With Grant out again for chaotic work-related reasons, Jenny and Peter are collaborating again—this time on setting material for Peter’s new D&D game! First, though, we answer a Patreon question from Douglas Underhill, who asks us “If you statted yourself as a 5E character, how would you allocate the default starting array of ability scores?”

Then, after our Scripture readings as usual, Peter takes a moment to describe his game and overall setting ideas. Then it’s time to brainstorm and create as Jenny and Peter work together to create points of interest, natural features, and dangerously exciting locations. Enjoy!

Scripture: Leviticus 19:33-34, Deuteronomy 32:28-35, Romans 12:17-21

Mentioned in the episode: Krakin Race on DM’s Guild

(Update: The Ross Rifles Kickstarter is live right now! If the game interests you—and it certainly interested us!—be sure to back it and help support this excellent project.)

Creative professional and storyteller Daniel Kwan joins us on this episode to talk about gaming in historical settings! Daniel is a former museum historian, a game designer at Dundas West Games, and co-host of the Asians Represent podcast. He works to support Level Up Gaming, a Toronto-based organization that “provides individuals on the autism spectrum and with other disabilities the opportunity to develop and explore their real-world social skills through goal-directed gaming experiences.” And he’s got a game Kickstarting on October 4th called Ross Rifles, about Canada’s involvement in the First World War and the life of soldiers in the trenches! He’s a fascinating person and an amazing guest, and the perfect person to talk to about setting your games in real historical situations, with systems appropriate to a focus on the historical experience. Follow Daniel Kwan and Asians Represent on Twitter, and keep an eye out for that Kickstarter announcement come October!

Our Patreon question this week comes to us from Aaron Arnold, who asks “To what extent does your backstory need to inform your build?”

After our Scripture reading, we dig deep into this topic with Daniel. How does one go about making a system that fits a real, historical moment and accurately represents it—while encouraging a desired experience at the table? How do you research a game like this? How do you handle the stereotypes of a particular era or moment that players (and gamemasters) may have in their heads? And what’s the line between historical accuracy and paralysis through detail?

Scripture: Job 8:8-10, Psalm 78:1-4, Romans 15:4

Our Ten Commandments series finally wraps up this episode, and we end it on a high note! (Yes, even despite the episode going up almost a day late.) We’ve got a bit of a preview of an upcoming discussion to start with, as Grant’s kicking off a game of Offworlders. Our Patreon question this week comes from David Hastings, who asks “What game do you love personally even though you know that objectively, it’s not that great?”

Our topic this week is, of course, the Tenth Commandment—”Thou shalt not covet”—and we’ve got a lot of Scripture to introduce as we start our discussion. “Covetousness” is a word often conflated with “envy”, “jealousy”, and even “desire”, so we take a moment to talk about the word itself. We also take care to differentiate it from a righteous anger at injustice and want—especially since many use that false distinction to their own advantage. We then talk about how the Tenth Commandment is somewhat unique in that it forbids a particular sort of thought rather than a particular sort of action, and the implications of that distinction.

Naturally, we have a lot to say about covetousness in a gaming context—rogues, corporate malfeasance, dragons, and more! But we have just as much to say when talking about real concerns of covetousness in the gaming hobby, whether it be a shelf of RPG books, that ridiculously-expensive custom gaming table, or even production values and knowledge.

Scripture: Exodus 20:7, 1 Kings 21:1-7, Luke 12:15, Hebrews 13:5, 1 Timothy 6:6-10

Grant’s out on vacation in lovely Myrtle Beach, SC this week, so Jenny and Peter tackle a special project—working together to create a unique setting centerpiece for a game Jenny will be running at her library! First, we answer a question from Patreon supporter Tom Stephens, who asks, “What is your favorite item that you’ve created for use in a game?”

With that handled and our Scripture read, we move on to creating a city from scratch. Jenny starts us off with a few basic ideas and restrictions, and everything builds from there—pun intended, of course. What’s the economy based on? Why do people come to this city? What makes it unique, geographically and politically? Who lives there, and who is in power? How is it governed? What sort of crime flourishes within its walls? What opportunities are available to player characters who start their careers in this city? And what, exactly, is a forcefield goat?

Ideas Jenny had after recording:

• It’s in a crater, but the crater isn’t even because the meteor came in at an angle. The Shepherding district is on a gentle slope up and out of the crater, and the Glassworking district is basically a straight wall.
• Might switch Factotum and Shepherding districts so that the mining and stoneworking can be done on a wall, maybe even under an overhang.
• At least one magic metal node per district is preserved. Always the biggest node.
• Civic district is Full Of Lawyers to help out the people seeking sanctuary.

Scripture: Exodus 31:1-11, Joshua 21:41-45, Hebrews 10:24-25

Guest—and possible honorary host—Krissi Woodward joins us this episode to break down her first time running a tabletop roleplaying game! Krissi ran a very successful arc of World of Darkness: Innocents for our gaming group and was willing to discuss that experience with us. First, a little bit about shiny new library cards and dirty library patrons, as well as an interesting Patreon question from Douglas Underhill, who asks about under-served genres of tabletop roleplaying games.

After our Scripture reading, Krissi gives us a ton of excellent advice and analysis from her first GMing experience. She talks about the game she ran and why she chose this system and story; her pre-game concerns and prep (including overpreparing); how she tackled issues that arose during the game, especially issues with player triggers; and plenty of clever GMing decisions that made the game a smooth and exciting experience for players and GM alike. Enjoy!

Also mentioned in this episode: How We Came to Live Here.

Scripture: Proverbs 9:9, Matthew 23:11-12, Romans 12:3

We’re nearing the end of our Ten Commandments series! This episode tackles lying—or as the Ten Commandments are commonly translated, “bearing false witness.” First, though, Peter talks a bit about his entry in the World Anvil worldbuilding contest; we discuss Krissi’s Innocents game and how it wrapped up, as well as Vampire and the various other games we have in the works; Grant’s attempt to stream game design; and the extremely lovely GRIS.

Aaron Arnold asks an extremely difficult Patreon question this week: What was the hardest lesson to learn as a Christian? So you also get to hear us puzzle through that!

After our Scripture, we discuss the Ninth Commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Unlike many of these other commandments episodes, in this one we had a very easy time talking about the theology of speaking truths rather than lies, but a much harder time getting into the detailed uses of lies in roleplaying games—simply because it’s such a big topic. We touch on the differences between lies and creativity; lies of malice and cowardice (and we get to use a different C. S. Lewis quote in this one!); several forms false witness takes that are harder to recognize than outright lies; prooftexting; logical fallacies; and much more. Enjoy!

Mentioned in this episode: J. Ellsworth Kalas’s The Ten Commandments from the Back Side; Wondermark #1062, “The Terrible Sea Lion”; YourLogicalFallacyIs.com

Scripture: Exodus 20:16, Genesis 3:1-5, Matthew 7:1-5, Colossians 3:8-10

This week’s topic is a sort of follow-up to our latest episode in our Ten Commandments series, except it’s also entirely City On A Hill Gaming‘s fault, we promise! We’re talking about how to make treasure and wealth in your games exciting and unique without surrendering the player characters’ moral high ground as they acquire it. We also talk briefly about Krissi’s Innocents game (and the excellent job she’s doing as she takes the GM seat for the first time.)

Our Patreon question this week comes from Paige Lowe, who asks: “What media has been your biggest gaming inspiration?” We actually struggled with this question a bit, so—good question!

After our Scripture reading, we dive headlong into this massive topic. After a couple quick rules, we talk about actually having people pay the player characters a good wage for their work (and how to make that work into good adventures); finders fees and Peter’s moment of moral panic upon finding a treasure; natural or naturally-created sources of wealth; locations and lost items; “finders-keepers”; fines and the privileges of power (and some morally-grey issues that naturally arise); mythic gifts and artifacts; customizing your treasure and changing its appearance; favors; and collaborating with your players. Oh, and Jenny’s secret elliptonic library that’s a perfect example of everything we talk about in this episode.

Mentioned in this episode: Fungi that draw gold from their surroundings; Bad King John’s lost treasure; a cache of wallets from the 1940s; and the very silly 5/5/2000: Ice – The Ultimate Disaster.

Scripture: 2 Kings 13:20-21, Proverbs 22:16, Matthew 6:19-21, Matthew 20:1-16

Bryan and Mike from the Geek at Arms podcast join us this week to talk about the unwritten rules at our gaming tables (and elsewhere in our lives!) Geek at Arms is an excellent, thoughtful podcast in the geeky faith space and we’re delighted to have two of its three hosts on this episode. Both shows’ members have also been appearing on other podcasts as well: Peter was on a delightfully fun bonus episode of City on a Hill, featuring Feng Shui 2 and drink tables TO THE FACE. Meanwhile, Bryan was on an episode of the Retro Rewind Podcast talking about Cowboy Bebop! Make sure to subscribe to their show (and follow them on Twitter.) And if you’re looking for a good cause to donate to, check out Hope Fostered as well, per their request!

Our Patreon question this week comes to us from Shawn Stauffer, who asks a simple question: “What did you have for lunch?” This turns out to be a more delicious answer than anticipated.

After our Scripture readings we break down the unwritten rules everyone has at the table—assumptions, inherited rules, group mores, and all the rest. If you’ve always assumed rules like “no PvP,” “don’t split the party,” or “put your tax money on Free Parking,” then this is the episode for you! Plus, we get a good rundown of Bryan’s and Mike’s GMing rules, and a quick aside from Grant about bad rules at the table.

Mentioned in this episode: Peter’s “Going on Tilt” blog post; Mike’s “The Rules” blog post.

Scripture: Jeremiah 31:33, Psalm 119:15-16, Matthew 23:1-12

Oh, hey, guess who’s back! That’s right—Grant rejoins Peter and Jenny back on the mics. (And thank you, seriously, for everyone who reached out or who prayed for me. It’s really appreciated. – G.) We pick up our Ten Commandments series with the Eight Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal,” and since our hobby kicked off with a thief class, you might guess we have a lot to talk about! First, though, we’ve got a bit of podcast business, and then a surprisingly in-depth conversation about hot dogs and hamburgers thanks to Patreon supporter Richard Lorenz. Oh, and also Peter got to try Minecraft for the first time on our stream, so look forward to more of that on Friday nights!

After our Scripture reading, we start in on the surprising complexity of what is in English a simple four-word commandment. We discuss theft as a sin of commission and as a sin on omission; theft as a primary component of the classic gaming experience going all the way back to its sword-and-sorcery roots; and the curious lack of stigma thieves sometimes carry in our tabletop games. Finally, we wrap up with the positive side of the Eighth Commandment: Chrestotes and “becoming a larger person.”

Mentioned in this episode: Dusk City Outlaws, and the relevant XKCD, because there’s always a relevant XKCD comic for any topic.

Scripture: Exodus 20:15, Malachi 3:8-10, Leviticus 6:1-7, Romans 2:4, Romans 13:7-10

Jenny and Peter welcome Kyle Rudge of Geekdom House and Mythos & Ink back onto the mics, this time to talk about publishing! We’ve a bit of news first—Grant’s out for a bit due to some health issues, and that’s also shaken up our gaming schedule, which means there might be an Innocents game in the works. Also, Feng Shui 2!

Our Patreon question comes from Kenning, who asks “If you got superpowers (say, basic superstrength and flight), what would you do with them?”

After our Scripture reading, we dive into the publishing business with Kyle. What’s the writing process look like from the publisher’s perspective? What do fair contracts look like, and what’s predatory? What are some common pitfalls? What’s self-publishing and crowd-funding done to the publishing industry? And what’s it like trying to be a publisher appealing to geeky Christians?

For more information about Mythos & Ink, visit their website and follow them on Twitter!

Scripture: Genesis 1:1, Job 19:23-25, Proverbs 27:9, Nehemiah 8:1-3, James 3:17

Peter and Jenny have the mics to themselves this episode, and they’re talking about one of the funniest and most imaginative books of the Bible: Jonah! First, though, we take a moment to mention the unfortunate and early passing of Rachel Held Evans, a Christian writer and thinker we’re all quite fond of taken from us too soon. We also have to put a call out for more questions from our Patreon supporters! And speaking of Patreon, our Patreon question this week comes from Shawn Stauffer, who asks “If you had to spend a year as any one of the characters you’ve made for an RPG, in their world, which would you choose and why?”

That answered and our Scripture read (including the entirety of Jonah 4, which might be the first time we’ve ever read an entire chapter of Scripture on this podcast) we dive into Jonah—pun intended. It’s a work unlike any other in the Bible: A parodic work featuring a prophet doing his best to disobey God and being frustrated when God succeeds! It’s also a work enjoining mercy and compassion over reveling in the punishment of others. Plus it’s got a prophet people actually listen to; and … did you know there’s a big fish in this one?

Scripture: Jonah 1:1-3; Jonah 4:1-11; Titus 3:3-8

Ryan Felton, GM and producer of City On A Hill Gaming, joins Grant, Jenny, and Peter to discuss creating actual play content! We’ve mentioned City On A Hill plenty lately, since Ryan was kind enough to invite the three of us on his show as players (and performers, as we’ll discuss in this episode.) You can find Ryan and City on a Hill Gaming on Twitter at @CityOnAHillGame! Ryan also helps us answer a question from Patreon supporter John Swann, who asks about performance anxiety when sitting down to a convention game.

After our Scripture readings, we start to break down making actual play podcasts, and why Ryan decided to create City On A Hill Gaming in the first place. We also discuss why APs are important and interesting; the unique challenges of creating actual play content over analytical podcasts like Saving the Game; and the challenges of making family-friendly and near-Christian gaming content. We also go into some detail on things we as players, and Ryan as the GM, would like to do to improve City on a Hill specifically, as common traps that listeners should be aware of when creating actual play content!

Also mentioned in this episode: Hamlet’s Hit Points and Beating the Story by Robin D. Laws; A Christian Gaming Podcast; Reunification by Press Pot Games; and City on a Hill “Side Quest #3” with Justin “Chivalrybean” Lowmaster (our editor!) and DMDad.

Scripture: 2 Samuel 2:6, Isaiah 6:8, Matthew 5:14-16

It’s our one hundred fiftieth episode, and we are excited! We’ve got a lot of people to thank, of course, and spend a couple minutes at the top of the show doing that. We’ve also got a touch of podcast business, and a mention of a recent episode of the Marengo Holy Happy Hour radio show that Peter appeared on to talk about gaming and Saving the Game. Finally, Grant has a specific shoutout to give to his friends Patrick and Tyler for helping with his Vampire game questions. (If you want a chance to play in their incredible games, by the way, check out The Gauntlet!) Oh, and there’s an airhorn.

Our incredibly timely Patreon question comes from Kenning, who asks “What is your favorite episode of this podcast so far?”

After our Scripture readings, we start in on our topic proper: Why we love games! Our answers are mostly about stories and experiences, but also systems, community, self-exploration, and more. Naturally, we want to hear yours as well!

Also mentioned in this episode: The Miskatonic University board game; Epidiah Ravachol, A Scoundrel in the Deep, and Worlds Without Master; One Shot’s actual play of A Scoundrel in the Deep; LoadingReadyRun; and Adam Koebel.

Scripture: Jeremiah 29:11, John 13:35, Acts 2:46-47, Hebrews 10:23-25

Rev. Derek “The GeekPreacher” White joins us once again, and this time it’s even more special than usual. This episode is a sort of test case for a new thing we might be doing with Derek more regularly—having Derek on to talk about specific theological topics from a geek perspective! First, though we’ve got a Patreon question to answer from Doug Hagler, who asks us what our individual D&D alignments are, and some Scripture we’ve picked out for the topic.

Then we let Derek take the lead as we discuss the unlikely sorts of heroes we see in both Scripture and in pop culture, from Moses and David to Frodo and Hawkeye. Accidental heroes, broken heroes, screwed-up heroes—we’ve got them all, and we’re happy to talk about them!

Also mentioned in this episode: Unsong; the Critical Core Kickstarter from Game to Grow; and STG 115, “RPGs in Social Skills Therapy (with Adam Davis and Adam Johns)”.

Scripture: Exodus 4:10-17, Isaiah 6:5-8, 1 Corinthians 15:2-11

We’re back with the second half of our unofficial two-parter on angels! (And yes, you can catch up with our first half here.) This time around, we’re discussing how to make angels interesting in your games. First, though, we’ve got some business to catch up on, including GaryCon 2019 (which Peter had a great time at) and ConCarolinas 2019 (which Grant will be attending this year.) We’ve also got a topical Patreon question from Paige, who asks “What advice do you have for running a game at a con?”

After answering that, we read our Scripture and dive in (with a brief initial segue about Angels in the Outfield for … reasons.) Angels as messengers, allies, and guardians! Angels as instruments of divine wrath or cosmic maintenance staff! How to portray angels in your game to make them interesting! And also, a little break to talk about the theology of guardian angels.

Mentioned in this episode: Exodus by Erika Shepherd and Party of One Podcast #168, “Exodus with Erika Shepherd”; Divinity by Erika Shepherd.

Scripture: Genesis 6:4, Numbers 13:33, Psalm 91:9-13, Matthew 2:13-15, Matthew 28:1-7, Colossians 2:18

Some additional context from Erika Shepherd about her games post-episode release.

It’s time for our Patreon-selected topic for the quarter, and this one’s so big it’ll take up two episodes! Our topic this week is angels, and with so much material to work with we just had to break this topic up. This episode has relatively little pure gaming content, because we had to push all of that off until next week! First, though, we talk about recording another session with City on a Hill Gaming, and Peter’s side quest episode, as well as a brief note about Grant’s upcoming Vampire game.

Our Patreon question this week comes from Kenning, who asks, “What is your favorite movie to talk about? Not necessarily a good movie, but an interesting one to talk about?”

After quite a lot of Scripture to read—turns out there’s plenty of verses about angels!—we tackle our main topic: Angels and angelology! What even are angels? What’s their purpose? What do we know about them, and from what sources? How do they appear in popular culture? And why do we care about the opinions of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite on the matter?

Mentioned in this episode: Gustav Davidson’s A Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels, Gill’s Exposition of the Bible, STG 110, “Spiritual Warfare (with Rev. Derek White)”, Min/Max Podcast #83, “Devastation: By Kobold”

Scripture: Genesis 3:23-24, 2 Kings 6:17, Isaiah 6:1-4, Ezekiel 1:4-21, Daniel 10:5-14, Luke 2:8-14, Colossians 1:16

Well, it was inevitable, folks: When we committed to doing a series on The Ten Commandments, we knew we’d eventually have to talk about adultery. Fair warning: This episode does talk about sex. We’re not explicit or anything, but keep that in mind! First, though, we’ve got a few other things to talk about—specifically, Grant’s D&D game in Sharn (or the lack of it) and a new Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition game he’s running.

Our Patreon question this week comes from John & Ginny Swann, who ask about TORG, running a horror story within a larger campaign, and getting otherwise light-hearted players to switch emotional gears for a more serious arc.

After a lot of Scripture, we start talking about adultery and marriage. Why is “You shall not commit adultery” a commandment at all? What did adultery and marriage look like in Old Testament Israel? And how do we tell stories involving adultery without being crass (or worse?)

Also mentioned in this episode: Our Virtues & Vices series episodes on Lust and Chastity, respectively; Fear the Boot 178, “Running a horror game”; and Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters.

Scripture: Exodus 20:14, Leviticus 20:10, 2 Samuel 12:1-10, Matthew 5:27-30, Mark 2:23-27, John 8:3-11, 1 Corinthians 6:18-20

We’re tackling a difficult and complex topic in this episode: How to roleplay characters with mental illnesses with sensitivity and grace. First, though, we’ve got a bit of other business to talk about, starting with our forthcoming appearances on City on a Hill Gaming (including Jenny’s very cool special episode, Side Quest #4 – The Crimson In Your Veins.) Grant’s also very happy to talk about his officially-started Eberron game, which went great! We also take a minute to remind everyone about our YouTube channel, which is finally updating with new episodes like this one and old episodes as we can.

Our Patreon question is from Raymond Dickson, who asks: How do you like to deal with a planned hiatus in a game (summer, scheduled surgery, travel, etc.)—not just going ahead with someone missing from the game, but putting the whole thing on hold for a bit? Unfortunately, our advice to Raymond is … not optimistic. But we do our best!

After an enthusiastic Scripture reading, we get right into this one, starting off with a lot of caveats and notes. We then break this down into three general (and largely artificial) categories, talking about persistent and ongoing mental illnesses; temporary, acute insanities; and artificial “madnesses” brought on by the sort of external causes we encounter in genre fiction. We talk a lot about the use of these at the table, but also do our best—within our limited abilities as non-experts—to give what advice we can about helping others deal with these issues at the table and in life, too.

Mentioned in this episode: Our previous episodes on mental health with mental health experts; “spoon theory”; and Sea Lions.

Scripture: Isaiah 1:17; Matthew 25:41-43; James 5:14; 1 John 3:17-18

We’ve got an unusual bonus episode this time around—one that in many ways recalls our old New Years’ resolutions episodes! We’re implementing an objectives and key results system behind-the-scenes here at Saving the Game, in order to grow the podcast and make sure we’re doing everything we can to improve the quality of our show. Since Grant’s also implementing it at work, it seemed like a good topic of conversation all on its own—a system any organization (from enterprises to families) can use to set measurable objectives.

As such, we go over the basics of the OKR system, then follow it up with a description of the objectives we’ve set and the key results measuring our progress on those objectives—everything from increasing listenership to improving our YouTube channel. We also talk about our appearance on the forthcoming episodes of City on a Hill Gaming, and “Session Zero” of Grant’s private-investigators-in-Sharn Eberron D&D game. We hope you find this edifying. We certainly did!

The book mentioned in the episode is John Doerr’s Measure What Matters.

With Jenny traveling for the holidays, we’re back to Grant and Peter on the mics for an episode! We cover our Christmas stories and Grant’s Christmas stream of the Link to the Past Holiday Randomizer, and remind our listeners about the very exciting upcoming Actual Play series we’re doing courtesy of City on a Hill Gaming.

Our Patreon question this week comes from Kevin VonFeldt, who asks us about the Kickstarters we wish we’d backed, but didn’t. This is also a good excuse to prompt our ever-generous Patreon supporters to send in questions like these!

Our main topic this episode is how to hack published adventure material into your game. For what was supposed to be a quick-and-easy Christmas topic, we had a ton to say about this! We briefly cover the pros and cons of adventures themselves, then start tearing down pieces of modules to explain why you might want to borrow those pieces, and how to adjust them for your own game. From maps to encounters to entire plot lines, we tackle everything you can think of—and wrap up with an idea about running entire modules in your own campaign in ways that don’t detract from your own homebrew settings.

Scripture: Proverbs 22:29, Colossians 3:23-24

Author and game designer Greg Stolze joins us once again, this time to talk about systematically creating good gaming sessions! We had Greg on once before, talking about personal horror and Unknown Armies on STG 83, and it’s great to have him back to give some excellent game-mastering advice. Greg’s also got a Kickstarter for Termination Shock just wrapping up, and will be Kickstarting a second edition of Grim War in early 2019, so definitely check those out!

We end up spending a lot of time answering our Patreon question from Tom Stephens this episode, since he asked about how much time we spend researching, recording, and editing for an average episode of Saving the Game. Greg recorded some podcast episodes to promote Termination Shock, and so he’s got plenty to add to that discussion as well!

After our Scripture readings, we go deep into the hard, practical steps gamemasters can take to build individual sessions and plan their game arcs built into both Termination Shock and Grim War. These are two rather different methods, but both are aimed squarely at new GMs, and designed to teach GMs how to keep players engaged and tell good stories without years of literary theory classes! Both the “playbook” approach of Termination Shock and the “lit-crit” approach of Grim War are worth testing in your own games, so give them a try (and consider picking up these games for more details!)

