Dice Exploder Season 3 Kickstarter Ends TOMORROW, plus Tasha Robinson talks Fall of Magic
Dice Exploder season 3 is still on Kickstarter for another scant 40 hours!
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Today’s episode: Tasha Robinson talks Fall of Magic’s five and a half foot long handprinted scroll
This week on the podcast my cohost is Tasha Robinson! What a privilege.
Tasha is the film editor at Polygon, but her work has appeared at NPR, Vulture, The A.V. Club (where I got my own media career started), and many others. Tasha is also a podcaster, one of the hosts of my favorite film podcast, The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast that pairs a classic film with a recent release. It’s great. I highly recommend it.
But Tasha is also super into the RPG scene, especially the Games on Demand crowd. And she designs them, too! In 2021 she got an honorable mention at the Golden Cobras for her game The Regency Committee on Decorum and Punchbowl Poop Prevention. She’s also written several excellent pieces about RPGs, like one for The Verge about AI and LARPs, that you can find in the episode’s shownotes.
But I asked Tasha to come on the show because of a piece she wrote for Polygon about Fall of Magic, a fantasy game by Ross Cowman in which magic is leaving the world, and you’re all accompanying “the Magus” on a journey to the birthplace of magic to see if anything can be done about that. It’s a very rules light game, and the primary mechanic is a 5 and a half foot long handprinted scroll.
While most people play Fall of Magic over the course of a few hours, maybe 3-6 sessions in total, Tasha’s piece in part documents her own Fall of Magic campaign which lasted three and a half years. Over 70 sessions.
I got to play Fall of Magic myself this summer in a single twelve hour sitting, and we had to skip a few locations, but we finished content and complete. And I could not let it go: twelve hours is significantly shorter than THREE AND A HALF YEARS. How??? What was going on in that game? I had to know.
Plus, like, Fall of Magic is amazing. And I’d just opened this season with a two part series on travel in RPGs. Not talking about Fall of Magic and its beautiful map felt borderline irresponsible. So I reached out, and Tasha and I had this conversation as expansive as the scroll itself about Fall of Magic, its spiritual sequel City of Winter, maps of all kinds in RPGs, and how you can get so much out of a game that feels so simple on the surface.
This is among my favorite episodes of the show yet, probably in part because of how much I love Tasha’s work, but also because I think it’s super good. Take a listen.
And then back the Kickstarter before it’s too late!
Wonderful episode. Can’t wait to check out more content from you & Tasha elsewhere! I’ve been playing these weird little games since the days when you *could* read and play pretty much all of them each year.
One thing I hope listeners understand about City of Winter is that a one-shot is definitely “demo mode” & that when your character dies you are still playing them in flashback and passing down memories for quite a while. Maybe multiple sessions! I found in playtesting that this mitigates much of the sadness. It’s like an extended wake & you have a lot of power & freedom after your character passes on. (Along with continuing to play side characters)