Inside The Table: A Tabletop RPG Talk Show

In this episode, we're talking about the recent OGL news with D&D and about what might come after.

But first, Marley has to talk out his feelings about The Menu, a film he almost enjoyed. To do so, we do a big spoiler warning (which ends at about 12 minutes in). 

Then, Cole chats about Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, thankfully without spoiler warnings. It is a strange break from the kind of thing they usually read, filled with extensive footnotes, strange realism, the literal devil, and a significant section of the book set in the time of Christ? 

Then, breaking from the usual format, we jump straight into the main topic, which is an in-depth discussion of what has happened with D&D over the last little while. We, of course, draw heavily from the great reporting done by Linda Codega along with illuminating interviews on the most recent Brainwaves episode.

We also list off some games that are great introductions to the indie TTRPG space for people escaping D&D. It's a great discussion about the pros and cons of each (especially coming from two people who escaped D&D themselves), but for simplicity's sake, they're all listed here:

Finally, Cole chats about To Change, a tarot-based game about transformation in body and mind. It also has terrific art

We close with a shout out to the Huntsmen's Hydra's Subathon, happening this weekend! It'll feature us both and a bunch of great creators playing various TTRPGs and video games. It should be a load of fun.

Featuring Cole (@IceColeBrew) and Marley (@Mynar_Lenahan)

Produced by Marley, as well.

Follow Inside The Table on your Social Media of Choice and be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Also, send in your Listener Questions to [email protected]!

On this episode, Cole & Marley sit down with game designer Austin Ramsay for an extended interview about Beam Saber, working as a tabletop designer, and his upcoming Mega Actual Play Project CalazCon.

But first, we chat a lot about the video games we've been checking out over the break. Card Shark, Suzarain, Pentiment... Folks, it's been a good Christmas.

We also have a brief, spoiler-free chat about Glass Onion, since damn that movie was fun and it's interesting that we're starting to see Pandemic-era media that actually depicts the Pandemic.

In Tabletop talk, Cole returns to the Emotional Mecha Jam to talk about Reizor's Live. Love. Die. Remember., a GM-less game about mechs that fall in love with their pilots and the lengths they will go to for them. It is a fascinating GM-less game filled with great prompts and thoughts of what love could be.

Marley, meanwhile, talks about playing in Cole's home game of Beam Saber. Marley played Emmeryn's time-traveling Looper playbook and had a bunch of fun messing with the wild mechanics in that. He also really enjoyed how good Beam Saber feels to play. 

On top of that, Marley released a new game over the christmas break, Apocalypse Roadtrip. It's a game about driving a red convertible through a kaiju, UFO, and cryptid infested highway which was on the top 8 physical games on itch?? Somehow?? Marley takes a moment to talk about making the game (itself a hack of Riley Daniels' As the Sun Forever Sets), his touchstones, and weird things you can do in it. 

Like, you can play a dog in it. If you want.

Continuing on the apocalypse theme, Cole dug into Binary Star Games' Apocalypse Frame! It's Lumen-system mech game that caught their eye especially with the excitement around Armored Core 6...

Finally, Austin Ramsay joins us for the aforementioned extended interview, talking through some of his side projects, his occasional love of crunchy tabletop games, the origin of Beam Saber, how the game changed over time, and finally discusses some of the fascinating new political mechanics in CalazCon. We also find out about his favorite Gundam series and the small handful of projects he has coming up...

Featuring Marley (@Mynar_Lenahan) and Cole (@IceColeBrew)

Produced by Marley, as well.

Follow Inside The Table on your Social Media of Choice and be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Also, send in your Listener Questions to [email protected]!

Content Warnings for:

In this adventure, Cole takes on the role of Lucille Deleuc, a reluctant Warden in the work of the Occult Detectives, with no memory of their past before working in the occult. Follow their adventure as they explore the murders happening in Monaþstone and more.

Sworn By Ghostlight is a lot of fun, the tables give you more insight in the Ash District as you play, and the items can let you infer on where to go next. Progress tracking also lets you define your success and your obstacles in your investigation as you follow your “thread” of thinking on how the culprit comes to be revealed and the mystery around why they choose their method.  

