Anamnesis is a journaling RPG for one player designed by Sam Leigh. In the game, you wake up with no memory whatsoever of who and where you are, and through a series of beautifully designed questions, and with the help of a deck of tarot cards you recover bit by bit your memory. In this episode, we talk about the Rider Waite Colman tarot deck, memory loss, solo gaming, walking downtown on a sunny day, and much more. You can download Anamnesis on Sam's itch.io page https://samleigh.itch.io/anamne...
Jul 06, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 9
John Battle, aka Batts is the designer of the RPG My body is a cage. In the game, there are two worlds, the one you live in during the daytime, very much like the one we live in ourselves, and the one you dream of. When you dream, you go exploring dungeons, you fight monsters, you collect treasures, you try to make a better life for yourself. In this episode, we talk about the inescapable duality of life, D6 dice pools, mecha games, movies, screenwriting, game design, and much more. Batts is run...
Jun 23, 2021•25 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Ian Yusem is the designer of the Mothership rpg adventures Moonbase blues, Picket Line Tango, The Drain. Ian has also a great blog called Uncanny Spheres in which he writes with a lot of honesty about his experience as an indie rpg designer. He posts detailed postmortems of his games where he addresses the financial reality of being an indie TTRPG designer and he writes a lot about community. What does that mean to belong to a community of creators ? How does one even find their own community ? ...
Jun 16, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Anna Blackwell is the designer of the solo RPG Delve , or rather the solo RPG series Delve , Rise and Umbra. Delve is a map-drawing game in which you run an underground dwarven hold. As you dig underground you encounter magic, treasures, evil forces. The game is played with dice and a standard card deck. It involves exploration, resource management, and drawing, and it's built to create a strong emergent narrative experience. In this episode, we talk about the fear of the dark, caving, drawing, ...
Jun 02, 2021•22 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Vi Huntsman runs a Crazy youtube channel called Collabs without permission . They do great video reviews of TTRPG zines. In March they shared a review of the game Mothership filmed at Bonneville Salt Flats. It’s a super brilliant review of the game, and it looks amazing, like a short Sci-Fi film. Vi has been collecting zines for years. We did the interview via a conferencing app. And as we were recording I could see behind Vi shelves literally filled with zines. In this episode, we talk about Vi...
May 19, 2021•26 min
Chris McDowall is the creator of the RPGS Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland . Both games share a fascinating weird industrial early XXth century setting and have been extremely influential to the indie RPG scene for the way they handle game mechanics. As a matter of fact, if you’ve listened to previous episodes of this podcast you might have heard other designers mention Chris’ games a few times. In this episode we talk about Fear, a strange fascination with the London Underground Railway, a...
Apr 21, 2021•26 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Ben Milton is behind the popular YouTube channel Questing Beast where he does reviews and flip throughs of RPGs and OSR books and zines. Watching his reviews, I've been struck by the constant attention he has for the layout or the design choices of the books, and how these choices might affect the playing experience. Ben is the author of Maze Rats and Knave , two rules-light RPGs, that had a great influence on the OSR scene. Ben recently published the Waking of WIllowby Hall , a fairy-tale med f...
Apr 07, 2021•30 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Leo Hunt is a multi-faceted creator. He wrote four novels, and in the last year, released two issues of VAULTS OF VAARN , a science-fantasy rpg. In this episode we talk about his inspirational sources, the difference between writing a novel and an rpg, game design, the American anthropologist David Graeber, and above all, about the colorful, fascinating world of Vaults of Vaarn. Vaults of Vaarn is available as a printed booklet from online stores, find the full list here https://vaultsofvaarn.wo...
Mar 24, 2021•29 min•Season 1Ep. 2
In October 2020, Yochai Gal released CAIRN , a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. Cairn is, among other things, inspired by Yochai's love for the forests and forest-fantasy fiction. Actually, from the window of his own house, one could see the edge of a forest. Cairn is available as a printed booklet from online stores, find the full list here: cairnrpg.com/print.html Or in pdf: yochaigal.itch.io/cairn --- --- --- --- Support The Lost Bay Podcast If you want more interviews and talks with design...
Mar 07, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 1
