Greetings astute alchemists,

In this our twelfth episode, we ramble through our preamble discussing Christmas music, knock-knock jokes, online scams and modern art. After we amble through those brambles, Christopher takes us through a year of our mail bag of comments and questions.

We hope you find the chaos of our 12th recording both diverting and informative.

— Luke & Christopher

See mor...

Greetings, alchemists. Once again, we dive into an arcane topic, but this one has a bit of a metatextual level: we speak of teaching the subject of game design. 

Christopher has many questions for Luke, who has answers, experience, and even some questions of his own. We discuss subject matter, students, things to consider from the academic side of things, and how the teacher can even consider themselves. 

Interested in becoming mor...

Players of Games,

As a game designer, playing other games is important to the design process, especially games orthogonal to your area of expertise. In Episode 10 of Ludological Alchemy’s Hypothesis we broaden our remit to discuss a topic adjacent to roleplaying games: war games. Specifically in our case, Hearts of Iron 4 by Paradox Entertainment. Luke introduced Christopher to the game a couple of years ago and since then they’ve ...

Dearest listener,

Here we present to a special episode. Normally, we limit such special episodes to paid subscribers, but we enjoyed this discussion so much we wanted to share it with everyone. Please enjoy and if you’re so compelled, put a few goldberries in our yellow hat.

TOM BOMBADIL.

Merry old Tom is a denizen of the Old Forest, northeast of the Shire in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. He’s an odd character, seeming unlike the elves a...

We know that for many, today is a day known as "Christmas Day", however, we here at Ludological Alchemy celebrate a more esoteric event: the final episode of our podcast The Hypothesis for the year 2024. Our first year of podcasting and blogging has been tumultuous, perilous, enlightening, frustrating, joyous, fraught, and entirely worthwhile, by our estimation. However, rather than looking back on this year in this episode, we ins...

We return to undertake a challenge. What rules must one adhere to when crafting roleplaying games? We develop a list of ten of them. Listen to follow our journey!

Technical note for our listeners: Recording this episode seems to have triggered some mild curse. Christopher appears to have angered some kami of audio, a gremlin of podcasting. Thus the recording required two attempts over the course of three months, and this was the be...

Are games truly games without those who play them? In this latest episode of our Ludological Alchemy podcast "The Hypothesis" we discuss the terms, personages, conditions by which we can identify and better understand that which is the most difficult part of any game: the player.

Are you a player of games? Surely you must be, but what sort of player do you consider yourself? Interesting. Tell us more — leave us a comment on the Lud...

Greetings, alchemists, and welcome to another episode of our humble audio ventures into the unknown: a so-called "podcast", and it is so called "The Hypothesis". We are your Ludological Alchemists, Luke and Christopher. Sam was not with us in body or voice for this recording, but very much so in spirit. He will return for another episode in the future. For today, you will have to contend with just the two of us. Let it be a burden ...

Dearest listener,

This episode of our Hypothesis contains a different outlook than our previous iterations. Herein, we present to you a live recording captured at Gen Con ‘24 of your humble alchemists at their labors. In this experiment, we attempt to play our game, The Alchemist & the Golem with each other and then, as a body, with the audience. I think you may be surprised to learn just how difficult it ...

Welcome to yet another episode of The Hypothesis! 

Today, we discuss uncertainty! In all its myriad forms. Can we crack open any kernels of known unknowns? We suggest listening to the episode from start to finish, and not in some random order, but we cannot control you. Nor would we want to! For you, dear listeners, provide us with yet another — and possibly the most important — element of... uncertainty.

Luke mentioned some probab...

We begin by welcoming our third alchemist, Sam. We quickly dispense with introductions and go into history, music, and snake oil salespeople. These are our confident opinions that we could be 100% wrong about.

Sam came to call us to task, and he brought receipts! Do you agree with the points made in this episode? Or did we all miss the point entirely? What do you think of our new three-headed-format? Leave us a comment on the Ludol...

We're back! Did you miss us? It's only the second episode!

We're off to a powerful start, getting into some notably macabre topics before talking about RPGs at all. Are we going somewhere? Do we have a point? That we leave as an excersize for the listener. 

We talk in-depth and in circles about setting and its place in roleplaying games. Thoughts? Do you agree with us? Or, better yet, are you convinced we drew all the wrong conclus...

Luke Crane and Christopher Badell launch this new podcast with a weighty question. Can they answer it? Tune in to find out!

This was our first ever recording, long before we knew that we were making a podcast called "The Hypothesis", and before we had the invaluable assitance of our producer Trevor Casterline. So! Forgive us our less-than-stellar audio quality and lack of knowledge about our name and purpose, with promises that the...