Scripture: Leviticus 19:34, Proverbs 4:6-7, Proverbs 15:22, Luke 6:39-40

Jenny and Peter oversee the promotion of our ongoing series on gamifying Biblical figures with one of the most difficult yet: Samson! Though his story is found in the Book of Judges, Samson is a notorious and often actively awful outlier among Biblical figures. He’s a drunken, womanizing barbarian who only occasionally interacts with God, and often seems more like Heracles or other mythic figures. What, then, can we learn from Samson and his story? And what can we take back to the gaming table?

Scripture: Judges 13:2-5, Judges 16:28-30

Yep, it’s a bonus episode all right—sillier and far less structured! In this episode: The end of Grant’s colony game; Peter’s continuing game; Grant’s upcoming Eberron game and #EberronFacts (and handing out setting crunch in small doses); how Jenny and Peter came up with their character concepts; and anxiety around new characters.

Our Ten Commandments series returns with a discussion of the Sixth Commandment: “You shall not murder.” First, though, Jenny’s got a lot of Overlight to talk about! We got to sit down and play it, and it was quite fun. Grant’s also got an Eberron game in the works, and Peter’s trying NaNoWriMo this month as well. We also address a question from Patreon supporter “gfactor”, who asks “What tabletop RPGs would you recommend for playing with younger kids (elementary age) and how would you transition them to more complex games as they got older?” (Our answers: No Thank You, Evil!; Happy Birthday, Robot!; Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple; and Savage Worlds.) We’ve got something a bit unusual after our Scripture reading as well—a quick explanation of an Aramaic term, “Raca”,  that’s untranslated in Matthew 5:22.

After all that, we have a heavy topic to address: Murder. Why ‘murder’ and not ‘kill’ in most translations? What’s the difference, and what causes it? How does Christ reframe this question in the Sermon on the Mount? And how do we square this against a hobby where violence, and often outright murder, is found in many of the games we play?

Scripture: Exodus 20:13, Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 5:21-26, Romans 13:9

It’s a special Halloween episode, this time on undeath! Well, okay, it’s at least a Halloween episode, and that counts for something. We start things off with a quick update on our Twitch stream schedule (Peter’s streaming Pathfinder: Kingmaker on Wednesdays for a while, leaving Jenny and Grant to stream on Fridays.) Jenny also has a special thank-you for Renegade Studios for being helpful in getting her copy of Overlight shipped correctly; and Grant plugs for his friend Patrick’s appearance on The Gauntlet Podcast, which is really a well-deserved plug for the entire Gauntlet community as a haven of indie gaming and game design. We also handle a question from Patreon supporter Zach over at Back Burner Games, who asks us what roleplaying game we’d make if we had absolutely no obstacles.

Then, after our very apt Scripture readings, we start talking about undeath! We obviously can’t cover the entirety of the topic in half an hour, but we do talk about what ‘undeath’ means, and briefly touch on some sample historical and cultural beliefs about the undead. We also discuss what Scripture has to say about the undead; why the undead in their various incarnations are scary; and how to use the undead in interesting ways as both a player and as a gamemaster. Enjoy!

Scripture: 1 Samuel 28:13-17, 1 Chronicles 10:13-14, Matthew 14:25-28, Luke 24:36-39

Krissi Woodward joins us again this episode to help Grant and Jenny speak a little less, since they’re both pretty sick in this episode, and to talk about character backstories with everyone! Krissi’s been on a few previous episodes can be found on Twitter as @d20mom.

We catch up a bit and talk about our upcoming streaming schedule over on Twitch, and then answer a question about fictional characters we’d want to GM for from Patreon supporter Richard Lorenz. Then after our Scripture readings, we dive into character backstories: What makes a good background, common pitfalls, some general advice, and the methods we each use for coming up with backstories for our characters.

Scripture: Genesis 37: 19-26, Isaiah 43: 18-19, Acts 9:1-6, 2 Corinthians 5:16-17

Jenny’s off exploring France this week, so Peter and Grant sat down together for another bonus episode in our Biblical Figures series! This time, we’re talking about Matthew—apostle, Gospel author, and reformed tax collector. We provide some Fun Facts about Matthew Levi before Grant gives an overview of the peculiar system of Roman taxation. Then we talk about Matthew’s major appearance in Scripture, as well as his role as one of the four traditional authors of the Gospels and the different martyrdoms traditionally ascribed to Matthew. Finally, we wrap up by exploring ways to use elements of Matthew’s story in our own games. Enjoy!

Mentioned in this episode: Alfred Edersheim’s Sketches of Jewish Social Life and Fausset’s Bible Dictionary.

Scripture: Matthew 9:9-13, Luke 18:9-14, Luke 19:1-10, Revelation 4:5-8

After more than a year, we’re finally back to our series on the Ten Commandments! We’re picking up where we left off with the Fifth Commandment, which tells us to “honor thy father and mother”—and a good bit more. We’ve also got a question from Patreon backer Kevin VonFeldt, who asks us about our favorite Kickstarters we’ve backed. We’ve also got some news about a growing gaming group and Jenny’s new cat (courtesy of Feline Café in Ottawa!)

After our Scripture readings, we talk in-depth about the Fifth Commandment: Its text, its meanings (both in Scripture and in cultural usage), and its implications. We also spend some time on the questions which naturally arise when it’s very hard to honor one or both parents. Then we talk about some common story and gaming uses of this topic, and how to put this commandment into practice in the world. Finally, we wrap up with a few special shout-outs to our podcasting and geeky-faith elders whom we’ve learned from: Folks like Derek White, M.J. Young of the Christian Gamers Guild, Dan Repperger, Chad Wattler, and more.

Scripture: Exodus 20:16, Proverbs 6:20-22, 1 Timothy 5:1-4

Zach Lorton of Back Burner Games joins us this episode to talk about playing music at the gaming table! Zach’s a DJ, game designer, and friend of the show, so he’s basically the perfect person to talk to about playing music and sound effects as part of the tabletop gaming experience. He’s also got a lot to say, as you’ll hear in this episode! Before that, though, we let Zach talk about Back Burner Games (Patreon, Instagram, Facebook) and very briefly talk about what we’re playing and what’s going on behind the scenes at STG.

After that, pastor and Patreon supporter Douglas Underhill gives us a somewhat controversial question to tackle, asking what our second choice of religion or life philosophy would be if somehow Christianity were off the table. Then we’re into our Scripture readings for this episode and diving right into the main topic! We cover Jenny’s musical talents and everyone else’s lack thereof; background music; sound effects and ambient music; foreground music (including a story Grant’s been wanting to tell for ages); how to use all of these at the table; and where to get music or sound effects.

Mentioned in this episode: Ribbon Drive RPG; the Pieces board game café in St. Louis, MO; myNoise; Tabletop Audio; MeloDice; and OverClocked ReMix.

Scripture: 1 Samuel 16:17-23. Psalm 96:1-2, Proverbs 25:20, 1 Corinthians 14:15-19

Gaming podcaster extraordinaire Kris Newton returns to discuss handling destiny in our games! Kris hosts two of our favorite podcasts: The Gameable Saturday Morning Podcast (neé Gameable Disney and Gameable Pixar) and the much-more-NSFW MegaDumbCast. He’s been on several times before, just as we’ve all been on various episodes of Gameable, and we’re delighted to have him back again. After catching up for a bit and hearing what Kris has been playing lately, we answer a spot-on Patreon question from Shawn Stauffer, who asks us to put together an adventuring party consisting entirely of Disney characters.

That done, and our Scripture for this episode read, we go deep into the idea of “destiny” in traditional storytelling and in tabletop gaming. What are some different approaches for including it in our games? How can we maintain player autonomy and input while getting full value from this powerful and familiar story element? What purpose does a destiny serve in our stories or as a metagame tool? And how do we mechanically define a destiny, if we do so at all?

Also mentioned in this episode: Steve Jackson Games’s In Nomine RPG; the Machine of Death anthology; the Protean City Comics podcast; and Magpie Games’s Masks RPG.

Scripture: Deuteronomy 31:19-22, Isaiah 46:10, Jeremiah 1:4-5, 1 Corinthians 2:9-10

Continuing our previous episode, Allen Mowers, Ashley Mowers, and Kyle Stainbrook from the Min/Max Podcast join us to finish our discussion on  moral accountability for our in-character choices. Just how much accountability do we have for the things our characters do in our games? How do we handle bleed, and how do we handle it when our own characters engage matters we aren’t fully comfortable with?

If you missed Part One of this conversation, you can find it here. Enjoy!

Relevant links: STG 111, “Larp and the Psychology of Play (with Dr. Sarah Lynne-Bowman)”; Dr. Sarah Lynne-Bowman’s articles on bleed and playing nasty characters; and STG 17, “Lines and Veils”.

Scripture: Psalm 7:14-16, Matthew 5:21, Matthew 13:13, Mark 7:14-23

We reach maximum hosting with not one, not two, but three guests this week! Allen Mowers, Ashley Mowers, and Kyle Stainbrook from the much-loved Min/Max Podcast join us to discuss moral accountability for our in-character choices. After we manage to get through an introduction, we all briefly talk about what we’ve been playing. Grant plugs our new “oh my gosh what if story” t-shirt, Peter and Jenny plug appearances on City on a Hill Gaming and Bard and Bible, and then we all answer a question from Patreon supporter Richard Lorenz about which fictional character we’d each want to run a game for us.

After reading Scripture, we then dive into this complex issue together: Just how much accountability do we have for the things our characters do in our games? How do we handle bleed, and how do we handle it when our own characters engage matters we aren’t fully comfortable with?

We’ll wrap up this conversation in Part Two next time, so stay tuned!

Relevant links: STG 111, “Larp and the Psychology of Play (with Dr. Sarah Lynne-Bowman)”; Dr. Sarah Lynne-Bowman’s articles on bleed and playing nasty characters; and STG 17, “Lines and Veils”.

Scripture: Psalm 7:14-16, Matthew 5:21, Matthew 13:13, Mark 7:14-23

We’re back with another con report! Jenny, Peter, and friend of the show Tyler “Churcher” Denning join us to recap Fear the Con 2018, held June 22-23 in Brentwood, MO.

Game rundown:

• Slot 1 (Jenny as GM; Peter; Tyler) – “SIGN: A GAME ABOUT BEING UNDERSTOOD”
• Slot 2 (Jenny) – “THE HORRIBLE THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO CHILDREN: MY COUSIN’S WEDDING”
• Slot 2 (Peter; Tyler) – “DUSK CITY OUTLAWS”
• Slot 3 (Peter) – “BEYOND THE MOUNTAIN WALL: BEYOND THE WALL SYSTEM”
• Slot 3 (Tyler as GM; Jenny) – “CHURCHERS KICKSTARTER TRAVELLER GAME!” (The Twitch VOD can be found here. Note that it is very NSFW!)
• Slot 4 (Tyler) – “[FATE] CAMELOT TRIGGER”
• Slot 5 (Tyler; Jenny) – “THE SMALL TOWN OF CATTLE SKULL”
• Slot 5 (Peter) – “LEVERAGE”
• Slot 6 (Jenny as GM; Peter; Tyler) – “THE DECK OF MANY THINGS”

It’s a perfectly normal episode, without guests or con recaps or anything – what even is this? It’s an episode about getting your feet wet as a GM, that’s what! After our usual banter, including Jenny’s sudden appearance in Grant’s D&D game, we answer a question from Patreon supporter Shawn, who asks us about our perfect gaming room. Then we get into our main topic with a variety of suggestions for people considering running their own game for the first time.

Some resources for new GMs: Peter’s “I Want To GM” blog post; Gnome Stew; Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast; Robin D. Laws’s Robin’s Laws of Good Gamemastering; Odyssey: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Campaign Management by Phil Vecchione and Walt Ciechanowski; and Matthew Colville’s Running the Game series on YouTube.

Scripture: Psalm 37:30, Matthew 23:11, James 1:12

It’s time for another bonus episode, `cause we’ve got a convention to recap and gaming news to catch up on! Jenny went to Ottawa Comiccon 2018 this May, and she’s got a lot of stories to tell! Aside from various panels and general geekery, she particularly liked Meeples To Go, Cardamajig’s The Deck of Many (with art by Jordan Richer), Roe’s Art, and Richard Dufault’s collected cosplay photos at the con this year. And of course, everyone should check out Jenny’s own cosplay pictures on her Twitter!

After the con recap, Grant plugs his wife Krissi and her appearances on the Gameable Saturday Morning Podcast to talk about Jem and the Holograms (Episode 45 for introduction and plot recaps, and Episode 46 for plot, setting, and character breakdowns.) He also discusses his 200 Word RPG Challenge entry (which can be read here.) Then we break down into catching up on important plot events and gaming lessons from our own games, as we try to tackle a bunch of little talking points we couldn’t get to while we had guests on over the past few episodes. Enjoy!

As foretold, once every thirty-three episodes Mike Perna of Innroads Ministries, Game Store Prophets, and Bard and Bible joins us—this time, to talk about board games! Mike takes a moment to plug TavernCon 2018 (June 9th in Warren, NJ.) We also give a bit of a shout-out (belated by the time this episode drops) to the Min/Max Podcast for hitting the one-year mark. Then we take on a question from Patreon backer “Retro Rewind Podcast” (another good podcast you should check out) about our favorite foods and the trouble we’d go to in order to eat them.

Once all that’s done, we read our Scripture and start talking about board games. We focus specifically on board games close to our roleplaying focus—games with heavy story elements, or games in which there’s a procedurally-generated story to enjoy—but we do roam around a bit and talk about a lot of games, so make sure to check the links below if you’re interested in any of those!

Board games mentioned in this episode: Overlight, Gloomhaven, Once Upon A Time (3rd Edition), T.I.M.E. Stories, Alien Artifact, Twilight Imperium, Through The Ages, Barker’s Row, Meeple Circus, Fog of Love, …and then we held hands, Star Crossed, The Grizzled, Freedom: The Underground Railroad, Arranged!, This War of Mine, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Above and Below, Near and Far, The Quiet Year, Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game, Android: Netrunner, Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn. (Phew!)

Scripture: Proverbs 11:1-3, Philippians 2:3-4, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27

This week, we’ve got not one, but two special guests on the mics with us! Daniel Silver and Father David Subu join us to introduce us to Doxacon Prime 2018! Doxacon is a convention about Christian genre fiction and fandom, and it’s happening November 2-3, 2018, in Washington, DC. (For more information, check out the Doxacon Prime Facebook group, and follow @DoxaconPrime and @Doxacast on Twitter.) You can also hear some recordings from Doxacon and other interviews over at Ancient Faith Radio.

Daniel and Father David have a lot more to talk about than just their awesome convention, though. First, we all chime in to respond to Patreon backer Nathanael Farley, who asks “What is your favorite (possibly indie) RPG that you think needs more love in the wider world?” (Our picks: Swords Without Master, The Trouble With Rose, Anima Prime, Dialect, and … 1st Ed. D&D. Seriously.) Then, after our Scripture readings (including our first Deuterocanonical reading from Wisdom of Sirach) our guests talk about the need for Doxacon, and how in many ways modern Christian genre fiction and fandoms are still affected by the “Satanic Panic” of the late 20th century.

Scripture: Deuteronomy 31:19-22; Proverbs 17:17; Wisdom of Sirach 4:20-25; Psalm 18; Hebrews 10:24-25

Author, actor, programmer, and preacher Stephen Weese joins us for a fascinating discussion on subculture ministry! Stephen’s book God Loves the Freaks, 2nd Ed. was one of the books we read as background material for Saving the Game when we were just starting the podcast, and it was great to finally have him on our show. We covered a lot of ground in this episode, so buckle up!

Our Patreon question this week is from Nathanael Farley, who asks “Which game system do you dislike the most, and what do you LIKE about it?”

Other things mentioned in this episode: The Grave Robbers; The Exodus Adventure Game; Fear the Con 11; City on a Hill Gaming; Sister Agony’s Academy.

Scripture: 1 Samuel 16:4-7, Mark 16:15, John 13:35, Galatians 3:28

Gamer and pastor Tim Decker of Christ Community Etc in Owosso, MI joins us to talk about playing support characters in our roleplaying games, in response to the eternal complaints of players who don’t want to play the cleric! We also discuss how to end a game that’s stopped being fun without any hard feelings, as Grant’s Fellowship group did, and the conclusion of Jenny’s “moidah mystery” prequel to Keep on the Borderlands. We also spend quite a lot of time answering Patreon backer “ComposerDad”, who asks whether gaming groups share the same unifying, cross-subcultural nature of churches. Once that’s done, we dive deep into ways to make those “boring” support characters into something more interesting than a healbot. Enjoy!

Also mentioned in this episode: STG 95, “Hospitality”.

Scripture: Exodus 17:8-13, Hebrews 13:15-16, Luke 10:36-37

We’re back with a surprisingly focused episode on sainthood thanks to Jenny’s hard work and research! We’ve only a little bit of off-topic material to discuss: A quick word about the list of questions our Patrons send in, and a brief diversion to discuss Nintendo’s Koi Koi game played with hanafuda cards. We also answer Patreon supporter Tom Stephens’s question about the one place in the world we’d go, if we could go anywhere at all.

After that’s done, it’s time for a deep dive into sainthood. After all, we’d eventually like to do a full series on individual saints and important Church figures; but we figured we’d need a primer on sainthood first, and Jenny definitely provided! Her research covers what a ‘saint’ is, how one becomes a canonized saint in the Roman Catholic church, and much more. We also discuss the use of saints as a concept for games and worldbuilding.

Resources: The Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference documents; other Anglican liturgical texts; and STG 107, “Relics and Holy Items”. Plus, the Friends at the Table podcast Jenny mentioned!

Scripture: Psalm 16:1-3, Romans 8:26-30, Revelation 5:6-8 (all NASB this time)

Due to illness, it’s another short bonus episode this week; but Jenny and Peter are talking about Gideon, so it can’t be all bad! Gideon’s a fascinating figure from Judges 6-8, who (like so many others in Scripture) serves the Lord faithfully while remaining familiarly human. His story and character contain some very gameable elements, and we cover those here. Enjoy!

Scripture: Judges 6:11-16, Judges 8:22-25

We’re back with a discussion of Christian allegory and allusion! This episode, we’re mostly focusing on how this applies to settings, and especially Peter’s ongoing series of setting design blog posts, since the setting he’s creating is designed with allegory in mind.

First, though, we catch up a bit and talk about the games we’ve played! Jenny’s a fan of The Grimm Forest, and talks it up quite nicely. Grant, meanwhile, has a lengthy story to tell about his five-year-old daughter, the card game she designed, and the No Thank You, Evil! “game” she ran for him.

We also answer a question from Patreon supporter “Mister X”, who asks: “What do you think about bennies? A great way to help balance those days with bad luck? A new outlet for powergamers to screw with the game? Another mechanic to clutter games with mechanic-creep?” (As promised, we suggest anyone interested in checking dice math try anydice.com, which is a bit opaque but very powerful.)

Scripture: Isaiah 53:6-7, Matthew 26:26-29, John 1:29-34

This episode, we manage the unthinkable and actually get our quarterly Patreon-selected topic in before the last possible episode! It’s a whole new world, folks. We open up the show by talking a little bit about our assorted podcats, the 200 Word RPG Challenge, Pilates, and a couple of other minor things. Then we move on to a pretty heavy question from Patreon backer Paige: How to memorialize a player in your gaming group after they pass. (We also recommend Fear the Boot’s recent bonus episode on this same question.)

After our Scripture readings, we delve into an equally dense topic: Resurrection in our games. Naturally, we start by contrasting the forms of resurrection ‘magic’ (or technology or what have you) we see in our games with the resurrection of Christ and the promise of resurrection offered through Him. (This leads to an interesting digression about confessions and creeds, and we’re not at all sorry about it.) Then we throw out all sorts of possible complications with resurrection magic, and find hooks in each of them to hang stories and games on. Enjoy!

Scripture: Isaiah 26:19, John 11:38-44, 1 Corinthians 15:35-44

This week, we’re talking about positive metagaming! First, we catch up a bit and recap what games we’ve played recently (including Peter’s terrifying encounter with a flock of seagulls and Jenny’s Beyond the Wall game.) Then, Grant goes on for a while about the Link to the Past Randomizer race at AGDQ 2018 (seriously, it’s fascinating.) We also answer a simple question from Patreon supporter Francisco, who asks if we prefer roller coasters or 4D immersive movie rides.

Then, after our Scripture reading, we delve into various ways players should be metagaming at their table. (No, seriously, ignore or correct Wikipedia’s outdated opinion on this.) We cover everything from facilitating productive play, to buy-in, to content management, and much more. Enjoy, share, and as always, comment below!

Scripture: 2 Kings 6:15-17, Proverbs 25:25-27, Acts 23:6-10

We’re back with a follow-up to our previous episode on mass combat! This time around, we’re talking about actually roleplaying in a mass combat scenario, and treating war and conflict as a setting for more traditional roleplaying. First, though, we plug Peter’s blog posts, and especially his heavy metal D&D setting design series and his most recent post on Horvu. (Happy Horvu, everyone!) We then tackle a question from Patreon supporter Richard, who asks us about Bible stories as one-shot games.

After our Scripture reading, and making fun of Grant’s inability to upload the correct file for STG 123, we dive right into mass combat as a roleplaying setting and opportunity. We make sure to include plenty of examples, and touch on a few common pitfalls as well. Enjoy!

Scripture: Judges 12:4-6, Jeremiah 51:27-29, 2 Timothy 2:3-7

(Fixed audio. Apologies!) This episode’s conversation about mass combat—a topic selected by our Patreon supporters—turned out to be so big, we’re following this one up with another episode on a related topic next time! Before that, though, we’ve got a lot of other things to discuss: The holidays, and especially all the games we played and picked up over the Christmas break. We talk a bit more about our Patreon and the need to change things somewhat as we move forward into 2018 (leave your comments on that below.) We also send our congratulations and prayers to Mike Perna and his family as they welcome their son into the world; and we send our condolences to the family and friends of Pat Roper, longtime Fear the Boot host, who passed away just after Christmas.

Our Patreon question this week comes from Paige, who asks “Is there a game/campaign/thing you wish you could run, but you don’t feel skilled enough to do it?” The answer: Oh my yes. All that having finally been taken care of, we do eventually get to our main topic: Making interesting mass combat scenarios as part of your ongoing roleplaying game campaign.

Scripture: Exodus 17:8-13, Joshua 6:1-5, Ephesians 6:10-17

It’s an emergency bonus episode due to illness and holiday stress, but an interesting topic: Joseph as a gameable figure! (Listen to find out which Joseph, naturally.)

As promised in Episode 120, we’re tackling “battered group syndrome” in this episode and the next! Yes, it’s a two-parter, because we had so much to say on this topic we couldn’t keep the conversation short enough for a single episode. We lead off with two quick plugs: One for Grant’s appearance on the Gameable Saturday Morning Podcast to talk about Exo Squad (Part 1, Part 2, and the horror of a Gameable AU involving Palladium’s Ninjas & Superspies); and one for Min/Max Podcast, another excellent show by Christians about gaming and theology. We then quickly answer a question from Patreon backer Kevin about our favorite polyhedral dice (results: 2d12+1d8, mean: 17.5.) After our Scripture readings, it’s time to tackle this topic head-on!

In this second half, we wrap up our discussion of how to handle damaged gaming groups, such as giving players agency over negative consequences to their characters or going to conventions (hereafter forever known as “gaming speed dating sessions”) to learn from other GMs. We also have more Funcilitator jokes, so—enjoy!

Full credit to Fear the Boot for, we believe, coining the phrase “battered group syndrome” and discussing this themselves in FTB 440.

