CurseMakers | Season 1 Wrap Q&A
Last time on Cursebreaker. We played our entire first campaign and we wanted to thank you all for joining us. We've had some time to process it all and we're ready to talk, So here we are. We've gathered up one last time to talk all about Cursed Breaker and what's next for Peabob. So sit back and relax with us as we answer questions from each other and from you, our listeners.
Tim / GM:Yeah. I think we can keep this one a little more casual than we have in the
Hannah / Eryn:past. We're great at casual.
Speaker 3:We're so good at that. Good at that.
Speaker 4:It's kind of
Thomas / Guy:our thing. Easy.
Tim / GM:So for the first part of this, I've just got a general wrap up reminiscing section. So all about curse breaker. So this is, like, the one of the few in character questions I'm gonna ask, and this kinda goes to all of you, and we can just go around the table. But, what did each of your characters immediately do following the events of our campaign? Holly, do you know exactly what Holly did?
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. I think Holly went back to Tildrey to spend quality time with her sister, Ivy. They hadn't really had a lot of time together, so that's probably top of her priority. And then I think Holly probably wanted to, help rebuild the business in the city of Tilderie a little bit just from the catastrophes that, the fires and all that stuff just to help the rebuild effort. And then I also think Holly would have tried so Margo bingo.
Hannah / Eryn:And correct me if I'm wrong, Tim. Margo kinda stepped up as a more of a political leader for Tildry, sort of representing the guilds. And so I think Holly would have maybe tried to backfill her in the guild as a guild leader.
Tim / GM:Definitely. Yeah. She's got a different position at this point.
Hannah / Eryn:Okay. So, yeah. I think Holly would have, like, vied for becoming the guild leader and replacing Margo Bingo. And then I also had this idea that Hollywood, eventually, after things settle down more, try to start, like, a a charity or, like, a a school maybe, for girls who wanna get into business and maybe, like, you know, underprivileged girls specifically because that was kind of her background. And so teaching them business skills or tradesmen skills so that they could go off into the world and start their own successful business just like Holly's Cobb.
Hannah / Eryn:I also think, you know, with her love life, very illustrious as we all know. But Holly would probably be seen entertaining a certain, fae elf gentleman around Tildry.
Speaker 3:Holly and Dolly.
Hannah / Eryn:Yep. Holly and Dolly hearts forever. And then I don't know if they'd like to settle down and get married and that kind of stuff, but I think they definitely would continue to see each other, romantically. And then I think anytime the curse breakers are in town, And I think her and Thibio would become, like, good dancers. Cool dancers.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. Oh, fuck yeah.
Speaker 4:I think
Tim / GM:we can say canonically too that Mina the alchemist ended up taking over the Live, Laugh, Life Juice Bar.
Speaker 3:Oh, hell yeah. Sure.
Speaker 4:Juice bar
Tim / GM:That makes sense.
Hannah / Eryn:Slash nightclub. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's a way hoppiner
Speaker 4:spot. Yeah. That's how it works. Happening. Happening.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. And then I'm sure Bert and Holly have a standing, like, coffee date once every other week or something like that just to Absolutely. See each other since we're both in Tildry.
Speaker 6:That's such a good hand off to Bert. We can skip me and come back.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Bert, well Let's
Thomas / Guy:do that.
Speaker 3:What are you up to?
Thomas / Guy:Okay. Like Holly, Bert also returned to Tildrey right away, helping rebuild the damage done a little bit by us and also by the judges. I guess his parents also returned and probably helped finance rebuilding some of those towers. And now, embarrassingly, I suppose one of them is named, like, the Wisher Spoon Wing or something. Yeah.
Tim / GM:Yep. I think that's also true.
Thomas / Guy:Bert, of course, published his book.
Tim / GM:Oh, okay. That was
Thomas / Guy:a huge priority.
Tim / GM:So the whole campaign, essentially, or it does it span beyond that?
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Yeah. It's a Bilbo situation. Sure.
Speaker 6:What's the title of the book?
Thomas / Guy:What's the title
Speaker 4:of the book?
Speaker 3:Back there again.
Thomas / Guy:It's probably just called Curse Breaker. Right?
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah. Perfect.
Thomas / Guy:It's just called Curse Breaker. I made that up.
Tim / GM:That leaves us a lot of opportunity if we wanna do, like, a novelization down the road.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It
Speaker 7:could be people being people too.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 3:People being curse breakers.
Speaker 6:People helping other people.
Tim / GM:Curse breaker.
Hannah / Eryn:No, that's the name of Holly's, charitable organization.
Speaker 6:People helping other people.
Hannah / Eryn:Pee
Speaker 7:Hop. Thomas pancakes are
Speaker 4:bad. Papa.
Tim / GM:You definitely could go The Hobbit route though and just call it curse breaker or people being people.
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah. I like that. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:So there's a little book tour probably involved that.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. He
Thomas / Guy:gets to lead the city. But, I'm also thinking Bert was offered some sort of higher up position at the tower of knowledge that maybe he took for a year and then stepped down because he didn't like the kind of bureaucratic role.
Tim / GM:Sure. That tracks.
Hannah / Eryn:Did Bert keep the book of knowledge forever? Like, did he keep it kinda secret and just have it in in his possession, basically?
Tim / GM:Yeah. That thing became really powerful.
Thomas / Guy:It sure did, didn't
Tim / GM:it? Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:Then it is probably kept safe in the Wisher spoon wing of the town of knowledge. Yeah.
Tim / GM:That makes sense. Perfect. Yeah. Tibio.
Speaker 6:So Tibio went home and immediately made the, like, hereditary necromancy, underworld, guardian thing not a secret. He encouraged his people to, like, share that knowledge, not like not in an evangelical evangelical way, but in a here's what life and death kinda look like. Here's what to look out for if somebody's promising you things that they can't really deliver. If they're promising you eternal life, that's not real. That's not safe.
Speaker 6:And I think he made an effort to kind of connect memoir with the rest of the world. Like, really reached out to Toldry and to Bert and Holly and said, hey. We need to make sure that all of the channels of communication are open in case of some other catastrophic event.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And just kind of tried to reconnect the societies of the world with the Fae and with memoir and have kind of more open communication and less secret keeping and, power hoarding. That's kind of his
Tim / GM:goals. And so does Tibeo remain in memoir, or is he kind of a worldly entity?
Speaker 6:I think he has, like, a seat in memoir that he kind of holds court in
Speaker 7:Sure.
Speaker 6:Where people can come to him if they have questions or concerns or if some random curse breaks through some random portal somewhere, he can do something about it. I think that he would travel, but he would feel very drawn to home and wanting to make sure that everything is safe there
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And starting at home and really feeling that, like, pressure or, like, not pressure, but responsibility from his, flight of fancy
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Before and knowing that he he does need to he does have a responsibility to that place.
Tim / GM:I can definitely see Tibia always having that sort of, piece of, like, his childhood and his heart where he's always gonna wanna be on some adventure.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Oh, for sure. So he takes, like, vacations pretty frequently, and they're not actually vacations. Like, he goes and he, like, does stuff, like adventures or solves a problem or goes and helps people somewhere.
Tim / GM:Mhmm. Cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I like it. Uli, probably no. Definitely settled down. Didn't okay.
Speaker 3:Hold on. Uli and Dave definitely got together at some point. Yes. Maybe not yeah. For everyone who ships Uli and Dave.
Hannah / Eryn:Yay. We all ship Uli and Dave.
Thomas / Guy:Dooley. Dooley. Hashtag Dooley.
Speaker 3:Hashtag Dooley. I I'd like to think that they don't really have what you'd consider a settled down life. Not in the, like, starting a family kinda way, but I do think that they took in Mayzie and kind of raised her together.
Speaker 6:I'm picturing them like adventuring together as a family Yeah. With little Caster Maizey.
Speaker 3:I think at some point, they would have realized that there are other people who grew up like Uli, with innate magic that can't really control it, and we're kind of villainized for it. And I'd like to think that they kind of opened their home to those kids, and we tried to teach them what she knew. And with Maisie's help, who's a magic student, would have been able to figure out some sort of program or, like, summer camp. I don't know. I just I want Lily to have learned from her past and tried to help as many people as she
Speaker 6:could. I love that. I love summer camp with
Speaker 4:Julian Dave.
Speaker 3:Summer camp with Julian Dave. I also think that
Speaker 7:Your next character is Maisie. Right?
Speaker 4:No. Okay.
Speaker 3:But they could have some ties. I don't know. We'll see. I also think that Lily started reconnecting with her family a bit more Mhmm. And repairing broken ties and old hurts and stuff.
Speaker 3:So
Hannah / Eryn:Do you think Uli and Dave would have gone back to, Hogwild, or do you think they would have just been kind of, like, one place for a few years, another place for a few years, like, try to spread around?
Speaker 3:I think home base at Hogwild for a while just because that's where the rest of the family is. But Dave's family owned that mine, and Willie always kinda had a heart for adventure. So I think there wasn't a great amount of settling any one place Mhmm. Just, going where they were needed. And definitely would go back to Tildry and visit.
Thomas / Guy:Cool.
Speaker 3:And check-in with Tibio and solve problems too. Go go where they're needed, I guess.
Tim / GM:And that leaves us with snack.
Speaker 7:Well, yeah, I'd say I don't think it's crazy to say that snack is, like, approaching, like, demigod level on on some in some ways, being able to morph into, like, a dragon that can, like, face down Idris or, like, a figure like Idris.
Tim / GM:Sure. I
Speaker 4:would say, like, in the
Tim / GM:in the power scale of D and D, I mean, you're still you're still beneath most dragons, I would say. You whereas dragons can opt to turn the dragon. Well oh, yeah. As a party.
Speaker 7:Well like, he he definitely had a lot of power. Mhmm. It was, yeah, definitely a force. And I think at this point, like, honestly, snack kind of got away from me. So I don't want to say too much about like what, I think he would do, but I'd say that like, most likely he's he his kind of like a disrupting force within like the dragon flights, which have, you know, a lot of focus on order.
Speaker 7:And then there's this wild card like creature that is, like, multiple things, multiple different elements at play. So, yeah. I I hope, he comes up in the future.
Tim / GM:Fair to say he took up Idris on his, winnings of the temple? Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 3:In the east.
Tim / GM:In the east. Yes.
Thomas / Guy:Have we all visited Snag's temple?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Have we? Interesting.
Speaker 7:I would what over what time frame? I mean, like
Thomas / Guy:Say, 15 years.
Speaker 7:Or
Tim / GM:I mean yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I think he probably appears regularly and asks everyone when we can do that.
Speaker 3:Like, so
Tim / GM:all the time, whatever you
Speaker 4:want. Yeah. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:River crosses the sky. So busy. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I'm gonna
Tim / GM:see the hot tub.
Speaker 6:East is so far, though.
Thomas / Guy:I Would you say it is east? Oh.
Speaker 3:David Foley definitely would have come visit. Yeah. Maybe not for a long time.
Speaker 7:It was a long debate on whether or not Maisie should come Right.
Tim / GM:As, like, an influence.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I
Tim / GM:suppose you could always summon people when you need them.
Speaker 4:Oh, shit. No.
Speaker 3:Yep. We never confiscated that.
Tim / GM:So for the rest of this, it'll be more, you know, our opinions about the, about the show personally rather than our characters. So just to kinda kick that off, when you think about Curse Breaker as a campaign as a whole, start to finish, you know, lamplight to Vindorn, where does your mind go right away? What's your first kind of emotional reaction to it?
Thomas / Guy:This is a hard one.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Mhmm.
Tim / GM:Because for me, the the sort of essence of Cursebreaker was, you know, you know, it's definitely like a belief in truth and a sort of, like, triumph kind of thing. It didn't hit so hard on, like, the bonds and friendship sort of thing.
Speaker 3:I wouldn't say that.
Tim / GM:Do you think it did?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, in my opinion, the whole campaign was very personal growth and, depending on each other eventually. Like, our bond got so strong that we kind of became each other at the end. Not really, but, like, everyone was influenced by each other. And and Uli had a lot of growth and started doing things that Uli wouldn't have done at the beginning of the campaign, etcetera.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I agree with what you're saying. Like, I think that the major lesson, you know, quote, unquote lesson at the end felt like it was you don't have to be what you've always been.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And part of, you know, having friends, part of having people around you is letting them do things that you can't do and do things for them that they can't do. It's it's about not always sticking to staying in your lane because it's habit and doing stuff that you know, doing stuff collaboratively.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. And and learning from each other is, like, okay.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I
Thomas / Guy:like that. I was gonna say growth too both for our characters and also us outside of the campaign. Like, we all became better players by the end
Tim / GM:of the
Thomas / Guy:campaign. Our recording got better by the end of the campaign
Speaker 3:and stuff. So I think we're all closer as friends too. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Tim / GM:So when we were actually playing, you know, for me, it took a little while to feel supernatural, not supernatural. Sorry. It took a while it took a while for it to feel, yeah, Like, it was second nature to me coming into this and just knowing what to do each session and, like, things had clicked and, you know, it all made sense. And I think for me, you know, that was probably around, episode 10 or so. What do you guys think on that?
Thomas / Guy:For me, it might have been after Bert's trial or maybe as a result of Bert's trial because that was a huge, you know, character moment for Bert and one I was very nervous about as a player. Mhmm.
Tim / GM:Because you were really on the spotlight for those 2 episodes.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. And so once that passed, I think I had a lot more confidence about who the character was in in general.
Hannah / Eryn:I don't remember which episode it was. It might be Beach Days and Destiny, episode 7.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Hannah / Eryn:And I think it was when we met the curse breakers on the road and kind of started learning more about that lore Yeah. I think that kind of made the campaign, like, start to build for me as, like, a bigger story. Because I think before that, the time we were in Lamplight was very, like, you know, more of just, like, a smaller town story kind of at that point. So I think it was that episode. I'm not sure if that's right or not.
Hannah / Eryn:Whenever we met those travelers and learned kind of about Yeah. The curse breaker tattoos and stuff.
Speaker 3:Giving direction to where we were headed. Yeah. I think I think around 6 or 7 for me too, but I think that's when I started getting comfortable with who Uli was as a character Mhmm. As opposed to who I created her to be.
Hannah / Eryn:I feel like there was a switch, and I maybe you'll speak more to this later in the episode, but I feel like there's definitely a switch in Uli of, like, all of a sudden, it felt like you, Maggie, kind of figured out, oh, I don't just have to give one word answers and be like, yeah. No. I'm a tough chick. Yeah. And, like, you started to, like, grow into that character more.
Hannah / Eryn:Like, there was definitely a decision I feel like you made about the character maybe or, like, just decided, like, I wanna play them in this way a little bit differently. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There was more of a it was like a letting go
Speaker 6:and just
Speaker 3:letting her be Yeah.
Speaker 4:Me, I
Hannah / Eryn:guess. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I love that. Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:That's cool.
Speaker 7:I think, like, an element of comedy is so, like, important for anything like this. So, really, I think it was, honestly, like, the country gnomes moment Yep. When they were, like, kinda clicked for me. It was like, I think more than just us would probably find this funny at this point. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And then I was like, okay. We're actually doing something people might like.
Tim / GM:That's what I was waiting for too. It was a genuine moment that really
Thomas / Guy:got me.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Where we just it was, like, truly a sign off where we
Speaker 4:were just, like, dying. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yep. I think that was the first moment where we all
Speaker 4:just, like,
Speaker 3:couldn't hold it in anymore.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We weren't in character. We kept breaking, and
Tim / GM:I don't know. So let's so if we're good with that question, that actually segues really nice into the second part of this. What are some behind the scenes memories that you have from recording? Because episodes 9 and 10 were recorded in the same night, and it was a miserable recording.
Speaker 6:Oh my god.
Tim / GM:Five and a half hours long.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. That's right.
Hannah / Eryn:And
Speaker 3:it was so hot.
Speaker 6:The wettiest, the buggiest, the worst evening of my life, but the recordings were just pure gold.
Speaker 7:Yes. Maybe we need to turn the temp up.
Speaker 4:There have been.
Hannah / Eryn:Turn the temp up. Take the clothes off, baby. That's how this pod records.
Thomas / Guy:There were other sessions where, like, I was not in a great mood or it was uncomfortable because it was hot or whatever that turned out into really good episodes. Yep.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Just
Thomas / Guy:like It seems like that doesn't influence
Tim / GM:Apparently not. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Or it's, like, so much suffering. You just, like, need to be somebody somebody else.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. It could be.
Speaker 6:It's it's interesting because I think what you guys have all said about your experiences with certain episodes really dictating how kinda in it you feel. For me, it wasn't that at all. For me and Tibio, it was 100% the voice. As soon as I had the voice down, I was in it and I was him. So, like, I couldn't tell you which episode it was, but it must have been in the 1st month of recording, like, probably the first four episodes.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Suddenly, I had the voice and it was easy. I didn't sound like Borat anymore.
Hannah / Eryn:Only only when you tried to do the what accent on top of Tobias
Speaker 6:accent? When you guys started making me do accents on accents, I was like, I'm gonna die.
Speaker 3:Louis Armstrong. Yes. Louis talked to you as a couple that it was the fucking funny thing. Stop crying.
Hannah / Eryn:But that
Speaker 6:I mean, that was it for me. Like, I I didn't have any there were so many individual moments in each of those episodes that you guys are talking about where I felt like really, like, as a player, really engaged and really, like, in it like, invested in it. But as Tibio, it after the voice came through, it was so easy for me to just be in that moment, be him and think as him, and then kind of outside of it, like, over my own shoulder, be Tara. Mhmm. You know, rolling the dice, watching my screen, blah blah blah.
Speaker 6:So it's it's really interesting to talk about that kind of thing.
Thomas / Guy:My bones.
Speaker 3:Oh, I man, we have edited these episodes down so much that there are, like, so many jokes. I don't even remember if they're in the episodes or if we cut them. But there's, I guess behind the scenes would be icebreakers Mhmm. Because we didn't really release we released some of them.
Thomas / Guy:A couple. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But there
Speaker 3:are a few that we never did. Yeah. And those are, like, pretty good memories. Did we release the one where everybody switched spots?
Tim / GM:I think we did.
Hannah / Eryn:Okay.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Tim / GM:Yeah. That was great.
Speaker 4:That was I think that was my favorite.
Tim / GM:There's a hot tub one too or, like, a a spa kind of thing. Oh, yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:Onsen or what however you say it.
Speaker 3:Onsen. Onsen spa.
Hannah / Eryn:Hot tub.
Speaker 3:There was one we didn't release.
Hannah / Eryn:Where we all were babies.
Speaker 3:We were all babies.
Speaker 4:Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:A lot of poop jokes.
Speaker 6:Okay. Okay. Okay. Now I have to talk about it. Okay.
Speaker 6:So I have a request for campaign 2.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And that is we gotta stop with the pee pee poo poo. We gotta stop. We need to stop. Not just for our listeners, for my own mental health. Like, it is fucking obnoxious how, like, how often we devolved into pee pee poo poo.
Speaker 7:I mean, how many times do you pee in a day? Like
Speaker 4:We don't even talk about it. Spider wise.
Speaker 6:It's assumed. No. We don't need to talk about it.
Hannah / Eryn:It's a universal connecting threat of humanity.
Speaker 6:Don't need
Speaker 3:to talk about it all the time.
Speaker 6:All the time. It made sense for Snack to occasionally pee in a corner because he was a wild animal. That was funny, though. That was very funny. But when it evolved into all of us suddenly talking about pee pee poo poo all the time, I was like, I'm gonna flip this table.
Speaker 3:It doesn't cuddle it out.
Thomas / Guy:To me. Yes.
Speaker 6:I did not consent to pee pee poo poo.
Speaker 3:Okay. Next campaign. No.
Hannah / Eryn:I will say a lot of that probably stemmed from me because my family does that at, like, just family gatherings. And my poor mother is like, why does she, like, cried once because she's like, why does every family dinner have to talk about boom? Because she was, like, genuinely upset with all of us.
Tim / GM:Kinda riding on the back of that, behind the scenes memories, does anybody have any tough memories or big adjustments we had to make?
Hannah / Eryn:It's fucking hot in Maggie's house sometimes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I know. I'm sorry.
Speaker 6:And the bugs. The bugs. But in here, it's not a big deal. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:There there's usually a few misunderstandings between me and Tim that get a little heated
Tim / GM:Sure.
Speaker 3:That we tend to cut.
Hannah / Eryn:I think that happens between Yeah. Other players too, not just you guys.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Like yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:I don't know.
Speaker 3:I mean, we've worked on it. It's a lot better.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And no none of you have to hear it. So
Speaker 7:I I guess one, I I I love this and I hate it at the same time, but it's always like, should we put the cats away? And it's like, maybe this time it won't
Speaker 4:be a problem.
Speaker 3:It's always a problem.
Speaker 7:Maybe they just won't today for
Speaker 4:some reason.
Speaker 6:They won't cat this time.
Speaker 7:Okay. So, like, in about a half an hour, we'll stop recording and
Speaker 4:keep it that way instead of
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. The time they like these multiple times. I think one time he knocked the computer that we record on off the stand it sits on. And then another, there were several times he just stepped on it and stopped recording. Yeah.
Speaker 3:God. And I keep thinking, I'll just hold on to him. It'll be fine. He just wants to be in his arms. It's never fun.
Speaker 3:Never fun. He, like, cannot not do it. So
Speaker 7:It's fun.
Speaker 4:I think
Speaker 3:there was one episode we brought Lyra and, like
Speaker 6:Oh my god.
