Arcadia 5e Magazine: Issue 4 - Q&A with the Creators

[Music] uh hello cat hello james hey everybody watching uh on the youtubes uh you may remember me from such youtube streams as ten minutes ago when we were hanging out talking and this is the arcadia four chat and uh we are joined by cat evans and james picasso and i uh my role in these streams i have the i have the easy job i just sit here and hang out and keep my mouth shut uh unlike right now and i monitor you folks in chat so if you have any questions about arcadia or the articles in it or the work that cat in this case the author is done then you can post your questions in twitch chat and while after james is done doing some uh normal interviewing stuff i will relay those questions so i otherwise i take a i happily take a back seat somebody's got a barky dog i wanna i wanna pet the dog where's the dog show us the dog uh she was gonna call this game's workshop this week oh really awesome that sounds cool i'm jealous of games uh james james take it away yeah hey everybody uh i'm james and chicasso i am the managing editor of arcadia uh pronouns he him uh welcome to the stream it is awesome to be here and of course today we are talking with kat evans cat do you want to introduce yourself to the people out there let them know who you are and all of the incredible things you do in the world of tabletop role-playing games um um hi i'm cat i smash words together i'm a freelance rpg writer writing for uh 5e and lots of other systems a lot of my work is horror or dark fairy tales and you may know me from the dm's guild and you may come to know me from my day job at cubicle 7 where i run uh lines that are not at all d d and that i probably shouldn't talk about here hi talk about whatever you want please talk about whoever's cool yeah whatever you're working on it's dope we want to hear it all some of the secrets i'm not allowed to talk about it's too cool to be shared well finally inquisition for me well speaking of information that's cool too cool to be shared and secret uh that segues nicely into the chained library which is your article for arcadia 4 that you put together for us why don't you tell the people out there what is the chained library all about the change library is a honey trap for wizards simply right awesome awesome yeah they can't resist they can't they give in to their private urges their prime their need for lore if you say secret knowledge to a wizard player they they're gone like a dog after a rabbit and that's what i have provided it's a big scary library in an incredibly hard to reach area that you have to fight your way past luxury bird folk to get to and first you have to find out about which is not easy uh and then you get to wander around in whispering stacks full of nightmare books to try to take over your mind it's great that's kind of yes yeah yeah it's awesome and this uh article is one of the first sort of drop-in locations that we have done in arcadia which means that there's creatures and adventure hooks and magic items and then there's a map for this place but it's not exactly an adventure right you you've provided the tools for people to have an adventure both in the chained library and also around events that might happen within the chain library and of course the chain library is not just a place it's also this organization that collects these books and keeps them locked up for the good of the world uh probably um and so what was it like putting all of this together what was your approach to writing this so it's kind of different to my usual approach because this started out as just a set of visuals that i wanted to include um the image that oh no i can't remember the artist's name someone please please please fill it in the artist took you that incredible shot of uh the double doors in the cliff the entrance to the library that was good actually where i started out right and she just reached right into my brain and plucked that out with no direction incredibly talented person definitely a wizard definitely suspicious um but it started with that in the image of the eyeless guardians who are these kind of bound celestial beings who are the only things that can be trusted around these awful corrupt books and you know what okay fine swashbuckling book buyers this may be a trope that i come back to more often than i should and it seems like a great place to wedge them in so i guess like those are all of my favorite influences like a little bit metal a little bit swashbuckling and something that will look cool yeah that's awesome so uh faizal is the the artist who uh put together that image of the library doors um but tell me about other things that you have put swashbuckling book buyers in uh i've been putting swashbuckling book buyers in my campaigns for a very very long time um the origin of the chained library as an organization is something that i tried out in a home game about four or five years ago couldn't really get the players to bite on so here it is unleashed for thousands of people i just think there is nothing more exciting and more fantasy than raffle style jewel thieves who are after something a little bit more magical and a little bit more exciting than a ring or a brooch and what's more exciting than magic exactly exactly and this is one of those things that i think you know this organization and this location could both be a help to players or a hindrance to players gms have a lot of flexibility when they are using this uh and i think that in many ways that opens up the design right um but it also then you have to get specific sort of with the different ways that it can be used to help gm's use it and and all that kind of stuff and i think this was one of those articles where you and i were going back and forth and it was like uh you know what i think i really like this could we have more could we have more could we have more and we just kept asking you for more and more words uh as we were going oh good good is there anything that you didn't get to write for the change library