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The Joy of GMing - with Special Guest Patrick Neagle
84 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to the sister-series to Anywhere But Now— our Doctor Who Actual Play Podcast! Our special guest today is C. Patrick Neagle, GM & Host of the Gothic Podcast, the horror & humor actual play audio drama!
Join us for a lively chat about writing and running Monster of the Week, and running games with recognizable sci-fi & horror elements! Stick around and hear about Patrick's special project, A Deck of Lesser Things!
Eps will be released between mods or episodes with our ongoing, serialized show. We’ll cover some making-of and behind the scenes tidbits of our latest mod as well, so do stick around, with host Casey Jones!
Be sure to subscribe and leave a comment, and follow us on BluSky and Twitter for more updates. Send your questions & fan art to AnywhereButNowPodcast@gmail.com!
The show releases new episodes weekly of our main storyline or a special interview series, The Joy of GMing.
Learn more at our Discord: https://discord.gg/qmdUPzun7n
Music by Tabletop Audio
Theme by RJ Pirchinello
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Transcript
Introduction to the Series
00:00:13
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you
00:00:35
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Whether you're at a game table, in your comfiest chair reading a book, or listening at home, there's nothing like a great adventure story. But they don't happen by accident. Welcome to the joy of GMing, a special interview series on the craft of great gaming. There's just something magic about sitting down to a good table with great friends, isn't there? If you're a lifelong gamer or a newbie rolling up your first character sheet, if you're a DM or GM, or just can't get enough tabletop talk in your day, this is the show for you.
00:01:05
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Each episode will bring you amazing guest speakers to talk about writing games and running them, building fantastic worlds and compelling story arcs, and oh so useful tricks of the trade. Hear some amazing stories, get inspired for your next game, and join us for an hour and a half or so of lively conversation.
Meet Casey Jones
00:01:24
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I'm Casey Jones, writer and voice actor. Over the last dozen years, I've written and produced screenplays, children's animation for TV and film,
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graphic novels, stage plays, murder mysteries, and audio adventures. I've also been writing and running tabletop games for over 10 years. Join me as we dive deep into creativity with fellow experts in making stuff up.
00:01:47
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This sister series to anywhere but now, our Doctor Who actual play podcast, will be released between mods or episodes with our ongoing serialized show. We'll cover some making of and behind the scenes tidbits of our latest mod, so do stick around.
Guest Introduction: C. Patrick Niegel
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Our special guest today is C. Patrick Niegel, the producer, editor, and host of the horror and humor actual play audio drama, The Gothic Podcast, which is currently in its fourth season.
00:02:13
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He's also a published horror and science fiction short story author, with pieces appearing in Typhon, A Monster Anthology, Coppice and Break, Mother Krampus, The Rag Literary Magazine, and most recently, Stories We Tell After Midnight, Volume 3.
00:02:29
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Currently, he's working on a collection of Monster of the Week RPG mysteries that he has highlighted in gaming sessions through startplaying.games. Patrick grew up in Missouri, but now calls the Pacific Northwest and the Portland area home, where he hikes, kayaks, and occasionally finds time to write and create. Patrick,
Writing Mysteries for Monster of the Week
00:02:48
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welcome. So nice to have you here. Thanks for having me. I would love to talk with you about your creative process for writing mods of a game.
00:02:58
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What can you tell our listeners about your approach to writing mysteries for Monster of the Week? Yeah, Monster of the Week is one of my favorite systems these days. And I started out running it for my home game. We had been playing around with D&D and just wondering what kind of things we could do. And I had come across Monster of the Week, I think through the way that a lot of people did.
00:03:27
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through podcasters. I started running it. Of course, immediately decided that I needed to do something different than what it was designed really to do, which is to emulate old TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural and all of those that have a monster of the week.
00:03:47
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So instead I decided to run a Scooby game, but I was going to run a Scooby game in the post apocalypse. And so I ran a monster of the week campaign where my players were the Scooby gang, but it's 10 years after all the apocalypses have happened. And they of course have changed greatly too. Of course.
00:04:14
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because Monster of the Week allows you to have all these complex relationships between characters. And I just really liked the idea that the cartoon characters that we knew and loved from the ancient days of television would be quite a bit different now that they have gone through 10 years of the apocalypse and grown up. You know, that campaign really kind of set the stage for how I
00:04:41
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would then go on to write more monster of the week scenarios, which are just never quite monster of the week. They're always something a little bit different.
Unique Campaigns and Formats
00:04:52
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Can you give us an example of how one is a little bit different? I guess my favorite and the one that I am working on writing the actual write ups for so that I can
00:05:01
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try to put them out into the world, is Ghost Hunt TV. Okay. With Ghost Hunt TV, you play a member of a Ghost Hunt reality show series. As a member of that team, your job is twofold. One is to find whatever the monster is causing problems, and your other one is to make sure that the audience never knows that there's really actual monsters out there in the world.
00:05:31
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So you're maintaining the masquerade, essentially. Indeed. I do a lot with that. I have another set of one shots that I do that is another kind of TV show. It's based on Destination Truth, Destination Monster.