Speaker 3:Never again. Lyra recorded for maybe, like, an hour total.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And that was a tough
Tim / GM:one too. I think you can hear a little bit her in there. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:She's immortalized. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So as
Tim / GM:far as the plot goes of Curse Breaker, I I tried to do my due diligence with the Chekhov rule and not leave a whole lot of loose threads, but there were a few of them. Are there any that stand out to you guys or things that you're really still kind of wanting to know? Not that I'll tell you. But
Speaker 3:Danny Deep Pockets slash Carl Hart dude. I don't remember.
Hannah / Eryn:The Danny Deep Pocket salesman.
Speaker 3:The, like, fae trickery salesman thing. I didn't it felt like there was going to be more to that because he was trying to get our names and everything, and then it just didn't. And I I was always curious if that was going to be a plot thread that we never followed because we kind
Speaker 6:of turned into my cabbages
Speaker 3:kinda guy. But it it felt like Tim was trying to convince us to, like, get involved with this stuff. And then, we just totally fucked that shit up. Because Holly was like, no.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And then
Speaker 3:and then Snack bought bidet and, like, did it by the cart.
Speaker 7:I'm pretty sure I told him my name too. Yeah. Like, no consequences on that one, but thank goodness. We didn't know of.
Thomas / Guy:That was an all timer episode for the party just derailing.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah.
Thomas / Guy:Everything damn was gonna happen.
Tim / GM:And then, yeah, naming bidet in the first place. Yeah. They were big.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I don't I don't know. I just it's interesting to think about going into this campaign from the get go thinking that Tibio is a certain thing and having all of the things in memoir be basically Tim's idea. Like, I didn't have any ideas for he was not intended to be king of the underworld. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I'll say that. Like, that was that was a Tim creation that ended up really being super cool and a real really interesting journey for Tibio. But, like, I just think about how how simple our characters may have been at the beginning and how complex they were by the end and Mhmm. How they affected each other. It's just a really cool thing.
Hannah / Eryn:I think Tim does a really good job as a DM or GM of helping you start with this kernel of an idea. Right? And that's D and D in general too, but I think Tim really fosters, like, your character throughout the campaign, which I think is one of my favorite things that you do. And, like, help that,
Tim / GM:I foster care of your characters. Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:So I know. Like, help them grow into something more. Like, you know, like, you you don't just let us play the same note over and over again, which I think is good. For sure.
Speaker 3:You also have a really good grasp on knowing everyone's loose threads and somehow weaving them together, which is really interesting because I couldn't do it. Yeah. I have no idea.
Hannah / Eryn:The magic weave and Holly being able to see that was never something I came up with. That was Tim came up with that.
Speaker 3:Same with Uli for being able to touch it and control it. Like, I don't know. It's just a very interesting concept, and then Mhmm. Our characters ended up being pretty close in that regards, I think.
Speaker 6:And the tears and the Weave being portals to the underworld and having that all the curse breaking and the underworld necromancy stuff being the same shit was, like, mind blowing to
Speaker 3:me. Mhmm.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. I think that was really cool. So good job, Tim. Yes. I'm glad we'd pay you something for something.
Tim / GM:Does anybody have a single standout memory or the biggest laugh from this campaign?
Hannah / Eryn:Oh my god. When we named bidet Yeah. That was when I lost my shit the most probably that I can remember. Mhmm. And I think that's in the recording of that episode too.
Hannah / Eryn:I think you clipped. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a very loud laugher and and loud person.
Speaker 3:My my favorite was the Bert's room screaming. Doesn't
Speaker 7:really scream Bert. The recording.
Speaker 3:No. I did. It's It did.
Thomas / Guy:Summer yeah. We had it down, I think. But yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm, like, not to toot my own horn. It was funny, but then everybody, like, cry laughing after that. And, like, we cut probably 2 minutes out of that laugh break. Like, it went on for a while. Yeah.
Tim / GM:That's that's actually something I might do less of in the future is cutting out our own laughter. I I sometimes cut it out because I'm like, okay. We're really patting ourselves in the back. No. But it But honestly, it's it's worth it sometimes.
Hannah / Eryn:Mhmm. Yeah. It was
Speaker 3:it was just one of those moments where everything was hilarious. And and after the fact, Tara and I kept laughing about something. And was it the same joke or it was something else?
Speaker 6:It was the same shit. We are just,
Speaker 3:like, lost
Speaker 6:in it.
Speaker 3:Keep it together. Yeah. Those are my favorite. I like when we kind of devolve.
Hannah / Eryn:I have another one too. So when John so John recorded some of the music with Tara, on his own, their own. And so we didn't hear it until, like, sometimes when the episode had posted. So we were hearing it at the same time. So when the 4 l juice bar
Speaker 6:Oh my god.
Hannah / Eryn:My god. When the nightclub okay. So John is singing in the nightclub song, and I, like, burst out laughing, like, in a good way.
Tim / GM:The fizzle potions 1?
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. The fizzle potions.
Tim / GM:The f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f
Speaker 4:f f f
Speaker 6:f f
Speaker 3:just Pristine Digitation.
Hannah / Eryn:I lost it in the car when I was listening to that.
Speaker 6:We were we were driving together. Chicago. Yeah. So it's Maggie, myself, Tara, and, Tim were in the car together. I was driving, and you guys played that song because John sent it to us.
Speaker 6:He had a long weekend by himself just recording in his office.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:We put it on
Speaker 6:the car speaker and played it, and we're all like, oh, yeah. This is a bop. Alright. And then it got to the part where he was speaking, and we all were you know, I almost crashed
Speaker 4:the car.
Speaker 3:I almost crashed the car.
Speaker 7:I'm I'm noticing something because, like, just to paint a picture of recording that song, we had a new puppy that was, like, just barking. I couldn't run the AC while I was recording, so it was, like, middle of summer, just like a 100 degrees in the room. And I'm just, like, waiting for windows when the dog is asleep so that I can record this. I'm just dripping in sweat, like, and laughing to myself. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So I
Speaker 7:think, like, overheating is, like, it's the key. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Just fry your brain a
Speaker 4:little bit.
Speaker 7:Gets that comedy.
Hannah / Eryn:Literally sweatshop, work conditions here
Speaker 3:at Peabot Podcast. Suffering brings about the best ideas. I'm sweating right now. I know.
Speaker 6:Oh, that was so good, though. There's yeah. We had a lot of fun recording the music for this, but it was also a lot of work, like the Tibio theme. Oh, I can finally share that the Tibio theme was in was in all parts come up with while I was on the toilet, which is not pee pee poo poo, but it is pretty close.
Speaker 3:It is
Thomas / Guy:pee pee poo poo
Speaker 6:poo poo poo poo poo.
Hannah / Eryn:You are part of the problem.
Speaker 6:It's my fault. I came up with both of those little kernels of melodies
Speaker 4:Colonels of melodies.
Speaker 6:In the bathroom.
Hannah / Eryn:So what you're saying is pee pee poo poo can be really inspirational.
Speaker 4:Jesus Christ.
Thomas / Guy:There was a maybe 40 or 50 episode gap between when we first saw Dave and Buster together and when we
Tim / GM:saw them again. Oh
Speaker 6:my god.
Tim / GM:Oh, that's right.
Speaker 6:When we realized Dave and Buster and then Hannah realized Dave and Buster.
Thomas / Guy:40 episodes later.
Tim / GM:And I think Hannah did realize it in the beginning and again.
Thomas / Guy:But just for now.
Hannah / Eryn:That's very typical.
Speaker 3:For Hannah.
Thomas / Guy:You got 2 jokes out of it.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. I did. It's great.
Tim / GM:Yeah. I don't know. Like, there's so much emergent stuff that comes at the table that's so funny. But then for you guys to come back with stuff is always the best for me. And a lot of it is just, like, the performative aspect of it.
Tim / GM:Mhmm. And so, like, some of the biggest laughs I got personally were, like, from Tibio and just some of the accent,
Speaker 4:like, describing
Tim / GM:to the giant and the volcano, you know, like, the giant was asking what their favorite traps were. And Tibia's response was, oh, yes. I very much like the stales that make you go blind.
Speaker 4:Cute.
Thomas / Guy:The architect was super funny.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That was really good. That was very good. Yeah. A lot of those moments in as Tibio, I don't even realize what I'm saying.
Speaker 6:I'm just saying words in Tibio's voice, and it's just chaos coming out of my mouth. And I don't know what I've said until I hear
Speaker 4:it back.
Speaker 3:Well, you do it well. Thanks.
Hannah / Eryn:I also think that, Maggie's really good at coming up with puns, and I love puns. So I always like and she I always tried to encourage
Speaker 3:inappropriate timing. I think the second half of the campaign, I've definitely Yeah. Just let them happen more. Or maybe to a fault.
Speaker 6:No. It's true. It was good.
Tim / GM:I think, Snacks Escalation of Farewell was really big thing.
Speaker 6:Oh my god. Farewell is,
Speaker 3:like, the best thing that ever happened.
Speaker 6:Farewell was such a good character.
Speaker 4:My god.
Tim / GM:His antics continued to escalate throughout the appearances of Farewell. So if you listen to the very last instance of it in Vindorn, when he's on the bridge talking to, you know, like, the guards that won't
Speaker 6:let him rip. Yeah.
Tim / GM:Both Jimmys. He's really leaning in and you can you can practically feel farewell breathing on your neck being, like and he says something, like, he's, like, what's
Speaker 4:this? What's this?
Tim / GM:You get so irritated and so charmed by farewell at
Speaker 4:the same time. So good.
Tim / GM:Alright. Let's move on to our next section here. These are questions from me to our players. Right. I finally get to find out what you really thought of the Cursebreaker campaign.
Tim / GM:My first questions to all, there are a few big reveals or surprises throughout the campaign. How much of that was actually surprising, and did you have your own theories as these things were developing? Some of the I might might have missed some big reveals, but to me, they were like Holly's sister being a chameleon was a big one for me. Curses being undead spirits, Tibeo being the guardian of the underworld, Genie being a spirit, and Joe getting his dragon.
Speaker 7:I almost wanna talk about a couple, but I'd say the Anri being Holly's sister. Mhmm. Like, when that scene happened and also, like, I mean, I I've been watching things like Critical Role now and stuff like that. But, when it was revealed that that chameleon was Holly's sister and this was just a secret, Hannah had with Tim this whole fricking time, I was like, you can do that? Like, Like, my mind was blown.
Speaker 7:I was like, you can wow. Yeah. So I think that was like such like a that one has like a high impact.
Hannah / Eryn:Cool.
Speaker 7:And I I'd say for, like, Genie, like, I wanna respond to that one since I was snack. Like, I I feel like it's like doing, like, the I got your nose trick to a kid on some level. But but, like, honestly, like, it never ever occurred to me that Jeannie was cursing me until that reveal happened.
Speaker 4:Same. I was like I
Speaker 7:was like, I think that just, like, speaks to, like, how good it was and, like, subtle because I know you've dropped hints and stuff and, like, it just didn't totally didn't notice. So listeners, you're probably smarter than me.
Tim / GM:Yeah. I'd I'd love to find out, kind of, what the other theories out there were as these things were developing, which it's kind of also great that we didn't really have that dialogue with any kind of audience. You know, there wasn't you know, for this campaign, we didn't really have a a a conversation, and and everything kind of developed in a vacuum. So it's really interesting to see the result of that.
Speaker 3:I I am privileged because I live with the DM. So I get to know a lot of these things early. But I feel like it doesn't affect the way I play, and it still feels like a surprise when it happens in session because I I know the basic theory behind all of it, but the way it comes about and the big reveals and how, like, dramatized it is and and how everyone else reacts to it, like, makes it like I'm hearing it the first time, which is really cool. But I I never really get to theorize unless you're letting me do that. You're like, do you wanna know?
Tim / GM:Alright. Anything else on that same question? Yeah. Theories or big reveals?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I guess I have a couple of thoughts. The chameleon being Ivy was not a surprise to me because you have a sister. Except it kind of was. So for me, going into it with the, like, the dropping of the clues of, like, Ivy disappeared.
Speaker 6:She didn't know where her sister was. She had this chameleon, and she had, like, this kind of feeling that it was her sister and all that stuff. I was like, it's gotta be her. It's gotta be her. And then eventually I was like, would
Speaker 3:that be too easy? Maybe it's gonna doubt yourself.
Speaker 6:Maybe they're gonna transfiguration this fucking chameleon and find out it's not her. Maybe that's the trick. So I kept going back and forth. I'm like, it's gotta be. It can't be.
Speaker 6:It's gotta be. It can't be. And then it was. And just the way that, Hannah, you played that was heart wrenching.
Hannah / Eryn:Aw.
Speaker 6:It was beautiful. There's a lot of times that Holly was a very, like, exuberant and chaotic character in a very fun way.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:But I think those moments with Ivy, especially, you really you really brought the chops.
Hannah / Eryn:Mhmm. I could, like, not especially when she changed back to human, there are parts or like Tim's flashback to when we were kids. Like, I can get teary eyed just thinking of it. I'm a really easy crier. And so, like, it's it was almost hard for me to even play those scenes because I'm legitimately, like, trying to hold back tears.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So Yeah. You you played them powerfully. It was really well done. Even though you knew that it was coming, there was no it didn't feel cheap.
Speaker 6:It felt very earned. It felt it was like a very satisfying, in the way that reading the same book over and over is satisfying because you know the plot so you know exactly what's gonna hit you. And, like, that that moment, even though I had that inkling that it was how it was gonna play out, was still really powerful and really surprising in the best way. So credit to you and Tim for
Speaker 3:that. Mhmm.
Hannah / Eryn:I think a big reveal for me, like, was with Bert's character when, he could turn back time. Oh. Yeah. I mean, I know it was something that maybe I don't know if you had it planned at all, but, like, when that whole scene happened and time rewound and we and then he made the decision to keep it as it was. I don't know.
Hannah / Eryn:I just think that whole segment was really cool and just, I felt like brought the campaign to kind of this cool magical level maybe that we hadn't seen before, yet in the campaign. And so, like, I don't know. That was one of my favorite parts was the the rewind episode. That was
Tim / GM:That was actually my favorite part. That was deeply unplanned. Yeah. So the way that rewind episode was written, actually or the way I had my kind of session notes planned out was that it was the rewind was just going to kind of happen or or the the fake future that they all experienced. So, basically, like, time was gonna be rewound, and then, you know, it would be that Flan cast herself off the building, and then, Jinx just gives up, and that would have been the end of it.
Tim / GM:But, actually, at the table, I felt the vibe kind of plummet when that happened, and I was, like, this doesn't it doesn't feel right. And so I did the rest of that was just kind of Hell,
Thomas / Guy:yeah.
Tim / GM:Freewheeling and seeing what we could come up with after that.
Speaker 3:And then just the way it happened in, like, after editing with the music rewind
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 3:And, like, it being not super planned is, like, the coolest part of that, I think. Because it Mhmm.
Speaker 4:It
Speaker 3:is probably my hands down favorite moment of the series because of just the way it, like, feels when that happens. Mhmm. I get shivers every time I listen to it. It's very cool.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. Sorry. Go ahead.
Speaker 7:Oh, and and Thomas wrote that theme for that scene too.
Tim / GM:That's right. Yeah.
Speaker 7:It just, like it just fit so well.
Thomas / Guy:Very personally connected.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Just a very burnt scene. That's that was one of those moments that was one of those moments that I think we each had them in the series at some point, especially toward the end where it felt like we were really our character and our character got to have a really truly themselves moment.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And that was Bert's really truly himself moment where he he got to say no. Truth does come first.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Truth is truth. And regardless of what powers there are, you know, whatever these other people are trying to tell me is truth or is a lie or what what I can or can't do. Yeah. Truth is truth, and that matters.
Tim / GM:And if I can speak to exactly that for a second, there were a couple times where I mean, I think all of you had at least one moment where just it's like it couldn't have been written better the way that it came out naturally. And that like, that's the kind of emergent stuff that always just works out so nicely. A lot of the interactions between Genie and Snack towards the end and Idris was just so cinematic the way it played out. And, you know, even Uli coming into her own, there's a moment right towards the end where, you know, somebody asks Uli if she feels ready for it, and then you're, like, no. And then you actually stop, and you go, yes.
Tim / GM:And you kinda, like, change your mind in the moment, and that was really big.
Thomas / Guy:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I feel like the last episode specifically, everyone got a moment like that too, which was like again, you couldn't have written it. It somehow happened, and that was a 2 parter also. Mhmm. We've recorded part 1 and 2 in 1 one night. And just, like, everything coming together, and the roles were perfect, and it just was, like, very cool.
Speaker 6:Even the bad roles were perfect. Even the bad
Thomas / Guy:roles. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. For you to see
Hannah / Eryn:something handy. If we
Thomas / Guy:can get back to how great Bert is. You list on here as the surprises Joe getting a dragon. Yeah. And that, that's something I was really appreciative of with my character. As a knowledge cleric, he got access to Scry, that spell.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. And Scry ended up bringing a lot of, like, really great endings to episodes by having some big, like, mic drop reveal.
Tim / GM:Yeah. The ultimate cliffhanger tool.
Thomas / Guy:Joe getting a dragon, seeing Ilia as the, like, vessel
Speaker 4:for Orza.
Thomas / Guy:I think there are at least 1 or 2 others
Tim / GM:here that I'm not thinking of. But
Speaker 3:Just like watching Joe kind of break down.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Mhmm. And I think, yeah, a lot of campaigns, you know, kind of shy away from things like Scry or things that are gonna tell you the future in some way. Right. But it's like, man, those are such good, like, foreshadowing opportunities.
Speaker 3:Oh, man. Yeah.
Speaker 6:There's a lot of good stuff.
Tim / GM:So kinda moving on to my personal questions for each of you. I've just got a little little sample platter here. Let's start with Uli, because my first one is more beef than anything. You threw a unique challenge at me by deciding to have 8 NPCs as immediate family members. How did they turn out compared to your first thoughts?
Speaker 3:Oh, boy. So I think there was a conversation at one point, where you were like, what is her backstory? I need her family members. And I was like, alright.
Thomas / Guy:And
Speaker 3:then I wrote 8 of them.
Hannah / Eryn:Well, I
Tim / GM:think as usual, you started by drawing each of them. Right?
Speaker 3:I had an an image in mind for them. I I think it took me a while to draw them, but, yes, aesthetically, I started with everything like I do. But I didn't really have, like, a plan for any of them. I just knew that I wanted my family and me to have, like, kind of a shaky connection. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I thought it made it it made more sense to have a very large, very well connected family that I felt like the outsider
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:From. So that's really all I I had planned for them. I think I gave you descriptions and, like, a basic personality for each of them Yeah. And just kinda let you have at it. So, it was very much a surprise hearing you act them out.
Speaker 3:I think I didn't expect Benth to be or shit.
Speaker 4:Which one
Speaker 3:Barrett was the quiet one. Right? Yeah. Barrett. I didn't expect Barrett to be the way he was, and I think he's my favorite out of all of them.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 6:He was very cool. And, also, I love that he had that, anti magic Yeah. Flavor to him, which kind of offset Uli's, and it made the reveal of the of your dad's magic history even more cool because it wasn't just you. It was also it affected more than just your you and Mhmm. Maybe there's more in your family than you thought, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:And that was that was kind of interesting character development wise because it, like, kind of solidified my feelings of, being the black sheep, I guess.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Where I thought that maybe I was just an outsider. Maybe I was just imagining it. But the fact that he had access to magic and I Uli still grew up thinking that she was the problem Mhmm. Was, like, very interesting.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I didn't plan that. So
Tim / GM:another big part of Uli for me as a DM was trying to mechanically represent, your your kind of control arc or you're gaining control over your magic. So abilities like assimilation, which was a really early one, your rage and surge, which came up a lot. I think that was your kind of bread and butter. The spell sculpting that came a little later, and then finally, your Uli patch. How did they play out from your perspective mechanically and narratively?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So starting out, I just knew that I wanted her to be kind of very tied to her emotions.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And didn't I hadn't really given thought to how that could develop or change. So when you started throwing the control stuff at me with Ryn and, like, learning how to shield and and spell sculpt. I really wasn't expecting it, but it made me start thinking about how I wanted Uli to develop and, like, where I wanted her to go from there. So it it kind of helped me figure out Uli as a character. And then you and I kind of collaborated then from that moment on, like, oh, wouldn't it be really cool if she had a mirror that, like, let her change her emotions?
Speaker 3:Because I was, at that point, like, getting really frustrated that I had to be this surly, awful character, or the patches, I don't think did you come up with that, or did I?
Tim / GM:So well, I actually initially made your overalls pretty lame in comparison to everybody else's fay gift. Yeah. And then yours kept expanding over time.
Speaker 3:And I think I I didn't know about the patches. So I think there was a moment where I was like, is that all they do? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Because I remember It
Tim / GM:was just some AC or something.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was, fire resistance. Yeah. Yeah. And then a little AC, and I was like, okay.
Speaker 3:Oh, cool. I guess.
Speaker 4:And
Speaker 3:you were like, just let it happen.
Speaker 6:Can we touch on the mirror really briefly?
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. The mirror that I totally forgot about, like, halfway through the campaign.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I'm glad that got dropped.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:I when you first pulled that out and then it gave you this opportunity to completely change Uli without any, like what felt like without any consequences. I was like, Mhmm. Because I I wanted that arc. I wanted that that satisfying conclusion for Uli to come into her own gradually. And it was I definitely understood where you're coming from because you were very frustrated and you were really feeling it, and it was hard for you to find a way to kind of get Uli out of that in a natural way.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:But I think that those brief moments of using the mirror and kind of feeling how unsatisfying it was Yeah. Really kicked Uli into high gear as far as, like, personal growth. And I think it it turned out really well. But Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So I'm I'm glad the mirror got
Hannah / Eryn:dropped.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Me too. Well, it'd be really hard.