that you wish you could have included oh i mean more of catalogue i think we only managed to get about three of the scary books in there um from the relatively safe to the one that rewrites history at the cost of your rational brain please use it please please use it and tell me on twitter when you do i have to yeah that's that kind of stuff is the best dangerous cults full of plot hooks i mean if you gave me half a chance i would have filled out the entire catalogue of the library i guess i would have loved to throw in just a couple of example encounters outside of the library as well just to show people in real terms the ways you can use the library as both friend info sometimes potentially both in the same scenario yeah yeah that's great so what is it do you think uh specifically about books uh in fantasy world that is evocative and interesting [Music] a lot of fantasy turns on history right what you know what you don't know um how you interact like you'll find centuries millennia old grudges and feuds and you know the writings of mad scholars who go back to the dawn of time or of the worship of dead gods all of that you find in the pages of books so a room full of books is your access to like every type of fantasy story that you could tell and of course books of where we as players find our magic in real life so if you say books to a fantasy note it's like automatically yes this is where the good [ __ ] is so yeah i think it's like interconnection of like in-world in fiction history and magic and secrets and also the weight that all players immediately place on them yeah and you mentioned the book that rewrites reality that you can open up a page and you know smudge some words and all of a sudden that part of reality no longer exists or that event no longer happened in history and one of the things that uh that what internally right when editors would see this or play testers there were two reactions one that was like that is [ __ ] awesome and i love it and then there was the reaction of oh god i would never give this to anyone uh what would you say to people who who are like oh i don't know i want to use this but i don't know how i'm scared of what it might mean to give put this in the hands of my players i think a very wise person once told me the bad decision is the best decision when you give players a tool that you can't predict how they'll use that's where you hand the story over to them and they will do something that's far more awesome than you ever considered if you've ever enjoyed twisting a wish spell this is exactly the same thing but more so if you find your players have done something that you absolutely can't handle you can build in not rewrites you should never like unwind something that a player has done but you can build in cool complications that throw the story forward in a different direction maybe even bring it back to where you wanted the plot to go in the end don't tell any players or you can just just write the wave sometimes please surprise you in a good way it what you're doing is you're giving the players the tools to almost you're giving the most like dm tools right and that puts you on this uniquely improvisational footing right where suddenly you don't know what the players are going to do to your world are they going to rewrite the history of your world well now i got to make something up and that's you know that's a great opportunity for improvisation right i don't know what's going to happen i'm going to have to be creative and uh i think i love that stuff i think that's a huge part of the juice for me as a dungeon master yeah and i often go ahead cat i was gonna say it helps that i'm a dm who might have a lot of the lore in their head but hasn't written it down anywhere so for me if the players want to fill in and do some of that world building that's a huge bonus to me [Laughter] exactly it's true it's true well and often right what's the worst thing that can happen in a fantasy game when you give them those tools is uh you might have to have an above the board conversation where you say uh oh i made a mistake uh you know it's it's not like you're actually giving them a book to rewrite real reality which i would never give to my friends who i play d d with um you know i mean worst case scenario is you can always punt and say that's an awesome idea i have no idea what happens next see you in a couple of weeks after i figure it out exactly yeah you've reached the end of the world um construction underway yeah construction is that a universal dm trope because i guarantee you that uh that we did that in the 80s you have reached the wall that where there's a sign that says under construction check back later i definitely picked it up in the 90s from a guy who'd been playing since the 70s so yes so cats i met you uh several years ago and uh at the time you were sort of just beginning your design career um and i'm wondering if you could talk to us because obviously now you're you're full time in this uh you you made the leap um in uh in a shorter time certainly than i did to to being able to do stuff full-time and that sort of thing so let the people at home watching or at work wherever you may be watching this uh and tell us a little bit about your professional journey so to start with chat it's james's fault largely uh james and gene phoenix and elisa teague and all of the other cool dm's who are at d d in the castle which i went to and spent three days in yeah corporate job that was the only perk i ever got from it i got to go to d d in the castle um yeah i spent like three four days immersed in nothing but role play and i thought this is like this is what i have to do this is i'm happier than i've been in this corporate job for the last 10 years and i could see people with um doing it part-time and we're actually making it work as a side gig so honestly literally the second i left in the castle i started writing down ideas for subclasses and ideas for adventures that i had and just started sliding them gently onto the dm's guild to see if