Dice in Mind

Dr. José P. Zagal is a game scholar and Director of the School of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology and avid game player as well. He teaches courses on game design, ethics in video games, and experimental games. Professor Zagal taught his first university-level class in 2000, has since supervised multiple award-winning student projects, and many of his former students work at leading game studios worldwide. Dr. Zagal has edited and authored numerous books and articles on game ethics, games education, game design, role-playing games, and more. He most recently co-authored Seeing Red: Nintendo’s Virtual Boy (MIT Press 2024) and co-edited Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons (MIT Press 2024) and The Routledge Handbook of Role-Playing Game Studies (Routledge 2024). He was honored as a Distinguished Scholar by the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and named a Fellow of the Higher-Education Videogame Alliance (HEVGA) for his contributions to games research. He also serves as the Editor-In-Chief of DiGRA’s flagship journal Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (ToDiGRA).

Please check out these relevant links:

RIT School of Interactive Games and Media
The Quiet Year
Prof. Zagal's Google Scholar Profile
Tabletop Role-Playing Games in Chile: Early History, Context, and Adoption
Cyberpunk 2020
Ghost Busters (West End Games)
Phoenix Dawn Command

Welcome to Dice in Mind, a podcast hosted by Bradley Browne and Jason Kaufman to explore the intersection of life, games, science, music, philosophy, creativity, and literature through interviews with leading creatives. All are welcome in this space. Royalty-free music "Night Jazz Beats" courtesy of flybirdaudio.

Please follow us:

Twitter/X: https://x.com/diceinmind

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/diceinmind.bsky.social

Due to our respective family and travel plans, this week we are bringing back one of our favorite guests. The topic is especially relevant as Brad recently moved and Jason is about to become an empty nester. Enjoy!

Shelly Mazzanoble is an award-winning author of essays, books, two unfinished novels, some short stories, and one-act plays that have actually been produced. Most surprising, she is someone’s a mother. She loves writing about reality TV almost as much as parenting. Then there’s all the Dungeons & Dragons stuff. Shelly has written three books about D&D: Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girl’s Guide to the Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game, Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Dungeons & Dragons: One Woman's Quest to Trade Self-Help for Elf Help, and Welcome to Dragon Talk: Inspiring Conversations About Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Love to Play It (co-authored by Greg Tito.) Most recently, Shelly has written How to Dungeon Master Parenting: A Guidebook for Gamifying the Child Rearing Quest, Leveling Up Your Skills, and Raising Future Adventurers.

Please check out these links from the episode:

Tertulia
Amazon
Bookshop.org
Barnes & Noble
University of Iowa Press
Middle-Aged Lady Mom (on Substack)

Welcome to Dice in Mind, a podcast hosted by Bradley Browne and Jason A. Kaufman to explore the intersection of life, games, science, music, philosophy, and creativity through interviews with leading creatives. All are welcome in this space. Royalty-free music "Night Jazz Beats" courtesy of flybirdaudio.

Ari Bowie is an editor and proofreader with Fox and Boar Games, now lending a hand in outreach and managing the company Discord. She has worked on a number of projects, including TrashSexy, 100 Ways, and ShadowWest. Despite being easily spooked, she has found herself working on several horror themed projects.

Fox and Boar Games is the tabletop publication company run by John R Harford – writer, artist and game content developer of over 30 years. Above all of his other pursuits – creating worlds for players has been John’s  lifelong passion. He’s been running games from an early age in 1983. He immediately began drawing on the existing worlds for emerging games like DragonQuest, Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, MERP and Gamma World to create his own scenarios and settings. His most current works leans into horror and dark fantasy in quasi-historical settings. Even when working in high fantasy or adjacent settings, John draws deeply on real world research to make his settings come alive. John is also a tenured professor who teaches (among other things) game narrative and tabletop system design at Raritan Valley Community College. His GMing style is narrative, fluid and employs immersive audio, visuals and narrative prose. Find out where Fox and Boar Games is going to be exhibiting or attending to get in on one of his games!

Please check out these relevant links:

Fox and Boar Games
Fox and Boar Games on DriveThruRPG
Game Art, Raritan Valley Community College

Welcome to Dice in Mind, a podcast hosted by Bradley Browne and Jason Kaufman to explore the intersection of life, games, science, music, philosophy, creativity, and literature through interviews with leading creatives. All are welcome in this space. Royalty-free music "Night Jazz Beats" courtesy of flybirdaudio.

Please follow us:

Twitter/X: https://x.com/diceinmind

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/diceinmind.bsky.social

Magnus Seter is an award-winning educational writer and game designer and a founder of The Yellow Hand creative collective. He is a well known figure in the Swedish RPG industry, both as an avid gamer and as an accomplished creator. Magnus started playing roleplaying games in 1982 with the very first version of  Drakar och Demoner. Because of this, he began tapping away at the family typewriter, writing extra rules and adventures for his own gaming group and shamelessly copying the style of the trailblazers of the day. Immersing himself in the hobby, Magnus soon discovered other RPGs, such as Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and Cyberpunk.

Please check out these relevant links:

Outside the Box (book)
The Yellow Hand

Welcome to Dice in Mind, a podcast hosted by Bradley Browne and Jason Kaufman to explore the intersection of life, games, science, music, philosophy, and creativity through interviews with leading creatives. All are welcome in this space. Royalty-free music "Night Jazz Beats" courtesy of flybirdaudio.

