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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.

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Episode 14: “My shield is my lantern!” (D&D 5e Session 5)

Your friendly neighborhood DM here. For this episode, which is the second episode taken from our fifth session of the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e game (played back in February 2018), I wanted to include the kids a bit more. So I invited my children, Lucia and Blake, to record the introduction and epilogue bits for the episode. The result is…well, you decide. We noticed that there were a lot of crickets chirping outside yesterday, so I suggested Lucia would record her intro outside, to see if the mic would pick up the ambient sounds. Later, I made the same suggestion to Blake, but by the time he got outside, the neighbors had turned on their fan, and so it was mostly white noise. He came up with an…interesting alternative.

The resulting introduction and epilogue are fun, and Lucia provides an overview of what happened in the previous episode – a list of the high points she remembers – rather than a “this is exactly where we left off.” How does that work for you?

 

Finally, we’d love to get some feedback from you, related to how undead have been portrayed in the podcast. My take has always been that dead creatures are dead creatures, and you can’t tell that “this one is a skeleton/zombie/wight/ghoul/whatever” just from looking at it. They all look very much the same: corpses that move, so it”s the behavior that tells them apart. But then, I’ve always been reluctant to name monsters for the players, as I’m sure you’ve heard if you’ve listened to just about any episode of our podcast. I feel it limits the imagination. But what portrayals of undead have you liked in your games? Can dead things see and thus have blind spots? Can they thus be surprised by a character that hid in the shadows?

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Episode 13: “Don’t Beat the Dead Elf!” (D&D 5e Session 5)

This episode is the first episode from our fifth recording session, from January 2018. We return to the “present day:” with the party of Klyde, Vhisuna, Squeak, and Kantu looking at the entrance to a stairway leading underground that has mysteriously appeared just in time for the elves to escape. Meanwhile, Balasar is struggling to catch up from his adventure in monster surgery, following the trail of dead elves.

 

As usual, I had plenty of alternative titles for this episode:

“Celebratory Arrows”

“Is there anything I could steal?”

“Stop Dying So We Can Figure This Out”

 

Our next episode should be released next Tuesday.

 

 

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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 10: “Human League” (D&D 5e Session 4)

DM Harold here. This episode begins our fourth recording session. I was mistaken before, when I said that the third session was the first session in 2018 – I was going by the time stamp on the audio files, which were updated when I opened the recording software again at the beginning of the fourth session! A rookie mistake.

 

Anyway, this actually marks the beginning of the fourth recording session and the first session in 2018…you can tell by our icebreaker question at the start, and the table’s nervous energy because it’s been weeks since we’ve all seen each other.

 

On that note, going into this session, I believed that we were going to be at least one player short due to schedule conflicts. I knew weeks in advance that we were going to be less than the full group, so I thought about how to play an interesting game that kept the players engaged but didn’t leave out the absent players. I could have prepared a one-off of a different system (and I do such things, later on in the year), but I felt like there was some fun opportunity to use the time to present some “interactive exposition:” that is, instead of just telling the players about some world background, I would have them LIVE it.

 

Well, schedules opened up at the last minute, and we ended up having our full complement of regular players. So, rather than discarding the idea, I offered the players a choice once we got started. You can hear what they chose in this episode.

 

For your entertainment, I will also be posting the players’ character sheets soon. I’ll update this post and the top page of the site when they’re available.

Rakhari-the-Kazarim

Geranda-the-Infractor

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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 8: “My Toothbrush Talks to Me at Night” (D&D 5e Session3)

 

This episodes continues session 3 of the Guardians of Indir campaign, recorded in January 2018. The party continues the fight on the wall around Indir and things get…silly at times. Particularly with regards to the two war veterans.

 

Note: I (Harold) make a mistake in this episode. Well, at least one. The one I’m thinking of is my explanation of the thrown property for weapons. If a weapon has the thrown property, you use the same attribute’s bonus for the attack and damage as you would if you were to use that weapon in melee. Only if a finesse weapon had the thrown property would you be able to choose freely between STR and DEX!

 

One other note: we’ve just got notification of our approval to be listed in Google Play. So if you have that service, you will shortly also be able to listen to our podcast there.

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Episode 7: “Jolly Green Giant” (D&D 5e Session 3)

Harold the DM here. Somehow I’m a little late in posting this log entry for episode 7. Sorry about that! As I post this, it’s early in the morning of Independence Day 2018. This episode is the first part of our third full game session, which was our first recording of 2018 (back in January). It’s more than usually obvious that we recorded the game separately from the intro with this episode and last episode (“Old Gigner Ale”), because I was experiencing really heavy environmental allergies for those two weeks. My voice is very croaky as a result.

Inspired by a shift that happens in session 3, I recorded a longer-than-usual intro for this episode, in which I talk about some of the process involved in changing the tone of your game on the fly, in-session. I may do a longer write-up in future, if I get to the point where I am writing articles separate from episode releases. So far I haven’t yet, but I can dream.

On the topic of other material not directly related to a podcast episode, I intend soon to start posting more of our artwork to this site, as well as posting some of the custom game content we’ve been creating as free DMs’ Guild downloads. Now that I mention it, what content would you like to see written up?