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C2 Ep. 89 Eberron Reviewed 17
249 Plays3 years ago
Eric answers your questions in a GM Q&A
This episode is brought to you by the generous donations of our amazing Show Sponsors: Laura Pickrahn, Darrin Katzska, Irene Viorritto, Ryan Royce, Darrell DeLaney, Jessica Smith, Charles Compton, Danielle Bramhall-Smith, Nastasia Raulerson, The Kamm Family, David Scrams, Elizabeth Clark, Andy Dossett, Rebekah Gowman, deviouspoptart, Eðvarð Arnór Sigurðsson, Michael Clark, Eric Witman, and Shelby Johnson.
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgements
00:00:00
Speaker
The following episode is brought to you by the generous donations of Laura Pickron, Darryl Delaney, Darren Katska, Devious Poptart, Irene Villarito, Ryan Royce, Andy Dossett, Danielle Bramhall-Smith, Elizabeth Clark, Eric Whitman, Jessica Smith, Charles Compton, Natasha Rallerson, Richard Cree, The Cam Family,
00:00:20
Speaker
David Scrams, Dustin Troop, Edvard Arnaud, Michael Clark, Rebecca Gowman, and Shelby Johnson, as well as all of our generous patrons.
Solo GM Q&A Session Introduction
00:01:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Eberron Renewed, an actual play podcast set in the Eberron campaign setting. I am your game master, Eric, and this week we are doing kind of a solo Eberron-reviewed GM Q&A. I reached out on our Discord and on our Facebook page for questions from you all that you had for me as the GM for the campaign, and I'm going to go through them and answer them as
00:01:39
Speaker
best as I possibly can. Obviously we're going to avoid spoilers for things that have yet to happen in the campaign that I have planned out but I'm excited to get into some of these questions and go through it and we'll see how long of an episode this ends up being. It may be a bit shorter than normal, it may be a whole lot longer.
00:01:57
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Who knows? I will when I'm done editing this. Anyway, thank you all so much for listening and we are going to jump into
NPCs and Player Interactions
00:02:05
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it. These aren't in any particular order. I'm just going to go through as I see them. I have them laid out on my screen here. So the first one is from Ophelia in our Discord. Ophelia asked, who's been your favorite NPC so far?
00:02:20
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I mean in terms of the sheer player reaction Maris pebble fist the underground doctor getting to actually play him in this last arc was delightful To see everyone's reaction and I actually broke Randy while he was talking while being Maris Which Randy consummate professional that he is rarely breaks while he's in character. And so that was so much fun but
00:02:49
Speaker
Maris was obviously a fun one-off character. At least as it stands right now there's not a whole lot of meat on those bones in terms of role-playing and character depth. So that is a fun one to play. Honestly it's got to be Viggo. Viggo has been so much fun
00:03:09
Speaker
to play over the course of the entire campaign and show his evolution over time, where he is now versus where he started and that journey along the way. And I'm excited to continue playing Vigo for as long as the party continues interacting with the clan. But yeah, it's been a lot of fun.
City Campaigns vs. Globetrotting Campaigns
00:03:29
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Irene asked, what are your favorite slash least favorite aspects of running a globetrotting campaign versus a city-based campaign? And does running them for a podcast change how you do things compared to your home table? And I do also want to call out on our Facebook page, Everon Renewed, that you can search for on Facebook and follow over there.
00:03:48
Speaker
Darren also asked a very similar question of what do you like better about running an urban game versus a globetrotting campaign? What do you miss about the structure of the first campaign? Where on the spectrum are you leading for campaign three? So I'm going to take that amalgamation of questions and do my best to answer them. So in terms of a globetrotting campaign versus a city-based campaign, this campaign as a city-based, urban-based campaign has been much more character driven.
00:04:17
Speaker
We have less ground in a very literal sense that we need to cover and we're able to have many more reoccurring characters in a campaign that is city-based as opposed to the globetrotting nature of campaign one of Eberron Renewed where we were going all over the place on an airship and doing big things making big moves. Now
00:04:42
Speaker
I love the character-based nature of a city-based campaign. I love the reoccurring NPCs. I love how the city becomes a character unto itself almost at certain points. It can be restrictive though. There have been moments where I've gotten a point of inspiration in my day-to-day life. I read something or I watched something and I thought, oh, that would be so cool to adapt, but
00:05:11
Speaker
I pitched this game as being based out of Sharn, and the idea that I have would very much take the campaign out of Sharn, and it would fit much better in a globetrotting campaign, so there have been points of inspiration that
00:05:25
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I have had moments where having it be based in the city and being an urban level campaign has felt somewhat restrictive. Whereas with a globetrotting campaign you can always scale that back to have a string of quests be street level.
