Roleplaying problems, made gameable.
Gaming on the Frontier treats tabletop roleplaying as a practical design conversation, not a rules lecture. Its speakers test ideas like Old West adventures, small-scale adventures, cyberpunk additions, downtime scenes, and old modules against what would actually happen at the table.
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Gaming on the Frontier is a tabletop RPG conversation show with a long memory and a practical GM brain. It is not built around slick summaries. It moves like a table discussion, with Bruce, Trav, and Jonathan prompting, correcting, joking, and following examples until the design problem becomes clearer. The show often starts with a simple premise. Then it asks what that premise would break. Old modules are treated as raw material that can be reworked for your own settings. Non-adventure roleplaying becomes a case for laundry, downtime, slice-of-life scenes, and the everyday pressure that can make a character feel real. The Old West episodes slow down over definitions, player expectations, different versions of the West, and the danger of assuming everyone at the table imagines the same setting. That patience is part of the point. A Western campaign can be straight, strange, or suddenly invaded by aliens, but the table needs to know what kind of game it is playing. The micro-world episodes show the show's favorite move especially well. Tiny adventurers are not just cute; they have stride length problems, heat problems, travel problems, insect and animal problems, and strange advantages if the system gives them ghostly or portal-based options. Cyberpunk gets similar treatment. The show looks at how modification, body discomfort, mission control, and broken promises might change the feel of an existing campaign. It likes genre references, but it uses them as tools. Dust Devils, Delta Green, Gulliver's Travels, Ant-Man, Fringeworthy, Old Man's War, and other examples become ways to test what an idea actually does in play. The humor is familiar. The advice is rarely compressed, but it is usually pointed toward making games run better. For listeners who enjoy RPG craft in its messy workshop form, Gaming on the Frontier has the feel of experienced players thinking out loud at length.
Made for: Best for tabletop GMs and RPG players who enjoy practical campaign design and long conversational problem-solving. It suits listeners already comfortable with RPG vocabulary and older genre references.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by treating strange premises as problems for the table: scale, tone, travel, player assumptions, and fictional consequences all get tested. Its relaxed panel style lets useful advice emerge through examples rather than tight instruction.
Gaming on the Frontier podcast covers the gamut of roleplaying topics from how to handle time travel in your game, playing extreme characters, to topics that every GM ought to know.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Bruce, Trav, and Jonathan test speculative gaming ideas by tracing the practical consequences that can turn a premise into a playable campaign.
Gaming on the Frontier turns speculative premises into practical questions for the tabletop. Bruce, Trav, and Jonathan work through ideas conversationally, testing how a strange world, altered body, or dramatic change of scale would affect characters and campaigns.
A mouse-sized adventurer needs a ride; your campaign prep suddenly has a transportation department.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Tiny-scale adventure becomes a practical rules puzzle, not just a novelty.
Gaming on the Frontier uses its micro-world setup to open a practical rules discussion: how far characters can move, how scale shapes pace, and why ordinary travel becomes the first real hurdle.
Tiny scale, real consequences, with a long look at Gulliver's Travels.
Bruce, Trav, and Jonathan spend the episode thinking through the micro world, where anything smaller than a human, and sometimes only as large as a small animal, changes how danger, strength, and simple problem-solving work.
A grounded look at what cyberpunk does to an RPG campaign once it moves in.
Gaming on the Frontier considers how much cyberpunk pressure an existing campaign can take before the setting starts to give way. The episode moves from an 80s kids-on-bikes frame into body modification, body dysphoria, cyber psychosis, coercive bargains, and the altered bodies…
A grounded look at adding cyberpunk's high-tech, low-life pressure to an existing campaign.
The episode treats cyberpunk less as a destination setting than as a pressure you can bring into a campaign already in motion. The hosts use William Gibson, Burning Chrome, Johnny Mnemonic, and the GURPS phrase "high-tech, low-life" to pin down the mood, then shift to the harder…
A loose, reference-rich isekai discussion that turns broken world rules into playable problems.
Gaming on the Frontier treats isekai as more than a portal premise. The hosts draw a line between almost familiar places and worlds where the rules themselves can bend, moving from Pleasantville's single altered condition to the Shadowlands of Wraith and the diceless elasticity…
A space-western campaign takes shape through salvage work, frontier investigations, and a practical turn into life support and terraforming.
Bruce, Trav, and Jonathan keep developing a space-western role-playing game, with Bruce leaning toward running a freelance crew of ship salvagers and troubleshooters.
Dice, divine mysteries, and the trouble with good intentions.
Bruce, Trav, and Jonathan define isekai as leaving one world and waking up in another, then use Pleasantville to show a near-copy setting where color and social norms change without changing physics.
Okay, so: space western salvage work, with bolts showing.
Gaming on the Frontier's Episode 848 continues a homebrewed Savage Worlds Adventure Edition fantasy campaign with GM Bruce, Trav as Stark, and Jonathan as Silas Meros.
This episode discusses how to adapt and rework existing RPG modules for custom campaign settings, offering practical tips for game masters.
This episode discusses non-adventure role-playing, focusing on slice-of-life gameplay during character downtime, with examples like Delta Green.
This episode discusses the indie RPG game Dust Devils, its 2002 Game of the Year award, new edition features, and how it uses playing cards and poker chips for Old West-themed gameplay.
This episode discusses gaming in the Old West, focusing on the cultural dynamics between early settlers and Native American tribes, including practices like wife-stealing.
This episode discusses how to approach playing role-playing games set in the Old West, focusing on defining the setting and aligning player expectations.
Okay, so Bruce, Trav, and Jonathan settle into adventuring in the micro world, where size changes everything and distance quickly becomes the real problem.
Bruce opens with the banter, then quickly turns size into a problem you can actually game out.
["Gaming on the Frontier episode 816 is about adding cyberpunk elements to an existing campaign, with Kids on Bikes, Forgotten Realms, and noir settings as the main test cases.
Gaming on the Frontier Episode 815 starts with William Gibson's high-tech low-life and turns it into a practical question about adding cyberpunk to an existing RPG campaign.
The hosts discuss issues with the Savage Worlds roleplaying game's advancement system, focusing on stats, skills, feats, and flaws.
This episode is a role-playing game session where players form a crew on a freelance troubleshooting ship operating in the Kuiper belt, responding to emergencies and salvage missions in a sublight-speed setting.
The hosts discuss dealing with the Faerie Realm and Fae in role-playing games, focusing on their rules and customs, particularly food and drink intolerance, with references to Palladium games like Rifts.
The hosts of Gaming on the Frontier introduce a new episode about dealing with the fairy realm and fae in gaming, featuring guest Courtney Stoll.
This episode continues a series on choosing or creating the perfect game system, focusing on the importance of randomness in game design.