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Episode 34: “My Chicken has a first name.” (All Souls Night, D&D5e)

After a LONG hiatus which included several recorded game sessions (to add to our already large backlog), the holidays, and the 44th DunDraCon gaming convention, Lucia got impatient enough that she edited this episode herself, choosing a more recent recording for something smaller that, as a one-shot, would encompass only a few episodes. So we bring you a more recent “Dungeon in a Box” entry with episode 1 of “All Souls Night.”

Dungeon in a Box is a D&D adventure subscription service, the brainchild of America’s DM, David Crennen, along with a crew of talented collaborators. We’ve been subscribers since the beginning – Harold’s a sucker for anything by America’s DM – and have actually recorded many sessions of the main Dungeon in a Box campaign for the podcast…we just haven’t gotten to the point of editing them yet! With the exception of some special holiday or crossover adventures – like this one – we’ve tried to present our games in the order that they were played…which is another reason why all you’ve heard on our podcast so far is Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. As of this writing, we’ve played and recorded over a dozen different games (some one-shots, some ongoing campaigns) in at least six different RPGs, but we’ve only got through the first nine months of our recording history so far…from November 2017 through May 2018. That means that we’re almost two years behind what we’ve recorded!!

We have a bit of a quandary at this point, though: the first non-D&D game we played was a game of The Taint RPG set in a deep sea construction site, with all the PCs as cyborgs designed and enhanced to work efficiently in the dark and pressure of the midnight zone (we made it up on the spot). That’s well and good, and we’d love to share it with you…except it’s incomplete. We ran out of time in our session to complete any sort of satisfactory story arc (or even really to showcase the primary “blossoming” mechanic of the Taint), and we’ve never managed again to assemble all that game’s players in one room again. So our tough decision is between two options: do we post an incomplete story, or do we try to reconvene the group and continue the game before we cut any episodes?

Let us know what you think, and whether you’d rather we hold off on posting our The Taint RPG episodes until we have a complete story (which could be never), or if you’d rather we post what we have in the spirit of “As long as the role-playing is good, it’s fine.”

In the meantime, enjoy this first episode of the All Souls Night one-shot. Dungeon in a Box is set in and around The Greenwold, a large subcontinent populated by sentients of all species, dragons, and the occasional brilliant detective. All Souls Night was a digital exclusive for the Dungeon in a Box service: a Hallowe’en one-shot that is not part of the main campaign, but which adds flavor to the game world. This game is set in the Muttonwood, a sparsely populated forest highland of mountains and crags. In order to get into play faster, Harold set this up like a convention game: he created six PCs with interlocking backgrounds, flaws, and ideals, and let the players choose which they wanted to play. We’ll post the character sheets with the next episode’s blog post.

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Episode 33: “Lunch and Karen” (D&D 5e, Session 8b)

Episode 33 of the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e campaign.

Harold here. So I was posting episodes more often – trying to make some progress and “catch up” to where I think we should be in the podcast (at this point, we should be well past episode 52), but then there was this huge work conference that took up two weeks of my time. So, now that that’s over, here’s the next episode.

This episode contains the last part of our eighth recording session, which was recorded over a year ago, in May 2018. In it, the players continue to create details, riffing off of each other, as they finish training their characters to level 3. This is the first session that we recorded AFTER I had been edited and started releasing episodes of the podcast – we had a full six months’ of game sessions before we released our first episode – but at this point I’m still learning how bad the sound is of all the nervous habits that the players have. It’s all normal stuff that players – and just people in general – normally do in a conversation at a table, but at this point it is finally starting to get curtailed in our podcast. I am painfully aware of the noise of people playing with handfuls of dice (jiggling and rolling them) and players talking over each other which have been up to this point pretty omnipresent in our podcast. To some extent, this is OK, as it accurately presents how people playing a real game sound. But at the same time I realize it is pretty distracting. I do get better at reducing these behaviors: hopefully you’ll hear the change in the next few episodes.

Another note: a few sessions earlier, Blake had started referring to his PC as “Squeaks” instead of its real name, Squeak. Over the course of a few months, we all joined in, and it became painful to edit and listen to in the future (this past year of posting episodes) as we got the character name wrong AGAIN and AGAIN. As I said earlier, this session (number 8) was our first session post-releasing podcast episodes. So at the beginning of the session (Episode 31), I apologized for getting Squeak’s name wrong. During that session, the players all talked about paying a nickel every time anybody said the name wrong again. You’ll hear references to that several times in this episode.

Overall, I’m delighted with this episode and our eighth session in general, because it marks a departure from our “normal” mode of dangerous adventuring, and returns to what we were doing at the beginning of the game (and podcast): world-building and role-playing. The players throw themselves into that creativity and I couldn’t be more pleased. Decades ago, I played in a long-running “Skyrealms of Jorune” campaign run by Joe Adams (nee Coleman), and I was fascinated by how he constructed each session. From his example, I extrapolated a lot of my philosophy of how to run a game. Combat was not the core of the game, even though in SoJ as in Dungeons & Dragons it is the most extensive and largest part of the rules. Combat is an element of the drama that you are telling together. But the character interplay, world-creation, and exploration creates the context that makes the combat interesting, and often necessary. I may have mentioned “Joe’s Golden Ratio” before: it’s what I call the idea that each session of an RPG should consist of only one combat encounter bracketed by investigation, exploration, and interaction…anything and everything that’s in the game that isn’t fighting. Maybe shopping and eating, for example.

