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Episode 46: “Imbraxi-wha?” (Guardians of Indir, D&D 5e)

The party finishes their plans and begins preparations for the assault.

This is the fourth episode taken from our tenth recording session, which we played and recorded back in June 2018. The story so far: the city-state of Indir, a multi-racial stronghold of few mammals with a reptilian majority dominated by dragonborn, is in a war against the aggressor elven nation of Valtaryn and its dwarven allies. The heroes intercepted a group of elven commandos, narrowly preventing the elves from taking control of a complex hidden beneath Indir. The complex is the remains of a buried tower created by a race of ancients called “humans,” who were legendary for their cruelty and brutally advanced technology. The party retrieved a number of human artifacts from the tower, which mysteriously erupted from below Indir, rising up to a majestic height of fifty feet. Elves and dwarves have since taken control of the tower, using magical portals that enabled access. The Indiran military has evacuated and blockaded the neighborhood nearest the tower. As the two forces are in temporary equilibrium, the Indiran leaders have thrown a festival to reassure the populace that the world isn’t coming to an end, while one of the leaders, Karen Balthorek, has secretly met with the party during the festival to discuss next steps for saving Indir’s population from extermination. Running with the suggestion of one of Karen’s magic advisors, the gnome sage Alfor, the party has just devised a plan to scale the tower and try to destroy or deactivate the portals.

That’s where this episode begins. But the party has some time – about an hour – to prepare for the attack on the tower. What are they going to do in that time? Considering this question (and how the players answered it) prompts me to talk a bit about Ape Adventures.

In case “Ape Adventures” is an expression unfamiliar to you, let me explain. There’s a well-known sequence in the 2008 movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in which Shia LeBeouf’s character, Mutt, gets separated from the rest of the characters during a chase sequence in the jungle. He’s stranded on his own, and the film cuts back and forth between the main plot with all the other characters and scenes of Mutt up in the tree canopy by himself. He is at a loss for what to do, but then some curious monkeys descend to investigate. Mutt befriends those monkeys, and they in turn teach him how to swing from creepers to vines. Soon Mutt and his primate pals are joyously speeding through the jungle on vines like Spider-Man swinging on webs. Eventually Mutt is reunited with the main plot, and neither he nor anybody else ever discusses what happened to him as he leaves his monkey mates behind forever. It’s pretty universally lambasted as a ridiculous sequence of events, but from it has arisen the expression “Ape Adventure” (even though Mutt’s buddies are monkeys, not apes. People like their alliteration!), which is used by writers to refer to a sequence in a book, film, or TV show where one character leaves the rest of the group and has a significant experience that is never discussed with anyone else once they return to the group.

Back in episode 30, Squeak went off on an Ape Adventure of his own. But this episode of “The Guardians of Indir” campaign involves each character splitting off from the group for their own Ape Adventures. It’s something that happens pretty frequently in role-playing games: either the party splits up so that each character can pursue their own interests (as in this episode), or one character gets separated or chooses to leave the group to have a little private time (as in episode 30). In D&D, it’s a very common trope that the thieves will absent themselves while the rest of the party is asleep…in order to pursue some side hustle in secret. Players of sneaky characters particularly love to do this, but players of any and all types of PCs will be in this situation from time to time. How do you handle these kinds of situations at your table?

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Episode 45: “MORE time travel!” (Guardians of Indir, D&D 5e)

The party discusses how to address the elven threat with Karen, Kabuto, and Alfor.

This is the third episode taken from our tenth recording session, recorded back in June 2018. In it, the players and PCs continue their journey to get serious about the next steps in the defense of Indir against the elven aggressors in their council with Karen Balthorek and many other NPCs during the street festival in Indir. Because the players were having a hard time getting focused, Alfor the gnome wizard keeps rewinding time for them so they can continue conversations that they forgot about…hence the title, “MORE Time Travel!”

This is also an episode that screams for some fan artwork, at least of the elevator shoes and the joy & disappointment of eating ice cream. Because we spent some time at the beginning of the session building more character backstories, many of the major NPCs make an appearance in this episode in those conversations (sometimes even without time travel to rewind them); we hear from Karen, Keats, Alfor, and Timbertina, while Scrapheap, Shonda, and Kabuto (who we determined was going to be Karen’s majordomo) are mentioned.

The silliness that I talked about in the last post is fun, but it does tend to make the game really aimless…which of course can be a real problem in any RPG session, but it’s particularly bad when the entire game – world-building, plot, characters, encounters, everything – is being improvised on the spot. So Harold lets them go on for a while, trying to make a decision. This is tough for the players to do; while there are really only two broad options to choose, there isn’t a clear favorite, because the player desires (“I wanna go to the battlefield and lead armies!”) conflicts with many of the characters’ personalities (“I’m no good on a battlefield!”) and either impasse or disgruntlement is a natural outcome. The DM lets them go for a long time before having an NPC step in and provide some information that would help the PCs make a decision.

There is a line of thought in RPG circles that this sort of delay, letting the players twist in the wind without explicit direction, is boring and/or frustrating. Without clear directions, this line of thinking goes, the players’ indecision delays them from getting to “the good stuff.” At the same time, there are others that think that a game should be all about player agency, and that line of thinking asserts that “leading the players” is something that any good GM should strenuously avoid doing. Some might argue that merely providing more information in the way Harold eventually does in this episode is being too heavy-handed. What do you think? How long is appropriate for the players to debate, discuss, and dicker amongst themselves without a resolution? When should a GM step in to cut off circular conversations, if at all? How have you handled situations like this in your games, either as a player or GM?

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Episode 44: “The Map Room” (Guardians of Indir, D&D 5e)

After a short recap, the party steps away from the Indir Festival to discuss next steps with Karen.

