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Episode 10: “Human League” (D&D 5e Session 4)

DM Harold here. This episode begins our fourth recording session. I was mistaken before, when I said that the third session was the first session in 2018 – I was going by the time stamp on the audio files, which were updated when I opened the recording software again at the beginning of the fourth session! A rookie mistake.

 

Anyway, this actually marks the beginning of the fourth recording session and the first session in 2018…you can tell by our icebreaker question at the start, and the table’s nervous energy because it’s been weeks since we’ve all seen each other.

 

On that note, going into this session, I believed that we were going to be at least one player short due to schedule conflicts. I knew weeks in advance that we were going to be less than the full group, so I thought about how to play an interesting game that kept the players engaged but didn’t leave out the absent players. I could have prepared a one-off of a different system (and I do such things, later on in the year), but I felt like there was some fun opportunity to use the time to present some “interactive exposition:” that is, instead of just telling the players about some world background, I would have them LIVE it.

 

Well, schedules opened up at the last minute, and we ended up having our full complement of regular players. So, rather than discarding the idea, I offered the players a choice once we got started. You can hear what they chose in this episode.

 

For your entertainment, I will also be posting the players’ character sheets soon. I’ll update this post and the top page of the site when they’re available.

Rakhari-the-Kazarim

Geranda-the-Infractor

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Episode 4: “I…speak…Goblin!!!!” (D&D 5e Session 1)

Our first game session of the D&D 5e campaign, Guardians of Indir, comes to a close as the party fights off elves and a big green “guy,” as well as struggling to escape a disaster of their own creation. Will they all make it back in one piece? What information will they have for Karen about Steeev?

This episode also coincides with our getting added to the iTunes catalog, so iOS users can now also find us on the podcasts app.

 

Lucia helped to introduce this episode. We may start to include a bumper on each episode to introduce each character in that player’s voice, just to remind people which voice belongs to which character. Also, as we continue, I’m getting better at calling characters by name, rather than just “you” and “you.” But there’s still lots of dice rolling, and in this episode Squeak is impersonating Balasar, so I refer to them as “Balasar 1” and “Balasar 2” (or sometimes “Balasar Odd”).

 

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Episode 3: “Welcome to the Neighborhood, or What’s Behind Window #2?” (D&D 5e Session 1)

 

After getting really excited about the game world with our session 0, we went right into playing in the world. So this week’s episode begins as we start improvising the game within the world we’ve created. We jump right into the City-State of Indir, with the party on the road south, looking to investigate another reported sighting of the blackguard Steeev Ganalon.

 

A side note on voices: I love to do voices for my characters, and I love playing against type as much as possible.  So that means that you will pretty much never hear me portray a British elf or a Scottish dwarf, both tropes so pervasive that many players fall into doing them unconsciously. But that can trip me up if I don’t really commit to it. My concept for the elves in this episode is that they were southern, but I should have made them full-on hillbillies. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have stumbled over inventing names for the reinforcements like I did.

 

I’ll know better next time. Every game of an RPG contains learning experiences.

 

Listen to the previous episode

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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.