00:05:48
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very nice. I thoroughly enjoy an episodic storytelling opportunity. I have not used the system Monster of the Week myself, although I'm itching to. But there is something very Monster of the Week-esque about an episode or a game of Doctor Who, especially if
00:06:09
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figuring out the exact nature of what the monster is by the marks they leave behind, by the NPCs they leave in their wake and so forth before you get to any kind of a confrontation and a how do we beat this thing. That is a very familiar and I would say almost comforting formula for an hour's worth of TV or a couple hours worth of an actual play. Oh absolutely and
00:06:37
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Even if it goes over into a two parter or something like that, you still have that comforting, I like your choice of the term comfort and comforting, that comforting rhythm of the story, especially for one shots where
00:06:53
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Your players come in maybe not ever having played the game before, especially with Monster of the Week. I am often introducing it to players on start playing games or out in the real world because you can give them that reference point.
00:07:11
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that Buffy the Vampire Slayer supernatural grim reference of, hey, this is, you know, how it's kind of going to roll. It's going to be, you're going to have to find out what's going on, you're going to have to figure out what to do about it, and then you're going to have to do something about it.
00:07:26
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exactly that's what i love about good session zero a good game zero where even and especially if players haven't run a specific system before putting them through their tasks as facing a monster of the week is a great
00:07:44
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format to use.
Session Zero Importance
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With our team, their session zero took place on a college campus. They discovered a trail, a breadcrumb trail of empty textbooks and dizzy hungover students that were empty headed.
00:08:01
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eventually discovered a home-brewed alien monster that ate knowledge, both printed and in someone's head, and treated it like a monster of the week. Like, how are we going to deal with this? Are we going to trap it? Are we going to try to poison it? What are we going to do with this thing? And being familiar with the tropes of sci-fi and mystery involved, bring enough of a beaten path to follow that they can get their paces, you know, and find their footing.
00:08:31
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Sure, absolutely. For our podcast, we do a session zero each season for ourselves. And if we felt that it was acceptable, then we can we put it out for our patrons on Patreon. Nice. Each season, we do a different role playing game. And so we need to kind of get a feel for it, even though
00:08:50
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Our tagline for our podcast should be we don't know how to run this game. Well, I mean, learning a system as you go is not the not the worst way to do it. I'm a big fan of mistake it till you make it.
00:09:06
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Well, we're a horror and humor podcast, too. So some of the humor comes from us not knowing how to play whatever we're playing. But those session zeros would often take that format. I mean, we're just playing this game to figure out the rules and we're doing it for a couple of hours or four. Well, the best way to do that is have a little bit of investigation, have a little bit of exploration, have a little bit of fighting. And so they often turned out that way. And that's different.
00:09:33
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really than how the season itself tends to go. I did want to make a point of saying how much I'm enjoying season three of the Gothic podcast. I love Alien, for starters. It's one of my favorite movies, bar none. And you are such a gifted narrator. I wanted to ask you, you're very welcome. I speak the truth. I wanted to ask you, how do you gauge your players involvement? You're in, they're basically your in-house audience and engage with them during the session.
00:10:03
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Well, we do all of our recordings with video. We don't do them just audio. And so that allows me to see how my players are reacting. We don't do any scripted. Okay. Well, maybe a very teeny tiny little bit every once in a while, I'll have something that you can kind of tell I have obviously pre-written and I'm reading like a description or something.
00:10:29
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But even that, I tend not to pre-write descriptions just because I never know where my players are going to go on the podcast or in one of my games at home or on start playing. I never know where somebody's going to go. And so I can't pre do all that. And so as I'm giving them what I feel they need to be in the scene, to be
00:10:54
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moving along to be advancing the story, I'm able to see their expressions, see how they're reacting. And that works out pretty well. And I know my podcast cast now, we've been together, three of us have been together now for four seasons. I know what will entertain them and I know what will frighten them and I know what they'll freak out about and I'll get a good reaction on
00:11:23
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on audio. Excellent. Yeah, no, absolutely. Running games remotely, being able to see body language and facial reactions are a huge necessity to just being able to stay in step, you know, making sure you're not just on the same page, but the same paragraph, the same line
Remote Game Engagement
00:11:42
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with them. It's a lot like being on stage in some ways and like, you know, breathing with your audience.
00:11:48
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Sure, and it's a difficulty for me in running my start playing games games. It's quite a bit different there because often I don't have video of my players. I don't require it. A lot of players that play online
00:12:04
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feel uncomfortable with that, and I don't want them to feel uncomfortable at my tables. And so I don't have that feedback. I have to go with tone of voice, how they are engaging with the story we're telling together, whether they're engaging with the story. More importantly, even than that, feedback after the games on what worked for them and what didn't. And I have to be very proactive about getting that information from them.
00:12:33
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so that I can learn about those players. And if it was a one-shot, then all I can do is tweak things and hope that's the next group. Well, that I do it better.
00:12:43
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I've been running games now for over a decade and I still feel like I'm learning something from my table every time I sit down with them. Even if it's not like some big life lesson or some big GM shift, learning that extra little tidbit about them as players and how they see their characters just makes the next game that much more gripping, you know? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and finding out that
00:13:09
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you know, what they really enjoyed from one game and what they really enjoyed seeing other players do with their characters, getting that kind of building up, getting it to repeat in the same but different way, to get it varied and
00:13:28
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It is an art form dependent upon me, the GM, and my own improv skills and my own descriptive skills and my own storytelling skills.
00:13:40
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and dependent upon my players and my cast on the podcast to buy into it, to give their own selves back into it. Absolutely. We've talked about this before on the show, but improv and the training to get your brain to get into a head space of yes and, getting away from, well, that won't work because, because those thoughts grind the momentum to a halt.