Featuring Cole (@IceColeBrew)

Produced by Cole, as well.

Follow Inside The Table on your Social Media of Choice and be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Also, send in your Listener Questions to [email protected]!

As the year comes to a close, Marley and Cole look back at the year that was and the tabletop games we checked out. We reflect back on the games we chose to look at, the games that stuck with ous, and, hell, even our favourites of the fourty-four games we looked at the last six months.

First, Cole chats about AEW Wrestling, finishing Norco, and Scarlet Hollow. Marley, meanwhile, has been getting into gangster films since working on his own Goncharov game and found Boardwalk Empire to be an oddly different way of telling a gangster story. 

We also spend a bit of time talking about The Game Awards and the video games we're excited about and video games we're not excited about.

In tabletop games, Cole talks about the physical beauty of the game Our Queen Crumbles by Jason Brown, the feeling of exploration and uniqueness of a game, in which a Queen is murdered, and the only mystery to be solved is to find why the Assassin did the deed.

Marley talks about his experience playing Partners by Steve Dee. It's an episodic mystery game where you build the gimmick and the main cast of a police procedural, yet outright states that it might be too much work to play more than one episode. Marley chats about what he loved about the game and how it approaches the challenge of improvising a mystery in a TTRPG.

On that note, Cole has returned to the city of Mónaþstone to read through Sworn By Ghostlight: Wings of Rot by Yuigaron. He has enjoyed the idea of bringing the previous location to a brand new location, The Rift, in order to seek the mysterious and purposely undefined Wings of Rot. It also showcases how the spirits interact with the Occult Detectives and whisper hints and clues to solve a case that has yet to be started.

Briefly, Marley shares his excitement in writing his own over-elaborate prep notes for a one-shot of Red West. Having been a player in a one-shot, he finds it really fun to outline themes and make his own settings and overall really enjoys the game. 

Then, onto the year in review: We chat about the most unusual, the most satisfying, the most on-our-bullshit, the what-mechanic-would-be-fun-to-take-from-one-game-to-another, the kind of games we missed out on, and finally our game of the year. 

Featuring Marley (@Mynar_Lenahan) and Cole (@IceColeBrew) 

Produced by Marley, as well.

Find Inside The Table on your preferred social media (linktr.ee/insidethetable). Also, send in your Listener Questions to [email protected]!

In this episode, Cole and Marley talk about how to break a TTRPG, because sometimes you just gotta.

But first, Marley has finished off watching the first season of Andor and Star Wars is back, baybeee!

Meanwhile, Cole got engaged, watched Bocchi The Rock!, read Melancholy Her, finished Citizen Sleeper, streamed Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and started a playthrough of Disco Elysium. 

And we're not even twenty minutes into the episode!

Cole kicks off tabletop talk by chatting about playing Skelpielimmer's Desperado Playbook in a Blades in the Dark oneshot and had a wild, bloody time playing a gunslinger in Duskvol. Marley audibly gasps at one point. 

Cole has also gotten interested in Rathayibacter's [BXLLET>, another fascinating gunslinger game about violence, and the responsibility it brings. Also, the name of the game is aparently a core mechanic?? They will report back on that...

Marley chats about his experience playing AlwaysCheckers' Notorious for last week's episode (which you can watch on our YouTube!). He's come away blown away with the possibilities that random tables can offer and has become a massive Jason Price fan.

He also checked out Mörk Borg, which is worlds away from the games he usually plays. He alternated between being enchanted by the world-building to being kind of underwhelmed by some of the random tables to once more being enraptured in the possibility of owning a monkey in-game. He also wrote a whole copost about his thoughts as he read through the book.

Cole finishes up tabletalk by returning to Sworn by Ghostlight: The Case of the Ebon Wood Effigies by Yuigaron. He's had a lot of fun with the mechanics and seeing how the game uses random tables (including the fantastic ), to build up a murder mystery from scratch. Cole also teases that this may become a future episode/YouTube video for Inside The Table...

Finally, we take some time chatting about breaking games or, rather, how people change existing games to suit them. We discuss aesthetic changes, making homebrew items, breaking games to make them accessible, and The Fail Forward Blog's Three Rules Rule: How much should you break a game before you decide you should just play something else?