Hannah / Eryn:It was also right before we went to Hog Wild because that was in Tildry, I think, when you got the mirror around then. And then we went to Hog Wild next. So it was almost like emotional training wheels for Uli. And so you were like, I'm a different emotion today from the mirror. And then you sort of you've used it a little bit after that.
Hannah / Eryn:But then, like, really after your time with your family in Hog Wild, like, you were your own, like, character, you know, comfortable. I felt like Maggie with Uli's emotions and, like, I think it's because Uli was getting more comfortable. Right? And so, like, I don't know. I feel like it was the training wheels were able to come off, which AKA were was the mirror.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I can touch on that a little later because there was a lot it wasn't just character growth. There was a lot of Maggie growth. So it was it was a lot of me in the character and, like
Tim / GM:yeah. So
Thomas / Guy:We were talking a little bit ago about how everybody had a great character moment that shined in the last episode and, the moment with Uli splitting into her double or whatever and fully accepting that was really good.
Speaker 3:I think I legitimately cried.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So yeah. Ugh, guys, they're gonna cry again.
Tim / GM:Snack. It is your turn.
Speaker 7:Hit me.
Tim / GM:Eldridge Blast. Your your relationship with Genie, in a lot of ways, you know, not so discreetly, was a direct line to the DM, and that that definitely was not by accident. How do you feel that affected the game, and how did it affect Snack's emotional growth and his journey?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I've so, Snack as a character, I think trusted Genie implicitly ever since he committed to making Snack a Dragon. So from the character perspective that, like, it was really unwavering for me as a player. I left a lot open to the GM, Tim, on what Genie actually is, and it wasn't, like, it wasn't decided whether or not Genie was actually, like, benevolent for a long time. And I I think that just became apparent, as those characters developed.
Speaker 7:But I was fully prepared for Genie to be manipulating Snack to be doing something like that.
Tim / GM:Mhmm. So it
Speaker 7:wasn't until later into the game where Genie was kind of like almost a a lifeline to the, DM for hints or on what we should do. I suppose we did do that a bit with, like, how to handle curses because Jeanne knew how to handle those. But, yeah, I I guess I I didn't, see it that way, but I definitely used it in those situations where, me and Snack didn't know how to handle the the curse, like, climax situation.
Tim / GM:Yeah. I just like having that option of being able to kind of communicate in a way that's still at the table and still in the recording, you know, and it's not like a, alright. Let's back up, guys. Like, what's going on here? You know, to keep it all kind of in the scene.
Tim / GM:So the other part of Snack that we love to joke about is that Snack was a powerhouse, especially in the late game. What was it like to manage that kind of lethal force in a narrative campaign? Because there's a lot you could have done.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think this is what is kinda like, there's just an inherent benefit of putting microphones in front in front of ourselves, trying to make something into listenable and interesting. Like, we're very it's there's a lot of incentives not to just, cheese Mhmm. Like, things like, I got, like, the, the gavel
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Which allows me to summon anyone with the Tildry tattoo. I think that's, like, the best example to use where, what I would say is snack is almost like a personification of that, like, fae bargain or like the gin genie bargain where you can wish for something, but you're not gonna quite get what you actually want.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So every time, like a situation I would use something like the gavel, it would be like, did you really wanna ask Snack to do that? Because this is what you're getting.
Tim / GM:And I felt like that's why it was so safe to give us something that's give Snacks something that's such an obvious mechanical advantage because he wouldn't have the wherewithal to employ it in that cheesy way.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So it was it was hard to use these things, like in a fun way. It was, but it was hard because I didn't want to abuse it. I want it to be interesting if I did use it. And of course, like, I'm constantly thinking I could, I could fix this cause I could have done blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 7:But I didn't, I didn't want to choose like that situation. I wanted to think like snack did, which is just chaos. So
Speaker 6:yeah. And that's, I mean, that's perfect for like, John was the exact right person to hand this to, to hand that opiness to. Opiness.
Speaker 4:John's opiness.
Hannah / Eryn:Pee pee poo poo.
Speaker 4:Just saying Antara.
Speaker 3:Jonzo Jonzo penis,
Speaker 4:by the
Tim / GM:way. No. We kept it in.
Speaker 6:No. But my what I'm trying to say is John as a player is so incredibly thoughtful and is thinking about the campaign, is thinking about the story, is thinking about the listener experience Mhmm. And wants to be, you know, constantly improving those things. So having you play the character that has all these overpowered crazy abilities but wouldn't be able to figure out how to use them because he's a big dumb baby. Like, of course.
Speaker 6:That's so perfect because you would never you would never go to those extremes. You would always make the choice that makes the most sense for the character, for the story, and all of that. So I think that was just really well done.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. That's a good point. The so the other, like, games and campaigns I played with John, John is usually more of a, like, support based, like and John's also a very good player at making other people at the table look good or, like, you know, empowering them to do their thing.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Thomas / Guy:So it was a fun twist to give snack every
Speaker 6:spell and box.
Speaker 4:Toy. Snack was
Speaker 6:very good. Toy.
Tim / GM:Did you ever feel like you were pulling punches? I I I can see the diff the I can see the motivation to not wanna cheese things, to make it listenable. But did you feel like you were ever, really holding back with what was available to you?
Speaker 7:No. Not really. Because, yeah, I was, like, very much in the mindset of snack, which, like, you yeah. You have to you'd have to, like, hold his head and make him, like, look at something to, like,
Speaker 4:do, like, the
Speaker 7:optimal thing. Sure. So I never felt like I had to do that.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Tibio. Uh-oh.
Tim / GM:Tibio had a heavy storyline, probably more than anybody else, and it centered a a lot around a literal duty and obligation to oversee the gate in Laporte Dela Nuit. How did his obligations affect the the way that you played the character?
Speaker 6:Tibio started out as a very I don't know. I wanted him to feel like a kid. I wanted him to feel very young, and I wanted him to feel like, he had a certain energy and exuberance and naivete. Yeah. Even in his interactions with the world.
Speaker 6:But I also wanted to pull on those ideas of duty and obligation and loss, really, because he was looking for his parents. He didn't know where they were, and he felt like he was losing his childhood. He felt like he was losing his family. He felt like he couldn't do anything right, but he still had that, like, cheerfulness. So I think that a lot of that weight was something that was in the back of my mind in every scene.
Speaker 6:So even when he's very excited, like, he turns around and sees a raven. You know? Like, those moments really affected every every moment that I played him, and I thought about it a lot because I wanted him to feel like a deep character and not just very simple.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I think a lot of that was pulled from, you know, my own childhood or, like, feeling like I wanted to portray that kid that had to grow up too fast.
Tim / GM:Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So there was a lot of that influencing where he came from.
Speaker 4:And
Tim / GM:And there was that in kind of a literal sense too with some of his aging and, you know,
Hannah / Eryn:things he's
Speaker 6:taking on. Yeah. And, like, thinking that, you know, this was gonna be all a big adventure and then having real consequences land on him and on his friends and trying to navigate that as someone who is very young but feels the the impending pressure Yeah. Of his life that he left behind.
Tim / GM:And I I like with Tibio too that, kind of going along with what you had just said about, like, where Tibio went right after this adventure. But in a lot of ways, you know, Tibia understood the duties that were set upon him, but he didn't necessarily agree with every aspect of it and sought to change some of those things. Like, you know, he didn't have the the kind of, like, reverent heaviness that your parents probably did with that sort of job. Like, you
Speaker 4:said, you
Tim / GM:know, you wanted to, like, connect more with the world and open a memoir to the world more and, you know, kind of, like, take Wakanda out of Wakanda as
Speaker 6:what she would recommend. No. I totally get what you mean. No. And, like, the the contrast between Sacra and how she was looking at this holy place.
Speaker 6:And she she was this little old lady who was literally, like, sitting in this doorway trying to hold everything back. And Tibia was like, well, let's just go. Yeah. Let's just fucking go. Why can't we work with other people?
Speaker 6:Why does it have to be me by myself? Yeah. Yeah. Like, I get that there's some sort of you know, like like, Tibio understood that he was kind of a conduit for all of this power and that it was a cultural thing to some extent. But he also knew that it doesn't it wasn't just him.
Speaker 6:It wasn't just affecting his people, his village, his family. Yeah. It was affecting the entire world. So connecting with all these other people that saw the same issue from a different perspective really made it global for him. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And I think that's another thing that kind of what this campaign became about for me was different perspectives on the shared issue
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And understanding other perspectives and knowing that the way you see the world isn't right. Mhmm. It's just one way.
Tim / GM:And we saw that quite a bit. There there are a lot of disagreements within the party.
Hannah / Eryn:You
Tim / GM:know? Snack being a very straightforward kind of bloodlusty in the beginning. And then throughout, you know, Tibio was always very anti violence, which is sometimes difficult in a d and d campaign.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It was really it was very fun to play those moments. I think with Tibio and Bert Mhmm. Those moments with Bert's parents were really fun. They were hard for Tibio, fun for Tara.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yep.
Tim / GM:I yeah. That that tension felt very, like, organic. And, like, you know, obviously, there's it's like, you know, Bert Bert understands the rules around it, but he's not part of that culture. And so he's like, yeah. I get it.
Tim / GM:Like, they're It's Yeah. Whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, it was it was so fun too because that that moment was toward the end of an episode, I think, of, like, Tibio being really upset and Bert being like, what
Tim / GM:the fuck?
Speaker 4:Got you before. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, Bert being like, how dare you? Those are my parents. And Tibio being like, how dare you? They're liches. And then that moment was so, like, full of tension for Tibio and Bert.
Speaker 6:And then episode ends. We're at the table, and me and Thomas were
Speaker 3:like, hey.
Speaker 4:You're not actually mad. Mad. Yeah.
Tim / GM:Hey. Meanwhile, Tibia's at the bar in Lamp, like, going, I
Speaker 4:don't want to kill this band.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I I it was it was a joy to play those moments. And it is a really interesting dynamic in my own mind because Tibby was very upset and Tara is like Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:It is very fun when we can disagree at the table as characters Yeah. When we know that we're all good.
Speaker 6:And it makes sense. It made perfect sense for Bert to be upset and made perfect sense for Tibby to be upset. So it was just, yeah, just fun.
Tim / GM:With that, Bert, I felt at times that Bert was the odd duck, and that he didn't have arcane spellcasting, and technically wasn't a curse breaker, even though everybody else was. Do you think that makes Bert an observer merely chronicling the adventures of the curse breakers, or does Bert consider himself an equal part of the party?
Thomas / Guy:I think the answer to that is both, that Bert does know he is, you know, fully part of the party part of the cursebreakers, but he definitely always felt a, like, a little bit of an outsider, like he was missing out or some jealousy maybe of what the other curse breakers could do.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Thomas / Guy:I think that difference you made with the spell casting, how Bert was the only divine spellcaster.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Thomas / Guy:That was really interesting to make that kind of difference between him and the other characters. Also, because clerics, it turns out, are, like, pretty good inherent curse breakers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:Like, I literally have a spell called dispelled remove curse. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Thomas / Guy:And that also led to a great moment in the last episode where he gets off a clutch, dispel evil and good That's right. To curse break the big bad.
Speaker 6:Oh, man. Yeah. That moment. I mean, just popping off after Holly becomes a literal giant crystal. Uli accepts herself for who she is.
Speaker 6:Snack is the most dragon of all dragons.
Speaker 4:And
Speaker 6:then that that exchange of Burton Tibbio being there in that last moment with Ilia, with Moja, and having those pure moments of themselves Yeah. Was so just freaking cool. I was so happy about that moment. And Bert knowing that he was a curse breaker in the end.
Thomas / Guy:Yep. Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:Yep. You did
Speaker 6:it. You did it. You broke the curse.
Tim / GM:Yeah. That final exchange with, you know, Bert becoming a curse breaker and Tibio choosing life over death, I think, was, like, the whole campaign in a nutshell.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Very good. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I'm not trying to steal Bert's moment, but when I when I said that I turned to Ilya and chose to bar her from the underworld, your jaw, Tim,
Thomas / Guy:dropped. I was shocked too. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I was like,
Speaker 3:I did it.
Thomas / Guy:One of my prouder moments for me personally was when we were back in Tildrey and Snack was in a whole mess of, farewell trouble Yeah.
Speaker 6:Or whatever. Oh, man.
Thomas / Guy:Where, like, he had spent all our money Yes. On Yeah. The tower or whatever. And then, leading snack toward being, like, oh, this was actually an altruistic thing you did, so you should become a curse breaker now.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Thomas / Guy:Like, that was a cool moment too to,
Tim / GM:And being able
Thomas / Guy:to snack into the fold or whatever.
Tim / GM:Literally do it yourself too. The Yeah. Tattoo. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You made curse breakers.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:You're like the I guess the best analogy I can think of is, like, Giles from Buffy.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Alright.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. That works.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Just yeah. I I felt like Bert had a lot of you had a a lot of really cool role play moments that had a big plot impact.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I think where you you talked things through with different characters
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And help them figure things out or have moments of truth and clarity, true to Bert,
Speaker 3:even if you weren't necessarily doing the heavy hitting or the Mhmm.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The big flashy stuff. You were definitely, like, the behind the scenes.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Tim / GM:And one of the earliest, I would say, at at really doing the character work, if we rewind all the way back to lamplight at the tangled jib, there's a moment where, Henry Muldriff is describing, his wife transforming, and Snack is getting excited because he's, like, oh, there's a way to transform into a scaler creature. Jesus. Sign me up. But then, at the same time, Holly was insistent on describing her character as getting really upset and starting to cry and just wanting to go to bed. Mhmm.
Tim / GM:And then Bert catches her on her way up the stairs and, like, Holly, is everything okay? You know? And she's like, oh, you know, I just need to go to bed, whatever. And she kinda plays it off. But that was that was Bert, like, really digging into and noticing these little choices at the table and then addressing it in the scene.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And that was that was about Ivy. Right?
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:Yes. Yeah. Yep.
Thomas / Guy:Which I didn't know at the time.
Tim / GM:Right. Yeah. Along with that, Thomas, there's also a lot of pressure as the primary support or healer in a party. I also intentionally gave you a lot of tools like brain gore that tempted you away from optimal healing choices. How did you make your choices in combat?
Tim / GM:Where did you draw the line between playing triage and getting your own glory?
Thomas / Guy:Well, I really I really liked this turn for Bert. This kind of started with, I guess it wasn't Hog Wild, right, where Ilia drank the cursed, Flask and died. Aviri. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Whatever. Whichever.
Thomas / Guy:Which one
Tim / GM:was it? The youngest one.
Hannah / Eryn:Veery. Veery.
Thomas / Guy:Oh, okay. Yep. Whatever. Yeah. Anyway and then, like, snack went and got revenge on that guy.
Speaker 4:Oof.
Thomas / Guy:And, I think Bert realized then that he or he, like, kind of felt powerless and was jealous of snack for being able to take matters into his own hands. And that's, he got brain gore soon after and started doing more martial combat stuff.
Tim / GM:That's right. And I think right after you left Hog Wild is when you, we did that tornado thing trying to take over the Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:And I
Tim / GM:did that little aside with Bert taking his shirt off and pinning down the caravan.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. So and and related to the last question too that was always the Bert was kinda wrestling that line of, like, sitting back, being an observer, and a fly in the wall versus, like, actually being involved in in affecting change and stuff.
Tim / GM:I mean, you were also put in situations where, you know, you were you know, let's take the Joe and the Dragon, for instance, where you and Emery became the main force against that thing Yeah. And, kind of left to your own devices until the bridge. And so, you know, it it really wasn't a situation where you were in any position to be the primary healer being just the 2 of you. I think that was a good example of Bert having to make every hard choice all at once.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And you clearly could take it on your own. Like like, you had the skills to back that up. Mhmm. So it's it's interesting that you didn't for the most part. I mean, you definitely did, but but it was it was definitely letting everyone else kind of take over.
Speaker 3:I think there was one point when we were fighting the bone dragon where you, like, stepped back and you, like, stood out of the combat. Do you remember that?
Thomas / Guy:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I I feel like you made some strategic choices where, like, I can do better things that aren't combat. I'm just gonna step out.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. I definitely I mean, set out to be more support and Healy and stuff. And so it's it's it's cool to kinda have that change for story reasons to include more offensive spells
Tim / GM:and stuff. Mhmm. Holly.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's me.
Tim / GM:Holly made some incredible technical plays throughout the campaign, that had some of the biggest damage turns, even outpacing snack at some point. How did you make your choices for spells and building Holly as a witch?
Hannah / Eryn:She's a witch. Yeah. Holly as a witch. She's a witch?
Speaker 3:No. I'm just kidding.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. So I think at first, I you know, this campaign spanned a year and a half or more for our real lives.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Hannah / Eryn:And at first, I think I was just choosing based on kinda what sounded cool for spell choices. And, you know, you're a little more limited kind of when you're a low level wizard. And as time went on, I realized I'm really bad at picking out spells that are useful. K. So what I actually did is I went on the Internet, and I was like, what are good D and D wizard spells?
Hannah / Eryn:Okay. And then It's
Speaker 4:a good way
Tim / GM:to get answers.
Hannah / Eryn:Hey, Google. I am a researcher. Okay? Because I just was I read them all and, you know, I was like, I just don't know what's gonna be the most useful or have, like, what things what does this actually look like? Like, I was having a hard time reading the spell and then figuring out what that would actually play out as, either in combat or not.
Hannah / Eryn:And so reading, I found a website that, like, ranked wizard spells, and I think they did it for all the spells. But it, like, had, like, a 5 star rating system of, like and then it kind of explained instances in a campaign when this would come up, like, outside of combat even. And so that really helped me, like, understand the usefulness and, like, how to use spells. And so, yeah, I for anyone who is new to D and D or just feels like they have also a hard time figuring out what spells are good and, like, have the most, can be applied in a lot of different ways. That really helped me.
Hannah / Eryn:And I can't remember the name of the website, but it was free. It was just on some random website on the Internet. But, yeah. So I kinda did research, and then I feel like after I did that, I think it was, like, level what level did we end at? 12.
Hannah / Eryn:12. I think it must have been around level 6 or 7. So, like, right about halfway through, that's when that happened. And all of the sudden, my spells got really good. Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think there was, a noticeable shift in the way you played also where it felt like you just finally got it. Yeah. And you were like, oh my god. I'm a I'm a witch.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. Yeah. So it was the player. Definitely more Hannah development. I felt like, obviously, Holly was growing as a witch in power.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. I think she was always really capable, but I think, you know, just learning new spells on the side and, like, she would try to like, I know in
Speaker 6:Tibio?
Hannah / Eryn:Tibio's town. What the Memoir? Memoir. Sorry.
Speaker 3:I was
Speaker 4:like, not hard.
Hannah / Eryn:I kept looking at you and saying, it's not hog wild. In memoir, I know, like, she tried to seek out the library and spend time, like, reading about spells. So I think I was trying to, like, weave it in more to the story too of her, like, searching out different spells. Hogwell doesn't have a library, but she would have looked there too. And I'm just kidding.
Tim / GM:Hog Wild got it. I
Speaker 4:mean They
Speaker 3:got Reader's Digest. Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:They have Reader's Digest by the outhouse.
Tim / GM:Uncle John's outhouse reader.
Thomas / Guy:Humor in uniform.
Hannah / Eryn:So yeah. So it was definitely just Hannah, like, getting better at D and D kind of. And I hadn't ever played a I don't think I played a wizard before. So learning the spells and their use was definitely a big part of that.
Speaker 6:So Kind of a good example of figuring out what kind of player you are.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Because it's one thing to figure out who your character is. It's another thing to figure out who you are as a player and how to best facilitate your play style and make sure that it's true to you and true to your character. So I I think that's really cool that you you were able to find a way that worked for you. And it makes sense that you had to do some research.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. Had to read the
Speaker 4:read the
Speaker 3:Made sense. But on the the flip side, you were probably the best of us at, like, aesthetically describing what you were doing and, like, while you were role playing. It technical stuff aside, I just feel like I always knew exactly what you're doing because you were just so good at
Speaker 6:Yeah. There were a couple times where you described a scene really thoroughly that it felt like the first time you did it, I was like, well, who's the DM here? And then I was like, oh. Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:Who is the DM?
Speaker 6:No. And then but that I mean, I I changed my play style because of that too. I I was watching, you know, actual play stuff. I was watching Critical Role on d 20 and blah blah blah. But the I I took some of that into account.
Speaker 6:And as Tibeo started, you know or as Tara, I guess, started describing Tibeo's spells as he was casting them a little more clearly and using, like, he throws his arms out and shoots some purple smoke out of his fingers and shit like that. Like Yeah. Yeah. I was I was doing more of that because of how enjoyable I found it as a listener to to have those visual moments because I'm not a very visual person. So having those descriptions and having those just little moments, not extensive, but little moments of, you know, what your character is doing and what you think they would be doing in those moments was really cool.
Speaker 3:I feel like typically we've never really focused on, the reagents and stuff and ingredients for spells, but you you've, like, very specifically made sure there was a crystal involved.
Speaker 6:There's a crystal for everything.
Speaker 3:Which is very cool.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. I just love crystals. Spell
Tim / GM:with a spell with a million names.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:I do just wanna give a shout out to one of my favorite Holly moments, of when she was in the oh my gosh. Help me out here. It's the 4 corners, like, trade shop when we went back Oh,
Speaker 3:the cross post? The cross post.
Hannah / Eryn:I don't I wanted to confuse it with 4 LG Spar. Sorry. No. The cross post. And she went to follow snack, and then, Moja showed up as a curse.
Hannah / Eryn:And Holly, like, scared him away with her how, like, powerful her role was. And I think Does
Tim / GM:he crit on it?
