2025 Year End Bonanza

More from Dice Exploder All episodes →

1. 

   S8 · E9 · 30 min

   Keys (Lady Blackbird) with Whitney Delaglio

   Transcripts available at diceexploder.com I love pregens! But why do I love pregens? I dug into this a bunch on an episode last year with Aaron Lim about the characters in Last Train to Bremen: I love being given a clear goal and baseline temperament when I sit down to play so I can get into drama as fast as possible. But the game Lady Blackbird goes a step further. Each character has "Keys" which lay out not just character traits and goals, but the central dramatic questions and stakes each character's arc is likely to concern itself with. And that, more than anything else, is probably what…

2. 

   S8 · E3 · 48 min

   Draw Maps, Leave Blanks (Dungeon World) with Tim Denee

   Transcripts available at diceexploder.com If the thesis of last week’s episode was “hey the fiction of your game matters a lot and can even have mechanical effects,” how do you know how deeply to define that fiction? Maybe no one in indie games has recently faced that question on quite the scale of Tim Denee with Blades ‘68, an expansion to Blades in the Dark. I wanted to have him on to talk about when you completely reinvent the setting, how do you think about what parts of the fiction are important and need to be kept vs what parts should evolve and change? And to do that, we picked an old…

3. 

   S6 · E8 · 28 min

   Lures (Heaven in the Dust) with Barclay Travis and Bee Alexander

   Transcripts are available at diceexploder.com Bee and Barclay are the hosts of Tabletop Book Club, a podcast that is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a show with such fun energy, and of course good design talk. Because Barclay has a new belonging outside belonging game that's just come out - Begin Again, check the link below - today I'm talking with them about lures, maybe my favorite part of the belonging outside belonging engine, and specifically how they're implemented in Heave in the Dust... Further Reading Heaven in the Dust by Luke Jordan Begin Again by Barclay Travis Dream Askew /…

4. 

   S5 · E9 · 38 min

   Fallout (Liminal Horror) with Craig Shipman

   Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Further Reading Liminal Horror, Heart, Blades in the Dark, Cairn Socials Craig on Bluesky and Linktree Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory , our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Credits Our logo was designed by sporgory , our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey. This episode was edited by Em Acosta.

5. 

   S6 · E7 · 46 min

   Love, Sex, and Romance: The War (Will That Be All?) with Kim Lam

   Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Today we’re wrapping up the Dice Exploder series on love, sex, and romance with Will That Be All? by Graham Walmsley, a game about the social relationships between the downstairs staff at Melton Hall, a fictional British estate, over the course of about a decade between the first and second world wars. It’s a lovely game about finding solace and community even as the world outside feel deeply uncertain - and that’s what Kim wanted to talk about: how setting, and in this case the spectre of war, can encourage and affect how not just romance but…

6. 

   S5 · E12 · 58 min

   Safety Tools, and Players Are More Important Than The Game, with Sarah Lynne Bowman

   Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Safety in RPGs and larp is a huge topic, one I’ve wanted to cover on Dice Exploder for a long time, but one I’ve avoided it because it feels hard to approach inside the “pick one mechanic” format of this show. Even more than most mechanics I cover on Dice Exploder, I feel like most safety mechanics are in conversation with each other in both logistical ways—how they compliment each other—but also in the philosophy behind their existence in the first place, how including these mechanics at the table is ideally a statement about how we’d like to treat…

7. 

   S7 · E7 · 59 min

   Inventory Tetris (Mausritter) with Quinns

   Transcripts available at diceexploder.com Mausritter is an old school dungeon crawling game where instead of playing as elves fighting dragons, you play as mice fleeing from owls. It’s not unlike any number of other old school games like Cairn or Into the Odd, but its inventory system is the only inventory system I’ve ever actually liked. Does it work differently than other games? At a raw numbers level, not really! But instead of a bunch of paper bookkeeping, Mausritter turns items into little cardboard squares like board game pieces that you put in a grid on your character sheet. That…

8. 

   S8 · E1 · 43 min

   Setting Elements (Dream Askew / Dream Apart) with Kodi Gonzaga

   Transcripts available at diceexploder.com There's many ways to decide who has authority over what in an RPG. Traditional games have a bunch of players with one PC each and a GM responsible for everything else, while Dreams Askew / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Ben Rosenbaum takes a very different approach: divide that "everything else" up into flavorful pieces, like "gossip & reputation" and "the wild forest" and give everyone a piece. That choice has become one of the backbones of Belonging Outside Belonging games (hacks of Dream Askew / Dream Apart), and today I'm joined by my good friend…