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Episode 28: “Is This Normal?” (D&D 5e, Session 7)

In our 28th episode, the party’s conversation with Timbertina and Sqt Rp Do is rudely interrupted…

This episode of our ongoing Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign, the Guardians of Indir, has the players enjoying a bit more NPC interaction than usual, as they get into character for more roleplay (it’s been long enough since they did much in-character interaction that some of the players are even surprised at Lucia’s voice for Kantu!). Is this normal? Only time will tell.

I (DM Harold) had a hard time naming this episode, because there were so many good lines from this portion of the game that would have served equally well. For example:

“Surrounded by idiots”

“I’m a telepathy!”

“I’m not sure I like that (but maybe I do)”

“Spiking the kobold”

“I don’t think that was the right way to do that.”

“I want to help”

“Sounds like a mental disorder”

and the classic “Blame Steeev!”

As I post this to allagesrpg.com, it’s more than a year after we actually played this session (we played it in March 2018!). Our game schedule is pretty cyclical. With kid players (at the time, all of our players were in 12th grade or under), the game schedule is strongly affected by the school semesters. So we’re coming up on a break in the game, when we first started playing another RPG! Don’t worry; we have continued to play D&D 5e as well in the months since then; we’ve just been alternating as schedules prevent one or another player from joining us for a session.

What games would you particularly like to hear played on a podcast?

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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.