Scripture: Psalm 51:10-13, Proverbs 25:18-20, Romans 12:17-21

As promised in Episode 120, we’re tackling “battered group syndrome” in this episode and the next! Yes, it’s a two-parter, because we had so much to say on this topic we couldn’t keep the conversation short enough for a single episode. We lead off with two quick plugs: One for Grant’s appearance on the Gameable Saturday Morning Podcast to talk about Exo Squad (Part 1, Part 2, and the horror of a Gameable AU involving Palladium’s Ninjas & Superspies); and one for Min/Max Podcast, another excellent show by Christians about gaming and theology. We then quickly answer a question from Patreon backer Kevin about our favorite polyhedral dice (results: 2d12+1d8, mean: 17.5.) After our Scripture readings, it’s time to tackle this topic head-on!

In this first half, we cover the symptoms of “battered group syndrome” (especially avoidance behaviors) and a few suggestions to help treat it, such as changing GMs or systems for a bit, granting players as much narrative control as possible, take-backs, and failures. Jenny also introduces us to the Funcilitator, which sounds … ominous. Enjoy!

Full credit to Fear the Boot for, we believe, coining the phrase “battered group syndrome” and discussing this themselves in FTB 440.

Scripture: Psalm 51:10-13, Proverbs 25:18-20, Romans 12:17-21

We’re back with our angriest, most rant-filled episode yet! Well, not really—but there’s a lot of passion in this episode, because we’re talking about GMing traditions the gaming community still seems to support despite being destructive, uncomfortable, and simply wrong. First, though, we’ve got a question from Patreon backer Paige Lowe about how blatantly one should steal from other media when planning a game. After that, we tackle our Scripture as usual before diving into six common behaviors we still see: Adversarial GMing; monopolizing narrative control; turning exceptional successes into failures; misunderstanding metagaming; harming characters to punish players; and creating in-game penalties for missed gaming sessions.

Also: Grant was recently on the Gameable Saturday Morning Podcast (who are of course long-time friends of ours) to analyze an amazing and difficult cartoon from his childhood—Exo Squad. It’s very long, because that’s what happens when our podcasts combine! Here’s Part 1, an introduction to the show and a breakdown of episodes and characters; and here’s Part 2, an analysis of thematic elements and considerations for gaming in this setting. Enjoy!

Scripture: Leviticus 19:14-15, Ephesians 4:22-25, 2 Timothy 2:22-26

Peter and Jenny have two special guests this week: Jacob Toman and Michael Mendis from Gospel & Gaming! Gospel & Gaming is, in their own words, “a ministry dedicated to sharing the love and Gospel of Jesus Christ with gamers all over the world.” Jacob and Michael did a great job representing them, explaining their mission in online gaming communities and tabletop gaming communities alike.

We also addressed a question from Patreon backer Jim Nanban, who asked us about the coolest piece of RPG paraphernalia we each own. (As promised, there’s a picture of Peter’s dice bag right here in the show notes.) We also briefly plug our Discord channel, which is continuing to grow as a community. Then everyone settles in to talk about evangelism and how Gospel & Gaming approaches it—even to the point where Michael and Jacob turn the interview around and start asking the hosts questions!

A couple of quick notes about this episode: First, Grant was very sick and missed out on a pair of awesome guests. (He’s better now.) Second, Peter’s audio sounds very bad this episode; there was a hardware problem writing his track to disk that wasn’t apparent during the discussion. And third, as hard as Grant tried we simply could not edit Blarey the Podcast Train out of this episode. That means that this is Blarey’s first official podcast appearance. Enjoy!

Also mentioned in this episode were three books Jacob highly recommended as primers for Gospel & Gaming’s mission: Michael Green’s Evangelism in the Early Church; Jerram Barr’s The Heart of Evangelism; and Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.

Scripture: Psalm 105:1-4, Matthew 13:10-13, Romans 10:11-15

We’re back with an episode topic selected by our Patreon supporters: That old adage, “the ends justify the means”—in other words, consequentialism! First, a few announcements: Grant now regularly streams the editing process for these episodes over on Mixer, so come hang out if you want to chat with him while he does that. Also, to help wrap up our “summer of mental health” focus, Jenny and Grant have pulled together a few mental health resources; we’ve got those listed below.

Our Patreon backer question this week is from Doug Hagler, who asks us about using a board game to introduce or set the scene for a tabletop roleplaying game. We struggle a bit with this one, admittedly, but we do manage to come up with a couple of ideas!

Then we settle into the main topic: Consequentialism, a philosophy we all know from that “the ends justify the means” adage. We describe it and address its shortcomings, then move on to how to use this idea in our games without ending up with unbearable characters! We also plug The Sci-Fi Christian along the way, which you should definitely be listening to as well.

Mental health resources:

• USA: The Suicide Prevention Lifeline; Our Fractured Minds (podcast); GoodTherapy.org
• Canada: Canada’s Suicide Prevention Crisis Site; Healthy Minds Canada’s mental health resources page.

Scripture: Joshua 1:7-9, John 11:47-50, 1 Corinthians 13:1-3

Booter, con organizer, and friend Adam Gottfried joins us to talk about planning Fear the Con and other conventions! First, Adam has an announcement (the first piece of news ever broken on Saving the Game!)—Fear the Con 11 will be June 22-23, 2018. Also, there will be a Kickstarter for the con at some point, although those dates aren’t exactly set in stone yet. (For more Fear the Con, see Episode 61 with Derek Knutsen and a host of others.)

Having made that announcement, we tackle Patreon backer Jim’s question about obscure media we’d want to turn into a RPG. We also discuss an impending visit from the Bishop of Jerusalem, which naturally leads into a discussion of Jerusalem Syndrome. Jenny also plugs Scott Westerfeld’s “Leviathan” series, and especially its map.

All that done, we move on to our Scripture for the episode, and the episode’s main topic: Planning and running a convention like Fear the Con. Most of this discussion is very much focused on Fear the Con, for obvious reasons; but we do manage to address the main things you need to think of when running a con, and how to handle problems as they arise!

Also: Grant’s started to livestream the audio editing process! If you want to hear the raw episode, and chat with Grant while he edits, keep an eye on our social media feeds (especially Twitter) for announcements of streaming times. You can also follow Grant’s channel on Mixer and get notifications there.

Scripture: Proverbs 11:5-6, Hebrews 10:24-25, Romans 12:10-16

Important note: This Weekend Reading series is the result of our Patreon backers supporting the show, and is the result of us breaking the $60/month barrier a while back. Unfortunately, we’ve recently dropped below $50/month. We really do like doing this series, though, so we’re going to keep doing this every two weeks for a while at least. (Asking listeners for support via Patreon is extremely helpful, and we love that our listeners do support us, but holding content hostage in some way doesn’t really sit right with us as producers of Christian content.)

Grant

First up, I’ve got an article I’ll talk some about next episode as well, but which I found utterly fascinating: “The Holiest City on Earth (Will Drive You LITERALLY Insane)“, Luke Harrington’s description (and armchair analysis) of Jerusalem Syndrome. Honestly, it speaks for itself:

Actually, the symptoms of Jerusalem syndrome—which affects as many as 100 people a year—are almost shockingly specific in their progression. First, the individual will become nervous and agitated and express a desire to leave the tour group and explore the city alone. (Tour guides in Jerusalem are actually familiar enough with the syndrome that many of them will try to step in here and put the kibosh on things.) After wandering the city alone for a while, the individual will become obsessed with cleanliness, bathing compulsively and often cutting his or her fingernails down to the quick.

The next step—and I am not making this up—is stealing a hotel bed sheet to make a toga. (The toga, of course, is a garment more associated with ancient Roman fashion, or frat parties, than with ancient Israelite dress, but the Jerusalem syndrome sufferer has more on his or her mind than historical accuracy.) Those who have studied Jerusalem syndrome note that the toga is always white, which they tie into the obsession with purity; I’d guess it probably has more to do with the fact that hotel sheets are pretty much always white, but then, I’m not the expert.

Every once in a while, I encounter Christians who believe that mental health problems are purely spiritual, and that depression, anxiety, or more serious mental disorders are a sign of a lack of faith, or something that can be merely “prayed away.” I’ll never discount the power of prayer and faith, but there’s a reason many Christians are called to work as mental health professionals! So it’s gratifying to see that Pope Francis understands that even those with great spiritual gifts can stand to talk to a therapist every now and then to “clarify a few things”:

Pope Francis says that when he was 42 he had sessions weekly with a psychoanalyst who was female and Jewish to “clarify some things.”

It wasn’t specified what the future pontiff wanted to explore. The revelation came in a dozen conversations Francis had with French sociologist Dominique Wolton, writing a soon-to-be-published book.

La Stampa, an Italian daily, quoting from some of the conversations on Friday, said Francis went to the analyst’s home. Francis was quoted as saying: “one day, when she was about to die, she called me. Not to receive the sacraments, since she was Jewish, but for a spiritual dialogue.”

High school biology classes tend to lead us to think that scientific names are dry, dusty, and static (if occasionally enlivened by a scientist trying to be witty.) Turns out, however, that rogue taxonomists abusing the system can kill you in the process of accruing scientific prestige:

Before you go rushing to the hospital in search of antivenin, you’re going to want to look up exactly what kind of snake you’re dealing with. But the results are confusing. According to the official record of species names, governed by the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), the snake belongs to the genus Spracklandus. What you don’t know is that almost no taxonomists use that name. Instead, most researchers use the unofficial name that pops up in Wikipedia and most scientific journal articles: Afronaja.

This might sound like semantics. But for you, it could mean the difference between life and death. “If you walk in [to the hospital] and say the snake that bit you is called Spracklandus, you might not get the right antivenin,” says Scott Thomson, a herpetologist and taxonomist at Brazil’s Museum of Zoology at the University of São Paulo. After all, “the doctor is not a herpetologist … he’s a medical person trying to save your life.”

In fact, Spracklandus is the center of a heated debate within the world of taxonomy—one that could help determine the future of an entire scientific field. And Raymond Hoser, the Australian researcher who gave Spracklandus its official name, is one of the forefront figures in that debate.

Jenny

One of my favourite memories from my childhood is trying to find more bookmarks so that I could kind of cheat at Choose Your Own Adventure Books, attempting to avoid a grisly end for the main character. (The alien abduction one was the hardest to get through alive, if memory serves.) I also recall a similar book series about teen drama and trying to avoid the popular kids’ wrath at school. I remember enjoying parts of those books, but also finding them rather vapid and boring after a while. Since then, I haven’t been able to truly find a good substitute in my life for those Choose Your Own Adventure books. The closest I could get was Bioware RPGs like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Until very recently when I was perusing the Google Play store on my phone and discovered Creatures Such as We by Lynnea Glasser, a choose your own adventure aimed at adult readers where you are a tour guide on the moon, and the most recent batch of tourists happen to be the designers of your favourite game studio, and you get to choose whether to maintain a professional distance, or pursue friendships and/or romance with them. The cast is incredibly diverse, and the number of choices you get to make is just… satisfying. The first playthrough of the game is free, but after that it costs $5, which I will definitely be paying.

Creatures Such as We is a philosophical interactive romance novel by Lynnea Glasser, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Living on the moon is lonely, and stressful, and exhausting. Video games have always offered you an escape to a better life. The easy, happy life you wish you had. Which makes it so frustrating when the game you’ve been playing ends badly. But you have a chance to figure it out, because the next tourist group is the designers. You can debate with them about art, inspire them with the beauty of outer space, get closer to any one specific designer in particular, and finally find out how to get the ending you always wanted.

Theology Nerd’s Wife Has Book Detector Installed. This article is a joke article, but seriously, I need one of those to keep myself in check sometimes.

As Lance tiptoed in the door, apparently planning on quietly slipping the books behind some of the other books stacked in various oddball piles throughout the house, he reportedly jumped in terror at a blaring alarm, which alerted his wife Melissa that he had brought home 27 new books on theology, Christian living, and the Bible.

Vincent Baker, designer of Apocalypse World, the RPG that led to many games that are Powered by the Apocalypse, recently discussed on Twitter the way he designed choices in Apocalypse World. I found the dissection of choice and compromise very interesting, and it’s given words to one of the things that made Monster Hearts and Dungeon World interesting to me. In those games, your actions don’t only have consequences for you. There are consequences for everyone else too. I like that in a game.

Peter

Divinity: Original Sin 2 released this week (on Thursday to be specific). I’ve only had a little bit of time with the final version of it, but it’s a very interesting and fun game. In particular, I don’t think I’ve ever seen pregenerated PCs done so compellingly in a video game before. And while it’s a fantastic game and fun in its own right, the thing that makes it more interesting enough to share here is the GM mode. If you remember back to the old Neverwinter Nights games, those promised to do a similar “tabletop on the PC” thing, but the tools were not as elegant as it sounds like they are here.

There are lots of prefabricated maps as well, all of which can be modified or pulled apart and rebuilt. You can build from scratch too, as well as sharing the individual components you’ve built for use in other campaigns. That means you might not find a gothic space cathedral at launch, but you’ll either be able to build one or download one somewhere down the line, provided GM mode finds a community.

While I’m pushing stuff to buy on you, I may as well mention that Reviving Old Scratch is on sale for $3 again. That book was a very impactful read for me and also gave rise to Episode 110 of our podcast.

I recently came across this rather wonderful story about a church searching for a pastor and a pastor searching for a church to serve. I really like the humility and warmth of all parties involved, and it think it’s a reminder that faith isn’t really supposed to be this grandiose thing.

Then a letter arrived from a woman named Amy on behalf of Granby Presbyterian. Handwritten. A single page. They ­didn’t drill him with knucklehead questions. They only asked if he was actually interested in being a pastor. The next morning, Jonas rose an hour early to work out his reply.

Finally, the dream of delivery drones is already a reality – for medical supplies in Africa! A company called Zipline is using drones to get life-saving supplies to medical professionals in Rwanda and Tanzania, and it is every bit as cool asit sounds.

By focusing on carrying critical medical supplies, Zipline has gotten off the ground faster and in a bigger way than other, more mundane delivery pioneers. It’s a lot easier to convince regulators to tolerate the potential safety risks of delivery drones falling out of the sky when those aircraft are making lifesaving deliveries to hospitals rather than carrying shoes or pizza.

We’re delighted to welcome Jack Berkenstock Jr. of The Bodhana Group back onto the mics this week! Jack previously joined us on STG 25, when he introduced us to the idea of roleplaying games as an adjunct therapeutic tool for children who were victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse, among others. This time, he’s here to talk more about RPGs in treatment for social skills, grief, loss, and more. After catching up with our old friend a bit, we let him plug Save Against Fear 2017 (Oct. 13-15 in Harrisburg, PA)—which we can confirm Jenny will attend this year, so catch up with her there too if you see her! We also plug the /r/ChristianDnD subreddit, especially for anyone looking to find other folks to game online with.

That done, we chat briefly about the 2017 total solar eclipse and answer (another) question from Patreon backer Fernando about Saturday morning cartoons we’d want to turn into games. Naturally, this gave us a chance to plug our podcasting friends over at the Gameable Saturday Morning Podcast, and Peter’s episodes on Batman: The Animated Series there. Our other choices: E.X.O. Squad, Reboot, Star Blazers, and Toad Patrol! (And yes, please nominate your own cartoons to game in the comments.)

Finally, we settle in and let Jack talk about his introduction to gaming, how he found out he wanted to do therapy for kids who were hurting badly, and how he figured out that those two loves might work together. In particular, we discuss methodologies, what kind of metrics work and don’t work in these sorts of situations, Olivia’s House, and how the therapeutic sessions Bodhana runs differ from your average tabletop game.

Games mentioned this episode: Unknown Armies; Cartoon Action Hour; Blades in the Dark; No Thank You, Evil!; Pugmire; Retrostar. Also mentioned: Face Value Comics; The Anglican Church’s “Prayer for Reconciliation”.

Scripture: Psalm 16:7-10, Psalm 91:2-6, John 8:2-11, Galatians 6:1-2

Adam Davis and Adam Johns from Wheelhouse Workshop join us to discuss how and why they use Dungeons & Dragons in social skills therapy! Their Seattle-based organization has been doing this for a couple of years now, and they’ve got a lot to say. (We’ve also worked with Adam and Adam previously on some Game to Grow content.) We also tackle a question from Patreon supporter Francisco (of the Retro Rewind Podcast) about replacing our favorite RPGs with board games in a pinch, and Grant briefly describes his trip to Electric City Comic-Con 2017 and his terrible-but-awesome decision to help his daughter get into the Pokémon TCG.

Adam and Adam then discuss Wheelhouse Workshop’s work: Why RPGs in general, and D&D in particular, are useful therapeutic tools; how a game session in their offices differs from your usual tabletop session; their house rules for their games; some success stories and interesting moments; and much more. Also, we mention in passing Monte Cook Games’ The Strange and Microscope, both of which are excellent games.

For more information about Wheelhouse Workshop, visit their website or find them on Twitter and Facebook.

Scripture: Numbers 23:8, Mark 2:15-17, 1 Peter 5:6-10

We’re joined this week by Matthew Surber, who’s both the Program Director at the West River Center in Maryland and a game designer affiliated with Defy Danger Adventures. We actually found Matthew through the most unlikely of sources (Reddit comments, of all things) but he turned out to be a fantastic guest! After addressing Patreon backer Tom’s question about broad and narrow skills in roleplaying games, and a quick diversion from Jenny about the dangers of Canada’s nuclear wildlife, we buckled down with Matthew to discuss applying counseling principles to games. Matthew’s got a Master’s degree in counseling and a Dungeon World game he runs for his other camp counselors; naturally, he had a lot of excellent advice to give about trust, bonds, empathy, and saying ‘yes’ as a GM and player.

Games mentioned this episode: Dungeon World; Beyond The Wall; Pugmire; Honey Heist; The Skeletons; Ten Candles.

Other things mentioned this episode: MegaDumbCast (MDC); Defy Danger Adventures; STG 25 with Jack Berkenstock; The Bodhana Group; Wheelhouse Workshop; and that rad Honey Heist t-shirt.

Matthew can be found on Twitter at @TheRealSurberus.

Scripture: Jonah 2:2, Psalm 119:76, Mark 2:15-17

Grant

First, a quick housekeeping note: I’m doing a monthly “Behind the Mics” blog post over on our Patreon page to give show patrons a look at what’s coming up each month and what we’re working on behind the scenes. The first one is up now. Not every Patreon supporter regularly checks their Patreon feed, so I wanted to make sure I shared that news here as well.

The awesome folks over at Speculative Faith—who publish reviews of and maintain a library of Christian speculative fiction—announced this week that they’re partnering with Splickety to produce Lorehaven, a quarterly webzine of Christian fantasy, sci-fi, and other speculative fiction genres. It sounds pretty great, so if you’re into that (as a reader or writer!) give it a good look. From E. Stephen Burnett’s announcement:

I’m an “evangelist” for Christian-made fantastic fiction. I tell people about these books all the time.

But when I mention them in churches, to other Christians, no one has heard about them.

We need ways to reach out to them, because they do want to read these stories. They just can’t find them. So they go to superhero movies instead, and get their fantastic “fix” in other ways. If they knew of creative, excellent, provocative Christian-made fantastic fiction, many new readers would love these novels.

My gaming article this week isn’t actually an article, but trust me, you’ll spend a lot of time reading it. Turns out Reddit has an Evil Buildings subreddit over at /r/evilbuildings. Need a visual aid for any evil lair, megacorp facility, or creepy tower? You are covered. Seriously, just look at these:

Finally: Where do you draw the line between commercial immersion and LARP? From io9’s Germain Lussier and his article “Walt Disney World Resort in Florida Is Opening a Completely Immersive Star Wars Hotel”:

A few months ago, Disney employees hinted to fans that actions would have consequences in the lands. We didn’t quite know what that meant—but at D23, Imagineers explained a bit more.

For example, you may see Chewbacca around talking to Hondo. They’re up to no good and could be recruiting a group of people to go on a mission. So then you’d go on the Millennium Falcon ride, one of two in the park. Based on how you and your crew does on that ride (the ride will allow each individual person to have their own job aboard the Falcon), you could get some extra republic credits afterward, or maybe a stern talking-to. If you’re really, really bad though, bounty hunters might hunt you throughout the park, like a new one named Harcos.

Peter

There’s a solid article on making custom GM screens over on Gnome Stew that you really should check out. The next time I have a regular in-person gaming group, I’m probably going to take the plunge on one of these.

The things you want to capture from the rulebook are things like charts, tables, lists that contain sequence of events, and handy page number references. Keep in mind that you’re going to have four panels of 8.5 inches by 11 inches to work with. You want to use all of that space to maximum effectiveness, but you don’t want to overload everything into the panels and be forced to use a six-point font to make it all fit.

Gamechurch has an article on Christian themes in the games of E3 that’s worth a look.

Our writers have scoured the press conferences and announcements of E3 to uncover the most spiritual developments in the games industry has to offer in the coming months.

Also, if you are curious about whether we are serious about all of these, the answer is yes, particularly Mario-staches, we don’t joke about that plumbers mustache.

If you’re on a budget and enjoy a good Diablo-style hack & slash action RPG, it’d probably be worth your while to check out Path of Exile if you haven’t already because as you read this, they’re scheduled to add two new acts to their 4-act game. A couple of quick words of warning: while the game is excellent and FREE (except for cosmetic items which I find too expensive to even be tempting) it is pretty gruesome and creepy in terms of both monsters and environments, particularly in the later acts. There are also some very evil characters that talk about doing the will of God. (It’s fairly apparent in the minimal story that exists that they’re all incorrect and most, if not all of them are nuts besides, but I figured I’d mention it.) With those two disclaimers on the record, it’s an extremely deep and polished game that feels very much like Diablo II, but plays fairly differently. All of your skills are either passive (which means they are on the largest passive skill tree you likely have EVER seen) or they’re active, which means you get them as loot.

Jenny

I learned recently about a particular type of retreat/pilgrimage called a walking retreat. This article talks about one in Nova Scotia, where people casually walk together from destination to destination, not constantly following the same routes as one another, but always coming together at the end of the day. I’ve always wanted to take part in these kinds of retreats, but they generally based far away from me. But this is the kind of retreat that I could see myself organizing at some point with some of the churches in my diocese.

“For me, it’s about community and sharing your story,” said MacPherson, pastor of a small United Church congregation in Murray Harbour, P.E.I., who made the late June pilgrimage on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. “I am always struck by how a group of people who are really strangers can come together and form a community so quickly. The caring and concern for one another and the willingness to help one another along the walk, I find that deeply spiritual and meaningful.”

Shut Up & Sit Down did a review of Tales from the Loop, which is one of the six truly excellent game systems I got to play during Fear the Con X this year. While I didn’t really experience the issues SU&SD had with the game, that was probably due to the GM’s experience with running games.

Everyone’s talking about Tales from the Loop, the game of roleplaying young kids in a 1980s that never was. It’s got everything you need to play out your own version of Gremlins, E.T., Stranger Things, or any movie where kids hurriedly pedal their bicycles to save the day (but should probably be home before dinner).

And who wouldn’t want to play a kid? Adolescence is amazing, and I’m not just saying that because I spent months teaching middle school Algebra. All the hormones, and discovery, and bravery, and adventures, and confusion… it’s perfect RPG fodder. The question is whether Tales from the Loop successfully unites ‘80s nostalgia and middle school feels with good science fiction mysteries.

While I have fallen significantly behind, I am a pretty big fan of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. Night Vale is all about the weird and surreal, and about being about as unrealistic as you can get without completely and totally alienating the listener. All that being said… this has got to be the weirdest, most surreal, unrealistic-sounding thing about radio that I have ever heard of in my whole life.  Think of the game setting possibilities!

In the middle of a Russian swampland, not far from the city of St Petersburg, is a rectangular iron gate. Beyond its rusted bars is a collection of radio towers, abandoned buildings and power lines bordered by a dry-stone wall. This sinister location is the focus of a mystery which stretches back to the height of the Cold War.

It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.

Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.

Our Ten Commandments series returns with the Fourth Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” Before we get to that, however, we have a bit of business to go over and a bit of catching up to do. We spend a little time discussing our Patreon support, since we haven’t updated listeners on that in a while. Grant’s learning Korean, and blogged about that a bit; and Jenny needs to issue a correction regarding the Battletech game she described in the previous episode. After all that’s out of the way, though, we tackle a big question from Patreon supporter Richard, who asks us about our favorite RPG characters.

