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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 29: “Something to Sell” (D&D 5e, Session 7)

The party gets XP and discusses how to sell their loot to get money enough to train for level 3.

At last we reach the end of our seventh recording session, from all the way back in March 2018! This was just going to be a little blurb of DM Harold giving experience points to the party, but the players were pretty hyped up about the adventure and continued to role-play in character, interacting with new NPCs they created to sell the potentially valuable human relics they salvaged from the dungeon…including the artificial humans Sqt Rp Do and That Guy On The Floor! Will they sell their companions for cash? Do they even think of them as companions? You’ll have to listen to find out.

After this recording session, a bunch of things happened: a bunch of the players left for Spring Break vacations with families, and then final exams loomed for the two players finishing high school, and the result was that we didn’t play Guardians of Indir for a while again. We have continued the campaign! But there is a big gap between this session in early March and the next one in mid-April 2018, which doesn’t include a bunch of the players. The next session with the whole group was in early May…and it was a completely different RPG.

We haven’t fully decided yet, but we may start releasing episodes alternating between the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e campaign and other games we’ve played: one-offs in D&D, the Dungeon in a Box Greenwold campaign, and some games in completely different RPGs. We’ve got a bunch recorded already – it’s been a year now as I (Harold) write this! – but we’d love to hear from you: which system(s) would you like to hear us play? So far as we’ve released so far, our game sessions have had pretty much the same group of players all along. What other players do you think we should bring to the table? Do you want to hear more young kids? More parents? More grandparents, retirees? Let us know in the comments or by tweeting @allagesrpg.

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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 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!

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Episode 22: Mirror of Mystery, part 3

This is the final part of our Halloween 2018 one-off adventure that Lucia created and ran for us, the Mirror of Mystery.

 

As long as we have a regular group that can all meet periodically to play, many roleplayers will gravitate toward campaigns: extended stories composed of related in-game events played out over many game sessions. But there is also the “one-off” game: a game that you play from beginning to end in one session. One-off games are a wonderful way to try something new, whether it is a change in the game’s tone, trying a new DM, playing a new character,  playing with an entirely new group of players, or sampling a different or new game system. Playing the occasional one-off game session can also help in blowing off some steam for the players and DM if they’ve been playing a long campaign, which might otherwise lead to burnout or stagnation.

 

As I (Harold) write this, we’ve been playing and recording our games for more than a year. We started on 11 November 2017, and it’s 1 December 2018 as I write this. I don’t in the slightest feel that I am even close to burning out, but we’ve also played several one-off games over the past year. It is only because this one was themed for Halloween that we present these episodes out of the order in which we played the game. Our other one-shots will appear in the podcast in the coming next few months.

 

What do you like to play for a one-off? What have you tried?

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Episode 21: Mirror of Mystery, part 2

We continue our Halloween 2018 one-off D&D 5e adventure, “Mirror of Mystery,” written and run by Lucia. Having defeated the shadow wolf, the party is preparing to leave the tower to return to the Quester’s Rest to determine what their next steps are.

 

The party is:

– Karol Vane Melboy, the avaricious noble with a luxurious mullet

– Jaboc Gardon, the human sorcerous forger

– Pumpko Boi, the homicidal artificer who wears only pumpkin shells as armor

– Tyranthraxus, the solar-powered robot who is resigned to live in the worst of all possible worlds

– Stumpy, the dwarf who just wants to never visit his family again

 

Lucia is curious about whether people would be interested to read and/or play “Mirror of Mystery” as a published module. Let us know if you’d be interested!

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Episode 20: Mirror of Mystery, part 1

Our last episode was from the middle of recording session 6, back in March. We have at least one more episode from that session, and at least as many more sessions of Guardians of Indir already recorded after that! But Halloween 2018 was a couple of weeks ago, and to celebrate that, at our last recording session, we offered the players the choice: they could resume Guardians of Indir (where we left off, on quite a cliffhanger), or they could play a Halloween one-shot. In the end they were intrigued and chose the one-shot…which Lucia designed and DMed! So, what we’re inserting here, in the midst of all the Guardians of Indir episodes (indeed, in the midst of session 6) is the start of this Halloween one-shot, so that it comes out at least somewhat close to the date of Halloween (if we waited and posted it chronologically with all the other episodes, it’d probably come out around Easter 2019).

 

As always, please let us know what you think. While our group has played several other games in previous breaks from the Guardians of Indir campaign, you haven’t heard any of them yet. So this is the first set of new PCs and new storyline you’ll hear as part of this podcast. How is that for you?

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Episode 19: “He bard that door.” (D&D 5e Session 6)

We’re back! Since releasing our last episode, we’ve had both Hallowe’en and the United States’ elections, which have kept us pretty busy. In this episode, taken from our first March 2018 session (recording session 6), we resume the Guardians of Indir Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition campaign with the party having just escaped dead things that were swarming out of the walls in the tunnels under Indir: Squeak, Vhisuna, and Klyde had fled into a dead-end room, while Balasar and Kantu had run through a gauntlet of attacks and traps back to the entrance. Will the party ever find their way back together?

 

Several days ago, our podcast was also added to Stitcher and Spotify. How did you hear about our podcast? How do you listen to our podcast? We’d love to hear your experiences, and also what you think about our game. In subsequent recording sessions, we’ve actually played other games, both with other DMs running D&D, and also other RPGs entirely. Perhaps you’ll hear some of those sessions soon…

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Episode 17: “When is a door not a door?” (D&D 5e Session 6)

This is the first episode taken from our sixth session, recorded on 10 March 2018.  So it’d been about four weeks since we’d all been together, and in the intervening time our only interaction was when Korben, Kaleb, Lucia, Blake, and Harold all met up at the 42nd annual DunDraCon convention (to paint minis and play D&D, mostly, though Harold ran two other games for convention attendees – one of The Taint RPG and one of Firefly RPG). So the group was a little more rambunctious than usual as we got started.

 

As we’ve explored the tunnels under Indir, we’ve been using a battlemat with markers for Harold to draw in the dungeon as the group explored. Or rather, Harold the DM drew the map first, then covered it completely with opaque squares of material that he would remove and replace as the party moved from one part of the dungeon to the next. So the party could only ever see a small part of the dungeon. As they weren’t bothering to map for themselves, they got a bit confused as to which way to go, which led to some hilarious disputes about choosing directions for travel.

 

When exploring a dungeon, how do you make sure that you don’t get lost or accidentally backtrack on yourself?

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Episode 15: “I’m impatient!” (D&D 5e Session 5)

This is the second episode from the fifth session of All Ages RPG, recorded back in February 2018. It’s interesting to me to see how the Guardians’ personalities are developing: Vhisuna’s acerbic responses, Squeak’s droll wit interrupted periodically by the dark influence of an alien amphibian, Kantu’s gruff but persistent joking, Klyde’s avarice, and how all of them are struggling to put some brakes on Balasar’s impulsiveness.

 

Longtime listeners will have noticed by now that our treatment of the changelings’ powers differ rather significantly from the Wizards of the Coast Unearthed Arcana version. Changelings in this campaign assume the physical characteristics of the creature being copied, with reasonable accuracy. So for example, when Squeak copies Kantu, the changeling is able to fly, albeit with a great amount of effort (I like to envision Woodstock from the Peanuts cartoon). But Squeak cannot gain more than movement abilities; he could not imitate Balasar and then get a breath weapon, for instance, no more than he would get pack tactics when copying Klyde.