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Episode 3: “Welcome to the Neighborhood, or What’s Behind Window #2?” (D&D 5e Session 1)

 

After getting really excited about the game world with our session 0, we went right into playing in the world. So this week’s episode begins as we start improvising the game within the world we’ve created. We jump right into the City-State of Indir, with the party on the road south, looking to investigate another reported sighting of the blackguard Steeev Ganalon.

 

A side note on voices: I love to do voices for my characters, and I love playing against type as much as possible.  So that means that you will pretty much never hear me portray a British elf or a Scottish dwarf, both tropes so pervasive that many players fall into doing them unconsciously. But that can trip me up if I don’t really commit to it. My concept for the elves in this episode is that they were southern, but I should have made them full-on hillbillies. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have stumbled over inventing names for the reinforcements like I did.

 

I’ll know better next time. Every game of an RPG contains learning experiences.

 

Listen to the previous episode

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Episode 1: “The Outside of the Deer” (D&D 5e Session 0)

Putting together all the disparate elements of an episode has taken a long time. We recorded the material for this episode back on 11 November 2017 as part of our “Session 0.”

“Session 0” is a term for any first RPG session where you meet with the players and discuss the groundwork of the campaign: creating characters, brainstorming world-building details, establishing house rules and acceptable table behavior, setting expectations, and so on. With this campaign, all I knew is that we wanted to play a D&D 5e game. The rest we made up at the table, and you can hear some of that in this first episode, where the DM and you meet the players and characters for our first campaign.

Listen to Episode 2

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Rambling Preamble

So it’s May and I’m still getting the first few episodes ready for posting – I’m surprisingly anxious to get it “right” somehow. Posting the initial content to the web site and doing the final edit of each track is taking me much longer than I thought it would, much less composing the music and creating the graphics. So, to tide you over (and to test that everything is working), I present to you…a Preamble to the podcast, in a way. It’s a much more verbose audio version of the information that I provided in my first blog post: my life and background that led up to our starting a podcast in the first place. I hope you enjoy it.

 

In this episode I mention a number of games, shows, and events. For your edification, I provide links to them here, in case you want to find out more about them.

  • The West Coast’s Premier Game Convention, DunDraCon:

http://www.dundracon.com

  • The Roll for Initiative podcast web site:

http://rfipodcast.com/show/

  • Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D):

DMs Guild (online store with AD&D rules) 

  • Monster Slayers (free PDF):

Drive Thru RPG site with free download

  • D&D 5e:

Wizards of the Coast (Free Basic Rules documents for D&D 5e)

  • Dungeons & Dragons & Daughters podcast

D&D&D web site

  • Tavern Tales Junior podcast

Tavern Tales’ “Junior” series

 

EDIT/CORRECTION:

In going back through my records, I found that it wasn’t my son who told me that I was going to run a game that week…it was my wife. She invited everyone to what became our Session 0 via e-mail after talking to our son about it at the beginning of the week.