Posted on

Episode 15: “I’m impatient!” (D&D 5e Session 5)

This is the second episode from the fifth session of All Ages RPG, recorded back in February 2018. It’s interesting to me to see how the Guardians’ personalities are developing: Vhisuna’s acerbic responses, Squeak’s droll wit interrupted periodically by the dark influence of an alien amphibian, Kantu’s gruff but persistent joking, Klyde’s avarice, and how all of them are struggling to put some brakes on Balasar’s impulsiveness.

 

Longtime listeners will have noticed by now that our treatment of the changelings’ powers differ rather significantly from the Wizards of the Coast Unearthed Arcana version. Changelings in this campaign assume the physical characteristics of the creature being copied, with reasonable accuracy. So for example, when Squeak copies Kantu, the changeling is able to fly, albeit with a great amount of effort (I like to envision Woodstock from the Peanuts cartoon). But Squeak cannot gain more than movement abilities; he could not imitate Balasar and then get a breath weapon, for instance, no more than he would get pack tactics when copying Klyde.

Posted on

Episode 14: “My shield is my lantern!” (D&D 5e Session 5)

Your friendly neighborhood DM here. For this episode, which is the second episode taken from our fifth session of the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e game (played back in February 2018), I wanted to include the kids a bit more. So I invited my children, Lucia and Blake, to record the introduction and epilogue bits for the episode. The result is…well, you decide. We noticed that there were a lot of crickets chirping outside yesterday, so I suggested Lucia would record her intro outside, to see if the mic would pick up the ambient sounds. Later, I made the same suggestion to Blake, but by the time he got outside, the neighbors had turned on their fan, and so it was mostly white noise. He came up with an…interesting alternative.

The resulting introduction and epilogue are fun, and Lucia provides an overview of what happened in the previous episode – a list of the high points she remembers – rather than a “this is exactly where we left off.” How does that work for you?

 

Finally, we’d love to get some feedback from you, related to how undead have been portrayed in the podcast. My take has always been that dead creatures are dead creatures, and you can’t tell that “this one is a skeleton/zombie/wight/ghoul/whatever” just from looking at it. They all look very much the same: corpses that move, so it”s the behavior that tells them apart. But then, I’ve always been reluctant to name monsters for the players, as I’m sure you’ve heard if you’ve listened to just about any episode of our podcast. I feel it limits the imagination. But what portrayals of undead have you liked in your games? Can dead things see and thus have blind spots? Can they thus be surprised by a character that hid in the shadows?

Posted on

Episode 13: “Don’t Beat the Dead Elf!” (D&D 5e Session 5)

This episode is the first episode from our fifth recording session, from January 2018. We return to the “present day:” with the party of Klyde, Vhisuna, Squeak, and Kantu looking at the entrance to a stairway leading underground that has mysteriously appeared just in time for the elves to escape. Meanwhile, Balasar is struggling to catch up from his adventure in monster surgery, following the trail of dead elves.

 

As usual, I had plenty of alternative titles for this episode:

“Celebratory Arrows”

“Is there anything I could steal?”

“Stop Dying So We Can Figure This Out”

 

Our next episode should be released next Tuesday.

 

 

Posted on

Episode 12b: “Falling for Humans” (Session 4 debrief)

 

This is a teeny, tiny, mini-episode, taken from the last part of our fourth recording session (the “human flashback”). The action has ended and we decompress a bit, calculating falling damage, talking about how we feel about humans in the world, and also evaluating what we’ve learned about the world from this flashback.

 

How have you used flashbacks in your games? Remember that I’d originally planned this flashback as a way to pause the action but develop the game world when one of the players was going to be absent for the session. I think the group had fun with it, which is the main point. In addition, I feel like this flashback really established the personality and place of humans in the lore of the world. What did you think?

Posted on

Episode 12: “Falling, Dragons, and Cheese Pizza” (D&D 5e Session 4)

 

OK, so we’re trying to post a new episode every six days. We’ll see how that intention goes. While the episode was posted yesterday, this blog post actually is happening 7 days after the last one…so we’ll see.

 

This episode ends the game we played in session four of our podcast recordings. We will soon post an appendix episode, which contains the debriefing of session four that followed the game session. We had an amazing number of interruptions in this episode: smoke alarms, cooking noise, package deliveries, surprise visitors. What has been the most outrageous interruption in your games?

 

We hope that you enjoy this one, and the human flashback in general. Our next episode should post next Wednesday.

Posted on

Episode 11: “Respect Your Elders” (D&D 5e Session 4)

Wow, this episode was a long time coming. The end of summer and the beginning of the school year was a pretty tough adjustment this year, but the long and short of it is that I (Harold) got behind on my editing. I hope it proves worth the wait, and I intend to release the next few episodes more than one a week to catch up. Eventually? Eventually I may actually commit to a particular day of the week to upload new episodes.

 

I find this a fun episode for a number of reasons. The players really begin to experiment with the humans’ abilities, really establishing what awful, entitled jerks the humans of the past were as they get into character with these new PCs. As usual, the recording also contains a number of mistakes I made (listen to how the elves’ weapons keep changing!); DM gaffes are always fun to identify. Finally, I find the episode particularly entertaining because we were so INTO IT when we were playing and recording it, that we never noticed how my wife entered the room and started doing chores in the background…all of which adds an interesting sound bed of clangs, beeps, whirs, and clatters. None of us noticed it at the time…except for three times that the smoke alarm went off. Yes, that’s right: the smoke alarm went off and interrupted our session THREE times. Don’t worry – none of that made it into the recording. But it does lend an interesting rhythm to the session.

 

As always, we hope you enjoy it. Let us know what you think! Thanks for reading this blog, and listening to our game.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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?

Posted on

Episode 6: “Old Gigner Ale” (D&D 5e Session 2)

Today we’re posting episode 6 of our Guardians of Indir Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign, entitled “Old Gigner Ale.” This was the second half of recording session two; a session that was cut shorter than most sessions before or since (so we’re only getting two episodes from it). In this episode, the players consider magic and some new NPCs at the Dragon’s Blood tavern.

One thing that I encourage DMs – new and old alike – to do is to incorporate stuff from the players into the game. Starting with episode 1, I’ve been doing that by asking questions of the players: where are you? Is it a wilderness, a farm, a town, or a city? What are the challenges? What races are preeminent, if any? What is the money called? Who are your trainers?

I also encourage you DMs to take any passing comment from the players at the table – whether it is a joke or a reference to something else outside of the game – and see whether you can incorporate that in some way into the world or the narrative. This is a fun method for discovery, where the players may give you input and ideas without knowing that they’re doing it. I’ve already woven several such things into the Guardians of Indir campaign, though not all of them have surfaced yet by this episode.

Finally, I encourage DMs to consider incorporating references to stuff outside of the game session into the campaign. Not personal stuff, usually, but as a DM one can always be looking for ideas. Of course you can include pop culture references, but that’s not the main idea I’m suggesting here. Things like real-world street names, actual business names, setups for jokes…these are fun references to the real world that your players may get, too. Incorporating those ideas can be very entertaining, especially if there’s something that the players know as well.

Some of you may have read the episode title and shaken your heads at my typo. That’s cute. We bought some soda from our local supermarket the day before recording session 2, and the kids were tickled that the cash register rang up our purchase as “GIGNER ALE” instead of ginger ale. So naturally I brought that into the game, and our game benefits from the mistake some clerk made a long time ago when entering the product details in the store database. So the typo is an intentional reference. You can decide how much the kids enjoyed the reference as you listen to the episode.

Anything can be inspiration. Pay attention! Take notes! Bring in material from everywhere – your game will very likely be richer for it.