Ludonarrative Dissidents

Special guests Gareth Hanrahan (The One Ring RPG and too many games to count) and Ben Robbins (Microscope) join us for another live episode of LND to discuss game design and history.

Back the LND Kickstarter today and join our book club on game design!

We hosted a live episode to talk about the launch of our Season 4 Kickstarter. Join me, Greg Stolze, James Wallis and special guests Meg and Vincent Baker (Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard and many more) as we discuss the history of RPGs, possible games we may review for Season 4 and many other topics!

The Season 4 LND Kickstarter pre-launch page is live! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rosspayton/ludonarrative-dissidents-podcast-season-4The Quiet Year is a map game. You define the struggles of a post-apocalyptic community, and attempt to build something good within their quiet year. Every decision and every action is set against a backdrop of dwindling time and rising concern.We were fortunate enough to have two very special guests for this episode.Avery Alder is the Quiet Year's creator and an award winning game designer. You can find her website at https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/ and she's on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/lackingceremony.bsky.socialOrder the Quiet Year https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-yearor from DrivethruRPG https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/110152/the-quiet-year?affiliate_id=465273Dr. Emily Friedman studies actual play and storytelling. She has an upcoming book on the history of Actual Play. You can find her on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/ecfriedman.comand on https://patreon.com/ecfriedman

We recently completed season 3 and are going to launch a Kickstarter on October 13 to fund a fourth season!

Follow the Kickstarter campaign to be notified when the campaign goes live!

This live episode discusses what will be new for the fourth season. We plan to have shorter book reviews in our live episodes, along with special segments. To that end, I review the new Mothership bounty hunting supplement, Wages of Sin.

We're also hosting a book club on game design, where each host reads and discusses multiple books with backers.

Watch the video version of this episode.

IN OUR TRADITIONAL style, as we reach the end of the season we’re bringing you a couple of Actual Play sessions of games that we’ve covered in earlier episodes, putting some actual ludo-ing into the customary narrative.

This episode is the first part of the Ludonarrative Dissidents Season 3 finale and we are delighted that Kevin Kulp, co-designer of Swords of the Serpentine, volunteered to administer a one-off adventure for Greg, Ross and James. It was a splendid evening of entertainment, running the system through its paces as we hurtled through several of the setting’s notable locations, and finding every possible opportunity to fall in the water.

SWORDS OF THE SERPENTINE is a game of fantasy shenanigans in a labyrinthine sinking city populated by rogues, schemers, cultists, swashbucklers and your player characters, written by Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner, and published by Pelgrane Press in 2022. It uses a variation of the Gumshoe system originally created by Robin D. Laws in 2007. The book has 396 pages.

• Swords of the Serpentine at Pelgrane Press
• Swords of the Serpentine at DriveThruRPG

No conventional show-notes this time, except to express our thanks to Kevin for giving up an evening to escort us through his co-creation, and to you for giving up your time to listen to it. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Thank you for listening! The hosts of this episode were Ross Payton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis, with audio editing by Ross and show notes by James. We hope you enjoyed it. If anything in this podcast or these notes has spurred your interest then we invite you to come and chat about it on our friendly Discord.

If you click on any of the above links to DriveThruRPG and buy something, Ludonarrative Dissidents will receive a small affiliate fee. You will not be charged more, and the game’s publisher will not receive less, it’s a win-win-win. Thank you for supporting the podcast this way.

DIALECT: A Game About Language And How It Dies is a 2018 single-session RPG by Hakan Seyalioglu and Kathryn Hymes, published by Thorny Games. It’s a game about a small community, isolated from larger groups, that first creates its own verbal forms to describe its situation, and then must adapt or lose them as the community reacts to external threats. It is critically acclaimed and a winner of multiple awards.

• Dialectat Thorny Games
• Dialect at Wikipedia
• Preview sample of the Dialect rulebook

Read the full show notes here.

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Our livestream discussion for August!

