Apparently, snakes have something called "hemepenes," something I only know because of Emily Allen.

Emily is a designer, writer, and the mind behind The Gardens of Ynn, one of those RPG books that feels less like a "setting" and more like a living dream you accidentally walked into and now can't stop exploring. Emily's work has that rare combination of elegance and danger: it's imaginative, it's playable, and it demands to be brought to a table and enjoyed. I am sorely tempted to start running her Stygian Library ASAP. If you like your fantasy uncanny, like wonder with teeth, Emily is your person.

And today we welcome back Josh McCrowell, designer of His Majesty the Worm, a book that basically looks at the classic dungeon crawl and hits it with a Tarot deck. With this appearance, Josh may be the most-frequently appearing guest in the history of the pod. The Worm won ENnies for best rules and best game this year.

If you want to to explore the full panoply of Emily's work, from Ynn to the Library, click here!

Preorder The Worm's first expansion, The Castle Automatic, here!

On Patreon, I posted my Gamehole Con seminar where I went over 18 years of leaked D&D sales data. You can enjoy it posthaste if you subscribe to my Patreon! It's only $3 a month! Click here!

If you know Infinity of Ships, you know their vibe: big imagination, tight design, and the kind of tables-and-ideas toolkit that makes a GM's brain start sprinting. Their latest release, 100 Strangers, gives us NPCs with story fuel, despite how incredibly clipped they are.

That's right. Today, I've got Adam Good and Jaimie Perez, the creative engines behind STATIONS.

Adam and Jaimie build for the moment at the table when you look up and say, "Okay, what happens next?" and suddenly you've got an answer that's surprising, usable, and weird in exactly the right way.

Hop on the next STATIONS project with 100 Strange Spaces! Click here to be notified on launch, or if it's Tuesday or after, back it!

On Patreon, I posted my Gamehole Con seminar where I went over 18 years of leaked D&D sales data. You can enjoy it posthaste if you subscribe to my Patreon! It's only $3 a month! Click here!

The Wild 90s in TTRPGs!

This conversation was a great one!

First up today is Wolfgang Baur, a creator and businessperson whose fingerprints are all over the hobby. He can write fantasy like Tolkien and run a business like, uh, someone whose geeky, good at running a business, and not at all ethically challenged in this year of 2026. He's the creator of the MIDGARD campaign setting and the founder of Kobold Press.

My other guest today is Satyros Phil Brucato: a name that radiates pure 90s occult bookshelf energy in the best possible way. Phil is a designer who helped define an era: Mage: The Ascension, Werewolf, Wraith; games that didn't just ask "What do you do?" but "What do you believe?" and "What does it cost you?" Phil's work sits right at the crossroads of myth, philosophy, and punk-rock metaphysics.

Support Baur's current Kickstarter for a 5E game of astonishing nocturnal horror here!

You have a magnificent multiplicity of ways to support Satyros Phil Brucato!

• Buy Brucato's MAGE MADE EASY here!
• Support his Patreon here!
• Buy his novel RED SHOES here!
• Buy 13 tales of darkness by Satyros here!
• A collection of 27 more short stories here!
• Brucato's game of rock 'n roll and fairies can be found here!

On Patreon, I posted my Gamehole Con seminar where I went over 18 years of leaked D&D sales data. You can enjoy it posthaste if you subscribe to my Patreon! It's only $3 a month! Click here!

Today we welcome back Joshua McCrowell, designer of His Majesty the Worm, a game that looks at the classic dungeon crawl and hits it with a Tarot deck. The Worm won ENnies for best rules and best game this year. Josh has a gift for taking old-school adventure DNA, labyrinths, delving, danger and giving it a new spine. Welcome Josh!

Pick up Josh's work here!

On Patreon, I posted my Gamehole Con seminar where I went over 18 years of leaked D&D sales data. You can enjoy it posthaste if you subscribe to my Patreon! It's only $3 a month! Click here!

This conversation was incredible.

The participants in today's talk designed the following games: D&D 3rd Edition, Apocalypse World, Ars Magica, Over the Edge, and even an "Additional Writing" credit on Daggerheart.

You have to check this out.

First up: Jonathan Tweet! A legend with a designer's designer résumé, the kind of mind that can build a rules engine and make it sing. Lead designer of 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons, Jonathan's sticky fingerprints are all over modern tabletop, and somehow he's still out here pushing the form forward like it's the year 2000 and we just discovered fire.