00:14:09
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but by not only getting into the headspace of yes and, having things like a game zero and just the experience over the course of a season or a campaign with your table, that trust you build by riffing off of each other and the collaborative nature of the story that you're telling. That is something that tightens up and becomes more cohesive, I think, as you go, as you get more experience with a set of players.
00:14:38
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Man, that improv business. I have done more of that since picking up Powered by the Apocalypse, specifically Monster of the Week, which is my first Powered by the Apocalypse game. With Monster of the Week, yeah, it's not about what you can't do. It's about how does what you want to do work. How do we make this happen? How does even a failure on the die advance the story? How does something come from it?
00:15:06
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Well, on the subject of low rolls moving things forward, even if someone rolls Snake Eyes or on a D20 rolls a one, just because they failed doesn't mean it can't push the story forward. You might alert the goblin guards or trip an alarm, break your hand trying to deliver a killing stroke. Sure, sure. I've brought those ideas now to my D&D games, to my Cyberpunk Red game that I run at home, to do everything that I run anymore is
00:15:36
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levels of success, levels of failure, and of moving things forward. Even if you rolled a Nat 1 in a 5e game, let's see how that can things interesting. Absolutely. We're actually talking about this in another episode we just recorded with Tommy Garber about Jim Butcher's approach to chapters when he's running the Dresden Files.
00:16:01
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The most interesting way to end a chapter is for the hero to have failed at what he was trying to do and attracted more bad attention to himself, or to have made his situation worse. So that, by piling on the obstacles and the hardships, when he finally does snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, it's that much more impressive, it's that much more satisfying.
00:16:27
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But I feel that approach to storytelling in games achieves the same result by using, just like you're saying, by using low roles like natural ones to push the story forward anyway and just give the heroes that much of a bigger opportunity to shine the next time they roll. And bad roles have changed the course of the podcast story.
00:16:51
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Majorly, it happened just this season. In fact, those episodes haven't aired yet, so I can't really. They probably will have by the time this comes out, but there was a point where I had zero plans of bringing our big arc of bringing our five season major arc.
00:17:12
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back into the current story at that particular time. And yet because of the roles of my players, it just seemed that was such a natural thing to do. It tightened the season. It made it so that we're going to be able to hit some of our other general idea of the beats that I want to hit during the course of the season or the course of a game. It put everything on track and I didn't even know it was going off track.
00:17:39
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Yeah, no, that's great.
Gothic Podcast's Alien RPG
00:17:41
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Low rolls can absolutely change the course of Mighty Rivers and Mighty Plots. We've had characters drop off the game. NPCs that could have and would have made future appearances have vanished in a cloud of snake eyes.
00:17:59
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and we just have to roll with it of like well okay in order for this to have tension in order for there to be stakes the rules have to apply to the GM's characters as much as they do to the players and for them to roll badly can have just as much of that course altering impact and change the destiny of your season
00:18:21
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I did want to ask you, I really found it interesting your decision to break up your storytelling for season three of the gothic podcast with the alien narrative to break it up across three different locations simultaneously so that three different sites are getting attention each episode. I was wondering if you'd talk with us about that because that was a really interesting choice.
00:18:46
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Would love to say that there was originally some grand scheme there, but what it was, I mean, the reason that I originally chose it was based on our session zero and how horribly, horribly wrong it went. The Alien RPG, you have a cinematic option and you have a campaign option, really.
00:19:09
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very deadly, because that's how the universe in Alien is. If you don't want it to be deadly, you don't bring in the xenomorphs. And so, as soon as they appear, things start going horribly wrong. As soon as bad things happen, the characters are having to make
00:19:31
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stress rolls and then that can cascade and it just gets worse and worse until they're breaking down, crying on the floor and whatever is out there is just coming over and going, oh, I'm going to eat you now.
00:19:47
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So the three story arc, if you want to call it that, I put it in place early on because I couldn't depend on one storyline lasting for our entire 20 to 24 episode season. That's fair. Then as soon as I put it in, then I started
00:20:11
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I started making threads. I started entwining the story. I started seeing how things connected, was really looking forward to seeing how these three different sets of characters
00:20:25
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were going to affect the others. And man, I can't really tell you how many times my cast members curse me on any given season, but especially the alien season, where they're having to remember their accents and intonations and characters for three different sets of characters. And sometimes more than one in the same episode.
00:20:54
Speaker
It's not always easy to toggle back and forth from voice to voice, but I do love hearing how events at one locale would make things more complicated at another. That's just wonderful. What made you decide on Alien for your third season? And for that matter, a horror actual play podcast. Tell us about your relationship with horror in tabletop games.
00:21:22
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Early on in the evolution of the Gothic podcast, I mean, we wanted to start off with the sort of tropey, classic, storm on the moors.
Gothic Horror in Alien Franchise
00:21:34
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people running around in their pajamas kind of setting. We wanted that classic Gothic setting. But I wanted always, I wanted to expand out of that. I wanted to explore what Gothic was. That's why at the beginning of every episode
00:21:52
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After the quote blurb that we have at the beginning, I say, this is Gothic. It's not just saying this is the show, but what I just quoted is an example of our aesthetic, of our idea of horror, and that the Gothic itself, of course, is very attached to aesthetic, very attached to atmosphere and tonality.
00:22:18
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Oh my yes. So early on I had some, I have this big cork board on my wall. I put index cards with notes with the details of each episode that we've done. But one section of it, it has the ideas I have for the next season and what I want it to look like.