All that taken care of, we dive headfirst into the Fourth Commandment. Why is this in the list of God’s commandments? What does “keep the Sabbath” actually mean, and for whom? And how does this idea of holy, restorative rest apply to our games and our lives?

Mentioned in this episode: Jack McDevitt; J. Ellsworth Kalas’s The Ten Commandments from the Back Side; our Weekend Reading series; and Stardew Valley.

Scripture: Exodus 20:8-11, Nehemiah 13:15-22, Mark 2:23-27, Acts 1:10-12

I have a small admission to make: I’ve been feeling frustrated and dissatisfied lately. Some of this stems from ongoing anxiety issues I’ve got, and some stems from everyday life: Work, family, costs of living, and so forth. Some of it stems from producing a podcast—not that I mind, obviously, but scheduling guests and editing shows eats up time. All that said, though, the source of much of this pervasive dissatisfaction has been very hard to pin down.

A few of you may remember that I tried picking up oil painting last year. I’d been looking for some time for a creative outlet, because I was feeling stifled and frustrated by a lack of creative production (I thought.) That … did not work out. I still love the idea of painting, but with two young children who need lots of attention in my life right now I don’t have the time to teach myself something that uses up expensive supplies whether you paint well or paint poorly. Oil painting was only one attempt, though. I tried writing poetry. I looked very seriously into setting up a pottery studio. I’d previously mentioned learning how to make stained glass, and my wife and I bandied that around a bit. I’d been weighing buying a Wacom tablet to try digital painting (thinking that easy access to an undo button would relieve a lot of the pressure and stress of painting with actual paint.) None of these were feasible, and those that were didn’t really seem to ‘click’ when I tried them. The struggle to find “the right outlet” to dispel this vague sense of creative stagnation, and the broad sense that things should somehow be better, only added to my frustration!

About two weeks ago, though, I had a small epiphany while doing the dishes and talking with my wife Krissi. I realized that I wasn’t looking to learn something creative. I was looking to learn something—to re-engage the love of learning I still identified with, but had let fall dormant over the past few years. I’d originally defined the problem, and thus the set of potential solutions, incorrectly from the moment I started looking at it; and I’d spent over a year frustrated because the solutions weren’t right for the actual problem.

This sort of error is pretty common, to be fair. Introspection is difficult for most of us at the best of times. When we’re unhappy, frustrated, and dissatisfied with our current condition, we’re even less likely to be able to clearly analyze our situation and correctly define the problems facing us. And when we’re dealing with other people—say, in a regular gaming group, or at church and in church groups—our relationships with people in those groups complicate this sort of analysis even further.

My gaming groups have historically been excellent. Aside from my very, very first campaign (which I think was some weird Palladium game with a college gaming club? There’s a half-remembered story for an episode someday…) every group I’ve joined was mostly made up of my good friends—even the avowedly terrible games. I’ve never had to resort to pick-up games with strangers, whether on forums or that ancient, arcane rite of posting a flyer on my FLGS’s bulletin board. And the ties between us as friends have stayed much stronger than the tie to any one specific game or campaign.

That’s not to say I haven’t been frustrated by our group’s games, though. Good GMing is an art form which requires practice, but the same is true of being a good player. Some games were atrociously bad for obvious reasons. Others had subtler weaknesses—a strong concept but weak collective execution, or a mismatch between player goals and GM goals that went unstated and unaddressed. One of the things we stress on Saving the Game is clear, healthy communication between game participants as people at (and away from) the table. If I learned anything from those struggling games (and some went on for several years) it’s just how important that is. Our Fellowship game has been particularly good for this lately, perhaps because the Overlord’s player has never GM’d before and actively asks for help and feedback.

That’s the thing: Right now, there are people playing games they don’t enjoy because they can’t or won’t open up to the other players and tell them that something’s frustrating them. Even some who will do that won’t then ask the group to help pin down what the real problem is. Without support, they’ll misidentify the problem, and either take drastic action which breaks an otherwise fixable game (or group), or create a cycle of frustration as solution after solution fails.

If only this were limited to games.

My wife’s much wiser than I am, of course. That’s why she’s been teaching herself Japanese in her limited spare time these past few months.

Krissi’s been a full-time mom for five years, with one brief stint of employment before Kid #2 came along. We have great kids, and watching children grow up and be awesome is incredibly rewarding, but it’s also sort of a trap. Aside from going to the gym, grocery shopping, and taking the kids to school and such, she rarely gets to leave the house. She gets no time for herself during the day, because everything really does revolve around the kids. Diapers, meal times, naps, constant noise and demands for attention … it’s exhausting. (Don’t think I don’t know what you do for us, dear. You’re fantastic.) Going to the gym is fine physically, but she’s needed to do something for her mind for a while now.

Why Japanese? A few reasons: A love for anime; a long-standing desire to travel to Japan; and deep curiosity about a language far removed from the Romance languages we’re more familiar with, especially her high-school Spanish. Perhaps some other reasons as well. Regardless, she’s buckled down and learned a great deal in a short amount of time. And I can tell you that she’s been much happier with herself. Our five-year-old daughter noticed, too. She asked to learn a language, without any prompting from us other than a conversation we had about language families. (She thought the idea that languages could have families was hilarious when she overheard Krissi and me discussing them.)

After sampling a few languages at a very basic level (thanks to the magic of YouTube), and probably watching one too many episodes of Dora the Explorer, she selected Spanish. She loved it, and has since stuck with it far longer than I ever expected. Her pride in learning something was palpable, and infectious. Our house had suddenly turned multi-lingual, with everyone learning a new language (even the one-year-old.) Except me, because I hadn’t rediscovered that learning is fun yet.

It wasn’t until Krissi asked me, not what creative hobby I might want to try, but what I wanted to learn that everything clicked into place. And then I couldn’t shut up about it.

I’ve never been the sort to bounce from congregation to congregation, looking for “the right church”. I’ve seen plenty of people do so, however. Too many of those give up on going to church altogether. Most can’t explain even to themselves what they’re really hoping to find at “the right church,” and so their reasons for quitting particular churches and moving on often seem trivial. Their excuses typically mask a more difficult-to-explain disquiet: If you can’t clearly and correctly explain what you’re looking for, you’ll almost always end up looking for the wrong thing.

Often, these people are scratching around the edges of deeper questions about God and Christ and His relationship to them that they’re uncomfortable openly scrutinizing. Too many Christians shame those struggling with their faith into covering up their doubts, rather than acknowledging those questions and seeking to help the doubtful find answers and strengthen their faith. “Believe” and “have faith” are twisted into “don’t question” and “say the right things.” The full richness of God is emptied of meaning. Is it any wonder that the hurting and the doubting struggle to find what they really seek, when they cannot?

If we can’t help each other ask questions, can we ever hope to help each other find answers? If we can’t ask the most important questions about God, engaging our intellects and opening up our hearts, can we ever hope to hear or understand His answers?

I started teaching myself Korean the weekend before last—한글, or Hangul.

Why Korean? A few reasons: I knew the script was well-designed, which would make learning easier. I knew nothing else about it, which made me very curious indeed. I watch a lot of professional esports, which Korean players often dominate; and while I don’t want to come across as the worst sort of Korean fanboy (much as Krissi doesn’t want to come across as a weeaboo), the possibility of reading Korean esports news did intrigue me. Perhaps some other reasons as well.

I debated several different languages, bouncing ideas off my wife and weighing my options. The finalists were Korean, Chinese (of some variety), Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. (A fun, if not exactly complimentary, fact about myself: If I’d picked Japanese too, I’d immediately have started competing with Krissi in my head and ruined the joy of learning for its own sake—for both of us.) Perhaps one day I’ll come back to those; they all have their own appeal.

So far, it’s been a delightful process. I can’t say I’ve learned much Korean in a week and a half, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I have learned in that time. I can feel old mental muscles limbering up, stagnant rot washed away by clear water. My wife and I excitedly compare Japanese and Korean grammar (and Android keyboards for our respective languages.) I have something new to look forward to every day—something fulfilling. Something that reminds me of one of the most wondrous passages in all of Scripture, which gives me shivers every time I read it:

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.

 

Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians—we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”

 

—Acts 2:1-12

It seems I needed to be reminded of what that does mean: “I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken; therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced; my flesh also will dwell in hope.” (Acts 2:25-26) Very likely, I’m not alone in that.

So speak up. Ask questions without assumption, and do so together in trust and fellowship. Most of all, be ready to hear hard questions rather than to silence them—and to each other help find answers. The Lord has given us tongues with which to share them.

The image featured in this post is “Pentecost” by Jean Restout II, 1732.

It’s a special bonus episode this week, as Jenny and Peter recap their Fear the Con experiences! Peter also recently wrote about his very emotional slot 6 game, and if you haven’t read that yet, you really should. Special thanks to everyone involved in planning and producing Fear the Con; everyone we gamed with; and everyone who helped with the charity drive for Pat this year!

Also, our apologies for any audio issues in this episode; this was recorded on a single microphone designed for one person, so there was a lot of handing the mic back and forth. (On the other hand, this was recorded on Jenny’s new audio equipment, so look forward to a better sound from her on future episodes!)

Grant, Peter, and Jenny discuss playing characters who are much better—or much worse—at things than you yourself are! This topic was selected by our Patreon backers, whom we’re very grateful for and who bring you this show every other week. First, though, we spend some time discussing Fear the Con X (which was last weekend, and which Peter and Jenny will run down next episode.) We also briefly discuss Overwatch and Dead Cells. We answer a question about wargaming from Patreon backer Kevin, and then get down to business—which includes a lengthy rant from Grant, and a surprising amount of bickering!

Mentioned in this episode: Dexter Manley; the Campaign podcast.

Scripture:Exodus 4:10, Isaiah 53:1-3, 1 Corinthians 9:22

Psychology researcher, professor, and LARPer Dr. Sarah Lynne Bowman joins us for a fascinating discussion of LARP and the psychology of play and roleplaying! Sarah had an enormous amount of information to pass along to us about different styles of live-action roleplay, terminology and concepts in LARP and in the psychology of play, the seeming dichotomy between tabletop and live-action play, and so much more. It’s a bit less organized than many of our episodes, simply because we let Sarah take charge of much of the conversation, but we definitely think it turned out better for that! (And check below for a long list of links Sarah provided for us.)

We also answer a question from Patreon supporter Paige, who wanted to know how much time we spend each week on tabletop gaming; briefly discuss Overwatch; and mention Bottlequest, a Golden Cobra two-page LARP game we used in our recent Fellowship game as a one-shot bottle episode mechanic. Plus, a bit more information about fake beards and Fear the Con X!

For more information about Sarah, check out her website and her book, The Function of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. You can also check out the Game to Grow episode we hosted, where Sarah was a guest; she’s been on and hosted a few other episodes as well.

Things mentioned in this episode, or passed on after recording by Sarah:

• Living Games Conference
• Nordic Conference (Knutepunkt)
• The Hirelings, a one-shot LARP
• Larps From The Factory
• “Papers” (a Nordic LARP)
• “Immersion into LARP: Theories of Embodied Narrative Experience” – an article by Dr. Bowman
• Shut Up & Sit Down’s painfully intense review of Dog Eat Dog
• Dystopia Rising (LARP community)
• LARPs: Legion: Siberian Story. Conscience; Magischola; Enlightenment in Blood (Vampire); End of the Line; Just a Little Lovin’; Kapo;
• TED Talk: The Power of Vulnerability
• The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA)

Special thanks to Peter for editing this one while Grant was on vacation—especially given how long the episode went!

Scripture: 1 Samuel 16:7, Proverbs 16:3, Luke 12:2

Jenny

This week has been a little stressful for me due to some family obligations, but this little joke article from The Daily Bonnet gave me a bit of a chuckle.

Reverend Jim, eager to increase his baptism numbers for the year, baptized more than five hundred people without their knowledge, during a church event at the local waterpark.

“They zipped pass me and I prayed,” explained Jim. “I was able to do about four or five a minute.”

Similarly, this webcomic, Elf & Warrior, definitely seems right up my alley. I’m really looking forward to catching up on it.

Elf & Warrior follows the adventures of a young, optimistic Elf named Basri and his Uncle Hector, a reformed (sort of) criminal in a unique fantasy setting full of strange monsters and magic.

And finally, I have been very much into crafty things recently. Specifically, crafty things to do with woodworking and resin. I’ve found a YouTube channel where this guy named Peter Brown makes cool things, generally resin, and then does lathe work. I find it all super relaxing to watch, and I think this video where he makes a “Secret Wood Bowl” is one of my favourites.

Grant

I’ve been in and out this week, so some of this is catching up on backlog. Still interesting, though!

First, this really interesting article from Christ & Pop Culture: “How Seventh-Day Adventists Convinced You to Eat Breakfast Cereal” by Luke Harrington. It’s about millennials; and cold, unappetizing, not-at-all nutritious breakfast cereals; and the brothers Kellogg.

Most of their efforts, however, were devoted to finding new ways to cram bland grains into people’s various orifices—highly dubious “health food” was a burgeoning industry, and they were determined to ride that gravyless train all the way to the bank. One of their early ideas was to bake giant chunks of whole wheat so rock-hard that you had to soak them in milk overnight to avoid breaking your teeth, which they called “Granula.” This proved to be a problem, though—not the tooth-breaking thing (obviously), but the name, which had already been trademarked by a different crazy fundamentalist running a different highly dubious sanitarium. To avoid a lawsuit, they changed one letter and called it “Granola.”

I’ve run Shanna Germain’s excellent No Thank You, Evil! for my four-year-old daughter and her friends a couple of times now, and she’s really taken to it wonderfully. A new expansion, Uh-Oh, Monsters!, is in preorder right now, and ‘Senda’ over at Gnome Stew reviewed it very positively.

Uh Oh! Monsters! is essentially the Storia version of a monster manual, but this book reads as the adorable monster museum run by Bill Zubbub and his dragon friend. Don’t pet the critters without asking first! There’s also the museum gift shop, filled with cool monster related magical items (the Froggle Goggles are my favorite).

Each monster comes with the appropriate No Thank You, Evil! stats and information as you would expect from a book of monsters: Health, Damage, Skills, Quirk, and Stuff. It’s well laid out and quick to sift through, making it a perfect GMing companion even if that GM is your ten year old.

Finally, another fascinating article from Hyperallergic, this time about Gus Wagner. “The Swashbuckling Origins of One of America’s Greatest Tattooers” describes an exhibit on the man at the South Street Seaport Museum, displaying items related to the life and work of a man who popularized and greatly refined the art in the early 1900s. The article isn’t completely positive about the exhibition itself, but there’s plenty here (and in the linked galleries) for people looking for characters and concepts for any turn-of-the-century game.

Seeing for himself the way that cultures around the globe approached tattooing by hand affected the way that Wagner’s own tattooing style developed, and he eventually brought back this knowledge to the US. As curator Martina Caruso said to me, “He learned hand tattooing from natives and artists in Borneo, Java, Australia, Japan, and Europe.”

Upon his reentry into the US, Wagner was eager to show off what he had learned, and set up shop as a tattooer. During this time Wagner also worked as a professional tattooed man within the circus and sideshow circuit referring to himself as “the most artistically marked up man in America.” Wagner was indeed heavily tattooed himself, and is reported in the exhibition materials to have had “264 tattoos by 1901 and over 800 by 1908.” The number of his tattoos only added to his legitimacy as a professional tattoo artist.

Peter

GameChurch has an really solid piece on the cycle of violence in games, particularly Ghost Recon: Wildlands. It makes a nice companion piece to our episode on the Myth of Redemptive Violence with Derek White.

“For Wildlands’ Ghosts, the cartel members die, but the threat is never gone.”

I wandered off my beaten media paths this week and found an interesting article on shaking up the traditional adventuring party model in D&D.

Simply put, D&D characters all fall into a single über-archetype that spreads over all the various combinations of class and race that you can come up with. They are (in the tradition of Cypher‘s character sentences) eclectic mercenaries who search for adventure. This is an awesome basis for games and it extends beyond D&D (unsurprisingly) to a diverse span of games including Numenera, Shadows of Esteren, 7th Sea, and Degenesis but it doesn’t have to be that way every time. In this post, I’m going to discuss each of these elements in turn to give you examples of how you can turn this assumption on its head without changing a thing about the settings or systems you and your players love.

Finally, hot on the heels of a Patreon backer question about the Psalms is more goodness from Richard Beck’s Experimental Theology blog, specifically about an adversary figure in the Psalms.

You can’t read the Psalms without reading about the enemy over and over. Enemies taunt, kill, jeer, rob, betray and oppress all through the Psalms.

Grant

Since we talked about U2 with Rev. Derek White in this week’s episode (and you really should listen to that if you haven’t yet!), it’s convenient that U2 went on Jimmy Kimmel Live just recently and performed “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. The writer for Relevant Magazine seems surprised to describe this rendition as “worshipful” and “new”, which really only suggests they haven’t listened to 1986’s Rattle and Hum album. But that’s secondary to a delightful performance featuring the Selah Gospel Choir.

It’s not strictly roleplaying-related, but this is an interesting indication of how well Roll20 is doing and how no segment of the larger gaming world is completely independent of the others. Roll20 is sponsoring Team 8, an esports team, and their Heroes of the Storm pro team will compete as “Roll20 Esports”. From Roll20’s blog post on the investment:

It’s a mildly unorthodox thing for a company like Roll20 to up and jump into esports, but there’s a lot about it that just made sense. We don’t do much advertising (‘cause you all do such a fantastic job of telling your friends about us!) and we feel like the friendly Heroes community might occasionally enjoy taking a break from winning and losing to make more friends on Roll20 in the same way we’ve enjoyed exorcising our competitive Diablo’s in “HotS.”

Finally, an article that’s both useful as gaming material and is a timely, real warning about modern cults and information. “The Knife of Aristotle Isn’t Just a Fake ‘Fake News’ Site—It’s A Cult“, by Brock Wilbur, investigates a cult that recruits by rebranding and diversifying so rapidly that it becomes difficult to track:

Rebranding NXIVM as a news outlet makes sense, but also seemed overly specific. But checking in with the cult’s dedicated watchdog shows that they have diversified into a number of specific audiences. The Source is designed to involve actors with this program, Exo/Eso is built around yoga, JNESS is a support group for women, and Society of Protectors is an analogous group of men defending the honor of men. God, they’re just terrible at names. It feels like they were always in a rush to get a new company out the door.

And that’s the cracked code. A cult knows that it can’t keep being a cult under the same name anymore, so it is quickly becoming too many different organizations to track, all built around getting people to spend a month in Albany. And maybe it doesn’t take a full-on detective to know that you shouldn’t keep considering any job where your boss can’t answer your questions about the job.

Peter

If you’ve been on the internet for the last week or two, you’ve probably seen some of the controversy over the upcoming Far Cry 5. John Walker, the resident Christian (or as he refers to himself, God botherer) over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun brings some sanity to the discussion.

Far Cry is, I think history has rather firmly established, not the place for Swiftian satirical interrogation of modern cultural mores. I would venture that Far Cry has proven itself disastrous at such attempts, and the idea that this fifth installment should suddenly be the game to strike a killing blow against freedom-loving patriotic Americans, or indeed be the mouthpiece that finally sees the alt-right’s rise collapse like a souffle on a landmine, is perhaps a touch optimistic. It’s much more likely going to be a goofy string of far-too-long cutscenes, each of which interrupts the opportunities to have lots of fun.

I’ll make you a deal: I’ll stop linking to Richard Beck in these posts just as soon as he stops being amazing. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting on that day to come. The latest bit of interesting food-for-thought is a couple of posts from Experimental Theology where he references the work of another leading Christian thinker, N.T. Wright. See if this whets your appetite:

In yesterday’s post I pointed how N.T. Wright in his book The Day the Revolution Began makes the argument that the gospels do present us with an atonement theology.

Finally, in the “that’s just cool” category (specifically in the “technological marvels” subcategory) there’s this amazing floating solar panel array that just went into operation in China.

China has announced that the largest floating photovoltaic (PV) facility on earth has finally been completed and connected to the local power grid.

Jenny

I was recently introduced to a piece of fiction titled Unsong by Scott Alexander. It’s about a world in which capitalism has gotten its hands on the mass production of Names of God, and a kabbalist who kind of stumbles his way into a bit of a revolution. I will warn you: later on in the book, the main character gets into some pretty serious stuff, and if reading about antisemitic political figures bothers you in a big way, you may not want to read the whole thing. And I haven’t actually finished reading it yet. It took me a little bit to get into Unsong, but this is the passage that really cemented my liking for this work:

HELLO PRESIDENT NIXON. THIS IS THE ARCHANGEL URIEL. I APOLOGIZE FOR RECENT DISRUPTIONS. THE MACHINERY OF THE UNIVERSE HAS BEEN SEVERELY DAMAGED. I AM WORKING TO CONTAIN THE EFFECTS, BUT AT THIS POINT MY POWER IS LIMITED BECAUSE I AM STILL MOSTLY METAPHORICAL. PLEASE INFORM EVERYONE THAT I REGRET THE INCONVENIENCE. AS COMPENSATION FOR YOUR TROUBLE, I HAVE GIVEN EVERY HUMAN THE ABILITY TO PLAY THE PIANO.

I like cheese. Not all cheese. But this cheese from Norway… I know I would hate it. I would not enjoy putting it into my mouth and consuming it. There is nothing that indicates that I would want to partake in any aspect of this cheese or its making. And yet… I want to try it. Just to say that I did. I think it would be an amazing life achievement.

In a small town on the Sognefjord, expert cheesemakers are continuing a tradition that’s believed to date back more than a thousand years. The village of Vik, population 3,100, is home to the world’s only dairy producing Gamalost – literally “old cheese.”

And finally, another board game that I want to add to my slowly growing collection. Ex Libris from Renegade Game Studios is about becoming the best, most accomplished librarian. I am very excited for this game to come out.

In Ex Libris, you are a collector of rare and valuable books in a thriving fantasy town. The Mayor has just announced a new seat in the Village Council, Grand Librarian. The prestigious and lucrative position will be awarded to the citizen with the most extraordinary library! Unfortunately, several of your book collector colleagues (more like acquaintances, really) are also candidates.

The Rev. Derek White, longtime friend of the show and known to the Internet as “The Geekpreacher”, joins us once again to discuss spiritual warfare! After introducing Derek (and letting him plug GaryCon), we turn our attention to some important information about fake beards and Fear the Con. Peter and Jenny will be wearing fake beards (ridiculous, nonsensical fake beards, to be clear) to Fear the Con in support of Pat Roper (one of Fear the Boot’s hosts) and his ongoing treatment for Stage 3 pancreatic cancer. We also pass on the news of a listener’s new game, the KARMA RPG System, funding on IndieGoGo.

With that taken care of, we address a question from Patreon supporter Francisco (of the Retro Rewind Podcast) about our favorite psalms, and any we might have memorized. (Turns out at least half of us really like Psalm 40, either live in concert or from the original album.) Then we settle in on our main topic: Spiritual warfare, in its various forms and interpretations among Christian traditions as well as in our roleplaying games. Derek and Peter both draw heavily from the book Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and Devils for the Disenchanted by Richard Beck for this discussion; likewise, Grant pulls from the PCUSA’s “What We Believe” series, specifically this article on the problem of evil.

Also mentioned in this episode: Gustav Davidson’s A Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels; Mayfair’s Role Aids line of RPG supplements; and Daniel Solis‘s Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.

Scripture:Genesis 3:13-15, 2 Kings 6:15-17, Luke 8:26-31, Ephesians 6:10-13.

Jenny

Apparently, pilgrims were also graffiti artists. St. Peter’s Church in Sudbury, England found a medieval carving of a peacock beside the organ.

