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The Joy of GMing - with Special Guest That Beard Guy of the Medusa's Cascade!
47 Plays5 months ago
Welcome to the sister-series to Anywhere But Now— our Doctor Who Actual Play Podcast! Our special guest today is That Beard Guy of The Medusa's Cascade!
Join us for a talk about TBG's wonderful podcast, the handiness of a good NPC scene, and the intricacies of putting a great party together!
We’ll cover some making-of and behind the scenes tidbits of our mods as well, so do stick around, with host Casey Jones.
Learn more at our Discord! Be sure to subscribe and leave a comment, and follow us on BluSky and Twitter for more updates. Don’t forget to send your questions & fan art to [email protected]!
And if you want, Casey can run your very own game of D&D for you!
Music by Tabletop AudioTheme by RJ Pirchinello
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Transcript
00:00:13
Speaker
Oh, 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?
00:00:56
Speaker
If you're a lifelong gamer or a newbie rolling up your first character sheet, if you're a DM or a GM or just can't get enough tabletop talk in your day, then this is the show for you. 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. Here are some amazing stories, get inspired for your next game, and join us for an hour and a half or so of lively conversation. 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 cover some making of and behind the scenes tidbits of our latest mod as well, so do stick around. I'm Casey Jones.
00:01:45
Speaker
Over the last dozen years, I've written and produced screenplays, children's animation for TV and film, graphic novels, stage plays, murder mysteries, and audio adventures. I've also been writing and running tabletop games for over 10 years. Join us as we dive deep into tabletop with experts in the field. Experts like our special guest today, Tom, that beard guy of the Medusa's Cascade, a fantasy tabletop actual play. Tom is a serial hobbyist, audio engineer, and musician, creator of things. Better believe we're going to come back around to that. A cat dad, GM, DM, and storyteller. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. It sounds so much cooler when you say the things that I put down in my bio.
00:02:35
Speaker
It does tend to sound a little nicer coming out of someone else's mouth, don't you think? Yeah. Yeah, I would have to very much agree with that. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. So, Tom, you've been running the Medusa's Cascade actual play podcast for well over a hundred episodes now. Yes, yes. If only that were all. You've also released full summary apps for catching up, side story episodes for character context, and your own behind-the-scenes series. Kudos! Yeah, hey, I mean, we gotta do something. It's gotta... Honestly, all of the other stuff besides the actual play?
00:03:13
Speaker
came literally from running out of material to do for the actual play. So we had to pivot and be like, all right, how can we keep the buffer that we have? Because I was releasing weekly episodes, even though we play biweekly. So we were catching up real fast. So we were just like, all right, well, what else can we do? What would be interesting to to put out so that I mean, that was pretty much what it was. I was like, all right, we should do some lore stuff because we haven't really like gotten into a whole bunch of lore stuff. let's do I wanted to do side stuff because the story is is ridiculously massive so it was like, what are some good NPCs? What are some cool stories that have already happened? Where are these NPCs now? Or what what's going to come it come down the pipeline so it won't be a ah a shock or necessarily out of the blue for certain characters to come into the story later on. The listeners will already have
00:04:05
Speaker
a general idea of what they're pursuing. So there's already context built into it. The field reports was just because we're like, oh, we're getting close to 100 episodes and most of them are two and a half to three hours long. And that's a lot of stuff to get through. Why don't we start doing recap stuff so that if people want to jump in and get closer to the more recent episodes, they can ah they can listen to those. So as you're only spending in between an hour and some of them are only like 15 to 20 minutes long. Catching up on six to eight episode chunks of the entire show and I think they're only at 13 level 13 in this campaign so far Yeah, we got a lot of chatty Kathy's so there's we have a very we have a very interesting dichotomy of like There will be travel that will take place. It'll be like a week's worth of travel that takes place in about 15 to 20 minutes because there's not a lot of things happening. But then when something happens, we'll spend like three sessions having these massive group discussions and things happening in you know in between different player characters.
00:05:08
Speaker
And we'll spend nine to ten hours worth of game time like dissecting the the next day and a half of what just happened, even though, you do you know what I mean? is it's It's one of those fun dichotomies of yeah everyone wants to have actualization for for their characters, which I'm here for. But sometimes it's just it's very jumpy sometimes. It is. It can be. Yeah, no, that is really smart, the way that you pivoted from just narrative material to behind the scenes stuff and off-screen things that were also happening for added context and adding depth for some NPCs of yours. That's really smart.
00:05:47
Speaker
and something I can 100% relate to. The joy of GMing came out of the realization that we were only going to be playing and recording maybe one weekend, a month, possibly two if we were very lucky, but planning to release episodes weekly and... We're gonna run out really fast, yep. e And there came the joy of GMing. So yeah, kudos to you for finding so much material to flesh out and play with. The only comparison I can think of is a scene, a rather important scene that happens completely off-table that
00:06:27
Speaker
Shapes events for the our main hero after he gets a citation from school for blowing up a planet He was trying to save and that whole thing happened completely off-table But the itch has been there to script it record it mix it and then put it out as some sort of bonus material Just like just like you're doing I would suggest doing it. It's it's well worth it. especially I looked at it as like a video game cutscene where like you get to a certain point and then there's something that's happening that you eventually will deal with, but you see the stuff happening off screen. You don't necessarily have full context of what's going on. But you can you you will recognize that character when they show up. You're like, oh, it's that, you know, whoever character it is from that cutscene like 20 minutes ago while I was playing. I wonder if this is about what's going on. Mm hmm. Yeah, we've done things. We've done similar things where we've had to cut to a pair of NPCs in one part of the the science center because their power levels were being futzed with by something the characters were doing over in the greenhouse.
00:07:35
Speaker
So we got to introduce the sinister bad guy stepping out of the shadows and talking in a gravelly voice and say it's being taken care of as like a nice little bit of foreshadowing. So can you pitch our listeners on the Medusa's cascade? What is it about primarily? What sets it apart from other actual plays? When you had sent me the stuff about anywhere but now, and even in when you had said in the beginning, you're like, oh, you're Doctor Who tabletop game. the The core idea, because I am very much a Whovian, is Doctor Who. The main patron of the party is a being that calls themselves the journeyman.
00:08:23
Speaker
And they met the journeyman with one face. The journeyman has transferred into another face at this point. They have a tavern called the Medusa's Cascade, which, if obviously you're a Whovian, you know, there there is a place we had originally called it the Medusa Cascade, but then we just, we switch we to the Medusa's Cascade. just so that wasn't any smart i don't i don't necessarily i think it's mentioned like maybe two or three times in the entire new who series like on screen i actually looked up how how many times they actually said like the medusa cascade it's a handful of times but a handful at most yeah but you still want that layer of separation
00:08:57
Speaker
I love Doctor Who, and the Medusa's Cascade is a tavern that is bigger on the inside. The the people that work in the tavern, the Barkeep and the Cook, they are the Journeyman's companions, so they switch up every now and again as well. And the big bad guy is of another being called the Constable, who is essentially the master to the the master to the Journeyman's Doctor. Oh, that's wonderful. And right now, not to give a whole lot of stuff away, the campaign started in Curse of Strahd because we all, it like four years ago, I was like, I'm missing D and&D. I want to play. I haven't played in a while. So I just said to a bunch of my friends, I was like, hey, come play one session of D and&D. I'm Jones and I'll run the game, which I had never run any games. But I was like, that's how much I wanted to play. So I I said, hey, We'll go through character creation. We'll have a little one shot. We'll just have some fun. If you like it, we can keep playing. If you don't like it, I will never ask any of you ever again to play another game. We'll forget this ever happened. Everyone really enjoyed it. Here's the crazy part. My initial table had nine player characters. oh Wow. Good, good God. Nine at the same time. And all of us were learning how to play at the same time.
00:10:14
Speaker
Holy Lord, how many rounds of fight scenes did you get through in a single session? Like two? Sometimes the fight scenes would literally be a three to four hour session. It would just be the fight scene. It's gotten better over the course of time. The the party is at like, for me, um it feels weird not having so many people in in campaigns. So like the suit right now we have seven player characters. There have been characters that have left, and I've actually done like side campaigns because they continue wanted to continue playing there were those characters, but the play styles or... When they could. Yeah, or or the time constraints just didn't allow them to be able to come and play.
