Support the show! On this episode, we have Hannah Schaffer and Evan Rowland, the two creators behind indie game design outfit, turtlebun. They've published games like Questlandia, Noirlandia, Damn the man save the music, Mud: a golem memoir, and many more. You can find more about those games at turtlebun.com. Evan and Hannah also co-host a podcast called Design Doc , which is in their own words, about "trying to make a living as people putting things out in the world". If you read any reviews of...
Feb 12, 2024•50 min•Season 5Ep. 1
A guest episode on the feed today as I share with you something from the folks over at Playing at the Hearth , the podcast from the Open Hearth gaming community. It's a nice, welcoming online place where people from all over the place get together and play games. It's like having access to a convention all year round. If you'd like to join, head over to their website. This episode has members of the community sharing their favourite games played in 2023. Lot of cool games mentioned and I add my ...
Jan 03, 2024•1 hr 27 min
Support the show on Patreon In this round-up episode for 2023, every single one of my guests sounds off about one game that they want to recommend to you! [00:02:05] Judd Karlmann recommends Into the Odd, The Between, and As The Sun Forever Sets [00:05:55] Lowell Francis recommends Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition [00:08:27] Jahmal Brown recommends Legacy: Life Among The Ruins 2nd Edition [00:12:05] Indrani Ganguly recommends Alice is Missing, Blase Monotony, and Bubble Bubble [00:13:55] Tan Shao Han r...
Dec 04, 2023•39 min
Support the show on Patreon Evan Torner is the Associate Professor of German Studies and Film / Media Studies at University of Cincinnati. He's the Director, UC Game Lab and has a co-edited volume (with William J. White) entitled Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Role-Playing and Participatory Media. He's also co-founder and one of the editors at Analog Game Studies , which has been publishing research into RPGs and larps for more than ten years, and the Golden Cobra Challenge , which is a larp comp...
Nov 15, 2023•55 min
Support the show on Patreon The is the second in a series of special episodes meant to teach some of my favourite indie RPGs. Tune in to hear Andrew Gillis, designer of the stunning Girl by Moonlight . In Girl by Moonlight , you play a group of magical girls resisting an oppressive society. It explores the heartbreak of denying who you really are, and the transcendent power of relationships and community. It's one of the best games to come out of the lineage of Blades in the Dark and will undoub...
Oct 30, 2023•1 hr 26 min
Support the show on Patreon Josh Fox is the award-winning designer of Flotsam: Adrift Amongst The Stars and Last Fleet . He's the co-designer of the highly influential GMless mystery game, Lovecraftesque alongside Becky Annison. And the two of them together run Black Armada Publishing , a UK-based publisher which has been putting out inventive roleplaying games for more than a decade. Josh is also the editor and cast member of Black Armada Tales , an actual play podcast that features a bunch of ...
Oct 10, 2023•1 hr 27 min
Hello! A cross-post in the feed today. This in an episode I did with Sam Dunnewold for his podcast, Dice Exploder , where every episode is a deep dive into a single RPG mechanic (usually) from a specific game. I talk about the Secondary Mission roll from Band of Blades which is a very cool mechanic that I love to think about. It basically inspired me to make a whole game at one point. This is an early release of the episode. It'll only be on Dice Exloder's feed by the end of the month. It's a gr...
Oct 03, 2023•35 min
Support the show on Patreon The first episode in a series of special episodes meant to teach some of my favourite indie RPGs. Listen in to hear Rae Nedjadi , designer of Apocalypse Keys , teach you how to play his game. In Apocalypse Keys , you play OMEN-class monsters working for an organisation named DIVISION tasked with holding back the apocalypse. Inspired by Hellboy and BPRD, the players struggle to find Keys before the villainous Harbingers unlock the Doors of Power and bring doom on the w...
Sep 25, 2023•1 hr 29 min
Support the show on Patreon Layla Adelman, who goes by the handle pandatheist in RPG spaces, is a rpg designer, writer, and serial twitter thread writer. She's one of the co-designers of the Illuminated Worlds system for Critical Role's Darrington Press. This is the system which powers Candela Obscura and potentially other unannounced games. She was an Ennies judge two years. She blogs over at Bone Box Chant at wordpress.com, including a major series collating and analysing statistics around Kic...
Aug 28, 2023•44 min
Support the show on Patreon Dave is a youtuber, reviewer and game designer. His Youtube channel, Dave Thaumavore RPG Reviews , currently has about 180 videos and more than 25,000 subscribers. He's also got a great newsletter where he publishes written interviews game design luminaries. Links to all of this stuff will be in the show notes. He's designed supplements for the Index Card RPG but his most recent standalone game is Fluxfall Horizon, a zany, scifi PbtA game of dimension hopping do-goode...
