Spooky podcast sensation Welcome to Night Vale heading to tabletop from the makers of Power Rangers RPG
A friendly desert community where the people are NPCs and dice rain from the sky.
The makers of the Transformers and Power Rangers RPG are aiming a bit more niche for their next tabletop adaptation. The longrunning fiction podcast Welcome to Night Vale will make its way to kitchen tables as an upcoming tabletop RPG thanks to a new deal between its creators and Renegade Game Studios.
The news first broke around Gen Con, somewhat lost in the heady mix of new releases and a genuine truckload of Disney Lorcana information. Still, for those who cut their teeth on the misadventures of late-night radio DJ Cecil Palmer and the residents of Night Vale, the opportunity to explore the weird and creepy town on their own is an exciting prospect.
The currently titled Welcome to Night Vale Roleplaying Game is slated to arrive sometime in 2024, though we don’t know much more beyond that. Renegade president Scott Gaeta said in a press release that the company is working with co-creators Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor in some capacity on the adaptations.
"For over a decade, Jeffrey and I have been building the world of Night Vale with our podcast, touring live shows, and novels. Now we cannot wait for people to finally get to step into that world themselves, and start telling their own stories about a weird little desert town," Fink said.
Welcome to Night Vale premiered in June 2012 as a bi-weekly podcast and has since expanded into live shows and a series of novels set in the fictional desert town roughly located somewhere in the American Southwest. Though, with all the supernatural events, horrific entities and extradimensional shenanigans, it’s hard to place exactly. The show follows Palmer, voiced by actor Cecil Baldwin, as he broadcasts the news and daily events of Night Vale, spinning weird tales that land somewhere between unnervingly spooky and heartfelt.
All three of the Renegade’s recent big adaptive titles - Power Rangers, Transformers and G.I. Joe - use a house system called Essence20. It uses a 20-sided die combined with the relevant skill die to overcome most contests and obstacles, and that skill die can range anywhere across the standard polyhedral array depending on the character’s proficiency. Dicebreaker has reached out to Renegade for more information on the Welcome to Night Vale RPG.