00:10:55
Speaker
So there's been a couple of side campaigns that have happened. I actually have a home game that is also running in parallel to collateral damage called Circle of Friends that I run like at home. Great title. And the basic gist of it after they get out of Barovia, they actually meet the constable early on. The constable actually comes and like abducts the journeyman and they have to go and they end up breaking him out of his time traveler's prison that he has. And um basically, they come to find out after they get out of Barovia that ah the constable has set up these things that they're calling machines, the machines, that are at different points throughout the three planes of existence that all of the player characters are from. And what he's doing is he's pulling all of the planes together. Basically, the more than one object cannot occupy the same space.
00:11:51
Speaker
So the idea is for them to eventually, if he gets his way, the machines will pull these three planes together and destroy them and erase them from existence. oh my And so they're having to run around trying to find all of these different things to try and stop the constable and and everything. Not to mention there's also Tiamat is in there because my paladin is a paladin of Bahamut. Okay, sure. ah We have Ariok. I don't know if you're ah familiar with ah Michael Morcock's Eternal Hero series. It's a fantasy series from the 70s. Okay. Elrico Elrico of Melna Bonne, who's like an albino human that that's a sorcerer. He finds ah a blade like a sentient blade that feeds on souls and gives him power.
00:12:33
Speaker
Ariok is like the patron god in D and&D. He's not an actual canon demon, but he's I found stats for him and he's basically like a corruptor. He's the Duke of Chaos is the moniker that he likes to use. He's a big player in all of this and Malar, who is like a lesser deity, is playing a large role in a couple of the characters. backstory so it was a fun time trying to take seven player characters stories and have weave them all together so that it makes sense and and they all want to help each other go along but there's still individual aspects going on there' there's a lot of stuff that's happening but uh that's essentially what it is they're trying to stop prime material planes that they are from as a group from being destroyed and recently in the podcast they found out that This is not the first set of planes. because they've They've essentially been told that like these three planes are part of a multitude. I believe the journeyman uses the the analogy of if you walked out into a rainstorm and stopped time, each raindrop would be a would be a plane of existence. Oh wow. That is what you're looking at.
00:13:42
Speaker
so they're trying to stop that from happening and they found out that their versions of the planes are not the first ones and the constable is very very confident that they are not going to succeed no matter what they do. If at first you don't succeed try try again. He's like, I've seen you try this a thousand times. I know where you're going. I know what you're going to do. You can't stop me. You can try. He even gave him the ultimate element of like, we can save your planes. If you join me, you join me and help me finish my goals. I'll save your planes. I won't destroy them. They may destroy themselves because they're on a path of destruction regardless of what you do, but we'll see. And basically that everyone just told the constable to F off and nice it was a big time. Nice.
00:14:27
Speaker
i'm I'm very proud that they hate, hate my villains. It's not like, oh, this is kind of a fun, they're like, when I say the name or I describe the character, I can see all of them just immediately their demeanor changes. um Oh, it's great. So I have the constable and he has three lieutenants that he calls the judge, the jury and the executioner. And he also has alternate versions of the party that are working for him. foils oh i love it nice so they have their mirror opposites working against them
00:15:01
Speaker
Yeah, it was basically when I came up with the idea, I was like, oh, it would be really interesting seeing as these these are all their first characters. We've played multiple campaigns outside of this one, so they've gotten more broad and in how they build their characters. But I was like, it'd be interesting to build my own version of their characters and then have them be bad guys and see how they they mix and just change their background just enough where they're like, they're on the side of the bad guy, not on the side of the good guy. I love it. That's really cool. Lots of fun stuff. So yeah, if you like if you like time travel and Doctor Who, but also fantasy, that it might be the podcast for you.
00:15:41
Speaker
Well, I know I'm hooked and I don't think I'm going to be alone amongst our listeners in sharing that sentiment. I cannot stay away from screwing with time in games. So much fun. It is so much fun putting effect before cause, throwing the laws of reality out the window and shaking them violently like a bath mat. And it's getting into my fantasy games as well. I'm running a table of Curse of Strahd right now and Time flows differently in my Barovia than it does outside of Barovia.
00:16:16
Speaker
Same with mine. They spent three weeks in Barovia, they get back out, it was six months later after they went in. Oh, they'd be lucky if it was that little time. ah Not that we enjoy the suffering or discombobulation of our players, but we secretly do. Trust me, if if my if my players succeed, um i I want to say it is the... I took the idea from the third series of New Who, the the Martha martha and and David Tennant Doctor, Martha number 10. They have the, there's a time storm and they are in the eye of the storm, so everything around them changes.
00:17:04
Speaker
while they remember everything that happened leading up to that. So if they succeed, the last two, three hundred years worth of history that they have in their worlds is changed completely. So whatever they were looking to do, because they have their own personal goals and then they have the campaign goals that they're trying to do. If they decide to go after the campaign goals before they go after the personal goals, their personal goals could completely change by the time they finish with the campaign things. And they have a whole new set of things to deal with. Good. We want our characters to change. We want for what they want to grow and evolve and adapt into new places. One of my favorite mechanics of the actual just character sheets for Cubicle 7's second edition of Doctor Who is what are your goals? What are your long-term goals? What are your short-term goals?
00:17:51
Speaker
And those have changed for our players. At least two of them have already. And I think the Fixers is due for a check-in because they'll accomplish a short-term goal or a long-term goal that they didn't even realize they were working on. And then there's this pivot. They have more opportunities ahead of them. They have more to play with, resource-wise. And it's just rewarding as hell because I think one of the biggest appeals for an actual play or tabletop gaming in general is the interactive nature of the storytelling. It's not just the GM's plotted script of events and you're going to have no impact on events.
00:18:38
Speaker
like no change the outcome surprise the hell out of us change the course of mighty rivers with your actions and your failures and you're almost got them because that's where the fun is absolutely oh hell yeah that that's one of my main things is i i don't even really have a script i have i've learned and i i preach plot don't plan so i have plot beats or story beats that will get dropped in at certain times but when those happen completely is up to what the characters are doing at at any given point what they decide to do can completely change where I was going to go with that particular storyline. I had a general idea. They take it a different direction. I would i can't tell you, and I'm sure this is probably the same for a lot of GMs. They say something. The players say something. They're like, oh, is this what it is? And it's like 10 times better than I could have thought of anything. And I don't say anything, but it is now. It is now. Because that's, that's too good. I can't not do that. So yes, it is now. yeah Or at least I'm picking a piece of it and dropping it into my, my story beat. And that's going to be an element now because it came from you and I would, I want it to be something that you thought up. So because then when that reveal comes and they're like, Oh, I was right. I knew it was going to be something like this. It's like, yes, you were right. That's the way it should be. You did, you did figure it out.
00:20:05
Speaker
Well, that hat that that's also more satisfying for the player that, you know, they're not just reaching the conclusion that you wanted them to reach, whether it's, you know, unmasking the killer du jour or what have you, but actually, realizing those answers and grabbing them and sometimes changing them for the for the sake of a better story. um More often than not, so far with my own GMing, there's been a deliberate
00:20:36
Speaker
Villain in play most of the time. It's not just man versus nature so like I try to figure out what can happen if the heroes do nothing and go from there building their challenges plotting out the kinds of NPCs they can run into and interact with and get information and you know have scenes and It is absolutely valuable to have that looser organic of like, okay, here are the the four or five major beats that we can expect them to hit over the course of a game and see how they react to those individually, I think is a lot more interesting. I very much agree. For me, especially with ah any sort of, especially with the villain, it's got to be, at least the way that i've I've played it and it has worked well thus far is having the villain be there and things are happening, but they don't necessarily know how the bad guy is doing the thing. Mmm, so they they have to figure out and sometimes I don't necessarily know how the bad guy is doing the thing but they will inevitably come up with ideas on how it's working and then usually I end up just cherry picking like
00:21:50
Speaker
that's a cool idea and that's a cool idea let's marry those together cool so we have consensus they have helped me develop it even though they might not necessarily know that they've helped me come up with it but i'm directly taking from their ideas and putting it into the game and seeing how that plays out and then we did just rinse and repeat absolutely i would invite you to take some credit though when you say that i don't know how it works because like obviously there's a bedrock of magic a is magic a And the technology available is something that you have a grasp of. Like you have, you know, the the toolbox at your feet that you can cherry pick things from. Oh, for sure. But like one of my favorite things about the Doctor Who genre of baddies and thwarting them
00:22:36
Speaker
is that the seeds of their destruction are already baked into their plan. Like, everything they need to carry their plan off is is also exactly what the heroes can use to thwart that plan. Or they can say, screw that, grab a pair of tiki torches and swing down with action with those. It is entirely up to them. Yep, absolutely. I mean, I will take some credit that I do know how some things work, but a lot of times I will intentionally leave it vague until there needs to be a granular explanation of how it works. And then I will sit down and figure out, okay, these are all the things that I've already said.