00:22:40
Speaker
Alien showed up there pretty early on because the Alien series, it jumps genres. So like the first Alien movie was horror. Yes. The second one was action adventure. It was a war film. Yeah. And so it jumps around. But that first movie was a haunted house story in space with this alien as the ghost and
00:23:08
Speaker
You had all the elements of the Gothic. You have the jump scares. You have lighting, the dim lighting. You have the atmospheric music. You have just the glimpses of the evil, the ghost, the spirit, the supernatural thing. All those things worked to make it so very Gothic horror story. I felt that that needed to be represented on our show.
00:23:37
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Well, I am so glad that you did. Horror at a gaming table. One of my joys as a storyteller, as an actor, is to get an emotional reaction out of my audience with terror.
00:23:55
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with fright, I get a genuine thrill out of safely scaring the pants off people at my table. Because there's something so beautiful about, I mean, don't get me wrong, I absolutely love horror films and horror TV shows when they're well done. Getting that vicarious thrill and that chill in the blood as the ice water trickles down the spine.
00:24:25
Speaker
Those are great, those are wonderful thrills. And to get it at a table where the person is actually embodying the character who is experiencing those things. And then to talk with them after the game is over and the exertion in their voices, the excitation, it sounds like they've just stepped off a roller coaster.
00:24:46
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Oftentimes, that's one of those things I was talking about. I actually have some trouble sometimes getting my cast members to actually do their expression audible. Because all they're doing is I see their faces and they're like stunned looks on their faces and their eyes are wide and their mouths are open. They're not saying a single word that's just going to come across on the audio. Guys, can we get some gasps of horror? Justin, like,
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah. One of my own triumphs, I guess, in running horror games, a Monster of the Week one shot with my Ghost Hunt TV theme. What I do on my Monster of the Week games, it's all theater of the mind. So it's all me doing, you know, just description and them telling me what they're doing and that feedback rolling back and forth. But I do have pictures that I pop up and I pop these up when
00:25:46
Speaker
I want to give them a visual representation of what's happening or when it seems thematically important that say somebody finds a cell phone and oh look somebody just took some pictures I wonder what it is they bring up the picture and then I pop that picture up on their screen it appears there one of the players in their feedback after the game said
00:26:10
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I had a genuine jump scare that it wasn't the character who was scared. It was me, the player. I was like, ah! When this image came up and that was glorious, I absolutely loved that that worked the way that I wanted.
00:26:26
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We were lucky enough to have a similar reaction with the Mirum, our monster from the very first episodes of Anywhere But Now. These distorted uncanny valley reflections that are trapped in mirrors that eat dimensional breadth and width. They flatten you, essentially. The trappings of gothic horror. Pitch black dark, pitch black shadows, walking into the dark, being unable to see anything so that you have to rely.
00:26:56
Speaker
on your ears and it gets quieter and quieter. Oh God, just the tension, the hair goes up on the back of your neck as you get closer and closer. God, there's just something hypnotizing about it. I love it. I absolutely love it. I love running horror and I love including horror in things that you might not really expect horror in. And so that's why I have to be very clear about, you know, in my advertising that I
00:27:25
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I do horror and humor, and even in my D&D games, there's likely to be some horror. And not just in something like Curse of Strahd, which is designed to be a horror game, but I mean, these are heroic
00:27:41
Speaker
adventuring swords who go out into the world to face monsters, but that doesn't mean that they're completely immune to what it is they're seeing, to terrors of the world. Honestly, one of the things I enjoy about the Doctor Who system is this wonderful thing called fear factor, where in the presence of an alien or monster or what have you, that is genuinely trying to scare you. There is a whole set
00:28:09
Speaker
of very simple rules to determine if it is successful or not in scaring the pants off you. And being able to spend story points, which are our currency in the game to nudge results in one direction or the other, story points can help a character keep their wits about them. But these are also characters who have been through some terrifying situations. And our main character, Time Lord, is a
00:28:36
Speaker
Survivor of War has a panic attack in at least one game as a result of double ones. I really enjoy, I appreciate that in a game where we are dealing frequently with scary, spooky things that are trying to kill us, that the characters reflect that. Like, it is not just the easiest thing in the world to deal with. You know, there are some aftershocks from all that.
00:29:03
Speaker
You know, I don't want to push it too much in my D&D games, because that's not what people come to a D&D game to play. But I think it makes for a nice balance to a little bit of change, a little bit of not what you were expecting, which goes back to what I was saying about how I can't seem to take a game and then do with it what it's really designed to do. I have to modify it somehow in my head for my adventures. I like those early Monster of the Week games I did.
00:29:31
Speaker
Is that such a bad thing though? To take something that largely works and then tweak it and make it your own.
00:29:38
Speaker
I think there is something to be said for, you know, when you're first starting out with something, get to know the game as it is meant to be played before you start messing with it too much or homebrewing. Know the rules before you can tweak them. Yeah, I absolutely encourage people to, once you find your own style, for instance, I just started running the Cyberpunk Red game
00:30:02
Speaker
this Chrome future thing. And I took over for another GM who had been running it before me.
00:30:10
Speaker
They left it on a kind of a cliffhanger. The characters had these things that they needed to start investigating. That previous GM has his style. It's very shiny and chrome plated. You know, that is one of the things that Cyberpunk Red should be. When I started GMing my first session, I wanted to make sure that
00:30:32
Speaker
I was expressing how the games that I was going to be running were going to go. There is a trigger warning here. Animal death. I guess not cruelty, but death. There is a cat that they found that they needed that had been killed and they needed to do some investigation on it. And it started as they were doing so, it started writhing around and growing tentacles.
