Topics / Role-Playing Games
Role-Playing Games Podcasts
765 shows and 88,750 episodes sit under Role-Playing Games.
Actual-play horror, solo adventures and table-made fantasy with Sorry, Honey, I Have to Take This, Rolling with Difficulty and Left Behind.
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Listening guide
Finding the right Role-Playing Games show for you
In Total Party Kill's To Kill a Mummy Lord, a player reaches for a healing spell and finds no d8 in their dice. "Just finding any old random D eight," they mutter, and the episode keeps the search. That small rummage is the signature sound of actual play: a story improvised by friends around a game, with the dice, the rules and the side talk still audible. At its best you hear a plan take shape, a roll settle it, and a group adjust to what the dice decided.
The form reaches well beyond a weekly Dungeons & Dragons night. The shows below include a GURPS war campaign that ran all the way to a finale, a Delta Green investigation soaked in dread, a Planescape campaign followed by listener Q&A, a Cosmere RPG game played live on stream, and a one-shot built around a roguelike. Some are tidy recordings. Others are livestreams with the hosts sending their Twitch audience off to another channel near the end.
Fans keep returning to the same arguments. Should a show recorded for video be judged by how it sounds without the picture? Can a season be cherished for its comedy and story even if it plays loose with the rules? Is a long campaign a world to live in, or a story that takes too long to move? The practical questions are simpler. How much rules talk can you enjoy? Do you want one evening or a long road? Are you after laughs or dread?
Comedy at a crowded table
If you like your fantasy with the jokes left in, Total Party Kill is the friendliest door. Its recent run sends a party from Candlekeep to find a lost librarian. Frtlbrtl gives each player room to introduce a character, from Micah Sargent's purple-haired Goliath paladin to Sarah Bickerton's scowling half-orc barbarian, until the table notices the party looks like an odd basketball team. Pinky of Death pits them against crystal golems. In To Kill a Mummy Lord, a dexterity check to learn to fly comes up 20 and gets the reply "You took to it like a flying fish to air." Rules stay audible here, down to a player reassuring "the rules lawyers out there" about a sorcery point. They serve the comedy, though, and never stall it.
The Lost Archives - Liveplay RPG’s works the same vein at livestream length. Its episodes here run 115 to 119 minutes, rotate between three campaigns (Tales from the Yawning Portal, Return of the Giants and Echoes of Honor), and include chatter about Easter chocolate and aurora photos. The patience pays off. In Battle of Wits (Ep 20) - Echoes of Honor | Cosmere RPG, a player tries to send a runner warning of a betrayal, insisting "It's deep, deep in my waters." The game master narrates the character crumbling to dust under "a narrative spren," and the player cheerfully takes the move back. It is a gentle joke about table knowledge, and it tells you how this group plays. The cost is sprawl: in Biting Cold (e124) | Return of the Giants | D&D Campaign, two players drop out mid-session when their internet fails.
For more sword-and-sorcery, the Fantasy page goes further.
When the table turns dark
Horror actual play draws its tension from the table's own laughter, which keeps threatening to puncture the mood. Fear Initiative: Dungeons and Dragons and Horror builds a grim river campaign around the Red Arrows, a militant religious order. Their army is made of people with blank, inhuman faces. In Arrivals, the party splits over whether to steer a boat toward several thousand "spider people," and the argument includes a line that could stand for the whole genre: "Wherever we go, trouble is there." The most recent episode in the feed, The Storm, is from December 2021, so treat the show as an archive to work through rather than a weekly habit. Expect transformation, curses and plenty of dice arithmetic during battles.
RPPR Actual Play's Delta Green is colder. Delta Green: The Labor of Dogs – Episode 9 (76 minutes) picks up with agents bleeding from gunshot wounds after a killing, scrambling to hide a body, then sprinting through a stadium inside a murderous game themed on the Chinese zodiac. The horror lands hardest in the jokes about going home afterward. One player's bond with a best friend is "hanging on by a measly two," and the table imagines Christmas with a thousand-yard stare and a character announcing that "people are just faucets waiting to be turned on." Content note: graphic violence and its aftermath. The Horror Fiction page has more fear. For horror that is scripted and staged, try the Audio Drama page.