Kelli Fitzpatrick is a science fiction writer, gamewriter, and teacher. She is the author of Captain Marvel: Carol Danvers Declassified (from BenBella Books, 2025) and is a contributing writer for the Star Trek Adventures role-playing game from Modiphius. Her Star Trek story “The Sunwalkers” won the 2016 Strange New Worlds contest from Simon and Schuster. Her short fiction has been published by Baen Books, Crazy 8 Press, Flash Fiction Online, and others, and her essays on sci-fi pop culture appear at StarTrek.com, Women at Warp, and in anthologies from Sequart and ATB Publishing. She has written for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope outreach team and Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative. She has over a decade of experience teaching high school and college courses. Find her at KelliFitzpatrick.com and on Bluesky @KelliFitzWrites.

Derek Tyler Attico is a speculative fiction author, essayist, and award-winning photographer. In fiction, Derek has won the Excellence in Playwriting Award from the Dramatist Guild of America, and he is a two-time winner of the Star Trek Strange New Worlds short story contest (“Alpha & Omega,” “The Dreamer and the Dream”) published by Simon and Schuster. Derek is also the author of the bestselling, critically acclaimed “Star Trek novel The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko” by Titan Publishing.

Jim Johnson was born about the same time Apollo XII landed on the moon (and has always been kinda spacey) and shares a birthday with the Kindle. He is the author of the Pistols and Pyramids weird western series and the Potomac Shadows urban fantasy series. He's also written a bunch of other stuff in and around the SFF genres and pen and paper RPGs. He's currently the project manager and line editor for Modiphius's Star Trek Adventures RPG.

Michael Dismuke is a Certified Professional in Talent Development and Certified Leadership Development and Succession Strategist. He is a national speaker/trainer and consultant, a freelance writer for the Star Trek Adventures RPG, and a published comic creator.

Please check out this relevant link:

Star Trek: Timelines

Welcome to Dice in Mind, a podcast hosted by Bradley Browne and Jason Kaufman to explore the intersection of life, games, science, music, philosophy, and creativity through interviews with leading creatives. All are welcome in this space. Royalty-free music "Night Jazz Beats" courtesy of flybirdaudio.

Dan Labrecque is a consultant by day, husband and father of three by everything else, and a tabletop RPG player since 1982, back when Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was the gateway drug and the Satanic Panic was trying to convince everyone's parents otherwise. He survived those troubling times as his parents were too busy working at Velcro USA to bother with that hype. These days, he writes and creates for the Yellow Hand, contributing to the Simulacrum RPG and the Eyes That Behold Call of Cthulhu campaign, and has authored the Monster of the Week mysteries Web of Shadows (also converted to Call of Cthulhu) and Tidings of Dread. Currently, he's deep in Alea Temporis, a Forged in the Dark time travel game, plus faction guides for Monster of the Week starting with the Pact of Mammon.

Please check out these relevant links:

Monster of the Week: Web of Shadows
The Yellow Hand
Jetpack Comics

Welcome to Dice in Mind, a podcast hosted by Bradley Browne and Jason Kaufman to explore the intersection of life, games, science, music, philosophy, and creativity through interviews with leading creatives. All are welcome in this space. Royalty-free music "Night Jazz Beats" courtesy of flybirdaudio.

Magnus Seter is an award-winning educational writer and game designer and a founder of The Yellow Hand creative collective. He is a well known figure in the Swedish RPG industry, both as an avid gamer and as an accomplished creator. Magnus started playing roleplaying games in 1982 with the very first version of  Drakar och Demoner. Because of this, he began tapping away at the family typewriter, writing extra rules and adventures for his own gaming group and shamelessly copying the style of the trailblazers of the day. Immersing himself in the hobby, Magnus soon discovered other RPGs, such as Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and Cyberpunk.

Please check out these relevant links:

Outside the Box (book)
The Yellow Hand

Welcome to Dice in Mind, a podcast hosted by Bradley Browne and Jason Kaufman to explore the intersection of life, games, science, music, philosophy, and creativity through interviews with leading creatives. All are welcome in this space. Royalty-free music "Night Jazz Beats" courtesy of flybirdaudio.

Five years into the podcast, this is the first time one of our episodes has released on May the 4th. We are departing from our typical interview schedule to take this opportunity to chat about what Star Wars has meant and continues to mean to both of us as to our generation. MTFBWY.

Welcome to Dice in Mind, a podcast hosted by Bradley Browne and Jason Kaufman to explore the intersection of life, games, science, music, philosophy, and creativity through interviews with leading creatives. All are welcome in this space. Royalty-free music "Night Jazz Beats" courtesy of flybirdaudio.

Jay Sojdelius is a founder and game designer, writer, illustrator, and graphic designer at The Yellow Hand, a creative collective that concerns itself with the independent conceptualization, development, and publishing of hobby gaming products, aiming to become a thriving game publishing business of quality and distinction.

Please check out these relevant links:

Simulacrum Kickstarter
Simulacrum Free Quickstart
The Yellow Hand

Welcome to Dice in Mind, a podcast hosted by Bradley Browne and Jason Kaufman to explore the intersection of life, games, science, music, philosophy, and creativity through interviews with leading creatives. All are welcome in this space. Royalty-free music "Night Jazz Beats" courtesy of flybirdaudio.

It's the annual State of the Dice! Join us as we review the first five years of Dice in Mind and share our plans for the coming years. Happy five-year anniversary!

Where will we go in 2026/2027?

1. Writing
2. Attending a Con
3. Playing RPGs

Welcome to Dice in Mind, a podcast hosted by Bradley Browne and Jason Kaufman to explore the intersection of life, games, science, music, philosophy, and creativity through interviews with leading creatives. All are welcome in this space. Royalty-free music "Night Jazz Beats" courtesy of flybirdaudio.