Aug 14, 2023•44 min
Support the show on Patreon Christopher Chinn is the blogger behind the long-running and well-loved Deeper in the Game blog . He's probably best-known for the Same Page Tool. But started in 2007, the blog has 15 years of thoughtful and insightful writing and advice on RPG design and play. Show Notes: 01:17 - Introducing Chris 02:54 - The origin of the blog (also "rules are for preventing bitterness between friends") 9:56 - How Chris learned to ditch the railroad and embrace improvisation 23:34 -...
Jul 29, 2023•53 min
Support the show on Patreon Emily C. Friedman is an associate professor of English at Auburn University and director of 18thconnect , a website dedicated to scholarship of the 18th century. Though an 18th-century literature scholar and critic by training, Emily is now one of the foremost chroniclers of the phenomenon we call actual play. She teaches games and actual play in the classroom and regularly writes about actual play on gaming website, Polygon . In fact, as of recording this, we're clos...
Jul 17, 2023•44 min
Support the show on Patreon On this episode, I'm talking to Becky Annison, the co-founder of UK-based design company, Black Armada Games . She's the award-winning designer of When the Dark Is Gone, part of the Seven Wonders anthology from Pelgrane Press. And is probably best known for the high drama werewolf game, Bite Marks, and GM-less mystery game, Lovecraftesque, on which she's the co-designer. When she's not working on games, she's a lawyer who works on high level climate change issues. Che...
Jun 01, 2023•46 min
Support the show on Patreon This week, we're talking to Paul Beakley has been involved with the games industry since at least the mid 1990s. He's a Game Chef finalist, a Golden Cobra honourable mention, and an official designer/adventure module writer for games like Deadlands, Earthdawn, Mutant Chronicles and more. He's also been writing about games for a long time, across various websites, forums, and magazines like Pyramid and Inphobia. But we're here today to talk about the Indie Game Reading...
May 16, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Support the show on Patreon On this episode, I'm chatting with Fiona Hopkins and Stephanie Burt , who are the co-hosts of Team Up Moves , a podcast about playing and discussing superhero tabletop RPGs. I'm a big fan of the podcast and so I reached out to the two of them. Apart from RPGs, Fiona is a front-end software engineer by trade who worked at Google, Twitter, the City of Boston and now the Democratic party. Stephanie is a poet and a professor of English at Harvard University. She's also a ...
Apr 20, 2023•1 hr 6 min
Support the show on Patreon On this episode, we're talking to Tan Shao Han , a TTRPG designer, writer, and cultural consultant from Singapore. He's contributed words to various Paizo Pathfinder books, including Lost Omens: Impossible Lands, new Dagger Isles supplement for Blades in the Dark, and other games like Monster Care Squad and ARC. He's the co-founder of Curious Chimeras , a company that makes games and games-adjacent interactive experiences. Shao Han interestingly did his Master’s Thesi...
Apr 07, 2023•42 min
Support the show on Patreon On this episode, we're talking to Indrani Ganguly who is the marketing manager for Hunters Entertainment, the publisher of Kids on Bikes, Alice is Missing, among other games. She is also the co-founder of Desis n Dragons , probably India's largest community of tabletop roleplayers. Of which, I am a humble member. Indrani is also a dicemaker, an artisan, making beautiful and custom math rocks under the name Nonagon Dice . She was a part of last year's Big Bad Con PoC L...
Mar 15, 2023•46 min
Support the show on Patreon On this episode, we're speaking to Jahmal Brown aka Mad Jay Zero . Jay is a podcaster, designer and rockstar GM. His podcast Diceology features interviews with folks from the RPG scene as well as fun recaps of his various games in Last Week in Gaming. As a game designer, he's contributed words to books like Pathfinder's magnificent Mwangi Expanse as well as designed his own games, Lifted Vol 1: Indomitable , a people with superpowers game primed by cortex. He also did...
Feb 28, 2023•53 min
Support the show on Patreon On this episode, we're speaking to Lowell Francis the writer behind the Ennie award winning RPG blog, Age of Ravens, which you can find at ageofravensgames.com . He's the co-designer of the fantastic Hearts of Wulin , a PbtA game of wuxia melodrama. He is also the Gauntlet Gaming Community Manager and co-host of Gauntlet Podcast. He is a comics author (he wrote Superman!), met his wife playing Magic the Gathering, and got knocked over by the fifth Dr. Who at a signing...
Feb 15, 2023•51 min
Support the show on Patreon On this episode, we're speaking to Judd Karlman, the podcaster behind Daydreaming about Dragons , my personal favourite source of GM advice. Every episode of his podcast has two parts: table techniques, where Judd talks offers techniques to play roleplaying games, and inspiration goat, where a real goat recommends media to Judd and he explains how that media can inspire your game. Judd is also the author of gaming supplements, most notably Dictionary of Mu, a setting ...