anyone would bite and surprisingly yes people do want to play a hack patron warlock they really do and then uh ashley warren launched uncaged like two months i think after i got back everybody should check that out please check that on cage check out all four volumes um there's so much good stuff in the second to fourth volumes that needs to be seen and read and played and just have joy taken in it to the extent volume one did and again then i was in uncaged and honestly once you have engaged on your cv uh it's surprising how many people will like read emails from you i think yeah i mean what was it like in the castle is it my impression is it's like cold it's so good just like it it looks super uncomfortable i don't know why i don't have this a really primitive idea what it must be like inside the castle uh it had no wi-fi it was like the 15th century nice but no we went in like 32 degrees celsius heat which i don't know is maybe something like high 80s low 90s fahrenheit so yeah the fact that it was just cold stone was a definite benefit nice that's cool i hadn't thought of that one side so it's basically hell he's right we have nothing terrifying well that sounds awesome to me yeah uh are there questions for cat matt oh yeah there's well first of all um there are a ton of people who love the chain library including people saying it is the best article so far in arcadia and i consider that high praise because we've had some really really astonishingly good articles um i had a question which is one of the first things you talked about kat was that you work on a lot of other horror games and it sounded like that's sort of where your heart lies what what what games i work on a lot of world of darkness games and i worked on uh onyx paths they they came from beyond the grave line jump start to appear soon it's really really fun hammer horror nonsense which is absolutely i love having her stuff that's great it's super fun um what else if i worked on what's on cult i don't think that's come out yet worked on graphics right which is oh yeah called with a k cult the the darkest of all role-playing games play it only with the people you trust most intimately with your life cult um and yeah aspire for grant howard and various other bits and pieces that i think haven't seen the light of day yet uh as a player oh as i was gonna say is there anything that you when you play or run d do you uh bring horror stuff into it and is there a way in which horror role playing is different in a game like d d as opposed to another rpg that's designed for it yes and no because what actually makes heartache is player buy-in um and i think that's what's that's what makes it hard in d sometimes it's just player expectations right you turn up expecting to be heroes and defeat the bad guy and um walk away into the dawn as the castle burns behind you or whatever um letting players improvise and letting players do some of the world building and make problems for themselves um is a really great tool that i found if you like turn directly to a player at your table and say what do you hear whispering in the shadows they will instantly create something that creeps out and other players at the table will respect that it's something that one of their peers made and not the dm and it's not something to laugh at and then you've got a room full of terrified very engaged players i was a huge fan of me anyway um what's the oh my god what's the one has the organization save in it um chill i was a huge fan of chill which is uh now now perhaps obscure but i liked it because it had a lot of the colicothulu stuff in it except you got to be heroic you're more like the ghostbusters and that's more like my style but i have also played um cthulhu isaiah nording says how would you use the chained library for a horror adventure and i'm i'm actually before cat responds i'm gonna say like let me tell you man like knowledge man was not meant to know is core to that lovecraft stuff and you can put all it's even like terry pratchett stuff like his libraries have mind-bending books in it that if you read will drive you insane and so i think you could easily use the chained library as a core hook for a horror game right where there is knowledge in there that has escaped or is trying to escape or that bad people want because it's going to remake the world but now with more tentacles i mean that sounds cool though the world doesn't have enough tentacles in it the world doesn't have enough tentacles uh so that was a question for you i apologize for answering a question somebody asked for you but if you have any insight into that please i would love to hear james's take on it as well because i think all three of us would say something slightly different and i think that's a testament to it being quite a versatile location so i would do it as obviously if you're gonna run horror always get your players buying find out what they're okay with check that they're okay with horror but i would do it as surprise horror so um act one introduce the change library end of act one destroy the champ library and at least some of its power into the world act two and act three try to survive in the horrible eldritch apocalypse that this is created end of actually try and stuff the book back into a pocket dimension we can't do any harm um that's the most obvious action horror way that i would do it but i think there are also lots of other more subtle ways i i gotta say like for people watching in chat what cat just did where they broke down basically it sounds like almost multiple campaigns but using an act-based structure that that made my heart grow several sizes larger because i think i think that i should probably do a video on the act based structure and how useful it is for dungeon masters right because it helps you kind of uh without having to do too much work it helps you understand where your adventure or your campaign is gonna go where i don't need to do much work on this i understand the act based structure anyway sorry yes james how would you choose