00:05:44
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but it's a much harder sell to flip it the other way of taking a campaign that is street level and then doing a globetrotting section, if that makes sense.
Podcast Influence on Game Mastering
00:05:54
Speaker
So you have a lot more freedom with the globetrotting campaign, I would say is my favorite aspect of it, where as a GM, you can take things so many places, whereas with a city-based campaign, you're much more restricted, but you can get a lot more intimate with the characters and the storytelling and things like that.
00:06:14
Speaker
Uh, does running them for a podcast change how you do things compared to your home table was Irene's follow-up question. Uh, so it's been a while since I've run a home table game. Most of the D and D that I play and run is content based. Uh, I will say just before recording this episode, I had session zero for a home game, so hopefully it goes well. But, uh, well session zero, well, hopefully the campaign goes well. Um, but I will say that.
00:06:44
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early on running for a podcast very much changed how I ran my game compared to how I ran them before and I don't think now it will as much just because my personal
00:07:03
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sensibilities and sensitivities and things like that have aligned with who I am as a content creator versus just an everyday person. And whereas before when I first started doing content, I was just less aware of certain things and things I needed to be cognizant of. And so it was a growth process. And so I don't think there's going to be a huge change other than the way I structure the game. There will be less
00:07:32
Speaker
pressure to have a button to end in an episode where it's going to be a satisfying episode and breaking my sessions up into episodic chunks. I'm sure some of that will come over and it will hopefully benefit the game by giving it a sense of flow and momentum, but there will be less pressure to do that. And for Darren's follow up question, what do I miss about the structure of the first campaign and where on this spectrum are you leaning for campaign three?
00:08:01
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So I miss the freedom, like I said, from campaign one of the globe trotting, you can go anywhere, do anything, but that can lead to it being kind of scattered, I guess. In terms of where am I on the spectrum for campaign three, I would like to find that happy medium of having a strong home base with strong NPCs and a strong infrastructure, but
00:08:31
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The story is allowed to breathe and go places and so you can have stories and quests that are intimate and set in the home base or the home city, what have you.
00:08:43
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But then also you can travel. You can go out for days, weeks at a time, but you're constantly coming back to this home base. I think is where I'm leaning right now for campaign three. That's all theoretical in my head. We have not had a session zero for campaign three, obviously. So I can't speak to definitively because the players get input on that aspect of the campaign, obviously. So Jeff.
00:09:08
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cast member of the show, who is your favorite player? It's gotta be Randy, as Flame112 said, it's obviously Randy like, come on, in response to Jeff's question. No, in all seriousness, obviously every player brings something unique and different to the table that I appreciate and enjoy playing with them. I'm not going to go into deep details about each and every one of them, but they are all a joy to play with and I have a great time at the table.
00:09:37
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Crow on our Discord asked, what's your favorite element of Sharn? Either something you introduced or was already a canon aspect. Also, are the cold opens going to come back? So there's been multiple conversations about the cold opens coming back.
Challenges of Cold Opens and Scheduling
00:09:52
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It's primarily a scheduling thing with the cold opens because we don't record those during the sessions. Generally, we would record them separately.
00:10:02
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And so that's a whole other scheduling can of worms and scheduling the show proper is a task in and of itself. So scheduling additional things on top of that without it constantly being the same players based on availability is a tricky thing. So I would love for them to come back. It's just needing to circle some of those squares. Favorite element of sharn.
00:10:26
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My favorite aspect of Sharn is I would say the crime element because it's so malleable. Because with the Boromar Clan and Dask and the Tyrants and all of it.
00:10:42
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You can play it so many different ways. Obviously we have a strong kind of mafia vibe in a lot of aspects of Boromar, but we also have kind of the underground smugglers. And you can also go kind of industrial revolution era England with like the street gangs and things like that. And so there's a lot of different things that you can do with them that I think are so much fun and unique.
