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...
info_outlineThis 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 to tabletop-adjacent storytelling culture.
Next, the conversation turns to New Game Master Month, an annual January initiative designed to help first-time GMs overcome anxiety and run their first sessions. With support across multiple systems, the hosts highlight its hands-on structure and argue that mentorship and encouragement matter more than endless GM advice videos.
Creators take note as Meta quietly tests limits on link posting for Facebook professional accounts. Jason and Peter unpack what this means for small publishers, the creeping pay-to-be-seen model of social media, and why modern promotion feels more complex and less effective than traditional magazine advertising ever was.
On a lighter note, the long-awaited second edition of Toon finally arrives. With original artist Kyle Miller returning, full-color interiors, and a renewed focus on fast, slapstick play, the hosts celebrate Toon as a perfect convention and one-shot game that understands comedy is hard and supports it with strong design tools.
The episode wraps with industry news as GMT Games welcomes Candace Harris to its team. Known for her years at BoardGameGeek, Candace’s move signals a push to make deep, logistics-driven wargames more accessible. The hosts close by musing about the untapped potential of wargaming as spectator media and why someone really should turn it into a sports-style broadcast.
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