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Episode 10: “Human League” (D&D 5e Session 4)

DM Harold here. This episode begins our fourth recording session. I was mistaken before, when I said that the third session was the first session in 2018 – I was going by the time stamp on the audio files, which were updated when I opened the recording software again at the beginning of the fourth session! A rookie mistake.

 

Anyway, this actually marks the beginning of the fourth recording session and the first session in 2018…you can tell by our icebreaker question at the start, and the table’s nervous energy because it’s been weeks since we’ve all seen each other.

 

On that note, going into this session, I believed that we were going to be at least one player short due to schedule conflicts. I knew weeks in advance that we were going to be less than the full group, so I thought about how to play an interesting game that kept the players engaged but didn’t leave out the absent players. I could have prepared a one-off of a different system (and I do such things, later on in the year), but I felt like there was some fun opportunity to use the time to present some “interactive exposition:” that is, instead of just telling the players about some world background, I would have them LIVE it.

 

Well, schedules opened up at the last minute, and we ended up having our full complement of regular players. So, rather than discarding the idea, I offered the players a choice once we got started. You can hear what they chose in this episode.

 

For your entertainment, I will also be posting the players’ character sheets soon. I’ll update this post and the top page of the site when they’re available.

Rakhari-the-Kazarim

Geranda-the-Infractor

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Episode 9: “Nice things come in tree packages” (D&D 5e Session 3)

Episode 9 concludes our third recording session of the D&D 5e campaign, Guardians of Indir, in which the party continues the battle on the city wall. The players make a jokey reference, and may or may not get the resulting joke I made in game after that (either they got it and it wasn’t funny to them, or it went completely over their heads).

 

Note that I (DM Harold) make ANOTHER rules error in this episode, which I didn’t catch until I was editing the audio for this episode, months later. I talk about how to handle such in-game mistakes at the end of this episode, and I already have ideas on how to “fix” this particular inconsistency, which may come up in our next session (this Saturday). But the delay between our playing/recording and publishing the episodes (six months at this point) means that you won’t hear the result for quite some time. How do you think you would resolve the problem?

The next recording session has some interesting story developments through an expository experiment I did, and for the game I created a lot of new D&D mechanics content. As I prepare to edit this, I’m reminded that by now we have quite a collection of variant rules, setting information, custom classes, and the like. So in parallel to producing the podcast episodes, I’m also considering publishing some of that content on Drive Thru RPG and/or DMs’ Guild to be freely available. Let us know in comments if you’d be interested in seeing such supporting content.

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Episode 8: “My Toothbrush Talks to Me at Night” (D&D 5e Session3)

 

This episodes continues session 3 of the Guardians of Indir campaign, recorded in January 2018. The party continues the fight on the wall around Indir and things get…silly at times. Particularly with regards to the two war veterans.

 

Note: I (Harold) make a mistake in this episode. Well, at least one. The one I’m thinking of is my explanation of the thrown property for weapons. If a weapon has the thrown property, you use the same attribute’s bonus for the attack and damage as you would if you were to use that weapon in melee. Only if a finesse weapon had the thrown property would you be able to choose freely between STR and DEX!

 

One other note: we’ve just got notification of our approval to be listed in Google Play. So if you have that service, you will shortly also be able to listen to our podcast there.

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Episode 7: “Jolly Green Giant” (D&D 5e Session 3)

Harold the DM here. Somehow I’m a little late in posting this log entry for episode 7. Sorry about that! As I post this, it’s early in the morning of Independence Day 2018. This episode is the first part of our third full game session, which was our first recording of 2018 (back in January). It’s more than usually obvious that we recorded the game separately from the intro with this episode and last episode (“Old Gigner Ale”), because I was experiencing really heavy environmental allergies for those two weeks. My voice is very croaky as a result.

Inspired by a shift that happens in session 3, I recorded a longer-than-usual intro for this episode, in which I talk about some of the process involved in changing the tone of your game on the fly, in-session. I may do a longer write-up in future, if I get to the point where I am writing articles separate from episode releases. So far I haven’t yet, but I can dream.

On the topic of other material not directly related to a podcast episode, I intend soon to start posting more of our artwork to this site, as well as posting some of the custom game content we’ve been creating as free DMs’ Guild downloads. Now that I mention it, what content would you like to see written up?