00:30:54
Speaker
Oh, bully. And so I'm now putting my own twist on things, my style on the game. And I encourage any GMs out there, whatever game you're playing, do some self-examination. What is it that you lean toward? What are your strengths? What do you like in your media? Because that stuff is going to come out in your game. And it's good to let your players know
00:31:23
Speaker
early on in a session zero or in your in their early experiences at least your style and what's going to come across. It's uncanny as you've been talking all I'm able to think about is how just as a comparison how a show might change hands from one showrunner to the next and how the first episode produced directed by the new showrunner
00:31:48
Speaker
feels immediately a little different from the last one. And a good storyteller, just like you're demonstrating, can immediately set up expectations so that the listeners, the viewers, know what to expect with those first scenes. I think that's just part of good storytelling. Any scene worth its salt needs to be doing more than just moving the story along or informing character.
00:32:14
Speaker
It should be establishing tone and without getting redundant about it, continue to do so and embellish on that tone. We have certain expectations of a horror game. We expect at some point to feel a little unsafe, to feel the fear that the heroes that we're playing are going to experience.
00:32:37
Speaker
The things I love about Alien as cosmic level horror. I've enjoyed perusing through the Alien RPG core rulebook talking about the thematic elements of the stories in the Alien universe that are more than just the Alien monster that can kill you as soon as look at you.
00:32:59
Speaker
You know, the themes of corporate greed, hubris of societies breaking down and people failing to cooperate. I appreciate the work you put into making season three of the gothic podcast feel like a story set in the alien universe.
00:33:17
Speaker
Oh, thanks. We try really hard with each of our seasons to really capture the tone of that setting. And so like season one takes place in two different places. I guess the idea of season three taking place in three was not so outrageous to us, but it takes place in what we call the Gothic then, that pseudo Victorian landscape.
00:33:43
Speaker
and a contemporary now takes place in a kind of a gothic-y central missouri town small town setting and in season two was all one setting but i felt that we really really nailed the atmosphere of a puget sound island
00:34:04
Speaker
I was worried with Alien. I was worried with the Alien season that we wouldn't be able to convey both the spacefaring humanity aspect of it and the essential horror of the Alien setting.
00:34:25
Speaker
And I'm glad to hear that we succeeded at least to an extent. Very much so. Very much so.
Live vs. Digital Tabletop Gaming
00:34:31
Speaker
So on the topic of live gaming versus digital gaming, which do you prefer? Can you give our listeners a description of what exactly you're talking about? With live gaming, you're sitting around a table or
00:34:45
Speaker
standing or pacing around a table whatever you have maybe some maps on the tabletop they might be more or less detailed maybe you have maybe you're doing dnd and you've got a bunch of dwarven forge fancy terrain that you have spread out or maybe you just have a rolled out mat that you're
00:35:07
Speaker
doing dry erase marker on. Maybe you're doing it in great detail or maybe you're just sketching it. Maybe you have painted miniatures. Maybe you don't. Maybe all you use your miniatures for is just to show what order people are in when they're walking down the hallway. There's different levels of interaction you might have around the table, but the energy
00:35:28
Speaker
is definitely, I think, different. And I guess I'll come back to that because we need to, I guess, give the difference between that and online gaming, where you're all in different places, communicating through your equipment, and sometimes at the mercy of your equipment.
00:35:47
Speaker
It might be Theater of the Mind or it might be that you have a virtual tabletop like Roll20 or Foundry or one of those. I like both, but the tone is different. The atmosphere is different. I enjoy being able to run more games because I can do them online. I can come into my office. I can sit down at my chair. I can turn on the computer and everything comes up and I'm ready to roll.
00:36:14
Speaker
and I can do two or three games in a day if I wanted to. I have my maps ready to go if it's something that requires tactical maps. I have my imagery ready to go. I have my music ready to go. I feel that online I can immerse my players in the setting that they're in, whether it's horror, whether it's D&D, whether it's
00:36:35
Speaker
cyberpunk, whatever it happens to be, that I can really immerse them in that world. They can also get into their heads and not be distracted by the other things going on around the table. Whereas at the table, you have, I think, more of a, almost more of a social aspect of it going on. There's crosstalk, there's table talk.
00:36:59
Speaker
I had this experience recently where I was running a game and we started running it online, but it was a group of friends. And eventually they said, well, we'd like to try running this once just in person, just to have that experience. And so we went from being distant from one another and me on my side feeling that I was really able to give them a good experience online because I have my cool maps. I have my music playing through it. I have,
00:37:29
Speaker
the imagery I can pop up, all that good stuff. And we went from that to sitting around the dining room table of one of their houses, me drawing the maps out on a dry erase mat, our miniatures being unpainted, things that they 3D printed so that they could have them on the table.
00:37:48
Speaker
We were sitting around and we get distracted a lot and they're talking about things and they're getting up and going for snacks, wandering out for smoke breaks or whatever. I don't have the music going or if we have music going, it might be weird jazz going on in the background. And I can't easily bring up pictures and I can't easily reference my monsters like I can online. Around the table ends up being much harder for me than being digital. But they loved it. They didn't just not mind that it was a map
00:38:17
Speaker
that I just do a dry erase marker on. It wasn't just that they didn't mind that I actually literally, and this was the last game we did, dug a food container out of their trash, drew a face on it, put some legs on it from a stick that I had found outside, and made it sort of a Baba Yaga's house set up. Oh, nice. They didn't just mind that I did that.