00:23:12
Speaker
this is how generally it's going to work but I don't have like a structured mechanic of how exactly things are going to happen until it gets to a point where I absolutely need that in order to facilitate the story moving forward and then then that's me sitting down and going okay so we've got a b c and d how this is how they all sort of fit together in the world how would that work with the three planes i've one has one is uh one is granzia which is like your standard high fantasy which is not my my setting actually it's one of my friends he did his own campaigns because he saw after like a year of me running several campaigns like I'm gonna do a campaign so that you can so that you can play, because you have been but have have been having to deal with all that. And he's fantastic at it. And he built out this whole world called Granzia. ah Then the other two are ah Sloane, which is sort of like a more technologically advanced, but not super far into it. They have like airships and that type of deal, but it's not like tech tech.
00:24:15
Speaker
and Iwi which is like an arcane punk so they have like metal cities they have horseless carriages they have more advanced like airships and trains and things like that so it's a little bit more a little bit more along those lines so it's it's having to figure out okay how does it work in each one of these things especially if it's like the machines how is it going to work across these three different diet these three very different planes but it's also going to work as a whole So I will take some credit that I do have to figure out how these work out eventually, but I don't necessarily have everything planned out in my head ahead of time, because I find that usually my plan just get goes right into the window. yeah
00:25:01
Speaker
Yeah, thrown out the window so I like just haven't enough to explain what's happening but not to like granularly tell you the minutia of everything that's happening because I most of the time I don't necessarily know. Oh sure yeah no that makes a lot of sense. Like I've been trying to soak up as much good GM and DM advice as I can in the last six months. And one of the best pieces of advice I picked up, I wish I could remember where, was don't plan more than a session in advance because it's not going to resemble two sessions from now anyway. So your approach of describing what it looks like, how it works without actually having to figure out the whys and wherefores of what's inside the machinery
00:25:47
Speaker
until they get close enough to crack open the chassis and take a look. That makes a lot of sense. It saves you a lot of unnecessary work. And a lot of times, they come up with really good ideas about how it could work, and I can take from that, and it might not be exactly what they say, but it's enough where they're like, oh, I thought it was going to be something along these lines. And then that gives them more confidence to continue to push and figure out what's happening, because if it if they get it wrong all the time, then they're gonna say, like, why even guess, because I'm not gonna get it right. if you can if you can give them if you can dangle the carrot in front of them but eventually they get to the carrot and they find out it's not exactly the way they thought but it's pretty close and that they're they're right on the cusp of figuring these things out it's going to motivate them more and more to be like all right we have to figure out how this works we have to see how this all plays together what are the connections between these things why is it us
00:26:41
Speaker
you know all all of the you know the big existential things which is kind of funny because like all of my all of my player characters have the you know like the chosen one or has like some sort of main character syndrome i Don't even know I wouldn't go main character syndrome, but more like their their backstories have like they're so they're special within Where where they came from gotcha, so they write these backstories and then in game they'd be like oh I can't why why do we have so many you know there's so many eyes on us and I It takes everything that I have to not just be like you guys wrote the backstory You told me to do this. I'm giving you what you want. Why are your characters all of a sudden like what? I don't understand why all these people are so interested. It's like, it's right there. You told me I did the thing. But I mean, like, I get it, because their characters don't necessarily know what the players know. But still, it's it' frustrating sometimes. They're like, oh, come how come there um we got all these eyes on us? It's like, because all you guys wanted to be special, you wrote your specialness into your backstory, and I gave you the specialness. So that's why you're special, which is good, because it works.
00:27:49
Speaker
You've got your magnificent seven of highly charismatic heroes with their own in-depth, unique backstories. Of course, you're going to be drawing attention to yourselves. Not only do I love a good backstory, but I love bringing it into the fore with a flashback. in It's been something I've been using more and more. For instance, the Fixer has a ah friendly relationship with this other Time Lord called the Dodger, not to be mistaken for the Doctor. And the first time we lay eyes on him, he has crashed his TARDIS and is sending out an all-call for help.
00:28:28
Speaker
So the next episode down the line, there's a flashback of the Fixer trying to ignore the Dodgers snoring in the middle of a lecture and just give some app extra depth to like, oh, they were that kind of friends. Okay, he was the bad influence and he was trying to tune him out. Okay, that kind of thing. or, um, Nave, who is an absolutely incredible character. She's a delight. That character is a delight peppering out their backstory with flashbacks to ye olde timey London. I find it helps illustrate to show why the character was interested in leaving in the first place, but also the events back then can also foreshadow events that are about to happen in a half hour down the road for amusing effect. or to add context to something after it's happened. We had in our Curse of Strahd, they're in the basement of the Death House. Spoilers, spoilers. There's a room with a crystal ball in it. And trying to move the crystal ball can activate some monsters, blah blah blah.
00:29:30
Speaker
Our heroes, yep one of our heroes trained a gun on the crystal ball trying to move things along and another player used mage hand to use his finger to pull the trigger. Okay. Oh wow. Like this ridiculous thing is happening. And it has a huge impact on the whole team. The crystal ball explodes, they're all, you know, thrown back and hurting from glass being in them now that's been psychically charged. But the next game, when they're trying to take a short rest, that same character, the gunslinger, had a dream. And he flashed back to being in the woods where a Academy friend of his was, you know, transforming into a werewolf and he was trying not to pull the trigger
00:30:11
Speaker
when a fellow student of his also used Mage Hand to pull the trigger, to force him to pull the trigger, to have the realization that that had happened to him before really shook him up. I felt like it added some extra piquancy to events later on when they were discussing medieval gun safety, which, you know, we are 100% behind. Absolutely. Out of curiosity, where in Curse of Strad are you? Is the group planning on going towards Argan Vostholt at any point, the the House of the Silver Dragon? In the future, I'm sure they are, yes. They are still fairly early on their their adventures.
00:30:51
Speaker
Of course, if I may make a suggestion, I worked very well in, in, in our campaign. Please do. Because of the whole idea of the revenant in the house spoiler. If you, if you've never curse a straw, it's been out for a long time. And it's like been around a while. ah easily the most popular module that 5e has but there are a revenant there and it's all it's all based on like the memory of uh argon uh argon bust so when my characters went in there they started having flashback memories of important points in their lives whether it was happy or sad and it was a good way to reveal connections between the characters that they might not have known were there fascinating
00:31:35
Speaker
So it it you use it your own risk. It could work. It might not work. But it it would it ended up being very useful to tie together stories and threads so that it was a little bit more like they may have different goals. But there there is a ah thread that can bind them together. Those stories. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great idea. I think I want to deliberately save it for a tropical desert island campaign I'm putting together. For that exact same reason, because these characters who all, you know, get thrown together on the rocks of a shore that they have no idea how they're gonna get off of, Dimension Door does not work here. Planar Shift does not get you anywhere useful here. Trying to send message off off island just means a bottle washes up to shore with your message in it.
