Horror RPG craft from the shadowed classroom.
Miskatonic University Podcast treats horror roleplaying like a strange night class with jokes in the margins. Keeper Bridget, Keeper Dave, and their guests talk Call of Cthulhu skills, props, pacing, settings, accessibility, and what makes fear work at the table.
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Miskatonic University Podcast is a long-running tabletop horror RPG show with Call of Cthulhu at its center. It has the feel of a late-night seminar where the lesson plan keeps getting interrupted by laughter, corrections, side comments, and real table wisdom. Keeper Bridget and Keeper Dave carry much of the excerpted conversation, often turning craft topics into practical debates about what players and keepers actually need. The show is strongest when it treats horror gaming as a shared act of trust. Characters can die, fail, go mad, or be sacrificed for a better story, and the hosts talk about that shift directly for players arriving from Dungeons and Dragons. That makes the advice useful, not just thematic. Episodes cover pacing a session, setting expectations, handling safety tools, and deciding when a group should compress, pause, or redirect a scenario. The show also has a tactile side. In the episode about clues, props, and handouts, the discussion keeps returning to how physical materials can make imagination feel present at the table. Arkham gets treated as a playable place, not just a name, with maps, blank spaces, keeper knowledge, and player choices shaping how the setting comes alive. The show is also willing to leave the usual 1920s and modern comfort zones. Victorian and gaslight horror, orphanages, child labor, powerless characters, and Cthulhu Dark all appear as ways to think about vulnerability and stakes. Guest episodes broaden the frame with Jesse Ross on portraying children, Gregory Geiger on accessibility in game design, and Mike Mason on Call of Cthulhu material. The result is not polished lecture audio. It is conversational, affectionate, and frequently off the rails. That informality is part of the point. The show sounds like people who care about games enough to argue with their own assumptions, laugh at their mistakes, and keep asking how horror can be more intense, more humane, and more playable.
Made for: For Call of Cthulhu players, keepers, and tabletop horror fans who want practical craft talk with a relaxed, funny table culture. It especially suits listeners interested in story-first play, props, pacing, safety, and darker settings.
What sets it apart: The show mixes a mock-academic Miskatonic frame with candid, practical conversations about what happens at the table. Its best episodes balance craft advice, guest design insight, and loose chemistry without sanding off the chaos.
A Podcast dedicated to Weird and Horrific Roleplaying Games.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Keeper Bridget and Keeper Dave make horror role-playing craft concrete through table-tested discussions of pacing, clues, settings, safety, and shared storytelling.
Miskatonic University Podcast turns horror role-playing craft into an animated conversation between Keeper Bridget and Keeper Dave. Their focus is practical: making clues and props useful at the table, pacing sessions through player communication, and helping people adjust from…
Class is in session: bring a doomed investigator and your least precious backstory.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Two Keepers find Arkham campaign ideas in travel distances and the investigators chapter.
Keeper Bridget and Keeper Dave find campaign ideas in the practical details of an Arkham sourcebook. A chart of travel distances between Arkham, Kingsport, Salem, and Boston gets them thinking about a drive in the 1920s.
Victorian gaslight leads Keeper Bridget and Keeper Dave to horror stories about children with little power and something to fight for.
Keeper Bridget and Keeper Dave take horror role-playing beyond the modern day and the 1920s, settling on Victorian gaslight. Dave describes a Cthulhu Dark scenario that begins in an orphanage, then follows his interest in chimney sweeps, orphanages, and the grime of the period.
Clues, handouts, and a memorable prop take center stage in Miskatonic University Podcast's 300th episode.
For its 300th episode, Miskatonic University Podcast brings back Andrew and Sean from the HPL Historical Society to talk about clues, props, and handouts.
Mike Mason explains how Arkham's unnumbered buildings let players and Keepers shape the town together.
Call of Cthulhu line editor and creative director Mike Mason joins Keeper Dave and Keeper Bridget to discuss how characters can inhabit Arkham.
A GM pacing discussion that gives players a say in how the session ends.
Keeper Bridget and Keeper Dave take up a familiar GM problem: the players are enjoying a scene, but the session has to end. In their convention-slot example, the group is still absorbed in an earlier scene with 90 minutes left. The GM could quietly push toward the climax.
Bridget and Dave open with a playful look at shared story and character survival in Call of Cthulhu.
Keepers Bridget and Dave open their new series of classes with a question for players coming from Dungeons & Dragons: why sit down to play Call of Cthulhu? Dave's answer starts with a change in perspective.
Old-school GM craft, talked through plainly.
Shadowrun actual play with community signal.
Tabletop creators, systems, and stories in conversation.
World of Darkness books, argued at table depth.
Tabletop design, talked through slowly.
Miskatonic University Podcast episode 294 features Mike Mason, Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu creative director and line editor, discussing the new Arkham book.
Keepers Bridget and Dave of the Miskatonic University Podcast flip through the newly published Arkham sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu following their interview with lead author Mike Mason in episode 294, riffing on its design highlights and sandbox tools.
Miskatonic University Podcast episode 296 launches 'Cthulhu University: From Neophyte to Elder God,' a six-episode curriculum series, starting with a 101-level introduction to Call of Cthulhu covering the game's origins in H.P.
Miskatonic University Podcast episode 308 launches the "How to GM Like a Pro" curriculum with a pacing lesson for tabletop role-playing games.
The hosts banter and prepare to record an episode of their podcast dedicated to weird and horrific roleplaying games.
A podcast dedicated to weird and horrific roleplaying games, featuring an interview with artist and game designer Gregory Geiger.
A podcast dedicated to weird and horrific roleplaying games, featuring hosts discussing game mechanics and welcoming a guest.
An interview with game designer Jesse Ross about portraying children in role-playing games, focusing on Cthulhu Dark and Girls Underground.
Miskatonic University Podcast episode 300 brings Bridget and Dave together with Andrew and Sean from the H.P.
Miskatonic University Podcast episode 293 examines horror role-playing settings outside the modern day and the 1920s, including Regency Cthulhu, World War II, the Depression, the Victorian era, and the Old West.