00:11:05
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that's the thing I like. I liked about the concept of playing a game in Sharn is because it is so unique compared to so many fantasy tabletop RPG game settings.
Storytelling in Sharn's Crime Element
00:11:17
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And I know that there are there are aspects of every section of Eberron that are unique, but to have a city of towers that is full of crime and corporations and
00:11:29
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It threads that needle of high fantasy, low fantasy, cyberpunk, grimdark, like there's so much going on that you can play with that I really enjoy. Leopard asked, what has been your favorite story arc to play in this far and which one did you enjoy how it played out the most? Was it the one where everything went as you expected or the one that went completely off the rails? So generally speaking,
00:11:55
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I am an agent of chaos when it comes to who I am at the table. I love it when things go off the rails. I love it when I don't know what's going to happen next as much as the players. So my favorite arc to plan thus far has been the murder mystery. Just because that was a lot of fun. I wanted to approach the plotting of the murder mystery arc
00:12:20
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with having everything already recorded. Like I wanted to plan all of the different plot threads that they could go down from an evidence standpoint and interviewing people and have this whole murder board already plotted out.
00:12:35
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And so that was so much fun to build a murder board and think about, okay, so this person was there and this is the information they're going to have, and it's going to lead them over here. But if they go to this person first, it's going to lead them back over here. And so there's a whole net of connections that will forever be on not the cutting room floor, because it wasn't recorded, but just on in my notes, because they took certain paths that blocked off other paths or just
00:13:02
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other paths became redundant and unnecessary. And so that was so much fun to construct this elaborate web of a murder scene and the people that saw it and the people that knew different pieces of information and things like that.
00:13:17
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Which one did I enjoy how it played out the most? I think the the teleportation canisters, like I said, I love chaos. It's so much fun. So, you know, having this this heist robbery gig turn into a chase through the towers of sharn with hob on the back of a barge, essentially, it was so much fun. It was it was a great time.
00:13:43
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Ophelia followed up Irene's question with any advice for running street level city campaigns tied to a home base. So the big thing that I would say is the whole appeal of a street level city campaign, in my opinion, is that you want to have a strong connection to that city and the level of the city that you're on. And for me, that means the NPCs.
00:14:11
Speaker
You wanna have reoccurring NPCs that the characters are interacting with on a regular basis. They can become resources that can join the party on adventures and things like that if they want, but just having them be constants in their lives. Introducing, I would say, if you're talking about a long, like full multi-year campaign, then around a dozen,
00:14:38
Speaker
NPCs or or less if you find that your need is less than that with unique skill sets and unique personalities and things like that will a Leave a lot of heavy lifting on your part Unnecessary because you're already gonna have a strong stable of characters that you can pull on So if the party is like we want to go see if we can find a fence for this thing Oh, well, you already know a fence
00:15:01
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here you go or when to go find an underground doctor okay Maris pebble fist is your underground doctor and so establishing this core of NPCs that the party
00:15:13
Speaker
can go to on a regular basis and get to know and care about will give you a lot of opportunity for unique storytelling and will give you an opportunity to both use the strength of those characters to tell evocative stories as well as allow your villains to potentially threaten some of those NPCs to motivate the party into action potentially.
00:15:36
Speaker
So that would be my biggest advice is spend a lot of time on your NPCs and fleshing them out, giving them plenty of depth to where your party can interact with them six, seven, eight times over the course of a dozen sessions and still feel like there's more to learn about this character and more to learn from them.
00:15:57
Speaker
And outside of that, manage your threat level. That's why I really am still glad that we went to Genesis for this campaign because with D&D, the power creep gets to the point to where having a true street level campaign once your party is eighth, ninth, tenth level becomes increasingly difficult because your threats have to continue to grow and grow and grow.
00:16:21
Speaker
And eventually it just, why are street tuffs casting finger of death? Uh, to, to use an absurd example, but that is a reason that I enjoy Genesis as a system for a street level campaign. I'm sure you could modify D and D to work well, maybe block off certain spells, things like that. But generally speaking, I really think that a, a system with a lower level magic system, especially lends itself well to a street level campaign.
