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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 42: “A Pact for Cheese” (All Souls Night, D&D 5e)

The Dungeon-in-a-Box adventure “All Souls Night” D&D 5e adventure featuring Sid Onoso continues.

I hope you and your family, like mine and my players’, really, REALLY like making goat noises. Why? Because if you like goat noises, we sure do have a treat for you!

Our intrepid party, consisting of Min Dalrin (the wizard farmer), Dyrah Tanner (the story-collector bard), Gulan Navluv (the dwarf cleric skeptical of everything supernatural), and their leader, Sid Onoso (the Greenwold’s Greatest Detective), have been on the case of the Missing Cheeseman, Piotr Fremanchen, finding clues and pursuing leads throughout the Muttonwood. At the close of last episode, they had just found the cheeseman shackled in a clearing, surrounded by a bunch of hobgoblins riding giant rams. When the hobgoblins started talking to the investigators, the “mildly” pyromaniacal Min immediately responded with FIRE. As we begin this episode, the party is continuing to beat up the kidnappers while trying to free Piotr.

What is your favorite breed of goat, and what sounds does that type make? One of the wonderful things about this one-shot (which started in Episode 34) is that every single player has a completely different goat impression…and they’re all correct, because goats make such a huge variety of weird and fun sounds!

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Episode 41: “What’s-his-bucket” (All Souls Night, D&D 5e)

We continue the D&D 5e one-shot adventure from Dungeon in a Box, “All Souls Night.”

It’s taking a long time, but we are posting more of the “All Souls Night” one-shot D&D 5e adventure from Dungeon in a Box, which we recorded in November 2019.

The characters are:

Sid Onoso, the Greenwold’s Greatest Detective (the party leader, an elven rogue)

and her companions: Gulan Navluv (the dwarven cleric of Valor Bane), Min Dalrin (the wizard farmer with a chicken familiar), and Dyrah Tanner (the tall human bard). All the characters are 5th level.

Our story so far: the Greenwold’s Greatest Detective, Sid Onoso, arrived at a country inn with her entourage in tow. There, she was hired to solve a case: find the missing cheesemaker, Piotr Fromanchen, who has not been seen for weeks and is presumed lost in the Muttonwoods. Some goblinoids mistook the party as members of the Black Ram Gang, then after dealing with that interruption, the party continued on to investigate Piotr’s dairy farm. There they found Piotr gone, valuables untouched (including a magic holly-handled sword), footprints everywhere, signs that the cheeseman’s livestock had been massacred and eaten by a mob armed with swords and axes, and bloody clawed handprints around the well. They were attacked by swarming rats, which the party slaughtered. Then they followed the trail of the attackers, and stumbled across some drunken goats. After fighting them, they were confronted by hobgoblins riding giant rams painted black. The hobgoblins demanded a toll of 500 Advantages as recompense for the party’s trespass of the “Bray Glade.” Rather than discuss their options, Min cut off their threats with fire, and the battle began.

Jumping around in time is always interesting, whether you are watching actors perform in films at different periods of their lives, listening to music by a prolific musician out of chronological order, or hearing RPG sessions that refer to games in the speakers’ past which haven’t been released to the public yet. So far in this “All Souls Night” game, the players have referenced the Dungeon-in-a-Box D&D 5e campaign (run by Blake), the Taint game (everyone playing deep sea mining robots), and other science fiction games (which could be either Dread or The Expanse). All of these games were played and recorded before we played this Halloween game in 2019; we’re just very slow at editing and posting more episodes. It’s why we always make sure to mention when each episode was recorded, so that, if you care to, you can piece together the chronological order of our game sessions.

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Episode 39: “Tall Glass, Short Flask, Leaky Jar” (All Souls Night, D&D 5e)

Episode 39 of our podcast: the next episode of the “All Souls Night” D&D5e game.

Okay.

It’s been five months since we last posted an episode…a lot has been happening for us and in the world at large. Like most people in the United States, we’ve had a big change in our lives and routines with the arrival of the new disease, Corona Virus ID-19. While so far our precautions have been effective and we’ve been lucky enough that no one has become very sick, the shelter-in-place guidelines have kept us from continuing our games in person. Like most people, we’ve had to adjust to limiting our exposure to other people in person, frequent hand-washing, conducting work/school/social interactions from home and online, and wearing masks to provide some protection for others from whatever contagion we might have. With all this, our schedule of editing and posting episodes was disrupted, and it took us a LONG while to get back into a rhythm of editing again.

But, while we haven’t been playing and recording any more games in any of our All Ages RPG campaigns, there are two bright notes: first, we have so many sessions recorded already that we could be posting weekly episodes for a year and not exhaust our backlog, and second, we have been successful in playing some other RPGs online, to the extent that we’re now practiced enough that we could probably resume our campaigns and record them for posting to the podcast somehow. We have done that once before, after all, with the All Daughters crossover one-shot game.

How have you balanced work and play in the pandemic?