Batman and Robin. Nick and Nora. Sherlock and Watson. Mario & Luigi. Chocolate and peanut butter. Vincent Baker and Meg Baker. Designers. Provocateurs. They are the Marx & Lenin of the Powered by the Apocalypse revolution. Like Jonathan, to count the games and designers who owe a debt to Vincent and Meg would be to try to count the stars.

All three of you have been on the show before. So this isn't a first date. This is the sequel. the stakes are higher, and this conversation I hope will be dangerously good.

Check out Jonathan's book about evolution for kids, Grandmother Fish! (My 4-year-old fully endorses this book.)

Embrace the work of the Bakers with In Dreaming Avalon, wherein Arthurian knights meet Shakespearean fairies.

Tonight on D&D Outloud, I'm joined by Joseph Laycock, a scholar of religion who explores what happens when belief, culture, and controversy collide. Joe is an associate professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University, and he's written some incredibly relevant work for anyone who remembers when D&D was treated like a portal to perdition, including Dangerous Games, his sharp look at the moral panic over role-playing games. He's also the editor of The Penguin Book of Exorcisms and the Penguin Book of Cults, because apparently he collects moral panics like some people collect dice.

Also joining me tonight is Daniel Harms, a librarian, researcher, and one of the great cartographers of the weird. Dan's work lives at that crossroads where folklore shakes hands with grimoires, and the footnotes start whispering back. He's written and edited a stack of essential occult reference works, including The Necronomicon Files, a deep dive into the "truth behind the legend," and he's spent years tracking the history of magical texts, ritual traditions, and the kind of lore that feels one inch away from becoming an adventure hook. He wrote the Encyclopedia Cthuliana, which is the indispensable source for Cthulhu mythos knowledge. If your idea of fun is "primary sources, but make it eldritch," you're in good company.

You can find Joe's book on cults here.

And Dan's amazing book on the Necronomicon here, and updates on Encyclopedia Cthuliana here.

Jim Lowder is a writer, an editor, a lore architect, and if we're being honest, a kind of Indiana Jones of shared worlds. From Ravenloft to Forgotten Realms to the trenches of TSR itself, Jim has chronicled the industry, shaped it, and occasionally had to wrestle it into coherence with nothing but a red pen and stubborn Massachusetts resolve. He brings history, insight, and the kind of war stories that remind us this hobby was built by humans, not dragons.

Our second guest is a man whose career arc reads like it was designed by a particularly chaotic bard. Pat Kilbane is an actor, comedian, documentarian, and now one of our most energetic chroniclers of Dungeons & Dragons history. You might know him from MADtv, but in the last few years he's become a relentless investigator of the game's past, digging through archives, tracking down lost media, and turning old TSR ephemera into modern revelations. Pat is equal parts entertainer and excavator; he's here not just to tell stories, but to figure out why they matter. Pat Kilbane, welcome to D&D Outloud.

Today, we converse with two firehoses of the human imagination: Mark Diaz Truman and Jay Dragon!

Some people play games. Some people publish games. And then there are the people who change how the whole industry works. Mark Diaz Truman is one of the architects of the modern tabletop renaissance; designer, publisher, organizer, and strategic mastermind behind Magpie Games, one of the forces that helped bring Powered by the Apocalypse roaring into the mainstream. From Masks to Avatar Legends, Mark doesn't just build games. He builds movements, communities, and launchpads for new voices. We are living in a future Mark helped to chart.

Jay Dragon is a creative force. I am over the moon to have her back on because our last conversation was one of my favorites. Jay's the mind behind Wanderhome, and Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, games that blend gentle heartbreak with radical imagination. She is currently the head of design at Steve Jackson Games. Please welcome the pastoral prophet of indie RPGs, Jay Dragon!

You can find more of Mark's work here: https://magpiegames.com/

And more of Jay Dragon's work here: https://warehouse23.com/collections/possum-creek

Happy Thanksgiving Americans! Here's a seminar from Gamehole Con 2025 about why YOU should be writing geeky nonfiction.

My favorite RPG book of the year is a book of spaceship p*rn designed by two poets!

INFINITY OF SHIPS is random tables for spaceship creation along with stunning artwork and essays that are as fun as they are engaging. The book was brought to us by Adam Good & Jamie Perez, and the pair have another book Kickstarting right now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/72stations/100-strangers-misfits-weirdos-and-outcasts-for-sci-fi-rpgs

The show also features Justin Sirois, publisher at Severed Books and author of Sickest Witch, a D20 Folk Horror RPG which can be found here: https://www.severedbooks.com/

On Patreon, I posted my Gamehole Con seminar where I went over 18 years of leaked D&D sales data. You can enjoy it posthaste if you subscribe to my Patreon! It's only $3 a month! Click here!