This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with our pal Mark Sable about his imminent comic series Miskatonic, which takes on Lovecraft, cosmic horror, racism, the Red Scare and more. We chat with Mark about all that, plus the Call of Cthulhu RPG, the symbiotic relationship between playing RPGs and being a writer and plenty more!

Miskatonic #1 is on sale digitally and in comic stores on Wednesday, November 11.

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For more on Mark’s work, check out his author pages on Comixology and Amazon.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Kathryn Hymes of Thorny Games about Xenolanguage. Thorny Games makes games about language (see the rather sublime Dialect for example) and their latest effort, currently on Kickstarter, draws inspiration from Arrival, Contact and “The Story of Your Life” to create an experience that is about first contact with an alien species, but also about learning to see the world differently.  And the game mechanic centers on a talking board!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we travel the dark and twisting paths of the Ravenloft campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. Prepare yourself for horrors beyond imagining, diabolical villains and a lot of near-hysterical praise for the art of Stephen Fabian!

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we slip into the shadows of Vampire: The Masquerade, a topic far too sprawling for just one episode. We try to cut to the heart of the game’s early era, the wild lore, the Storyteller system, the LARPing, the Tim Bradstreet art, Milwaukee. We probably just scratch the surface. But we manage to find time to also discuss Near Dark and the vampire courts of the late 90s/early 2000s goth club scene! Weird!

In the latest episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast this week, we look at Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey’s gritty, shared-world fantasy anthology series, the Tim Sale graphic novel adaptations and the magical moment in roleplaying history when Chaosium convinced the designers behind all the major RPGs (including Traveller!?) to collaborate on their Thieves’ World box set. It was a glorious moment, and all to brief.

Join us in the latest episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast as we investigate the extremely earnest World Action and Adventure RPG, a universal RPG system from 1985 that codifies the real world into a semi-playable game. There is poetry. There is clip art. There are so many charts. Most importantly, the creation of World Action and Adventure scored author Gregory L. Kinney (right) credit for five college courses! Easily one of the oddest RPGs we’ve ever encountered.

Friend of the show Jim Zub is back on the Vintage RPG Podcast this week, with a bag full of fun new projects. First off is the Skullkickers Kickstarter: Caster Bastards and the Great Grotesque, a comic and RPG supplement that celebrates the 10th anniversary of his love letter to pulp and D&D. We also talk about the forthcoming Beasts & Behemoths, the latest installment of the Young Adventurer’s Guides, and the Stranger Things: Dungeons & Dragons comic book.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we walk the shadowy streets of Lankhmar: City of Adventure, one of the greatest RPG city sourcebooks. Based on the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber, Lankhmar is both a city and a larger campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons (using a modified character creation system) that captures the atmosphere of the original stories. The real genius of the book is the approach to the city, which uses modular geomorphs for the tangled and ever-changing back alleys. We also talk a bit about Leiber, his Lankhmar co-creator Otto Fischer and the stories themselves, which form one of the biggest influences on early Dungeons & Dragons.

Steal your strength and guard your soul: this week, the Vintage RPG Podcast looks at Chaosium’s Stormbringer RPG. Designed by Ken St. Andre, Stormbringer is a high power and high risk RPG set in the world of Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories (for our money, perhaps the greatest fantasy series ever written). One of the more straightforward of the games using Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing system, it has piles of fatalistic atmosphere and dark themes, perhaps most notably the magic system that relies on mind altering substances and is entirely arranged around summoning and binding demons and other supernatural entities. Most Stormbringer games end in death or corruption – the fun is in figuring out which is the better fate.

This week, the Vintage RPG Podcast travels back in time to the 80s that never were with Tales From the Loop, an RPG where extraordinary science fiction mysteries crash into the dreariness of everyday life. Based on the mesmerizing artwork of Simon Stålenhag, this Year Zero engine game from Fria Ligan is one of our favorites – easy to pick up and play (especially for beginners), gorgeous to look at and full of enigmas. Check it out if you were ever a kid.