great i was gonna say going back to what we talked about earlier about players destroying your world building and your plot if you've built in acts you've actually got natural break points where you can stop and collect what you're doing and kind of rebuild taking into account all of the weird stuff they did that you weren't expecting yeah absolutely yeah it's incredibly useful it's incredibly useful outline and it lets you have these like pivot points where you're like well i know what's supposed to happen in act two because act two is where you know uh the drama escalates for instance but i don't know what the players are gonna do in act one so i don't actually have that much fleshed out detail-wise i don't need to and the between act one and act two is where we stop for a second and i figure out okay how do i build this out based on what the players just did anyway yes spoken like a true writer cat exactly we're i think are we scheduled for like 20 minutes per person because uh derrick is ready but i got a lot of questions i want to ask let's see hang on a second yeah we got 30 per 30 minutes okay cool okay uh by the way uh willie abel is in chat and said that the chain library is so so good heart well he likes it well he's cool and he likes my stuff i would like to give a little tease for something uh involving cat and hearts [ __ ] i want to talk about the heist i want to talk about the uh yeah that's the most spooky magic libraries you let me do it again man yeah that's true that's true yes yes i yeah so james please lead the way yeah well so uh cat is you if you are fans of the chain of akron you may know about the heist that is coming up the heist adventure and uh well we thought it would be great to uh to bring it to the people uh matt wanted everybody else to be able to play the heist as well um and so uh we hired someone who is an expert in spooky buildings uh in fact two someones who are experts in spooky places uh so uh cat and their partner lore uh are both going to be uh in fact have for over a month now been cranking on the heist i believe that is so for people who don't know i think we talked about this a little bit in the chat before the chat but like um i in my in my online uh streamed dnd game the chain of akron the players have to infiltrate the players have chosen to infiltrate the castle of the dead lady she's a vampire queen type character basically my version of strawd in in the cham in my game and i was just gonna use castle ravenloft and we had taken the map of castle ravenloft and we had scanned it and we were monkeying with it and i realized wait i don't own this i can put it in front of the players but i can't put it in front of you folks who are watching because it's not mine and that's where i kind of drew the line like ethically i'm like i don't want to bite somebody else's content that they own and then kind of promote it like it's almost mine and i was like maybe we should just do it for real like make an adventure that not only am i gonna run but that you folks can then ideally at some point in the future buy and play yourself and have a really cool castle to explore that has a whole bunch of dead people in it and cat and lore are the authors cat i hope that my i did a kind of quasi outline and i hope there wasn't anything in there that you felt like you had to take too seriously and that you felt you were free to kind of throw stuff out throw stuff out and if you had a better cooler idea use it oh it's so helpful though i sat and talked to laura about it the after we got the email about it and i thought okay the worst thing about castle raven loft is that you can't tell how it fits together and you can't navigate it we're going to break this castle into zones that are kind of mini regions within themselves and i looked at the outline that you said was like yes thank you exactly that that was a big part of it too was like i can't tell you how many hours i spent i mean probably literally like six or seven hours in a given week one week just trying to understand the layout of castle ravenloft and peop and i couldn't do it i was like i do not understand how these play obviously the author understands how this place fits together and they've done their best with the isometric map right which i respect a hundred percent but i and keep in mind this is a castle that has been mapped in every edition of d d and it's basically the same and i was going to the other maps nope that didn't help somebody built it in minecraft on purpose so that other dms could fly around inside it and figure out how it works in my life and i was like i was like i was like that's cool but wouldn't it be better if you could just understand how this castle works right like i would would it be better if you didn't have to build it in minecraft just to understand it in three dimensions so i'm super looking forward to that um yeah so we i am especially after having heard about your uh love for horror in the genre in in the rpg category now i'm super interested to see where this goes you talked about how important in horror it is to get a buy-in from your players and when we're talking about horror horror is by definition it is psychological right and and that is not a really typically a component of dnd games you're just going to kick down the door and you know probably kill whatever's on the other side and so once you get into a game that is about scaring people that comes in lots of different flavors and you might inadvertently in your zeal you might cross a line and so you gotta before before you start to play a horror game you gotta sit down with your players or email them or whatever in discord is comfortable for you and make sure you understand what they're comfortable with and let them know kind of in broad strokes what you're thinking about because you don't wanna you don't wanna you don't wanna actually make somebody unhappy you know making somebody uncomfortable to scare them is one thing but making somebody literally unhappy that's no bueno you know what some of the things