00:32:24
Speaker
Aha, that's great. So they're gonna have to get really creative. But that same device of flashbacks and revelations later on that, oh yeah, no, your paths have totally crossed before. Neither of you were paying attention to that at the time because he was a block over and she was upstairs trying on a wedding dress for a wedding that was never gonna happen. Mm-hmm. but Cause and effect, man. Cause and effect. Another good way that I've used Flashback was very recently in the podcast. I want to say like maybe a couple of episodes ago. ah We had a player come on maybe I want to say about a year ago. okay We had someone that had to that had to leave because of ah life stuff that was happening. But I had them come in and we didn't get a lot of time to do like backstory stuff for this character. But there was a really big event. The party was accosted by the constable. And this was the first time he had met the constable. And there was a whole thing that happened. But eventually, the following day, once everything was sort of smoothed over with the party,
00:33:31
Speaker
some of the party went into the nearest nearby city to get stuff to repair their airship and We did a whole like maybe 30 to 40 minute flashback scene of him like standing on the on the bow of the ship and looking out ah into the forest and he just like flashes back and the character is ah a reborn human and he has a like a bark like skin like it's a gray bark like skin looks like birch bark none of the player none of the characters have ever seen anything along these lines they don't know what it is he doesn't necessarily explain what it is because it's it's tied to some like really dark stuff that he did back in the past but
00:34:12
Speaker
We did a flashback of how he came to go from, you find out that the bark-like skin was a type of like a skin rot, like a disease. So think like the stone men from Game of Thrones. Gotcha. where eventually they they become statues it's very much the same except these people are encased in wood and tree and eventually will become trees but as it's happening you know like their joints become stiff they bleed more often it becomes difficult to move around and do things
00:34:46
Speaker
the creaking becomes louder oh yeah and he become he he is beset with this particular thing and he in it the flashback explains not necessarily through like exposition but like through what he does in the thing how he gets to a point where he overcomes this disease and then but like he wakes up where his body is fully covered except it's like his skin as opposed to As opposed to just like crackling over and there's there's a whole bunch of stuff I very much it was probably one of the most fun things that we did with this character and it was very easy to do it we I just gave him a very very basic outline of sort of the events leading up to how it was gonna go and then we just we improv back and forth on each other and just
00:35:36
Speaker
took things and ran with it it was super fun to do i highly suggest if you can do this with a character that if you don't want to have if the characters want to have like a big exposition for their backstory or like because this character is like out of time he he he showed up in the game ah several thousand years after he was like petrified by this uh by this cult that the that the party had defeated and by defeating them he his petrification waned and he became mobile again Instead of having him explain all the things, having the flashback was a good way to have him participate in telling the backstory, but without him just being like, oh, I did this, and then I did this, and then this happened, and then this happened. It's like the movie you know it's the it's the standard movie flashback of looking at the horizon, and it's sort of panning inside, and then it pans to a different area, and all of a sudden, it dissolves into another scene, and you see the thing,
00:36:31
Speaker
It's the same character but maybe younger or maybe in a different you know a different setup and you see the thing happen and then there's eventually the you know like the someone says their name and they're like sort of pulled out of this memory and and that all happens. It was super fun. I highly suggest flashbacks in general. I'm 100% with you. Flashbacks are amazing. They're just delightful. I have to say this and get it out of my brain, like the wood rot you're describing, like all I can think of is like, what if it was contracted from a splinter? It gives me shivers. It's called elder twine is what the the disease is called. Great name, great name. I'm a big fan of wordplay choice when selecting the name for something. And it's it's always gratifying to hear a name that that was not first thought. So thank you, you're awesome.
00:37:21
Speaker
i give I give a lot of credit to random name generators and and being like, but I like that, and I like this, and let's mash those together. That sounds cool. Let's mash them together. On the subject of improv, have you studied it? Did you take classes in school? you Ever part of an improv team? cause You're not the first GM to reference it, nor am I, in my background, but I'd love to hear about your own early experiences with improv as a way of making for better DMing. I mean, I'll be very, very honest. i
00:37:54
Speaker
Never taken an improv class. I've never studied it. I think I did like a little school play once I think I just I always had a really active imagination I will say that my brother who who got me into the game is ah Is a very talented with improv. I don't think he's yeah pretty sure he's never done anything formal with it, but he's been playing since he was like I So he was he was playing the muscle is there and so seeing him do it and then Also finding like actual plays so like I got very into critical role that very into dimension 20 I got very into nad pod I got very into a lot of a lot of actual plays and seeing the different styles that I enjoyed I Tended more towards the improv as opposed to a little bit more scripted it was just a matter of me watching people that were really really good at it and seeing how did they pick that thing out and and it was really it was just learning to not be afraid to take a chance and to not not be afraid to to fail because failing
00:39:05
Speaker
pushes a story forward more often than not so it's just a matter matter of just like exact rolling with something because it was one of those things where I started learning to to run a game was um realized very early on the way that the book says it because I was running from a module the way that the book says that it could happen 99% of the time it ain't gonna happen that way so you got to be able to think on your feet otherwise it's not gonna be it's gonna be very very cumbersome so it just got to a point of like all right I just need to know Have in my head, you know, like what are the the motivations of the character? So instead of me thinking I got to get to a point for me to see but it's not not a a not a case of Hearing something and then thinking in my head. How would this character react or answer this particular thing? I got to get to a point where reacting and that character and that my
00:40:00
Speaker
reaction is natural, and then that's what it should be. Even if it doesn't necessarily always make sense, the beauty of having some NPCs not show up all the time and having it come back, you can retroactively make things make sense by doing something further on in the future and it just play it off like, oh, yeah, it's always part of the plan. Half the time, it's like I. Yeah, exactly. so so my improv was very much i think my improv came a lot from that but also from playing as weird as it sounds from playing i played a lot of high school football and we watched a lot of tape for i was a defensive player so it was very much
00:40:43
Speaker
knowing, it's you know being able to recognize patterns and knowing how to manipulate or how to use that information to my advantage to be able to do something. So being able to recognize a pattern or recognize how a certain a certain player character will react to the type of thing that I'm going to say, or how how if I throw this in there, I know exactly how some of the player characters will We'll go at each other or we'll we'll work together. So it's just a matter of, I think half of its pattern recognition and half of it I think is just sheer amount of practice of just yeah screwing up and then just i mean keep pushing forward. But I have no formal training. It's just, I think I'm just very interested and I have always liked an improvisation. It's more fun.
00:41:33
Speaker
It is. You're describing a great approach. Yes, and is always more interesting than no, because no, but is also a very good one as well. No, but can be useful. No, but is one of the categorical responses that can happen if depending on how badly they roll. I'm talking more about when a player is suggesting something or trying to move the story ahead but it doesn't quite match what you have in mind and you bring things to us a jarring halt with no because blah blah yeah versus no but here's this other thing you can pull off it's about drilling past that fear the risk of sounding like an idiot or a fool and just saying, yeah, I might, but I'm going to keep talking anyway, and we're going to get to the next topic and here we are. Boom. And getting past that fear to the point where you don't let it slow you down in the first place, that is le mojus of the improv that we're talking about. Absolutely.
00:42:25
Speaker
But yeah, like I've had other GMs on like the incredibly talented Jacob Cordes who deals mostly with improv and has had years long campaigns on start playing continue to run on games that like the engine of is his own improvisation. I used to be a lot more rigid with the pre-planning and the mapped out outcomes of which there can be no derivation to what I hope is some kind of a sweet spot of like, okay, we have enough prep that we have a little world that they can bounce around in for two to three episodes. But there's also that fluidity, that flexibility of discovery, yes, ending with what the players come up with, that we have enough structure, but enough,
00:43:13
Speaker
fluidity to tell a narrative story with some inkling of theme, God willing. I mean, theme. I feel the same way. I'm very much a I will prep enough for a place so that I have a a jumping off point for a place or for an NPC that they're going to meet or talk to. But really it's most of the time it's giving giving the players just enough To go off of and then me playing off of what they decide to do Because I can have a whole you know have a whole bunch of stuff to say but I use like ten percent So it's easier to just have the information ready. If I don't ever use it, then that's okay. Especially if I come back and play in this world again, they come you know my new new characters come back in. I already have a whole bunch of stuff set up. I might have to change things here and there so it's not all the same information because it may be during a different time, but it's all pretty much the same.
