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Episode 46: “Imbraxi-wha?” (Guardians of Indir, D&D 5e)

The party finishes their plans and begins preparations for the assault.

This is the fourth episode taken from our tenth recording session, which we played and recorded back in June 2018. The story so far: the city-state of Indir, a multi-racial stronghold of few mammals with a reptilian majority dominated by dragonborn, is in a war against the aggressor elven nation of Valtaryn and its dwarven allies. The heroes intercepted a group of elven commandos, narrowly preventing the elves from taking control of a complex hidden beneath Indir. The complex is the remains of a buried tower created by a race of ancients called “humans,” who were legendary for their cruelty and brutally advanced technology. The party retrieved a number of human artifacts from the tower, which mysteriously erupted from below Indir, rising up to a majestic height of fifty feet. Elves and dwarves have since taken control of the tower, using magical portals that enabled access. The Indiran military has evacuated and blockaded the neighborhood nearest the tower. As the two forces are in temporary equilibrium, the Indiran leaders have thrown a festival to reassure the populace that the world isn’t coming to an end, while one of the leaders, Karen Balthorek, has secretly met with the party during the festival to discuss next steps for saving Indir’s population from extermination. Running with the suggestion of one of Karen’s magic advisors, the gnome sage Alfor, the party has just devised a plan to scale the tower and try to destroy or deactivate the portals.

That’s where this episode begins. But the party has some time – about an hour – to prepare for the attack on the tower. What are they going to do in that time? Considering this question (and how the players answered it) prompts me to talk a bit about Ape Adventures.

In case “Ape Adventures” is an expression unfamiliar to you, let me explain. There’s a well-known sequence in the 2008 movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in which Shia LeBeouf’s character, Mutt, gets separated from the rest of the characters during a chase sequence in the jungle. He’s stranded on his own, and the film cuts back and forth between the main plot with all the other characters and scenes of Mutt up in the tree canopy by himself. He is at a loss for what to do, but then some curious monkeys descend to investigate. Mutt befriends those monkeys, and they in turn teach him how to swing from creepers to vines. Soon Mutt and his primate pals are joyously speeding through the jungle on vines like Spider-Man swinging on webs. Eventually Mutt is reunited with the main plot, and neither he nor anybody else ever discusses what happened to him as he leaves his monkey mates behind forever. It’s pretty universally lambasted as a ridiculous sequence of events, but from it has arisen the expression “Ape Adventure” (even though Mutt’s buddies are monkeys, not apes. People like their alliteration!), which is used by writers to refer to a sequence in a book, film, or TV show where one character leaves the rest of the group and has a significant experience that is never discussed with anyone else once they return to the group.

Back in episode 30, Squeak went off on an Ape Adventure of his own. But this episode of “The Guardians of Indir” campaign involves each character splitting off from the group for their own Ape Adventures. It’s something that happens pretty frequently in role-playing games: either the party splits up so that each character can pursue their own interests (as in this episode), or one character gets separated or chooses to leave the group to have a little private time (as in episode 30). In D&D, it’s a very common trope that the thieves will absent themselves while the rest of the party is asleep…in order to pursue some side hustle in secret. Players of sneaky characters particularly love to do this, but players of any and all types of PCs will be in this situation from time to time. How do you handle these kinds of situations at your table?

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Episode 45: “MORE time travel!” (Guardians of Indir, D&D 5e)

The party discusses how to address the elven threat with Karen, Kabuto, and Alfor.

This is the third episode taken from our tenth recording session, recorded back in June 2018. In it, the players and PCs continue their journey to get serious about the next steps in the defense of Indir against the elven aggressors in their council with Karen Balthorek and many other NPCs during the street festival in Indir. Because the players were having a hard time getting focused, Alfor the gnome wizard keeps rewinding time for them so they can continue conversations that they forgot about…hence the title, “MORE Time Travel!”

This is also an episode that screams for some fan artwork, at least of the elevator shoes and the joy & disappointment of eating ice cream. Because we spent some time at the beginning of the session building more character backstories, many of the major NPCs make an appearance in this episode in those conversations (sometimes even without time travel to rewind them); we hear from Karen, Keats, Alfor, and Timbertina, while Scrapheap, Shonda, and Kabuto (who we determined was going to be Karen’s majordomo) are mentioned.

