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 / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum

Socials

Tabletop Book Club, Bee, and Barclay on Bluesky

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.

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

My friend Tristan Zimmerman is currently crowdfunding Ballad Hunters, a GUMSHOE game, meaning it’s based on a core mechanic built for investigation games and gathering clues. That mechanic goes like this: “always give the players the clue.” Simple! And I think so astute as to what the actual fun part of investigation is in RPGs: it’s not “can we roll high enough to progress,” it’s “once we have all these clues, how do we put them together and what do we do with them?”

Further Reading

Ballad Hunters by Tristan Zimmerman, now on Kickstarter

GUMSHOE by Cat Tobin, a list of resources for and articles about GUMSHOE

The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola

Socials

Tristan on Bluesky.

Molten Sulfur Blog, Nations & Cannons, and Shanty Hunters from Tristan

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.

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

I bet you’ve heard of this game Triangle Agency. Big exciting Kickstarter, super flashy product design, a game with… spoilers in the back? It’s corporate horror, it’s packed gorgeous art, it’s a game I spent 20 sessions with in 2025. And I… had a pretty frustrating time with the game. There is so much I love and admire about Triangle Agency, but also so much I struggled with, and I wanted to break it all down on the show.

And I didn’t want to do that without bringing on someone who could unabashedly sing this game’s praises, because I think the game deserves that too. So today I’m joined by the general manager of my campaign, moderator of the Dice Exploder discord, my friend Seraphina Garcia Ramirez, to talk about the voice of Triangle Agency's game text and really the whole game at large.

It's the longest episode of Dice Exploder ever. Let's go.

Further Reading

Triangle Agency by Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland

Socials

Seraphina on Bluesky and itch

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.

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 mechanic from Dungeon World that cuts to the heart of it: draw maps, leave blanks. But how detailed of maps, and how big of blanks?

Further Reading

Blades 68 on Backerkit

Blades in the Dark by John Harper

Dungeon World

Tim’s maps of Doskvol

Socials

Tim on Bluesky and olddog.games

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.

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

In Blades in the Dark, you play as criminals in Doskvol a haunted city where the ghosts are such a problem that they built giant lightning barriers around the whole city to keep them out. That sentence alone already makes me want to get the game to the table, and we haven’t even gotten to the rules of Blades in the Dark yet.

That’s the conversation I wanted to take a crack at today: rules are important, they can radically shape play, but the fiction a game brings is just as important. Doskvol’s lightning barriers mean you can’t just run away into the wilderness after you’ve committed some crimes, and that’s just as important for ratcheting up the tension and consequences of your campaign as the mechanic of devil’s bargains...

Further Reading

Blades in the Dark by John Harper

Mythic Bastionland by Chris McDowall

Apocalypse World 3e/Burned Over by Meguey & Vincent Baker

Wanderhome by Jay Dragon

Vincent Baker on How Apocalypse World Is Structured (like an onion)

In Praise of Legwork by Sam Sorensen

1d20 Diegetic Rules, 1d20 Hypo-Diegetic Rules by Sam Sorensen

The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola

Socials

Nova on Bluesky. Nova’s blog, Playful Void.

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.

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 Kodi Gonzaga, a designer making just such a game, to break down exactly how it works at the table.

Kodi's game Extra Ordinary is on Kickstarter now. Check it out!

Further Reading

Dream Askew / Dream Apart by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum

Socials

Extra Ordinary on Kickstarter!

Kodi on Bluesky.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon

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.

Dice Exploder: Afterimage is alternative show format, a cross between play report and personal memoir.

The Experimental Role-Playing Laboratory, or ERPL, was a thrice a year mini convention put on by students at my college back in the 00s and 10s and onward to this day. It's how I got into indie games. I still think about it, and the people I met there, to this day. They still mean something to me. What might I still mean to them?

Written, edited, and performed by Sam Dunnewold

Tristan Zimmerman at the Molten Sulfur blog

Steven’s newsletter and novels. Try Black Velvet to start.

Transcript available at www.diceexploder.com

Music by Blue Dot Sessions: https://app.sessions.blue/

My games: sdunnewold.itch.io

Follow me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/diceexploder.com

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

It's the Dice Exploder 2025 year end bonanza! This year I'm joined by Lin Codega and Diogo Nogueira to go over a whole bunch of game mechanics that we think represent where rpgs were at in 2025 and where they might be going in the future.

Further Reading

Mythic Bastionland by Chris McDowall

Praise the Hawkmoth King by Sage the Anagogue

I want to fight my friends in the back of a moving truck by Seraphina Garcia Ramirez

Traffic Lights Are Communication Tools by Meguey Baker

Daggerheart

Draw Steel

The One Ring starter set

Sam Sorensen’s overview of Over/Under and one of Lin’s pieces on the aftermath

Apocalypse World 3e Kickstarter (now finished)

Socials

Rascal.news

Weird Games and Weirder People

Lin and Diogo on Bluesky.

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Dice Exploder on Patreon