Most people would be aghast to discover graffiti on the walls of a historic property. But when there’s a chance it could have been created hundreds of years ago by medieval pilgrims, it takes on a very different meaning.

On a bit of a more serious note, Requiem for a DM by Owen S. Good on Polygon talks about his memories of his high school DM in the years before that DM died of suicide. It definitely brought back a few memories for me, and I’ll admit to shedding a few tears reading it.

…we rarely slept even if we called it a sleepover. “All Night D&D-athon” is how Monty usually termed these get-togethers, with Mack and Seppi and Eric, which usually ended in Eric, who had named a dark elf for a G.I. Joe character or some stupid thing, losing his boots of speed or a sword of flames +2 versus undead. Monty, our dungeon master, would chop you down if you got too impressed with your character. He once put a curse on me in which I could only carry copper pieces. And we played with encumbrance rules.

For my bit of silliness for the week, CBC Comedy wrote a fun little piece about this podcasting thing that we here at Saving the Game love so very much.

In a press release issued earlier today, podcast hosts across the country officially expressed their belief that, “Anyway, um, that should… about do it for this week I think.”

Peter

Jason D. Wood, also known as The Mad Cleric (who we had on back in Episode 63) has a great article about being a responsible gamer up on his blog.

Regardless of which stereotype fits you most closely, I think we can be a part of creating a new stereotype: that of the responsible gamer.  You know, the person who is deeply engaged with the people around them–who does good, creative, life-affirming work–who lives with purpose and vivacity–and also really loves games.  That’s who I want to be.  But is that possible?

Very much in the wheelhouse of most of our listeners is this fantastic article about building empathy through story.

When I, a man, read the memoir of a woman, my brain begins to live her story and understand it in a way I can’t reach any other way. When I, a white person, read a story with a protagonist of color, my consciousness expands to understand marginalized perspectives in a manner unavailable to my rational mind.

Story is the ultimate conveyor of empathy and solidarity.

And finally, this is just too cute: the first annual comedy wildlife photography awards!

These days there are countless annual photography competitions throughout the year and one of the most recent to join that long list is arguably the best yet, the ‘Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

Grant

It’s the 50th anniversary, sort of, of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. No, really. Twitch.tv is streaming all of it (ALL of it!) as a fundraiser for PBS stations, and naturally lots of people are talking about Fred Rogers and what he meant to the generations who knew him. You might have seen this Twitter thread and Entertainment Weekly article by Anthony Breznican in passing—”Remembering Mr. Rogers, a true-life ‘helper’ when the world still needs one“. It’s a warm, poignant story about real, immediate ministry, from a man many of us consider a modern-day saint.

Then he opened the student union door and said goodbye. That’s when I blurted in a kind of rambling gush that I’d stumbled on the show again recently, at a time when I truly needed it. He listened there in the doorway, the bitter Pittsburgh winter wind flowing around him into the warm lobby bustling with students.

When I ran out of words, I just said, “So … thanks for that. Again.”

Mr. Rogers nodded. He looked down, and let the door close again. He undid his scarf and motioned to the window, where he sat down on the ledge.

 This is what set Mr. Rogers apart. No one else would’ve done this. No one.

He said, “Do you want to tell me what was upsetting you so?”

In the above article, Anthony Breznican mentions in passing a 2016 Christ & Pop Culture article as well, which is equally worth your time: “Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Reconciliation and Foot-Washing in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood“.

But here in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, only five years later, a quiet Presbyterian minister and an African-American police officer show the world how to integrate swimming pools. Rogers invites; Clemmons accepts. As Clemmons slips his feet into the pool, the camera holds the shot for several seconds, as if to make the point clear: a pair of brown feet and a pair of white feet can share a swimming pool. Nearly 25 years later Rogers and Clemmons reenacted this moment. A much older Rogers and Clemmons sit with their feet in a similar blue wading pool talking about the many different ways that children and adults say “I Love You”–from singing to cleaning up a room to drawing special pictures to making plays. As the scene ends, Rogers takes a towel and helps Clemmons dry his feet with a simple, “Here, let me help you.”

Over at Gnome Stew, Troy E. Taylor offers up a really interesting idea—one especially relevant to the sort of gaming we talk about on STG—in his article “Setting That Moral Compass“. He suggests using the first adventure of a new campaign to calibrate the characters’ “moral compass”, testing declared alignments and philosophies against how they really act.

Of course, for the DM, it is far more informative if a character’s outlook is revealed during the course of play. Do you have a rogue with a heart of gold? Is that cleric far more selfish than he lets on? Will the sower of chaos be the first to demand a fair trial?

The party’s first wilderness journey can be a great time to put the player’s declarations to the test. Instead of rolling on the random chart to decide whether it will be kobolds or bugbears that torment the characters on the road, devise some encounters that feature moral conundrums. Then sit back, watch and take note on what transpires.

These need not be time-consuming or even taxing, in terms of combat. But they can be revealing about elements of their character’s character.

Finally, if you’re looking for a great encounter site for your game, you could do worse than this completely forgotten and abandoned Tennessee town, swallowed up over the course of a hundred years by the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. Southern horror? Pulpy exploration? Who knows!

What we’d actually discovered was the Elkmont Historic District, an abandoned town that’s just outside of the still-active Elkmont Campground. It’s the perfect place to pitch a tent and go for a midnight flashlight adventure.

Grant

It’s been making the rounds, but if you haven’t read the late Alex Tizon’s tremendously powerful article “My Family’s Slave” in The Atlantic, take the time to do so. It’s as powerful as everyone says.

NPR‘s Nina Martyris wrote an excellent article last month: “‘Paradise Lost’: How The Apple Became The Forbidden Fruit“. It’s perhaps more about language and puns and the changing meaning of words than Genesis 3, but still an enlightening read.

“Jerome had several options,” says Appelbaum, a professor of English literature at Sweden’s Uppsala University. “But he hit upon the idea of translating peri as malus, which in Latin has two very different meanings. As an adjective, malus means bad or evil. As a noun it seems to mean an apple, in our own sense of the word, coming from the very common tree now known officially as the Malus pumila. So Jerome came up with a very good pun.”

Cecilia D’Anastasio had a very interesting article in Kotaku last December: “Dungeons & Dragons’ Gradual Shift Away From Monster Boobs“. It’s very mildly NSFW—after all, it does show a few images from various editions’ Monster Manuals—but it’s an interesting study of inclusiveness & respectfulness, and features plenty of commentary from D&D Lead Designer Mike Mearls.

By the 4th edition of D&D, the nymph is absent from the Monster Manual. By 5th, it’s clear that she’s gone for good. In an e-mail, Mearls said that nymphs were simply unpopular monsters among Dungeon Masters. 5th edition was designed after crowdsourced playtesting, and over 175,000 responses from early testers confirmed that gamers prefer elder brains and beholders, apparently, to monster boobs.

“When we considered the audience, we tried to think of how men and women would react, and make sure the reaction we elicited was in keeping with the monster’s character and the design intent,” Mearls said.

Finally: Want an article about the perfect, unobtainable macguffin? This fascinating 2015 New York Times article on “red mercury” by C. J. Chivers is your bag: “The Doomsday Scam“. (Subtitle: “For decades, aspiring bomb makers — including ISIS — have desperately tried to get their hands on a lethal substance called red mercury. There’s a reason that they never have.”)

As declining security fueled worries of illicit trafficking, red mercury embedded itself in the lexicon of the freewheeling black-market arms bazaar. Aided by credulous news reports, it became an arms trafficker’s marvelous elixir, a substance that could do almost anything a shady client might need: guide missiles, shield objects from radar, equip a rogue underdog state or terrorist group with weapons rivaling those of a superpower. It was priced accordingly, at hundreds of thousands of dollars a kilogram. With time, the asking price would soar.

Jenny

A recent devotional on Our Daily Bread, Clothed by God by Amy Boucher Pye, ties in quite well to our most recent episode.

In a vision given to Zechariah, we see Joshua, a high priest, covered in rags that represent sin and wrongdoing (Zech. 3:3). But the Lord makes him clean, removing his filthy clothes and covering him in rich garments (3:5). The new turban and robe signify that the Lord has taken his sins from him.

I am hardly known for my love of Star Wars. I recognize that the movies are important, but I’m a Trekkie at heart. However I have enjoyed playing the Fantasy Flight RPG, Star Wars: Age of Rebellion, in the past. In fact, I’m actually looking more into an upcoming sourcebook for it called Fully Operational, which details more types of engineering classes. I really like the looks of the most recent preview, Go Boom!

The battlefields of the galaxy are no place for the weak-willed. Warriors of countless species charge into war against the Empire oftentimes armed with with little more than a blaster, a grenade, and a stone-carved resolve. Fully Operational, the Engineer’s sourcebook for your games of Star Wars: Age of Rebellion, provides players and gamemasters with a trove of information about Engineers, those brave Rebels who provide an additional level of support for the cause with their technical skills and talents.

And finally, for your weekly dose of cuteness, here’s a Tumblr post about a kitten saved by a member of the Canadian armed forces.

Peter

Game Church has an interesting article about morality, humility, and selflessness in the new game Prey that just came out.

After the game’s events, there’s an addendum where all of your choices and decisions are addressed. I never got a back-pat for cleaning up people’s garbage (not that I honestly expected that), but as the game judged me for how I cared for the living, I realized (even though I served these people empathetically) I was really only in it for the rewards and the sense of gratification that it brought me.

Richard Beck provides a very interesting bit of food for thought on the Problem of Evil in Thursday’s blog post.

Imagine the Bible gave us the theodicy we all want, The Explanation we’ve all been asking for.

Then imagine how The Explanation would be used.

And finally, take a look at this very cool Hot Wheels race video that’s been circulating. Someone clearly put a lot of work into this, and it’s amazing how exciting and humorous they made a bunch of toy cars racing!

We continue our discussion with Krissi Woodward about clothing and visual character descriptions! We pick back up with discussions of cultural and vocational costume, and move on to the effects of technology on what people wear and look like. We then spend a fair bit of time on modesty (and fair warning: While we don’t get obscene, this section does get fairly frank about the human body, so if you’re particularly sensitive keep that in mind.) Then after a few more notes (and mention of the Aghori, who are absolutely fascinating; Poche Posh and Soviet denim smugglers; and underground Korean tattoos), we quickly mention other aspects of appearance. We then spend some time on what clothing can and should mean for Christians, and how God sees past what we wear into our very hearts. Finally, we wrap up with some useful and recommended tools and means for getting artwork or minis done for your character!

Tools and sites mentioned: Heromachine; Hero Forge; DeviantArt; ArtStation; Emergency Commissions on Tumblr; and the /r/ArmoredWomen, /r/ReasonableFantasy, and /r/ImaginaryCharacters subreddits.

Scripture: Genesis 3:6-7, Exodus 28:15-21, Isaiah 53:2, James 2:1-4

Jenny

There’s been a lot of talk in recent weeks about the benefits of gaming in relation to mental health. But something I’ve struggled with on occasion is how my spirituality and religion interact with my mental health. Jordan Holmes, a Christian psychotherapist, wrote this article on some common (and possibly dangerous) misconceptions surrounding the Christian view towards counselling.

I recently came across a message by a very well-known pastor who preached on why Christians should never see a counselor. The pastor shall remain nameless as I believe he is well intentioned; his message conveys genuine care and concern for his flock. However, as well intentioned as he may be, he is wrong; surprisingly, shamefully, wrong.

Some revised D&D 5E subclasses have done what I’d thought to be impossible: they actually got me actively excited about potentially going off-official book when making a character. That never happens! I’m particularly interested in messing around with the College of Swords route for bards.

Today Unearthed Arcana returns to being monthly, appearing on the first or second Monday of a month. To kick things off, we look back at five of the subclasses from the recent series: the barbarian’s Path of the Ancestral Guardian, the bard’s College of Swords, the fighter’s Arcane Archer, the monk’s Way of the Kensei, and the sorcerer’s Favored Soul.

People Who Read Books Are Nicer. There. You’ve seen it on the internet, so it must be true!

Jokes aside, this short article by Sarah J. Young talks about a recent study from Kingston University in London that found that reading books is connected with greater empathy and social conduct.

After being quizzed on their preferences for books, TV and plays, 123 participants were tested on interpersonal skills including how much they considered other people’s feelings and whether they acted to help others. The study, conducted by Kingston University in London, found that readers were more likely to act in a socially acceptable manner compared to those who preferred watching television.

Peter

I’ve been looking for a low-stress, easy-to-follow plan for getting into better shape and it looks like this old program from the Canadian Air Force that I found via a LifeHacker article earlier this week is going to do the trick. From the comments to the article:

“I started using this program in 1965 while I was in the Navy. It is so effective and simple. It works because it is easy to develop the habit of doing the exercises daily. It never exhausts you. Fitness just sort of creeps up on you.”

I almost want to parcel this out over several of these posts about individual episodes, and I still might, but for now, I’m just going to be generous and share the whole thing – specifically the Newsworthy with Norsworthy podcast. Luke Norsworthy has a fascinating show where he talks to all kinds of folks about various topics in Christian theology and spirituality. I discovered the podcast through a link on Richard Beck’s page, but I’ve since listened to several more, and have really enjoyed them. I have no idea how Norsworthy finds the time and energy to do the podcast and still be a pastor, but I’m glad he does.

Luke and his wife Lindsay along with their three daughters live in Austin, TX where Luke is the senior minister of the Westover Hills Church. Luke also hosts the Newsworthy with Norsworthy Podcast,  a weekly podcast discussing Spirituality, Christianity, and anything else that seems news worthy.

For those of you who are into video games as well as tabletop ones (which I’d guess is probably most of the folks reading this) The Humble Store is running its annual Spring Sale. Lots of good deals to be found on various video games, including This War of Mine, Spec Ops: The Line, and Stardew Valley, all of which are excellent games to not only play, but think about. It’s also worth noting that the Humble Store donates part of the proceeds from your purchase to charity every time you buy from them, and while the default, Charity: Water (their blurb is below) is a fine charity, there is a dizzying array of other charitable organizations to choose from.

Right now, 663 million people don’t have access to clean water. That’s 1 in 11 of us. charity: water is a non-profit organization on a mission to bring clean and safe drinking water to every person on the planet. 100% of all public donations directly fund water project costs, we prove every project we build using photos and GPS coordinates on Google Maps, and we work with strong local implementing partners to build and maintain projects.

And finally, one last thing, just for fun:

Grant

First up, an article from Relevant Magazine that hit very close to home for me: “Death, Heartbreak & Hope“. It’s the story of Levi Lusko—a church planter and rising pastoral star with a growing network of church campuses—and how he lost his daughter. (Longtime listeners may remember that we nearly lost our daughter soon after she was born to heart issues.) It was a tough read, but worthwhile, and I think it points at something very important we need to remember when facing grief and death.

“The Bible talks about the peace that surpasses understanding and I really believe God gives you peace like that, but He doesn’t give it to you before you need it,” he says. “He gives you only what you need to get through what you’re going through in the moment.”

Living in the face of devastating loss isn’t about blind optimism or avoiding pain and grief. For Lusko, it’s about facing life—including potential loss—head-on, trusting God to provide both in seasons of gift wrap and funeral plans.

Also in the “Christian Reading” category: Rev. M. J. Young, Chaplain of the Christian Gamers Guild, has been doing a very detailed Bible study for a while now, working through much of the New Testament. He’s just starting on Revelation. The backlog can be found through the mailing list archives (a Yahoo Groups discussion group) and if you want to sign up for the Revelation study, now’s the time!

Next, a simple article from the fine folks over at Gnome Stew: “Fantasy Crops For Your Game“. The premise is fairly straightforward, but it’s a useful reminder that when we’re putting together alternate universes for our games, those little details add richness and plausibility to a setting. Plus—as seen in some of these example crops—they may be more than palette-swapped foodstuffs!

Something that rarely comes up in fantasy games, though characters often travel through farming villages, is agriculture. Yes, sometimes there’s a fight in a field, or a possessed scarecrow, or orc raiders are burning the fields or slaughtering cattle, but medieval fantasy peasants grow the same crops that we do in the modern world. Which is odd when you think about it. Because yes, mad wizards are more likely to make owlbears and oubliettes than magical corn, but farm boys become apprentices sometimes and then there are times that magic just happens: Stray magic warps things or a wish ends up weird.

Finally, a really fascinating pair of articles about cartographic propaganda from Hyperallergic: “Maps Made to Influence and Deceive” and a follow-up article, “The Octopus, A Motif of Evil in Historical Propaganda Maps“. Aside from being excellent reading material in their own right, there are a few things to think about here when designing your own maps for campaigns. This is especially true if the map is supposed to be an in-game artifact. Who drafted the map, and were they trying to influence people when they made it?

Social movements like temperance and women’s suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries utilized maps to compel the public. An 1889 map by William T. Hornaday illustrated the extermination of the American bison and helped with his advocacy for their survival. W. T. Stead’s 1894 map of vice in Chicago packs the grid of the 19th Precinct with brothels, pawn brokers, saloons, and lodging houses, the induced anxiety similar to the use of color on an 1895 map of Manhattan with “concrete socialism” in bright red and private enterprises in white. Others are vividly reactionary, like a satirical 1894 “The American Pope” anti-Catholic cartoon where the shadow of a cardinal is cast over the country and its public schools.

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Krissi Woodward—Grant’s wife and costume designer—joins us once again to discuss visual character descriptions in our game, and especially clothing! We have a couple of announcements related to our Weekend Reading series and our Patreon question rewards. Then we tackle a question from Patreon backer gfactor, who asks about electronic apps or devices which might enhance the tabletop play experience.

With that handled, we begin breaking down the importance of describing character appearances in our games. Grant leads off with a potentially controversial statement about character portraits and minis, which leads us into why players are often hesitant to delve into this at all. Then we go deep into the rabbit hole with Krissi, talking about clothing (and other elements of our appearance) in a conversation that went so long, we had to split it into two parts!

Mentioned in this half of the episode: Inkarnate and Worldpainter.

Scripture: Genesis 3:6-7, Exodus 28:15-21, Isaiah 53:2, James 2:1-4

Grant

Oddly enough, all of my suggestions this week deal with the written word in one way or another.

From Zachary Totah over at Speculative Faith, an article on discernment in reading: “To Read or Not to Read: How Should Christians View Religious and Secular Fiction?”

The problem has plagued Christian readers for decades. Should we read Christian or secular fiction? Or both? The debate has lasted a long time, and I doubt it will disappear before they remake Lord of the Rings (you know it’s going to happen eventually).

I think we’re missing the point entirely. The question shouldn’t be “What do we read?” but “How do we read it?”

From Lori Caskey-Sigtey via Gnome Stew: “Why You Should Donate To A Library Or Community Gaming Program“. As a bibliophile and friend of several librarians, this is particularly close to my heart!

Helping these kinds of programs out helps people find gaming. For the kid who uses the library because they aren’t the most social or who needs a place to go after school that isn’t their home (I’m definitely referencing myself here, the local library was my safe away space when I was young.), this is another venue for them to discover Tabletop Role Playing Games, and kids who discover it in this way are the ones most likely to get the benefit out of the program by being able to socialize with people who are as nerdy as they are.

From Merriam-Webster’s Words at Play blog: “What does ‘otaku‘ mean in Japanese?” A look at a new, fairly specialized term with evolving meanings in different contexts. Especially relevant since the word’s come into use among the English-speaking geek community.

Some feel that ‘otaku’ carries the sense of “reclusive and potentially dangerous,” while others think it could mean “mostly harmless and quirky.” In truth, the word’s meaning has shifted multiple times in recent memory.

Peter

As a compliment to my recommendation of Reviving Old Scratch by Richard Beck, this is the first of a batch of complimentary/supplemental posts from his blog. Beck is always worth reading, but this batch of stuff feels particularly useful for the Christian gamer.

In the Old Testament “dragons” aren’t associated with Satan. In the Old Testament the cosmic foundations of creation are described as great sea monsters–dragons–rather than as the principalities and powers. Sea monsters in the Old Testament and the principalities and powers in the New Testament are related concepts, representing creation’s deep, structural resistance to the reign of God. When Satan is described as “the Dragon” a bridge is built between God’s battles with sea monsters in the Old Testament and God’s battles with the Powers in the New.

Gnome Stew, in addition to the article Grant referenced, has a great article on what to do if YOU are the problem player at the table.

Going into the game I was determined not to be a back-seat GM. My success there was minimal. I wanted to be a resource, but I found myself speaking up with rules and precepts far more than I should have for someone who wasn’t running the game.

Wired has a fascinating article on how much (or how little) anthropomorphism is desirable when making robot assistants.

Others, like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, have no form. They come baked into simple speakers and desktop appliances. It seems most robot helpers take one of these two shapes: humanoid or monolithic.

Jenny

An article by Benjamin L. Corey called Loving Yourself: The Biblical Command We Tend to Forget. I know this is one that I’ve struggled with, particularly by focusing on the first part of the command. He also wrote a follow-up piece on the subject.

I believe that Christianity is a religion about love– most notably, loving God and loving our neighbors. However, I think we’re too quick to forget to extend the same to someone else the Bible calls us to love: ourselves.

Geek & Sundry has been doing a series this month on gaming stores as a lead-up to International Tabletop Day. One of the most recent articles posted, How a Single Mom Became a Champion for a Family Friendly Gaming Community by Teri Litorco, illustrates for me a picture of one of the most universally accessible game stores I’ve ever heard of. The game store in question is Break from Reality Games in Johnstown, Colorado.

“When we would go play at our local game store we didn’t really feel welcome and felt like we were bothering them with our family size…4 boys at this point. I played in a couple of tournaments where my opponent would be cussing up a storm with my sons sitting mere feet away. The bathrooms were grungy and I couldn’t let my baby crawl around. Eventually, I just started sending my sons and husband and I’d stay at home.”

It was in facing these challenges that the idea of creating a game store and community she and her family, and those like her, came to be.

And for today’s miscellany, a water wheel named Mr. Trash Wheel removes trash from Baltimore river.

Mr.Trash has been in use since 2014, removing over 1 million lbs of rubbish from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Some of that rubbish includes 8.9 million cigarette butts and half a million polystyrene containers.

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Grant

“The Crumbling Chicken Church in Java“. A meditation by Luke Harrington over at Christ & Pop Culture on a peculiar Javanese landmark, 2 Kings 4, and what happens when God’s calling crumbles under earthly pressures.

He didn’t have the money at the time, so he continued to pray, and by 1994 he had scraped together the funds to buy the land and begin construction on his fowl creation. It would soon be used as a sanctuary open to people of all faiths, as well a rehabilitation center for disabled children, drug addicts, and the insane. […] In any case, though, the vision’s realization was short-lived, because in 2000 Alamsjah ran out of funding and was forced to close down his gallinaceous creation, before he’d even finished construction on the building. Nearly 20 years later, the area has been almost entirely reclaimed by nature.

From KQED’s Mind/Shift: “How a Sword and Sorcery Camp Uses Immersive Role Play to Teach STEAM“. LARP as well-rounded education!

“When I first arrived I thought it would be people running around and hitting each other, but it’s not. It’s about reacting to the consequences of your actions and the responsibility that comes with it,” said one 13-year-old camper.

“Chicago gang business cards from the 1970s and 80s“. Amazing artifacts in and of themselves, but these would also be a delightful (and simple) prop for any era-appropriate game in Chicago.

“The hand-drawn graphics, the ‘Old English’ typefaces, the outlandish names and clever slogans,” he explains are elements that time stamp the activity and attitude of Chicago’s gang culture.

Peter

In the category of “powerful redemptive symbolism,” there’s this story about a tattoo parlor in Maryland that’s been helping people with racist or gang tattoos cover them up – for free.

Dave Cutlip, who runs Southside, said he and his wife developed the idea of free coverups in January after a man came into his tattoo parlor hoping to get a gang tattoo removed from his face.

“I could see the hurt in his eyes,” Cutlip said.

