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Episode 26: “The Maroon Four” (D&D 5e Session 7)

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.

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Episode 25: “Not the Hazelnut spread!” (D&D 5e, Session 7)

“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?

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Episode 24: “I hate everything down here!” (D&D 5e Session 6)

Listen to episode 24, as we return to the Guardians of Indir story.

After a long hiatus and a couple of side adventures over the last few episodes, we return in this episode to our sixth recording session (from March 2018) and the continuation of the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e campaign. When we last left our heroes, Balasar had just been reduced to zero hit points by a monstrous, tentacled myriapod that had followed the sound of his enthusiastically pounding rocks in a dungeon with his holy hammer. At the end of last episode, the players had only just realized that this dungeon strongly resembled the layout of the Tower of the Sun that they’d defended in the human flashback episodes (episodes 10, 11, and 12). Though Balasar knew nothing of this, his player (Korben) had realized that the collapsed passage roughly corresponded to the place where stairs had led up to the roof of the tower in the flashback, so he tried to clear a path. But instead a monster skittered in to investigate.

Just a reminder to our listeners, too, that the party came down underground in the first place to pursue a trio of despised elves that had attacked the city and somehow opened the gate to these underground passages. So far, there’s been no sign of the elves other than one dead one they found just inside the dungeon. Two others remain, somewhere…will the party find the elves, or some sign of why these tunnels exist under their city? Listen to find out!

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Episode 23: All Daughters RPG podcast crossover adventure

I’ve known Kyle from the Tavern Tales and Tavern Tales Junior podcasts for years now, ever since he and his wife (Marie-Claire of the What the Force? podcast) came to visit us in California after collaborating on the Critionary for the Crit Juice podcast. Kyle starting his family-friendly podcast, Tavern Tales Junior, was a major inspiration for us to start All Ages RPG. So last summer I was telling him about how much my kids enjoy listening to his kids on his podcast. He responded with “Maybe we should try to get them to play a game together sometime.” Well, I spun that idea up into a dream of having all the daughters from all the family-friendly RPG podcasts playing in a game together.

And guess what? We actually made it happen, with the cooperation and participation from the great luminaries of the A Quest for Magic & Steele (Amara is one of my favorite GMs on any RPG podcast – I love the voice work she does), Allison Underland (wonderful collaborative storytelling), and Dungeons & Dragons & Daughters (super energy and the girls are really masters of their characters quirks and shticks) podcasts. What you see and hear here is the result.

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Episode 22: Mirror of Mystery, part 3

This is the final part of our Halloween 2018 one-off adventure that Lucia created and ran for us, the Mirror of Mystery.

 

As long as we have a regular group that can all meet periodically to play, many roleplayers will gravitate toward campaigns: extended stories composed of related in-game events played out over many game sessions. But there is also the “one-off” game: a game that you play from beginning to end in one session. One-off games are a wonderful way to try something new, whether it is a change in the game’s tone, trying a new DM, playing a new character,  playing with an entirely new group of players, or sampling a different or new game system. Playing the occasional one-off game session can also help in blowing off some steam for the players and DM if they’ve been playing a long campaign, which might otherwise lead to burnout or stagnation.

 

As I (Harold) write this, we’ve been playing and recording our games for more than a year. We started on 11 November 2017, and it’s 1 December 2018 as I write this. I don’t in the slightest feel that I am even close to burning out, but we’ve also played several one-off games over the past year. It is only because this one was themed for Halloween that we present these episodes out of the order in which we played the game. Our other one-shots will appear in the podcast in the coming next few months.

 

What do you like to play for a one-off? What have you tried?

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Episode 21: Mirror of Mystery, part 2

We continue our Halloween 2018 one-off D&D 5e adventure, “Mirror of Mystery,” written and run by Lucia. Having defeated the shadow wolf, the party is preparing to leave the tower to return to the Quester’s Rest to determine what their next steps are.

 

The party is:

– Karol Vane Melboy, the avaricious noble with a luxurious mullet

– Jaboc Gardon, the human sorcerous forger

– Pumpko Boi, the homicidal artificer who wears only pumpkin shells as armor

– Tyranthraxus, the solar-powered robot who is resigned to live in the worst of all possible worlds

– Stumpy, the dwarf who just wants to never visit his family again

 

Lucia is curious about whether people would be interested to read and/or play “Mirror of Mystery” as a published module. Let us know if you’d be interested!

