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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.