental tendencies (17:30) and explains how Forgotten Realms was (kinda sorta) born in the magazine (19:22). Preservation comes up (21:00). A brief encouragement to subscribe to Unwinnable Monthly during our Holiday Subscription Drive (24:25). Stu gets excited about completing his Planescape collection (25:00). See you in two weeks! * Clarification: Stu meant Rubbermaid, not Tupperware Correction: Despite his whip-fast certainty, Stu was wrong. Pong came out in 1972.

In this episode, we break format to give you some gifts suggestions of the holidays – whether you give them to your favorite tabletop playing pal or add them to your Christmas lists is entirely up to you. First up, the Dragon Heist platinum edition (02:15). We chat about dice (07:00). Artisan makes very nice dice. We talk about Wormwood dice vaults and accessories (09.00). Stu laments that he didn't own the Masks of Nyarlathotep prop set from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. It comes in two flavors, regular and holy crap that is expensive (09:45). Art & Arcana inevitably comes up (13:50). Both the regular edition and the limited edition are on sale on Amazon. You can read more of Stu's thoughts on the regular edition and the limited edition on the Insta. Hambone suggests the D&D 5E conversion of X1-The Isle of Dread from Goodman Games (17:38). We thought this one would be out in time for the holidays, but alas, it's hitting shelves in January. You can pre-order it now, though and put a picture of the cover in a card or something. Or you could nab them Into the Borderlands. We wanted to plug the webstores of World Champ Game Co. and Bodie, but both their webstores are closed right now. Instead, why don't you throw them a couple bucks on their Patreons: you'll get some cool stuff every month (19:20). Hambone hits a couple quick gift suggestions (19:50) like Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters and SRG Super Show Finally, every year, Hambone's mom buys his a pound-o-dice from Chessex for Christmas, and that is pretty cool. See you in two weeks! * Correction: The singular of dice is die.