00:16:51
Speaker
So maybe look at other systems if you're really wanting to run one of these that would lend itself better to this type of campaign. Crow asked, favorite antagonist to play so far? I already said Viggo and I think that still stands. Solomon Callaway is also a lot of fun to play. I don't get as many opportunities to play Solomon Callaway, but I have really enjoyed playing him.
00:17:16
Speaker
Flame112 on the Discord asks, Eric, did you always intend the Ram to be a reoccurring enemy slash foil for Hob, or did it just turn out that way? Also, how did you decide who slash what took over the Ram's body? So the Ram, I didn't intend to become what the Ram ended up becoming. I thought the Ram was going to be a fun rival for Hob down the road.
00:17:39
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but then things just of my own doing morphed and changed to where the ram became much more of an enemy
00:17:49
Speaker
antagonist towards Hobb. And then Eris and the whole party kind of got skin in the game in terms of wanting to take the ram down. And in terms of how did I decide, I just kind of went through what types of stories I wanted to tell that I had yet the opportunity to tell in this campaign.
00:18:09
Speaker
and then went digging through Eberron lore to find something that could fill that gap. Because the ram was such a gift from the party of having Trevor try to do resurrection and rolling a despair or a bunch of threat. I forget which one it was. It was just such a perfect opportunity to insert a character in.
00:18:35
Speaker
And I had a lot of different ideas for who could be inserted. And I ultimately, I'm happy with what I landed on. The biggest thing is this party hasn't killed a whole lot of big enemies yet. And so I initially thought, oh, this would be a great chance to bring somebody back who they killed, but there's not, other than the Ram, there's not a whole lot.
00:18:58
Speaker
So, and obviously it couldn't be the ram because the spell was failed. So, yeah, I'm really happy with the plane that I have and where it's going to go moving forward.
00:19:08
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Okay, Alex on our Facebook group asks, what has been the biggest pleasant surprise of the season in terms of style of game and or Genesis system?
Adapting to Genesis System
00:19:18
Speaker
So biggest surprise has honestly been, I've really enjoyed how well everybody has taken to the multi axis success of failed nature
00:19:30
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of the Genesis system. It is a daunting thing, especially for people that have played a lot of D20 based systems to switch over to the mindset of like, okay, I succeed, but something bad happens that isn't related to the thing I was trying, but it's in addition to, and it can be a lot to wrap your head around. And I've really enjoyed seeing the creativity and what people have come up with in terms of what happens when a despair comes up or a triumph or a bunch of advantage and seeing what that looks like.
00:20:00
Speaker
but also the characters. The characters in this campaign, I have really grown to have a level of affection for, I won't say more than campaign one, but certainly there's a different level of affection for these characters and just the level of depth that they all have and the amount of flaws and how relatable all these characters are that I really enjoy.
00:20:29
Speaker
Alex also asked what's an aspect of everyone you've never explored but we would be interested in for future episodes. So I've really enjoyed playing in sharn and there's still a lot of sharn that we have yet to touch on and I feel like the the actual impact of the houses
00:20:50
Speaker
in Sharn is something we haven't deeply touched on. Obviously they've ransacked multiple house facilities and we've had Hobb's interaction with one of the houses, but I don't feel like we've gotten a real sense of how much, at least in my eberron, a stranglehold the houses have
00:21:13
Speaker
on the different industries in sharn. And that's something that if the opportunity presents itself, I would like to get into and explore a bit of. Brian Wilson asked, is there an overall direction and plot you have for the campaign as a whole or is it episodic by nature?
Player-Driven Storytelling
00:21:30
Speaker
So from a planning standpoint and just from a almost philosophical standpoint going into this campaign, I wanted it to feel
00:21:42
Speaker
just completely different from campaign one. I wanted it to be a stark departure in a different direction and so part of that was campaign one in my planning phase
00:21:54
Speaker
I knew who the big bats were going in. I had an idea for what the end game looked like. I had an idea for the different act structure and where things were going to go. Some of that went way out the window. But a lot of the big beats didn't. They stayed in place. And what happened in campaign one happened in campaign one. Like I said, not going to get into spoilers here because it's a campaign two show.
00:22:22
Speaker
And if you still are listening through campaign one, you're good. But I wanted this campaign to be very much driven by the idea of, in Iron Man 3, Tony Stark says, you create your own demons. And I wanted that to be kind of the ethos of campaign two, of let's drop a party of characters in Sharn, have them working for the Boromar clan.