This is the second episode taken from our tenth recording session, originally recorded in June 2018. As you may remember – we wrote about it as recently as the previous post – Harold the DM was improvising this campaign, specifically by only creating material for the game DURING the game. We’d had a recording problem – a broken laptop – that meant that the previous session (Session 9, not posted to the podcast yet) was recorded with different software on different equipment with different characters in a different role-playing game. So as we resumed the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e game with this session (Session 10), there had been two months since the last session, during which time Harold had done his best to not think about or prepare anything for the campaign at all. Over the same period, the players were very busy with their schooling, what with final exams and the other hallmarks of finishing their semesters, not to mention those players who were graduating from high school. The end result was that we needed some time to get back into the D&D game. It also goes a long way to explain why the players were all so punchy and unfocused.

Context is everything. Some days the games are just going to be silly, because that’s all the players can handle. That’s one of the beautiful things about role-playing.

The last episode, Episode 43 “Gigner Tokens,” was the beginning of the session, with Harold asking leading questions to help the players remember who their PCs are by prompting them to create more details about their characters. This episode – 43 – is the natural extension of that process, with Harold giving a quick recap of the “story so far” to the group, both to remind them and to remind himself of what was happening in the game. That helped center Harold, and gave him a bit of time to create what was going to happen next…Karen Balthorek summoning the heroes to come up with plans for what to do about the impending mammalian invasion.

There’s some fun bits in here, too, not least of which is the mention of Kabuto – a mysterious name that Harold wrote in his notes during session 8 along with a bunch of other NPC names. He hadn’t looked at those notes in two months, and nobody could recall why he’d written it. Can you?

During the conversation with Karen, Squeak shares some information about the Tower with the rest of the group; this is a reference back to the events covered in episode 30, “Oh, it’s alright,” which none of the other players knew anything about, as that episode hadn’t been posted yet.

Lucia mentions Kai Winn at one point (which should give you an idea what she was watching in summer 2018), and Balasar calls Vhisuna a “Crimmen Al,” which will be an absolute travesty if it doesn’t get used as an NPC name in some future game. “Hey, Crimmen! Long time no see! Everybody, this is my old buddy, Crimmen Al!” “Only my friends call me Crimmen. You can call me Al.”

What’s a little detail that has come up in one of your games, that has later blossomed into something really significant for the campaign?

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Episode 43: “Gigner Tokens” (Guardians of Indir, D&D 5e)

Episode 43 gradually resumes the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e campaign.

Having completed our posting of the All Souls Night adventure, with this episode we go back in time to the D&D 5e Guardians of Indir campaign…

…but when we started recording this session (session 10) in June of 2018, it had been several weeks since we’d played D&D together. In the interim we’d played a session in an entirely different RPG – P.L.U.S. – that also used concepts from the classic 90s superheroes setting/RPG, The Taint. We still hope to publish material from that game in future episodes. But when we came back, we had to get our heads back into this campaign.

That was particularly a challenge for the DM, Harold, who (as we’ve described previously) was trying to run the Indir game completely improvised. So rather than jumping right back into the party confronting the elves in the tower, the first part of the session – this episode, really – consists of a lot of side conversations and digressions as the DM asks pointed questions about little character details to get both himself and the players back into the game, particularly since the PCs have each completed their training and advanced to 3rd level.

It may seem aimless and rambling at first, but each of the characters is developed a bit more during this episode. Well, maybe it never stops seeming aimless and rambling.

Klyde owes a debt to his tribe, so a quarter of his earnings he sends back to the clan. He once tried to pass on some counterfeit goods to his trainer, but failed to fool him. He’s trained a fuzzy little shuvuuia named “Scrap Heap” as his animal companion.

One of the many times Vhisuna got them into trouble and her brother Keats got them out of it, the repercussions forced their shared family to move yet again.

Earlier in his life, Squeak spent a lot of time in the Underdark. A small Indiran scouting party came down and, during their patrol, broke up a fight between different factions underground. Squeak decided that this was his chance to escape the strife in the Underdark, and he imitated one of the soldiers and marched back out with them.

Kantu is a red-shouldered aarakocra. He spent most of his life in Sometown-in-the-mountains before coming down to Indir for the trees. Kantu now has an animal companion, Muffin the boar.

“What does Muffin look like?“

In Balasar’s village, they played a sport like basketball using rabbit skulls instead of a ball. He found Maval Bersk, the ancient sentient construct. Balasar was drawn to Yugondai when his village was being destroyed by a monster and a pigeon descended from the sky bearing him a warhammer to defend his home. The dragonborn forces of Indir came to the village afterward, and Balasar signed up to the military, bringing Maval Bersk along with him.

“When Balasar sees a door, he becomes a bit…unhinged…”

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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 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 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!

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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 18: “Monster Fight!” (D&D 5e Session 6)

 

This is the second episode from our sixth game session, recorded 10 March 2018 (a long time ago!). This episode is doubly late, as Harold (who does the bulk of the editing) was out of town at a conference all last week.

This episode is noteworthy in that we see much more teamwork between the PCs than we have seen much in the past. At the same time, we also see a fairly cavalier attitude about abandoning one’s companions to look at something interesting, or to get away from a threat.

Seeing as how it’s October as we post this (more than seven months after recording!), a number of the players have been producing artwork as part of their Inktober challenges they’ve set themselves. Hopefully we will be posting some more of their artwork soon; you can always check the gallery for posted artwork.

Light continues to play an important part in the campaign, as only two of the characters can see even short distances (30′) in the dark. How do you handle light in your campaign(s)? Do torches burn out, or do they stay lit indefinitely?