Speaker 3:He crit.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, that moment was, like, such genuine joy for me as a player because I just felt like I did something myself and I, like, helped snack and I took out the bad guy. Like, it was just like a really fun, like, super witchy moment. And I had another one later in the campaign too, but that was the first one that, like,
Speaker 4:I'm so cool.
Speaker 3:That was another Holly clip moment. Yes. Are you I think you did, like, a witch cap. Yeah. Oh, man.
Hannah / Eryn:So
Tim / GM:good. That whole interaction, with Snack going back to cross post, teleporting that
Speaker 4:with jeans,
Speaker 6:which was That was wild.
Tim / GM:That was out in the far reaches where I had no I had no preparation. No preparation. No notes around that.
Speaker 3:You're like, I'm a I guess
Hannah / Eryn:That was all like, what is gonna happen? Like, that was like kind of fearful for all of us at the table. I think a little bit of, like, did Snackoff the deep end? Is he gonna, like, something terrible gonna happen here? Like, I don't know.
Hannah / Eryn:You know? Or, like, is he gonna become just a cold blood murderer and we're gonna, like
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Tim / GM:For the next part of this, we actually received some questions from our listeners, which is delightful. I super appreciate everyone who sent in stuff.
Speaker 7:And we're not we're not related to all of them.
Speaker 4:Not so.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Isn't that incredible? It's true. We are not directly related to all the people that sent in it.
Speaker 6:Oh, speaking of listeners, thank you to the 2 people that actually donated actual real money
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah.
Tim / GM:To us. Let's spend just a second talking about that. We set up a buy me a coffee page at, buy me a coffee dot com slash p b o p, p bop. And we didn't really advertise it that much aside from putting it at the end of a few episodes, and some benevolent people out there that listen to our show that we swear to God we don't know, don't need the money to us.
Hannah / Eryn:Thank you.
Speaker 3:That sounds so suspicious. We legitimately do not know.
Thomas / Guy:And it really helps. We've
Speaker 7:joined off strangers.
Thomas / Guy:To help the podcast.
Tim / GM:And we we put it directly to use. We are now sitting sitting in our new
Thomas / Guy:New studio.
Speaker 3:New studio. Yeah. That we built ourselves.
Hannah / Eryn:That we
Speaker 4:did build ourselves. Yes. In
Speaker 6:a in a house that one of us already owned.
Speaker 3:But it is like decked out.
Tim / GM:Couple asterisks on there. But yeah.
Speaker 4:I think
Speaker 7:it's worth mentioning it's totally possible. We wouldn't have decided to do, campaign 2 without those just to because it like, it really just let us believe in ourselves. It wasn't really it's not about the money we spent.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Yeah. Way further than
Speaker 4:we've got.
Tim / GM:It didn't cover the
Speaker 4:studio. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's really it's been very cool, like, realizing we have listeners that we don't know about. Yep.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Shout out to whoever in Brazil is just binging our shit. Yeah. Yeah. Love you.
Speaker 6:Love you in particular.
Tim / GM:You know, we still are at a point where we we have a very keen idea of where we're being listened to and, you know, who can see us. You know, we've made some Reddit posts, but we keep an eye on our analytics and it just it warms my heart to see people that we don't know going through our entire show. And Yeah. We'd love to hear from anybody out there.
Speaker 6:And to be clear, we don't know exactly where you are.
Speaker 3:No. We we just no doxing.
Speaker 6:We just know what country you might be in. And if and we don't know how many of
Thomas / Guy:you are. VPN is going through.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Right.
Speaker 3:Which I'm so sorry. Okay.
Hannah / Eryn:Everyone is being really creepy. Basically, we just wanna say,
Thomas / Guy:we feel where you live.
Speaker 3:Oh my god. Coming for you.
Hannah / Eryn:What? Season 2.
Speaker 6:We're streaming directly into your Googles.
Hannah / Eryn:We're already there. I was just gonna say I think the what everyone's getting at is it's really inspiring to have people be inspired by us in a small way. So thank you
Speaker 6:very much. And just, yeah, really gratifying.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's just it's, like, astounding. We did this for fun. We decided to put it online because we had recorded it, and we wanted to see if we could.
Speaker 6:And we thought we sounded good.
Speaker 3:Ignore the first six episodes.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But, like like, we did it. We did an entire campaign, and it's, like, crazy that there are people we didn't even tell about this, like, listening to every episode, which is so cool.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah. Big shout out to everybody who sent in questions. So we're just starting to the questions for everybody. Where did the music come from for everything?
Speaker 3:Our souls.
Speaker 7:I think it would be good to focus on, like, the main theme. Yeah. So, like, the, baseline was actually some something Tim wrote originally in FL Studios.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Do you wanna, like, talk about that first, and then I'll
Tim / GM:Yeah. I so I'm I'm pretty amateur at music stuff, so there's not really a process behind it. More just, you know, finding knowing that I had a resource, like John and Thomas, that could polish it into something, you know, that that sounded full and beautiful. Starting with the starter assets of FL Studio, I could sit there and pluck away with whatever notes sounded good together. And then, I think John recognized, you know, like like, we can really turn this into something.
Tim / GM:And there's even a first draft of the theme song that sounds pretty island.
Speaker 6:It's jungle mode.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So oh,
Thomas / Guy:I never heard that one.
Speaker 6:It's Donkey Kong.
Speaker 4:It's straight Donkey Kong.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So, I had very very limited, instrument pack, and anyone that does limited inter pack instrument packs may know, your selections are gonna be really weird stuff
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 7:To work with. So I had some real drums, but they were, yeah, they were island
Speaker 3:Did you just hear bongo?
Speaker 4:Yeah. She's just talking them. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:So I
Speaker 7:think we should, like, play a clip of it there. Yeah. So at some point, that should get faded in. But basically so that was what I came back with. I'll also say, like, I had, a week off because it was, like, the spring break week for me with work and stuff.
Speaker 7:And I spent so much time, like, playing it, go and sit in the living room, listen to it on sound like, the soundbar
Speaker 6:Making me listen into it.
Speaker 7:Through headphones, like, trying to learn how to, like, make something sound decent, like, in in a general sense. So a lot of that energy and time was just me, like, being very neurotic about trying to learn how to basically mix that
Tim / GM:thing. Yeah.
Speaker 7:But yeah. So the island theme came out first, and, we're like, this is not quite right.
Speaker 4:Oh, it was so funny. No.
Speaker 6:It was so good because you were, like, working on this for hours and hours and hours and, like, multiple days. And you're like, Tara, it's done. Do you wanna come listen to it? And I was like, I've done been hearing it. You're not alone in this apartment.
Thomas / Guy:But I
Speaker 6:went and listened to it and I was like, it's great. It sounds very jungle themed. It sounds like Donkey Kong is bouncing level to level chasing that little Mario guy.
Speaker 4:Video game
Speaker 6:and stuff.
Speaker 7:So the the final one, yeah, was definitely tweaked a lot. And I think, basically, like, Tim's baseline was very, like, just moving forward and just kinda, like, had a good movement to it. And, I think for this campaign, we wanted it to be fun and, like, not super, like, heavy feeling for the theme. And, I think that worked out really well overall. It definitely matched the vibe for the majority of the campaign.
Speaker 7:And, obviously, when we get to Vindor and things get more serious then, but yeah, the music, I mean, it it's all coming from us. Like, yeah. And, you know, we recorded real people singing for, Tibeo's theme. Mhmm. And Hog Wild.
Speaker 7:And Hog Wild too. That was us seeing idiots in the apartment.
Speaker 6:That was
Tim / GM:really fun. Hog Wild was a really fun conversation.
Speaker 7:It was very fun. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It was just you 3. Right? Or was Tara involved?
Speaker 4:Tara was
Speaker 6:I was present. Okay.
Speaker 7:Yep. Yeah. So I was barely involved.
Tim / GM:Literally, you know, it's all us whooping and hollering in the back of the Hog Wild
Hannah / Eryn:he sings. Wild.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And me in the living room trying to keep Lyra quiet.
Tim / GM:And then No.
Speaker 6:It was so good.
Tim / GM:For anyone who didn't recognize in Tibio's theme song, that's all Tara, including the the quiet French whispers. And then And
Speaker 3:the choral stuff.
Tim / GM:That also got put into the Vindorn theme song, but the the vocal, solo in that.
Speaker 7:That was that was Tara's vocals, then we actually had a couple other people come in to
Tim / GM:That's right.
Speaker 7:The other voices.
Tim / GM:Special guest, Ally Jay, I think was in
Speaker 4:the Yep.
Speaker 6:Ally and Andy. Andy.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 6:Yeah. They both did fantastic work, and John built out all harmonies. Like, the the melody was initially me, and I had the the great opportunity to sing those little solo bits. But, yeah, it was all John doing the writing on it.
Tim / GM:And like we said, it was Thomas who came up with, the theme for birds rewind that we used a couple times.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:And, I just I think it's really cool that we've got, like, you know, not just multi talented people at this table, but, you know, people who overlap a lot with their passions and interests. And it just I don't know. It gives us a lot of reach.
Speaker 6:Well and just really quick, Uli's little bit of music
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Very, very cool.
Tim / GM:And that that one did come out of me.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That was you. And that was very cool. And it was unexpected, and it was placed really well in the episodes where it landed.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I will say that for the Vindorm themes, adding Tibeos little bit at the end there was a shock to me and was honestly really flattering.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. It's good.
Speaker 4:Well, it's
Tim / GM:it's such a good nod to, like, let's finish the fight kind of idea. Yeah. 1,
Speaker 6:the the effects that John put on it to, like, reverse parts of it Yeah. And have that guitar go like,
Hannah / Eryn:at the
Speaker 6:end was so fucking cool. The first time you played it for me, I was like, I'm dead. I'm just dead now.
Speaker 7:I was, like, wailing on the whammy bars. Like, I hope I don't break this.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I'm just gonna record
Speaker 7:it a couple times. But, actually, it was for the Vendorn theme. If you listen to the dirty synth sound, that was actually the same melody, and that was Thomas's idea to stick that on top. So cool. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So that that was definitely a full collab.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Yeah. Cool.
Hannah / Eryn:I was just gonna say, Tim mentioned that, like, everyone at the table is super talented in different ways. And, like, a lot of the guys do music things and Tar can sing and speak French apparently. And I also wanted to shout out to Maggie, our resident artist.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. I know.
Speaker 4:I'm glad.
Hannah / Eryn:It's not in the episodes, but all of the art that you may see around either on YouTube or on Instagram mainly is where she posts a lot of the artwork. I'm trying to think, is there anywhere else that it would be out? I mean
Speaker 6:Facebook, somewhat.
Hannah / Eryn:And then, like, on the Apple Podcasts or your little podcast, the
Speaker 3:Oh, the logo.
Hannah / Eryn:The logos, all of that Maggie made. So check out the Instagram, though. I think you can really see the cool character art and, like, how it helped. Visualize who our
Speaker 6:characters were because we had kind of we we came to Maggie with kind of vague descriptions. I know I just I was very flippant about mine. I was like, Tibio is a gnome and a skeleton in a trench cloak. It's a gnome. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And, yeah, Maggie really brought our characters to life in a new way that helped us kind of take those visualizations into the game.
Hannah / Eryn:So check out the Instagram. Maggie's amazing artiste. And I feel like our campaign wouldn't be the same without her art.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:So yeah. Thanks, Maggie. I can't handle this.
Tim / GM:Same goes for our Reddit account if, any Redditors have seen us posting, somewhat infrequently. But every now and then in the d and d subreddit, we'll throw up an episode announcement or something, and that main cover was done by Maggie as well. All the character out on there.
Speaker 3:And Tim does maps.
Tim / GM:That's right. I've got a couple maps for this one too. I'd like to get into more of that. It's just a little time consuming.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're pretty cool, I guess.
Speaker 4:I guess.
Tim / GM:We do okay. Another or the same listener would like to know what if we have a favorite episode, personally. And, I think I threw this out to Maggie the other day. I think pride and prestige. Wow.
Speaker 3:Pride and Prestigitation is my favorite.
Tim / GM:Thank you. That might be my favorite. I can't really make up my mind. But
Hannah / Eryn:Why is it your favorite?
Speaker 3:So that was another 2 parter episode. Well, we recorded 2 episodes in 1 evening, and it was just like the first time that everything felt perfectly on. Everybody was on in character. It was just, like, really funny. Everybody had a moment where there was, like, a funny quip or, like, a silly moment.
Speaker 3:I don't know. It's just, like, really cool.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I love episodes where there's awkward Dave stuff. Yeah. I just feel like it's it's perfect.
Speaker 6:That's so good. I the first couple times that Tim honestly, the, like, accidental, not accidental interruptions were choice. Yeah. Like, the first couple times that you did it, Maggie had literal, like, panic moments of, like No.
Speaker 3:I think I was like because you didn't realize was sweating. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I it felt like the first time Tim did it, you didn't realize it was on purpose. Yeah. And Tim was, like, really cued in and clued in to have those moments be as awkward as possible, and it was perfect.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Knew when I was gonna speak and,
Speaker 6:like, perfect. It was just it was so well done.
Speaker 7:It's like down to the nanosecond.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And just, like me. Yeah. It was so hard being at the table because I have I know. Have such an anti cringe humor, like, so my body was, like, trying to escape the room.
Speaker 3:I think we both our souls left our body. And that's that is specifically, like, the worst kind of social interaction that I have frequently in my life. So it was just there at the table.
Speaker 6:Oh, and it just came through beautifully because all of that angst and, like, cringe that you had as a player channeled directly into Uli in the most perfect beautiful way.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 6:It was just it was just so good. It was so joyful and funny and horrible.
Speaker 3:Uncomfortable as hell to record, but so good
Speaker 6:after the band. So good.
Hannah / Eryn:My favorite episode was Oops All Cobolts.
Speaker 4:Oh my god.
Speaker 7:That was pretty great.
Hannah / Eryn:I had the most fun. I as we were, like, getting ready and gearing up to go fight the dragon and, like, you know, that was terrorizing the land and stuff. And I was, like, Maggie said something just at the table, like, as we were playing, and she was, like, oh, I can make everyone what is it? What's the spell?
Speaker 3:It was seeming. I I
Hannah / Eryn:can cast seeming. And I was like in my head, I'm like, we can all become
Speaker 4:kobolds. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then and then I
Hannah / Eryn:was like, that'll be amazing. And so I really pushed for it in character. And then I just went crazy with it because it's like Holly was, like, free to be just a crazy character. And as a player, snatch. Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:I was like, it was so much fun. So
Tim / GM:There's there's sorry. There's a very specific delicious novelty to, like, putting everybody in the same costume whenever you change locations. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I so mine is a little controversial. I honestly think it's episode 1 fishy plate at lamplight. Really?
Speaker 3:And the reason episode 1.
Thomas / Guy:There's a lot of reasons for that.
Hannah / Eryn:It's the only episode where snack can't be in the sun, and we never mention it. Never
Tim / GM:mentioned it.
Speaker 4:Like Let's
Speaker 3:talk about loopholes. Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 7:He got tan. But no. Like, I think, like, just for a yeah. I gotta, like, give the visual of this. Like, this was our first time doing it, and it was kinda like me, like and Tim helping, like, us kinda like, hey.
Speaker 7:We should do this really weird thing. Like, let's record ourselves and post it.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And, you know, and so, like, we are literally we're using, like, a a mixer. We didn't have enough mic, so we're literally, like, waiting for someone to have room to speak and then, like, moving in so that that person can talk on the mic. So there's Yeah.
Speaker 6:Ton of
Speaker 7:proper timing.
Speaker 6:We are wearing masks.
Speaker 4:We are
Tim / GM:wearing masks.
Speaker 3:Mid COVID.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Mid COVID. And And I I think with all of that, like, it's still, like, there's something so, like, genuine. I I go that's the episode I've listened to the most and there's a lot bad about it. Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's cringey. Yeah. But yeah. Like, it was good enough for us to keep doing it.
Tim / GM:So yeah. That's true.
Speaker 7:It was a really good, like, plot hook too. Like, it was very clear, like, what we were
Speaker 4:trying to do. So yeah.
Thomas / Guy:Mine probably is the butterfly effect. Yeah. I love the way it turned out. Mhmm. It it wasn't necessarily my favorite to play Sure.
Thomas / Guy:Because behind the scenes, all of us, whenever we had a very, character centric episode for our character, like, you just become paralyzed in the moment and take 5 minutes to make every single decision. Yep. And, luckily, we can cut all that out, and it sounds awesome Yeah. In the final product.
Tim / GM:But I
Speaker 4:should take
Tim / GM:a moment to talk to other people who are just starting out with D and D. There are some people, even old coworkers of mine that have reached out and said, like, hey, because of your podcast, like, I've I've developed, like, an interest in trying this at least. To those people, we caught
Speaker 3:a lot
Tim / GM:of 50% of what we record.
Speaker 6:So much. Oh my god. I take forever to talk.
Tim / GM:That's that's the biggest thing. It's like, you know, it's the the pauses between stuff. We take time to come up with our responses. We don't we don't pre write things and we don't, like, discuss it and then do it kind of thing. But we do we do cut out our pauses.
Tim / GM:So and we're not voice actors.
Speaker 4:And,
Speaker 6:like, credit where credit is due, we have also improved a lot.
Tim / GM:For sure.
Speaker 6:So Absolutely. The early episodes we were cutting a fuck ton. Yep. These last few episodes, it definitely wasn't as much.
Tim / GM:That's very true.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We've we've gotten tighter on our turns. We've gotten better at our role play in the moment, stuff like that. But it is a it's a gradual process, isn't it? It's a learning process.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. And I think part of it too is learning at the table when to jump in and not because I think at first, it was hard to figure out when you're recording something. This isn't for normal play D and D. But when you're recording, you have to be kind of really conscious of what has someone done or, like, when is it appropriate to all be talking at once. And we kinda, like, learn those nuances about each other Mhmm.
Hannah / Eryn:In a recording sense as the campaign went on.
Speaker 6:So Yeah. Definitely. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And it it feels it's better to make the right choice about what you're going to say, especially if you're doing it for other people because it's better storytelling. So I think we learned that it was okay to take time and and make sure that it was what we wanted. And sometimes we would stop and be like, no. I wanna take that again. Like, I don't I don't like how that turned out.
Speaker 3:Or
Tim / GM:That did happen a couple times. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Only thing I'd add to this is, like, this is a performative version of D and D Yeah. And it's not how I started out playing it at all. And it I don't even know if I would keep doing it if my first time playing was, like, the podcast version because, like, you know, like, when you are playing with friends, like, you don't need to emulate, like, Critical Role or anything like what we do. It it is like, you know, whatever is fun for you. And sometimes it's like treating it like a video game is what is fun and, like, it's in joke stuff, you know, and that's totally fine.
Speaker 7:That's legal. You know, that's Yeah. That's authentic D and D.
Tim / GM:And that's I I came up much the same way where it's you know, we're we're resting on our mechanics. We're eating, talking, and we usually play for 4 or 5 hours at a time
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:Rather than trying to cut these into our episodes and cinematic quality and all that stuff.
Speaker 3:I think For sure. For me, it's been half. Like, I think we've been recording for about half of as long as I've been playing with you. Sure. But not ever for a podcast.
Speaker 3:So this has been a totally different experience as well. It's less casual, but it's also still very casual at the same time Mhmm. Because we know that we can edit things if we need to.
Thomas / Guy:Did we record the last one?
Speaker 3:No. We didn't record
Hannah / Eryn:that one.
Thomas / Guy:I was gonna say.
Speaker 3:The Ninh. Poppy. Oh. Not Poppy. Oh my god.
Tim / GM:We didn't record all
Speaker 4:of that.
Speaker 6:That you're making a mistake in that way, though. Right? Pepper. Yes. Pepper.
Speaker 6:No. Just say it wrong. It's fine. Poppy is correct now.
Speaker 4:It's Poppy.
Thomas / Guy:It's Poppy.
Speaker 6:Okay. I don't think I have a favorite episode because a lot of them were so enjoyable that I just really but I do have a couple favorite moments for Tibio in particular. Yeah. One of them was the I'll just do one of them. The moment that I actually got to sing Tibio's song Yeah.
Speaker 6:In that fucking cave in memoir Yeah. Was so hard but so satisfying.
Hannah / Eryn:Well, because
Tim / GM:you also didn't know that was coming, and it was the DM saying sing now.
Speaker 6:No idea. Yeah. I was like,
Speaker 4:as as soon
Speaker 6:as I like well, sorry. As soon as we recorded the theme and we put it in the show, I was like, I'm a have to sing it at some point. I gotta sing it at some point. It's gotta because we've been talking about music affecting Mojo and blah blah blah blah blah. There's gotta be a reason to do it.
Speaker 6:And I was like, I don't know when it's gonna be. And then it took me I was shaking so bad that I had to take, like, 2 minutes to be like, I just need to breathe for a second. And then I just slowly was like, okay. And then I went for it. But, yeah, it it turned out really good, but it was a very scary moment.
Hannah / Eryn:Well, you did great and sounded beautiful. Thanks, Doug.
Tim / GM:Any other big breakthroughs?
Hannah / Eryn:Really no favorite episode that you can think of?
Speaker 4:Because you'd
Speaker 6:like to I do I do love the, the Tildry for its trial shit.
Tim / GM:Yes.
Hannah / Eryn:I was gonna say that as my second follow-up up favorite episodes were the trials. The 2 episodes.
Speaker 6:Those were very fun. And just like, the flower strangers were really absurd. Oh,
Speaker 3:yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I I enjoyed that whole arc. It was very very fun, very urban. It felt felt very, like, we're in the big city.
