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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 42: “A Pact for Cheese” (All Souls Night, D&D 5e)

The Dungeon-in-a-Box adventure “All Souls Night” D&D 5e adventure featuring Sid Onoso continues.

I hope you and your family, like mine and my players’, really, REALLY like making goat noises. Why? Because if you like goat noises, we sure do have a treat for you!

Our intrepid party, consisting of Min Dalrin (the wizard farmer), Dyrah Tanner (the story-collector bard), Gulan Navluv (the dwarf cleric skeptical of everything supernatural), and their leader, Sid Onoso (the Greenwold’s Greatest Detective), have been on the case of the Missing Cheeseman, Piotr Fremanchen, finding clues and pursuing leads throughout the Muttonwood. At the close of last episode, they had just found the cheeseman shackled in a clearing, surrounded by a bunch of hobgoblins riding giant rams. When the hobgoblins started talking to the investigators, the “mildly” pyromaniacal Min immediately responded with FIRE. As we begin this episode, the party is continuing to beat up the kidnappers while trying to free Piotr.

What is your favorite breed of goat, and what sounds does that type make? One of the wonderful things about this one-shot (which started in Episode 34) is that every single player has a completely different goat impression…and they’re all correct, because goats make such a huge variety of weird and fun sounds!

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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 16: “We need to mug two elves” (D&D 5e Session 5)

 

Here’s episode 16, in which the Guardians follow Balasar and find a mysterious and very valuable puzzle in the dark. It’s the third and final segment taken from our fifth recording session for this D&D 5e campaign, from February 2018.

 

February was a short month for the podcast, as the DM and nearly all of the players attended DunDraCon 42 instead of recording a second session that month as would be customary. We aim to record two sessions a month, but that’s been more of a guideline than a rule, particularly as in the Winter and Spring school schedules were tight. At least one of the players was in the midst of their final semester of high school and preparing to receive a diploma, figuring out college logistics for the Fall, and so on.

 

Dealing with puzzles is always an interesting challenge in RPGs, both for the players and the GM. Puzzles serve as an interesting challenge for the players, rather than for the characters, as characters pretty much accomplish everything else through role-playing or in-game mechanics. But a puzzle that is solved with a die roll isn’t really a puzzle, it’s a skill check or an attribute test. And that gambling element of rolling dice that’s so fun with combat is disappointing if used to solve a riddle, say. Players want to use their brains!

 

Or more want to use their brains, anyway. Some players don’t like puzzles or riddles, because they break character. A hugely wise monk should have no difficulty solving a riddle, but the monk’s player might. The PCs shouldn’t be stopped because their players are having a bad day or are just tired. So what do you do as a GM to entertain the players with puzzles without blocking the PCs from advancing the plot? You can make the puzzles optional, of course. The PCs don’t HAVE to open that chest, for example; the treasure inside would be helpful, but it isn’t required to complete the adventure. As an alternative, GMs can present players with a puzzle, let them stew over it for a while, and then – only IF they are unable to figure out the puzzle on their own – the DM can ask for a relevant roll to try to get a clue, a partial solution, or even the full solution to the puzzle/answer to the riddle. That way, the players get a chance to solve it, but the puzzle didn’t stop the game cold.

 

All that assumes, of course, that the PCs have all the pieces necessary for the puzzle…

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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 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 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?

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Episode 6: “Old Gigner Ale” (D&D 5e Session 2)

Today we’re posting episode 6 of our Guardians of Indir Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign, entitled “Old Gigner Ale.” This was the second half of recording session two; a session that was cut shorter than most sessions before or since (so we’re only getting two episodes from it). In this episode, the players consider magic and some new NPCs at the Dragon’s Blood tavern.

One thing that I encourage DMs – new and old alike – to do is to incorporate stuff from the players into the game. Starting with episode 1, I’ve been doing that by asking questions of the players: where are you? Is it a wilderness, a farm, a town, or a city? What are the challenges? What races are preeminent, if any? What is the money called? Who are your trainers?

I also encourage you DMs to take any passing comment from the players at the table – whether it is a joke or a reference to something else outside of the game – and see whether you can incorporate that in some way into the world or the narrative. This is a fun method for discovery, where the players may give you input and ideas without knowing that they’re doing it. I’ve already woven several such things into the Guardians of Indir campaign, though not all of them have surfaced yet by this episode.

Finally, I encourage DMs to consider incorporating references to stuff outside of the game session into the campaign. Not personal stuff, usually, but as a DM one can always be looking for ideas. Of course you can include pop culture references, but that’s not the main idea I’m suggesting here. Things like real-world street names, actual business names, setups for jokes…these are fun references to the real world that your players may get, too. Incorporating those ideas can be very entertaining, especially if there’s something that the players know as well.

Some of you may have read the episode title and shaken your heads at my typo. That’s cute. We bought some soda from our local supermarket the day before recording session 2, and the kids were tickled that the cash register rang up our purchase as “GIGNER ALE” instead of ginger ale. So naturally I brought that into the game, and our game benefits from the mistake some clerk made a long time ago when entering the product details in the store database. So the typo is an intentional reference. You can decide how much the kids enjoyed the reference as you listen to the episode.

Anything can be inspiration. Pay attention! Take notes! Bring in material from everywhere – your game will very likely be richer for it.

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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