Notes On The First Episode

-I like this episode the least. I've seen over two months worth of episodes so far and every one so far is better than the first episode: the camera is less shaky, they're funnier, you can hear people. So stay tuned.

-Name of the show courtesy of Mandy.

-We talk a little about what happened the previous session there--most of that is courtesy of my adventure-seed version of Jeff Rients carousing mishaps table.

-Music is, like I said yesterday, courtesy of The Sword. Thanks to Shiro at RPG Corner for turning me on to them. As you probably know, it's hard to play D&D without music--which creates a problem for filming the show: in order to have us really playing like normal, we need music, but we also need the licensing rights to every single note of every single song you hear a snippet of on the show. So you can't just put whatever CD on and start shooting. (This also, incidentally, is why porn music is so bad).

Since I am a big Sword-during-DnD fan I took an outside chance that they'd do it and--Hey, look at that--lucked out.

-2 Things that wound up on the cutting room floor:

Satine and Connie planning to go out the window and circle around behind the militia guys and attack them.

During the interview part of the show, me asking Kimberly how many of the people in the room she'd had sex with and her take a really long time to remember before figuring out it was 5. Out of 8.

-They start in Vornheim, right in the middle of the map.

-There will be stupid. The response to this show will include clueless D&D fan snark, clueless porn fan snark and possibly clueless stoner metal fan snark and clueless-mainstream-press-on-slow-newsday-snark. If the past is any guide, the ignorance will go viral and have serious hybrid vigor. The main problem is when they spout disinformation. If you have ever found anything on this blog enjoyable or useful or interesting, I humbly request you correct any factual errors you may see about us out there in the psychotosphere. I appreciate it.

-As of this first episode:

Frankie's a 2nd-level dark elf rogue named Varla
Kimberly's a first or 2nd-level half-elf barbarian named Rookia
Satine's a 2nd level wood elf rogue named Mirror
Connie's a first-level halfling rogue named Jinx
Mandy's a 3rd-level tiefling cleric named Tizani Ildico, which apparently means something in some actual language
Sasha's a first level tiefling wizard named Foghorn Leghorn, then she changes her name to Mowgli, and then to Mo-Dog

-Because:

-They have a pretty nice miniature for nearly every classic monster in the game
-One of their sculptors, Werner Klocke, is particularly gifted at sculpting pulchritudious and callipygous females, and
-They put out a lot of minis.

Mandy and I like, own, and operate Reaper Miniatures a lot and so when we got the go-ahead to do the show, I asked The Escapist if we could get Reaper to sponsor us and the Escapist people made some phone calls and Reaper said "Yes".

Upshot being Reaper sends us whatever minis we want for the show. Which is indeed very pleasant and makes me feel even more like a spoiled brat than I usually do while working on this project.

So I decided, to make thing simple for myself: on the TV campaign, I use monsters that I can represent pretty well with a Reaper, and for my home games I'll use all the monsters that I've got some Citadel or Ral Partha or whatever other mini for, or which are as-yet-un-minied.

Anyway, what this means is Step One involves me going through every single page of the fantasy sections of the on-line Reaper catalog and deciding who's in.

If you're wondering, looking at every single Reaper mini takes six hours. This is both fun and grueling and definitely makes your eyes hurt.

Then, once I got a list of all the minis I liked--plus thought up a few conversions we could do with Reaper parts--I grouped the monsters according to the environment I wanted them to show up in. The list of available environments were based loosely on a gameworld evolved from this map.

So then I write up a kick-off event for the campaign and think--ok, if they start here, where could they plausibly end up after two sessions? And I ask Reaper to ship all the low-level miniatures that match those environments and figure out adventure seeds I can drop around there.

Then we shoot.

Then, after that, depending on which seeds they picked up, I write up new material for wherever the party could plausibly get to in one session from there and ask Reaper to send all the stuff that matches those environments--plus any new stuff that evolved out of play. Like, for example, the girls stole some riding beetles from some goblins the other day so I got Reaper to send some riderless beetles.

I have a flowchart with all the environments in boxes with the monsters and other adventure ideas next to them for mapping out what stuff I'll need to write up when. If they do X then I have to prepare for eventualities Y and Z, if they do W, then I have to write up Q and Z, etc.

As time goes on, there will be some triggerable events that will lead to things getting horribler in one way or another (don't know what those'll be exactly--or which ones the PCs will blunder into--we'll just have to wait and see what develops) and I'll begin to throw in plot ideas based on what happens during the game that shape the material so that events in the sandbox begin to point toward the major villains.

We are using new-school level advancement, partially because that's what Satine was used to, and partially because it means people watching can actually see the PCs grow over the course of the year, but mostly because I want to be able to fit the awesome, earth-shattering monsters into the first season.