Tim / GM:I'll I'll give you a little background on some of the DM decisions there. I I constantly played around Tibio's unwillingness to kill humans.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:So I would set you guys up with, like, you know, just kind of like, if you ever watch Power Rangers, like, Putty People.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Sure.
Tim / GM:It's just some non person.
Thomas / Guy:People? Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Well, and even then Tibia was like yeah. Even then Tibia was like, are you
Speaker 4:a person? Exactly.
Speaker 3:I'm so so
Tim / GM:concerned because life hurt.
Hannah / Eryn:Do you have a soul? I can't hurt you. I don't
Speaker 6:wanna hurt you. Are you okay?
Hannah / Eryn:Tibeo, that's a trans post.
Speaker 6:I cast blindness on this fucking bag of flour.
Speaker 3:And then snack in the background of that episode is, like, killing ravens behind it. Yeah.
Tim / GM:I mean Just, like, ripping their heads off. Well, we'll have another chance to talk about this too, but, like, Snacks, you know, development away from violence. And then he had a little kind of slip up, you know, towards the end there against Greygut, who was his, you know, kind of antagonist in his own. The second Greygut was kind of incapacitated. Schneck jumped on him and stabbed him to death.
Thomas / Guy:Oh, yeah.
Tim / GM:And that was that was Snack's last little departure into abject violence, I think. But it was also sort of closing, you know, his his former arc, I think.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 3:One last kill, and then I'm done.
Tim / GM:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Okay. I'm done now.
Speaker 4:Okay. Hey,
Speaker 7:Tim. We got a question. How do you world build?
Hannah / Eryn:How do
Tim / GM:you build worlds? Yeah. I didn't I probably did the least world building for Cursebreaker than I've done for any campaign, especially in the beginning. I was so excited to get this thing rolling that I just wanted to, like, dive into it, not think about it, not be too precious about it, and just start recording something. And that's what we did.
Tim / GM:So I I did the Nightmare Wizard arc, and then as we went, you know, I was only building the tracks out so far ahead of me. And I think that worked out the best because I could really respond to everything that came up with everyone.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Yeah.
Tim / GM:And, like, at the end of every night, you know, I could get a little bit of feedback from you guys and see where it was gonna go next and maybe text you guys in between sessions, but I think, you know, every strategy is valid, but I'm I really dig this not figuring it out thing.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. It never felt lacking or anything like that. Like, it seemed it seemed fully fleshed out. But, like Hannah mentioned earlier, like, the meeting those the old curse breaker and the other travelers on the road really made it feel like a big cohesive world.
Tim / GM:Yeah. And it was so I I tried really hard to stop introducing new plot elements, like, roughly halfway through the campaign, So I could start, like, you know, capitalizing on those ideas that I had already set up. So it's like, you know, you establish that there are, you know, like, spirits in the world or something, and that there are curses. And it's like, I tried not to, like, build that plot too far because I I do have a habitual problem that hopefully the wider world will never know about,
Speaker 4:where
Tim / GM:I go I get really big with plots and it gets too big and I can't reign it back in. And so, it always ends up with, you know, the gods are trying to take the world back from within or something. And it's too big for me to handle.
Speaker 3:That was, like, one campaign that you went too far. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Yeah. I suppose. It it went super well this time. Good.
Speaker 3:Yeah. As someone who has played with you for most of your DM ing career
Tim / GM:True.
Speaker 3:I would say that it has only gone too far, like, thrice.
Speaker 4:Foreign camp.
Tim / GM:Thrice out of Spice. Yeah.
Speaker 3:No. We've made, like, 700 campaigns.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We've done
Tim / GM:a few.
Speaker 7:So, yeah, for, like, the locations, like, on some level, like, mirrored playable characters, a lot of them did. The questions around, like, DM and playable character collaboration around those, what was that like?
Tim / GM:Yeah. I, see here. Who do we go to first? Probably Holly. Telgi.
Speaker 3:Well, hi. We went to Lamplight.
Tim / GM:Okay. Yeah. We started in Lamplight, but, like,
Hannah / Eryn:that was like your hometown.
Speaker 3:No. But I lived there.
Tim / GM:Right. So it's like a it's like a hot wild and Lamplight.
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Hannah / Eryn:This is
Thomas / Guy:like a Tilteri is really its own character. Yeah.
Tim / GM:And so yeah. So Lamp Light, you know, didn't really reflect Uli. You know, it more reflected just like a place to start. You know, like, the unnamed hometown kind of thing. And Hog Wild definitely had a lot more Uli in it.
Tim / GM:But, yeah, I I really like that part of it because, again, you guys got to give me these character ideas and this kind of, like, an idea of your background. And then, Holly and Bert, behind the scenes collaborated on both being from Tildry. And at that point, all I had said was, like, Tildry is where the librarian is Yeah. Mhmm. Which is the reference of, like, what those three towers are.
Tim / GM:And, you know, it's like where the magic happens and where the fashion is. And that's, like, why, you know, Holly and Bert were there. And then, you know, memoir was huge. That one, I think, developed completely differently than everyone else's, because I felt in a lot of ways, like, memoir was the heart of the campaign, especially going into it. I thought that was gonna be the main idea behind the campaign.
Tim / GM:And so I got some influences from Tara, but then I also got to really surprise her with, like, a lot of the scene building. And I think the physical details of it, you know, you know, weren't super clear until we actually got there.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I had a I had a picture in my mind for memoir that was more, more hobbit y Yeah. Oh. And more swampy.
Tim / GM:Okay. And And that's I was I
Speaker 3:was so careful
Tim / GM:not to make it gross.
Speaker 6:Your version is super better.
Speaker 4:Yeah. My version is very pretty.
Speaker 6:Yeah. No. It was perfect. And I I think it it made sense for because gnomes are typically kinda tankery and typically kind of techie. So having that flavored as necromancy and stone and bone was very cool and a very good a very good
Speaker 3:choice. Yeah.
Tim / GM:Did, what were you guys' like visions of Tildrey? Like, to me, it's all stone and hard angles and triangles and rectangles and stuff.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. I, Thomas and I recently got back from a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland. And if you've ever been there, there's an old town area that's, like, very gothic and stone like, this kind of dark gray stone, all these buildings in the old part. And so if you go look at pictures on the Internet right now of Old Town, Edinburgh, That is how I that's how I imagine Tildry now. So I think at the time, I had a really hard time imagining Tildry, though, before
Tim / GM:actually going into
Hannah / Eryn:in my head. Yeah. I think
Speaker 3:it was kind of sci fi for me. Just like big shiny towers that had weird floating sidewalks between
Thomas / Guy:them. Moving, walkways and elevators or whatever. Yep.
Speaker 3:But then your basic medieval, like, town surrounding this giant castle in the center, but it wasn't a castle. It was a
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:A school.
Tim / GM:Yeah. And for that reason, actually so Tildridge was so big, but then Hogwild, to me, was the most digestible.
Thomas / Guy:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:And it was the it was the one that played the most with physical geography because we had that kind of, like, defense plan laid out for how to deal
Speaker 6:with the locals. Maps.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Oh my god. But just knowing that geographically, like, the water tower is in the center. You know? The the blacksmith is towards the front, and so I got good one side.
Tim / GM:Exactly. Yeah. So that felt the most physically real to me. Mhmm. And then, you know, of course, the snacks place was the least of a location, I feel like.
Tim / GM:It was more of, like, playing, like
Hannah / Eryn:A dungeon.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Your home is in a dungeon, essentially. Yeah. Which was super cool. Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:There was a dungeon. There was a dragon. We did it, you guys.
Speaker 6:We did Dungeon and Dragons.
Thomas / Guy:Treasure and dragons.
Speaker 3:I think the lamplight was the most imaginable for me. And I'm not sure why, but I think it just, like, tickled something in my brain.
Tim / GM:And I think I did do a lot more paragraphs about scene descriptions back then.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. I loved the lamplight theme with that we got
Tim / GM:Oh, yeah.
Thomas / Guy:When we revisited. That helped
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Thomas / Guy:Set the scene for
Tim / GM:it really well.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. When we transported back into the jail gel cell. Wow. That was hard to say. Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:And then the theme of the rowers outside. That was great. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I also think whistle. I whistled a long
Speaker 3:time ago.
Thomas / Guy:I also think starting in Lamplight was great because it gave us several episodes to, like, figure out who these characters are that we were playing before we had any, like, spotlight deep story stuff.
Tim / GM:Yep.
Speaker 6:Like Yeah. NPCs that we already knew to interact with.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 3:How Dave happened Mhmm. Was, like, totally unexpected. That was Hannah's fault. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Offhand.
Speaker 6:Hannah fested it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Hannah fested
Hannah / Eryn:it. Just love love. Okay.
Speaker 7:So last question for Tim from listeners is actually around NBCs. Are there any, like, rules of well, I yeah. Like, general, like, heuristics, rule of thumb sort of stuff you use to, like, create the NPC? And then also, like, any in particular that had, like, a certain, like, inspiration that comes to mind that you wanna talk about?
Tim / GM:Yeah. So for doing NPCs, like, I really like to do, as much as I can, like, identifiable voices or unique voices, I think, turn out to be the strongest characters in a lot of cases.
Speaker 3:Pedet. Pedet. Pedet, your pockets.
Tim / GM:Yeah. And I, you know, I like trying to do voices, because it's very silly and fun. But I'm just gonna look at my NPC list.
Thomas / Guy:It's very hard on you when we don't see an NPC for 20 episodes.
Tim / GM:And they come back. That's true. To keep the voice consistent. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Also, making you name characters on the spot.
Tim / GM:Yeah. So so I do it on the spot sometimes, you know, when I don't know the character's gonna exist or when it's fun to do that. But But when I'm naming characters, I, unless I'm naming them, like, referentially as a joke, I I really try to make their name memorable in some way, and I think that's super important in D and D because there is nothing less memorable than, like, like, Ilothri, then Dylthar. Like, it's like, fucking what? Like, you know, all these a million elf names.
Tim / GM:So that's why I named characters, you know, like
Hannah / Eryn:Maisie.
Tim / GM:Maisie or, like, Henry Muldriff. You know, it's named after, like, a magic card or, like Yeah. I'm looking through our list of NPCs here that nobody will remember, but, like, Daniel Orchard, Nook. Who the fuck
Speaker 3:is Daniel Orchard?
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Todd Poe was a good one.
Speaker 6:Todd Poe
Speaker 7:was solid. Yeah.
Tim / GM:Oh, all of the NPCs of Tildry, you know, were largely named after Final Fantasy inspirations. Yep.
Speaker 6:Thanks Thomas.
Tim / GM:Judge Malboro, Judge Flann, Judge Tonberry.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:If I'm not mistaken, the FF in Engelbert Wisherspoon is a vague reference to Final Fantasy.
Speaker 7:Maybe.
Speaker 6:Englebert, Final Fantasy
Speaker 4:wishes you like.
Hannah / Eryn:I did not know that. Beautiful.
Speaker 6:Oh, that's hilarious. Of course it is, though. Oh my god.
Tim / GM:So my my rule of thumb to answer the question is give them a silly or memorable name, ideally, that sounds like something else, I found as the key. A name that sounds like it's something else is very memorable.
Speaker 6:Let it be its own mnemonic?
Tim / GM:Yep. Pretty much.
Hannah / Eryn:Mhmm.
Thomas / Guy:Do we have any favorite NBCs we wanna highlight?
Tim / GM:Yeah. Do you guys Besides
Speaker 3:besides Besides
Thomas / Guy:besides Norp.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Norp. Yeah. No.
Tim / GM:I love I love playing Dave, and I love playing, Joe, actually. It was one of my favorite ones because he was just such he was so, like, cocky and Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I liked Emery and Tibio liked Emery and no one else liked Emery. I fucking hated them. And that's fine. Tibio and Emery can be best buds forever.
Speaker 3:He was a dick right off the bat.
Speaker 6:Of course he was.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I don't abide by that.
Hannah / Eryn:I love Dolly because it's Lee Pace.
Speaker 3:Yes. Mhmm. Dolly Pace.
Hannah / Eryn:The inspiration for Dolly is Hannah's obsession with Lee Pace, the actor extraordinaire.
Speaker 3:I wanna talk about how Dave happened though because
Tim / GM:Sure. Sorry. Real quick. Ironically, it's funny because, like, Joe McMillan, the villain, is based off a character played by Lee Pace in some TV show.
Speaker 6:Oh my god.
Speaker 3:Joe McVillan.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. It's a whole circle.
Tim / GM:It's alright. Go ahead, Maggie.
Speaker 3:I just Dave was not supposed to happen.
Tim / GM:That's right.
Speaker 3:He was just another bodyguard or whatever we had to get by. Mhmm. And then Hannah was like
Hannah / Eryn:Okay. Can I speak for myself? Yes. You were being so awkward around him, and I didn't really realize, I think, at the time that Uli was just like that around everybody that she didn't really know about now.
Speaker 3:So he was really gone.
Hannah / Eryn:And then I was like, Uli slept with him in Holly's head and Hannah's. And then that's where that all came from is because you were being so awkward around. You're like, I can handle this, guys. And then you're like, hey. And he was like, hey.
Hannah / Eryn:And I was like, oh, they fuck.
Speaker 3:What was going through my head was I'm the only one who is from Lamplight. And, like, of course, I know the rough and tumble, like, bar regulars. Dave would be one of them. And I I did a lot of that in the first few episodes where, like, oh, yeah. I know my way in.
Speaker 3:Like Mhmm. Without discussing it with Tim or anything. Mhmm. Like, oh, yeah. I know this.
Speaker 3:I know where that is, Which makes sense. Which makes sense. I was trying to, like, yeah. I know this place. And then Hannah was like, oh, so you and Dave, And it was like a joke.
Speaker 3:It was just a joke.
Hannah / Eryn:Uh-huh.
Speaker 3:And then it was our running joke and
Speaker 6:and then it was real. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that was real. So you got Hannah to thank for Dooley.
Hannah / Eryn:And then you fell in love.
Tim / GM:It's like a lot of real marriages. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It starts
Tim / GM:as a joke.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And then Hannah
Hannah / Eryn:Hannah forces them.
Speaker 3:Now kiss.
Tim / GM:I think what I might do for this next session is actually play a little clip from each of your session zeros.
Speaker 7:Oh, no. Oh.
Tim / GM:So You actually Terrified. It's it's an for each character, and then we just saw how they would play it out.
Speaker 3:They're so bad.
Tim / GM:Yeah. They are bad. I'll just play a clip, probably the, you know, quote unquote best part of each.
Speaker 6:Mine's all bad. It's all Borat voice and weird.
Tim / GM:And it's got, like, so none of your stories have, like, they're so far away from what you ended up being, each of you. And and for the most part, there's some congruity there. But let's just start with Uli. So the quest the question is, what inspired Uli, and how did she change by the end of the campaign? And I think to kick that off, we'll listen to a bit of your session 0.
Tim / GM:If I had a scroll of bold strength, I'd at least be able to do all the chores by myself, at least for a day.
Speaker 3:No. You have no. Fucking build muscles, dude. Like, lift something. Get stronger the right way.
Tim / GM:But magic is so much easier. I could just do it all.
Speaker 3:I beat his ass. So, Uli originally, I had created to be a very, self important and and very, like, boastful type of character, who I definitely maybe sort of based off of Bakugo from My Hero Academia. There it is.
Tim / GM:Which is a hyperfixation
Speaker 3:of mine. So, but I was just like, man, I should play, like, a really, proud and, like, confident character with a lot of behind the scenes emotional issues. But then I realized that I don't know what boastful and confident looks like on me. Mhmm. I literally don't know how to be that person.
Speaker 3:So it was, like, really hard at the beginning, and I had no idea what I was doing. And I eventually I think within the first five episodes, just, like, totally shifted away from that, I think I and I know originally I really wanted to put importance on Lily growing up as the only magical character in her family or magical character the only magical person in her family, and them really seeing physical strength and, like, ability as the important trait to have, and Uli coming in with magic and, just kind of, like, exploding all of that. I don't know what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 4:Do you
Speaker 3:know what I mean?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So she she had magic as a strength, and they saw it as a weakness. Dor, especially, who really put emphasis on his own physical strength. Seeing Uli as kind of a rival
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Or, like, stronger than him and, like like, that's not okay. You are cheating your way into this because you have magic. Mhmm. So that's where the the issues with her family kind of started. So I wanted to play her as somebody who really kind of stepped away from magic, and didn't wanna, like, depend on it or use it at all because it was a weakness, because it wasn't her own physical strength, which is why I created a punch sorcerer.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 3:So I wanted her to use physical attacks and, like, strength as as her her, like
Tim / GM:So do you think Uli was really blind to the idea that she was enhancing herself with magic when she did those things? Like, there'd be, like, you know, the instances where she would crack her knuckles to use blade ward to start a fight. There was some hint that she might not have even known that she was using magic in those cases.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, like, when I created her, I wanted I wanted to be able to, kind of skew the spells in a way that I would it would be like an after effect. The cracking the knuckles thing, it would be like, getting ready to punch somebody and then punching them and then somehow imbuing that punch with magic and not really realizing it because she can't control it. She ran away from her problems instead of trying to, like, work with them. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So that's how it started. And I realized that I do not know how to do that. I I basically kind of fully shifted into just being me.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But a me where I hadn't really come to terms with a lot of my own emotional problems, and family issues. So it was really hard for me at the beginning because I was finally playing somebody I knew how to play, but it was really, really emotionally tied to who I am as a person. Yeah. So it was it was hard because I I feel like I personally have made a lot of, like, emotional Mhmm. Development in the past few years of my life.
Tim / GM:So So that's actually that's exactly what the second question is kinda getting at here. So your your character, Uli, definitely changed the most emotionally.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:You know, throughout the campaign in terms of, you know, getting control and sort of learning herself and learning how to handle the world. So a very similar question, but your your emotional depth arc, it really culminated in the final episode. So so let's let's talk mostly about the end of that and how that felt to finish.
Speaker 3:Throughout the whole campaign, Uli really kind of learned that she didn't have to be physically strong or emotionally strong all the time, and that it wasn't weak to depend on who she was, like, with her innate magic or the friends that she had made. Emotional connections weren't a weakness or something to be ashamed of. So I think at the very end of the campaign, we got to see a bit of that because we're in maybe the beginning half of the campaign, Uli would have tried to take on the role of, like, the most powerful, the one who, like, had to punch somebody first or, like, look the strongest. I think at the end, she may I made a decision to, like, step
Speaker 4:away from
Speaker 3:the role that I think I had intended to play at the beginning, if that makes sense. The choice I made was to leave Ilia with people that I knew I could trust to handle it
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And then take on a role where I was, like, fully dependent on the innate magic I had and, kind of doing the support behind the scenes stuff, I guess, if I'm I don't know what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 6:No. I'd no. I'd I hear you. I totally hear you. And, like, trust was a huge thing for Uli.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Like you your character went from having a family that you couldn't trust to be vulnerable around to having, you know, a chosen family, a group of friends that you learn to actually trust and leave important things to and make important decisions with. And you have that trust with them to be vulnerable and let go of that prioritization of strength.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and realizing that it was a group, like, joint effort. We all couldn't have done it on our own
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Separately. Uli definitely couldn't have, but knowing she had an important role to play Yeah. With her friends
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Was really it was it was interesting to kind of get there as a character, but it was also just really cool. And, like, I cried in the last last episode when Uli got her final patch and her patch was
Speaker 4:her
Speaker 3:because she had gotten patches for all of her friends. I didn't know I was getting another patch. Yeah. Nobody knew. So when it showed up, it was like like, oh my god.
Speaker 3:I am my own friend. Like, I had to accept me and, like, do something nice for me and, like, fully realize who I am.
Speaker 6:I cried listening back. It was it was a really good moment. In the moment, I think we were all so, like, high on adrenaline. Not the rest of us were just like, ah. I'm like,
Speaker 3:oh my god.
Speaker 6:But yeah.
Speaker 3:I have to embrace myself. It
Speaker 6:was beautiful.
Speaker 7:So I
Speaker 3:no. You could go ahead.
Speaker 7:Oh, I did have a question about Ollie. Specifically the, tantrum tankard. So, like, it it like, I so the tantrum tankard allows you to basically bottle up emotions and then rule or, like, tap into it later. Right? And, and it, like, I understand where that comes from for Uly because, you know, you have, you lose control over your spells and can cause damage if you have, like, a tantrum or high heightened emotions.
Speaker 7:But I had, like, a really, like, visceral reaction when you occasionally would offer the tanker to someone else who was in like an, a heightened emotional state like that, that just felt like, I don't like me, John, as a person like that, like, that felt weird to, like, want to do that. So I don't know if you thought about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That was, actually very intentional. So Tim kind of created it for me knowing that Ollie would need something to help her stay in control. So for the first however many episodes, I, like, very intentionally used it as a crutch instead of dealing with my emotions. So I would I would definitely just get rid of them and deal with them later.
Speaker 3:As time went on, I realized I didn't need it so much, but other people might benefit from it. So the the act of offering it was maybe a misguided sort of attempt at care for other people. Like, I see you're distressed. Here's what I do when I'm distressed. Get rid of the emotion completely.
Tim / GM:And and honestly so the tantrum tankard was one of my favorite tools, from, like, a narrative standpoint. Being able to, like, not only, like, switch emotions on a dime, but being able to transfer them to other people. I used that pretty ham fistedly with Dave Dave where I had you guys share emotions with each
Speaker 6:other. So good.
Tim / GM:Yeah. But so the the tankard and the mirror, you know, that came after that, which was sort of like an, like, upgrade or a new attempt at the tankard Mhmm. In a lot of ways, and I feel like that's a very organic arc to take with your your challenge for control, because a lot of people are gonna seek out, like, the pill answer, you know. Like, it's, like, what can make me in control right now that takes no effort from me? The tantrum taker.