00:22:45
Speaker
and let's see what they can create in terms of their own demons. Who are they going to antagonize? Who are they gonna convince these antagonistic entities that they need to deal with the party members? That kind of thing. So that was my planning going in, is I had session zero with the players, we wanted to work for the clan, wanted to have kind of a crime driven campaign.
00:23:13
Speaker
And then from that point I started fleshing things out for each individual character and the stories kind of surrounding them. And I wanted the characters individual personal stories to drive and flesh out the overall story. So obviously Milo has a strong attachment to the clan and a great amount of loyalty to the clan. And so the clan aspects are very much driven largely by Milo's character.
00:23:38
Speaker
Eris has Olive and Norse and Millhatch and all kind of the the mega maniacal industrial mad people in sharn and that's very much Eris's story. Hob has the houses
00:23:53
Speaker
and in that aspect. And Raynard has his family drama and how that comes into play and all these things come together to create the central narrative of a group of people just trying their best and doing well at some points and failing at others. So that is the overall direction I had, but I didn't plot out this campaign if that makes sense.
00:24:20
Speaker
And then we only have a couple questions left from Mark Stanley on the Geek Pantheon Facebook group. Can you tell us your favorite parts of the campaign so far? And how much of the shenanigans with Milo's wife was developed in play versus ahead of time? So favorite parts of the campaign so far, I've loved the embrace of the, the pulpy over the top aspect of Eberron in this campaign.
Eberron Campaign's Distinctive Style
00:24:46
Speaker
like getting to do chases through the towers of sharn, over the top superhero-esque fights. It's all been so much fun to see this side of Eberron really shine. And I think that's not something we got a whole lot of in campaign one. So I'm really loving that tone of this campaign so far. And in terms of the shenanigans with Milo's wife developed in play versus ahead of time,
00:25:12
Speaker
Randy kind of gave me carte blanche. He told me, Milo, his wife died. He hears her voice. She died in a fire. And that was really all Randy had in terms of ahead of time planning.
00:25:30
Speaker
And then I came up with some ideas and some thoughts that developed over time to not really even fully align with my ahead of the time planning. Jason, having that shadow spell thing and like looking like a house therani spell and Mark, that happened in the moment. That wasn't something that was plotted out and planned. It was something where I think Milo rolled a bunch of advantage
00:26:00
Speaker
And I was like, okay, what can I do? Oh, this will be an interesting wrinkle. Go with it. And so now this whole new aspect of Milo's story has been introduced relating to his wife. And so a lot of it has come up organically and I really enjoyed that. We have one more question from the Discord. You thought I would forget. From Laura, please, can we have just a hint of what your super secret naming algorithm is?
00:26:30
Speaker
So for those of you who don't know, in previous reviews, I've alluded to, I have a quote unquote algorithm that's overselling it by a mile for naming a lot of the NPCs to varying degrees of success. It gave us Norton Milhatch, it also gave us
00:26:50
Speaker
Herban Primafit, I think, was the name of another one. So, you know, there's a spectrum of success for this naming convention. I'm trying to think of what would be a good hint to give if I can't even give one without giving too much away. I'll give you a word that is a hint and you can take this for what you will
00:27:20
Speaker
synonyms. There you go.
00:27:25
Speaker
Thank you all so much for listening.
Community Engagement and Social Media
00:27:27
Speaker
If you want to be part of the conversation surrounding this episode, or if I decide to do one of these again, you want to be able to ask me your questions, head on over to our Discord, the link to which you can find on all of our social medias, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, at The Geek Pantheon. That's where you can find it. We also have a YouTube channel, youtube.com slash The Geek Pantheon, where I have a bunch of DMing videos up and book reviews, as well as an actual play.
00:27:51
Speaker
GMed by Philip called Kyber Shards that is set in Stormreach and I'm a player on it. It's a grand old time. Some crazy stuff that just recently happened. So if you haven't been watching, go check the show out. And yeah, thank you all so much. We have a Patreon, patreon.com slash the Geek Pantheon. All of our wonderful patrons who support the shows financially. And go check that out if you want to join them. Thank you all. I've been your Game Master Eric. I will see you next time.
00:28:22
Speaker
you