Tabletop design, talked through slowly.
[insert quest here] follows long, generous conversations with tabletop RPG makers about how games get imagined, written, funded, shared, and revised. It stays close to craft, but lets convention costs, print logistics, cultural context, and personal design history matter too.
PRESS PLAY
[insert quest here] is a long-running tabletop RPG interview show built around careful, open-ended conversations with designers, publishers, organizers, and other people working in the game-making ecosystem. Its center of gravity is role-playing design. The show is not only interested in finished books or clean elevator pitches; it spends just as much time on the working conditions, community networks, and creative compromises that shape those games before they reach a table. Ray’s interview style is relaxed and context-heavy. Questions often arrive after a story, a comparison, or a practical observation, which gives guests a broad runway before narrowing into process. That rhythm suits the material. Recent conversations cover queer games exhibitions, autobiographical solo RPGs, cultural consulting, anti-colonial design, charity bundles, Kickstarter campaigns, cooperative publishing, and the business problem of turning an already-finished project into a print edition. The show is warm, but it does not smooth over difficulty. Convention booth costs, travel, insurance, distributors, art budgets, and the limits of publishing all become part of the design conversation. So do questions of representation, self-expression, colonial history, genre violence, and who gets lifted into the field next. The best episodes feel like listening in on people who already know the terrain comparing notes in public. There is enthusiasm here, but it is usually attached to the labor: the layout choices, the framework decisions, the community bundles, the stubborn act of making a big book match its creators’ vision. The show assumes its audience can follow references to PbtA, Firebrands, solo journaling games, itch pages, Kickstarter, PAX, and design scenes without much hand-holding. That gives it a specific texture. It is not a beginner’s tour of role-playing games. It is closer to a friendly, candid back room at a convention, where the talk keeps returning to how games carry memory, politics, collaboration, and care.
Made for: For tabletop RPG players, designers, editors, publishers, and scene regulars who like process-heavy interviews. It especially suits listeners interested in small-press games, queer game spaces, solo RPGs, and the realities behind publishing.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by treating logistics as part of design rather than background noise. Conversations make room for costs, access, community labor, cultural context, and the unfinished thinking behind creative choices.
[insert quest here] is a Queer Australian podcast that focuses on Role Playing Games. We love telling diverse stories, and so we do our best to lift up the voices of our community by showing off new and innovative games, from a bunch of designers.We have a lot of Actual Plays, and interviews, and sometime host other content that is harder to define.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Ray's focused interviews connect role-playing game design with publishing realities, cultural expression, and the communities working to broaden access.
[insert quest here] follows role-playing games back to the people making them. Ray's interviews are generous without going soft: introductions establish each guest's work, then the questions move into design choices, creative ambitions, and the material conditions around…
From an autobiographical RPG to convention table costs, your curiosity about games can get gloriously specific.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A warm conversation about queer games, exhibition spaces, and the cost of making tabletop work visible.
Interview with Xavier Ho traces the thinking behind Pride at Play, an exhibition that brought queer games into gallery spaces during Sydney World Pride and later in Port Phillip.
Logan makes a solo game from his life, and Ray considers the writing behind it.
Logan has turned his own life into a solo tabletop role-playing game. Ray starts by asking how he went from playing games to making them, then lets Logan explain the rules. Players choose scenes drawn from events in his life and roll dice to see how each scene turns out.
Ray and Bashir Gauss discuss factions, historical friction, and the choices each table makes in play.
Ray and Bashir Gauss talk about the trouble with making tabletop role-playing games out of history: players need factions they can work with, but those factions should still have disagreements and ways to go wrong.
Ray and Kat browse a solo game bundle, tracing its game influences and talking through practical design choices.
In Solo But Not Alone, Ray and Kat browse the annual solo game bundle Kat organizes for Jasper's Game Day. Kat publishes games as Peach Garden Games, and the two find plenty to talk about on the bundle's itch page.
Sin and Pam weigh the publishing choices behind bringing Navatham's End to print.
Navatham's End is finished and laid out, but getting it into print still leaves Sin and Pam with choices. In this follow-up, Ray asks them about finding a publishing partner when publishers may prefer to come aboard earlier.
Old-school GM craft, talked through plainly.
Shadowrun actual play with community signal.
Tabletop creators, systems, and stories in conversation.
World of Darkness books, argued at table depth.
Horror RPG craft from the shadowed classroom.
An interview with game designer Spencer Campbell about his RPGs and design journey.
Host Ray interviews Filipino game designers Pamu and Sin about their work and upcoming projects, including the Our Shores Kickstarter.
An interview with game designer Jeff Barber about his upcoming third edition of the role-playing game Blue Planet.
An interview with members of the San Gennaro Co-op, a cooperative organization in tabletop RPG publishing, discussing their work and the co-op's mission.
Host Ray interviews Xavier Ho, a games researcher at Monash University and organiser of Pride at Play, a queer games exhibition that ran during Sydney World Pride 2023 and again for three weeks in Melbourne at the City of Port Phillip Town Hall.
Host Ray interviews Logan Timmins, Melbourne-based indie TTRPG designer and co-founder of Amble Studio, about his journey from Dungeons & Dragons player to game maker, and the design philosophy of specificity he developed through games like Per Essence.
Host Ray interviews Basheer Ghouse, a desi-Muslim-American game designer whose credits include D&D's Through the Radiant Citadel and Kobold Press's Southlands, about his original RPG Guns Blazing: a dieselpunk alternate 1920s where freedom fighters and mercenaries face both colonial powers and supernatural threats drawn from Islamic djinn lore.
Host Ray interviews Kat (Peach Garden Games) about Solo But Not Alone 3, an annual itch.io bundle of single-player TTRPGs raising money for Jasper's Game Day, a North American suicide-prevention charity active in the TTRPG community.
Host Ray interviews Sin and Pam Poncalan, the two Filipino designers behind the tabletop RPG Navathem's End, about its forthcoming print edition being published through Axo Stories, a Global South publisher based in Mexico.