Lovable Rascals (With Rowan Zeoli)

This week Nathan and Riley are joined by special guest Rowan Zeoli of Rascal, an independent, reader-supported, worker-owned outlet for journalism about tabletop roleplaying games not unlike Aftermath. The site is celebrating one year of life on the increasingly tumultuous planet Earth with a subscription drive, so we ask Rowan how things are going (pretty well!) and then dig into a harrowingly powerful piece she recently wrote about roleplaying the January 6 insurrection in a Brooklyn warehouse. What can we learn from living out these moments in a controlled, game-like environment? And why don’t wargames recreate modern history more often? Then we discuss Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and its director’s support of the original Gamergate movement, which everybody seems to have forgotten about. Why, though? And what does it mean for a sequel that seems at least somewhat interested in exploring more diverse stories – despite the objections of an audience that’s partially turned on it for that very reason? Finally, at listeners’ request, Nathan gives everyone a special pre-release preview of a passage from his book, and he’s not nervous about it at all. Credits - Hosts: Nathan Grayson,…