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Episode 40 (April Fools Recording): “A Wide Set of Stairs”

One of the main things we do in editing our podcast is cut stuff. We cut long pregnant pauses, we cut fillers, we cut obnoxious background noise, and we cut long tangents. But a lot of this stuff we’ve saved in “outtakes” files, primarily for our own entertainment. We like to laugh at ourselves and how many fillers we use, for example.

While adjusting to the pandemic lifestyle through the Spring and early Summer kept us from our normal editing and posting schedule, Lucia decided to make a rough cut of outtakes and release it on 1 April 2020. She did this on schedule. Though we haven’t posted it to the site until now, it did appear in all of our podcast feeds on April 1st…without any explanation. This is the result. The track goes all over the place, from conversations with chickens to drum-beat loops of stuff getting knocked over through people stuttering or laughing until they vomit, randomly picked from two years’ worth of outtakes (so the age of the players – and the quality of their voices – jumps all over the place). Enjoy!

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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.

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Welcome to our worlds

Hi. My name is Harold, and I’ll be your Dungeon Master today.

This is how every session of our current campaign, Guardians of Indir, begins. But how did we get there, and who are we?

I discovered RPGs when I was 10, got more heavily into them when I was 12, and have been playing and mostly running games since then (it’s been more than 30 years). But that went out of the window when my kids were born – most parents will tell you how difficult it is to accommodate any schedule that isn’t based on the kids – and for years I hardly played at all.

After nearly a decade, my son was finally old enough to be interested in playing RPGs with me, and I started teaching him games that we could play together. A couple years after that, my daughter joined in, too. Soon I was able to share all my passion for gaming with them.

Well, nearly all…because I love to listen to RPG podcasts, and for the longest time I couldn’t find ANY RPG podcast I could listen to with a family audience. Grandparents or kids, neither were appropriate audiences for all the podcasts I listened to and enjoyed. Why was that? I was frustrated. Eventually I found one that was family-friendly, and shortly after that, some friends started a side campaign with their kids on their podcast. Suddenly the kids and I could listen to other people playing RPGs, too! I was very excited to share this aspect of RPG life with them.

But what did my kids say as soon as they listened to an RPG podcast? Naturally, they said “Well, we could do that. Why don’t we?”

This site and the associated podcast are the result.