i've slapped content warnings on and not actually the scary things but just some of this like factually historical things yeah um like the really uncomfortable anthropological museum that i've wedged in there that that's definitely something that you need to discuss with your place up front yeah but if you're a horror gm you also need to be like the world's best most active listener because you know this you've been running games on stream for years but people in chat who haven't been running games on stream for years if players are like engaged in the moment they won't tell you if they feel bad you have to figure it out and you have to be willing to be the one to go okay this isn't working let's pause for a second even if you just do a little thumbs up around the table and check in with everybody because they will push forward for the sake of other players and then afterwards they'll like have to leave the room and yeah you may not find out that they had a bad time one of the most important skills that a game master needs and i don't know how you teach this is something you develop over time is listening to the things the players don't say it's reading between the lines and in fact we're talking about like restructuring the physical layout of our streaming setup so that i as the gm do not have players at my immediate left and right who are in my peripheral vision right it's like no no i need to be able to see the entire party at once because i need to be able to read the party i need to be able to look up and see how people are doing you know thumbs up thumbs down without them even realizing i'm doing it that is a critical critical skill so tell me something online yeah well yeah no absolutely yeah and yeah and it can super backfire um yeah even experienced uh paul herman says even experienced dms can fail at that every mistake i've ever made i have it in me to make again uh tell us something cool about the heist so i will let law keep their own secrets although i know that they've made some absolutely amazing things they've been working on the castle catacombs and it's just jam-packed full of full of nightmare fuel i would say but i have talking about player buy-in i've made a room where the players can befriend the confessions and secrets that have been laid to rest in the church of saint nero the moment take them with them or be haunted by them for the duration of their stay in the castle and that is amazing if they're the type to go hunting for a little bit of extra edge they can provide one of their own if they're happy oh my god i can't wait to run this this is gonna be so cool this is gonna be cool thousands of people are gonna get to see this it's going to be awesome i can't wait this is kind of exciting yeah this is going to be awesome uh absolutely i think jerry is telling us that uh our next guest is ready yes so before we go kat where can people find you and all the cool stuff that you're working on uh the best thing is to follow me on twitter where i am at perpetualgloom um you can also check out my indie games on ichio itch dot io slash perpetual gloom i think we'll get you there or search kat evans on the dm's guild and find a bunch of wacky fun zany all called horror stuff including a gothic earth adventure based on the song jolene which is fun for all making sure you didn't forget something what was that comment i don't know what was that comment also dreadful realms on game found also dreadful realms on game found the kickstarter that laura and i did at the end of last year which you can back now by googling game found super awesome realms yes i am a backer of course you are james you're the best uh all right cat well thank you so much for joining us uh and i think we're gonna say goodbye and we'll bring on derek bye cat whoa that was fast bye cat it's dead eric awesome hello guys can you guys hear me yes yes can you hear us awesome yes perfectly thanks perfect perfect we're so excited to have you here yeah yeah so derek you are the author and also the cartographer in our on the road encounters article in arcadia 4. and we're definitely going to talk a lot about that but first take me back because you also do rpg stuff full time um so how did you how did you get into doing all of that well that's that's a long story but if we go back like four years i was at a point where i was an english teacher here in mexico and i was always curious about websites and doing stuff on the internet but i had never done it before so i decided to buy a domain and start a website and it was either gonna be something about ttrpgs or science because those are just two things that i like a lot i chose um dnd so i started my blog and i at first i was just like uh writing recaps of my games and like writing tips and then one day like i was researching on marketing and i found something that well in hindsight it seems obvious that if you add images it has like a hundred percent more traction so i always drew maps on on uh on a grid on grid paper and i just like took photos of those and posted where on the blog and then i posted this and read it and then one day someone makes a comment it's like hey um do you have a patreon or something because because this these marks are looking good and i didn't know what that was so i go there and i see other people making money out of this and i mean it was just a hobby it was a revelation at the moment i was like man these people are making money so i opened up the patreon page and it started getting traction in like five or six months for what i leave my job and start doing this full time because it worked it totally worked that's amazing it's awesome so you're living the dream yeah in a way i am well with at first i was only doing like illustrations and i wasn't like super into it i learned to do photoshop and got a drawing tablet and everything and then um i started to invest time in improving my writing because i mean i already knew english but i didn't know how to write properly uh and now that now that's what i do i write adventures and