Into the Megadungeon Episode 06 "A Malignant Presence"

I’m very excited to present the first of two blood curdling October episodes of the podcast. In this episode I take us into the megadungeon to interview Luke Gearing about his weekly lunchtime megadungeon campaign Rutghast, as well as his published sci-fi horror megadungeon Gradient Descent. We talk about why the dungeon is more fun if every creature is an NPC, how random stocking produces interesting results, and why empty rooms matter. We also talk about how science horror gaming differs other genres at the table, and how Gradient Descent personifies the dungeon itself as a malignant presence that haunts the player and not just their characters.

When I first published Episode 6 of Into the Megadungeon, the audio for the episode was broken. As soon as this was pointed out to me I reuploaded a fixed version, but it took a couple of hours to refresh across the various platforms. Furthermore, I’ve found that if you have started playing the episode previously, it can be hard to force your platform to refresh to the updated audio.

In Spotify, for example, I could only make it work by running it through a web browser. On Apple I was only able to do it by unsubscribing to the podcast and resubscribing to it. And so on. In short, if you started listening to the broken version of the episode on your platform of choice. You may need to either switch to a different platform, or force your platform to update in order to listen to the episode. My sincerest apologies!

Here are links to the episode on a variety of platforms that all should work—at least if you come at them fresh or manage to force the platform to reload the episode you started earlier with whatever tech savvy you can muster. It’s a great interview with Luke Grearing, so I hope you are able to find your way to it by one path or another. (For all I know, the various apps do eventually update on their own, even if you've begun listening to the episode.)

Episode 6 “A Malignant Presence” on Spotify here.

Episode 6 “A Malignant Presence” on Apple Podcasts here.

Episode 6 “A Malignant Presence” on Podcast Addict here.

Episode 6 “A Malignant Presence” on Overcast here.

Episode 6 “A Malignant Presence” on Pocket Casts here.

Episode 6 “A Malignant Presence” on Google Podcasts here.

Reader’s Notes

You can find Luke's blog ⁠here⁠, which is just chock full of useful things and wonderful creations of his remarkable digital pen.

Luke refers to two retro-clones or OSR rulesets. You can find Delving Deeper an(other) OD&D retroclone from which Luke quotes the random stocking procedures ⁠⁠here⁠⁠.

He also refers to Zarkov Kowolski's Neo-Classical Greek Revival, which has the innovative rule about increasing XP for each dungeon room explored. You can find it ⁠⁠here⁠⁠.

You can pre-order Sean McCoy's Warden's Operation Manual ⁠here⁠, which Luke mentions as the source of the simple but brilliant “ongoing concerns” campaign notebook page.

And, of course, you can find Gradient Descent ⁠here⁠.

You can access a transcript of this episode ⁠here⁠.