Jan 31, 2023•43 min
Support the show The Yes Indie'd Website // The Indie RPG Newsletter
Dec 31, 2022•37 min
Marx interviews Thomas Manuel about games journalism, the synergy or dissonance between being a playwright and being a game designer, and about his games The Spider and the City, Hypercity, and Depths Unfathomable. Yes Indie'd Pod on Twitter Yes Indie’d Pod website Yes Indie’d Pod Patreon Donate via Ko-Fi Thomas Manuel on Twitter Thomas Manuel on Itchio Thomas Manuel official website Marx Shepherd on Twitter Marx Shepherd on Itchio All music derived from: be quiet from the album Sketches by Jahz...
Dec 28, 2022•32 min
Marx interviews Cezar Capacle about Push and philosophies of game design, I Guess This Is It and minimalist story gaming, and how to publicise oneself in a post-Twitter world. This episode is kindly sponsored by Matthew Gravelyn , whose game Tapestry is available now . Yes Indie'd Pod on Twitter Yes Indie’d Pod website Yes Indie’d Pod Patreon Donate via Ko-Fi Cezar Capacle on Twitter Cezar Capacle on Itchio Cezar Capacle bio page Thomas Manuel on Twitter Thomas Manuel on Itchio Thomas Manuel off...
Nov 30, 2022•47 min
Marx interviews Michael Low of Luck of Legends Games about games in the classroom, education in games, and about the choose-your-own-adventure colouring book RPG training manual Starsworn. This episode is kindly sponsored by Matthew Gravelyn , whose game Tapestry is available now . Yes Indie'd Pod on Twitter Yes Indie’d Pod website Yes Indie’d Pod Patreon Donate via Ko-Fi Starsworn on Kickstarter Michael Low on Twitter Luck of Legends on Itchio Cezar Capacle on Twitter Cezar Capacle on Itchio Al...
Nov 14, 2022•46 min
Marx interviews James Davey of Gem and Eye Games about The Midnight World, a game about mental health, world-altering powers, and terrifying gods from other dimensions. This episode is kindly sponsored by Kurt Refling and Ian Howard , whose game Here We Used to Fly is on Kickstarter now . Yes Indie'd Pod on Twitter Yes Indie’d Pod website Yes Indie’d Pod Patreon Donate via Ko-Fi The Midnight World official website The Midnight World on Facebook The Midnight World on DTRPG / Itchio Starsworn on K...
Oct 28, 2022•30 min
Marx interviews Thomas Eliot of Sixpence Games about Fear of the Unknown, a one-shot game of building towns and investigating horrors. This episode is kindly sponsored by Kurt Refling and Ian Howard , whose game Here We Used to Fly is on Kickstarter now . Yes Indie'd Pod on Twitter Yes Indie’d Pod website Yes Indie’d Pod Patreon Donate via Ko-Fi Fear of the Unknown on Kickstarter Thomas Eliot on Twitter Sixpence Games official website The Midnight World official website The Midnight World on Fac...
Oct 28, 2022•46 min
A brief announcement about the future of Yes Indie'd Pod. Yes Indie'd Pod on Twitter Yes Indie’d Pod website All music derived from: be quiet from the album Sketches by Jahzzar is licensed under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 International License • available from Free Music Archive Support the show The Yes Indie'd Website // The Indie RPG Newsletter...
Sep 26, 2022•4 min
Marx interviews Jeremy Gage of Have You Played This, whose podcast Draw Your Dice is an educational podcast exploring how to make TTRPGs. This week’s sponsor is By Odins Beard RPG whose game We Deal In Lead is available for pre-order now ! Or, check out the Other Worlds game jam on Itchio . Yes Indie'd Pod on Twitter Yes Indie’d Pod website Yes Indie’d Pod Patreon Donate via Ko-Fi Jeremy Gage on Twitter Have You Played This? Network Draw Your Dice Podcast All music derived from: be quiet from th...
Sep 18, 2022•59 min
Marx interviews Iko of The Lost Bay Podcast, a podcast focusing on indie TTRPG zines and their creators. This week’s sponsor is Elijah Mills whose game Campfire is out now! Yes Indie'd Pod on Twitter Yes Indie’d Pod website Yes Indie’d Pod Patreon Donate via Ko-Fi The Lost Bay Podcast on Twitter The Lost Bay on Itchio The Lost Bay Podcast official website Jeremy Gage on Twitter Have You Played This? Network Draw Your Dice Podcast All music derived from: be quiet from the album Sketches by Jahzza...
Sep 04, 2022•36 min
Marx interviews Chris and Wes of Spooky Bell Games about Beyond Deep, an adventure and locale for Mörk Borg set in a mining company town. This week’s sponsor is Gamenomicon whose game Goblin Market is on Kickstarter now! Yes Indie'd Pod on Twitter Yes Indie’d Pod website Yes Indie’d Pod Patreon Donate via Ko-Fi Beyond Deep on Kickstarter Chris on Twitter / Wes on Twitter Spooky Bell Games on Instagram / Facebook / TikTok The Lost Bay Podcast on Twitter The Lost Bay on Itchio The Lost Bay Podcast...
Aug 28, 2022•31 min