The silliness that I talked about in the last post is fun, but it does tend to make the game really aimless…which of course can be a real problem in any RPG session, but it’s particularly bad when the entire game – world-building, plot, characters, encounters, everything – is being improvised on the spot. So Harold lets them go on for a while, trying to make a decision. This is tough for the players to do; while there are really only two broad options to choose, there isn’t a clear favorite, because the player desires (“I wanna go to the battlefield and lead armies!”) conflicts with many of the characters’ personalities (“I’m no good on a battlefield!”) and either impasse or disgruntlement is a natural outcome. The DM lets them go for a long time before having an NPC step in and provide some information that would help the PCs make a decision.

There is a line of thought in RPG circles that this sort of delay, letting the players twist in the wind without explicit direction, is boring and/or frustrating. Without clear directions, this line of thinking goes, the players’ indecision delays them from getting to “the good stuff.” At the same time, there are others that think that a game should be all about player agency, and that line of thinking asserts that “leading the players” is something that any good GM should strenuously avoid doing. Some might argue that merely providing more information in the way Harold eventually does in this episode is being too heavy-handed. What do you think? How long is appropriate for the players to debate, discuss, and dicker amongst themselves without a resolution? When should a GM step in to cut off circular conversations, if at all? How have you handled situations like this in your games, either as a player or GM?

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Episode 44: “The Map Room” (Guardians of Indir, D&D 5e)

After a short recap, the party steps away from the Indir Festival to discuss next steps with Karen.

This is the second episode taken from our tenth recording session, originally recorded in June 2018. As you may remember – we wrote about it as recently as the previous post – Harold the DM was improvising this campaign, specifically by only creating material for the game DURING the game. We’d had a recording problem – a broken laptop – that meant that the previous session (Session 9, not posted to the podcast yet) was recorded with different software on different equipment with different characters in a different role-playing game. So as we resumed the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e game with this session (Session 10), there had been two months since the last session, during which time Harold had done his best to not think about or prepare anything for the campaign at all. Over the same period, the players were very busy with their schooling, what with final exams and the other hallmarks of finishing their semesters, not to mention those players who were graduating from high school. The end result was that we needed some time to get back into the D&D game. It also goes a long way to explain why the players were all so punchy and unfocused.

Context is everything. Some days the games are just going to be silly, because that’s all the players can handle. That’s one of the beautiful things about role-playing.

The last episode, Episode 43 “Gigner Tokens,” was the beginning of the session, with Harold asking leading questions to help the players remember who their PCs are by prompting them to create more details about their characters. This episode – 43 – is the natural extension of that process, with Harold giving a quick recap of the “story so far” to the group, both to remind them and to remind himself of what was happening in the game. That helped center Harold, and gave him a bit of time to create what was going to happen next…Karen Balthorek summoning the heroes to come up with plans for what to do about the impending mammalian invasion.

There’s some fun bits in here, too, not least of which is the mention of Kabuto – a mysterious name that Harold wrote in his notes during session 8 along with a bunch of other NPC names. He hadn’t looked at those notes in two months, and nobody could recall why he’d written it. Can you?

During the conversation with Karen, Squeak shares some information about the Tower with the rest of the group; this is a reference back to the events covered in episode 30, “Oh, it’s alright,” which none of the other players knew anything about, as that episode hadn’t been posted yet.

Lucia mentions Kai Winn at one point (which should give you an idea what she was watching in summer 2018), and Balasar calls Vhisuna a “Crimmen Al,” which will be an absolute travesty if it doesn’t get used as an NPC name in some future game. “Hey, Crimmen! Long time no see! Everybody, this is my old buddy, Crimmen Al!” “Only my friends call me Crimmen. You can call me Al.”

What’s a little detail that has come up in one of your games, that has later blossomed into something really significant for the campaign?

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Episode 43: “Gigner Tokens” (Guardians of Indir, D&D 5e)

Episode 43 gradually resumes the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e campaign.

Having completed our posting of the All Souls Night adventure, with this episode we go back in time to the D&D 5e Guardians of Indir campaign…

…but when we started recording this session (session 10) in June of 2018, it had been several weeks since we’d played D&D together. In the interim we’d played a session in an entirely different RPG – P.L.U.S. – that also used concepts from the classic 90s superheroes setting/RPG, The Taint. We still hope to publish material from that game in future episodes. But when we came back, we had to get our heads back into this campaign.

That was particularly a challenge for the DM, Harold, who (as we’ve described previously) was trying to run the Indir game completely improvised. So rather than jumping right back into the party confronting the elves in the tower, the first part of the session – this episode, really – consists of a lot of side conversations and digressions as the DM asks pointed questions about little character details to get both himself and the players back into the game, particularly since the PCs have each completed their training and advanced to 3rd level.

