Old RPG artifacts, fresh arguments.
The Vintage RPG Podcast follows Hambone and Stu through classic and contemporary role-playing games, supplements, art books, stores, and hobby ephemera. It is warm, specific, and happily tangent-prone, with nostalgia used as evidence for how tabletop culture keeps changing.
PRESS PLAY
The Vintage RPG Podcast is a brisk, conversational show about tabletop role-playing games as books, boxes, memories, stores, design choices, and cultural fossils. Its center of gravity is the physical and historical stuff of the hobby. A TSR-era art book is not just a pretty object; it becomes a way to talk about resources, ambition, Dragonlance, and what a publisher could do when it had a huge library of art. Trollpak is not just a supplement; it opens a discussion of RuneQuest-style culture-building, underground societies, fungus farming, giant insects, troll restaurants, gods, conflict, and the difference between making monsters evil and making them people. Castle Thrax sends the conversation toward Spellbinders in Akron, mail-order catalogs, local game-store mystery, and the strange romance of not knowing what every listed product really was. Shadowdark gets praised through the practical lens of running games: clear procedures, adjustable danger, light timers, modes of play, and a Dungeon Master experience that feels freshly tuned. The show has room for contemporary RPGs, but it approaches them with a long memory. It knows what older D&D, TSR, Car Wars, Monster Manual, Fiend Folio, bestiaries, and small-press oddities felt like on the table and on the shelf. That memory is not treated as automatic proof that the old days were better. It is used to measure how games solve problems, create mood, and teach players what kind of world they are entering. The conversations are loose and joke-friendly, with fatigue, weather, WFMU, Discord, watch-alongs, and Patreon business sometimes passing through the frame. Still, the strongest episodes keep snapping back to concrete objects: a tabloid newsprint serial, a lost catalog listing, a monster source, a weird title, a striking villain image. Hambone and Stu give the show its lived-in texture. They can be affectionate, blunt, and occasionally cranky, but the affection wins. The result is a show for people who like the hobby’s marginalia as much as its famous rules. It feels like listening to knowledgeable friends rummage through a very crowded shelf and keep finding evidence.
Made for: Best for tabletop RPG fans who care about the history, design, art, and physical culture of games. It especially suits listeners who enjoy D&D-era memory, obscure supplements, and opinionated conversation that assumes the details matter.
What sets it apart: The show starts from specific artifacts rather than broad nostalgia, then follows them into publishing history, design criticism, and hobby folklore. Its looseness is part of the method: tangents become evidence, and small product details become the point.
Join Stu Horvath and John McGuire as they delve into their favorite tabletop roleplaying games from the past, present and future!
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
It turns games, catalogs, artwork, and publishing curiosities into a lively working history of tabletop culture.
The Vintage RPG Podcast treats tabletop games as playable systems and material culture. Jon Hambone-McGuire and Stu Horvath examine rules, artwork, old catalogs, publisher histories, and curious physical artifacts through a loose two-host conversation.
An old game-shop mailer becomes a tiny archaeological dig, with your curiosity doing the excavating.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A warm, skeptical TSR art-book discussion about Dragonlance, collecting, and the images that linger.
The Vintage RPG Podcast turns a small collecting mix-up into a compact tour of TSR-era Dungeons & Dragons art books. Stu Horvath realizes several similar volumes had run together in his memory, with one still outside the collection, and the conversation opens from there into the…
Trollpak is strongest when troll culture gets practical, strange, and specific.
Trollpak turns a fantasy box set into a question of what makes a people feel fully imagined. The episode follows trolls underground, where darkness, fungus farming, giant insects, gods, worship, eating habits, and social customs build a culture tied to humanity rather than…
A Spellbinders catalog leads to a warm, curious tour of lost games and pre-internet discovery.
Castle Throx cracks open the pre-internet RPG trade, when an Akron game shop could make its own products and a back-page catalog doubled as a discovery guide.
A loose, useful discussion of Shadowdark's old-school danger, flexible modes, and clear GM tools.
Hambone and Stu Horvath give Shadowdark a lively, table-minded look, placing it in the space between 5E, OSR, and traditional D&D. The Ford-versus-Ferrari comparison gives the conversation a clean frame: familiar tabletop foundations remain, but the clutter is pared back and the…
A loose, tactile discussion of newsprint, community, and the lasting pull of old print forms.
The End Times starts in the practical clutter of Gen Con plans, MIT Press book sales, and Stu's unrealized bathrobe-and-sandwich-board bit, then settles into a warmer discussion of print as a home for story.
An improvised clubhouse chat turns half-buried RPG history into living lore.
A rescheduled guest leaves Jon Hambone-McGuire and Stu Horvath with room to roam, and the episode turns that looseness into part of its charm.
A warm, slightly wandering conversation about Chaosium's survival, stewardship, and 50th anniversary plans.
Rick's conversation with the Vintage RPG Podcast treats Chaosium's endurance as a mix of lucky timing, shared labor, and steady care for the company's past.
Wrestling toy talk with full collector brain.
Host John Hambone McGuire interviews artist Benjamin Mara about his entry into RPGs and his work in the RPG art space.
Hosts Stu Horvath and John McGuire discuss their current projects in tabletop RPGs.
Rick Meints, president of Chaosium, recounts how he and a new management team saved the company from bankruptcy in 2015.
Stu Horvath recounts his GenCon 2025 experience, including meeting a patron, visiting a museum, and attending events.
Jean Demere discusses his collection of adventure modules, Ballads of Aurad, and the zine-making process using a Rizagraph machine.
Hosts discuss their experiences playing the GI Joe RPG and Top Secret New World Order, along with thoughts on DM screens and open rolling.
Hambone and Stu Horvath announce The Vintage RPG Podcast is pausing for at least a month after nearly eight years, since its July 7, 2018 start, because Stu's Goodman Games book interviews leave him unable to write.
Stu Horvath centers this Vintage RPG Podcast episode on four TSR-era art books, starting with the 1988 Art of Dragon magazine that collected the first 10 years of Dragon covers and interior art.
The Vintage RPG Podcast uses “Troll Pack,” a 1982 RuneQuest box set, to argue that fantasy monsters do not have to be written as disposable enemies.
The Vintage RPG Podcast episode “Castle Thrax” centers on Spellbinders, an Akron game shop that produced at least two RPG modules, including Castle Thrax from 1985.
Hambone and Stew discuss personal fatigue from weather changes and home renovations before diving into RPG topics.
The hosts discuss the WFMU marathon and their involvement in the station's game show.
Hosts Jon 'Hambone' McGuire and Stu Horvath of The Vintage RPG Podcast review Shadowdark, a 325-page streamlined RPG designed solo by Kelsey Dion on a D&D 5E base, with Hambone declaring it 'probably a near perfect RPG' — a statement he says he rarely makes.
Vintage RPG Podcast hosts Jon 'Hambone' McGuire and Stu Horvath review The End Times, a 12-issue serialized newspaper horror project by Benjamin Percy with Stephen King as a contributor, set twelve years after a pandemic kills 99% of humanity in a fictional Minnesota community and capped at 500 physical subscribers.
The hosts discuss a book called 'A Fantastic Bestiary' and its connection to the origins of monsters in Dungeons & Dragons.