Our 27th episode, “Squeak and Sqt,” featuring a bunch of adventurers trying to figure out what to do when their opponent vanishes and all they can see are ancient mechanical humans.
This episode, our twenty-seventh, continues the D&D 5e story of the Guardians of Indir. The incarnadine elf they’d been fighting vanished abruptly, so that the only people the party could see other than themselves were the mechanical, drab-colored elves (humans, though only Squeak and Balasar have any experience with what humans may once have looked like). There’s a lot of laughter in this episode.
There’s also an example of how a character voice can change on the fly. Late in the episode, a new NPC appears, and I (Harold) must admit that I didn’t give a lot of thought to what he’d sound like when I invented him. As I’ve talked about before, I’m intentionally playing this campaign with as little planning as possible – making it up on the spot as much as I can. This makes for a much more dynamic, interactive story for the most part, but it can mean (as it did here) that the NPC details like voice, cadence, and mannerisms evolve live in the game. You don’t start with a completed character, because the character didn’t exist until it appears in the game. At first I present the character with just a slight tonal modulation and an altered cadence to his speech. But quickly I realized that this wasn’t as fun, nor was it consistent with other Indirans that we’ve heard. So the voice changes abruptly over a few minutes, eventually becoming Tim, the grizzled veteran that the party has since come to know and love.
Episode 26 continues our D&D 5e Guardians of Indir adventure, with the party reaching the end of a tunnel spiraling down deep underground as they chase down the source of the strange noises they’ve heard.
Harold the GM here. Episode 26 follows the Guardians of Indir as they continue to chase down the source of the strange, vaguely musical noises they’ve heard in the ancient human ruins under the city of Indir. They’ve just arrived at the end of a long tunnel that spiraled even deeper down underground.
Naming our episodes is always a fun but challenging task. We like to use a quote from the episode itself, both because it’s a fun reference, but also so that it reminds listeners of the future (including us) what happens in each episode. So while there are a lot of fun quotes that we could use, there’s generally only a few that:
a) don’t give away what is happening to the listener before they hear the episode for the first time,
b) don’t refer to some side joke or inconsequential development unrelated to the main plot, and
c) are distinctive enough that one can, at a glance, recall what happened in that episode when you come back to it in the future.
That’s what we set out to do, at any rate. How are we doing with that, do you think?
Because it’s fun to us, here are some of the titles that we considered but didn’t use for this episode:
“Mario from now on”
“Headless Joe”
“Undergoing Mitosis”
“Bird, baby, bird – feather inferno!”
“Don’tcha know that we’ll never stop!”
“So maybe I SHOULDN’T set everything on fire?”
There’s another one that I (Harold) quite liked, but it actually gives away too much for someone who hasn’t listened to the episode already.
Naming episodes is obviously an important thing. You need to know which episode is which, and, in a sequential story format like our RPG podcast, you need to know the order of the episodes, too. But sometimes there’s a conflict with how the podcaster feels they should be named and how the distributor feels they should be named, as the podcasting world discovered recently to its dismay. At the beginning of March 2019, Apple announced to all podcasters (who distribute their episodes on Apple Podcasts) that it was going to start enforcing its 2017 Podcast Best Practices Guidelines as if they were requirements. There’s a lot in their Best Practices Guidelines about how to tag podcasts, and how to name them and describe them in a way that doesn’t repeat or contain extraneous or non-unique information, and that’s all well and good. But there is also a Guideline at the end of the list that says that no episode title should contain an episode number, which is a problem for pretty much every serial podcast ever posted on any site, anywhere. With the enforcement announcement, Apple started to enforce these “Guidelines” by removing a bunch of podcasts that had violated these strictures from their service. Overnight, poof! Many, many podcasts disappeared from the Apple Podcasts store and service. As you can imagine, there was a huge outcry, which seems to have taken Apple by surprise. It wrote several follow-up e-mail announcements to its podcasters in response, one of which was sent in such a rush that it ended in the middle of a sentence!
In the end, Apple stepped back its decision and is no longer removing podcasts for having episode numbers in their titles. But I’m trying it as an experiment, to see how it looks and feels to have our serial episodes appear without a number in the podcast applications like Apple and Stitcher and Spotify. Almost immediately, I got a report from one listener who was confused even though episode 25 showed up as the next episode, it didn’t say “Episode 25” in the title. What do you think? Is it confusing or an inconvenience to you, or just different and you’ll get used to it? We’d love to hear how you feel about it.
“Not the Hazelnut spread!” continues the story of the Guardians of Indir, our first D&D 5e campaign.
With this episode, taken from our seventh recording session (early in April 2018), we rejoin the Guardians in the ancient ruins beneath the city of Indir, still looking for the elves that they’d chased underground. They’ve just finished fighting the tentacled myriapod, which is a word I (Harold) learned in the course of preparing this episode (in the session I still refer to it as an “arthropod”). We also talk about art, and each player talks a bit about the sorts of artwork they’d like to see for the Guardians of Indir. We’ve already produced some artwork: watercolor logos, character portraits, a map of the region. What other artwork would you like to see? Let us know your ideas!
As a GM, providing sensory details is a high priority for me, though I am far from perfect at doing so. In this episode I try to describe some sounds that the characters hear. How do you think I did? How would you have described it yourself? How have you described sensory information in your games?