It may seem aimless and rambling at first, but each of the characters is developed a bit more during this episode. Well, maybe it never stops seeming aimless and rambling.

Klyde owes a debt to his tribe, so a quarter of his earnings he sends back to the clan. He once tried to pass on some counterfeit goods to his trainer, but failed to fool him. He’s trained a fuzzy little shuvuuia named “Scrap Heap” as his animal companion.

One of the many times Vhisuna got them into trouble and her brother Keats got them out of it, the repercussions forced their shared family to move yet again.

Earlier in his life, Squeak spent a lot of time in the Underdark. A small Indiran scouting party came down and, during their patrol, broke up a fight between different factions underground. Squeak decided that this was his chance to escape the strife in the Underdark, and he imitated one of the soldiers and marched back out with them.

Kantu is a red-shouldered aarakocra. He spent most of his life in Sometown-in-the-mountains before coming down to Indir for the trees. Kantu now has an animal companion, Muffin the boar.

“What does Muffin look like?“

In Balasar’s village, they played a sport like basketball using rabbit skulls instead of a ball. He found Maval Bersk, the ancient sentient construct. Balasar was drawn to Yugondai when his village was being destroyed by a monster and a pigeon descended from the sky bearing him a warhammer to defend his home. The dragonborn forces of Indir came to the village afterward, and Balasar signed up to the military, bringing Maval Bersk along with him.

“When Balasar sees a door, he becomes a bit…unhinged…”

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Episode 33: “Lunch and Karen” (D&D 5e, Session 8b)

Episode 33 of the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e campaign.

Harold here. So I was posting episodes more often – trying to make some progress and “catch up” to where I think we should be in the podcast (at this point, we should be well past episode 52), but then there was this huge work conference that took up two weeks of my time. So, now that that’s over, here’s the next episode.

This episode contains the last part of our eighth recording session, which was recorded over a year ago, in May 2018. In it, the players continue to create details, riffing off of each other, as they finish training their characters to level 3. This is the first session that we recorded AFTER I had been edited and started releasing episodes of the podcast – we had a full six months’ of game sessions before we released our first episode – but at this point I’m still learning how bad the sound is of all the nervous habits that the players have. It’s all normal stuff that players – and just people in general – normally do in a conversation at a table, but at this point it is finally starting to get curtailed in our podcast. I am painfully aware of the noise of people playing with handfuls of dice (jiggling and rolling them) and players talking over each other which have been up to this point pretty omnipresent in our podcast. To some extent, this is OK, as it accurately presents how people playing a real game sound. But at the same time I realize it is pretty distracting. I do get better at reducing these behaviors: hopefully you’ll hear the change in the next few episodes.

Another note: a few sessions earlier, Blake had started referring to his PC as “Squeaks” instead of its real name, Squeak. Over the course of a few months, we all joined in, and it became painful to edit and listen to in the future (this past year of posting episodes) as we got the character name wrong AGAIN and AGAIN. As I said earlier, this session (number 8) was our first session post-releasing podcast episodes. So at the beginning of the session (Episode 31), I apologized for getting Squeak’s name wrong. During that session, the players all talked about paying a nickel every time anybody said the name wrong again. You’ll hear references to that several times in this episode.

Overall, I’m delighted with this episode and our eighth session in general, because it marks a departure from our “normal” mode of dangerous adventuring, and returns to what we were doing at the beginning of the game (and podcast): world-building and role-playing. The players throw themselves into that creativity and I couldn’t be more pleased. Decades ago, I played in a long-running “Skyrealms of Jorune” campaign run by Joe Adams (nee Coleman), and I was fascinated by how he constructed each session. From his example, I extrapolated a lot of my philosophy of how to run a game. Combat was not the core of the game, even though in SoJ as in Dungeons & Dragons it is the most extensive and largest part of the rules. Combat is an element of the drama that you are telling together. But the character interplay, world-creation, and exploration creates the context that makes the combat interesting, and often necessary. I may have mentioned “Joe’s Golden Ratio” before: it’s what I call the idea that each session of an RPG should consist of only one combat encounter bracketed by investigation, exploration, and interaction…anything and everything that’s in the game that isn’t fighting. Maybe shopping and eating, for example.

Take a listen, and let us know what you think.