Cutlip, 49, couldn’t help the man, it turned out, because the tattoo was too prominent. Might he be able to help someone else? He and his wife turned to Facebook, offering free coverups for racist or gang tattoos with “no questions asked.”

“Sometimes people make bad choices, and sometimes people change,” the post reads. “. . . We believe that there is enough hate in this world and we want to make a difference.”

I picked up Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted (currently on sale for $2.99 – follow the link) on a whim over the weekend and read it straight through in one shot. I found it to be a very insightful and thought-provoking read. Though in fairness, I shouldn’t be surprised that anything written by an author recommended to me by Derek “The Geekpreacher” White is insightful and thought-provoking. It touches on Christus Victor atonement; Scooby Doo; and the “Yes, and” principle; and there are tons of challenging passages like the one below as well.

With their focus on traditional family values, the Protestant work ethic, and “God and Country” patriotism, conservative Christians snip out the Jesus who marginalized the family, who was a friend to sinners, who sided with the poor against the rich, and who was executed by the state for sedition. Snip. Snip. Snip.

Progressive Christians snip out different stuff. We’re aware that Jesus was executed by the state but fail [to] notice that Jesus’ battle with the Satan didn’t look a whole lot like what we’d describe as political activism. Jesus lived under empire, one of the most exploitative and oppressive in world history. And yet, Jesus never led a protest against Roman occupation. Jesus didn’t lead a “March on Rome” or carry a sign through downtown Jerusalem protesting Roman oppression. Jesus’ one disruptive action, clearing the Temple, was the restoration of a house of worship so it could be a house of prayer. And most worryingly, Jesus was routinely gracious to the colonial occupiers and agents of empire like tax collectors and Roman centurions, to say nothing of telling his oppressed countrymen to “love your enemies.”

LoadingReadyRun had their pre-prerelease for the Amonkhet set and the video is available. The LRR crew is always entertaining and they always get a lot of really high-quality guests. This was no exception.

Jenny

“Edmonton church, art space offer religion and art together.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the article from the original source in a non-PDF format, but this particular section from the Anglican Journal interests me, especially this excerpt:

Von Bieker says art shows can provide a way of sharing ideas about God and other topics that are sometimes challenging to discuss.

“Theology, reconciliation, sexuality, gender identity…there are a lot of issues we don’t know how to have a good dialogue about,” he says. “Art and story are keys to having those conversations. That’s what Jesus did with the parables.”

“Video games? What about the magical power of imagination?” A blog post written by a camp instructor at the Royal Ontario Museum on his first foray into the summer D&D program there. I did a little research, and though this blog post is a few years old, the ROM does still run this program.

Aside from inspiring my sense of imagination and wonder, the program was a safe space free of judgement. Because let’s be honest, there is a stigma attached to the game. But at the ROM? With my friends? Absolutely not. Being at the museum also fostered my curiosity with antiquity. People always ask me what inspired my pursuit of a career in archaeology. I always answer “Dungeons and Dragons at the ROM”. Not Indiana Jones. Not Jurassic Park like many misunderstand. It was playing a pen and paper RPG at my favorite place on earth. The Royal Ontario Museum.

And finally, one of the best sequences of events I’ve ever read about, a robot bought drugs and a fake passport off the Deep Web for an art show. The bot – not the creator of the bot! – was subsequently arrested.

The Random Darknet Shopper, an automated online shopping bot with a budget of $100 a week in Bitcoin, is programmed to do a very specific task: go to one particular marketplace on the Deep Web and make one random purchase a week with the provided allowance. The purchases have all been compiled for an art show in Zurich, Switzerland titled The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland, which runs through January 11.

Grant, Peter, and Jenny return to discuss the Third Commandment! There’s quite a lot of banter and catching up to do first, of course, and we banter about illness, the forthcoming Amonkhet set in Magic: The Gathering, Snafu Brewing and TRAPPIST-1, and more. We also have a doozy of a question from Patreon backer Richard, who asks us for our favorite stories from the table. Thankfully, we get to respond in kind! (This also gives us an excuse to mention Tooning Japanese in passing, by the way.)

Once we actually get on topic, we start our conversation about the Third Commandment with Scripture and the Roman Catholic catechism on this verse. We also discuss Jewish traditions involving the name of God (and the etymology of certain names.) After that analysis, we move on to using these and related concepts in our games: The power of names, taking oaths, and vulgarity. Finally, we wrap up with a very brief discussion of how to handle unnecessary and uncomfortable vulgarity at the table.

Also mentioned in this episode: Roger Zelazny’s Jack of Shadows; and Thomas’ comments on Episode 107 via Facebook.

Scripture: Exodus 20:7, Exodus 20:24, Matthew 5:33-37, James 5:12

This episode, we tackle a surprisingly complicated topic: Relics and holy items! Grant’s out sick, what with his entire house having been struck by plagues of all sorts, so Jenny and Peter have the mics to themselves. For our Patreon question, they get handed a very tough question from Jared—”What was the most rewarding campaign you ever ran or played in?”—which takes a bit to answer. Then after our Scripture, it’s on to our main topic. We discuss Catholic and Orthodox traditions around relics to lay some groundwork before moving on to talking about the use of relics in our own games: How they might work in certain sorts of settings; what to do with them; and what to do about fakes. Also, a helpful warning: Never go full Blackleaf.

Mentioned in this episode: Two Atlas Obscura articles, “Only the Vatican Has More Christian Relics Than Pittsburgh” and “The Practicalities of Transporting a 400-Year-Old Heart”; and The Fellowship of the Talisman by Clifford D. Simak.

Thomas Kolar was kind enough to provide us with a nicely-written response to our call for more information on this topic from our Catholic listeners. You can find his post here. Thomas not only responded, but also linked a number of helpful resources in his post. Thanks, Thomas!

Scripture: Exodus 25:10-11, 2 Kings 13:20-21, Matthew 27:35

Grant and Peter are back to talk about exploration as a major feature in RPGs! First, a bit of sad news from Peter; then, we spend a bit of time talking about Grant’s Fellowship game, and how strange the system feels to him. We also answer a fun question from Patreon backer Jim, who asks what little, almost insignificant feature factors into our decision-making when we buy cars.

After our Scripture readings, we delve deep into our main topic, discussing why exploration is fun and why it matters; what sorts of characters might be motivated to explore unknown territory; how to set up random or incidental encounters so that they don’t feel artificial; a brief discussion of hex crawls; and sources of inspiration for wilderness and exploration encounters.

This episode topic was selected by our Patreon supporters, who bring you this show every two weeks and help us make the show better. If you’d like to help support us on Patreon, you can do so here. Thanks, folks—we really appreciate your support!

Mentioned in this episode: The /r/ImaginaryLandscapes subreddit; Ball’s Pyramid; the SCP Foundation wiki; and Cordyceps fungi.

Scripture: Genesis 13:14-15, Mark 16:15

In this episode, Grant and Peter discuss naming characters and renaming characters! We kick things off with a conversation about the games Grant’s playing right now—Pugmire, Fellowship, and No Thank You, Evil!—and attempt to answer a question from Patreon backer Rich about play-by-post gaming. Then after quite a lot of Scripture (and really, it’s a small sampling of what could have been used for this particular topic) we start in on the difficult art of naming your character: Why it’s so difficult, what goes into a character’s name, and different ways to come up with the right name. Then, we discuss renaming characters—an underutilized dramatic tool for both players and game-masters. That segues into additional names for characters, and when these new names might be added. Finally, we wrap up with a brief discussion on the weight of a name.

The sermon Grant mentioned as inspiring this topic—and a much weightier topic to come—can be found here. Again, we strongly recommend listening to it! Special thanks to Rev. Justin Cazel.

Scripture: Genesis 17:3-6, Genesis 41:50-52, Isaiah 62:1-2, Matthew 1:20-21, Matthew 16:17-18, Acts 13:6-11, Revelation 2:17

We’ve got THREE guests crowding around the mics this week to continue with part two of a special episode on personal fitness! Kimi (cosplayer, tabletop gaming podcaster, weightlifter, gym owner, and former personal trainer), Chris (media professional, tabletop gaming podcaster, filmmaker, and former personal trainer) and Krissi (gamer, stay-at-home mom, and licensed Zumba instructor) all join us to put personal fitness into a gamer-friendly context. They (along with Grant and Peter) discuss nutrition, sleep, stress reduction, willpower, and more!

Be sure to catch the first half of this episode if you missed it, where we talked about our own fitness journeys, why exercise and physical health matter, unfocused and focused exercise, and setting goals.

Special thanks to all our guests for joining us for a long recording session and providing so much helpful information. For more information about our guests and their projects, as well as where to find them online:

• Kimi: Happy Jacks RPG Podcast; GoldenLasso.net. Social media: “@goldenlassogirl” on Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / YouTube
• Chris: The RPG Squad; “It Figures” (short film); Gamers Behaving Badly. Social media: @TheHussman (Twitter)
• Krissi: Zumba. Social media: @d20mom (Twitter)

Scripture: Proverbs 16:3, Isaiah 40:31, Colossians 3:23, Philippians 2:1-4

We’ve got THREE guests crowding around the mics this week for part one of a special episode on personal fitness! Kimi (cosplayer, tabletop gaming podcaster, weightlifter, gym owner, and former personal trainer), Chris (media professional, tabletop gaming podcaster, filmmaker, and former personal trainer) and Krissi (gamer, stay-at-home mom, and licensed Zumba instructor) all join us to put personal fitness into a gamer-friendly context. They (along with Grant and Peter) discuss their own fitness journeys, why exercise and physical health matter, unfocused and focused exercise, and setting goals. Plus, Grant and Peter slip through time and answer a question from Patreon backer Doug Hagler, who asks what system we’d use to run a post-apocalyptic campaign.

Be sure to catch the second half of this episode as well, when we’ll talk about nutrition, sleep, stress reduction, willpower, and more!

Special thanks to all our guests for joining us for a long recording session and providing so much helpful information. For more information about our guests and their projects, as well as where to find them online:

• Kimi: Happy Jacks RPG Podcast; GoldenLasso.net. Social media: “@goldenlassogirl” on Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / YouTube
• Chris: The RPG Squad; “It Figures” (short film); Gamers Behaving Badly. Social media: @TheHussman (Twitter)
• Krissi: Zumba. Social media: @d20mom (Twitter)

Also mentioned in this episode: Red Markets by Caleb Stokes; FTB 180, “Gamer Health (Part 1)” and FTB 181, “Gamer Health (Part 2)”.

Scripture: Proverbs 16:3, Isaiah 40:31, Colossians 3:23, Philippians 2:1-4

Happy New Year! Grant and Peter are back to talk about … dice?! After a couple of minor announcements and housekeeping notes, we list off some of the games we’d really like to try to play in 2017. We also tackle a Patreon question from Jim, who asks us about handling combat in theatre-of-the-mind games (or for visually-impaired gamers, like the Going In Blind podcast.) Our main topic isn’t so much about dice as reacting to the dice, and handling the unexpected results they can give us while keeping a consistent narration—even if it leads campaigns in strange and unexpected directions.

Games we mentioned wanting to play in 2017: Unknown Armies, 3rd Edition; Pillar of Fire; A Scoundrel in the Deep; Feng Shui, 2nd Edition; Dogs in the Vineyard; DramaSystem; GUMSHOE. Also mentioned: The One Shot Podcast and the Party of One Podcast.

Scripture: Proverbs 16:9, Leviticus 16:6-10, Romans 8:28

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Grant and Peter sit down to tackle a topic selected by our voting Patreon supporters: Playing supernatural creatures! First, though, we spend quite a lot of time on a serious problem that cropped up in Grant’s Pugmire game—a case where a player had a very bad reaction to the previous session’s events. Then we tackle a question from Patreon supporter (and host of the Retro Rewind Podcast) Francisco Ruiz, who asks about games centered around specific holidays. Finally, it’s our main topic: How to play supernatural creatures, We talk briefly about whether Christians should do so at all; then we discuss ways to make that more interesting, especially regarding the traditional weaknesses such creatures typically have.

Mentioned in this episode: Gullah; Pugmire.

Scripture: Isaiah 9:13, Romans 14:1-4

Grant presents a very special Christmas bonus episode: A reading of a unique sermon given on Christmas Day, 1983, by Rev. Bob Lawrence of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Greenville, SC.

Merry Christmas, from all of us to all of you.

Music: “Greensleeves” and “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence“, performed by Andrew Remillard.

Scripture: Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20

We’ve finally reached the hundred-episode milestone! Our heartfelt thanks to all our listeners, past hosts and guest hosts, and Patreon backers; you’ve all helped make this podcast special. We look forward to the next hundred-plus episodes!

This episode, Grant and Peter celebrate reaching STG 100 and call out our new theme music (by James Opie, of Nihilore.com). Then, we plug our annual charity drive for The Bodhana Group; discuss some forthcoming changes to our Patreon; and Grant reviews Big Fandom Greenville. After that, we’ve got our Patreon question! This one’s from Jared, who asks “What game systems that you have played have felt the most compatible with spiritual growth, and what game systems that you have played have felt the least compatible with spiritual growth?”

For our main topic, we discuss a worldbuilding problem—handling historical mysteries in fantasy or sci-fi settings where longevity and data retention risk negating the mystery altogether. That leads us into a larger discussion of what the historical record might be like in all sorts of fantastic settings, and what a game master should think about when determining what historical knowledge is available during their game.

Scripture: Daniel 2:19-21; 2 Peter 3:8; John 1:1

Mike Perna of Innroads Ministries joins us at the appointed hour, to give our listeners some real, practical advice on running small gaming events for your church or community! First, though, we talk about a few other things, in no particular order: Our upcoming fundraiser for The Bodhana Group (keep an eye on our social media feeds for links to that!); the Game to Grow panel we hosted on spirituality in roleplaying games; players taking notes during games; the InSpectres game Grant just wrapped up; and Big Fandom Greenville (more on this next episode.)

We also tackle a great question from Patreon backer Doug, who asks “What, if anything, do you think is simply off-limits for a game? Is the answer different if we’re talking you personally, or for gaming in general?” (This turned out to be surprisingly relevant to our main topic!)

Also mentioned in this episode: A Game for Good Christians, STG 17, “Lines and Veils”.

Scripture: Proverbs 16:3, Ecclesiastes 3:1, Luke 14:28

Grant and Peter continue our ongoing Ten Commandments series with a look at the Second Commandment! First, though, Grant has a fair bit to say about InSpectres and Pugmire, and some lessons he’s learned from those games lately. Then we tackle a question from an anonymous Patreon backer, about transitioning into the game master role, and briefly discuss potential Patreon changes and our upcoming holiday charity drive. We also reiterate our call for your stories of harassment and ‘othering’ in the gaming hobby and industry. After all that, we finally get down to the Second Commandment (as well as a bit about how different Christian and Jewish traditions actually arrange and enumerate these ten commandments.)

Scripture: Exodus 20:4-6, Isaiah 55:8, Hosea 3:1, Revelation 9:20-21

We’re back to talk about religious villains in your game! First, Grant discusses a successful Pugmire one-shot and his upcoming InSpectres game. Then, Grant and Peter put out a call for your stories of ‘othering’ in the hobby (which you can submit by email or through our contact page.) We spend a fair bit of time answering a very interesting question from Patreon backer Jim about rewarding good player behavior. And finally, we get to our main topic: Religious villains. We discuss creating religious, and even specifically Christian villains, as well as what makes those villains powerful and effective in our stories.

Mentioned in this episode: Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, Ep. 48, “Prophets of Doom”; and—

Scripture: Isaiah 29:13-16, Matthew 7:21-23, Matthew 23:13-15

Grant and Peter kick off a new, more theologically-oriented series this week! We’ll be looking at each of the Ten Commandments, and so of course we’re starting with the First Commandment. First, though, we answer a question from Patreon backer Richard Lorenz about other podcasts in the “geeky faith” genre (and specifically faith and roleplaying games—see the show notes for a full list of everything we mentioned!) We also spend a little time talking about Game to Grow. For our main topic, we talk about the importance and theological implications of the First Commandment, as well as some of its gaming implications.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Podcasts:
  • Strangers and Aliens
  • Geekually Yoked
  • The Sci-Fi Christian
  • Helix Reviews
  • Reel World Theology
  • The Church of the Resurrection’s sermon archives
  • Infinity +1
  • Five Minutes in Church History
  • The Liturgists’ Podcast
  • Faithful Creative
  • Retro Rewind Podcast
  • The Dice Steeple
• Game to Grow
• Episode 09, “Faith and Fantasy (with Dan Repperger)”

Scripture: Exodus 3:15, Exodus 20:1-3, Matthew 22:37-38, Matthew 6:24

(A personal note: This blog post was supposed to go up last Friday. However, between a nasty head cold and some other issues, that didn’t happen. I apologize for not getting this out in a timely manner.)

Session 6

I’m going to try something a little different for this post. Since these two sessions were pretty action-packed, I’m going to recap each session and then immediately talk about it from a GM’s perspective, rather than packing all the GM notes at the bottom.

Recap

I left the party on a cliffhanger: Rishi (the wacky old kenku loremaster) was juuuuust about to tell the party something they could do to earn the trust of Kondou (head of the kenku village) and the other kenku. (I’m going to talk about that cliffhanger in the “GM’s Notes” section below.) Well, Rishi’s task was simple, on the face of it. He wanted them to retrieve a stone tablet, about 8″x12″x1″, with a kenku carved into it. It had “gone missing”, he said, and he’d just learned where it went: It was in Auntie Bloat’s house.

“Auntie Bloat”, it turned out, was an ancient kenku witch—much older even than Rishi—who lurked in a bog at the far western end of the island, living in a fish’s skull. She and Rishi apparently were in a bit of a standoff, and the PCs offered the opportunity to shake things up. So the next morning—after waking up to the sound of Rishi shouting a story off his balcony to passing kenku—the party set off to find Auntie Bloat.

The kenku village was just a bit uphill of the small lake the party had spotted the day before, and the witch’s swamp was (naturally) at the end of the small river flowing out of that lake. Finding her was therefore just a matter of traveling down-river. This occasioned an interesting debate, however: Aster (the scrappy, urban rogue with a … limited … grasp of the concept of personal property) was strongly in favor of taking a fishing boat, even if there wasn’t anyone around to ask about that. (Her player—my wife—invoked her “It’s not stealing if I need it more” flaw, and earned an Inspiration point for doing so.) The party argued this for a bit, and eventually nixed the idea on both moral and practical grounds, but it was a good (and 100% player-created) moment.

The trip down-river was uneventful, and generally skipped over aside from a general geographic description. However, I did make sure to describe a point—which the party reached right about sundown—where the terrain rather suddenly and drastically changed. The players could practically see a line in the trees where things went crooked and dark, and the trees became twisted.

A little further in, while it was still twilight, the party found what appeared to be an old campground. Aster decided to scout ahead while the other two set up camp. This turned out to be a mistake—as soon as Aster was out of sight, two twig blights and two needle blights ambushed Lambert (the cleric) and Garm (the fighter). Thankfully, Aster circled back quickly and, well-hidden by the darkness, started laying waste as only a rogue with advantage on all her rolls can. The party took practically no damage in this fight, and Aster wrapped it up by using the lamp oil in her kit to light the needle blights on fire (and managed to stay hidden in the process thanks to some great rolls.)

The fight did cause the party to proceed more carefully, however, and that let them discover and avoid the dangers of a stretch of quicksand I’d put into the swamp. Just at the point where they could see and hear the ocean through the trees—about a mile away from where they’d entered—they found one last feature of the swamp: An arc of scarecrows, set in a line around the mouth of the river. These would feature prominently in the next session! About this time, I started adding more sensory detail: A stench of rotten fish and seaweed, a slick slime on everything, and so forth. I did my best to convey rot and decay, and specifically the sort you find at the ocean.

Finally, the party spotted the witch’s house, and it definitely shocked the players and characters alike. Rishi had warned them that Auntie Bloat lived in “a fish skull”, but the two-story tall, jagged, prehistoric skull of a deep-sea horror was certainly unexpected. The bone stairs leading up a glistening, sickly-white hill standing on a rocky outcropping jutting out into the sea; the flickering light leaking out of the skull-house’s gaping eyes and between its clenched teeth; the slime and rot coating everything—all of it worked to put a genuine scare into the party, and that reveal ended up being a great moment for everyone.

As they watched from their hiding-place, the moon began to rise over the ocean. At that moment, the jaw-door creaked open and a hunched, kenku-shaped shadow lurched down the stairs, turning at the bottom and walking straight into the ocean. Looks like they’d arrived just in time…

GM’s Notes

Given my errors last time, I was trying very hard to let the players take the lead in this session. I think I was successful in that, at least.

It took me two solid weeks to come up with whatever Rishi was going to ask the party to do. I’m really glad one of our players canceled on us, because I desperately needed that time. I knew I was going to introduce “Auntie Bloat” sometime soon, but I wasn’t sure what Rishi could ask of the party that he (a) couldn’t do himself, and (b) would make sense in this setting. I ended up paging through the Dungeon Master’s Guide the night before the game looking for a macguffin, and finally spotted sending stones. Those solved a lot of problems: One of the pair would be worthless to the players (but important to the kenku); it’d be something Auntie Bloat would happily trade for just to spite Rishi and hurt the kenku; and it served an important role in the setting (which you’ll read about next.) Tough one!

One thing my wife called me out on after this session: Distances. I’ve been deliberately vague with distances, since I’m not good at drawing terrain maps and I just don’t have every feature of this island sorted out in my head yet. I’ve tried to describe distances as “a day’s travel” or “about an hour away” or the like, and that’s worked. However, apparently I’m not doing that consistently, and that makes it harder for everyone to understand where they’re going, what they’re experiencing in-character, etc., and thus what to do. Something to work on.

Not much to say about the fight with needle blights and twig blights, except that the players definitely thought it set the tone for the “evil swamp” area nicely. It wasn’t designed to be especially hard, and there were a few fun, creative moments, so that went well.

Auntie Bloat’s house was the highlight of this session. It was creepy, the scene description involved multiple senses, and there was a real sense of wonder—”what do you mean, a two story tall fish skull?!”—mixed with danger. We wrapped up with a real sense of anticipation for the next session, and I need to try to do that more.

Session 7

Right—back to our story!

Recap

With the witch apparently gone, the party now had to figure out how to get into the witch’s house. Fortunately, Aster (experienced thief that she is) had little trouble climbing the bone plate wall of the witch’s house, especially with a boost from Garm. She peeked through the knuckle-bone curtains (another ‘eww’ moment for the players) and determined that the upstairs of the house seemed empty. Once again the immovable rod came in handy, anchoring a length of rope for the rest of the party to climb up. (Aster smartly coiled up the rope and laid it on the ledge inside, so it wouldn’t show from the outside.) Then the party crept into the witch’s hut and began searching for the tablet.

The upstairs was disturbing, but distinctly lacking in carved tablets. A stove with a cauldron; a table with various foul ingredients for concoctions spread out over it; a blood-stained stone block and ritual knife; a few bookshelves (with books in some sort of unreadable language that hurt the eye); and various trophies, ranging from surprisingly mundane to surprisingly gory, filled the driftwood floor. (A stuffed sahuagin head stood out among these trophies.) A rickety staircase led downward to a cellar filled with mud, bloody cages, barrels of rotting fish and other sea life, crates of collected items, drawers full of junk and detritus—a grotesque mockery of a normal, junk-filled basement or attic. A search here turned up a few items: Potions, a Quall’s feather token (anchor), a few gems and a fair amount of gold squirreled away in various places, a pair of magic arrows (which Aster discovered and immediately squirreled away without telling the party), and, at the bottom of a particularly foul barrel, the tablet Rishi had sent them after.

Right as they turned to leave, however, a shrill, buzzing voice whined “I’m telling…!”