Watch the episode on Youtube

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SWORDS OF THE SERPENTINE is a game of fantasy shenanigans in a labyrinthine sinking city populated by rogues, schemers, cultists, swashbucklers and your player characters, written by Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner, and published by Pelgrane Press in 2022. It uses a variation of the Gumshoe system originally created by Robin D. Laws in 2007.

• Swords of the Serpentine at Pelgrane Press
• Swords of the Serpentine at DriveThruRPG

Full show notes are here

Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our livestream discussion for June!

Watch the episode on Youtube

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discuss this episode on our Discord.

CHICAGO BY NIGHT is a 2018 city sourcebook for Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition, written by Matthew Dawkins and a host of others, and published by Renegade Game Studios, who have the rights to do all this stuff these days. The most recent iteration of a sourcebook that first appeared in 1991, this edition is by far the longest at 357 pages. It describes the vampire culture, clans, people, locations, backstory and subterfuges of the eponymous city. (‘Eponymous’, because I always have to check, means ‘lending its name to’ a thing, not ‘taking its name from’). We talked about the latest edition of Vampire the Masquerade earlier this season and concluded that it did what it needs to in a suitable style, if you like that sort of thing. How does that fit with huge chunks of crunchy campaign-world detail like this? Don’t click that dial!

• Chicago by Night at DriveThruRPG (there’s more information here than at the publishers’ website)
• Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition at DriveThruRPG
• The original Chicago by Night from 1991 at DriveThruRPG
• Chicago by Night second edition (1993) at DriveThruRPG

Read the full show notes here.

Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our livestream discussion for May, featuring special guest Jerry Grayson of Khepera Publishing. Check out the Godsend Agenda today.

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Our April livestream!

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IN MEDIAS RES is a short modern-horror scenario (‘adventure’ is the wrong word for it) by John Scott Tynes, originally designed for Cthulhu Now and first printed in The Unspeakable Oath issue 10 in 1993. It was reprinted in The Resurrected #3 – Out of the Vault in 2003. Thirty years after its publication, it still lives up to its reputation as an unflinching piece of modern horror RPG design that’s genuinely horrific.

Read the full show notes here.

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Our March livestream!

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MAELSTROM is a paperback-format RPG written by Alex Scott and published in 1984 by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Books in the UK. It contains rules for roleplaying in Europe, mostly England, at the time of the Tudors (the 1500s), with a solo adventure, a sample adventure and a herbiary. It is an interesting comparison to the other 1980s British RPG set in a faux-Europe of the early Renaissance, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which was published two years later.

The game was re-released by Arion Games in 2008, and the company has also released an expanded version and several supplements, as well as standalone titles Maelstrom Domesday (set after the Norman invasion), Maelstrom Rome and Maelstrom Gothic.

• Maelstrom at Wikipedia
• Maelstrom at DriveThruRPG

Read the full show notes here.

Discuss this episode on our Discord.

We have a special guest, Adam Scott Glancy, one of the Delta Green co-authors! He clarifies a few points about Delta Green Countdown.

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Sponsor: Technical Difficulties Podcast- check out an excellent actual play RPG podcast, featuring Delta Green, Eclipse Phase, and many other fine systems featured on LND.

Delta Green Countdown is a massive sourcebook for the original edition of Delta Green. It blows the doors off the world of Delta Green, reaching wider and digging deeper to map the terrain of the twisted pulp apocalypse we call the dawning of the 21st century. How has it aged since then?

Read the full show notes here.

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Our first livestream of the year! We talk about new games we played and a grabag of topics.

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ALICE IS MISSINGis a self-contained one-session RPG for 3–5 players, designed by Spenser Stark and released in 2020 by Hunters Entertainment with Renegade Game Studios, after a Kickstarter that raised $138,000. It’s been described as ‘unique’, ‘sublime’ and ‘a little masterpiece’, and has won a bagful of awards including three 2021 Gold ENNIEs and the Indiecade award for tabletop design.

Read the full show notes here

• Alice is Missing homepage
• Alice is Missing online game
• Alice is Missing at DriveThruRPG

Discuss this episode on our Discord.

Our monthly livestream for December!

Watch the livestream here.

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