i make maps that go with them most of them are dungeons or interior like indoors locations uh some of them are like on the road which is what i did for arcadia for arcadia magazine right so you are you self-taught when it comes to cartography you you nobody taught you how to draw maps you did that on your own because it is incredible what you do thank you james um yes i i thought myself like i've been like the forever gm for my group for like 20 years so i've been like like if you if you are on the same page you've been doing maps for as long as i am and uh but but when i when i saw the money coming that's when i that's when i when i told myself you know what there you have to invest in this so i i researched a lot i i learned how to use photoshop and and the tablet and everything and i i think that i've always been very open about hearing other people's criticism and when you post stuff on reddit you get a lot of that and i learned i learned a lot from from a lot of comments somewhere constructive others not so much but i learned either way that's pretty pretty good for reddit to get some constructive criticism uh and and and to be able to take it and everything like that is huge uh and obviously your adventures too that go along with these maps is incredible i know you said you've been a forever gm for 20 years i have two and my maps have not gotten any better from the time that i started so you you really have some uh some special talent so what was it that made you want to write on the road encounters right these are drop-in encounters that you can drop into like a game when your party is basically going from one place to the next one adventure to another um and and so why did you think like yeah this is something that i would like to pitch um i i think the main reason is because there's a niche for it um like you see tons of uh products about adventures like full-fledged adventures campaigns and stuff and sometimes you just need something that's gonna happen on the road that's not gonna take like even half a session but that's interesting enough that's gonna pull the plot in that direction just for like an hour and i think it um i think this guy these kind of encounters are very useful to the world build like yeah like you can do a lot of building on like on a big campaign or something but when you get on the road and then you get to have a like a small chit chat conversation with an npc that's not important for the plot uh then then you get to learn some like just interesting bits of the world building that are not relevant to the plot i think that when an adventure is like a hundred percent focused on the plot um somehow it loses tension um because it i guess it's a kind of like great road railroading when everything is about the plot it's cool to see some things that are not about blood but that teach you something about how people live in the world or what their customs are what they believe what the local laws are or their consequences yeah like the um it gives the players like especially i think um the last of your uh on the road encounters is the cartographer which is super cool and these these encounters give the players a chance to express their character just be their character in an encounter that doesn't have combat in it that or or if it does have combat in it there are ways to negotiate and stuff like that and that is super important to give the players a chance to inhabit their characters outside the context of rolling dice and trying to solve puzzles yeah i've also always thought it's really important to have some options for resolution that are not combat which is something i try to do i think most of them have an option for um avoiding uh like drawing swords and killing stuff yeah yeah i know right the uh the first thing i remember reading about the the cobalt encounter where um where you had like yeah well you know if the if the players pay this toll to these kobolds who have taken over a toll house they can just walk on by if they're that kind of you know if they're that kind of group that doesn't want to see like what's going on here or why is anything amiss they can pay the toll and keep going and i thought that's so cool right and obviously that's what the kobolds want that's the scam that they have set up is that yeah we're the toll house now um and you you can pay to us but then you had this you know but as the adventures go away they might hear people crying for help in the guard house and so now it's not just ignoring it now you're ignoring cries for help too right and it puts them in these interesting complicated moral situations that like that happens in criminally fate tonight and that happens in the the duel um do you like that sort of thing putting players in difficult situations yes i do um but i've i found that my players often put their own safety above that of others so in like for example in the tall house encounter like they may hear the cries for help and decide you know what let's just go to the next town and report this we're not doing anything enough it's not our problem yeah yeah it's not well it's not a problem but they're still going to report it or maybe they don't even do that i don't know um we're playing a a game that has higher stakes so taking on too much problems may mean uh lethal consequences in our particular game so choosing to help these people may maybe be counterproductive that's my cat sorry what is going on that's great this is a friendly stream 100 um more ways than one so you we were just talking about this with kat this was another article that uh you had sent to us and i was like oh this is cool let's add some more and then you added more and then we sent it to play testers and the play testers were like we would like more complications we'd like to know how to make home alone style traps in grimly fate tonight and we'd like to know you know like have this cartographer maybe have something else going on all that kind of thing um what was it like getting sort of the play test feedback and going through the revision