Featuring Cole (@IceColeBrew) and Marley (@Mynar_Lenahan)

Produced by Marley, as well.

Find Inside The Table on your preferred social media (linktr.ee/insidethetable). Also, send in your Listener Questions to [email protected]!

In this very special episode, Marley is playing through a solo game of Notorious by Jason Price as Cole was feeling a little under the weather.

Now, Notorious is a game about a bounty hunter (or a nomad in the parlance of this game) tracking down their target on a strange planet. They mess around with the local factions, cause trouble, build reputation, and eventually come face to face with their target in a dangerous showdown. It's also a game that feels so much like an episode of The Mandalorian with its incredible random event tables that are unlike anything Marley has seen before...

Note: This episode is a TTRPG actual play and it does involve a lot of tracking of stats, rolling on tables, and reading off of character sheets. If you want to see what's going on, this podcast is also available as a YouTube video.

Featuring Marley (@Mynar_Lenahan)

Produced by Marley, as well.

Follow Inside The Table on Twitter (@insidethetable) or Cohost (@InsideTheTable). Also, send in your Listener Questions to [email protected]!

This episode, we're chatting about how art changes how we approach tabletop RPGs! It's also kind of a Halloween episode!

But first, Marley chats Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinent of Curiosities (which he has found largely mediocre, with a handful of enjoyable episodes) whereas Cole has been enjoying Nona The Ninth, the latest book in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series. They also went to an Everything Everywhere All At Once themed birthday party??

Then, Cole kicks off Tabletop Talk by discussing Atsuhiro Okada's Ryuutama, a Table-Talk RPG game which feels like a video game brought into a tabletop environment. Also, the GM gets to choose what kind of dragon they play as.

Marley changes the tone completely by discussing Liminal Horror by Goblin Archives. It's a cosmic horror hack of Into The Odd, in which players generate fragile investigators by rolling on random tables. The recent Tales from the Void jam caught Marley's eye in particular, as it showed how easy it was to hack together expansions and adventures for the game (and inspired him to write a hack of his own).

Then, Marley continues chatting about paranormal investigators by talking about Riley Daniels' Ghoulboys: Paranormal Investigators. It's a Belonging Outside Belonging game that combines Buzzfield Unsolved: Supernatural and Phantasmophobia to create what feels like a solid improv comedy party game?

Cole talks about his experience with Cortex Prime, which is a Fate-like tabletop system that allows you to run a game set within any genre. Cole talks about how he feels about a system like that, as opposed to seeing how systems like Belonging Outside Belonging or Forged in the Dark can approach genres with more substantial hacks.

Finally, we chat art. Specifically how much influence art has on the game a GM ends up running, how artists can sell you on a game, and whether games without art hinder our experience playing a game. 

Featuring Marley (@Mynar_Lenahan) and Cole (@IceColeBrew)

Produced by Marley, as well.

Follow Inside The Table on Twitter (@insidethetable). Also, send in your Listener Questions to [email protected]!

After a week off (curse you, Pax Pox...), your co-hosts return, this time to discuss pitching Tabletop Games, both to players and to the world at large.

But first, Marley talks about his experience attending PAX Aus, along with seeing panels, celebrities, and talks about the sheer number of TTRPGs he played while he was there...

Cole, on the other side of the planet, talks hanging with AshenWorks and playing fun games in person. They've also been getting into commentating for MLE Esports GG and using Word of the Day to expand their vocabulary. Also, Witch In Mercury is good, so he's been watching that.

Marley starts the tabletop talk with As The Sun Forever Sets by Riley Daniels. It's a Forged in the Dark game that's also a hex-crawl and also set within the world of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds? Marley is facinated by the idea of playing in the dying days of the British Empire of the 1890s, but is also amazed by the mechanical innovations the game makes in the FitD genre.

Then, noted board-game-disliker Marley brings up his most anticipated board game of the past few years: Monopoly: Fortnite Edition. Initially brought in by just the bizarre concept, Marley has found himself bizarrely sold on an adaptation that's more than a re-skin that plays fast and loose with what we know of Monopoly to create... a tactical shooter? It's a deeply fascinating thing.

