By Dave Windust
At Dice Company, thoughts have turned to games systems. With Campaign Two on the horizon, we are pondering whether to continue with Dungeons & Dragons, or to look to other games to fuel our fun. With this in mind, here’s a rundown the various games systems we have played so far:
Dungeons & Dragons (Small Embers, Campaign)
At the time of writing, we have recorded 99 chapters of our sprawling, epic, dramatic, silly campaign, so it’s probably fair to say we enjoy it a fair bit. It’s the godfather of TTRPGs and dominates the space probably a bit more than is ideal, but it is a lot of fun.
Listen: Chapter one: Appalling Consequences
Candela Obscura (The Curious Case of Ernest Wainwright, Four-part story)
Candela Obscura is a horror/investigation game based in the fictional world of Hale. With minimal dice rolls, and a focus on narrative, our adventure saw Charlie in the GM’s chair leading us on a mystery through the streets of the city of Newfaire, trying to track down Ernest Wainwright, a missing scholar.
Listen: Episode one
Warhammer (sort of) (A Storm In a Puddle, Six-part story)
Inspired by the classic Warhammer roleplaying game, Harry brought his own spin on the system as he took us across the Sea of Claws to the hamlet of Piddlebog, at the arse end of nowhere to deliver a bloody, dark fantasy story, leavened by bleak humour and the fact that as players, we can’t help being ridiculous
Listen: Episode one
Monster of the Week (What Happened That Night? Two-part story)
As a Hallowe’en special and an editing experiment, Tom created this tale of unwary teenagers exploring a mysterious sanitorium on Hallowe’en night. We used Monster of the Week, a game that allows you to quickly spin up characters, settings and plots and jump into the action. There are two versions of the episode, one presented as an audio drama (with rolls and table talk stripped out) and the second as a more traditional Actual Play.
Listen: Part one – audio drama version
Kids on Bikes (The Picture of Bartemius Crow, Four-part story)
It’s becoming a tradition that we try new games systems on Hallowe’en. Our 2025 edition brought us to Kids on Bikes, and Alex’s GMing debut. We channelled our inner Goonies for an 80s-reference drenched mystery about missing kids in small-town America, featuring dogs in hats. Lots of dogs in hats.
Listen: Episode one
Mothership (Darkstar: Distress Call From Boomertown, Four-part story)
Darkstar: the galaxy’s local service provider is Dice Company’s vehicle for the chaotic deep-space comedy horror of Mothership. We’re big fans of Mothership’s stress mechanic, and also Charlie’s nightmare scenarios. Our new Mothership feed is coming soon!
Eat the Reich (Four-part story)
To open 2026, friend of the show Adam Beltaine joined as guest GM to guide us through the bloody, visceral and gloriously over-the-top vampires v Nazis adventure that is Eat the Reich. This is a combat-focused system that specialises in prompting players to wreak death and destruction on the Third Reich in the most creative ways they can think of. Turns out we can think of quite a few ways.
Listen: Episode one
BONUS: Genesys (Dungeon Majeure: The Myth of Snoozy Basin, Eight-part story)
A bit of a cheat, because it’s not on the Dice Company podcast feeds, but all four regular players joined the Dungeon Majeure podcast for some Genesys-driven fun with narrative dice pools. Telling the story of four unusual adventures (Clive the miracle chicken is probably the most ‘normal’ character), we enjoyed the off-kilter world of Dungeon Majeure, and a GM who didn’t try to put restrictions on whether our characters were allowed to eat each other.
Listen: Episode one
COMING SOON: Call of Cthulhu (It’s Grim Up North, Five-part story)
And coming up in March, we delve into cosmic horror as we release our first Call of Cthulhu story. It’s 1926 and a wealthy dilettante travels homewards to collect his inheritance…
Keep an eye on our feeds – this drops in March.