00:44:13
Speaker
So it's just a matter matter ah of switching things up a little bit here and there, but I don't know if I could fully improv everything off the top of my head because I would just blank so hard. You need some shape to wrap around, damn it. I did want to ask you, you mentioned that you started off with nine PCs. How did you find that many players? like I was friend already friends. We were already friends. I had met the majority of them in the convention circuit. I started being really into comic books maybe about 10-15 years ago. I had wanted to write my own. Sloan, the world Sloan is... generally is is one of the worlds that I had built to to write a comic in. And I didn't know if I was ever going to actually make the comic book. So I transitioned it into into a setting for tabletop. But we met over the course of several years, ah but like Boston Comic Con. And then I did several years down with them at New York Comic Con, which is nice super fun, but also the craziest five days I've ever had to ever ever works. it's a maze of madness yeah it's it's bonkers but the best of times we all knew each other and it was in a group chat and i was just like hey i really really want to play dnd i haven't played in a few years i am willing to get the rule books i am willing to be the one who runs the game i just really want to play i think you guys would enjoy it and if you want to play cool if you don't like it we never have to play again but
00:45:51
Speaker
most of them weren't still are like obviously comic fans but like anime fans as well very much like video game fans so there was a definite period of time in the first like six months of the campaign me having to repeat that this is not a ah video game you cannot you don't win dnd the winning comes from creating the story together so Try not to look at it as I need to get all the things and I need to put out as much damage as physically possible It's cool to do that. I'm totally here for if you want to be a min max Character build do that but also make sure to understand that the story is What we're focusing on the story is the important aspect the min max of your combat situation
00:46:40
Speaker
It's for one piece of the game. There's a whole other side, several sides, you get the exploration, you have all the social stuff. Let's worry about this because you guys, you get they I won't lie, they're overpowered and they are optimized to the extreme, which is fine. it It helped me learn how all of the mechanics of character building worked so much faster than if we just did whatever. There are a few type A personalities that really like to optimize whatever they're doing, whatever is the most efficient for how they want to play. And they were looking at it more as a video game and then as opposed to it as a collaborative storytelling game, which is crazy because now I say, hey, you know, I found this new game. Does anybody want to, you know, do like a one shot or, you know, do for funsies and
00:47:30
Speaker
I always get like four or five people in our group. They're like, yeah, I'll give it a shot. you You run the game. I'm like, yeah, I got the book. We'll go over the rules and everything. We'll have some fun. We'll do the thing. So it's changed their outlook on it. And I think they enjoy it very much. And a lot of them have gotten so good at role playing. They've gotten so, so good at the story part of it. And they're also still incredibly formidable in combat. it makes a very very fun time but yes one of them was in his words not mine was he he was a self-proclaimed damage whore because he just wanted to do as much damage as physically possible in one you know in in a single shot of his bow that's what he wanted
00:48:09
Speaker
Yeah, our gunslinger is heading the same direction. I helped him put together said pistol, negotiating the the amount of damage it could do per turn and things like that. And I'm just going to have to continue making his opponents tougher and tougher so that he, you know, gets a challenge. What I did for that, because they were steamrolling everything that I threw at them from like regular stat blocks, any of the named bad guys that they fight against are player builds. Ooh. Ooh. So they have to fight themselves. So they have to fight characters that way. They're equals. They're equals, essentially. And with named characters, they don't die when they hit zero. You have to double tap.
00:48:52
Speaker
Oh, I like this. I like this very much. I have a standing rule of if they want to be able to do something bonkers with their character, like if they want to be able to have like crazy stacks or read a rule for a spell or for an ability, and it's not necessarily rules is written, which I'm not really a rules is written type of person anyway, but like bending it pretty bad, but still kind of within the ideas. My go to response is I am 150% here. for you doing that, but if you can do that, then that means my bad guys can do that too. Are you okay with knowing that I could have a bad guy character that could do the same thing that you wanna do right now? If that's yes, cool, I will let you do that. We'll figure out a mechanic for it or we'll set it up in such a way so that it works like that, but just realized you guys could come up against a bad guy that can do the exact same thing that you're asking me to do right now for you.
00:49:51
Speaker
And most of the time they're like, yeah, I know I'm all set with that because they realize it's like a little bit over the line. But I'm cool with going over the line because like, I mean, what are rules for if not to be broken? You know, if they're having fun for me, that's the most important part. But it's also realizing that like, I'm not just going to be a punching bag for you. No, if you want this to be fun, I got to be able to do so the same things that you're capable of doing. I also like amping up the consequences for their actions. I may have mentioned this in a previous episode. Firing off that gun of his in a narrow, confined space, especially near someone with dark vision, can hamper
00:50:35
Speaker
their vision in the short term because they just saw a flashing light go off in front of their face. yeah exactly Exactly. Because regardless of my own feelings about firearms, I'm not the biggest fan of them. I'm not the biggest fan of them in tabletop games, but Vampire Hunter D has also had a massive impact on me in terms of like, this is what gothic horror can be. And those guns look frickin sweet as hell. hell yeah so you know we wanted to have those opportunities but at the same time like you say i'm not going to let you just steamroll over me on this there will be consequences to these actions and these you know these triggers will have these hammers go off down here and you know you might not always have the biggest baddest most powerful gun in the land so it it might suck sometimes
00:51:27
Speaker
Oh yeah, no. What I'm really looking forward to is the payoff down the road for the fact that the gunslinger does not remember the nature of his vow when he signed up for the gun. The character was drunk at the time and woke up the next morning with, you know, gun case at the foot of the bed and pounding headache and general sense of purpose with said firearm, but has no recollection of what he actually vowed to do with it. And I'm looking forward to that revelation when it comes down the road, several, several, several chapters down the road. Those are always fun. I wanted to say my hat is off to you regarding just the layout of your website for the Medusa's Cascade. Details in the doobly-doo. Because it all feels very accessible.
00:52:18
Speaker
extremely well organized and easy to jump in. I wanted to ask you, was that your work? Was that something that someone else on the crew did? How do you spread that around? Essentially, we got ah the layout and the the guy who sets up the website is one of the players. Hachi plays Shanks. So he's he's the elven archer that is the self-proclaimed damage whore. But he is ah incredibly talented and and really knows his stuff with like web design and tech stuff. So it was a matter of he found a really cool template and we got the website and it was basically just we had decided that we wanted to have a website that would give you enough information to grasp like the massive amount of stuff that there is like. So we don't even have like all of the NPCs. I'm still updating stuff on the website. It's a consistently evolving document thing. Yeah. Yes. It's it's always, it's always expanding.
00:53:14
Speaker
Yeah, that that was that was mainly Hutch that found it and set it up that way. And then it was just a matter of me and him and a couple of the other players going through and being like, okay, we should have it broken down into these sections. And then it's just and enough to, we didn't want the website to tell the whole story. We wanted it to be enough to sort of whet your appetite to go listen to the podcast. Sure. because that's most time that we've put into that's the thing that we put the most time into and the most thought into. And the website was really just a way to like showcase just the amount of work that we've put into it and for you know basic visuals and that sort of thing. That's something else I wanted to talk to you about because the character art you've got on the site is incredible. I wanted to ask you who your artists are. Is it someone else on the team?
00:54:02
Speaker
Yeah, we have ah quite a few artists that are on the team. Like I said, we were in with the the convention circuit. So yeah, it's it's a lot of stuff. A lot of it ends up being helped along with some early like AI stuff to give us like general ideas of what we wanted the characters for and then just sort of handing out as much as we could to people that were willing to do it for little to nothing because we're all broke. Yeah, I feel you there. But like I wanted to encourage this discourse because I have made this mistake myself, i.e. trying to do too much myself, let alone at once. Let's say there are aspiring actual play hosts in our audience or even just GMs of ambitious world building. How have you divided up the responsibilities for all of this wonderful execution with your creative team?
00:54:52
Speaker
It took a while to get a good idea of how we wanted to do it but eventually we have gotten to the point where like say for lore and anything along those lines is I put together the very basic bare bones of the ideas of what these things were and like across the plains is where we talk about we do a lot of lore for like locations but really it's just it's a ah conversation so like me saying this is the vibe that I feel like this place is And having a couple of people, having a couple of the players sit down usually, especially if like the location is tied to ah a ah character's backstory. So for instance, with Luxembourg in Granzia, that's where Hutch's character Shanks is from. And we also had one of the other players, Joe, jump in.
