Ludonarrative Dissidents

The Season 4 LND Kickstarter pre-launch page is live! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rosspayton/ludonarrative-dissidents-podcast-season-4The Quiet Year is a map game. You define the struggles of a post-apocalyptic community, and attempt to build something good within their quiet year. Every decision and every action is set against a backdrop of dwindling time and rising concern.We were fortunate enough to have two very special guests for this episode.Avery Alder is the Quiet Year's creator and an award winning game designer. You can find her website at https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/ and she's on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/lackingceremony.bsky.socialOrder the Quiet Year https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-yearor from DrivethruRPG https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/110152/the-quiet-year?affiliate_id=465273Dr. Emily Friedman studies actual play and storytelling. She has an upcoming book on the history of Actual Play. You can find her on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/ecfriedman.comand on https://patreon.com/ecfriedman

We recently completed season 3 and are going to launch a Kickstarter on October 13 to fund a fourth season!

Follow the Kickstarter campaign to be notified when the campaign goes live!

This live episode discusses what will be new for the fourth season. We plan to have shorter book reviews in our live episodes, along with special segments. To that end, I review the new Mothership bounty hunting supplement, Wages of Sin.

We're also hosting a book club on game design, where each host reads and discusses multiple books with backers.

Watch the video version of this episode.

IN OUR TRADITIONAL style, as we reach the end of the season we’re bringing you a couple of Actual Play sessions of games that we’ve covered in earlier episodes, putting some actual ludo-ing into the customary narrative.

This episode is the first part of the Ludonarrative Dissidents Season 3 finale and we are delighted that Kevin Kulp, co-designer of Swords of the Serpentine, volunteered to administer a one-off adventure for Greg, Ross and James. It was a splendid evening of entertainment, running the system through its paces as we hurtled through several of the setting’s notable locations, and finding every possible opportunity to fall in the water.

SWORDS OF THE SERPENTINE is a game of fantasy shenanigans in a labyrinthine sinking city populated by rogues, schemers, cultists, swashbucklers and your player characters, written by Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner, and published by Pelgrane Press in 2022. It uses a variation of the Gumshoe system originally created by Robin D. Laws in 2007. The book has 396 pages.

• Swords of the Serpentine at Pelgrane Press
• Swords of the Serpentine at DriveThruRPG

No conventional show-notes this time, except to express our thanks to Kevin for giving up an evening to escort us through his co-creation, and to you for giving up your time to listen to it. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Thank you for listening! The hosts of this episode were Ross Payton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis, with audio editing by Ross and show notes by James. We hope you enjoyed it. If anything in this podcast or these notes has spurred your interest then we invite you to come and chat about it on our friendly Discord. 

If you click on any of the above links to DriveThruRPG and buy something, Ludonarrative Dissidents will receive a small affiliate fee. You will not be charged more, and the game’s publisher will not receive less, it’s a win-win-win. Thank you for supporting the podcast this way.

DIALECT: A Game About Language And How It Dies is a 2018 single-session RPG by Hakan Seyalioglu and Kathryn Hymes, published by Thorny Games. It’s a game about a small community, isolated from larger groups, that first creates its own verbal forms to describe its situation, and then must adapt or lose them as the community reacts to external threats. It is critically acclaimed and a winner of multiple awards.

• Dialect at Thorny Games
• Dialect at Wikipedia
• Preview sample of the Dialect rulebook

Read the full show notes here.

⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our livestream discussion for August!

Watch the episode on Youtube

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

SWORDS OF THE SERPENTINE is a game of fantasy shenanigans in a labyrinthine sinking city populated by rogues, schemers, cultists, swashbucklers and your player characters, written by Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner, and published by Pelgrane Press in 2022. It uses a variation of the Gumshoe system originally created by Robin D. Laws in 2007.

• Swords of the Serpentine at Pelgrane Press
• Swords of the Serpentine at DriveThruRPG

Full show notes are here

Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our livestream discussion for June!

Watch the episode on Youtube

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

CHICAGO BY NIGHT is a 2018 city sourcebook for Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition, written by Matthew Dawkins and a host of others, and published by Renegade Game Studios, who have the rights to do all this stuff these days. The most recent iteration of a sourcebook that first appeared in 1991, this edition is by far the longest at 357 pages. It describes the vampire culture, clans, people, locations, backstory and subterfuges of the eponymous city. (‘Eponymous’, because I always have to check, means ‘lending its name to’ a thing, not ‘taking its name from’). We talked about the latest edition of Vampire the Masquerade earlier this season and concluded that it did what it needs to in a suitable style, if you like that sort of thing. How does that fit with huge chunks of crunchy campaign-world detail like this? Don’t click that dial!

• Chicago by Night at DriveThruRPG (there’s more information here than at the publishers’ website)
• Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition at DriveThruRPG
• The original Chicago by Night from 1991 at DriveThruRPG
• Chicago by Night second edition (1993) at DriveThruRPG

Read the full show notes here.

Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our livestream discussion for May, featuring special guest Jerry Grayson of Khepera Publishing. Check out the Godsend Agenda today.

Watch the episode on Youtube

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our April livestream!

Watch the livestream on Youtube

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.