A pair of mud mephits, indistinguishable from the mud around them until they moved, began complaining that they’d seen everything and were going to tell the witch about the party. (I made sure to use whiny, dissatisfied, childish voices for them, which quickly turned the whole situation comical.) They were avaricious, beggarly little creatures, and obviously not a combat threat to the party—but they also couldn’t be permitted to tell Auntie Bloat who’d been there, or that she’d been robbed. Aster bribed them with seven gold coins apiece—from the witch’s own stashes of gold, no less—and they greedily accepted, stashing the gold away in a rafter and a rat’s nest. Then they fell to squabbling about who had more gold, at which point the party left.

Two other actions, in no particular order. First, Lambert (who is proficient in the Herbalism skill, and a neutral good cleric to boot) took a few minutes to ruin as many of Auntie Bloat’s potions and poisons as he could without just smashing up the place. Second, Aster searched about until she found a musical instrument—an ocarina, as it happened—and stole it. Her player refused to explain why she’d done this until later, when she handed it to Garm without a word. (Garm, you may recall, is a gifted but very shy and secretive musician.) That ended up being a clever little roleplaying aside, and was met with broad approval.

The party left the way they’d come, taking their rope and immovable rod down as they left and hoping to slip out undetected. Unfortunately, something had apparently noticed them. Remember that arc of scarecrows I’d described before? All facing out, away from the witch’s house, as if keeping an eye out? That ring had turned inward, looking at them.

This completely freaked the players out. They froze in hiding, debating what to do for a while, before Aster (with another amazing Stealth roll) slipped up behind one of the scarecrows and checked it out. It wasn’t moving, though I made sure to describe it in such a way that it was clear it could move—it wasn’t just clothes on a pole. Then Aster had the bright idea to blindfold that scarecrow with a strip of something.

The moment when the scarecrow reached up and pulled the blindfold off might have been the highlight of the night. Everyone flipped out—in character and out of character—and panicked. The resulting fight with two scarecrows was very tough (I’ll talk more about it below), and Aster ended up using both of those magical arrows she’d found (+2 arrows, as it turned out) while Garm and Lambert both nearly went down. Scarecrows take half damage from non-magical weapons, and their fear and paralysis abilities really hampered everyone’s ability to put out damage. Lambert’s bless spell saved the day, helping Garm and Aster hit more consistently (Garm’s player was rolling very badly) and providing a big boost on saving throws against those status effects. After six long rounds of combat, the party barely scraped by with a few hitpoints apiece and extra kindling.

After that, the party did their best to move carefully through the swamp, keeping an eye out for more dangers (and thus avoiding quicksand on the way back.) Once they were clear of the swamp, though, they made all possible speed back upriver towards the kenku village. They arrived near dawn, exhausted, filthy, hungry, and successful.

Rishi was delighted, of course, and revealed what the tablet was: Half of a pair of sending stones. The other half was kept in another kenku village on a distant island, and was their only regular means of communicating with them. Rishi had “lost” it (implying he’d traded it away to Auntie Bloat, either foolishly, or as a very dear price for something else he’d needed more at the time) nearly twenty years ago, and the village had been unable to communicate with its counterpart since then. Naturally, when the party woke up that evening the kenku were celebrating the tablet’s return, and Kondou agreed that this service was proof of the party’s friendship with the kenku. He asked that the party take word to the colony that the kenku would deal with them as friends, and added only one condition—that his son’s bones be returned from the old monastery the colony had settled in.

The next morning, the party traveled back to the colony, where they were debriefed by Governor Warwick and one of the colony’s other Council members, a bookish gnome named Bas Holst. The latter wondered if Auntie Bloat might not have been a hag—a twisted sort of fey creature—and Lambert determined to ask the naiad in the monastery about that. The Governor ordered that news of the kenku and the witch (or hag, if she was indeed a hag) be kept secret, but that everyone be warned about the wyvern. She also told the party that a small group of lumberjacks, who had gone a bit far afield of the colony on the northern shore, had been ambushed by sahuagin storming up out of the waves. Two were dead, and two more hurt. Lambert rushed off to tend to the injured colonists, while Garm and Aster sought out dinner—and that’s where we wrapped up.

The party hit level 3 at the end of this session. Aster officially took the ‘Thief’ sub-class; and Garm took the “Eldritch Knight” subclass (which I’ll talk about a lot in my next post, since the next session ended up being a lot of roleplay involving that choice.)

GM’s Notes

The whole time the party was in Auntie Bloat’s domain, in or near her house, I did my best to play up the gore and horror of the area. My group doesn’t have much problem with that, but the rather wanton use of it definitely played up the grotesque Black Forest / Slavic fairy-tale witch vibe I wanted. (As it happens, it’s also the sort of thing hags do, according to the Monster Manual.) Lovecraftian horror permeates our group at times, and this was actually sort of a refreshing change.

The encounter with the mud mephits went very well. It definitely wasn’t a combat encounter—though if the player characters had waited around to ambush Auntie Bloat when she returned, the mud mephits would’ve been part of a rather complex combat I had in my back pocket. Without that, though, the mephits posed an odd sort of question: What do you do when evil isn’t gloating or nefarious, but rather whiny and childish? It was fun, it set the tone a bit and introduced mephits into the setting (which I’ve only otherwise encountered, in any form, through Bioware’s D&D computer games!) The party’s solution was also fine.

Aster’s little moment, where she snagged a musical instrument, is part of a complex and evolving relationship she and Garm have. Aster technically owns Garm and can (and does) order him about. She’s also very curious about him, and wants him to be a relatively normal person instead of the emotionally-stunted killing machine the arena turned him into. Silently giving him that ocarina was a signal that (a) despite Garm’s best efforts, Aster knew about his musical talent; (b) it was totally fine with her; and (c) she was going to keep it secret from everyone else, at least for the time being. Lots of subtext in a single action—and excellent roleplaying.

I need to talk about, and apologize to my players for, the scarecrow encounter. Turns out two CR 2 monsters is a really tough fight for three second-level PCs, especially when they take half damage from almost everything! I didn’t do the encounter math ahead of time; if I had, this wouldn’t have been nearly so hard a fight. Having said that, though, this was also the only time I think the party has really felt challenged in combat. Since we’re not really doing dungeon crawls much, where long chains of less-difficult encounters can wear a party down, I may have to put more difficult fights in—when appropriate, of course.

And with that, I think I’m done recapping! I’ve got more to write about still—we wrapped up session #8 this past weekend, and it went extremely well. At this rate, I may never catch up with our fast-moving game… how awesome would that be?

Anyways, let’s talk about exploration—and bad GMing.

Recap

For those keeping track at home, I’ve written about three sessions so far. Here’s a recap of the next two.

Session 4

So after exploring the ancient monastery and clearing it out, the various colonists moved in (somewhat) and started settling down in earnest. After a day or two of helping with various chores, the PCs decided to explore and try to find an easy way to the top of the cliffs they had settled in front of. They went south, following the coastline, and found a sizable bay there that might one day be a good harbor, though the current colony location is a bit far away to use it themselves. In the distance, well to the south-south-east, they also spotted a sharp, solitary spire of rock jutting out of the ocean. (The picture I sent them to illustrate this was of Bell’s Pyramid, a pretty amazing natural wonder in the ocean between Australia and New Zealand.)

After about half a day of travel, they eventually found a place where they could get up the cliff face. They found a sub-tropical forest at the top, along with a few high places they could get a better view of the inland terrain from. That gave them a glimpse of a bit more geography—a tall, volcanic mountain in the distance, a plateau sloping away from them … and a thin, barely-visible plume of smoke rising in the distance to the west of them, suggesting that someone might live there.

After getting a bearing on that, the PCs traipsed back along the cliffs to a point above the main body of colonists, still gathered around that ancient monastery. They found a few indications that there had been outbuildings of a sort at the clifftop, but everything except the foundations and a few pottery shards was long since gone.

At this point, the party’s creative instinct took over. Using the immovable rod they’d recovered in the previous adventure and some of Aster’s rope, they set up a crude pulley system and pulled one of the thick hawsers from the Brazen—the colonials’ wrecked ship—up to the clifftop. Using this much sturdier rope, they worked to create a relatively safe route up and down the cliff. It would still be a hard climb for most of the colonists, but it would let those who needed it get up and down without significant danger.

Then the PCs reported back to the colonial governor, got permission to go investigate that sign of potential habitation in the morning, and … well, that was it for the session. Not a great session, but I’ll talk more about that below.

Session 5

The party packed up, made a few simple arrangements, climbed up the rope system they’d helped create the previous session, and headed west.

The journey took most of the day, and (not wanting to interrupt too much) I mostly just described the terrain. That was mostly sub-tropical forest, with a few clearings, gently sloping downhill as they moved away from the cliffs along game trails through the forest. I only threw in one stop of any importance: They encountered a very large stone head on its side—clearly ancient, and badly worn away by weather and plant growth, but recognizably humanoid. A bit of searching found what might have been more pieces just barely sticking out of the ground, equally proportioned and suggesting that this statue was massive when it stood upright.

Naturally, the PCs had to climb it, and they eventually did so. (No rush, so I don’t think I made them roll for it. I just said it took a little while.) Even though the statue head sat among trees, it was big enough to provide a vantage point. A thin, glimmering thread of light suggested a stream in the distance eastward—the first surface fresh water the PCs, or any other colonist, had yet found!—and possibly a small lake. Some rolling hills could be seen to the south, and they could see over the water to the north just a little—enough to see a dark shadow on the horizon that might have been another, very remote island. To the northwest stood the mountain they’d spotted the day before—a smooth volcanic cone, not especially tall (certainly not snow-capped) and green about three-quarters of the way up.

Unfortunately, between the party and the mountain flew a wyvern.

The wyvern was certainly not close enough to cause any immediate concern. However, the fact that it was close enough that the party could make it out, and that it was carrying something about the size of a dairy cow, wasn’t exactly comforting either. They watched it carefully as it flapped toward the mountain, until they couldn’t make it out anymore. Then they flipped out for a while. We talked about wyverns for a bit (and traded more images off the internet—Google Image Search has been my constant companion throughout this campaign!) until the players got back on track and continued onward.

As the ground evened out a bit, the forest began to change. It still looked like a natural forest, but fruit trees became more and more abundant, and the ground was a bit clearer—as if it had been tended to. That’s when I sprung the second surprise of the evening: A bent kenku with a staff stepped out in front of them, halting their progress. There was a moment of shocked staring—none of the party having ever even heard of a kenku before—before the elderly kenku spoke to them in a language they didn’t understand. Lambert greeted him in Common and told him they had been washed ashore by the great storm a few days previous, at which point the kenku threw up his hands and danced happily around a tree, shaking his walking stick and shouting (in heavily-accented Common) “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! I told them the storm brought change! No one believes Rishi when he says things, but whooo’s the fool now?!”

That was their introduction to Rishi, easily the players’ favorite NPC so far. He spoke a sort of pidgin Common, with plenty of ancient words from other languages thrown in and a great many mimicked sounds as well. (We had to stop to watch this old David Attenborough video about the lyrebird, to give some idea of the level of mimicry involved.)  It was clear enough for the PCs to understand, however. He escorted them to his village, and through it to his house—a low-ceilinged structure built around a large tree, about thirty feet off the ground. The village was a maze of rope bridges, thick branches acting as aerial walkways, houses and other buildings on the ground and in the trees, and a few communal cookfires. The other kenku didn’t seem to speak Common—only the same language Rishi spoke at first, and which the party would eventually learn was Auran. (About this time, Aster picked up on the fact that the bird’s-beak dagger she’d picked up from the monastery might be of kenku make.)

The party ate dinner with Rishi—mostly fruit Rishi had picked as they walked, from what he described as his “garden”—and traded information. Rishi called himself a “Windspeaker”, and apparently fulfilled the role of elderly advisor and lorekeeper in the village. After the sun was down, a stout, young, angry-looking kenku appeared at Rishi’s door and summoned them all to meet with Kondou, the village headman.

Rishi translated what ended up being a fairly unproductive meeting. Kondou wasn’t especially trustful, and figured the arrival of more than a hundred-fifty colonists would be a disaster, but claimed the kenku would weather this storm as they had others before. The angry young kenku—Kondou’s son-in-law Janno—saw the beaked dagger Aster had and snatched it away from her, claiming it had belonged to Kondou’s son. The party told where they’d found it and the circumstances, and Kondou asked them to return his son’s bones to him. Janno voiced suspicions that the PCs, or the colonists in general, had killed him themselves. Beyond that, little was accomplished.

On their way back to Rishi’s house, Rishi casually mentioned that there was something the party could do to earn Kondou’s trust. A little favor for him, and for Rishi, and for the kenku village in general…

GM’s Notes

Looking at the description for these two sessions, the casual reader might be fooled into thinking this was a productive and fun two weeks of gaming. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The feedback I got after Session 5 was straightforward: Stop telling us what’s happening, and let us do things ourselves.

This sort of narrative railroading is a trap I fall into a lot as a GM. It’s occasionally necessary when a party is exploring—it’s important to describe the setting and set the tone, I think, before the players try to do things which don’t fit the environment. In this case, I do feel that I needed to describe a bit more than usual. However, what resulted was two solid sessions of GM setting description and plot narration, and that was definitely too much. I even did this once they had NPCs to interact with! That might’ve been because I was caught up in describing the world, and didn’t notice my ‘cue’ to hand narrative control back to the players; but I suspect it’s just a bad habit of mine. (I pointedly didn’t do as much narration in subsequent sessions, and of course that worked much better.)

That significant criticism aside, there were a few bright spots in these two sessions. Rishi was the breakout NPC. I based him heavily and obviously on The Lion King‘s Rafiki, which I think is fine—he’s not exactly the same, but having a baseline character reference for the players saved a lot of roleplaying effort and established a common ground.

The other big hit was the wyvern. This is unsurprising, and actually something we talked about a lot on our recent episode about epic monsters. The presence of a large, dangerous animal—one which certainly threatens individual colonists and their livelihoods—was rather unnerving. The weirdly normal nature of the wyvern was also a big deal, though. Wyverns aren’t malicious; they’re just large predators, with bad tempers and a taste for livestock (and occasionally farmers.) That was oddly reassuring.

Lastly, I want to talk about the kenku in general. Astute GMs and players who know their Monster Manuals well may be writing angry comments about how the kenku don’t actually speak. That’s true, sort of—according to the 5th Edition Monster Manual (and previous editions’ kenku writeups as well), the kenku understand Common and Auran, and can mimic it very well, but can’t exactly speak it. They can’t make new words, develop a language further themselves, and so forth.

I really liked the kenku as a sort of native people—one of the things I’m developing in the history of this setting is that the “traditional” D&D races don’t exist anymore in this part of the world, and that leaves room for more interesting NPCs like kenku, gnolls, lizardfolk, etc.. However, the language thing was a problem: The mimicry ability of kenku is distinctive, and I wanted to keep it, but I also wanted the player characters to be able to talk to these NPCs. If they only mimicked what they heard, and they hadn’t heard Common, Dwarven, Elven, or any other “normal” D&D language in thousands of years, how would that work? My solution was to let them be capable of normal speech (with Auran as their native tongue), but excellent mimics—so good that their storytellers and lorekeepers could easily pass down most of an ancient form of Common to their students. That neatly handled both the communication problem and my main issue with the kenku as an NPC race. Easy!

So—that was sessions 4 and 5. I’ve got more to talk about, though, because for all that didn’t happen in these two weeks, the last two sessions have been action-packed and player-driven. Stay tuned!

Grant and Peter are back with a whole host of things to talk about! We start with a bit about the Pugmire campaign Grant just started playing in. Then we answer a surprisingly tricky question from Patreon backer Jim Nanban, who asks us for our “elevator pitch” for RPGs as a hobby. We remind everyone that Save Against Fear 2016 is coming up very quickly (and that you should go if at all possible!) And finally, we reach our main topic: Epic monsters. What do we mean by an “epic monster”? What role can and should they play in your campaign? Why do they sometimes fall flat? And what little tricks and additional details can you add in to really make them stand out to your players? And most importantly, what’s the best story about an epic monster from your own gaming career?

Mentioned in this episode:

• Save Against Fear 2016 (so nice we linked it twice!)
• GURPS Horror
• Magic: The Gathering’s Eldrazi titans

Scripture: Job 3:8, Revelation 13:1

But seriously: Last week, the party wrapped up the first dungeon crawl of the campaign. This was kind of a major milestone for our gaming group, on both sides of the virtual GM’s screen. My wife had never actually explored a proper ‘dungeon’ before, since she’s relatively new to gaming. I’d put maps together for the Savage Shadowrun we played a while back, but those were mostly floor plans I’d filed the serial numbers off and turned into heist scenarios; this was a properly-gridded dungeon, which the players had no foreknowledge of, and that was a first for our group. And for myself, this was a bit of a personal milestone: My previous D&D game was a terrible Eberron game, where I’d focused so heavily on making pretty maps that I completely neglected to put together a coherent plot. So just by virtue of entering a dungeon at all, we were off to a good start.

Good thing, too.

Recap

As mentioned previously, the shipwrecked and battered colonists had taken refuge at the entrance of a large structure built into the shore-ward cliffs to defend themselves against further sahuagin attacks. I mentioned a few things that the colonists were short on and in immediate need of, making sure to include fresh water in that list for … well, you’ll see why.

The governor—one Baroness Hester Warwick—asked the player characters to explore the structure and make sure there weren’t any nasty surprises lurking inside, behind the colonists. They waited until morning, loaded up on supplies—in particular, Garm (the human fighter) grabbed a sturdy club and Lambert (the human cleric) cast a light spell on it to act as a torch. A few other light spells were cast—it’s a cantrip in 5th Edition, so any party with a cleric should never be hurting for light in a dungeon—and in they went.

The vestibule (A) and long hallway were quite weather-worn, as you’d expect from an ancient structure carved from sandstone next to a hurricane-prone ocean. Few details were gleaned from the long hallway, though some evidence of bas-relief carvings remained and a few nature scenes were legible. Centuries of sand and natural debris, blown up the stairs by storms over time, made the entrance hallways messy, but passable. At the other end of this hallway stood chamber (B), apparently a sort of ‘hub’ for traffic, with a balcony, stairs and several exits.

The players quickly explored the space the northeast of this chamber, revealing it to be an empty store-room devoid of everything except pottery shards. They then went southeast to (D), which turned up a lot of trash, oversized snake pellets (uh-oh), oversized snake skins (uh-oh), and a rather prettily-carved bone bracelet (uh… okay?) which Aster (the half-elven thief) claimed for her own. These rooms appeared to have once been very plain living quarters, with a slab to sleep on—rather like cells. The larger room (C) right at the cliff face, however, had a window and seemed rather nicer, except for the giant poisonous snake. This struck at Aster and knocked her unconscious, but Garm and Lambert quickly dealt with it, and Lambert’s cure wounds put Aster back on her feet immediately.

Naturally, the next step was to dump the giant snake out the window onto the colonists below, which occasioned some comment later and some screaming almost immediately.

Heading back, the party crossed over to (E), where Lambert began to get a vague feeling that he’d been somewhere like this before. Nothing immediately came to mind; but this room, with a raised dais, bookshelves (whose contents had long since rotted away), and stone benches and tables, was the first space that looked reasonably habitable.

Heading up the stairs north of (E), with Aster (and her darkvision) scouting ahead, the characters noticed a flickering glow around the corner. This turned out to be coming from a number of giant fire beetles living in (F). The party made a bit of noise in the hall, which attracted the fire beetles, and what I’d planned to be a sort of centerpiece fight around rough terrain (along with a nasty surprise) turned into a simple matter of luring beetles into the hallway and dealing with them one or two at a time. Garm and Lambert did most of the work, and Aster eventually snuck into (F), climbed some of the large debris (fallen from the ceiling over time) and picked off the last one with her shortbow. She did trigger that “nasty surprise” I mentioned on her way back, but the violet fungus whiffed its surprise attack and was easily dealt with afterwards. The party was covered with bioluminescent goop, but otherwise completely unharmed!

On examining this largest room (F), Lambert could finally hazard a reasonable guess as to what this complex had once been: A monastery of some sort. The rooms below were for visitors, including a nicer room for an occasional VIP, and the gathering room was potentially something like a chapter house. The damp, fungus-covered room the party currently stood in could have been a refectory; and that supposition was strengthened by the discovery of a kitchen in the next room (G). Attached to that through a narrow hallway was a washroom (H), probably used for hot baths and laundry depending on what was needed. (The party found a small, corroded statue of Lisopheth, the goddess of fresh water, in an alcove in this room.) While the way up near (G) and (H) was blocked by dirt and limbs, water and a breeze were clearly leaking through, indicating that this passageway probably lead outside to the top of the cliff at one time.

East of the refectory was a spiral staircase leading down; another ramp leading up into darkness; and a pair of rooms (I) and (J) which had apparently once been dormitories. Lambert and Garm estimated that, judging by the space and scattered remnants of simple bedframes, there were probably no more than a dozen monks in this space at any given time. A definite stink filled this space, and Aster discovered a small iron dagger with a bird’s beak as its pommel next to a variety of unrecognizable bones and a few large, black feathers. The three giant rats in (J) explained the stink and remnants. Once again, the party dealt with the problem rather cleverly: Garm and Lambert marched rather noisily around to the west side of (J), drawing their attention so Aster could sneak up on the rats and dispatch them from the northern entrance to the room. It worked so well that after the first two rats were down, I stopped combat, narrating the third rat’s demise rather than wasting time rolling. A search afterwards turned up a small box of unrecognizable and likely ancient gold coins stuffed into a crack in the wall.

At this point, we wrapped up the session, and it turned out everyone had rather conveniently just hit level 2. (No, I didn’t actually plan that—it was providential.) The players decided their characters would take a short rest in the hallway north of (I), to get away from the fetid stench of the giant rats’ nest. A few Hit Dice were spent to heal up, and in between sessions everyone did the minimal book-keeping required to level up in 5th Edition.

After their rest, the party decided to go down the spiral staircase to the east. I hadn’t mapped this part of the dungeon, partly because I wanted the players’ imaginations to fill in, partly because there wasn’t going to be any combat down here, and—well, partly because I’d run out of time prepping for the session. A flooded hallway with flickering white light shining through the semi-salt water confronted the party. Garm took some of Aster’s rope, a piton, and his club and dove in, using the weight of his chainmail to walk as far as he could before having to turn around and return for air. He’d just about reached his limit—a very impressive thirty feet underwater in heavy armor—when he felt steps and was able to climb up into surprisingly fresh air beyond. After tacking down the rope, the other two could cross more easily, and everyone made it through that obstacle unscathed.

The light turned out to be coming from a continual flame spell over a large arched doorway; but of more immediate interest to a party of treasure-hunting PCs was the storeroom next to them. This turned out to contain an old stone chest filled with copper, gold, silver, a magical gem, an obviously magical cloak, and a magical rod of some sort. (More on these later.)

The larger chamber, oddly enough, contained nothing but a large pool of fresh water filled by a spring flowing from a crack in the wall. The party was just about to leave when a naiad (a water fey, rather like a dryad) rose up from the pool. She answered a few questions—most notably, she confirmed that this had been a monastery for worshipers of powerful fey, whom she also served and who had bound her to this pool a very long time before. (Turns out fey aren’t good at keeping time, especially when they can’t see the sun, moon or stars.) She confirmed that the flooded hallway would drain over the next day or so, and agreed to let the colonists draw water from her pool on three conditions: First, that the colonists did not defile or dirty her pool; second, that the party deal with the trapped spirit of a monk trapped in undeath within the monastery; and third, that in a year and a day the three party members would return to perform a service for the naiad. This last was a bit worrisome—no one clever likes to owe a fey creature favors or services—but given how desperately the colony needed fresh water, the party agreed.

Back upstairs, the party carefully approached the final room of the monastery, which turned out to be the abbot’s quarters. This too wasn’t mapped, because I’d (again) not had time, but also because leaving it a bit vague made this part rather creepier. The room turned out to have a private chapel of sorts attached to it, and the skeletal remains of the abbot were still on the floor there, where he’d clearly met some sort of violent end. After that discovery, the shadow I’d had lurking in the room, making furtive movements, finally attacked. Unfortunately, its attacks were pretty much ineffective—I just couldn’t roll well, Lambert had just acquired his turn undead class feature after leveling up, and everyone else cleverly used their lights to keep track of the shadow and prevent it from hiding. It only managed one successful attack on Garm before being defeated.

