What can we say? We can’t resist a pun, either in the podcast or as an episode title. It’s kind of a throwaway joke in the episode, but it really tickled us all over again in editing. Lucia has been doing a fine job keeping up with the editing; Harold has not done such a great job entering the episodes into this journal. This episode is the last from our October 2019 recording session of the Dungeon in a Box D&D 5e adventure, “All Souls Night.”
We’ve really been enjoying the whole Dungeon in a Box campaign, and as Lucia likes to point out, “the authors really have a thing for goats and sheep.” While it will be hard to part with these beloved characters Sid Onoso (the Greenwold’s Greatest Detective), Min Dalrin, Dyrah Tanner, and Gulan Navluv eventually…you won’t have to do without them anytime soon, as the adventure continued into November 2019 with our next recording session. So there’s still several episodes to go with the “Mystery of the Muttonwood’s Prized Cheeseman!”
Speaking of goats and sheep and other sometimes-innocuous, sometimes-inimical animals, what have been some of your favorite opponents in All Ages RPG? Who do you think is the most despicable villain so far on our podcast: Lorenal, the Elvish leader; Steeev Ganalon, the dragonborn fugitive (both from Guardians of Indir); the Pumpkin Monster (from Mirror of Mystery); or the Black Ram Clan (from All Souls Night)? Or are there others that you love to boo even more?
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.
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.”
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.
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.
