Interview With Matt Gullett

Matt Gullett has been building Eldritch Wastelands for ten years, and he’s finally letting the world in. An arcane apocalypse has torn a hole in reality, civilization has collapsed, and a hundred years later, psychopathic warlords and voodoo mamas rule the ruins of the Weird South. It’s Gamma World’s DNA filtered through Thundarr the Barbarian and seasoned with a Southern drawl — and it runs on ShadowDark. In this episode, Matt talks about why he ditched Savage Worlds mid-project, how a friend’s off-the-cuff recommendation changed everything, and why the stripped-down ShadowDark engine finally let his world breathe the way it always should have. He covers his Kickstarter’s blazing fast funding, his long-game vision for quarterly zines and new content, and why running games at Texas conventions has been his single best marketing tool. Along the way we get into the elegance of purpose-built game systems versus universal ones, the OSR community’s genuine warmth, RPGs as a tool for social development — Matt credits the hobby with curing a childhood stutter severe enough to make ordering ketchup at McDonald’s a crisis — and the stories behind some of the hobby’s most generous people. This one is for anybody who wants their apocalypse with a drawl.