Punks and Toons
Tabletop Weekly
This week on TableTop Weekly… Jason and Peter ease into a quieter, holiday-season episode with a mix of indie highlights, industry shifts, and thoughtful commentary on where tabletop gaming culture is heading as the year winds down. The show opens with a spotlight on Hey Ho, Let’s Go Home, a new punk-infused holiday zine from Ham and Egg Publishing. Written by John Maguire and Gio Colazzo, the short story reimagines A Christmas Carol through the lens of DIY punk, following a teenage runaway visited by the ghosts of the Ramones. The hosts praise its warmth, sincerity, and strong connection...
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Just the news!
Tabletop Weekly
This week on TableTop Weekly… Jason and Peter open the show with a heartfelt thank-you to the community as the Top Secret: Tradecraft Manual Kickstarter continues to outperform expectations. With five days to go, strong backer numbers, and solid momentum in what is traditionally a difficult launch window, the hosts reflect on what this says about the Top Secret community and why expansions only matter if people are actually playing the game. The first news story covers Evil Hat Productions opening its annual game submission window. The discussion breaks down what Evil Hat is looking...
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A better way to run gaming conventions?
Tabletop Weekly
This week on TableTop Weekly… Special guest Kai Schaefer, creator of Gamers Online, joins Jayson and Peter to talk about a better way to organize tabletop conventions and events. Before the main segment, the crew rolls out a TableTop Weekly holiday gift guide, blending practical gaming tools, clever accessories, and a healthy dose of humor. Gift highlights include DIY gaming tokens, D&D-themed ornaments, 3D-printed dice trees and towers, compact GM screens, fidget-friendly dice spinners, gamer backpacks designed for books and minis, novelty ice molds shaped like polyhedral dice,...
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A New Top Secret Book!
Tabletop Weekly
This week on TableTop Weekly… The headline story is the Top Secret: Tradecraft Manual, the first major expansion for Top Secret. Written by Scott Kongable, the book deeply expands every Tradecraft skill with narrative examples, clearer mechanics, difficulty guidance, and tables, all drawn from hundreds of campaign sessions. It also introduces new Tradecraft, streamlined chase rules, and early steps toward what will eventually become Top Secret’s next edition, while remaining fully backward compatible. The discussion continues with Operation Backfill, Kongable’s massive 283-page...
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Selkie Shenanigans
Tabletop Weekly
This week on TableTop Weekly… We open with a quick Solarian update as Scott Kongable’s Top Secret: Tradecraft Manual gets a sneak peek ahead of its upcoming Kickstarter. The book expands every core Tradecraft skill with real-world research, new options, and clarifications designed to deepen espionage play without changing the heart of Top Secret. Next up is Brute Fort, a micro solo dungeon crawler packed into a double cassette case, complete with an actual cassette soundtrack. Designed by Alfred Valley with music by Gus BC, the game leans hard into analog nostalgia, punk aesthetics,...
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The maps of Jog Brogzin
Tabletop Weekly
This week on TableTop Weekly… We kick things off with a deep dive into Pioneer, a new near-future RPG built on the Traveller system. Designed by a former NASA engineer, Pioneer pushes hard sci-fi realism even further, focusing on plausible space exploration 10–20 years from now. The crew discusses what meaningful adventures look like without faster-than-light travel, touching on inspiration from The Expanse and Daniel Suarez’s Delta-V novels. Next, we break down comments from Shawn Levy regarding a potential live-action Dungeons & Dragons series for Netflix. The conversation centers...
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Tales from Gáelcon
Tabletop Weekly
This week on TableTop Weekly... Jason and Peter are joined by Rory O’Donoghue from Gáelcon to talk about Irish gaming, micro-RPGs, and the upcoming Golden Fez Awards at TotalCon 2026. The show opens with a toast to their late friend James Carpio, whose memory inspired the Fez. Nominations are now open at goldenfez.com, with returning categories like Velvet Smooth and Hack the Planet and a brand-new one: Honey, I Shrunk the Dice—celebrating one-page RPGs. From there, the crew dives into Captain Midnight and the Satellite Dead, the newest Weird Heroes of Public Access adventure, blending...
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Museum of Games Ireland
Tabletop Weekly
This week on TableTop Weekly... Jason returns from across the Atlantic, joined by Peter and their special guest Colum Lundberg, founder of the Museum of Games Ireland. It’s 1 a.m. in Killarney, but Colum is wide awake and ready to talk about preserving the history of tabletop gaming, How a small display of vintage games accidentally grew into a full museum, and how Steve Jackson’s personal archives (complete with hand-drawn maps and game notes from the 1970s) landed in his care. The conversation dives into conservation work, water-damaged documents from the early Ogre drafts, and the...
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The New Editions Episode
Tabletop Weekly
This week on TableTop Weekly... Peter hosts solo while Jason is overseas. He is joined by guest Ian McGarty from Silver Boulet Press for a quick tour through four major tabletop headlines: GURPS 4th Edition Revised, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 5th Edition, Alien RPG: Evolved Edition, and Free League’s Invincible RPG. They start with GURPS, where Steve Jackson Games announced there won’t be a 5th Edition—just a full modernization of 4th. Everything will stay compatible, right down to the original page numbers, a promise Peter and Ian find both hilarious and impossible. Warhammer Fantasy...
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Gygax Memorial Fund
Tabletop Weekly
This week on TableTop Weekly... Jason and Peter sit down with Paul Stormberg, president of the Gygax Memorial Fund, to talk about the long journey toward creating a permanent Gary Gygax Memorial in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin—the birthplace of Dungeons & Dragons. Paul shares the challenges the Fund faced over the years, including the uphill battle of convincing city leaders in a town known for its “rich and famous” residents that Dungeons & Dragons was more than just a quirky pastime. Through patient outreach and a series of local initiatives, Paul helped Lake Geneva’s leadership...
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Jason checks in from a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop and Peter is dodging a thunderstorm, but the show must go on. First up, they talk about Igniting the Spark: The Story of Magic: The Gathering, a new feature-length documentary that tracks how Peter Adkison’s basement operation, Richard Garfield’s “cheap little card game” idea, and a very risky launch turned into a global hobby and the first real “intellectual sport.” From the early cash-flow panic to the rise of the Pro Tour, they dig into why it is lighter on drama than D&D docs, but still a must-watch for Magic fans, and where you can stream it.
From cards to airwaves, the guys move on to Welcome to Night Vale: The Roleplaying Game, a boxed RPG based on the beloved surreal community-radio podcast. Built on Renegade’s Essence20 take on d20, the set includes a Visitor’s Guide, Host’s Guide, a five-part mystery, pregens, dice, and everything you need to get weird in the desert town when it lands September 9, 2025. They then cheer the reprint of Shadowrun 1st Edition from Catalyst, complete with its gloriously 1980s vision of the far-future year 2050, and talk about how much this cyberpunk-meets-urban-fantasy classic shaped the genre. Greenhorns gets the “weird space” spotlight next, a trippy, rules-light d20 game with auto-hit combat, OSR-style lethality, uncanny classes, a pile of missions, random tables, and a free quickstart to test drive. Finally, they recap a weekend at Catfest in Baltimore, a small brewery con run by Justin Sirois of Severed Books, packed with indie comics, RPGs, great beer, a dangerous food truck, and friends like Terrible Games, Levi Combs, Rising Phoenix, Feral Press’s gorgeous mega-dungeon Anox, and top-tier art from Chad Mitton.
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