Cole meanwhile has been checking out GM-less games with astounding art.

First of which is Dialect by Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalioglu, which is a game about a community that strived to create their own culture, and the language that remains after a dominant culture assimilates them. Cole found it to be a great introduction to entirely new kinds of tabletop games.

Then, Cole chats about Cantrip by Misha Panarin and Celeste Cruz, a fun Belonging Outside Belonging game about young witches getting up to trouble at a magical school. It reminded Cole of Little Witch Academia and Kiki's Delivery Service and was just a fun, chill time.

Then, we move onto our main topic of Pitching Games. We've chatted with members of assorted TTRPG communities about what sells them on games and how they sell games to other people. Marley also chats about his reflections from spending a weekend seeing tabletop game developers pitching their games at a huge games convention. Then we take a moment to be real with y'all and talk about what interested them about the four tabletop games they discussed on this episode of the podcast...

Featuring Cole (@IceColeBrew) and Marley (@Mynar_Lenahan)

Produced by Marley, as well.

Follow Inside The Table on Twitter (@insidethetable). Also, send in your Listener Questions to [email protected]!

This episode, we're doing something different. Marley is going to PAX Aus (say hi if you see him!), which means he didn't have the time to edit a big proper episode and do the usual social media stuff.

So instead, Marley's playing a solo game of Anomaly: Containment Breach by Sniper Serpent. It's a really fun Quiet Year-hack inspired by the SCP Foundation and video game Control, and it's one of Marley's absolute favourites.

Now, it is a light horror game, so content warning for mind control, mild violence (including supernatural violence and implied murder), and uncaring bureaucracy. So be warned!

But it's a lovely fun episode, so enjoy!

Featuring Marley (@Mynar_Lenahan), and a shout out toCole (@IceColeBrew)

Produced by Marley, as well.

Follow Inside The Table on Twitter (@insidethetable). Also, send in your Listener Questions to [email protected]!

This episode, we're talking about all the ways roleplaying games shape and restrict the roles we play in them.

But first, Marley checked out Nicolas Cage's Pig, which he describes as a non-violent John Wick film set in the seedy underbelly of the Portland haute cuisine scene. It was way weirder than he expected it to be, but still rad.

Cole meanwhile has been watching Beaststars. It's a bizarre anime that is eerily like Zootopia, only with much more sex and violence (and is much better). Cole fears it may have awakened something in them...

Next, Cole then talks about A Court Of Fey & Flowers, a new actual play by Dimension 20, which combines Good Society with Dungeons and Dragons. We chat about how the show combines both games, before going into our history with Dimension 20 and battlemaps. 

As for Tabletop Games, Marley chats about Riverhouse Games' Machine Gun, an avant garde jazz game which expanded his notions about what kind of experiences tabletop games can provide.

Cole then talks about Mythopoeia'sThe Quotidian, an unofficial Blades in the Dark playbook who is just a normal, boring person who has their life sorted out and helps the crew by annoying anyone they come up against. We then use this as an opportunity to revisit the spectacular Unusual Suspects Jam, which features a number of great unofficial playbooks. 

Offworlders by Chris Wolf and Olivia Gulin is next. It's a fast-paced, easily hackable scifi game (with great art) that fills the niche between the rules-lite Lasers and Feelings and a more complex FitD game like Scum & Villainy.

Speaking of fast paced games, Cole's been checking out GilaRPG's Slayers, which he says is a fun mix of Bloodborne and Monster Hunter. It's interestingly distinct from RUNE, which we checked out previously, and Cole feels its the kind of game they could just pick up and run with. 

For our main topic, we talk about the weirdness of racial modifiers, games that cast you in a specific role, being restricted from playing anybody, and TTRPGs as an opportunity for fanfiction.

We close with a shout out to Thomas Manuel's Indie RPG Newsletter, which has been checking out some fun corners of the indie rpg scene recently. Huntsmen's Hydra's show Fire in the Dark has also been nominated for a GameHERS award and you can still vote for it here!

Featuring Cole (@IceColeBrew) and Marley (@Mynar_Lenahan)

Produced by Marley, as well.

Follow Inside The Table on Twitter (@insidethetable). Also, send in your Listener Questions to [email protected]!