Tim / GM:You know? The mirror. You know? And it's like, I think it's through finding and failing with these things that you really learned, like, what the option is. And it's it's the hard route.
Tim / GM:You know? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, feeling your feelings. Yep. Dealing with them. Realizing it's not the end of the world to feel sad or angry or scared, which is, like, very personal for
Speaker 4:me. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, definitely a lot of me in Ollie.
Thomas / Guy:And I would just, yeah, I
Speaker 7:would just add, like, just for listeners, like, obviously, we're not, psychiatrists or anything. But, like, there's clearly a balance, but I think that that's what I was kinda hoping to hear because that that was my reaction. Like, this feels like kind of inhuman to just, like, erase it.
Speaker 3:It's just a Band Aid. Yeah. But, yeah, obviously, no judgment. Just from my own personal experiences, I I felt like it was a kind of cool platform for me to, exhibit things that I've learned in my own personal life Yeah. In terms of emotional well-being.
Speaker 3:And she was just a good vessel for that. But, it did make it really hard for a while to play her because I everyone else is playing a character, and I'm like, oh my god. I'm just playing me. But, like, me before I knew how to handle my own emotions, so it felt like regressing a little bit.
Thomas / Guy:For for whatever reason, some of my favorite Uli moments were when Uli was being very vulnerable or, like, self pitying. Like, for some reason, I always remember, in the 4 l Juice Bar fight, I think I think you do a wild surgeon. Yeah. Like, explode Everybody. Everywhere.
Thomas / Guy:And so then you spent your turn
Speaker 7:just, like,
Thomas / Guy:kneeling down being, like, oh, you're so stupid. I can't believe you did that. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, that's such a good turn.
Speaker 3:But and there was a conscious choice to self pity as opposed to taking an action. And I remember because I weld surged, there was, like, a spell involved. I don't remember. I was, like, emotional because I saw
Tim / GM:You enlarged reduced yourself.
Speaker 3:I enlarged reduced myself instead of doing something because I wanted to, like, show that I felt super tiny and, like, pitiful. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:I felt
Thomas / Guy:like I mean, Uli obviously has a ton of badass moments, but it, like, it takes guts and creativity to, like, do something dumb.
Speaker 6:I just yeah. That moment of the grease and then tiny Uli was just so perfect where you're
Speaker 3:like, I'm sorry. Cyber. Yeah. A lot of Uli was not fully intentional, but the emotional stuff really was. So I I'm very proud of who she became in the end.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. I'm
Speaker 6:glad you fought through it because I think it was it was clear during a lot of the early episodes that you felt it. You were really feeling a lot of what Uli felt. Yeah. And, yeah, I'm I'm really glad you fought through it because I I think the the growth that Uli exhibited throughout the campaign was really it felt earned. It felt really relatable, and it felt really raw and honest in a cool way.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:I I think one of the one of the greatest exemplifying moments of this is when Tandy tries to kick Uli out of Lamplight after fighting with Emery, And that there was, like there's a lot of intensity behind that moment because, like, it's Uli picking a fight with Emery and blowing up the docks, and, like, you know, it's it's us starting out this campaign, and Maggie is destroying the city I start you guys off in.
Speaker 3:And almost killing the first NPC.
Tim / GM:And so and I think the the diction that Tandy uses is you are not a part of this group, which was, like it was a little sharper than I meant it to come off. But I I was trying to put in a little bit of, like, the, like, the fear of, like, you're not gonna like, the the the wagons leaving the station and you're not a part of
Speaker 3:it. Right.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think you also said something like, you're not in control.
Tim / GM:Yeah. And I use that over and over again.
Speaker 3:Yes. And after the fact, outside of playing, Tim and I had a conversation about it because he was worried that he went too far, like, personally.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And, it's interesting because I think I I maybe would have taken it that way, but I was so intentional with who Uli was
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That it didn't feel like a personal thing at that moment.
Tim / GM:Hey. DMs out there. It might be tempting to to poke fun at your players, like, personal insecurities.
Speaker 4:I
Tim / GM:would use that sparingly.
Thomas / Guy:Definitely check-in with them afterwards. For sure.
Speaker 4:And, oh
Tim / GM:my god, talk to your players.
Speaker 3:It was just it was like a really cool moment of consent. Like, was this okay? Yes. Like, I don't wanna go too far. And and me being like, absolutely, this is, like, perfect for the character arc.
Speaker 3:So consent also.
Tim / GM:And so, yeah, that that leads us off in a great spot to, Holly, kind of the, same question to kick us off, actually. What inspired Holly, and how did she change by the end of the campaign? And to give us an idea of where Holly started, we'll listen to just a little bit of her session 0, I think.
Hannah / Eryn:You there. Yes. You. Why, you look like you've been walking far too long. Those boots pinch a bit?
Hannah / Eryn:Ah, yes. I can see just by looking at you that you have been sized incorrectly. Let's just take a seat here at Holly's Cobbler Corner, and we'll have you properly fitted for the perfect shoe. So Holly was inspired directly by, Sophie from Howl's Moving Castle, the animated movie.
Speaker 4:Love it.
Hannah / Eryn:And basically, in the movie, if you haven't seen it, just a girl who's a hat she works in a hat maker shop, becomes, like, taken by the switch and then ends up having power, like, kind of within herself a little bit, and there's much of other stuff that happens. But I really liked the aesthetic. I think visually of when Maggie was drawing my character, I was like, she looks like Sophie from Howl's Moving Castle, because I just love that, like, Victorian. I don't know. Like, workers, outfit with, like, the long sleeves and the high neck dress and then wearing an apron over that.
Hannah / Eryn:And she was, like, worked in a shop. And so, like, all of those things were directly inspired by that. So that's where Holly started. And then I think I just always wanted pink hair, so I was like, make her hair pink. And yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:So I think by the end of the campaign, you know, Holly grew in in power. She every time Tim, like, did a great job of just giving me fun witchy things all the time, like Sal the cat and, the broom and just all those things just made her, like, so much fun to, like, be that fully formed, like, just super witch. Like, I just wanted to be the witchiest witch in the west. You know? Like, and so that was really fun because that was definitely, like, what I was going for with the whole character.
Hannah / Eryn:And then I think as far as, like, Holly's personality, you know, I am a in Hannah, in real life, a pretty direct person in general. And so I think that definitely came through in Holly. So a little bit of me in there of how I played her of just, like, relatively going to be a straight arrow, shoot for what she wants, go for it, you know, not really wait for other people to, like, always catch up. Like, she's just gonna go. And so I I like to move in my personal life.
Hannah / Eryn:So I'm like, let's go. Let's do this. You know? Let's move forward. And so, I don't always like to stop and think about the bad things that could happen from my actions, and so that comes through a lot in Holly Hyacinth.
Hannah / Eryn:So yeah. And then I feel like I don't know if there's any other things that you guys from, like, outsider perspective.
Tim / GM:Yeah. There's a couple things there. So, two notes about Holly that kind of pervade my understanding of her is, one is a sense of place. I think Holly served his home base more than any other character, being that her home was, like, the
Hannah / Eryn:Oh, yeah. Place
Tim / GM:that everybody kind of, you know, lived out of for, several episodes of the campaign. And that I think that was big to Holly's identity, having the workshop and your home, you know, and your, like, your basement with the actual workshop. Several episodes had you know, we had fights there more than, you know and we had fights in Snacks Place too, of course, and in Hogwild as well, but this is all Holly's home.
Hannah / Eryn:Mhmm. She's very established in, like, the community in a tangible house way. Right? Like, there was, like, there's a lot of physical things that made Holly who she was, and we were able to play literally inside those things. The shop and the house and the guild and all that stuff.
Hannah / Eryn:So, like, I think that really led to that home based feeling for Holly. Holly's character and also getting to play host was really fun in my house and stuff. So, like, I as a player, I think that was really fun and definitely something like Holly was like, let's have brunch in my house. Here's some tea for everyone. You know?
Hannah / Eryn:So yeah.
Speaker 6:It's interesting too because I think Holly more than anyone had the feeling of your life got torn up by the events of the campaign. Like everyone else, it's kind of like, you know, you pick up and drop them in and they play in the sandbox, but Holly was here and her life got fucked up by all the things that happened, which is really an interesting dynamic, especially in comparison to Snack, who's just like the wild child. Yeah.
Tim / GM:In a lot of ways, has kind of nothing only things to gain from this adventure, whereas Holly's, you know, got a lot of the sacrifice there.
Hannah / Eryn:Oh, that's a good point.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Moments where your your your decisiveness kind of got the group into trouble. Like, I'm thinking specifically of Hog Wild when
Speaker 6:Oh, the John
Thomas / Guy:was holding the
Speaker 3:punch in the knife.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Oh.
Thomas / Guy:And I think that that was a big character development for Holly too to kind of recognize that and
Speaker 7:What was the scene again?
Thomas / Guy:We came out of the sewers or whatever.
Speaker 3:It was Dave.
Thomas / Guy:And yeah. Joe Joe is controlling the townspeople and yeah. Was it Dave and Emery?
Speaker 3:I think Emery was with us.
Tim / GM:Yeah. But it was it was whoever was still up there. So Dave and Barrett, I think, were being held down by townsfolk because they were Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:As like as like collateral to be like, hey. Don't fuck with us or we'll hurt these people.
Tim / GM:Yep.
Thomas / Guy:And then Holly fucked with them, and they hurt those people.
Speaker 6:She fucked around and found out.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah. That was that was, the other part of Holly that I think changed a lot over time. And there's a couple of really cool moments where it comes to a head is where, you know, Holly has some hints that she's, not necessarily callous, but she does what's good for business.
Hannah / Eryn:You
Tim / GM:know, that's kind of her mentality. And throughout the campaign, she learned to make choices that were bad for business, but better for the soul. You know? And so she had a couple moments early on where she was kind of deciding between the optimal move and doing the nice thing for the party. Yeah.
Tim / GM:And she chose the optimal move. But as we progressed later on, like in the in the bone, in Tibia's place towards the end of that with the Raven fight, Holly was about to leave the fight, and she was on the bridge. And then she goes, damn it. And she, like, runs back into the fight. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:You know? Also deciding to become a vampire at the end.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Big team. I'll start your fight. Yeah. Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. I think that's a 100%. Like, you know, she started off the because the first half of the campaign, she's really focused on just saving her sister, and that's all she really cares about. And so everything else was secondary to that. And so I think after that was completed and her she felt, like, safe with her sister, who is her only family, she kind of actually had, like, friendships and, you know, her new curse bicker family that she had built up.
Hannah / Eryn:And so, starting to care actually about these people. Because I think in campaigns for me in the past, it's like, we're all in from, like, the second play. And I'm like, no. Holly doesn't care about these people really. They're a means to an end right now in the beginning.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Then that's a cool way to look at it.
Hannah / Eryn:And not in a mean way, but she's not going to stick her neck out for them if it gets in the way of her goal.
Speaker 6:She's driven. She was driven, and that was a really cool thing.
Speaker 3:And and growing up in poverty and having to be self sufficient, like, it makes sense that you you would depend on yourself and your sister and nobody else.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:So So Holly was kind of thrown into, like, a bag of personalities, and, you know, it's obvious that she would be skeptical to them, like, from the get go, some of them especially, like snack for instance. So we've got a listener question here. How did you navigate playing with characters with obviously different alignments? And so, you know, the I think the easiest difference there from the beginning is Holly versus snack, where Holly is a very kind of dogmatic, you know, business owner, and snack is a literal, like like, creature from the deep kind
Speaker 4:of thing.
Hannah / Eryn:And I
Tim / GM:think at the beginning, you know, Snack is pretty straight up and down evil and that he is, you know, selfish to his own end sort of thing. Mhmm. And Holly, I I would say, is pretty much lawful good at the very beginning, and that's a hard spread. So how did you manage that relationship? Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:I think of the, one of the first or second episodes when we get in the boat with Todd Pohl together, me and Snack. And, at that point, Holly was just like, oh, you're an interesting little nugget, aren't you, Snack? Like, she didn't really, like, have much more thought beyond that, as long as he wasn't a threat to what she was doing. He she was like, oh, you're kind of a weird little guy. And so I don't know.
Hannah / Eryn:That's kind of I think, like, she was like, you're a lizard. Like, my sister's a lizard. You know, like, I don't know if there was much beyond that and it was maybe just focusing on my character at that time, too. But I think I'm trying to think of more interactions. I think Holly, Hannah, and Holly, like, I always had a lot of fun interacting with Snack's character Snack's character or John's character.
Hannah / Eryn:Sorry. I put Snack. And, yeah. I don't know. I just like I think a big part of Holly slash me personally as a player.
Hannah / Eryn:Like, I was always jealous of Snack because he got to looks like he had more fun, quote, unquote. And so, I don't know. I feel like Holly was probably felt more restrained by her responsibilities. Right? And it felt like Snack got to, like, do whatever and be kind of this, like he obviously had his own motives, but, it just seemed like, oh, this is what a carefree living would be like of, like, just doing whatever you want, roaming the lands, knowing but yourself.
Hannah / Eryn:Whereas I think Holly really felt the weight of her responsibility to, like, stay focused on that too.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. So Yeah. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And once you figured it out, you got to be a little selfish.
Speaker 6:Snatched your opportunity.
Hannah / Eryn:Snatched shirts. Yeah. So I don't know. I just love playing, like, really dramatic, kinda wild characters. So, like, when I got to be a cobalt, like, you guys obviously heard it all on the pod.
Hannah / Eryn:But, yeah, it just is, like, fun to cut loose like that because you have to be a real person in real life. So, like, the more fantastical you can be, I think, in when playing D and D, it just kinda makes it more fun for me as a player. So
Tim / GM:Yeah. That that's a perfect segue into snack here. So let's let's start off on the same spot. What inspired snack, and how did he change by the end of the campaign?
Speaker 3:Gonna play a little snack clip.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Our our episode 0 of Snack, I can't even remember. This has to do with, the vampire. Right? Piezo?
Speaker 6:Piezo. Yeah.
Tim / GM:That's right. Let's take a listen to that.
Speaker 7:Have you belongings to to give me for for the respect you give?
Tim / GM:I do. I have riches untold. And he turns around and gestures to room and says, shit. It seems I have been plundered in my sleep.
Speaker 7:Well, I will I will take your services then. Come follow me.
Tim / GM:I can give you this. What? It's the steak that was in my heart. I managed to pull it out.
Thomas / Guy:Ugh, gross. No.
Speaker 7:So, yeah. Me as like a player, I'm always very cognizant, maybe like a little paranoid about being like an overbearing character, like at the table. And, that's helpful because like, like, in the past, like, I do spend more energy trying to, like, highlight other characters or try to engage with them. But, like we played a campaign and I kid you not, like, we talked about this, just a few months ago, like Maggie and I played this campaign, 6 people, not like 15 people, 6 people for over a year. And she literally didn't even remember my character.
Speaker 7:Like it was that, it was that much of a background character. It was like, not even an NPC.
Tim / GM:Like that's right.
Speaker 7:What was his name? Yeah. So, so anyway, but like, what was good about that is like, for this, podcast, it was like, you gotta do something different, John, like every character is Henry Muldriff that you do. So that was like, fine. You know, I'm just going to do something really off the wall.
Speaker 7:And like, the Tasha's, book came out and then this was just such an absurd, like, concept, like a Kobold with a genie and like, and like, so like, I guess as far as like initially playing him, like I was really focused on like this concept of like an evil puppy. Like
Speaker 4:yeah. To me
Tim / GM:it was always a toddler with a bazooka. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It was
Speaker 7:like, it doesn't know any better. It is doing, it is doing evil, but it's like, yeah. It's also cute. But that like became unsustainable. Like I just realized I was spending so much energy.
Speaker 7:Like, how can I, like, how can I fuck up what they're trying to do in like a way that's not totally destructive? And I just didn't want to live in that space the whole time. So then, like, I just try to like, make like, like pinnacles of like evil ish behavior and then signs of good, like the, the hero's feast cocoa, and like buying it to share with people and stuff like that. But then also like, still doing something horrible, like, the next day, you know, like, killing the bird that's he thinks is a spy.
Tim / GM:That's right.
Speaker 7:Yeah. But, yeah. Like, I I think If
Tim / GM:I can real quick, there are so many good instances of snack just going out and killing things. Like
Hannah / Eryn:Setting traps.
Tim / GM:Yeah. There is I I don't remember
Hannah / Eryn:the specific quote right now, but it was something about, they
Tim / GM:had asked snack. He comes back to the party and they're like, Snack, did you, like, bring back some frogs for us? And he's just like, bring it back. Like, what are you talking about? I just went out there and killed a bunch
Thomas / Guy:of snow.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. So, and then, so as, like, far as progression goes, like, I I just wanted to, like, show that progression from like evil. And I didn't know where he was going to land in the end, but I knew he would have to kinda like meet in the middle with the party. The that just really corresponded well with gaining power.
Speaker 7:And then he did this, like, Charmander to Charizard sort of thing, you know, like,
Speaker 4:so perfect analogy.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So, Yeah. And what was weird about that though, is like, it was really hard for me to not still like play him as kind of a smaller creature because like, I wanted him to still think he was small, but he is big. And so like, that was a weird thing to like, kind of like keep straight over audio. But yeah, like that, that was definitely the, the concept was basically, you know, I spending like the early impressionable years around just basically chaotic evil environment.
Speaker 7:Everything around him is trying to kill him or like maliciously harm each other. There's no such thing as friendship or family into, you know, like this new environment and kind of like learning what what can what he could become. And that's, that's kind of where he ended up. He still has that chaotic nature, but just kind of stumbled upon like influences that allowed him to be like, a useful, like, I guess, a positive force in the world. And that just like blind pursuit of power too, like just becoming a dragon.
Speaker 7:Why? I don't know. I just wanna, you know, just dog catching the car and he did it. Like, he did get to become a dragon. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And then that's what that's what triggered, like, the need to think about it.
Tim / GM:Yeah. So for Snack as a character, as a whole throughout this campaign and moving forward, what did you learn from the character of Snack playing such a different kind of angle on D and D, and what are you gonna carry forward in the future campaigns?
Speaker 7:Pick a voice before you start recording.
Speaker 4:It's like
Speaker 7:like I we did the episode 0. I was like, oh, that wasn't great. I should practice that. And then and then we just recorded again. I was like, well, that's what I got.
Speaker 7:But it did like, I mean, it was sustainable. I was able to do it. That's a big one. I think also like, Yeah. If you're having fun, the character is fun.
Speaker 7:At least that's, that's how I feel. So,
Speaker 4:what
Speaker 7:I'm going to carry forward is like, I'm going to, my next character is not going to be this aspect of the party, but I'm going to let myself have fun and let myself have the spotlight and the character that is to be.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And then there are a couple, you know, super important moments. You know, we talked earlier a little bit about, the cross post incident and and how, how much of a milestone that was for the whole campaign, I think, if you wanna touch on that a little bit.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think that one so that scene what triggered that moment was Uli's sister. What was her name?
Speaker 3:Viri.
Speaker 7:Viri, was killed for all we knew at that moment, by a cursed item. And we, that cursed item, we knew came from the crossroads, like a shopkeep person who was like knowingly selling cursed items. We let them live and I think snack probably wanted to kill him or something. But, yeah, like that was like, that was probably the peak, giving into kind of a dark side moment for snack where, so he basically just has Genie teleport him there and, kills this guy like that. That's what he went there to do when he did it.
Speaker 7:Deliberately
Tim / GM:like making a genie an accomplice to that act too.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And like, what was interesting as soon as I got there, I was like, what the hell are you doing, John? Like, you're just like totally derailing this. You have no idea. Like, so that was like a very uncomfortable moment for me.
Speaker 7:Cause I was like, literally I just like grabbed whatever Tim had in mind and just like totally did something different at that moment. But I think that was a good, yeah, that was a good climax to that giving into, an evil, impulse even if it, you know, came from, like, an emotional state, like a positive thing, you know, emotional relationship with another, person. But, yeah, I think that was that was at his darkest moment probably.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And I think it came out into something pretty cool, you know, relying on Holly to kind of fix that situation. You know?
Tim / GM:Yeah. Since Mojo was, like, directly threatening you and all that kind of stuff. But it that that also accelerated the plot, you know, by a good handful of episodes because I wasn't prepared to divulge, you know, some of the things that we learned there. You know, like, Mojo was, like, directly out to get you guys at this point, you know, and knows who Holly is and kind of really reveals the whole fight as being between undead spirits. And
Speaker 4:Mhmm. You know,
Tim / GM:I guess that comes a little later where it's outright revealed. But, yeah, definitely push things ahead of where I was expecting to be, and I feel like it woke up the campaign in a really cool way.
Speaker 7:Thanks. Yeah. And, I mean, like, as the GMU had every opportunity to just, like, mix that. Like, it didn't have to happen.
Speaker 4:You'd be
Speaker 7:like, no. And it would have been fine, but I'm really glad you let me do that. Cause I definitely felt a need to do something drastic there. And I think it came across good.
Speaker 6:It was really dark in the moment and it provided a really good parallel to, the first Jinx fight in the nightclub Yeah. Where you gleefully Annihilate him. Gleefully just fucked that guy up so bad Yeah. With joy and cheer. And in this moment, you were very serious.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So even even though it felt like a backslide, even though it felt like a regression for Snack to be doing such lethal violence without any input from anybody else. It was still different in the tone because Snack was very serious.
Tim / GM:That's a good point. I think Snack knew at that point what he was doing and how bad it was.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It wasn't a game. It was it was a very serious thing. He was like, these are the consequences for the crime that you've done against my people, like my friends.
