300 episodes later, Jef & Jon still believe there are more systems to master
Discovering a game is mostly Confederate apologia is just another day in the podcast mines for these boys.
System Mastery, started by Jon Taylor and Jef Aldrich, is podcast catnip for RPG nerds. It’s funny, and if you squint, it can even be educational. Aldrich and Taylor review old games — often out of print, often for good reason. Started in 2013, they recently celebrated their 300th episode in typical fashion by bantering through the baroque powerhouse, Palladium Fantasy.
Over the decade, unsatisfied with just ruining RPGs, they’ve stumbled into reviewing bad movies, bad TV, even bad Star Wars stuff (as per latest reports, Star Wars has yet to recover). And they haven’t even stopped there. They’ve published RPG-themed cookbooks, cocktail recipe books, tarot cards, and more. And to think it all started in a Trader Joe freezer.
Rascal sat down with Taylor and Aldrich to chat about how they got started, what they’ve learned from reading old RPGs for over ten years, and how they stop people from getting mad at their (obviously correct) opinions.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Thomas Manuel: First of all, congratulations on 300 episodes. Did you think when you started this podcast in 2013 that you might be still doing this 12 years later?
Jef Aldrich: No, not at all. When we started the show, I had been working at the refrigerator in Trader Joe's. I was stacking eggs when I had the idea to do this. It was just a hobby idea. And there was a point, I'd say maybe 20 or 30 episodes in, where just working at a Trader Joe's wasn't enough to even financially keep this free show on the air. So, we started a Patreon with the monthly goal of $6 to pay for the hosting fees.
Jon Taylor: I was going back to school for a pharmacy tech degree, and at the time I had been watching a bunch of YouTube videos and things like that. I was thinking, ‘oh, what I really wanna do is make video content.’ So when Jef was like, ‘I have an idea for this podcast,’ I was like, ‘oh, okay, sure. I'd like to try and put a video on that.’ And then after doing five episodes of that, I was like, ‘man, I hate video editing’.
