We had a little chat with Josh, Lewanika, and Glen with Tabletop Journeys about the exciting things they’re doing on their podcast.
Jared: First off, tell us a little about the three of you!
Tabletop Journeys was born out of the pandemic of 2020 like so many other things. Josh and Lewanika had been talking about doing a podcast for a really long time, like ten years. We just couldn’t find the secret sauce. We always thought that we would have a political counterpoint show, but then politics stopped being something that could be celebrated or fun to talk about. Then that September or October, on a whim, Josh suggested a RPG themed podcast, and they jumped on the idea. Picked a name, started laying out the platform, and then started recording the Zoom conversations that they were already having for hours on Saturday mornings while they were writing content or working on terrain or whatever. After a handful of shows, they knew they needed a third voice and brought Glen into the fold. Three years in, the show has gone through a lot of permutations already, but at its core is about the TTRPG community, homebrewing, worldbuilding, and how to make games really sing at your table.
J: How did you get started in TTRPG? What keeps you interested in the game?
Josh sort of dabbled in RPGs when he was a kid. His first game was Warhammer Fantasy when he was about 12, and he played in a Spelljammer campaign in High School during lunchtime in 25 minute sprints. He was playing in a Shadowrun game when he found Live Action gaming and that just blew up his world. He dove into Vampire the Masquerade in a serious way and started publishing articles in local game magazines about playstyles and how to make your game more immersive. That’s when he and Lewanika really became friends, and they have been in each other’s orbit ever since.
Lewanika had been an avid reader and storyteller from a young age. Writing fan fiction for his favorite IP’s (often superhero comics and old school Anime) for his elementary school assignments, as well as for fun. Early friendships with theater kids sparked the creativity within him that was always searching for an outlet. At the tender age of 13, Lewanika’s first gaming moment was a single game session at a campout with his Boy Scout troop. There is not much he recalls about that session other than the fact that the older scouts were so excited to show a new player the game.
Known in Tabletop Journeys circles as a second generation gamer, Glen sat down to his first DnD game when he was eight years old. Those early games were DM’ed by his father, Glen Sr., and thus magic was born within him. Glen Sr. also served as scoutmaster and often played or ran games with Glen and the other boys of the troop, including Lewanika. The formative years were just the beginning as Glen continued to game throughout his teen years and beyond. Expanding both his love and knowledge of multiple systems and the roleplaying hobby.
The most impactful early game experience, however, happened a few years later in a brand new town, while trying to make friends in his new neighborhood. Lewanika’s next door neighbor and a couple of friends from Junior High school invited him to a game. During that session his character was slain. He was told that the PC was at zero Hit points, and the battle was done. The heroes had lost. Then that first true DM said these words: “As blood begins to cloud your vision and you feel yourself start to fade, you turn to see who made the killing blow. It was your older brother. You started this adventure in search of him, to find him. To save him from a fate unknown, and you die knowing that he was the true enemy all along.” That was the moment that this became more than a game, it became something of a calling, and a personal passion. With this game the epic stories of his comics, of his books, of his TV shows and movies were at his disposal. With this game the mundane could be recreated into the Legendary. Connecting with Glen in the months that followed, playing D&D with our Scout Troop and with his father often as our DM, Lewanika continues to play games from TSR and so many other systems. Including Vampire the Masquerade in College, where he met and became fast friends with Josh, playing and running games until the drive to create led to the formation of the Tabletop Journeys Podcast.
The one thing that unifies all of them is that they are storytellers and worldbuilders. While the game itself is the vehicle that they have chosen to share those stories, it’s the desire to lean into the fantastic and wonderful that really drives them. But they all approach it in different ways; Glen excels at defining spaces and the physics of a scene to make them incredibly tactile and real. Lewanika is a master of intrigue and storytelling throughline, everything is important in some way. There is no detail that doesn’t mean something. Josh is way more improvisatory than either of the other two, and he aims to create a shared experience for his players where the choices that they make have real and lasting consequences on the flow of the adventure. They each bring these distinct viewpoints into the content that they produce to make genuinely immersive stories, realistic characters, and innovative plots.
J: What got you into broadcasting your games for people outside the game table to enjoy?
