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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 12: “Falling, Dragons, and Cheese Pizza” (D&D 5e Session 4)

 

OK, so we’re trying to post a new episode every six days. We’ll see how that intention goes. While the episode was posted yesterday, this blog post actually is happening 7 days after the last one…so we’ll see.

 

This episode ends the game we played in session four of our podcast recordings. We will soon post an appendix episode, which contains the debriefing of session four that followed the game session. We had an amazing number of interruptions in this episode: smoke alarms, cooking noise, package deliveries, surprise visitors. What has been the most outrageous interruption in your games?

 

We hope that you enjoy this one, and the human flashback in general. Our next episode should post next Wednesday.

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Episode 11: “Respect Your Elders” (D&D 5e Session 4)

Wow, this episode was a long time coming. The end of summer and the beginning of the school year was a pretty tough adjustment this year, but the long and short of it is that I (Harold) got behind on my editing. I hope it proves worth the wait, and I intend to release the next few episodes more than one a week to catch up. Eventually? Eventually I may actually commit to a particular day of the week to upload new episodes.

 

I find this a fun episode for a number of reasons. The players really begin to experiment with the humans’ abilities, really establishing what awful, entitled jerks the humans of the past were as they get into character with these new PCs. As usual, the recording also contains a number of mistakes I made (listen to how the elves’ weapons keep changing!); DM gaffes are always fun to identify. Finally, I find the episode particularly entertaining because we were so INTO IT when we were playing and recording it, that we never noticed how my wife entered the room and started doing chores in the background…all of which adds an interesting sound bed of clangs, beeps, whirs, and clatters. None of us noticed it at the time…except for three times that the smoke alarm went off. Yes, that’s right: the smoke alarm went off and interrupted our session THREE times. Don’t worry – none of that made it into the recording. But it does lend an interesting rhythm to the session.

 

As always, we hope you enjoy it. Let us know what you think! Thanks for reading this blog, and listening to our game.

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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 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.

 

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