Happy New Year!
Welcome to a landmark year for RPGMP3 – 20 Years of Actual Play Gaming.
It is 20 years since we started the website. Twenty years of tabletop roleplaying actual play recordings. Twenty years of watching things change.
While the URL for the RPGMP3 website was purchased by PaulofCthulhu from yog-sothoth.com in late 2003 following an inspired experiment involving a minidisc recorder and a boundary mic during one of our sessions of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, it was not until early 2004 that the site was built and started seeing traffic. Paul had hosted the recording on Yog-Sothoth and got a good response, but as the site’s focus was Lovecraft, the idea to create a standalone place for these recordings developed. I took over the URL, built the first version of the site, and started running it. I learned a lot from Paul in those early days. He had a lot of experience running online communities, and he was one of the players for our first large campaign, World’s Largest Dungeon. “Magic Missile Coming Online. Dakka-dakka-dakka!”
This campaign launched the popularity of the site, and the forums were buzzing with happy chatter. People who had not gamed in many years found a way to be present at a table again. Others were inspired to start their own groups, some of which were hosted on the main RPGMP3 site and still are. All this was before Apple entered the world of podcasting, and we spent a good amount of time manually coding the feed when we released each session.
The site continued to grow and has changed a lot over the years. The need to keep up with technology has always been something I enjoyed, but I was never a great whizz with PR. Life changes, including moving to the US from the UK, slowed things down. Even with a group of moderators, keeping a ball like this rolling is tough when you have to write and run games, record them, edit and process them, and release them. I have huge respect for any individual or group getting into this. It is a different game than it used to be, but there is still too much time staring at waveforms and wondering what the heck you are doing. Technology changes made some things easier and presented opportunities to learn new things. New recording hardware to explore, the addition of video into the mix once we reached a point where folks were not all on dial-up. Streaming was another big change, but we have kept moving forward.
We have been doing this for 20 years. I have met so many people through this site and the content we have created. I have played and run thousands of sessions (most recorded and available if you are so inclined) and listened to many more from other groups worldwide. I am happy to see the growth of roleplaying, actual play, and the TTRPG community as a whole. It always makes me smile when someone asks where all this started and someone tags us. The acknowledgment of the time spent committed to this endeavor is hugely appreciated. It is heartwarming that we are still remembered in the sea of content we have available now.
I wanted to take this anniversary to try and do some things I have wanted to do for a while. So, starting this year, we will try to be more present in the TTRPG community (fighting my innate lack of PR skills and inherently introverted nature as best as possible). We are also going to put a pause on the current Iron Gods game and switch to something new in Pathfinder 2e Remastered. I originally thought we might revisit the World’s Largest Dungeon, but the more I look at it, the more I think something new may be in order in a similar theme, perhaps with some of the set-piece rooms pulled from the WLD. It has been a long time since I wrote anything substantial, and perhaps now is a good time.
And if you are especially unlucky, I may try pushing out some talk-to-camera content, though there is already a lot of this out there from excellent creators. Let me know if this is something you might like to see, as it would be a significant shift in headspace for me – but not necessarily a bad one.
So, with that said, I invite you all to visit RPGMP3 and explore our old content. We have some truly excellent sessions, often in systems that get very little coverage as they are far from mainstream or very old. Perhaps listen to the World’s Largest Dungeon again or one of the games from our contributor groups. Join us on our Discord (the forum still lives on, and it’s funny how this stuff comes in cycles).
Thank you all for allowing and even encouraging me to continue with this. Running this site and producing this content is a great privilege that I hope to continue for another 20 years.
Dungeon ON!