Speaker 3:And it was, like, intentional justice. Like, he's trying to
Speaker 6:He wasn't having fun. Do the right
Speaker 4:thing.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It was a lot
Tim / GM:Yeah. There's a lot less of pushing a knife into a deer to see what
Speaker 6:would happen. Yeah. Yeah. You weren't you weren't playing in that it it even though the the concept of what you did was felt backwards, the implementation was a forward movement.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And, I mean, I I had like, when I made the character on alignment, it said chaotic evil, and I wanted to make that convincing. Mhmm. And I think that's where it happened. Yeah.
Hannah / Eryn:I think that was an instance where, like, you did a lot of what I do in characters is, like, I don't owe to a fault of myself. I don't always think about the party and the consequences because I'm, like, I'm so trying to focus on, like, how true can I be to this character? And I think it was nice to have someone else in the party do that and, like, be like, I don't care what anyone else is doing. I'm playing true to snack right now in this moment, and it you know, the consequences be damned. And, like, I play like that to a fault, like I said, sometimes.
Hannah / Eryn:And I'm trying to be better about being more conscious of how it's gonna play to the thing and, like, balancing it. Right? Because you still wanna be true to the character. But it was nice to have it's nice to have some of those other, like, other people have those moments of, like
Speaker 6:Impulse.
Hannah / Eryn:Impulse. I'm just gonna react and how Snack would react in that moment. And that's when I punched Joe. Yeah. I feel like that was Holly.
Hannah / Eryn:Like, she would get fucking mad and just wanna punch her in the face. Like, you know, like, that's and let the chips fall where they may. And so I think it was nice. There's a lot in Hog Wild that happened like that. Mhmm.
Hannah / Eryn:And I just felt like snack was my kindred spirit.
Speaker 3:Hog Wild brings out the worst in people.
Hannah / Eryn:Yes. It does.
Thomas / Guy:I think that friction that happens when you act in your own interests instead of the parties is super valuable, though. Like, it creates really interesting, moments and things to play off of.
Tim / GM:Yeah. I think everybody's a little scared to create those moments because you don't Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:I am. I know. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But it
Speaker 3:does help you kind of become more your character. Like, what what would Uli do in this situation? Is she mad at snack for doing that? Or is she like, yeah. Revenge.
Speaker 3:My sister's laying here dead. Like
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. There there is an old, like, D and D meme or whatever of a terrible asshole player who's like, oh, it's what my character would do.
Tim / GM:Exactly. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:But, but there's definitely ways to do that in a very good way that that both John and Hannah has pulled off.
Speaker 4:So Mhmm.
Speaker 3:We're just good players. That's all.
Tim / GM:So for Tara and Tibio, we'll start from the same place, but I'm I wanna put a little caveat in this. So the question, of course, is what inspired Tibia, and how did he change by the end of the campaign? And I really wanna focus on the the very beginning of Tibia because in my memory, Tibia was the first character that was kind of submitted, like, for the campaign, and it was I I wanna be a gnome riding in a skeleton. And I think, like, I had very recently listened to, I forgot the name of the podcast already. Root Tales of Magic.
Hannah / Eryn:Oh, yeah.
Tim / GM:And there's, there's a skeletal character in that one, And I was I remember thinking of that, show and, you know, like, me as a typical DM, I was very resistant to that idea because I was, like, well, that's a huge mechanical advantage to be riding a skeleton permanently that you can kind of command that you can call. Yeah. And then, like, the more I thought about it, the more we got into it. I was, like, this never really puts Tibio in, like, a super advantageous position. And, like, you know, that's because Tara is smart about the way she plays it, and she doesn't she's not using it as a superpower.
Tim / GM:It's more of a flavor thing.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah.
Tim / GM:You know, and that's partially me as a DM limiting her on what she can do based on what special bones she has and that kind of stuff. But, anyway, Tibio came to me as a really strong inspiration that turned into one of my favorite characters I've ever, like, seen, and it started in my mind as a joke. So for sure, again, tell me about that.
Speaker 6:It for sure was a joke.
Tim / GM:We've got a fresh one over here.
Speaker 6:Oh, no.
Speaker 3:What
Speaker 6:what are you doing?
Tim / GM:Are you here to help or
Speaker 3:no? I I don't I don't What's
Tim / GM:your name?
Speaker 6:My my name is Tibio. I don't I don't understand understand what you're doing.
Tim / GM:Does anybody know this guy?
Speaker 6:So my okay. So Tibio at the very beginning, and there actually might be a message that I sent to Maggie about this, was supposed to be a gnome in a skeleton in a trench coat that was, like, selling watches.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Like like, you wanna buy a watch? And, like, he was supposed to be a grown ass adult and very skeevy.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And then I don't know what happened. I think it was just like this joke can't be a forever character. It's too much of a joke. And somewhere along the line, it turned into this Tim Burton esque, Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, little boy, little sweet little sweet, sick Victorian child with all the weight of the world on his shoulders. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And in his current incarnation, Tibia was originally essentially an orphan
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Raised by his grandmother with a little brother who had no magic in a village full of necromancers. So his whole identity is wrapped up in not knowing where his parents are, feeling like he's a parent to his little brother, and feeling like he has to bring his family back together. There was no intention for him to be this underworld leader character that his his plot in my mind his his life in my mind was very small. And it was very cool to be able to expand on that. And I mean, all credit to you, Tim, because, yeah, none of that was me.
Speaker 6:But, I mean, some of it was me. But but it it is really interesting because in yeah. He started out as just a joke. Full joke.
Hannah / Eryn:I do feel like it's fun when the jokes turn into, like, real inspiration. Right? Like, I've never heard of a character like that, you know, or, like, thought of that dynamic of writing inside a skeleton the whole time, like, your whole life. That's like you. You know?
Hannah / Eryn:And so, like, I just think it was really inspired, whereas I feel like I lean on, like, other things, like in Holly's example, you know, things that I like. I'm like, oh, that'd be fun to have as a character. And so, I don't know. I just felt like your character was very unique, and it was really fun to, like, see you play that and how you control the skeleton and stuff throughout the whole campaign. So I loved I loved every bit of Tibio for sure.
Speaker 3:And not only having a weird concept to begin with, you decided to do a French accent. Yeah. Also.
Speaker 6:Okay. So luckily, I was actually taking French at the time that I started doing this, but the French accent was horrific at first. It was very, very bad.
Speaker 4:Damn it.
Tim / GM:Yeah. I'll say for anybody listening to, The Adventures on Etheresea at the same time, we came first.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Yeah. We had. Our bad French accent was first.
Hannah / Eryn:So I think I think French people French people came first, you guys.
Tim / GM:Wow. Deveitical.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I don't know. He he was just he was supposed to be this very sweet character, and I wanted him to be kind of refreshing and bring an innocence to the party because I I got the feeling that, like, I was gonna be in a party of complicated adults.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I wanted this young boy to be like, no. Right is right. Killing is bad. Obviously, killing is bad. And having that close relationship with life and death and the underworld and necromancy and still having that, like, insistence that killing is bad is so like, it was just a fun thing to play with for me.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. That dichotomy is so good. Like like, Tibio can do some truly horrific things.
Speaker 4:Oh,
Speaker 6:yes. Horrendously terrible things.
Tim / GM:Yeah. In the in the hands of the wrong person, you know, Tibio would have been the main villain of everything.
Thomas / Guy:Oh, yeah. So sweet.
Speaker 4:Yep. Mhmm. It's like
Speaker 3:that you had ethically sourced bones. Yeah. Like, you never you never killed anyone.
Speaker 6:Yeah. My, yeah, my intention was that all of his bones would be from skeletons of deceased ancestors.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. That
Speaker 6:was kinda the original idea. And then and then as I was going, I think it just kinda came naturally that it would be, like, rare and interesting bones that were found out there.
Tim / GM:The the like, I think I phrased it once of, like, as bones of interestingly led lives or something. Yeah. Kings and
Speaker 6:It was, like, kind of paired with, like, stories. Yeah. And, like, archival and stuff like that. And I because we started out with some items here and there and I never wanted items for Tibio. So I think the bones made a really cool mechanic of giving Tibio magic items to work with without actually having a bunch of magic items to work with.
Speaker 3:Yep. Just add it to your skeleton.
Speaker 6:Because Tara, as a player, didn't want them for some reason. No idea why. I just every time I got a magic item, it's like,
Speaker 3:I'll put that in my pocket
Speaker 6:and never look at it again.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Just conceptually, like, Tibio as a whole, like, a a kind of a note to DMs out there. It's like, let people try, like, weird stuff and and deal with the mechanics of it in the moment. You know? Like Mhmm.
Tim / GM:I I've caught myself doing this a number of times, disproportionately, admittedly, to Uli. I've cut her off more than anybody else, where she wants to suggest a kind of special power or a home brew mechanic, and I cut it off on the basis of, well, if I think about what other classes have that ability available to them, you can't also have that and be what you are. You know, it's not fair for you to have what they can do and for you to be you. And so I kept cutting off all these ideas because they mechanically sounded too overpowered. Tibio's skeleton never put me in a tough spot as a DM.
Tim / GM:Not really. Like, there was never a point at which I was like, oh, shit. Like, I gave Tibio the super powerful autoskeleton. Like, I have to worry about that. Let people do fun stuff.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well and I and I wanted Tibio skeleton to not feel like a weapon.
Tim / GM:For sure.
Speaker 6:So even even though you did give me the mechanical ability to strike with it, I regularly used it. And I didn't want to feel like, like, I kept comparing comparing it to a mech suit. Mhmm. But I didn't want it to actually feel like a mech. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I just wanted it to be more flavorful, more about, interacting with the world, more about, carrying your history with you.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And that was really important to me for Tibia was to for him to feel like he was carrying his history with him.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Speaking of your history, you had a very mysterious background in that. And we talked about some of your duties in your town, but we didn't go into a lot of personal Tibio stuff. We referenced, like, the squirrels and the slippers and that your town loved you.
Hannah / Eryn:I forgot about that.
Speaker 6:Shit. It was just ad libbed.
Hannah / Eryn:So cute.
Speaker 6:Oh, man.
Tim / GM:So did you what did you have, like, planned? You know, you've touched on this a little bit, but what did you imagine Tibia's upbringing to be like?
Speaker 6:I thought it was gonna be very, like, Tim Burton sad boy. I pictured it being like French provincial, sad, rainy, almost poverty with his family being very close knit and feeling keenly the loss of his parents. Mhmm.
Hannah / Eryn:Like, not enough soup every night.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like,
Speaker 3:yeah. To boil my bones
Speaker 6:to the nutrients. Yeah. For real. And and I pictured him I mean, the relationship between Tibio and his brother initially was very parallel to my relationship with my sister.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And having that younger sibling that you would do anything for, do anything for. And I think Holly can relate to that a lot as a character. Like, having that sibling that is your whole world for a lot a lot of your life. Mhmm. And, initially, my thought was that Tibio had to take care of his brother, Fibelo, and had to really shelter him and shield him from the world that just wasn't equipped to deal with a non magical child in a town full of necromancy magic people.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But the the introduction of fibilo when we got to memoir was phenomenal. Mhmm. Absolutely phenomenal because I had no idea that he was gonna be like big burly boy, which was perfect. Yeah. Because, of course, he would be the younger brother that's, like, literally literally larger than Tibeo.
Speaker 6:And just the the attitude and the boisterousness of fibula as a character was really fun. Yeah. All of the NPCs for Memoir were really just delightful and very surprising because my initial thoughts for Tibia were very grim and bleak.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And having his whole life be flavored by necromancy and by, you know, this death and life and, focus on protecting the world from the underworld and all this very dark stuff. But having the people all just be, like, cheerful as fuck was perfect. So I I enjoyed that a lot.
Hannah / Eryn:Mhmm. It just reminded me you're talking about memoir of the Bones, Bones, and Beyond whole scene with Genie
Speaker 3:and Snap buying things with
Hannah / Eryn:the lamp decorations. Oh, I forgot about that. That was so funny. Another favorite moment.
Tim / GM:And, we'll kind of finish a round of character questions on Bert.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Rex. Hey. You scared me.
Tim / GM:Hey. Shh. Hey, Bert. Good to see you.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. It's good to know.
Tim / GM:Listen, I need your help. Bert. See
Thomas / Guy:you in the dark here.
Tim / GM:I need your help. I'm sorry. I know I know I told you it wouldn't happen again, Bert.
Thomas / Guy:Oh, jeez, Brex.
Tim / GM:But I need your help. It's bad this time.
Thomas / Guy:What'd you do this time, Brex?
Tim / GM:They're saying murder.
Thomas / Guy:They're saying murder.
Tim / GM:Bert, I didn't do it. Thomas, what inspired Bert, and how did they change by the end of the campaign?
Thomas / Guy:Alright. So, this came, at least somewhat from my own personal life too. I used to be a journalist, and I went to journalism school and worked in that industry for, like, 10 years or so. So I like to the idea of having a character who is like an intrepid reporter, just like gung ho out to get the story and get the scoop. And not only did I think that would be fun to play, but I thought that it would be kind of a gift to you, the GM, as a way to, like, hey, I'm seeking out a story.
Thomas / Guy:So
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Thomas / Guy:And you're the one telling a story. So, I was early on, I was right. Okay. Some other inspirations for the character were, like, chronicler from, the name of the wind. For sure.
Thomas / Guy:I like Yeah.
Speaker 7:I like
Thomas / Guy:the idea of someone who's, like, superpower was they're really good at writing. Yeah. They can write good. Yep. And then, like, the kind of background of the librarian at Tildrey was based a little bit on, like, the Citadel in the Game of Thrones where
Speaker 4:Sure.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Sam works.
Tim / GM:The center of knowledge.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. The the the one in our campaign is more, like, lively and less stuffy and, like, but but I liked that idea of of kinda working in a place like that. Mhmm.
Tim / GM:And and that kind of monk lifestyle as well. We're like Yeah. You're much more interested in the pursuit of knowledge and truth rather than a lot of these kind of earthly day to day sort of things.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Exactly. And so, a cleric was a really interesting choice for me, because, you know, I I wanted my character to be, like, focused on this pursuit of truth and knowledge, and clerics sort of fits that. But in Dungeons and Dragons, typically, a cleric is like a follower of an actual god. Right.
Thomas / Guy:And I really didn't wanna do that, because I liked the direction of just focusing on these these, qualities
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Thomas / Guy:Rather than an actual entity.
Tim / GM:Right. Well, I I like the focus of the truth itself, you know, regardless of, like, the kind of governing body behind that or any any given entity. It's like the idea of the truth being, you know, an unbiased truth Yeah. By itself. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:And yeah. Yeah. So I I presented that to you saying that, like, hey, I don't really want to have a god that I'm following, but I don't know exactly how to pull it off. And, the way it worked out with the book and the Tower of Knowledge was extremely good. Like, I couldn't have planned it better.
Thomas / Guy:I really liked how that all played out. Mhmm. The the the knowledge domain cleric was interesting to me too because that can do 2 cool things, which is becoming proficient at any Yeah. Skill, which lets me do fun dump stuff, like kick a flaming skull like a football or know how to skateboard.
Tim / GM:And then having the excuse of I read a book about this once.
Speaker 4:Oh, so perfect. Yeah. And
Thomas / Guy:then it also has access to those cool story driven spells like augury and, scrying Yeah. To
Tim / GM:Which, I'll confess before this campaign, I was terrified of those spells because you have to, in some way, predict what's going to happen concretely.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. They do seem a little mean to GMs if without heads up. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:If it's
Tim / GM:a toss-up, that's a hard question to answer.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. But I yeah. I tried to present it as, like, storytelling opportunities for moving the plot forward and stuff like that.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Thomas / Guy:What else? Oh, I I I wanted his name to be very obnoxious.
Hannah / Eryn:Very long.
Tim / GM:Yeah. I think even even, Benjamin Blank commented once somehow miserable. I'll write that.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Wisherspoon is named after my academic adviser in college. Oh, I
Tim / GM:didn't know that.
Speaker 6:Oh, cute. Awesome.
Tim / GM:Can I ask you a personal question? Is Sid clearly a reference
Thomas / Guy:to him? Clearly is kinda based on him. Yeah.
Tim / GM:Okay.
Thomas / Guy:Mark Witherspoon. Shout out to Mark Witherspoon. Awesome. Yeah.
Tim / GM:Yeah. And then Sid also being a reference to a To
Speaker 4:Final Fantasy. Of course. Of course.
Thomas / Guy:I was like, well, we had these other characters. We gotta have a Cid.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Of course. He's, like, the one that makes it into every final Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I
Hannah / Eryn:think you chocobos. Right?
Tim / GM:Yes.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Yeah.
Tim / GM:We didn't have any chocobos. Yeah. We missed that.
Speaker 3:A snack.
Hannah / Eryn:They're probably, like, copyright.
Tim / GM:Bert, I think you've heard this from a number of people, but, Bert was a very stable character throughout the campaign. In what moment did you feel most proud of your character and his achievements?
Thomas / Guy:We talked about a lot of them already. I mean, I I think his biggest moment was, at the tower in the butterfly effect making that big choice to
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Thomas / Guy:Not reject the truth and instead follow the actual reality, not the made up one.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Thomas / Guy:He he did have that kinda change toward more, combat driven stuff too after Snacks cross post incident. Mhmm. And that kinda culminated in the dragon battle. I was really happy with how, Bert did in that.
Tim / GM:Just barely hanging on?
Thomas / Guy:Yep. Yep. Yeah. And another big culmination was was, again, what we talked about in the last episode, pulling off a big curse breaker spell at the end to Yeah. To send, Moja away.
Tim / GM:Yeah. I think those were definitely, like, the big bird highlights. You know? Mhmm. Which is funny because the the trial was such a huge bird focus, and then his real his real moment didn't come in so much later.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:With that, I think we do have to answer perhaps the most important question of this campaign. That's for everyone. If you had to ship any characters in the campaign, who would they be? This is players and or PCs and NPCs included.
Speaker 3:I assume this means non, like, can canon stuff.
Tim / GM:For sure. Non canonical. But, like, in my mind, Victoria and Margo was always a thing. Sorry, Victoria. Veronica Venus and Margo.
Tim / GM:Okay. Sure.
Speaker 3:Really? Yeah. But she was so old.
Tim / GM:Well, they aged separately.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. The yeah. Yeah. They were artificially aged.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Bert and Brax.
Tim / GM:Oh. Bert and Brax. Yeah. I mean, they're like birds
Speaker 3:of a feather. In the stacks?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, we yeah.
Thomas / Guy:I mean, we are in college together. You know? Yeah. We we more than once talked about Bert and Dorr.
Speaker 3:Oh, yes. I should've
Speaker 6:said that. That would been so good.
Thomas / Guy:Which is kinda I've made the comment every time that Dor would, like, literally split Bert and I. Or
Speaker 4:or
Speaker 6:Bert and Ilia.
Speaker 4:Yeah. There was lots
Speaker 3:of Bert. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Lots of Bert ships.
Speaker 3:I mean, my siblings were all beautiful.
Tim / GM:Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 6:We don't need to share Poly with anybody because she'll just do all Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:She did it in in game. I don't really know how to do it
Speaker 4:in game, I guess.
Speaker 3:I I like the idea of Ilia and Bert Mhmm. Just because of the, like, saving each other's lives.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. I ship John and Tim through snack through snack and genie. Yeah. But there were moments when I was like, you 2 love each other, like, at the table.
Thomas / Guy:They literally said that to each other. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I know.
Speaker 3:No. There were definite Genie snack moments though where Genie would get, like, jealous of Yeah. Idris.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. That was great. Yeah.
Tim / GM:Yeah. That
Speaker 4:was awesome.
Speaker 7:Solid. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I
Hannah / Eryn:feel like in those moments, just knowing Tim and John for so long, I was like, these bros are besties.
Speaker 4:Like, you
Hannah / Eryn:know what I mean?
Speaker 3:Like, just the bromance
Hannah / Eryn:the bromance between Tim and John was so palpable at
Speaker 4:the table. I was like,
Hannah / Eryn:I love you guys.
Speaker 4:I think
Tim / GM:in a big way, like, I got to do something I've wanted to do for a long time, which is like
Speaker 3:Shower him in gifts. Well,
Tim / GM:sure. You know, there's there's a lot to be said for, you know, how much I adore John, but at the same time, you know, it's like, I've played D and D with John for a long time. I know John has played D and d separately from me for a long time. You know, he's got the most experience at the table by the years, I think. So I felt really confident just giving him all the power and trusting him to kinda do the right thing with it.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:And that was super liberating from my perspective to just have Genie just, like, gush on him constantly. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Just turn in any whatever magic item and just do whatever
Tim / GM:it is.
Speaker 4:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool.
Tim / GM:I ship Well, Dave and Uli.
Speaker 3:Dave and Uli, but that's
Speaker 4:canon now.
Hannah / Eryn:Canon. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, they were touch and go, and Uli was just so resistant to it. But Let
Tim / GM:me let me run down the NPC list. It stops at a certain point. It actually stops at memoir, but let me write off a few. Sheriff Tandy, Emery Gray, Donna Clark, Cameron the Bard, Todd Pohl, Joe McMillan, Garth Pohl.
Speaker 6:Garth Pohl?
Tim / GM:Ref referenced once Todd's dad. Somebody asked, what is your father's name?
Speaker 6:That's right.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And
Hannah / Eryn:they're like Garth. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But there was, like, there was, like, a reference, though.
Tim / GM:It was just a mention. Yeah. Mhmm. Okay. We got Veronica Venus, Maisie Muldriff, Henry Muldriff, Ash Muldriff, Genie, Rynhalo, Ethan Doink.
Speaker 4:He was a prisoner that you
Tim / GM:guys wrapped in the web.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's right.