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Episode 20: Mirror of Mystery, part 1

Our last episode was from the middle of recording session 6, back in March. We have at least one more episode from that session, and at least as many more sessions of Guardians of Indir already recorded after that! But Halloween 2018 was a couple of weeks ago, and to celebrate that, at our last recording session, we offered the players the choice: they could resume Guardians of Indir (where we left off, on quite a cliffhanger), or they could play a Halloween one-shot. In the end they were intrigued and chose the one-shot…which Lucia designed and DMed! So, what we’re inserting here, in the midst of all the Guardians of Indir episodes (indeed, in the midst of session 6) is the start of this Halloween one-shot, so that it comes out at least somewhat close to the date of Halloween (if we waited and posted it chronologically with all the other episodes, it’d probably come out around Easter 2019).

 

As always, please let us know what you think. While our group has played several other games in previous breaks from the Guardians of Indir campaign, you haven’t heard any of them yet. So this is the first set of new PCs and new storyline you’ll hear as part of this podcast. How is that for you?

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Episode 19: “He bard that door.” (D&D 5e Session 6)

We’re back! Since releasing our last episode, we’ve had both Hallowe’en and the United States’ elections, which have kept us pretty busy. In this episode, taken from our first March 2018 session (recording session 6), we resume the Guardians of Indir Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition campaign with the party having just escaped dead things that were swarming out of the walls in the tunnels under Indir: Squeak, Vhisuna, and Klyde had fled into a dead-end room, while Balasar and Kantu had run through a gauntlet of attacks and traps back to the entrance. Will the party ever find their way back together?

 

Several days ago, our podcast was also added to Stitcher and Spotify. How did you hear about our podcast? How do you listen to our podcast? We’d love to hear your experiences, and also what you think about our game. In subsequent recording sessions, we’ve actually played other games, both with other DMs running D&D, and also other RPGs entirely. Perhaps you’ll hear some of those sessions soon…

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Episode 18: “Monster Fight!” (D&D 5e Session 6)

 

This is the second episode from our sixth game session, recorded 10 March 2018 (a long time ago!). This episode is doubly late, as Harold (who does the bulk of the editing) was out of town at a conference all last week.

This episode is noteworthy in that we see much more teamwork between the PCs than we have seen much in the past. At the same time, we also see a fairly cavalier attitude about abandoning one’s companions to look at something interesting, or to get away from a threat.

Seeing as how it’s October as we post this (more than seven months after recording!), a number of the players have been producing artwork as part of their Inktober challenges they’ve set themselves. Hopefully we will be posting some more of their artwork soon; you can always check the gallery for posted artwork.

Light continues to play an important part in the campaign, as only two of the characters can see even short distances (30′) in the dark. How do you handle light in your campaign(s)? Do torches burn out, or do they stay lit indefinitely?

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Episode 16: “We need to mug two elves” (D&D 5e Session 5)

 

Here’s episode 16, in which the Guardians follow Balasar and find a mysterious and very valuable puzzle in the dark. It’s the third and final segment taken from our fifth recording session for this D&D 5e campaign, from February 2018.

 

February was a short month for the podcast, as the DM and nearly all of the players attended DunDraCon 42 instead of recording a second session that month as would be customary. We aim to record two sessions a month, but that’s been more of a guideline than a rule, particularly as in the Winter and Spring school schedules were tight. At least one of the players was in the midst of their final semester of high school and preparing to receive a diploma, figuring out college logistics for the Fall, and so on.

 

Dealing with puzzles is always an interesting challenge in RPGs, both for the players and the GM. Puzzles serve as an interesting challenge for the players, rather than for the characters, as characters pretty much accomplish everything else through role-playing or in-game mechanics. But a puzzle that is solved with a die roll isn’t really a puzzle, it’s a skill check or an attribute test. And that gambling element of rolling dice that’s so fun with combat is disappointing if used to solve a riddle, say. Players want to use their brains!

 

Or more want to use their brains, anyway. Some players don’t like puzzles or riddles, because they break character. A hugely wise monk should have no difficulty solving a riddle, but the monk’s player might. The PCs shouldn’t be stopped because their players are having a bad day or are just tired. So what do you do as a GM to entertain the players with puzzles without blocking the PCs from advancing the plot? You can make the puzzles optional, of course. The PCs don’t HAVE to open that chest, for example; the treasure inside would be helpful, but it isn’t required to complete the adventure. As an alternative, GMs can present players with a puzzle, let them stew over it for a while, and then – only IF they are unable to figure out the puzzle on their own – the DM can ask for a relevant roll to try to get a clue, a partial solution, or even the full solution to the puzzle/answer to the riddle. That way, the players get a chance to solve it, but the puzzle didn’t stop the game cold.

 

All that assumes, of course, that the PCs have all the pieces necessary for the puzzle…