Notes On This Week's Show That Have to Do With DMing:
-That map is just a small sketch I made of the area between the Goblin City and Vornheim so that the party could plan their route back. There are two river crossings on the map and an unknown number of river crossings not on the map. There was actually a lot (a lot) more discussion about which way to proceed than what made it into the episode, with Connie, Frankie and Satine wanting to go to The Place of Skulls (because of the name, nobody knows what's actually in The Place of Skulls), Mandy arguing for caution no matter which way they went, and Justine and KK pretty much waiting for the discussion to end so they could fight things.
-I had stuff prepared for both crossings on the map plus several other points nearby plus I had prepared for if they just decided to stay in the Goblin City or if they just headed randomly off west or east and said fuck the mission altogether. I realized after I had written all this material that every location involved pigs, warthogs, or groundhogs in one way or another.
Notes On This Week's Show That Don't Have Anything To Do With DMing:
-I stuck in a title card at the beginning of the show to explain all the things about the show that everybody who reads this blog already knows. When I watch the episode it wasn't up long enough for me to read it. I don't know whether that's a glitch or not. Either way there's nothing there you don't already know: We play D&D, we have for a long time, it's a d20/ad&d hybrid yadda yadda.
-Mandy got that all-seeing map during this adventure.
-Yup the episode is short. Some will be short, some will be long--that's the way it works.
-My Liverpool accent was well-received by actual British people which is surprising since usually I feel like you can never do a foreign accent well enough to please people actually from that place. That's nice.
-Astute viewers may have noticed that the beetles were red when the goblins were riding on them but now are suddenly green. It's a long story, but basically I painted the original beetles and Shannon at Reaper painted the second set and I liked it so I left it.
(Shannon/Qpenguin is one of the secret heroes of I Hit It With My Axe and I keep meaning to do a blog entry where I praise her to high heaven and talk about her marvelous paint jobs and the way she delivers requests for preposterous conversions with time to spare but I feel like that blog entry would need to have awesome photos of the minis to accompany it and I keep not being able to take those awesome photos--at some point I'm gonna have to sit down and do that.)
-Some people have asked why we switched sets--gold star for you if you realized that we didn't and we just turned the table a different way and shot from a different angle.
-Incidentally, the reason everybody always sits in the same place pretty much has to do with how close they need to be to the microphone. Mandy and Connie have the quietest voices so they have to sit the closest.
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19 comments:
Dipping your doughnut into your Dr. Pepper is a controversy rivaled only by dipping bacon into coffee.
I think the title card is a simple fix, & a good one for that.
I assumed the be(a)etles changed colo(u)r much like locusts do when they go from solitary to gregarious-- they were red when the bad guys rode them & then they became green when the good guys rode them. Duh.
Zak! I just want to tell you this blog and your series are totally getting me pumped to play tabletop D&D for the first time! I grew up with D&D computer games and I used to love poring over my dad's Monster Manuals, but you guys make it seem so fun I just have to try it! I hope I can find an awesome and creative group like yours!
@deirdre
hey, thanks! that's what we like to hear, here.
loved the accent. hilarious! i guess when you said you were good with voices you were simply telling the truth (at the time i read it i was a bit doubtful. shame on me i guess! :))
the title card is a good idea, but indeed wasn't up long enough to catch everything. but everyone can simply rewind the clip so it's not really a problem.
how/when do you decide how long an episode is going to be?
last, but not least, consider the pig-balloon idea stolen (by yet another viewer). awesome stuff!
Patent the goblin pig balloon and make Reaper miniaturize them before Games Workshop steals it!
I'm serious, dude!
Good episode btw.
pig baloooon! so cute. i love your Liverpool accent and i think you sound more like John then any of the other Beatles.
This was the cutest episode yet, everyone is adorable.
and i second the patenting
Bacon in booze coffee...Tell Frankie she is the biggest genius since the guy who figured out you should use chopsticks to eat cheetoes.
Every time you do the goblin Bizarro voice, I lose it.
How much time elapsed between episode 13 and this one?
Also..I want my players to fight a colossal eldrich beast. Thousands of stories tall. The dungeon is them climbing up the creature and hacking off various parts, looking for weaknesses. Any ideas for mechanics on this anyone?
I think that giant talking beetles that speak like The Beatles may be one of the best things ever. It's elaborate punnery at its best.
And yeah, the voice is pretty good. It's certainly odd to hear it coming from across the pond.
It was a brain fart on my part that I didn't make the connection between beetles and The Beatles. I noticed that they had names of the Beatles, and I recognized the Liverpool accent as being a good joke based on the Beatles, but I never made the connection till later. It was like, "Ooohhhh! They're beetles!!! I get it!"
Martian, I don't know if you need new mechanics, as you're essentially reskinning a standard dungeon. A creature that size will have parasites big enough to fight in single combat, so that's your monsters sorted. Traps and other environmental dangers are turned into the colossus' biological systems trying to expel the invaders, or the creature itself trying to swat them away.
It's the vitals which will need some work. The easiest thing to do is to have them be blobs of hit points which need to be hacked away, with some attendant parasites or hostile antibodies to protect them, but I would tend towards making them ambulatory; it's one thing for the players to reach the pulsating brain of the colossus, but another when the pulsating brain rips itself from the walls and comes for them, like the queen in Aliens.
@ Martian
One option is to have the symbionts be the means of the beast's destruction.
Sort of like the 'good bacteria' in your stomach that help digest food, if they all died, you'd have problems with eating.
If the party wipes out the symbionts at their scale (along with kelvingreen's genius idea of supersized t- and white blood cells (oozes/ slimes/ puddings and the like I imagine)the beast will slowly, but surely starve to death.
Another option is to further cast the PCs in the role of invading disease and force a bit of role-playing on them by making them turn the body of the beast's defenders back on itself.
This episode is the best yet.
The show is actually what got me interested in DnD again, and what made my wife finally give it a try. I blogged about showing it to her for the first time.
Unfortunately, that probably means she expects me to live up to you as a DM.
@deirdre: It's a shame your blog hasn't been updated in so long! The recipes you had posted were really interesting.
I can't believe my three favorite things have been combined into one moment of perfection...bacon, coffee and Frankie.
And she got Ringo.
Its kismet I tell you! Kismet!
I'll add to the chorus of praise on the Liverpudlian accent. It's essentialist I know, but one doesn't expect Americans to be able to do that.
Is the donut dipping authorization thing applicable to all DM's?
Does it matter what kind of donut, and where you buy it?
What is the number to reach you..
The pigballoons are überawesome!
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