Tim / GM:Dave and Buster Hackbone.
Hannah / Eryn:Oh, I didn't know their last name.
Tim / GM:Bella Beaumont.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. Hollywood. Holly super fan.
Tim / GM:Earl of Earl's pearls. Viri Niss. Dieterman the elf. Hilda the soup maker Augustus, the old curse breaker Daniel and Danielle Orchard mum Mumble Dundas, Humble Dundas, and Rumble Dundas. Yes.
Tim / GM:Margo Bingo, Nook Barrow, Samantha Barrow, Lisa Barrow, Millhouse Barrow, Ulrichness, Jason Pigeon, Illyness, Stylocoolmate, Auk, the bugbear.
Speaker 3:Stylocoolmate? I don't remember how
Speaker 4:to do it.
Speaker 3:Good. Listener. That's
Speaker 6:alright? Listener, if
Hannah / Eryn:you don't know them, it's okay.
Tim / GM:No. It's fine. Yeah. Stylo Coolmate was the guy who led you on the tour of the brewery. He has Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:He's so excited
Hannah / Eryn:about you.
Thomas / Guy:I love Stylo.
Tim / GM:Alk the bugbear who had a hangover when you met him.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Because he we thought he was just like,
Thomas / Guy:A bugbear.
Speaker 3:A bugbear. And then he was like, oh, I'm sorry. I was so hungover.
Tim / GM:He was terribly eloquent with
Speaker 4:it. Yeah. It was funny.
Tim / GM:The judges, Flan, Tonberry, and Malboro, Those 2 dwarf hammer guys that tried to kill Holly were
Speaker 6:And I bladed.
Tim / GM:Marin and Lugan for Yeah. Mario and Luigi.
Speaker 3:Oh my god. Oh,
Speaker 6:that's funny.
Tim / GM:Mina, Benjamin Blanc, Professor Norp, G Quinn, the the bouncer, Jinx, Sid Clearly, Danny Deepockets, bidet, carlacentaur, Toby Goshman, Amaranth, Megan, Bourne, Ock the Genasi. Never got back to him. Ben Barrett, Sheriff Law. Beshia, that's, Mama Niss. Vin is Papa Ness.
Speaker 3:They did have names.
Tim / GM:DeLoreum, which whose name got changed to be on. Gaspard, John Copper, John Silver.
Speaker 3:Oh, they were the suitors. Nearing?
Tim / GM:Billy Platt, who was the final suitor? Sacra, Talus, Mexilla, and fibulofemur. And that is when I stopped writing down NPC next.
Speaker 3:Oh my god.
Thomas / Guy:What about, like, Tandy and
Tim / GM:Just the very beginning. She's the first one.
Thomas / Guy:And, Shit. Chief or captain or the bart the inn owner.
Speaker 4:Oh. Oh. The boss.
Speaker 3:The boss. Ross. Ross.
Tim / GM:Ross and Tandy.
Hannah / Eryn:I can see it.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Definitely.
Hannah / Eryn:He writes novels. She works on ships.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's like a Hallmark movie.
Tim / GM:There was a brief mention of Joe Macmill and Veronica Venus too, being a
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That was Hannah Okay. That was another Hannah fueled, like, romance thing. And she got me to do it.
Tim / GM:She actually texted you at the table this afternoon.
Speaker 3:It was Hannah's birthday. Hannah was a little drunk.
Speaker 4:Hannah texted
Hannah / Eryn:me and said Now we're getting these you should
Speaker 3:imply that they're together. And I was like, I don't wanna do that. But I did it anyway just for you.
Speaker 6:Also, we forgot about Donna.
Tim / GM:I did mention Donna at the very beginning. Bob Barber salesperson.
Speaker 6:Yeah. The Bobber salesperson.
Tim / GM:Yep.
Speaker 3:I feel like if the campaign had gone a different way, it could have been Uli Dave Emery as a little triad.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Emery Emery, you know, his involvement could have been very different with this whole campaign start to finish.
Speaker 6:Anyone aside from Tibio had ever been nice to him.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah. At first, I thought it was gonna be Bert and Emery. We're gonna
Thomas / Guy:be little.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim / GM:That that leads us great into, another, user question for us. This is just to do some unresolved stuff. We had a question from, Paul h here, and it was, Emery's eye cave and Lysander's creepy eye based transformation are both big question marks. Are we likely to hear more about these subjects in season 2?
Speaker 6:I have a follow-up to this question. Yeah. Tim, are you afraid of eyes?
Tim / GM:No. No. I'm not.
Speaker 4:The show is a lot.
Tim / GM:Yeah. I think, they've got, like, a good impact, I think, visually. I like to rely on them for that
Speaker 4:visually. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean
Tim / GM:to answer the question directly, are we likely to hear more about this these subjects in season 2? I would say yes. That was Oh. The the eye thing, and, like, you know, Lysander obviously was transformed by the same thing that we had seen in Emory's eye cave thing. That is something that I chose not to get into in this campaign, kind of like I cut it for time sort of thing, where it's like, I didn't wanna split the focus that much
Speaker 4:Okay.
Tim / GM:Into Emery's adventure, because it was so much about what you guys were doing.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:That is also to say that that evil went unchallenged during this time. So it had time to build up its own power. So our raw idea.
Speaker 6:We fucked up y'all. Shit.
Thomas / Guy:We should've gone to just 5 walls.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we'll see kind of as things progress where else that has influenced the world.
Speaker 6:Can it not be a spider?
Tim / GM:Well, no. That was just Lysander.
Speaker 3:Spider. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I don't want any more spiders.
Tim / GM:Spider. That's fine.
Speaker 3:Lobsters are just ocean spiders.
Tim / GM:Yeah. We had one more question from Paul, and it was, our heroes have become incredibly powerful. Will Peebops still follow the same party in season 2? Short answer, no. No.
Speaker 3:We all are very excited about our next characters, though.
Tim / GM:Obviously, it's unsustainable to have a dragon in the party. So had to cut that one off.
Speaker 3:He's like almost a demigod, guys.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. It's like the start of every Metroid game where he loses his dragon powers. Exactly. Yeah.
Tim / GM:We'll We'll say
Speaker 7:you come at Halloween.
Speaker 3:Well, you done fucked
Speaker 4:up. Yeah.
Tim / GM:Yeah. So that brings us into the the perfect position to talk about season 2. Well,
Speaker 7:so it won't follow the same party in season 2, but
Speaker 4:It'll be the
Speaker 3:same players.
Speaker 7:Well, same players, but are there opportunities to, like, see these characters in season 2?
Tim / GM:I would definitely say so.
Thomas / Guy:We'll be in the same world. We have confirmed that. So
Tim / GM:so so, we we are in development on season 2. We'll be recording in September. Posting has yet to be announced as far as posting dates go. Season 2 will take place in the same world. It is east of where you were, and it is roughly 15 years later.
Speaker 6:East.
Speaker 3:East. East.
Tim / GM:East.
Speaker 6:So exciting to go east.
Speaker 3:I just I wanna, like, tell them everything. Please be excited.
Tim / GM:Please clap. So we're trying to keep, campaign 2 relatively mysterious. Suffice to say, we are going all out in our effort for the 2nd season. It is currently named Cloudfall. Cloudfall.
Tim / GM:Cloudfall.
Speaker 6:Right here first, folks,
Speaker 3:And it's gonna be
Speaker 4:sick as fuck. Sick as fuck. So
Tim / GM:the, the final episode of our campaign, we didn't really have a chance to, to really connect on this and talk about all of our feelings around it because we ended it and then left.
Thomas / Guy:So It was a long session.
Tim / GM:It was a long session.
Speaker 7:Left for, like, 5 weeks. Like, we haven't been all in the same room since. Yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And in that time, we, like, built an entire D and D room and and developed our characters for the next season. So, like
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Tim / GM:A lot has happened since then. Yeah. So the last two episodes, part 1 and part 2 of the finale, were recorded in the same night, and that started with me asking everyone to leave the room except for Hannah and Thomas. And I offered them the ability to come out become a vampire for the last session. It's kinda where we began.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. I was surprised by that. I didn't know that was coming. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:That was fun.
Speaker 3:Also, we've never done, like, a you leave the room now.
Hannah / Eryn:Right? Yeah. So that was kind of a fun I was like, oh, surprise at the very end, Tim. So I I thought that was just a fun element to, like, play out as a player,
Speaker 4:I guess.
Hannah / Eryn:Mhmm. And so kinda left some surprise for everyone. I don't know. I think it was kinda interesting.
Speaker 3:I thought it was, apt to have us leave because we're prone to table talk.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And Yeah. The people who left are the ones who would probably be the most against any of our friends becoming vampires.
Tim / GM:For sure.
Speaker 3:Or trying to take their place.
Thomas / Guy:Sure. Yeah.
Tim / GM:Yeah. I think it it it meant a lot to have you guys physically out of the room for that decision, not just for the impact of the reveal, which came pretty quickly. But, yeah, more for the actually getting it to happen kind of thing.
Speaker 7:So I
Tim / GM:think you're right.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. I I think that I appreciated not being in the room for it because it allowed Tibio's reaction to be impacted by my own shock. Mhmm. And I think Tibio's reaction was very visceral and very, honest to his feelings of what the right thing is and how far the group had come.
Speaker 6:So in that moment, I mean, his shock and my shock were very similar. Like, how could they possibly have made this decision without us? How how could they possibly have made this decision without confirming everything was ready to go? It was it felt so impulsive, and it it felt so unreasonable, and it felt so dangerous. And I think the only reason that Tibio didn't get into it more is because it was too late.
Speaker 6:It was already done. So in that moment, he just wanted to get a move on to to fix it.
Tim / GM:Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And do his best to make whatever potion needed to be made Mhmm. And get this done so that we could deal with it. Yeah. It was just a it was a really interesting really interesting moment as a player to have to know that Tibia would be so conflicted about it.
Tim / GM:Yeah. And and Uli had a lot going on in that episode too from the kind of magic overload, you know, her, wild magic surge in which she rolled, wasn't it a 100?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I rolled
Speaker 4:a 100. Yeah.
Tim / GM:In the final episode. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And just dealing with the fact that my the sister I kept asking about and Tim would be like, oh, don't worry about it. Or, oh, I don't know.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, oh, she's the final boss. Yep. So, it was interesting to take the character growth I had in that whole the development for the entire season and then have to have her have another emotion surge.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And but have it go a totally different way from the way it had been going. Yeah. So, losing control and then knowing she could regain control is really cool.
Speaker 6:When asking for help. When you called Bert back into the room, I was like, hell yeah, Uli. Hell yeah. Get a friend. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like in a friend. I can't handle this on my own.
Speaker 6:Oh, great. And I mean, that was the perfect opportunity for Bert to have that role again of, like, talking through something with somebody and playing group therapist a little bit. And I think, yeah, just that that whole chunk of time was played really well with Holly being, like, tired and weird, and we didn't know why for a little bit and, like, Tibio being frantic for whatever reasons and only just, like, hearing the worst possible news Mhmm. And leaning on a friend and Bert providing that help and Snack just being ready to fucking go. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was it from the very beginning of the episode or not the episode, sort of. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:From
Speaker 3:the very beginning of the finale, we all kind of knew our roles and, like, really took those and ran with them. I don't know. It was very interesting because I feel like throughout the entire campaign, we've been, like, playing by ear and we finally had like, okay. This is what we gotta do. And we did it.
Speaker 3:And we did it well. It was very cool.
Thomas / Guy:It was all set up for us. And I like, we came up with a plan pretty
Tim / GM:fast Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:Without too much hemming and hawing and
Speaker 3:Which is not typical.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Like, I I feel I felt like I went into those that last session, the last 2 episodes, like, not not underprepared, but just like like my pre my preparation was the rest of this campaign rather than, like, where I sit down and figure out how this last encounter goes. Yeah.
Speaker 6:It felt like everything led up to that moment in a very clear way. Mhmm. I also just wanna point out the way that Snack cared for bidet in the last couple episodes Yeah. Was really cool
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Especially given how, like, flippant you had been with, like, take my donkey to everyone before that and to be like, all right, bidet, do you know what's going on? Be sure to jump if you're scared and like, I'm gonna teleport in the way if you get hurt. Like, that was it was a very cool moment of growth for Snack to have something to care for.
Speaker 3:Like, this isn't just a random NPC. This is Yeah. A party member.
Speaker 6:It was cool.
Speaker 7:I do think yeah. Like, just cinematically, the the picture of Farewell Riding a Donkey is just so absurd with, like, this ridiculous plan.
Tim / GM:Like, oh, that's awesome. I I like the I like the image of thinking of snack and then, you know, kind of imagining his final destination is this dragon on a mountain. And then the reality of his final destination is farewell on a donkey. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's With
Hannah / Eryn:his eyes closed. Any donkey.
Tim / GM:With his eyes closed.
Speaker 4:It is
Speaker 3:the oldest, grossest donkey in
Speaker 4:the world.
Tim / GM:And a genie coach whispering into his ear. Yeah.
Speaker 6:No. It's so good. It was just really good.
Speaker 3:And I I think the la the finale was very interesting because we took roles that we wouldn't normally have taken.
Tim / GM:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Snack took the, like, diplomacy role.
Tim / GM:Uh-huh.
Speaker 3:He went to go be a distraction and talk to, Moja, and, like, he he wasn't the big deciding factor and the, like, big explosion. Well, he was.
Speaker 4:But Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:Until he was. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But the tension was, okay. I'm gonna take this, like, side role while you guys go handle it.
Tim / GM:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Which was character development. And and in our final actions, it was, like, very interesting that we all kind of switch places.
Tim / GM:Mhmm. That's it's it's exemplary how how consistent that is too. And I'll just kinda go around the table here. Like, Holly, you know, the the homemaker, the businesswoman, the provider became the elder hag
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Yeah.
Tim / GM:And led the charge against Moja
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah.
Tim / GM:You know, in the most kind of powerful, like, direct way possible and, like like, you know, convinced or controlled the vampires away from the party Mhmm. After you know, you said earlier, it's like you don't give a shit about the party. Like, you wanna go through with your own thing. And she became a vampire just so the party could have a strategic advantage in this moment.
Hannah / Eryn:I think it was interesting too because the first thing she did when we got into the rainforest that had sprouted from the acorn was fail against the vampires. Yeah. She couldn't control them. And so I loved that because the it was the literally the role was bad. And so I, like, rolled up really well, like, a 2 or 3 or something.
Hannah / Eryn:And Tim was, like, yeah. You don't control shit. And I was, like, what have I done? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think he was
Speaker 3:in for 1.
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah. So it worked out. I think that was a really like, I was annoyed in the moment about my role, but then I was like, oh, it actually played out to be pretty cool. So
Tim / GM:yeah. And, yeah, we've we've touched on Tibio before in his in the final moment there. You know, Tibio, he had he had perfectly equal opportunity to choose to use the ability to suck a soul back into the underworld, which is what his Monaamor was meant to do, or to bar a soul from entering the underworld, which is also what his suit was meant to do. And instead of doing the final blow against Mojo, which is kind of where I think it was set up to go, he chose to bar Ilia's soul from dying.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Like, that's kinda what he was there to do was close the rift. Get Mojo into the rift. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Tibio didn't go to the rift. Tibio stood back and, like Yeah. Handled something extremely important that Uli had trusted him to do instead of taking on the role that he had initially been given, which is very interesting. And and instead, Uli and Holly went and handled it, which was not what we were supposed to be there to do.
Speaker 3:I don't know.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I feel I feel a lot of feelings about my choices in the last episode. I didn't know I was going to do that until I did it.
Hannah / Eryn:We usually don't.
Speaker 6:We usually don't. A lot of Tibio is just me just diving in.
Speaker 3:But, like, the whole campaign, you're being set up to be the savior.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And all of this pressure and all of this, like, accepting that death is necessary and knowing that doing harm for the greater good is sometimes acceptable and struggling with that and all of the growth and the change that he's gone through and trying to get past the idea that he has to do it all himself and that he has to be this connection to the other underworld in a way that nobody else can be. Mhmm. And linking it all to curse breaking and getting to this point where he felt like Mojo was this person that he had to fight all by himself, and he was the only one that knew how or could or something. It just and in those last moments going,
Speaker 3:fuck it. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:That's not
Speaker 6:true. Yeah. Tibio would save a life over anything.
Tim / GM:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And wouldn't sacrifice someone to get this done for anything. It and just, yeah, choosing to save Ilya was it was everything. In that moment, it was everything. And I'm I'm really proud of that, and I didn't know I was gonna do it going in. And especially because I spent the previous turn fucking it up.
Speaker 6:I fucked up and dragging Moja's Soul down to the underworld the first time. It just had no effect.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And having that opportunity to do it a second time and choosing something else just it felt so right. It just felt perfectly right. And I'm still really happy about it. And, yeah, I get a little emotional about it because, yeah, it just felt perfectly, Tibio.
Tim / GM:Yep. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And then you have Bert and Snack taking on the actual curse breaking
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:As opposed to any of the other trained curse breakers.
Speaker 6:And then the perfect follow-up was Bert
Thomas / Guy:just being like, yoink. I I I was sure my turn was, bringing Ilya back
Hannah / Eryn:Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:To health.
Tim / GM:Which is even better because, like, you know, I'm so obsessed with, like, the rule of threes. And, like, this would have been the 3rd time that Bert had saved Ilya.
Thomas / Guy:Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Instead. And so then she was saved and I was like, I got this dispel thing.
Thomas / Guy:And I I rolled my dice and it went behind my iPad. So I was like, it's gonna be a fucking one. Yeah.
Tim / GM:So I
Thomas / Guy:moved my iPad. I was like, oh, a 20.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Thomas / Guy:That's good.
Speaker 3:It was just like you spent the entire campaign being the outsider who wasn't the curse breaker, who who effectively didn't do any of that, and then landing the killing, like Mhmm. The final I don't know. It wasn't the killing blow, technically, was it? But it it was, like, it was. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Was it? Yeah.
Speaker 6:I just I it felt so perfect because the whole campaign had been us learning how to curse break and how important it was to, like, beat something down and then use the curse breaker
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Spell as the last resort, and that's how you kill the bad guys.
Tim / GM:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And
Speaker 6:then in that moment to have it be like, there is no right way.
Tim / GM:Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's all just a matter of perspective. It's all just a matter of how you wanna do it. And our whole group is about finding new ways to do things that make sense.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And having Bert just be like, actually, I have a spell for that.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Like, let's do it my
Speaker 6:way. Perfect. And it was just so good.
Tim / GM:There's a a long line of NPCs in this campaign if you listen back, and it's pretty spread out. But I've I've repeatedly used the line, once you find a solution for something, people rarely seek another.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Tim / GM:And I've had that come from several NPCs, and that was kind of a hint at, like
Thomas / Guy:Turns out arcane magic is bad for curse breakers. Yeah.
Tim / GM:So I've been telling you guys this whole time. This is this is the curse breaking strategy. This is the tattoos. This is how you do it. And you guys found a completely different way to handle it.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think
Speaker 3:we don't wanna follow the rules.
Tim / GM:And I think Genie was always meant to show that there are other ways of handling it. Yeah. Genie can just eat them.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. Also, they can be good. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And the the snack character flip in this one was being given the opportunity to be a full dragon and choosing friendship instead.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That was so good.
Speaker 3:It was really cool. I don't know. I feel like we all did very interesting
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Totally strange choices, and it was great.
Thomas / Guy:Yeah. And I I I guess I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't know how, like, conscious the choices were to make those decisions. It just kinda
Speaker 3:It felt right in
Tim / GM:the moment.
Thomas / Guy:Right, and it just kinda happened. And then afterwards, you're like, oh, that was actually all really good.
Tim / GM:Yeah. It really is only after the fact that we can kind of put all these things into little logical silos
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Tim / GM:And be like, oh, yeah. That's so perfect.
Speaker 3:I do remember in the moment thinking, I can stay here and fight and try and save my sister, or I can, like, go totally off books and, like, run away from it and do something else. Yeah. Try to hand
Tim / GM:it some other way.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, am I needed here or am I needed there? And then
Speaker 6:You and I had a moment, Maggie, where I don't know if it was you and I or if it was Uli and Tibeo.
Speaker 3:It was both.
Speaker 6:But it was it was a moment of, like, you having to make that choice and me slash Tibeo just being like, I got this.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And me being like, okay. I I you're my friend and I trust you.
Speaker 6:And that's I mean, that was the same thing that happened with, you know, Tibio saved Ilya. And I was just like, Bert's gotta have it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, my role is done.
Speaker 6:I'm trusting.
Speaker 3:It was really cool.
Tim / GM:Yeah. Well, I I think we could talk about curse breaker for the rest of our lives, but we do have to call the campaign officially closed at some point, and I think that moment is right now. So let's set our sights on, the next great thing, which is campaign 2 coming eventually. I wanna give all of our listeners a huge thank you, you know, whether you know us personally or not. You know, especially if you don't, you know, it means a lot to us that you're listening just because you enjoy the show.
Tim / GM:You know, please share it with your friends, you know, reach out to other people, you know, share this around. You know, we are going to be putting the the time and effort and elbow grease into season 2 and we're gonna make it, you know, as good as we can, and I want as many people to hear that as they can. So thank you for spending your time with us, and, expect a lot out of us, I think, in the future. That's right. Thanks so much for listening.
Tim / GM:I'm Tim, your DM and your genie.
Hannah / Eryn:I'm Hannah playing Holly Hyacinth.
Thomas / Guy:I'm Thomas. I play Engelbert f f Wisherspoon.
Speaker 8:I'm Tara, and I play Tibio Femur.
Speaker 7:I'm John. I play Snack the Kobalt.
Speaker 3:And I'm Maggie playing Uli.
