Welcome home.
This is Audio EXP for July 12th, and the episode title is “What the heck?”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #294]
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Empyreal Media Productions won the RPG Publisher Spotlight this month. I’m in touch, and we’re getting the Q&A ball rolling.
It’s been a week of big RPG news and Prime Day. Let’s start with the latter as I’m disappointed with the lack of TTRPGs in Big Heckin’ Four-Day Prime Day.
We ran a megathread and added sections of manga, graphic and light novels to support what could have been a standalone post all about tabletop RPGs. In practice, I found only Renegade’s Hunter: The Reckoning in the true Prime Day sale. That might be due to changes at the World of Darkness as well, more on that later.
However, I did find other TTRPG deals which I added to the megathread because a deal is a deal and those included Marvels’ Multiverse RPG, some Pathfinder and a Hooded Man RPG based on the old BBC Robin Hood series.
My best buy in the sale was the SnapGrip ShiftCam Classic, which I look forward to using to convert my smartphone into something easier to use at conventions. 2025 was the first Prime Day in which reviewers could buy, receive and review items all in the same sale.
And while I was doing all this, where was Bronwen, you might ask? She’s been having a honeymoon break after gettng married but signs that she’s coming back to blogging can be found with a review of her rather spectacular wedding dress. I’m not going to pronounce the brand, but it was an armour-themed dress, and the review has weddings of Bronwen and Murdo waving a sword around behind one of our local castles, where the event took place.
I’m going from weddings to combat. There’s no connection. We had a great guest post from Alexander Atoz of DragonEncounters.com on How to Make Combat Interesting. There are some great tips in here, and I especially like the balance between having surprises but not having bosses mysteriously only start to use important powers in the very final stages when they could and should have been using them from the start.
It’s odd, though, that after 50 years of D&D, we’re still asking ‘How do we make combat interesting?’.
The next combat topic is more important. Previously, we’ve covered the collapse of Diamond Comic Distributors, how the goods in their warehouses have been seized by the liquidators and the tabletop games and comic book companies caught up in that. Dynamite, last week, was going to struggle to pay staff. This week, Green Ronin Publishing has a GoFundMe to secure legal representation and fight the legal technicality in court. If you have spare dollars to donate, you can find the links on Geek Native and via the show notes.
On the blog this week, we talked to Tove and Erik of Midnight Tower about The Adventurer’s Guide to Eastern Farraway. This book is finally on Kickstarter, smashing the funding goal and follows years of adventures from Midnight Tower, all of which are set in the low fantasy but 5e realm of Eastern Farraway.
In the interview, we touch on D&D games without whimsy, the Scandinavian influences in the game and the journey Midnight Tower has been on.
I also talk to Padraig and Dominic of Cubicle 7 about Warhammer: The Old World. This new Warhammer TTRPG is set 240 years before Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but, as we unearth in the interview, a crossover feels inevitable.
Other indie RPG news this week comes from Daniel D. Fox, known for Zweihander who announced Nocturne. Nocturne feels different as it’s grim in the gothic horror sense, and rules light, and more Poe than Lovecraft or jump scares.
In the other corner, on the blog, there’s a preview of Adventuring Family, which is a newish TTRPG from a small team of teachers, psychologists and psychotherapists and designed to be family therapy for kids with certain challenges.
Before we get on to the news from the big end of the TTRPG pool, I want to touch on Porcupine Publishing being bold and perhaps too bold. They’ve published the TTRPG Bear Grylls Gone Wild. That caught my attention because Bear Grylls as a TV celeb and while I’ve not seen his shows, I know they’re about wilderness survival and tips.
Then, as I read the blurb, I realised the game was about him kidnapping co-host Holly Willoughby and the PCs trying to rescue her. Now, Holly is another TV celeb who is unfortunately the victim of a real-life attempted kidnapping and stalking. It’s possible that Porcupine didn’t know that, or, I guess, maybe I’m being too sensitive. What do you think?
Now, what about that news from the corporate end of the tabletop hobby I promised? Dungeons & Dragons has a new boss. His name is Dan Ayoub, he’s ex-Microsoft, and was at Halo while it was good.
Dan isn’t just the new boss but he’s the boss of it all as D&D is becoming a franchise model. Dan sits at the top of the pyramid, which will include merch deals, computer games, comics, TV and books. Wizards of the Coast didn’t really shine on the light that it was not like this before, and I just have to guess that the computer game companies had some more leeway. An example of why that might not have been a good idea is the expensive failure of Sigil, WotC’s attempt at a VTT, which never seemed to get the tabletop games vibe at all.
We’re not through either as ex-Wizards of the Coast marcoms VP Jess Lanzillo has popped up at the World of Darkness. She’ll now be the Creative Director. I think that’s a slightly different role for her than previously, although I’m sure she’s had lots of exposure to creative directors from her adland days and even at Wizards of the Coast. It’s a power hire from the newly remade White Wolf.
Lastly, in our outro section, we’ve three squared hunbles. I say that because the first one, GURPS and Pyramid, is a set of three in itself over at The Bundle of Holding. If you’re looking for a truckload of downloads and interested in one of the original generic RPG systems, it’s worth checking out.
The other Bundle of Holding deal is for The Dark Eye, an English language bundle for a TTRPG that has outsold D&D in Germany in previous years.
Lastly, and with a few days left on the clock at Humble, there’s a Numenera Collection. This game is set 1 billion years into the future, with technology regressed and yet with nanites everywhere to give the illusion of magic.
That’s a wrap. Keep safe, stick it to the man, and I’ll see you next week.