The long road to a finale
Plenty of listeners want an ending they can plan around, and Awaken The God Emperor [GURPS] has one. It reached "Succession" Awaken The God Emperor Gurps Campaign: Episode 69 [FINALE] in July 2026. Two of the episodes discussed here run between 69 and 103 minutes, so this is a real commitment. Its premise is a prophecy about a man from centuries past, and the show earns that scale through logistics. In "Wall" Awaken The God Emperor Gurps Campaign: Episode 53, the party tallies 32 liters of water against their encumbrance and then has to haul Roke, crippled in one leg, up a cliff. Meanwhile a pet bird named Symore lands on Junia's head and squawks for corn. "Ona" Awaken The God Emperor Gurps Campaign: Episode 62 climbs a mountain to a temple ritual and a vision in which the sun cracks open like an eye. If rules math and side jokes tire you, this will test your patience. If you enjoy hearing a war get planned on a map, it rewards you.
Behind the screen
Some listeners enjoy the conversation about the game as much as the game itself. Rolling with Difficulty runs Hunting Party, a Planescape D&D 5e campaign set in the Beastlands, and includes listener Q&As. In Hunting Party Q&A: On the Scent, the players talk about keeping themselves separate from their characters, using a lines-and-veils sheet, and stepping "above table" to plan conflicts between characters. One player puts the appeal plainly: "the fun of it being an improv format is that everyone goes in unexpected ways." In Hunting Party Q&A: Gone Fishin', a listener asks what would have happened if nobody passed a crucial set of trials. The answer is frank: "They would have had to move along." Rolling with Difficulty Talkback: Draw Steel, first aired on Patreon, compares a new tactical game with D&D, covering maneuvers in place of bonus actions and resources that grow over the course of a fight.
The Download's tracks sits next door. It is a conversation show, and its two hosts wander in many directions. In Episode 359: The Party is at the Party, one host pitches a scenario in which heroic exorcists work as caterers so they can reach demons in rich people's basements, which he calls "party down exorcists." It is good company for anyone who enjoys hearing how games get dreamed up.
Where to start
- For a single evening: RPPR Actual Play, Roguelike: The Tomb of Time. This standalone sends adventurers into a pyramid. Each time they die they wake in an oasis, and one player's character is introduced as the guy who has died in the background of every adventure.
- For laughs: Total Party Kill, Frtlbrtl. The character introductions do the work of a pilot.
- For a finished saga: Awaken The God Emperor [GURPS], "Ona" Awaken The God Emperor Gurps Campaign: Episode 62. Use it as a sampler before committing to the whole run.
- For dread: Fear Initiative: Dungeons and Dragons and Horror, Arrivals. The episode includes a recap of the story so far.
- For the rules-curious: Rolling with Difficulty, Rolling with Difficulty Talkback: Draw Steel.
Start with the one-shot if you are unsure. One evening will tell you whether you like hearing the dice decide.
Featured shows below are part of the PlayNext catalog. Updated weekly.
Featured shows
8 shows, described rather than listed
Each has a short write-up and a note on what it does best here.
This ensemble actual play pairs ornate bodily horror and tense scenes with quick jokes, tactical questions and blunt table talk. It suits listeners who like dread punctured by chaotic banter.
Campaign recaps lead into active play as the ensemble builds scenes through quick confirmations, rules checks, callbacks and side jokes. It suits listeners who enjoy hearing a story take shape at the table.
Experienced players answer tabletop questions, compare systems and sessions, and widen direct responses with examples. Hunting Party adds brisk campaign play for listeners who enjoy both discussion and story.
A regular ensemble moves among campaign arcs, side adventures and one-shots, mixing fantasy narration with rolls, rules negotiation, profanity and absurd jokes. It suits listeners who want table-first chaos.
A solo player turns declared actions, initiative, morale checks and damage totals into improvised dungeon fiction across SoloDark, Rollohi and Black Powder and Brimstone. It suits rules-minded listeners.
A recurring GURPS ensemble carries one campaign through rules checks, strong GM narration and in-character exchanges, with continuity driving each scene. It suits listeners who enjoy measured, connected play.
This long-running table mixes Pathfinder 2E play with rules talk, lore, banter and hobby-history digressions. The Outlaws of Alkenstar arc suits listeners who enjoy heists and companionable chaos.
A solo storyteller blends fiction with mechanics, oracles and visible decision-making, weighing continuity and character motives aloud. It suits listeners who enjoy thoughtful play where uncertainty stays in the story.