Reading D&D Aloud

In which Producer Chris continues to mess with all our minds by leaving at least one obvious error in the show! Today, I have two masters of their craft, two gaming greats whose work is capable of standing on its own two feet and maybe even punching other games in the face, or gutting them like fish, or blasting them out the airlock depending on your genre. First up is Luke Gearing. He is one of the Mothership boys over at Tuesday Knight Games, and is known for Gradient Descent, Fever Swamp, and most relevant to my mind, WOLVES UPON THE COAST, which I am currently running. Welcome Luke! Second in order but by no means in significance we have Kevin Crawford, the man with the mind behind the WITHOUT NUMBER line of games. STARS WITHOUT NUMBER is the dream campaign which I seem eternally unable to get my gaming group to play. His successful crowdfunding campaigns outnumber my ex-girlfriends, and his influence on game design in the 21st century has been remarkable. He is also tremendously hard to lure into an interview, so I will publicly brag that this is the second time I've managed to seduce him into a conversation. Welcome Kevin! Support Kevin Crawford's current Kickstarter here! You can find a free adventure by Luke Gearing for VIOLENCE here!

Episode 100! And is this our best episode ever? A thing Wizards of the Coast has said is that 2024 D&D was the fastest selling version of that game ever produced. I predict that Wizards sold 50,000 copies in the first couple weeks and then made that boast. I would also predict that the other two people we have on the podcast beat that record, because we have Rowan Hall & Spenser Starke here. Starke and Hall are two of the cooks sweating over the stove and serving us Daggerheart from Darrington Press. Daggerheart sold out its initial print run in two weeks, even though it was supposed to last a year. All of which is prelude to say, Hall and Starke are bestselling game designers whose work has broken out of the nerd ghetto to run riot in the culture at large. ENWorld praised Daggerheart as a high fantasy mash up of D&D 4th Edition, the Genesys System, Blades in the Dark, and the Cypher System, producing high fantasy combat in a collaborative storytelling environment. Also on the show, we have Ben Costa and James Parks! They are the ENnie-award winning creators of Land of Eem, a warm, funny, and charming fantasy RPG. Before that, they created the world of Eem in their graphic novel Rickety Stitch and the Gelatinous Goo, and I am delighted to have them on the show. Welcome Ben & James! Check out LAND OF EEM here! And of course, DAGGERHEART can be found almost everywhere, but here's a link anyway.

Today we are diving deep on the demonic, and imagine what if, instead of running away from demons and devils in Dungeons & Dragons, creators and companies ran towards it? Recently, we had Gavin Norman of Old School Essentials fame to talk about the Demonic Grimoire which is funding on Backerkit as you hear this. But May is Old School Essentials month on Backerkit, and Gavin Norman and the other Necrotic Gnomes celebrating an Exalted Funeral have gathered an entire cult of creators to summon an entire Luciferean library. Hellish hardbacks! Possessed pamphlets! Satanic scrolls! Cthonic codices! Malevolent manuals of memes from Mephistopheles! The wicked works of Woland, the only demon brave enough to visit Stalin's Moscow! Today we have two of the eldritch elders, monstrous masters whose manuscripts will be birthed unto this wicked world whether we would have them or no. First up is Nicholas Montegriffo. His contribution to this macabre and malign month is HELLBLASTER: AGAINST THE CYBERFIENDS! The adventure's pitch reads thusly: "Under a burning sky rent asunder by eldritch storms, a jagged wreck from an unknown world vomits corruption. Abominations of fiendish flesh and mirrored chrome spit hot plasma death from iron orifices. Amid howls for blood and cries of pain, priceless artifacts of alien technology sound a call to adventure. Inspired by classic modules and early-90s dark industrial aesthetics, HELLBLASTER: Against the Cyberfiends is a location-based adventure for high-level characters, set in a crashed spaceship captured by the forces of hell." Also joining us is Luciferean luminary and accursed augur, Allen Hall. Allen's works include UHF CONTACT, a series of adventures for LIMINAL HORROR, & THE MOUNTAIN OF POWER, an awesome pamphlet adventure for Old School Essentials. His contribution to OSE Month is titled "Out of the Iron Labyrinth" and it's described thuslhy: "OUT OF THE IRON LABYRINTH is a hell escape adventure built for play with Old School Essentials. Whether they were kidnapped by a cult, traded to a demon by an evil wizard, or accidentally banished by an errant spell, your character must navigate the Court of Yllthrax, one corner of the infinite Iron Labyrinth, in order to find a way back to the Material Plane. Designed for play by one player character, Out of the Iron Labyrinth can be played with a GM or as a solo adventure using the included solo tools. Perfect as a self-contained module or as a side adventure when the party in your campaign gets split up (or when only one player can make it to game night)." Back HELLBLASTER here! https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/bloodstar-productions/hellblaster-against-the-cyberfiends Back OUT OF THE IRON LABYRINTH here! https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/m-allen-hall/out-of-the-iron-labyrinth

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!

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.

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.

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