00:38:43
Speaker
reveled in it. They love it. They love all of that. They love the being around a table with their friends and gaming. And even if it is more distracted and less focused, even if it's a lot less technically impressive, that's the experience they want.
00:39:00
Speaker
The thing about online versus around the table, there are big differences to it. With a lot of money, you can make a far more immersive visual experience on the table in person than what I did. The experiences provide your players with something and it's what they want to get out of it. If you can give that to them, then that is far more valuable than
00:39:28
Speaker
you know, the stuff that you're bringing. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. It has been a while since I have run a game in person. Definitely something I miss.
00:39:40
Speaker
But as far as the bells and whistles are concerned, we never got fancier than a soundtrack, some maps that have been printed out in black and white on our own printer, illustrations of the characters they're looking at and so forth. We never got as far as miniatures or anything like that. It was more theater of the mind. But it's wonderful that you can
00:40:02
Speaker
tell a story together in person and leave them with memories that they can keep forever and cherish. Yeah, and I'm not giving any more weight to one or the other here. Online gaming allows people who can't game
Benefits of Online Gaming
00:40:22
Speaker
around a table. I grew up in Northern Missouri in a town of 197 people. My mom
00:40:30
Speaker
played D&D with me so that I would have somebody to play with when I was growing up. And then eventually I found a couple of other people who became lifelong friends because that's one of the things that happens when you game together. You know, there are people out there now who live in those small towns who don't have access to people who want to play and online gaming.
00:40:53
Speaker
and the explosion that it has had in the past couple of years, especially since 2020, that offers them the ability to do this thing that I feel has given me so much, that has given me, well, interpersonal skills of some degree. This adventure that I have of the stories that I've been part of, of these problem-solving skills that I have gained,
00:41:20
Speaker
And it allows them to do that, whereas if they had to depend on standing around a table with somebody, they might never get to play. Yeah, sometimes as simple and obstacle as transportation can change everything.
00:41:36
Speaker
I do have some nice maps. I did a summer camp D&D program with a middle school here in Portland, Oregon a couple of summers ago. They were very generous. We were able to print out two scale maps we were able to use for the game. So I ended up running those a lot for in-person first adventures for D&D because I have these awesome maps and I want to use them.
00:42:02
Speaker
No, I love a good map. Don't get me wrong. I adore theater of the mind, but having a map that I can point to or drag a mouse across so that I can further illustrate literally to my characters where they are situated to each other so that they can make more decisive choices about what they're going to do, say, or affect with, you know?
00:42:29
Speaker
Absolutely. Especially with a tactical game that leans more tactical like D&D. When I started playing it, we barely had maps. I would describe things my players would.
00:42:40
Speaker
draw it out on graph paper. We had a few miniatures, but it was a lot of theater of the mind. And it's kind of hard to remember those days anymore, where if you're playing something like D&D, which is very map-based, if you're not using maps with it, then you are making it effective in a way that is hard. I applaud you. I think that that's awesome, but I kind of have to have a map for D&D combat.
00:43:08
Speaker
no absolutely if nothing else a map with grids points of reference is crucial for something like that there's a level the climax location of a mod that i'm not going to run for
Role of Maps in RPGs
00:43:23
Speaker
some time for my players that are actually in our show now but there is one game coming up next season that is particularly
00:43:32
Speaker
map heavy. There are gonna be two or three different maps where lines of sight are the deciding factor of, you know, whether or not they get spotted by someone that is casually looking around, whether or not someone could fire at them, because there will be games in the future where combat, especially ranged combat, could be a factor
00:43:53
Speaker
And for situations like that, I want them to feel like they have a genuine idea of where they are so that they have full range of what they can do. Yeah, even on the podcast where we try, I mean, we really do try not to have the maps and things, but sometimes you just have to. So like for the alien season, Alien for tactical movement and stuff uses three different zones. You know, you're close, you're far, you're away over there.
00:44:21
Speaker
And so on, in some of the settings, especially the spaceship, it's multiple levels of this maze-like ship. And my cast kind of needs to know what the ship looks like. And so we had maps and they could see the levels of the ship and the corridors and kind of get an idea of the zones for purposes of Alien.
00:44:46
Speaker
We had a game, one of our most recent recorded games, Lantern in the Smoke. I am a huge fan of the video game Alien Isolation, which takes place. It's a great survival game and an incredibly faithful interquel between Alien and aliens and does a delightful job of filling in some questions as to what happened to Ellen Ripley's daughter, Amanda Ripley.
00:45:16
Speaker
We won't go into spoilers, but the fact that that game takes place exclusively over a gas giant put me in thinking of gas giants and the stations that might hover in orbit over them and wound up creating the Sigourney.
00:45:35
Speaker
a gas mining facility that filters, processes, packages, and distributes gas. And in true fashion of Doctor Who, nothing is quite what it appears, all things are not what they seem, and aliens emerge in a fairly quick order.
00:45:53
Speaker
But by using a map modeled off of the actual blueprint of the Nostromo in terms of the layout of the ship and where different rooms connected to each other by those long snaking corridors, it really helped us even with theater of the mind and just barely referencing to the map from time to time. But it gave us that claustrophobia. Well, this is how wide the corridors are. And you can hear the aliens with the gas and the pipes overhead.