00:55:41
Speaker
to help with that as well and it was basically I had five or six questions that I had in as a general sense of you know like what is you know we know where the location is so what is the you know what is the architecture of the city what is the culture that is surround that surrounds the city what is the religion that is practiced if there's a major religion or if there are several different types of religions what is the city's like main export because there's always usually when there's a long-standing city most of the time it's either they are like a trade hub and they may not produce anything but they are at the center of a nexus of multiple places that produce things and they're like a crossroads
00:56:21
Speaker
or they have something they export and it brings them wealth and also attracts people to their city and also what kind of like festivals or celebrations does this city have because then it gives you a good idea of like the demeanor of that and whatnot and then it's really just what I've found has worked the best is me saying okay what does the architecture of this place look like what do you guys think and have the two people that are with me or the whole group would maybe like throw out at ideas and then come to a consensus of like yes we really like that so like with Luxembourg it is very much Hutch grew up in Louisiana down by New Orleans so Luxembourg is like an elven
00:57:07
Speaker
New Orleans. And a lot of that is based around like the culture of New Orleans. So there are like, you know, Bourbon Street type of places, there's like a garden district and a French Quarter. I mean, obviously all within the realm of like elves and stuff like that. There's Luxembourg and there's the Forest Bastion Luxembourg has mostly has high elves and Elodrin elves that are more the hoity toity like the rich people. the forest bastion is more along the lines of wood elves and hutch actually found an older race that's no longer in in canon called the wild elves and i had to explain oh i was like wild elves are actually like pretty freaking racist like they're basically saying you're like they're they're the dark skin savage elves
00:57:53
Speaker
And he's like, well, I get that, but I want to take it back. I want to make the wild elves be something that there but they are they are more in tune with nature and with the things surrounding nature. And and they're they're more of the Spartan type of elves. So he created a whole lore around what the ah the wild elves were. And he was ah his his character was a product of an Elodran mother and a wild elf father. oh so it was literally just me asking questions and then we would all play off of each other's ideas on how we wanted to go until we got to a point where we were satisfied with the pretty much the basic layout and then I would go through and take everything that we had written down and re-listen to the the audio that we had recorded and then put together basically like a six or a seven paragraph in you know like you would find in ah a settings book of like the idea the basics of this city or of this area in which
00:58:48
Speaker
the places is happening. Same thing with with backstories. It's always a matter of what is it that you want? And then coming back to having a ah dialogue back and forth of saying, cool, I like what you have here. This is sort of what the setting is so we can tweak it. I want you to keep your your main stories. But we have to remember that, you know, especially if it's a first level character, you're not a hero from, you know, you haven't you haven't done all of these crazy things you don't have a legend yet you don't have a legend yet and if you did it would have to be a long-lived race and so for like shanks is a good example shanks is and we had decided this before we realized that like canon elves live like maybe a thousand years at most we had gone with sort of like the more lord of the ring style elves that they live for a couple thousand years and he had made shanks in the 300s so he was
00:59:45
Speaker
in terms of elves, pretty young, but in terms of a lot of the other races, had lived several lifetimes in comparison to some of the other races. So he had done stuff. It had been years since he had done a lot of the things. So he is far enough removed where he was capable of it at one point, but he may be very, very rusty at what he's doing. So he's not the best. He's not like he was. Exactly. He's still doable within his backstory. But he's rusty as hell. They're either rusty as hell or they have just learned these things and maybe they're really good at a very particular thing but they're not good overall at at what they're doing. Yeah. So it's really just ah having a conversation back and forth between
01:00:29
Speaker
the players and whoever's running the game. And if I very much suggest if you're putting together your own like homebrew setting to sit down with the ah party, session zero or before you start session one and say, this is what I'm thinking. is this something you're interested in and if everyone's interested in that type of setting then we go through and we build out so like you show them a map and then and say pick where you're from you pick out they pick out where they're from okay i don't have lore for any of the cities that you have picked
01:01:07
Speaker
So we're going to sit down and we're going to create the lore around what it is. So A, I don't have to explain to you what your character already knows about the lore of the city because you have physically helped me come up with that lore. And B, you have ownership and you have agency with how the place that you are from is is molded and is taken care of and and and constructed. and everyone else if they're all from the same plane or from the same area they have a general idea of what it is for them to be in that area or what the vibe is of that place so they know going in so they have that autonomy and they already have the information that they need to make informed decisions without stopping the game and me having to pull out and read like 10 paragraphs worth of information no offense to anyone i wouldn't remember it either but they're not going to remember the majority of what i just read them Exactly. So it's easier to have them participate in that particular thing and make it ah make it a part of the activity, part of the group for not only does it give you a setting, if they help you build the setting, but that also helps them inform how their characters' backstories work and how they fit within that world. So they have a much bigger mind's eye of what they're walking into. So even if their character is not part of a city that they go to,
01:02:30
Speaker
they have a general idea because they were there when that city was being fleshed out so they kind of know what to expect walking in and you don't have to spend that extra time explaining and it takes a lot of onus off of the GM having to do everything yeah and it also helps with at least I found it has helped with the players improvising and role-playing more because they have the agency to make that they have the ability to do that ah I've been very much trying to get my players because a lot of times I'll get the hey Tommy how does my character feel about this information that we've just heard and in the beginning
01:03:11
Speaker
I would give them that because I think they were still trying to figure out how to play. But for a while now, I've been saying, I don't play your character. You tell me how that hits them. And if there's anything pertinent to what it is that your you may not know based on story that's being told, I will give you the extra things to give you context to why you it you makes you feel that way. yeah But you tell me how that happens. And same thing with, like, insight roles. insight roles for a long time for at least at the very beginning where like you roll high enough I just read you a book and now it's gotten to a point where I say you know they give me an insight role and they're figuring things out they have all of the information what I've been doing and I think works really well is I give them especially further if it's a high a high role for them ah I will be there their internal monologue
01:04:07
Speaker
of saying okay you have this what about that you know like i will present the because i i find even if they know the facts or the different things that are happening if they don't necessarily see it because it's not displayed in front of them so by me being the impartial and the the just straight facts voice that's in the side of their head saying okay so you have this this and this what could these mean together And then depending on how high they roll, you know, they could be like, oh, well, that doesn't necessarily make sense because of this. But what if it's something like this? And then just to get their gears moving and have them solve the puzzle connect as or or connecting the dots so that it's not just relying on rolling and then me telling you what you know, as opposed to you have all of the information and some of the information you might not know you have because it might not necessarily be pertinent fact in your head, or it might be ah
01:05:02
Speaker
way, way back in the campaign, but I remember most of it and I know what the important things are. So your subconscious is sort of bringing up like, Oh, here's this tidbit. Here's this tidbit. Here's this tidbit. How do these all fit together? yeah And then, then they use their, their brains to figure out the thing that they need to figure out. So it's more of a, it's a give and take as opposed to just like roll. And then I give you the answers or, you know, I just hand you a book on what the setting is or what your background is. yeah you have You are an active participant and I find that that works a hundred times better than me just sitting and coming coming up with everything. And I'm terrible at doing that by myself anyway. I need a group. I need someone to bounce ideas off of. I need to have a conversation for my brain to work right to get to the point where I need it to go. That makes sense. Found that it works really well with other groups. So that's that's that's how we've have we've sort of come into that.
01:05:57
Speaker
I think it's incredibly important to check in regularly with players, especially after big wham moments, reveals, things like that. Not only to just give yourself a second to catch your breath and give someone else the focus of like calamity. You just saw a space pirate get hit in the chest with a death beam and fall over dead. How are you feeling about that? And things like that. not only to check in with them to see how their characters are responding in the moment, but also to check in to make sure the player is still comfortable. But what you said about how you respond to insight checks and investigation checks with their inner monologue on their behalf, I find that really interesting. For my own sake, when it comes to exposition, I love to use comparisons.
