Eric is the host of Imaginary Worlds, a podcast about sci-fi, fantasy, immersive storytelling and creative inspiration. Every episode, he goes on a deep dive of fictional worlds, stories, and the people behind them to showcase what makes the worlds of fandom and fiction so capitvating. We sat down to play Anyone Can Wear the Mask, a TTRPG love letter to superhero comic books: A game about a hero, a villain, and the city they share.
Dr. Friedman is a professor of storytelling outside the rules of mass media, including never-published manuscripts from during the age of print (1750-1900), and more recently, the history and world of TTRPG Actual Play. Her next book, The Actual History of Actual Play, is being published by MIT.
I couldn’t name a better guest to sit down with as we celebrate 11 great years of Party of One with a game of The Creation of Wonder by Eve Golden-Woods. We sat down for a wonderful discussion about stewardship, archiving, preservation, and a story about the compiling of the world’s foremost collection of animated GIFs.
Caleb is one of my favorite designers AND podcasters (you have to check out Nightcrawler is My Boyfriend, it is a joy), and so I was thrilled when he reached out about the new game he’s releasing, The House Edge. It is a mashup of Triangle Agency and FIST (two of my favorite RPGs), in which a squad of paranormal mercenary thieves team up to take down an otherworldly casino owner who wronged them… and end up infiltrating a twisted time loop facility as a result. It is EXTREMELY MY JAM.
Sasha is the creator of Spindlewheel, an interpretive tarot-like storytelling game where you weave together a story from card to card (and one of my favorite games of the past decade!). To wrap up our impromptu Spindlewheel trilogy on the show, we sat down with the special Spindlenoir deck to tell the story of a big-city dreamer cursed with deadly ambition in Adorned With Curses by Avalyn Ramsay.
Vera Drew is a director, writer, editor, and actor, who won the 2024 Gotham Award for Breakthrough Director for her debut feature film The People’s Joker, an unauthorized, autobiographical transgender coming of age story filtered through the language of Batman comics. (If you can’t imagine why that sentence has me screaming, you don’t know me very well.)
Because Vera is a huge Magic: The Gathering Commander fan, we played a game of The Fallen using one of her favorite Commander decks (including some fan-made cards!) to tell the story of a paladin, their god, and the long road that follows their fall from grace.
Matt is the host and creator of Merely Roleplayers, a long-running actual play podcast focused on theatrical performers enjoying tabletop RPGs together. He’s also the creator and writer of I Need A Miracle, an audio drama about a world purely through its people’s prayers for miracles, some of which are granted in ways that cause problems for everyone. Season 1 was a NJ Web Fest selection and award finalist, and season 2 is currently crowdfunding.
We sat down for a creative interview and discussion over a game of The Mountain, a Spindlewheel Microgame about a god, locked in the peak of a mountain, and its followers, scaling the mountain to free that god… for good or for ill.
To celebrate 500 episodes(!) of the show, I sat down with a bunch of my friends to play The Creation of Wonder by Eve Golden-Woods. We told the story of The Singularity Cycle, Phase I. The Blade of the Exarchs, a multimedia rock opera cinematic experience adapted from 20 years of TTRPG campaign notes.
Thank you to my guests on this episode: Noah Houlihan, Jonaya Kemper, Hazel Amber Goswick, Alex Pearlman (Pearlmania500), Audrey Ladytabletop, KeganEXE, Marn Lastname, Caleb Zane Huett, Christine Prevas, Dr. Emily Friedman, Sophia Ricciardi, His Name Was Dusk, Kendrick Smith, AJ Ray AKA Hooshakid, Meghan Cross, Kienna Shaw, Jadzia Axelrod, Cate Osborn (Catieosaurus), Aaron Voigt, Dillin Apelyan, Stentor Danielson, Caro Asercion, Kevin Gallagher, Riley Hopkins, Lucas, Sarah Gailey, Matt Boothman, Elisabeth McCaughrean, Quinn Majeski, Grant, Mike Schubert, Patrick Kenny, Barclay Travis, Richard Kreutz-Landry, Steph Beck Fey, Dewayne Feenstra, and Adam Vass.
Caldwell is an illustrator, storyboard artist, writer, director, producer, and voice actor. You know him from Not Another D&D Podcast, as one of the creators of Drawfee, and from his new game, Drawnsters, a DIY card game battle video game currently on Kickstarter.
We wanted something weird, and inventive, and funny, and surreal, and so Project ECCO by Elliot Davis felt like an absolutely perfect fit. So I cracked out my calendar and we broke down a story of a time agent chasing a temporal anomoly across time and space (causing untold havoc along the way).
Emily is one of the hosts of This Week in Fandom History, a podcast which breaks down different foundational moments that shaped and shook fandom culture over the years–from those you know like the back of your hand, to those you might never have heard of before.
We got deep in the paint with our shared love of superhero fandom in a game of In The Shadow Of Glory, a two-player letter writing game about a hero and villain so deeply intertwined, they have become the only people on earth who understand one another.
V is one of the hosts of This Week in Fandom History, a podcast about notable events across fan culture, from the very recent to the pioneering moments of fandom. We sat down to play Un-Navigateable by K Ramstack, a solo tabletop RPG about the experience of cataloging an old blog off before taking ti down from the internet. It’s a great opportunity to examine our own history of fandom, and the particular ways we came of age on the Internet.