00:46:23
Speaker
You're saying that about the gas giant and I just can't help but, you know, say that that imagery is so evocative that that is indeed why I... I mean, I don't know the video game, but that imagery of the space station with the gas giant in the background was one I just had to have. And so that's, you know, one of those settings for the alien season. Yes. As it hovers there. Now, I think I...
00:46:52
Speaker
put on our Instagram. I think I uploaded a picture that I had hand drawn of the space station. And I don't know if that thing is even viable given physics, but I think it looks cool.
00:47:08
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. The Alien franchise is iconic. It wasn't the first sci-fi horror film even from that screenwriter, but it was one of the first true greats, I feel, of the late 70s.
00:47:23
Speaker
just the amount of impact it had on horror in space and cosmic horror as this thing with texture and practically a smell jumping off of the screen. I'm actually looking forward to dipping our toe in cosmic horror in an upcoming episode later this very season. Not so much with perma-drueling monsters that can kill you with a single stroke,
00:47:52
Speaker
But more the idea of the genie that must not escape the bottle. You are speaking to me about one of my favorite movies, and I don't know if you've seen it. It's from 1956 called Forbidden Planet. I knew you were going to say that. I knew you were going to say Forbidden Planet. No, please, please tell our listeners all about it. Forbidden Planet is all about letting the genie out of the bottle.
00:48:18
Speaker
It's a great 50s sci-fi movie, but really well done. I mean, the effects are awesome, I think. It's got Robbie the Robot in it, which is also the robot that...
00:48:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's the robot that played the robot in Lost in Space, the original. It's this monster, it's real horror. It's like Island of Dr. Moreau kind of horror in space, the pervading tension. These astronauts go to this planet looking for this scientist. They find out that he's been pursuing things he should not have pursued.
00:48:57
Speaker
There are things man is not meant to know. Science that should not have been scienced. Yeah, basically that. There are some wonderful unanswered questions in Doctor Who canon. Among them are certain space and time fairing.
00:49:17
Speaker
species, alien species, that simply disappeared without explanation. I am a big fan of classic who as well as new. We'll discuss this more in episodes that come after that particular mod, but
00:49:35
Speaker
Something the show did very effectively was how it set up that the Time Lords were not necessarily omnipotent, but certainly the ruling power in terms of the laws of time travel. And for them to casually mention at one point that there was a species even more advanced than them, and they were wiped out by the monster of the week.
00:50:02
Speaker
immediately sets those stakes without actually having to describe much about said alien species. All we have to know is, oh, they're even mightier than Tom Baker. Oh, wow, they really must be up against something this week. What happened to said species planet on top of them being wiped out was never explained. That question gets an answer in an upcoming mod. A non-canon answer, but hopefully a satisfying one all the same.
00:50:29
Speaker
I don't
Audio Formats in Horror Storytelling
00:50:30
Speaker
know. I think kind of coming back to the idea of horror in these things, I really like the podcasting format, the audio format for storytelling, whether it's a scripted audio drama or whether it's an actual play audio drama or just regular actual play.
00:50:50
Speaker
the idea that you can take these properties and explore things that a show, a TV show, might not have the budget for, might not be able to explore because they don't have the means to do it. But here we have everything at our disposal. Anything we can imagine is available to us in our
00:51:16
Speaker
settings in our creations, in our worlds, and
00:51:23
Speaker
The irony, the paradox of that is that horror is also best when we don't see the monster clearly. When we only see parts of it. Alien, another great example. They had an actor in a full body alien suit for the first Alien movie. The seven foot tall guy. And they had full body shots of
00:51:47
Speaker
the alien and they looked at them in the dailies or whenever they looked at them for editing purposes and they said that looks stupid it looks like a dude in a suit and so they cut those parts out and all that's left is a tail is the gleam off of the carapace
00:52:05
Speaker
the mouth and the drool coming from the second jaw. We're able to do that in our audio too, because even if we have the whole monster standing there in front of our players, in front of our characters, we can show only the parts that we need to to hint at it, to create fear.
00:52:25
Speaker
and dread and atmosphere for our listeners as well.
00:52:47
Speaker
manuscripts from books into audio scripts for a company on the East Coast. They did these science fiction and political thrillers and action thrillers and all these different genres, having to break down a book that's hundreds of pages long into a script that's hundreds of pages long.
00:53:08
Speaker
and making note of audio cues and things like that. It starts to train you to look for where to start putting those things in, you know, or at least thinking about where they could be applicable. Absolutely. Back in Missouri, I
00:53:24
Speaker
I wrote a little bit for the stage. A series of Batman parodies for the stage. They went really well. I really enjoyed them. That aspect, taking some other form and then realizing where to put in a sound effect, a musical cue, a gasp, just the cues and the stage direction itself. So helpful for me in pacing my games, pacing my writing.
00:53:54
Speaker
No, absolutely. One of the things I'm most grateful for is the musician that provides tabletop audio, who we are a Patreon patron of. They have written and composed
00:54:08
Speaker
hundreds of tracks and background sounds for immersive tabletop games. And one of the first things I do when I'm editing audio is pick the right track from his wonderful library of music to not set the tone, but reinforce what's already there and just makes it resonate that much more with the listener. I use tabletop audio for my online games and
00:54:39
Speaker
Sirenscape for sound effects sometimes. Nice. That's really cool. I'll have to check out Sirenscape as well. Speaking of things that are online, Patrick, what can you tell us about Totem Deck, a deck of lesser things? Way back in, oh goodness, it was right before third edition D&D came out. It was May of the year 2000. And a friend of mine and I
00:55:07
Speaker
had been collaborating on gaming stuff for a while. We'd actually sent several proposals into Dragon Magazine, which was the THE gaming magazine of the day. We got one approved and we wrote this thing up. We came up with this idea that the Deck of Many Things, which is an iconic item in the D&D universe, was too powerful. It's a game killer. It's a game breaker.
