Posted on

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?

Posted on

Episode 5: “Be Careful What You Read” (D&D 5e Session 2)

Here’s episode five of our Guardians of Indir campaign, which begins our second recording session. In this episode, the players learn about leveling up their characters for the first time, and they create some interesting world and NPC details in the process.

My approach has always been to introduce new rules to my players as they become relevant, so I only started talking about leveling up with a trainer at the end of the last episode. The players get some choices on how they will gain levels, and one player presents a bit of a surprise in the choices they make, demonstrating that even fantasy characters must be careful what they read.

Posted on

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”).

 

Posted on

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.

 

Listen to the previous episode

Posted on

Episode 1: “The Outside of the Deer” (D&D 5e Session 0)

Putting together all the disparate elements of an episode has taken a long time. We recorded the material for this episode back on 11 November 2017 as part of our “Session 0.”

“Session 0” is a term for any first RPG session where you meet with the players and discuss the groundwork of the campaign: creating characters, brainstorming world-building details, establishing house rules and acceptable table behavior, setting expectations, and so on. With this campaign, all I knew is that we wanted to play a D&D 5e game. The rest we made up at the table, and you can hear some of that in this first episode, where the DM and you meet the players and characters for our first campaign.

Listen to Episode 2