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Episode 32: “Of Groktents and Shuvuuia” (D&D 5e, Session 8b)

In this episode we continue our account of the several days in Indir following the party’s return from the dungeon-turned-tower, with Vhisuna and Kantu describing their training. In addition, the party gets up to some extra activities, making the most of the relative calm as war looms in Daboboah’s near future. Khyren, a local priest, has decided to hold the annual cosmopolitan street festival for the neighborhood despite the imminent threat of invasion by mammalian forces.

At the end of the episode, Harold mentions that we have started a wiki, to help us and our listeners keep track of all the stuff that we’re inventing as we play. We’re working to continually update this. The wiki is here on our site: http://allagesrpg.com/wiki/guardians-of-indir/ If you have any suggestions or recommendations for our podcast or our wiki, please let us know. We’re also considering providing transcripts of our episodes.

Thank you for listening!

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Episode 31: “Incapacitate, decapitate, defenestrate, and taxonomize” (D&D 5e, Session 8b)

Episode 31 of All Ages RPG: Balasar and Klyde train to level 3

Here’s another episode of our Guardians of Indir Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign. In this one, we get a lot of silliness, but also a lot more detail about Balasar’s trainer, Maval Bersk. I really enjoy this process of discovery, as we each introduce details into the campaign world like these characters, and then the group collectively adds details to the character. This makes a more complicated, nuanced character than one person tends to be able to do on their own, or at least not as quickly. Maval’s backstory is interesting in that it begs a whole bunch of additional world-building questions: how did he get there? What does his name mean? Why was his profession needed?

Recently on Twitter we’ve discussed the use of money in D&D campaigns, and how to keep money interesting, so that PCs will spend it, rather than hoarding it. I find that the requirement to pay for training eliminates this as a concern in these lower levels. For instance, the Guardians have had to scramble to be able to afford training with each level they’ve gained; excess money just doesn’t happen. But then, that’s also a function of how much money the party acquires in its adventures. Does money pile up in your role-playing games? If so, what do you use your party’s wealth for in your games?

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Episode 30: “Oh. It’s alright.” (D&D 5e, Session 8a)

Whoa. It’s been months since we’ve posted an episode. Sorry, everyone, for the long wait! We actually have a LOT of content recorded; it’s just that the end of the school year and summer break presented a lot of scheduling challenges that made editing very difficult. We will be racing in an attempt to catch up, so you may see multiple episodes being released per week for a while.

This episode is a bit of a departure for us. It’s still Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, still the same Guardians of Indir campaign, but it was recorded in April 2018 during a period where a couple of the players were being crushed by all the last-minute requirements to graduate from high school. We hadn’t been able to schedule a single session for more than a month when we recorded this, and so I (DM Harold) decided to record a little 1-on-1 session with Blake (who was available), just to keep my hand in it, and also because we did have some side stuff that Squeak needed to experience that didn’t need to happen with the other players in the room.

Squeak started out a sage, studying ancient tomes, which (among other things) led to his leaving the secret island homeland of changelings more than a century ago. Finding his abilities much in demand on the mainland, Squeak worked for various governments as an infiltrator and spy, which sometimes dovetailed nicely with his passion for esoteric texts.

When rumors of the discovery of an actual living dragon broke out, war inevitably followed, as it always does when the question of dragons arises with dragonborn. There seem always to be those who believe in dragons and those who don’t, and there’s very little common ground ever found between them.

Squeak found himself stranded in the middle of a conflict between dragonborn forces as dragonborn civilizations chose sides. The changeling was found and befriended by a young Indiran officer named Balasar, who vouched for Squeak to his superiors in the “dragons no longer exist” school of thought. Grudgingly, Squeak was allowed to work for Indir.

The “Dragons are real” faction, calling themselves “dragonkin,” rallied behind the warlord who claimed to know the location of the living dragon and hold the secret to controlling it. Quickly swelling to enormous size, the Dragonkin forces absorbed or destroyed every nation that stood in their path. The dwarves of Dij Vilca briefly held back the invading army, but their forces broke against the full might of the dragonkin horde. The elven nation of Valtaryn avoided battle entirely, yielding ground and retreating into their deepest forests. The dragonkin army trampled into Indiran lands. The Indiran leaders had not been idle; Karen Balthorek led the party that formed an alliance with nearby tribes of goblins and kobold clans, while Steeev Ganalon continued to fortify Indir itself with a wall that grew steadily higher as he diverted more and more money to the war effort. With humanoids swelling their ranks, the Indiran army was able to shatter the dragonkin army, slaughtering its warlord and putting to bed any lingering superstitions about the existence of dragons.

