Welcome to the inaugural episode of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, the new podcast from game designers and authors Kenneth Hite and Robin D. Laws. Join our thrilling audio adventure as we discuss games, movies, history, narrative and sundry concerns of the geekosphere.

Here’s what we talk about this week:

In our Among Our Many Hats segment, we talk about Ken’s new roleplaying game Night’s Black Agents, in which the spy thriller goes vampire, with logistics supplied by the GUMSHOE system.

In Travel Advisory, Robin recounts his recent trip to the Continuum convention in Leicester, England, where he performs a health-check on the hobby and marvels over future Glorantha mapping plans from Moon Design, publishers of HeroQuest and now RuneQuest. Along the way we detour to London’s John Soane Museum, an enduring monument to one man’s acquisitiveness.

Our Ask Ken and Robin segment tackles a question from Robert Scott Martin on the role of the GM in contemporary game design.

To round out the episode, Ken dons the mantle of Consulting Occultist to give us the 101 on The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, with a cast of characters including William Butler Yeats, Bram Stoker, and Aleister Crowley.