As I write this, the fall 2020 semester of school has just begun. This episode resumes the All Ages RPG D&D 5e game from Dungeon in a Box, “All Souls Night,” which we recorded in November 2019, with the Greenwold’s Greatest Detective, Sid Onoso, and friends deep in the Muttonwood, trying to find the missing cheeseman, Piotr Fromanchen. We rejoin the Detective and company in the midst of a battle with crazed goats…

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Episode 37: “I’m an investigator, not an exterminator!” (All Souls Night, D&D5e)

With this episode, we conclude our first recording session of the Dungeon in a Box one-shot, All Souls Night. More episodes featuring Sid Onoso, the Greenwold’s Greatest Detective, and her friends Min, Gulan, and Dyrah will follow soon as they continue their search for Piotr Fromanchen, the celebrated cheese genius of the Muttonwood.

This is a case where you set out, expecting that the adventure will just be a one-session one-shot: simple, straightforward, short. Right? But when the players are this invested in their characters, they spread out to fill the space, and so this brief adventure spanned multiple sessions. How have one-shots gone for you in the past? Aside from running games at conventions or organized play events (such as Adventurers League or the Pathfinder Society) – in which you don’t know who is going to play and you have to finish the entire game within a strict time limit – have you had one-shots that spanned more than one session?

As we’ve written previously, we have another one-shot – the first non-D&D RPG we recorded for All Ages RPG, in fact – that also surprised our GM in that it went way over time, and we had to break before the story resolved (or even before the PCs had Blossomed, which is a game feature of that particular RPG, called “The Taint”). We haven’t posted episodes of that recording session yet, because we still haven’t played/recorded a second session of the game. In this case, we haven’t played it again because, at first, the players were more excited to resume the Guardians of Indir campaign, and then later two of the players in that game decided that their priorities had shifted and they couldn’t play with us anymore.

Have you had similar experiences? We’d love to hear about your one-shots, any issues you had with running one-shots, and how you coped with those issues.

Thanks for listening.

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Episode 36: “Looks like a setup” (All Souls Night, D&D5e)

Publishing episode 36 reminds me of the Closed Door Problem in RPGs. “All Souls Night” is a bit of a mystery adventure, which was heightened the moment Harold created the characters for the adventure and decided to include The Greenwold’s Greatest Detective (of course I mean Sid Onoso, not that hack Apollo Porous). Mysteries can be tough to run, in much the same way that puzzles are tough. You want to present something that is challenging to the PLAYERS who are playing the game, as they get much more satisfaction from overcoming puzzles and figuring out mysteries than just rolling to see if “their PC figures it out.” But there are two issues with this:

1) who the PCs are – what skills they have, what their background expertise is – SHOULD affect how well they do when the game world presents them with problems to solve, and

2) You can easily stump a player with something that seems obvious, but turns out to be incredibly obtuse or obscure when it comes up in the game. Famously, a Closed Door in D&D can cause serious problems for an adventuring party: the mechanics of every edition of the game are pretty explicit on how PCs go about opening doors, but they always leave a chance for a door that the party fails to pick, fails to force, and/or fails to detect. Absent another option for circumventing the obstacle, the party can be prevented from continuing (this is why the Knock spell was invented, by the way: to ensure that No Door Will Ever Stop Us Dead in our Tracks Again!).

But that’s bad, isn’t it? It certainly doesn’t feel good to have competent, danger-worthy heroes, who can’t proceed with the adventure because they happened to have bad rolls and/or they missed looking under the doormat for the key (as a common example of finding stuff in a mystery game).

So how do you run a mystery game in such a way that it both allows players to figure stuff out AND doesn’t force them to have/understand certain clues in order to proceed? It’s a tough challenge. Let us know how you feel we did with this in “All Souls Night.”

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Episode 35: “The Road Inspection Committee” (All Souls Night, D&D5e)

Lucia’s whirlwind editing continues with the next episode of our Hallowe’en 2019 “one-shot,” All Souls Night from Dungeon in a Box. When we last left our heroes, the Greenwold’s Greatest Detective, Sid Onoso, and her friends were confronting a case of mistaken identity when a band of pugnacious goblinoids accosted them, believing the party to be members of the infamous Black Ram Gang.

Listening to episodes of this adventure really emphasized something for Harold: he’s not as comfortable running other people’s material as he is running his own. During editing, we were often laughing at his uncharacteristically-awkward descriptions (as in last episode’s “the gourds and sticks clattering together make a sound of clattering”). It could be that he was just having an off day, or it could be (as he attests) that there is an extra awkwardness introduced when trying to adapt someone else’s language for your own. Harold has a weird aversion to reading any text boxes verbatim, and so we end up with this sort of awkwardness from him when he tries to paraphrase blocks of descriptive text. Weird.

There’s something to learn in every episode, of course. In this episode, Dyrah critically succeeds at an attempt to convince their antagonists that the party is something it’s not. Here’s a question for DMs: how do you feel about how that played out in the game? Do you think that the effect of that persuasion was appropriate, or was it too much or too little? How would you as a player have wanted that critical success to affect the events and story? Thinking about how you would handle such calls in advance of your own games is how we become more successful in shaping our experiences to go in the direction we and our players agree that we’d like to go.

Let us know in the comments how you’d play it out if it was your game. And, as always, let us know how you feel about ours.