Returning victorious to the city of Indir, Squeak was feted as a hero along with Balasar, who had been repeatedly promoted on the battlefield as his superiors were killed. The victory celebrations enchanted Squeak, particularly with their music. Fascinated by the music and with no immediate spy missions demanding his attention, Squeak felt free to seek an apprenticeship with the world-famous dragonborn performer, Torinn.

He excelled as a bard, discovering that not only was he fascinated by music and performance, but that he was quite talented at it as well. Soon Squeak, too, was enchanting small audiences at humble venues, performing anonymously in a different form each night. But then, during the adventures of the podcast, he thought he heard someone calling his full name. He followed the voice to an abandoned basement of a building derelict since its owner was killed in the Dragon War, where he found an ancient tome. Eagerly he attempted to read the tome, but the language was none he knew, nor did it fit any linguistic patterns he knew. He became fixated on the tome, muttering to it as he drew scrolls and scrolls of diagrams attempting to discern a pattern of sense from the scrawled “writing.” His music practice was neglected. Dark tendrils of obsession grew in his mind, and as they did so, the book seemed to speak to him, whispering of The Axolotl. The dark thoughts took shape in his mind, the shape of a box. He found he could imagine opening the box, and strange and terrible power would flow through him. So it was that Squeak became a warlock between episode 4 and 5 of this podcast.

Now that the PCs have escaped from the dungeon-that-became-a-tower, they have enough experience points to gain levels, as long as they can pay their class trainers. Will Squeak figure out how to get some more money? Will he choose to continue his world-class music training, or will he choose a more sinister path?

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Episode 29: “Something to Sell” (D&D 5e, Session 7)

The party gets XP and discusses how to sell their loot to get money enough to train for level 3.

At last we reach the end of our seventh recording session, from all the way back in March 2018! This was just going to be a little blurb of DM Harold giving experience points to the party, but the players were pretty hyped up about the adventure and continued to role-play in character, interacting with new NPCs they created to sell the potentially valuable human relics they salvaged from the dungeon…including the artificial humans Sqt Rp Do and That Guy On The Floor! Will they sell their companions for cash? Do they even think of them as companions? You’ll have to listen to find out.

After this recording session, a bunch of things happened: a bunch of the players left for Spring Break vacations with families, and then final exams loomed for the two players finishing high school, and the result was that we didn’t play Guardians of Indir for a while again. We have continued the campaign! But there is a big gap between this session in early March and the next one in mid-April 2018, which doesn’t include a bunch of the players. The next session with the whole group was in early May…and it was a completely different RPG.

We haven’t fully decided yet, but we may start releasing episodes alternating between the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e campaign and other games we’ve played: one-offs in D&D, the Dungeon in a Box Greenwold campaign, and some games in completely different RPGs. We’ve got a bunch recorded already – it’s been a year now as I (Harold) write this! – but we’d love to hear from you: which system(s) would you like to hear us play? So far as we’ve released so far, our game sessions have had pretty much the same group of players all along. What other players do you think we should bring to the table? Do you want to hear more young kids? More parents? More grandparents, retirees? Let us know in the comments or by tweeting @allagesrpg.

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Episode 28: “Is This Normal?” (D&D 5e, Session 7)

In our 28th episode, the party’s conversation with Timbertina and Sqt Rp Do is rudely interrupted…

This episode of our ongoing Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign, the Guardians of Indir, has the players enjoying a bit more NPC interaction than usual, as they get into character for more roleplay (it’s been long enough since they did much in-character interaction that some of the players are even surprised at Lucia’s voice for Kantu!). Is this normal? Only time will tell.

I (DM Harold) had a hard time naming this episode, because there were so many good lines from this portion of the game that would have served equally well. For example:

“Surrounded by idiots”

“I’m a telepathy!”

“I’m not sure I like that (but maybe I do)”

“Spiking the kobold”

“I don’t think that was the right way to do that.”

“I want to help”

“Sounds like a mental disorder”

and the classic “Blame Steeev!”

As I post this to allagesrpg.com, it’s more than a year after we actually played this session (we played it in March 2018!). Our game schedule is pretty cyclical. With kid players (at the time, all of our players were in 12th grade or under), the game schedule is strongly affected by the school semesters. So we’re coming up on a break in the game, when we first started playing another RPG! Don’t worry; we have continued to play D&D 5e as well in the months since then; we’ve just been alternating as schedules prevent one or another player from joining us for a session.

What games would you particularly like to hear played on a podcast?