ENnies voting is now open!
Fear of a Black Dragon has been nominated for Best Podcast, and we would be honored and thrilled if you voted for it. Ranking it #1 would be even sweeter. Our show is billed as an OSR podcast, but there is a huge amount of Powered by the Apocalypse discussion (no surprise, as it’s a production of The Gauntlet).
http://ennie-awards.com/vote/2018/
Fear of a Black Dragon is a strange, cool beast. Every episode, we cover a new OSR module or setting book. During the section called The Basic Crawl, we run through the features of the module, discuss what we liked about it, pose and answer questions we had about it, and then do a “chain lightning round” of cool tidbits in the text. The next section, called The Expert Delve, is where we discuss an issue connected to the module, usually through the lens of story game or narrativist techniques. Finally, in Companion Adventures, we discuss films, books, and other media that would serve as great inspiration for the module.
What I like best about Fear of a Black Dragon is that, in addition to being very entertaining, it does a lot to create space for gamers from different ttrpg “tribes” to interact with each other’s stuff. Story gamers and indie gamers get to hear about the wildly inventive stuff going on in the OSR scene, and OSR gamers are shown how story game techniques can be helpful in running their games. It is truly a podcast for everyone, and I like to think it is doing a lot to improve how we have conversations about ttrpgs.
If you are interested in sampling an episode, here are a few of my favorites (with a note about The Expert Delve topic for each):
Ravenloft (Kicking-off the adventure)
http://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/fear-of-a-black-dragon/ravenloft
The Secret of Castronegro (Working with theme and motif)
http://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/fear-of-a-black-dragon/the-secret-of-castronegro
Operation Unfathomable (Good characterizations)
http://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/fear-of-a-black-dragon/operation-unfathomable
Thanks for reading, and please re-share!