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?