00:55:37
Speaker
Yeah, once you bring out the deck of many things, you're just saying, I'm now going into the wacky Looney Tunes world of gaming. And if we continue on past this, it's all going to be just crazy stuff. And we wanted something that we could use like that because people love random stuff.
00:55:57
Speaker
the deck of many things is awesome. You can pull these cards and cool things happen or horrible things happen. Your soul could be trapped on another plane of existence. We just wanted something with temporary effects or that were minor things that would not be a game ender.
00:56:14
Speaker
And so we came up with a whole deck of these items. My personal favorite being the turkey. The turkey totem. You pull the turkey totem and your primary weapon becomes a, like a Renaissance fair... Turkey leg? Turkey leg.
00:56:35
Speaker
And it turns back after 24 hours, but not if you ate any of the turkey leg. I could just see a broadsword respawning with a bite mark out of it. With a big bite out of it, yeah. But the thing was, we didn't really expect much out of this. You know, they published it. Then we got the issue, and they had hired this artist who had done really nice art for each of the cards. Oh, wonderful.
00:57:05
Speaker
There are a lot of cards. Actually what I just did recently was I digitized all of those and have them in Roll 20 now as a playable deck. Oh that's great. That you can draw from in some of my home games. That's really nice. I have to say it feels really nice to see an artist bring something you describe to life. Oh yeah. That's not just me fishing for fan art because we want your fan art.
00:57:34
Speaker
So do we over at The Gothic Podcast. We are desperate for fan art. Yes, please.
00:57:40
Speaker
One of the first things I ever tried to get published was a graphic novel. Writing a comic book script was at that point in my experience not terribly different than writing any stage play in terms of formatting. Having found an artist for one issue or the second issue and seeing them bring back pencils of what I had described felt not even a click, but of like, oh gosh, it's actually a little bit more real.
00:58:09
Speaker
Oh yeah. I have to imagine that's a bit of what it felt like seeing the Deck of Lesser Things published in Dragon Magazine. Yeah and it was just it was great it was just this you know big layout of all this art and if they'd gotten my name right that would have been awesome too. Oh no! I'm so sorry.
Patrick Niegel's Pen Name Story
00:58:31
Speaker
My co-author's last name is very difficult to spell. They got it perfectly, perfectly spelled. But me, they spelled my name, they did my name differently in like three different places in the magazine. Oh, that's discouraging. I'm so sorry.
00:58:50
Speaker
But it kind of gave me my pin name that I'm using for my gaming writing. Excellent. Because they just dropped in one of them, they just dropped the K off of Patrick and I kind of like the way it looked. So yeah, no, it's it's slightly more elegant without the without the K on the end. So Patrick with or without a K with or without a K. How can our listeners get in touch with you?
00:59:16
Speaker
Oh goodness, you know, I as me have Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr and all these other social media things, but your best bet if you want to chat is I monitor the gothic podcasts
00:59:34
Speaker
social media much more closely than I monitor my own.
Contact Information for Gothic Podcast
00:59:37
Speaker
You can find The Gothic Podcast on Twitter, on Mastodon, at The Gothic Podcast at Dice Camp. And Twitch, we do our live holiday specials on Twitch. Just look for the Gothic Podcast. You have to put in the... Yeah, no, that makes sense. It'll just take you to Gothic Podcasts.
01:00:04
Speaker
Yeah, you'll get podcasts about hot topic. Yeah. And, and such. If you put in the Gothic podcast and you'll find all of our social media. Lovely. And there will be a link directly to your link tree.
01:00:19
Speaker
in the doobly-doo. That's the way to go. That is the way. That is the way. Well Patrick, I wanted to say thank you again one more time for joining us today. It has been such a delight talking with you about spooky spooky games. Well thank you for having me and my last parting bit of advice, I guess, if anybody's listening out there for advice. If you are GMing
01:00:43
Speaker
The best thing that I have taken from Monster of the Week and Powered by the Apocalypse, and I apply it to all my games now, be a fan of your players. Make sure they have heroic moments, even in horror. Oh my yes, it's super important. Always make sure your entire team has something impressive to do. Make them feel like winners, even if winning isn't the point.
01:01:10
Speaker
Get out there and roll some dice. No, get out there and roll some dice, kids. I believe in you. And finally, to our listeners, another big thank you for sharing your precious time with us. If you feel it's been well spent, please share the joy of GMing with your friends who are looking to enjoy themselves. You can email your questions for me and our players and send that lovely fan art to anywhere but now podcast at gmail.com.
01:01:36
Speaker
And if you'd like me to run a game of Doctor Who for you, reach out on startplaying.games. If you like what you hear, leave a review, rate the show, and follow us on Blue Sky and on Twitter at anywhere but now with an underscore at the end, and wherever you get your podcasts. Links for Patrick and for everything else in the doobly-doo. From all of us, I'm Casey Jones. There's exciting things to come, my friends. I'm glad you're along for the ride.
01:02:05
Speaker
Thanks so much and have a great day.