process i can say that's certainly interesting my operation is a two people company so we mostly don't have time for play testing or the resources to do it so i i guess it was the first time that i got feedback from actual players we did if i remember correctly two rounds of play testing and i don't know what to say really it was very interesting to see people's feedback like we we write stuff and we try to accommodate for a variety of options um we cannot account for everything or else we would be writing like a 500 pages book for like a single adventure um but the up what they were interested in was very interesting for me because sometimes i feel like people want like a i don't know like the way i think people are going to solve a situation is is personal to me people think in very different ways and like i tried to account for things but uh when i saw that they wanted more complications more ways to use the stuff to make like you said home alone style traps and stuff um i don't know it was i i guess the word is eye opening because people are very creative and i consider myself a creative person but there is no limit to creativity yeah yeah it was really interesting because i i definitely wanted to in talking to the testers right keep that openness and keep that you can approach these problems in many different ways mentality about a lot of the encounters um but they were they were sort of pushing back and saying that's great but if we do that we need to know like we need to cover these scenarios that are sort of most case and i it would help us as gm's run these if we had a little more information about you know this which we see is the most common scenario or that kind of thing or it would help us if we could have some sort of plot twist optional plot twist we could throw in here to spice it up to make it different right um and that was really uh that was a good push and pull between the testers and i and then obviously you were also uh at the very end of that poll right it's it's your call as the author what goes into the article and what doesn't um yes and that's very appreciated though i think we included everything didn't we you did you did include everything yeah yeah every every note that was passed you were like sounds good let's do it uh so that was really great um so you also uh you just had uh your work published by wizards of the coast earlier this year right uh so you want to talk about candle peeps yeah yeah yeah well i can say that because this was all online because of the pandemic and everything at times it felt like the most elaborate april's false joke someone would pull on me like because like someone so like one day like last year someone contacts me and it's like do you want to write for wizards i'm like well and yes started sending me paperwork and contracts and everything and it locked it all looked legit but since i never had like at least like a video call with someone it was all on mail and i wrote and said i sent stuff and they sent it back but like i didn't know like i didn't even know the name of the book because they keep it super secret i didn't know the names of anyone else involved until until the cover was leaked uh so it was super crazy like i didn't know anything like i remember that the cover was i think on january and it was until then that i knew how many people were involved and who else was involved in like even the name of the book i didn't know so it was at times surreal it was a big honor to be published by uh by wizards of the coast and i think the end product is pretty good i'm pretty satisfied with it yeah so you talked about running a a bit more of like a high-stakes uh kind of game that i think from following on twitter i know is like more lethal right um that uh the game you're running now it's it's easier to die in in combat right um how do you think that changes the game uh aside from players you know being more willing to walk by kobolds in a guard house it requires it requires buy-in from the players like at least they should agree we're playing that kind of game in our our our two groups do um we're not playing the nd5e we're actually playing dxtnd the yeah it's old school essentials which uh which you recommended to me james the other day uh we're playing that and i mean it's is medieval fantasy it's like the same thing but i think the way it changes the game what i've seen like i i learned to play with third edition so this is all new to me but the main difference i've seen is that since they know everything could go south like in seconds and there could be little consequences players are playing smarter they are they are smarting up they are being more cautious it's it's becoming a part of the game so when they do choose to engage in combat um it's because they're trying to get some treasure or something because we're we're doing gold for xp uh so they oh yeah they gave me old cool gold for fb yes yeah exactly so dungeons are usually pretty big usually they have not explored them like a hundred percent because it's dangerous so they gauge the risk they choose how deep they want to go and once they have like enough gold or valuables uh it comes to a point where they say you know what let's bounce out let's go back to town level up and maybe maybe maybe we'll come back and explore more or maybe you just go on another adventure but they're playing smarter and what i found is uh even though we're using safe versus dye effects even even even when we're doing that because they are being so cautious uh we haven't had that many lethalities i actually uh we've only lost one pc in each group and they're level four already so it's it's not that it is so lethal but they're playing more cautious yeah yeah i played in a a game like that for three years and or we're still going and it is it's a totally different experience because you you don't charge headlong into combat uh you know it's it's very much more you you pick those moments and you're calculated about them uh and uh you're worried you know you got the 10-foot pull