Take a listen, and let us know what you think.

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Episode 32: “Of Groktents and Shuvuuia” (D&D 5e, Session 8b)

In this episode we continue our account of the several days in Indir following the party’s return from the dungeon-turned-tower, with Vhisuna and Kantu describing their training. In addition, the party gets up to some extra activities, making the most of the relative calm as war looms in Daboboah’s near future. Khyren, a local priest, has decided to hold the annual cosmopolitan street festival for the neighborhood despite the imminent threat of invasion by mammalian forces.

At the end of the episode, Harold mentions that we have started a wiki, to help us and our listeners keep track of all the stuff that we’re inventing as we play. We’re working to continually update this. The wiki is here on our site: http://allagesrpg.com/wiki/guardians-of-indir/ If you have any suggestions or recommendations for our podcast or our wiki, please let us know. We’re also considering providing transcripts of our episodes.

Thank you for listening!

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Episode 31: “Incapacitate, decapitate, defenestrate, and taxonomize” (D&D 5e, Session 8b)

Episode 31 of All Ages RPG: Balasar and Klyde train to level 3

Here’s another episode of our Guardians of Indir Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign. In this one, we get a lot of silliness, but also a lot more detail about Balasar’s trainer, Maval Bersk. I really enjoy this process of discovery, as we each introduce details into the campaign world like these characters, and then the group collectively adds details to the character. This makes a more complicated, nuanced character than one person tends to be able to do on their own, or at least not as quickly. Maval’s backstory is interesting in that it begs a whole bunch of additional world-building questions: how did he get there? What does his name mean? Why was his profession needed?

Recently on Twitter we’ve discussed the use of money in D&D campaigns, and how to keep money interesting, so that PCs will spend it, rather than hoarding it. I find that the requirement to pay for training eliminates this as a concern in these lower levels. For instance, the Guardians have had to scramble to be able to afford training with each level they’ve gained; excess money just doesn’t happen. But then, that’s also a function of how much money the party acquires in its adventures. Does money pile up in your role-playing games? If so, what do you use your party’s wealth for in your games?

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Episode 30: “Oh. It’s alright.” (D&D 5e, Session 8a)

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?

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Episode 28: “Is This Normal?” (D&D 5e, Session 7)

In our 28th episode, the party’s conversation with Timbertina and Sqt Rp Do is rudely interrupted…

This episode of our ongoing Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign, the Guardians of Indir, has the players enjoying a bit more NPC interaction than usual, as they get into character for more roleplay (it’s been long enough since they did much in-character interaction that some of the players are even surprised at Lucia’s voice for Kantu!). Is this normal? Only time will tell.

I (DM Harold) had a hard time naming this episode, because there were so many good lines from this portion of the game that would have served equally well. For example:

“Surrounded by idiots”

“I’m a telepathy!”

“I’m not sure I like that (but maybe I do)”

“Spiking the kobold”

“I don’t think that was the right way to do that.”

“I want to help”

“Sounds like a mental disorder”

and the classic “Blame Steeev!”

As I post this to allagesrpg.com, it’s more than a year after we actually played this session (we played it in March 2018!). Our game schedule is pretty cyclical. With kid players (at the time, all of our players were in 12th grade or under), the game schedule is strongly affected by the school semesters. So we’re coming up on a break in the game, when we first started playing another RPG! Don’t worry; we have continued to play D&D 5e as well in the months since then; we’ve just been alternating as schedules prevent one or another player from joining us for a session.

What games would you particularly like to hear played on a podcast?

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Episode 27: “Squeak and Sqt” (D&D 5e, Session 7)

Our 27th episode, “Squeak and Sqt,” featuring a bunch of adventurers trying to figure out what to do when their opponent vanishes and all they can see are ancient mechanical humans.

This episode, our twenty-seventh, continues the D&D 5e story of the Guardians of Indir. The incarnadine elf they’d been fighting vanished abruptly, so that the only people the party could see other than themselves were the mechanical, drab-colored elves (humans, though only Squeak and Balasar have any experience with what humans may once have looked like). There’s a lot of laughter in this episode.

There’s also an example of how a character voice can change on the fly. Late in the episode, a new NPC appears, and I (Harold) must admit that I didn’t give a lot of thought to what he’d sound like when I invented him. As I’ve talked about before, I’m intentionally playing this campaign with as little planning as possible – making it up on the spot as much as I can. This makes for a much more dynamic, interactive story for the most part, but it can mean (as it did here) that the NPC details like voice, cadence, and mannerisms evolve live in the game. You don’t start with a completed character, because the character didn’t exist until it appears in the game. At first I present the character with just a slight tonal modulation and an altered cadence to his speech. But quickly I realized that this wasn’t as fun, nor was it consistent with other Indirans that we’ve heard. So the voice changes abruptly over a few minutes, eventually becoming Tim, the grizzled veteran that the party has since come to know and love.

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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!