01:06:50
Speaker
emotional emotional comparisons like instead of just saying to someone you approach someone of great power you know I say have you ever gone to the hospital and overheard from someone that the x-ray machine is just down the hall and you immediately have that feeling that there's a presence down the hall that maybe you should stay away from this person is radiating with that. So that they have their own version of personal context of however they felt, however old they were when they had an inkling of that kind of experience so that we can get a shortcut right to their emotional from a response to it versus the monster is big.
01:07:28
Speaker
Oh, I 100% agree. If you can find an analog for somebody to be like, oh, you know this feeling when this happens? And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what you have right now. And then it's the immediate like res response of like, oh, shit. or you need the you know the the Whatever response you're looking for, I cosign 100%. Go for it. It's also really useful when a PC is trying to make contact with their deity. I've had this come up in D and&D, I've had this come out in a Doctor Who, especially with a higher power or lower power that does not traditionally speak.
01:08:08
Speaker
In verbal terms to their followers, what I find really useful is like you don't hear the words, but in your brain, you feel the satisfying buzz of being told it's going to be taken care of, or you're going to get what you asked for so that they have that hunch. They have that response to something without the dialogue so that we can approximate something like an a mo quote unquote religious experience for our but but for our players or bring them into another flashback where they receive a particularly meaningful gift and they wake up with their senses back where they're supposed to be in terms of effica efficacy. I also find that is the impactful way to describe the benefit of some kind of narrative change.
01:08:57
Speaker
i very much agree like with gods for me the one god that like really the one god that has been most present has been bahamut and this is the goliath paladin of bahamut but his oath is the oath of conquest go on The way that he describes Conquest, the reason he chose Conquest, not mechanically he likes the things that the Oath of Conquest gives him the player does, but story-wise, because he picked Bahamut because he recognized Bahamut from Final Fantasy, and didn't realize like the difference between Bahamut in the game, which I was like, that's fine. I was like, if you're going to be a follower of Bahamut, but also a Conquest Paladin,
01:09:38
Speaker
what exactly is your conquest? Because conquest usually tends to be a little bit more iron fist dictator type of deal. And he's like, his whole thing was that the clans in the mountain range and the Terran Ridge, which he was from, are not connected very well. And his goal is to unite his Goliath clans over it into into one clan as opposed to separate and and war and sometimes feuding clans. the reason he chose conquest was because canonically in goliath culture strength and ah valor in battle is usually how they choose their leaders so his whole thing was conquest paladin usually you know usually it's iron-fisted dictatorship but he wants to have those abilities so that he can prove himself worthy to be the leader
01:10:33
Speaker
of all of the Goliath on on the ridge so that he can bring them together and give them peace for the first time because that's what that's what he wants he wants peace uh for for the Goliath like he's totally down with he's definitely a uh you know strength and honor and ah valor and that sort of deal he's all about doing making the hard choices and like he likes to see the the whites of his enemies eyes as he's killing them like that's he's very much still like Goliath he's a mountain man that swings a big sword and wears wears heavy armor but he's not doing it because he wants to be the ruler because he thinks he's better than everyone else
01:11:15
Speaker
He's doing it because he wants to be seen as worthy to join everybody together and set up some type of like council where everyone has a say as opposed to it just being you know a monarchy or or Whatever it happens to be of So it was a really interesting dichotomy. So we had I had to have a little bit more of a hands-on approach with Bahamut because Bahamut is very much law and order and not very much conducive to ah conquest. So very early on he had a dream in which he just saw the eye of a platinum dragon in his mind's eye that basically told him
01:11:56
Speaker
Violence is acceptable as long as it is the last resort. As long as you have if you have exhausted all other avenues to get where you need to go, violence is acceptable as long as it is the final resort and they are deserving of your violence. And if they are deserving of your violence, then you better take care of business. because he's Galahad, who's Galahad Gathkinathi is very much a, I will let you believe and do whatever it is that you are doing, whatever you want to do, I will not tell you or force my beliefs on you. However, if you are hurting people, if you are hurting people that are innocent, especially if it is women and children, but anybody who is innocent, then these hands are rated E for everyone and you better get the hell out of the way.
01:12:47
Speaker
Not only that, but he has a very close relationship with Bahamut because in order to get the journeymen out of the constables, time travelers prison, Galahad sacrificed himself ah to take take their place and he spent 50 years in a cell. And he was visited every day by an older gentleman. who called himself Bothak. And it took him the entirety of the 50 years and almost like literally up to the second when the party finally broke in and saved him for him to finally realize that he was speaking to Bahamut every week for 50 years.
01:13:24
Speaker
So they would have conversations about philosophy and spirituality and Marshall things. those all like He has a very, very close relationship with Bahamut and Bahamut eventually is tapping him to be his champion. partly because Galahad is worthy and deserving of being Bahamut's champion but also because Galahad's mentor Antonius was secretly a paladin for Tiamat and tapped as Tiamat's champion
01:13:57
Speaker
And it's a it's one ah it was explained by Bahamut as one of Tiamat's sick games that she likes to play by finding out who he's looking at as a champion and corrupting the person that is going to teach him and then setting them at odds with each other. That's lovely. it's a it's a good time it was ah it was a mind a cluster funk if you will of sounds like it it was a good time though but he he has regular conversations with Bahamut so like if it is a very important thing and he rolls high enough with his religion he will have like a vision and speak to Bahamut directly as as the Bothak character the older wise gentleman that
01:14:38
Speaker
speaks with him otherwise i do very much what you do with having like a feeling or whatever although every other character who's not uh religious within the confines of the game likes to give him shit being like oh did you you have to interpret interpret the you know oh oh oh watch out there's a breeze coming through let's make sure we interpret that the right way Good Two things. Last thing I'll say on the whole gods communicating their will front, our gunslinger is leaning heavy into the Western motifs and everything. Like the pale rider is his higher power. So I, he did not ask for this explicitly, but I basically gave him a comeback Shane moment where the, in a vision, the,
01:15:27
Speaker
The writer rides past, and only when he is past does he glance over his shoulder in any kind of gesture of approval, so that it's always the withholding papa, you know? Because why bring in a God character if you're not also gonna play with father issues, am I right? Oh, absolutely. 100%. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, though, because I would regret it if I did not, would you please tell us and our listeners how a prison for time travelers is different from a prison for non-time travelers? Because I have an inkling, but I want to hear what your time traveler's prison is like.
01:16:05
Speaker
Well, the time specifically, at least with the constables, that he calls it his vaults. I took the idea of not only ah halls that rearrange themselves, but also if you've ever watched warehouse 13, you know, the MC Escher vault that they have. It's sort of like a play on that. And within the confines of these cells, time operates differently. So for Galahad, it was 50 years in that prison. And that was strictly because I had him roll me a D100 and say, give me, you know, roll me a D100. He didn't know what it was about. And I was like, okay, cool. So you've been in this prison for 50 years.
01:16:51
Speaker
And because I took 50 years from his life, I ended up actually giving him like a proficiency in religion because he did a lot of reading and studying. And I gave him a feat that was very similar to Battlemaster maneuvers. I called it Art of War, where he could have he could use a bonus action to do a battle maneuver to do certain things, tripping attacks and painting attacks, that type of deal. So I was like, your is It's gonna work within the story and you're gonna be better coming out of this, but for the player characters, for the rest of them, it was a ah couple of hours. Yeah, I love doing that. Time compression is such a fascinating narrative device to play with. In the episode Hard Time, we had the TARDIS land responding to the Dodgers distress beacon, and all of our companions almost immediately
01:17:42
Speaker
wound up in The Quicks, a place where time moved faster to the point of appearing to be a blur to people on the far side of the threshold, which in this case was a chain link fence. But they were stuck working indentured servitude for months and months. And just like your character Galahad had to roll to determine how much they were aging while they were doing this grueling labor. And depending on how Badly, they rolled, depending on how close they were to the MacGuffin of the day, was like, okay, age five years. Like, you now have crow's feet, where you did not have crow's feet before. You now see some silver in with the pepper in your hair. And that did not go away at the end of the episode, which only made it more interesting to play with down the road. Like, yeah, your your joints. You actually notice you have joints now. Sorry about that.