Well, we actually resisted doing actual plays for a really long time, because we don’t listen to a lot of them and weren’t sure that we would be able to do them “right”. We have always tried to keep our show to “commuting length” so we wanted to have the episodes be in chunks that you can enjoy in one sitting. So many actual plays are live, multiple hours long, and that just wasn’t a format that sang to us as creators. So we started listening to a lot of audio drama, but we knew that we didn’t want to do a scripted show. So we tabled the idea for a long time.
When The Candlekeep Mysteries came out, we started talking to our Patreon Supporters about playing through it with us, and decided that if we found it interesting, other people might too. So we recorded the first session and started to play with the format to see if we could make them episodic without ruining the flow. We have been very happy with the way that it has come out, and it’s been a lot of fun exploring this sort of format in our games!
The other side of our Actual Play content is our Field Trips where we invite game creators to the table with us to run their games. While it would be great to say that we invented the format, we didn’t. Josh will be the first to admit that he stole it from The RPG Academy podcast in a “Hey, we could do that!” moment. Michael Ross has graciously acknowledged that imitation is the greatest form of flattery, and the first one that we did was when we invited the folks from Accidental Cyclops Games to play through their PbtA game based on the Faith No More album The Real Thing. Since then, we have had the opportunity to play with some AMAZING creators, and are looking for ways to do this more.
J: Where did you get the idea for the name Tabletop Journeys?
On some level, Tabletop Journeys has existed for about 20 years without anyone really knowing about it. When Lewanika and Josh became friends, they would spend most of their Friday nights gaming together. Beyond that, they played in and ran several tabletop and live action games together, and they were constantly creating new worlds and stories. But even beyond that, they had a large group of RPG centric friends, and any time they were at a party, or Denny’s at 3am, they would get into these discussions about the hobby; the rules, games they played, etc. The two of them plopping down on a couch to discuss whatever was happening in the industry was commonplace. Even right before the formal inception of the podcast, they were in the middle of a discussion about some Kickstarter that Josh had backed, or a game that Lewanika was running, when the idea to bring it to air just materialized and they were off to the races.
The name itself took a little time, but it was always clear that it was about our journey with TTRPG and welcoming others along our path. Thus we became Tabletop Journeys. and our opening line “Welcome Travelers” was born. Within weeks as Glen joined us, we finalized our overall mission with words that Glen brought to the table, “Make your next role LEGENDARY!”
J: What can you tell us about your different categories of podcasts?
Short answer? Everything is fair game! Our main discussion episodes feature player centric and storyteller centric interviews and news about the industry and new game releases. We have done shows about various media that informs and inspires the stories we tell at our tables. Some of our favorite shows to run are called “Class Warfare” where all three of us would roll up toons from one class, and bring in a guest storyteller for a one shot. So we really try to offer a variety of content, so if one particular episode doesn’t resonate with a listener, there is bound to be another that does.
J: You just finished a Kickstarter (post Oct 24 th) What else do you have in the works, project wise?
This is a big question, because we haven’t announced anything going forward yet, but we are always creating. There are a few things that we can share though. First off, this isn’t the last time you are going to hear about Factions from us. There was a lot of content that we decided to pull out of the book for a lot of reasons, but those will eventually make an appearance. We have another volume of Adventure Starters in the works. We are also going to be branching out into content for non-5e systems, including an idea for a Powered by the Apocalypse build. And we are going to be keeping with our goal of one larger crowdfund project a year. One of the things that we keep talking about is a big campaign book that combines our three homebrewed worlds, but that’s very much a long term goal.
J: Where can people find more info and stay up to date on any new content coming out? Social media etc?(Be sure to include the web links!)
Best place to find the podcast is at www.ttjourneys.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. We should be pretty much everywhere, and if we aren’t on your podcast platform of choice, just let us know!
Here are our social media channels:
https://bsky.app/profile/ttjourneys.bsky.social
https://www.facebook.com/ttjourneys
https://www.youtube.com/@ttjourneys
You can find these and other links to support the show at our Link Tree:
https://linktr.ee/ttjourneys
J: Anything else you’d like to add?
We really appreciate the space! We love doing this show and bringing top notch creators and content to folks every single week and we love the support that we get from all our friends in the TTRPG space. It’s a community that we really love and want to support, so if you are a creator and want to come on the show to talk about your awesome project, run a game for us, or whatever, just drop us a line and let us know!
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