That pretty much wrapped things up—the monastery had been explored, treasure had been found, and an inconvenient but inexhaustible supply of fresh water had been acquired for the colony. The naiad’s spring won’t serve the colony forever, but it definitely solves a major, immediate need. The party also got to keep most of their treasure—taxation is an interesting little wrinkle I threw into this game, and something I’ll have to talk about soon—and the magic items turned out to be an elemental gem of water (which summons a water elemental when smashed), a cloak of the manta ray (which lets its wearer swim easily and breathe underwater), and an immovable rod (a classic D&D item, and one with an infinite variety of uses for a clever group of PCs.) All in all, not bad for two sessions of work!

GM’s Notes

My roleplaying career started with D&D Third Edition, and the wacky old dungeons of earlier editions had been relegated to history by that time. The D&D CRPGs I played before I ever picked up dice—Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Planescape: Torment—hinted at those just a little bit, but they mostly presented dungeons which fit well into the setting and whose construction mostly made sense. No truly weird features, like White Plume Mountain’s hovering river, no Tomb of Horrors‘s demon mouth of annihilation, nor Undermountain’s … everything. As a result, I’ve always believed a “good” dungeon should have a clear purpose and a sensible history in within its setting, and that fantastic features likewise need to suit the setting and need to exist for reasons which made good sense to their creators. Certainly this ancient, ruined monastery fits that mold; it had an ecosystem of sorts, and its history mattered a great deal (and will hopefully continue to matter going forward.)

On a personal note, I managed to spend minimal time on these maps, and that’s great. I’ve mentioned on the podcast before that my Eberron game failed in part because I spent so much time making pretty maps in MapTool, with all sorts of layers and dynamic lighting and visibility and pretty special effects, that the plot never developed. That didn’t happen this time—hallelujah!—and the game was much improved for it.

I don’t have much else to say about this dungeon crawl, in part because dungeon crawls are sort of their own reward. A good dungeon serves the same purpose as any other location in a RPG—they’re places where the game’s story is developed both procedurally and dramatically. What makes a dungeon crawl special is the challenges—done right, they’re a series of puzzles, whether those be combat-related or not. These encounters were mostly combats, but I hope to change that in the future. (I do tend to struggle with non-combat encounters a bit.)

We likely won’t be doing too many dungeon crawls in this game. There’s too much overworld exploration, colonial social development, and external diplomacy (hint hint!) to do in this game for that. But there will be a few more, and while I’ve got plenty of room to improve, I think I’ve set the bar reasonably high for those future dungeons.

Grant’s back from Electric City Comic-Con 2016, and it was fantastic! We recap the show, including some specific people and organizations Grant wanted to specifically call out (check the full notes below for links.) Then Grant and Peter answer a Patreon backer question from Jim, who asks about demonstrating the difficulty of doing the right thing in game without being obvious or annoying about it. Finally, we cover our main topic: A discussion of generalist and specialist characters, with a focus on an issue that came up in the pre-game prep for our current D&D campaign.

Scripture: Exodus 31:1-6, Colossians 3:23-24

EC32016 specifically called out by Grant:

• Hatcore – fun custom geek hats
• Fanboy Glass – great glassware with geeky etchings
• Jeremy Whitley – Eisner-nominated author of Princeless and other comics. (Grant said “writer and artist” in the episode; turns out that’s wrong. Sorry!)
• Easley Pokémon League – a local Pokémon group
• Boardwalk – Grant’s preferred FLGS and the primary game vendor at EC32016
• White Knight Cosplay, Heroes in Force, Amanda Finley Cosplay, SC Ghostbusters – all awesome cosplayers

(Part Two.) Kris and Katrina Ehrnman-Newton, hosts of the inimitable Gameable Saturday Morning Podcast (and its previous Gameable Pixar and Disney iterations), join us for an episode so monstrously huge we had to make it a two-parter! This time, we’re talking about design considerations for a “moral universe”—the assumptions built into a fictional setting about the consequences and decisions that affect characters’ moral efforts. We start with our Patreon backer question, this time about potential real dangers of gaming. Then across two episodes, we cover the design aspects of a moral universe in great detail, and wrap up talking about the challenges and opportunities these present at the gaming table. Thanks again, Kris and Katrina—we’re looking forward to joining you to talk about Saturday morning cartoons soon!

If you missed the first half of Episode 91, click here to listen to part one.

Katrina previously joined us for Episode 58, “Prophecy”, and Kris joined the three of us for Episode 67, “Breaking Canon”. Grant and Peter have also appeared on the Gameable Saturday Morning Podcast for a bonus episode on The Prince of Egypt.

We hit on a wide and strange variety of other things this episode, including but not limited to: Depression Quest; Genesis 18; Batman; Longmire; The Crow; Mouse Guard; Jessica Jones; fighting hummingbirds; The Care Bears Movie; Sailor Moon; L.A. Confidential; Dogs in the Vineyard; Pillar of Fire; and a May 2016 blog post from Peter, “You Must Be This Treacherous To Ride The Story“. Phew!

Scripture: Genesis 3:22-24, Amos 2:6-7, Matthew 5:44-45

(Part One.) Kris and Katrina Ehrnman-Newton, hosts of the inimitable Gameable Saturday Morning Podcast (and its previous Gameable Pixar and Disney iterations), join us for an episode so monstrously huge we had to make it a two-parter! This time, we’re talking about design considerations for a “moral universe”—the assumptions built into a fictional setting about the consequences and decisions that affect characters’ moral efforts. We start with our Patreon backer question, this time about potential real dangers of gaming. Then across two episodes, we cover the design aspects of a moral universe in great detail, and wrap up talking about the challenges and opportunities these present at the gaming table. Thanks again, Kris and Katrina—we’re looking forward to joining you to talk about Saturday morning cartoons soon!

Once you’re done with this half of Episode 91, click here to listen to part two.

Katrina previously joined us for Episode 58, “Prophecy”, and Kris joined the three of us for Episode 67, “Breaking Canon”. Grant and Peter have also appeared on the Gameable Saturday Morning Podcast for a bonus episode on The Prince of Egypt.

We hit on a wide and strange variety of other things this episode, including but not limited to: Depression Quest; Genesis 18; Batman; Longmire; The Crow; Mouse Guard; Jessica Jones; fighting hummingbirds; The Care Bears Movie; Sailor Moon; L.A. Confidential; Dogs in the Vineyard; Pillar of Fire; and a May 2016 blog post from Peter, “You Must Be This Treacherous To Ride The Story“. Phew!

Scripture: Genesis 3:22-24, Amos 2:6-7, Matthew 5:44-45

I’m not going to give a rundown of the characters in this session, except a very basic race-and-class. I’ll save character writeups for another time, because they deserve a post all their own.

Recap

I started things off with a bit of narration to set the scene: A colony ship laden with people and goods, about fifteen weeks at sea. It’s en route to a distant archipelago believed to be rich in land, goods, and magic—the last being a rare thing indeed in the “old world”. Unfortunately, this vessel (which I still need to name!) has been separated from its sister ship, and has been driven before a hurricane for several days. It’s just run aground, and the morning light and clearing weather shows that its hull is badly damaged, and that the storm surge and winds have grounded the ship on a low barrier island.

After deliberation and a little scouting, the settlement’s governor and captain decide to unload the ship and, using her longboats and manpower, move to the “mainland” across the lagoon created by the barrier island. There’s a series of sandbars that protect the space between the barrier island and the larger landmass beyond—shallow enough that a man could walk across it in water up to his chest, and with several places only ankle-deep (at least, at low tide.)

I’m leaving out a lot of detail, of course, but that should be enough to set the scene. Enough talk—time for action!

The PCs are hauling goods across this line of sandbars and shallows—unarmored, though they each had a weapon on them just in case—when a reef shark latches onto the fighter’s leg and a pair of spear-wielding sahuagin rise up from the waters in front of them. They aren’t alone—I described screams and shouts erupting all along the line of laboring colonists—but these three were the PCs’ encounter.

Naturally, the players immediately surprised me. Their characters had no idea what these sahuagin were (none being found in the waters off their homelands), so my wife’s half-elf rogue (“Aster”) immediately makes a Persuasion check to wordlessly convince the sahuagin they’re no threat, and they can be friends! She rolls an 18, which is actually quite good. This gives one of the sahuagin pause, and it doesn’t attack as it considers what Aster’s lowered dagger and extended other hand mean. Unfortunately, the other one snarls and throws its spear at her, rejecting her peaceful overture. It hits, dropping Aster to about half HP. (First-level characters are pretty lacking in hit points!) The human nature cleric (“Lambert”, played by Peter) is not fond of this turn of events, and casts a cantrip spell to pull the attacking sahuagin towards him and deal a bit of damage. That puts the sahuagin between Aster and Lambert.

And it’s at that moment I’m reminded why I love playing with this particular group—aside from being married to one and podcasting buddies with another.

The human fighter (“Garm”) reaches down, grabs the shark, rips it off his leg and out of the water … and attempts to hit the sahuagin with it. And this partially works! I ask for a Strength check to grab the shark (basically a grapple), and he succeeds. I then decide that because the shark is writhing around, Garm’s definitely attacking with disadvantage. That results in a missed attack roll, but attempting to beat a sahuagin with its own reef shark ends up being the definitive highlight of the whole night. This should probably have been two separate actions over two rounds, but I was caught up in the action and the moment turned out to be well worth it. (Garm’s player mentioned after the game that “sure, you can try to hit him with the shark” was the best moment of his entire gaming career. That’s the power of saying ‘yes’.)

Note that in the first combat round of the campaign, two of the three players have used something other than an attack roll, and neutralized two of their three opponents for at least a round. Back at the top of the initative chart, the shark fails his own Strength check to escape the hold. It’s still up in the air, which is not typically where sharks are found.

Aster attacks the sahuagin Lambert dragged towards them earlier—and crits! Because she’s flanking her target, that means sneak attack damage—and in 5th Edition, sneak attack dice are doubled along with damage dice on a crit. This sahuagin was at 17 HP after Lambert’s spell, and she does 20 points of damage, wrecking it with a nasty backstab. Quite a lot of cheering ensues on the Google Hangout!

At this point, the remaining sahuagin assesses the situation (in part because it’s his turn.) He’s seen the tiny half-elf lady try to make a peaceful overture to him, and when that was rejected she drove a dagger through his hunting partner’s spine. The big guy is currently menacing him with the very shark they’d gone hunting with. The third is clearly a spellcaster of some sort. All in all, this has not been a good hunt. He turns tail and runs—or swims, anyway—blowing a call to retreat on a conch shell horn. All along the line of colonists, cheers go up as the other sahuagin and sharks flee. Garm tossed the still-struggling reef shark onto a nearby sandbar, where it was unceremoniously brained for its efforts.

Lambert tends to the wounded colonists and the other PCs, and unloading resumes, although much more slowly and under guard from archers in the ship’s longboats. A scout reports that there’s a crumbling, if imposing, ruin just around the bend, built into the tall cliff faces rising up just a little bit inland. The colony’s governor decides to set up the first night’s camp there; there’s a sort of portico in front of what seems like an ancient temple or shrine, and the raised vantage point is more defensible than an open beach. However, he asks the party members to rest up (and eat their fill of broiled reef shark!) because he’s got a special task for them: Exploring the ruin and making sure there aren’t any more surprises waiting for them inside.

Trust me—there will be. I’ve got two pages of graph paper already filled with a map…

GM’s Notes

All in all, I was very happy with how this first session went down. We only actually played for about an hour and a half, but I feel like we got a good bit accomplished for the start of a new game and new system. Combat was very quick—twenty minutes if you include all the time looking up combat rules for the first time. That was a huge help. As a GM, I rarely end a game thinking it went well—I’m often quite harsh on myself—and I couldn’t help but be pleased at the end of the evening.

I do want to break that combat encounter down a bit. By the book, two sahuagin and a reef shark are a very dangerous encounter for a first-level party. That’s a 450 XP encounter: Three CR 1/2 monsters, which are normally 100 XP each, and a multiplier for a combat with multiple creatures since that’s more actions for the PCs to defend against. A hard encounter for three first-level PCs is budgeted at 225 XP, and 300 XP is a deadly encounter! A lethal encounter as the very first combat is, according to all conventional GMing wisdom, a terrible idea.

However, I had several features in place to mitigate the difficulty of the combat while still making sure the players felt they’d earned a significant victory. While the PCs started at a bit of a disadvantage—their tanky PCs weren’t armored—they could quickly move into water too shallow for the reef shark. That gave them the opportunity to “beat” the shark just through movement actions. The sahuagin were also going to throw their spears, which reduced their damage somewhat after their first attack. Most importantly, they were cowards. I kept track not only of the damage done to each individual monster, but to the whole group of monsters. When the total amount of damage done to the monsters was half their total HP or more, they would decide their “easy prey” wasn’t worth the trouble, and flee. Since these monsters have 22 HP each, that meant they’d flee when the party did 33 damage. I also counted anything creative as damage; the rogue’s Persuasion check not only ‘stunned’ one sahuagin for a round, it also did half that sahuagin’s hit points in damage. (Fun fact: You don’t have to describe all hit point loss as physical damage.) The fight looked dangerous, and it certainly could have been if it had gone longer, but everything was set up to make sure it wouldn’t go that long. It worked out quite well, too—the last sahuagin was clearly at a disadvantage at the time he decided to flee.

I do want to talk more about that Persuasion check. My first instinct was to say “no, that doesn’t do anything.” After all, these are vicious creatures, and I definitely didn’t want these sahuagin (who make great low-level coastal villains) befriended! For the first time in my gaming career, however, I consciously applied the “yes-and” rule when GMing. The player had done something creative and interesting; my job was to make that work within my plan, not reject it as contrary to how I’d planned the game to go. I had to think about it for a moment, but having the Persuasion check effectively ‘stun’ one of the opponents worked out very well. It rewarded that player for being creative in a combat encounter—and in fact for trying to not have the fight at all, which is one of those things we’ve constantly talked about on this show!—without drastically changing the story.

Finally, that wonderful shark moment. This was another “yes-and” moment, and I had to think about that one too. In this case, the character’s mechanical attributes swayed me towards saying ‘yes’—Garm has the “Tavern Brawler” feat, which makes him exceptionally good with improvised weapons. That was reason enough to get out of the way and let that player be cool; and even though it didn’t work—probably due to the mechanical penalty I imposed, which everyone agreed was completely reasonable—it was an awesome moment that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

So yeah—after one session, I’m feeling really good about this game. I have a lot of prep work to do still: None of the NPCs have names yet, and I need to think beyond the upcoming dungeon crawl and determine what else is going to happen in the first arc of this campaign. But I’m extremely happy with how things have gone so far, and how promising the game is!

Rev. Chris Ode joins Peter and Grant in a very personal episode this week! Chris is a Lutheran pastor, and an actor and religious consultant for Zombie Orpheus Entertainment. We cover a lot of ground in this discussion, including: Zombie Orpheus’s new project, “Attacking the Darkness” (Kickstarting now!); ZOE’s “Dark Dungeons” movie (an adaptation of the original anti-D&D Chick tract); the lingering effects of Dark Dungeons and other anti-RPG material on the Church, gamers, and gaming; scapegoating; and our own Patreon campaign. (We’re on Patreon now—check out the video for more information!)

Also mentioned in passing:

• Game Store Prophets’ “Bonus Content” episode with Rev. Chris Ode
• STG 74, “The Myth of Redemptive Violence (with Rev. Derek White)“
• STG 63, “An Introduction to Roleplaying Games (with Rev. Jason D. Wood)”
• Zombie Orpheus Entertainment’s YouTube channel

Scripture: Isaiah 44:22, 2 Corinthians 3:17, Ephesians 4:31-32

Deliver what you promise

That right there? That’s the most important piece of podcasting advice I’ll give you throughout this entire series.

Since most aspiring podcasters enjoy listening to podcasts too, I want you to take a minute and think about the podcasts you used to listen to regularly. A few of them—a very few—wrapped everything up neatly, announced that they were ending, and gave you links to the hosts’ new projects and a fond farewell. The rest did one of two things: Either they changed their content so much that you weren’t interested anymore; or began updating erratically, maybe even to the point where you couldn’t tell if they’d podfaded or not.

Be a reliable source of content

Here’s a fun fact: If I’m twelve hours late posting a Saving the Game episode, that episode loses twenty-five to fifty percent of its listening audience. Permanently.

Podcast listeners are creatures of habit. If your episodes consistently drop on particular days of the week, that gets incorporated into your audience’s listening schedules. Podcasts that update irregularly don’t fit into that schedule. Update too irregularly, and many listeners will assume you just don’t update anymore, dropping your show entirely from their podcatcher app.

The ubiquity of smartphones and podcatcher apps makes keeping up with irregularly-updating podcasts a little easier, but browsers and desktop apps are still commonly used to listen to podcasts. Here’s a chart of the top ten clients used to download/stream Saving the Game episodes over the past 90 days:

It’s not the best pie chart in the world (Podbean’s built-in charts and my Excel powers are both weak) but just over 35% of our listeners use Firefox, Chrome, or iTunes. Internet Explorer’s probably included in the ‘Others’ category. Thing is, these listeners are looking for Saving the Game‘s content manually. Some of that’s likely driven by social media, but user interaction is still required to see that a new episode is available. If a new episode isn’t there when these users check in at their usual time, many won’t come back to check again. You’ve lost them that week—and if this becomes the norm for you, many will get out of the habit of checking your feed altogether.

It’s not just your audience you’re disappointing, either. No one wants to collaborate with unprofessional people who over-promise and under-deliver. Podcasts and podcasters develop reputations, and believe me: When you invite someone onto your show, they will research you. If you don’t have a good reputation (whether because you can’t tell your guests when their episode will actually drop, or for other reasons we’ll talk about in subsequent posts), they won’t want to go out of their way to record a show with you. Reputation and content go hand-in-hand.

Frequency is less important than consistency

The up-front answer to this is pretty simple: Produce content at a regular pace, and plan to release episodes on a schedule you can keep up with. Everyone loves a weekly—or even daily!—podcast, but if your personal life, editing speed, and recording schedule mean you can’t keep that pace up, don’t try. Aim for every other week, or even once per month. That’s absolutely fine. If your listeners can anticipate a new episode when you promised to put one out, and you deliver, you’re in good shape—you’ve rewarded their faith in you, and they will be back for more next time.

If you start to slip, take a hard look at why you slipped. Did you procrastinate and not get this week’s editing done? Did you not leave any room in your production schedule for life’s inevitable interruptions? Did something big legitimately come up, making this a one-time problem? Have you simply over-committed time to your podcast, and the rest of your family hasn’t bought in along with you? Some of that can be fixed the next time around, but you might also have to re-evaluate just how frequently you can reliably put out an episode. That won’t feel great, but it’s better than watching your listener numbers decline because you aren’t producing the content you promised!

Produce content relevant to your audience

Every successful podcast creates content for a particular niche audience, whether that’s “Christian tabletop gamers” or “politics geeks who want so-and-so’s take on the last week’s news” or “Walking Dead fans” or whatever. That’s great, for all the reasons we talked about last time. That’s rarely the only thing in a podcast episode, though—a little bit about what’s been going on in the hosts’ personal lives, or a bit of banter in moderation, creates a sense of a personal connection and doesn’t detract from your audience’s enjoyment. There’s also a natural sort of penumbra around your core topic of related material. (For example, our core topic is “Christianity and tabletop RPGs”, but it makes total sense for us to talk about “Christianity and hobby board games” or “Christianity at RPG conventions“.) Those “expanded” topics are actually quite valuable: They reach out to new audiences, keep your core topic from becoming stale, and bring new insights with them back to your core topic.

It’s possible, though, to drift away from the core topic you promised your listeners you’d talk about and never come back. Sometimes this is planned—you feel like you’ve said all you can on your topic in your current format, and you’re revamping your show to talk about something new. (Our friends over at The Gameable Disney Podcast did this when they ran out of major Disney animated releases to discuss, for example. They transformed into The Gameable Pixar Podcast, and they’re about to do it again now that they’ve run out of Pixar films.) You’re essentially trading in your existing audience for a new audience, with (hopefully) some overlap and a larger starting audience.

However, this isn’t always planned. Sometimes your focus slips, and you never talk about the thing you meant to talk about. More and more of your show is taken up by something else you really want to talk about instead. You’ve promised your audience content you aren’t delivering on—and those listeners who really wanted that content will go somewhere else to get it instead. We’ve had this happen to us when we focus too much on the “tabletop RPGs” half of our core topic, and don’t deliver on the “Christianity” half.

Staying on topic

This doesn’t require “a solution” so much as “regular maintenance”. Check yourself occasionally—did your last couple of episodes stick to your core topic? Are you spending a lot of time on unrelated topics? Are the jokes and digressions crowding out the actual discussion? Are there things you keep wishing you’d removed in editing in the final release? These are things you can discover for yourself just by listening to your own podcast when episodes drop.

Audience feedback is invaluable here. If you’ve got a solid social media presence, or other ways to communicate with your listeners directly, they’ll tell you when they’re dissatisfied. Reviews and ratings are another channel for listeners to give feedback and help keep you on track. Keep an eye on your listenership statistics, too; don’t obsess over them, but if there’s a noticeable drop (or spike!) that doesn’t have an obvious cause, think about whether or not you’re actually producing content your audience wanted to hear.

There are a couple of things you might try to get yourself back on track. If you use an outline, make sure you’re sticking to it; if you don’t, try using one, so everyone knows what you’re going to talk about. Try to aim to keep banter and off-topic discussions to a certain small timeframe, or do one quick trip around the table for everyone to say something personal before you get into your main topic. A little structure goes a long way. You can be flexible here, and you should to meet the needs of individual episodes, but you do want to actually get around to that main topic sooner rather than later!

Professionalism, cont.

Next time—whenever that may be; see how frustrating irregular updates are?—I’ll talk about being a professional behind the scenes. Look forward to that, folks, and if you have any feedback please leave a comment!

Former Methodist minister and current Wizards of the Coast writer James Wyatt joins us to talk about designing pantheons for fantasy settings! James is a long-time D&D writer with a multitude of major credits, and he’s currently writing for the Magic: the Gathering creative team. That experience shows in this conversation, which covers the qualities of well-designed pantheons, their essential natures, and a multitude of design details relevant to your campaign world. We also talk about Shadows Over Innistrad and “The Lunarch Inquisition“, James’s recent story set there; Plane Shift: Zendikar, which turns that Magic: the Gathering setting into a home for D&D 5th Edition adventures; the paradox of the Cross; our first “gaming curriculum” episode; and Thursten. We talk a lot about Thursten. Enjoy!

Scripture: Deuteronomy 10:17, Job 4:15-17, Acts 17:22-26

Author and game designer Greg Stolze joins Grant and Peter to talk about Unknown Armies 3rd Edition, its Kickstarter, some of his other work, and personal-scale horror stories! We spend a lot of time talking about Unknown Armies—practically the whole episode, really—and Greg had plenty to say about personal horror and how Unknown Armies reflects that. In particular, we talk about how this sort of horror differs from the “cosmic horror” currently in vogue; how relationships can matter more in personal horror; stress and horror; and more. Enjoy!

Mentioned in this episode:

• The Unknown Armies 3rd Edition Kickstarter campaign (wraps up April 29th)
• Greg Stolze’s homepage
• The Delta Green RPG
• “In The Beginning”—a blog post by Greg Stolze describing the origins of Unknown Armies
• Dinosaurs In Space
• Milan Kundera and The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• The Babadook

Scripture: Job 38:4-7, John 15:13, Colossians 3:23-25, Romans 3:10