01:18:34
Speaker
but consequences to their actions and their choices and their roles. it's's It's delightful. Galahad is now the oldest living Goliath that he knows of, because he's like, we read in the lore that there is no actual lifespan, or at least known lifespan for Goliath because they usually tend to do dangerous and and you know potentially life-threatening things because they chase valor and they chase honor. natural causes might be an axe in the chest. Yes, exactly. They don't know how old, but Galahad is a 75 year old Goliath, which is unheard of in pretty much all Goliath culture. And he's been trying so hard to get certain things of like trophies to show that, like, I didn't spend all this time sitting on my ass. I wouldn't be doing things. I just I'm better than you. I lived that type of that type of feel. So he's got he's ah he's he's He's got a ridiculous set of armor. I think right now he has like an AC of like 23 or something stupid like that. He essentially got Mysium armor and it's all like Bahamut motif. And i yeah, we like I said, I made them overpowered because it was it was more fun. I could throw more shit at them. So it was that was the fun part. Exactly. But yeah, I agree.
01:19:53
Speaker
So, Tom, you also mentioned that you're an audio engineer and a musician. Did you compose your show's music personally? The first, I want to say like 50 or so episodes, it was actually one of the players who's also a fantastic music musician, ah Guy Similia or Gaetano. That's wonderful. He played a ah ah druid, but he was the one who did the Curse of Strahd introduction that was for like the first 50 episodes of the campaign. And then my band that we we do is is but just a fun project. We composed the one that's currently going on right now we're called The Floating Lighthouse. We got ah an EP and a couple of albums on the on the streaming
01:20:34
Speaker
streaming websites but it's been one of those fun deals of just like every few three or four years will put out something but like everyone also has life stuff so it's yeah we're we're currently in the process of building our own rehearsal space as opposed to spending you know several hundred dollars a month to have a have a rehearsal space with other people that was pretty far away it was like an hour and a half drive for me one way to get there for a while so it was just after a while it's been a couple years since we've played but it's one of those things where i don't think that it it's just a matter of us picking our instruments back up and playing again it'll take a couple of weeks practicing and then we'll be right back where we were we did all of we we recorded and wrote that and uh it's a fun time
01:21:18
Speaker
It sounds like it, literally. ha um But yeah, my hat is off to you for just the overall impact of the balanced presentation of not only the podcast but the site and the fact that your players are also involved in the execution of it. that's That's just wonderful to hear. Do you have any pearls of wisdom, Tom, you would like to share with our listeners about putting an actual play together or building a team? I would say for putting together an actual play, what what we've done over the last four years has just been a constant evolution. So I would say my biggest pearl of wisdom is don't worry about having everything perfect. Just do it. Learn as you go. No one's going to be perfect the first time around. you can if you If you do shorter campaigns, unlike what i what I'm doing right now, then you will be able to take what you've learned and apply them to your next campaign. And you can do the same thing over and over again.
01:22:15
Speaker
get people that are on board with what you want to do but also aren't afraid to say no or to disagree with you and to give you a secondary opinion or a third opinion or a different perspective. I would also very highly suggest playing with um if if you have the ability to within your friend group to play with a diverse cultural group of friends because I am literally besides myself and the player that plays Hoshino
01:22:51
Speaker
ah We are the only Caucasians in the group, and it has, it had for me, honestly, it has made me more open and more, I see more things because they get brought up within sessions. i it It has made me, I think, a better a better friend to not just my friends, but being understanding of people and lives and and cultures that I'm not a part of, but I can at least, I have i have an understanding, i have I have a touchstone that I can go back to. I think it it it just broadens your horizon as a person. I think that that ultimately should be your goal in any of these games is to broaden your horizons, make more friends, make closer friends, and become a better listener. i think I think that's the biggest takeaway that I've gotten, and I think that's something that a lot of people should strive for is
01:23:50
Speaker
especially if you're going to be running a game you really need to learn how to listen yes not just hear them and wait for your turn to talk but to really take what they're saying not just in character but out of character take it and internalize it and and use it to help them get to where they want to go because as the GM you're the facilitator you're the one who is there to get them to where they want to be and if you don't listen and if you don't genuinely have a a stake in in the game regardless of if you're you know like I have we have ah the
01:24:29
Speaker
Afro-Latino, straight up African-American. We have had, I have some Vietnamese and Korean players. We have ah people from ah the LGBTQIA plus community that is playing right on. Yeah, we have, ah in fact, Salix is, Salix, one of the ah characters is canonically non-binary. Beautiful. They are what they have described, and I don't know if this is an actual thing, but I dig it so bad that we put it in the game, called themselves the Blessed of Coraline, so that they have the ability to um present as androgynous, but they can also present as male or female depending on how they are reacting or how they are feeling that particular day.
01:25:19
Speaker
that's magnificent and they will go by they them but they will also go by she her or he him depending on what their their vibe is and what's going on and that's been like one of the big things that we've done but we've also had we've had uh we've had queer characters as well queer romances and it's been it honestly has been the most fun because it feels like because i'm i'm not part of the community But it feels like I've been more accepted by the people that I play with that are in the community to to be able to give them the space that they want to be able to express ah themselves and and tell the stories that they want to tell. Even if it's not something that I'm necessarily familiar with, it's something that they want to tell and it's just as important as anything that I want to tell. Honestly, these stories have been so much richer because they are telling these stories that I would genuinely never would think of because it's not in my purview. and my purview and ah realm of experience, but I am gaining these experiences at least secondhand by seeing these things happen and hearing these plays hearing
01:26:27
Speaker
these stories and how it affects them like i obviously with my complexion i am not necessarily akin to having you know racial you racial stuff happen to me but i have learned so many things about like subtle stuff that i never would have ever seen because I play with people that have to deal with those things and I'm more sensitive and much more a q acutely aware of those things and I think it's made me a better person and I hope I've ah hope i've rubbed off on them just as much as they have on me.
01:27:00
Speaker
Absolutely. Number one, being an ally, the value of being a sincere ally cannot be overstated. So thank you for being part of that link in the chain. I could not agree more. Diversity in not only your friend group, but also the people that you play with can only improve the quality of not only your life, but also your perspective. Because privilege is not just advantages that one demographic has over another, it's also the lack of disadvantages that others face. And until those are pointed out to you, they can remain entirely invisible. So it's only by recognizing where that privilege exists that you can start to
01:27:51
Speaker
Work with it, work against it, use it to help other people. It is important that you interact with and have friends and talk to people that don't just repeat back your own opinions and share your existing views and perspectives because how in the hell are you going to grow? How in the hell are you going to learn anything other than what you already know? Absolutely. Absolutely. Tom, how can our listeners get in touch with you? I have social media stuff, but the vast majority of the time I spend on any social media is on TikTok, actually. I mean, you can find me on Twitter, I believe. On Twitter, I am IamThomasTBG, I believe is that.
01:28:37
Speaker
Details will be in the doobly-doo rest assured but And I understand that the Medusa's cascade also has a patreon. Is that correct? ah It does. We're still working on specific things. We're trying to figure out exactly what we wanted to do. We've all decided that it's it's not worth trying to put things out there. We don't have necessarily a humongous audience. And and yeah we're just happy to have people that want to listen to us and want to join us. And if we can get to a point where it's a feasible thing to ask for anybody who wants to donate to the cause to do that, then We're 100% for it, but we're also we also don't want to promise things that we might not be able to deliver. So it's one of those fun deals. Of course. Tom, thank you so, so much for joining us today. It has been an absolute delight to talk with you and learn about everything that you've done to make the Medusa's Cascade what it is. You've been delightful to talk to today. Thank you.
01:29:33
Speaker
Thank you. it's I've had a blast anytime you want to have another conversation. I'm i'm always i'm always down to chitchat. Beautiful. 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 future guests and send that lovely fan art to anywhere but now podcast at gmail dot.com. And if you'd like me to run a game for you, whether it's Doctor Who or some spooky D and&D, reach out on startplaying dot.games. Leave a review, rate the show, and follow us on Blue Sky, Twitter, and YouTube at anywhere but now and wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to join our Discord. From all of us, I'm Casey Jones. There's exciting things to come, my friends. I'm so glad you're along for the ride. Thanks so much, and have a great day.