out and you're you're touching the full floor in front of you um to to see where those uh those pressure plates and stuff are so yeah it's very interesting i missed that era of gaming where um i mean i love modern heroic gaming but i definitely missed that that era of gaming where you measured your project you measured your progress by how many rooms you had cleared tonight yeah yeah yeah i thought it was so inspiring that i wrote a hack for the dungeon turn exploration rules and and i also published it on the dm's guild it's kind of for 5e though i have not played tested it with 5v that much but i think it works what's it called it's called dungeon crawling with style on the dm skills nice so it includes a an encumbrance system that's easier to track than the one we have in 5e and also the the 10 minute turn exploration mechanic from from bx um though i'm not sure if it matches the the style of 5v like you said matt it's more like heroic um i don't know like heroic fantasy i don't know if the if the uh the resource managing mechanic matches all that much or if people even want to like it but i don't know i wrote in it's there it's it's it's got the uh the silver medal so some people have bought it i don't know not many not many people review stuff so i don't know what people think about it nice that's awesome is this a product that's available on it must be on the dms guild right it's on the dm's guild dungeon crawling with style it's like two bucks nice so you could go check it out so people should check that out i mean yeah i can go wrong with two bucks how can you go wrong just just not even in the box because i yeah no not even two bucks because i left the like you you can see like uh like a mini view of the product and i left most of it you can read it without buying it even there you go just like picking it up again yeah yeah matt what is uh what does chat have for derek well zombie food uh elite just said am buying right now so uh hopefully hopefully you get some hopefully get some juice derek um we had a whole bunch of people who were like wait derek is elven tower i love elvin tower stuff paul l said you were super helpful and responsive when i reached out to you with questions thanks for the amazing maps and thanks for your humility that is that is super cool um someone in chat i'm gonna do my best here please be patient somebody in chat whose name i believe would be pronounced guillermo juan manuel ortiz mourinho says there he is it's my friend derek being a superstar he's one of the players in one in our cursive strat game he's one of my players awesome that's awesome uh pesto enthusiast who is uh one of our mods and also he is our lead tester said is uh i actually i actually i love this name but i don't know how to pre i actually don't know how you pronounce it out loud um the is the cartographer secretly you you mean the cartographer in the airplane yeah yeah from the uh yeah i guess that's me i had a i had a question and a lot of people uh in chat said some variation of buenos dias which i thought was really cool um so most most of the um encounters there most of the encounters are i would describe them as being relatively low level right there are a couple there's like the cartographer which is good for any level can you imagine a sequel to this article that would be uh of a similar style but would be higher level content or do you think of do you think of that kind of encounter the on the road encounter as being something that is primarily relevant for low-level players and eventually they're teleporting around you don't need that i guess i agree with what you last said um i think it's primarily important for low level i mean if if you're playing 5v at some point you just like teleporting all over the place yeah and like traveling with a caravan with two horses it's not viable right um maybe in a in a low magic game you can you just still travel on a caravan even on high level uh then again yes i wonder if you could do something where like you're you're this is a this is an on the road encounter for higher level characters because uh some evil wizard or ancient artifact has has caused your teleport spell to take a detour and you end up in this effectively on the road encounter even though you're relatively high level i don't know i don't know if that's reasonable but i think that would be an interesting challenge you know what i i think you just you just hit the nail like if we're doing this for high level then we have to create complications for high level forms of travel like gates going haywire and moving somewhere you didn't want to go teleporting teleport going wrong or what else like like if you're doing like an extra astral jaunt or something and you get to the wrong plane or something like that okay and it can just be a short encounter that has some role playing in it and maybe a maybe a puzzle or something and the goal is how do we get back to where we were trying to go in the first place right and it could just be a really memorable flavorable in a flavorful encounter i think that would be really cool um yeah that's awesome uh oh also by the way derek i noticed that you are a man of taste such as myself and i saw you have uh jodorowsky's the ankle on your shelf in the background i thought that was super cool i've always been a fan of uh alejandrovsky's work i don't think oh really that's cool i saw some game books back there that's awesome um what other stuff are you working on derek that folks might be interested in well the stuff that exists and that i'm working on is all on our patreon page um like if people subscribe they get instant access to like like 400 maps and adventures it's a it's a lot of stuff in the past we were doing individual um like individual maps each with an adventure each of those adventures like two thousand three thousand words long but starting this year on february now we're packing like a ton of maps in larger adventures and we're we're publishing three a month each are like seven to eight thousand words uh and what we're focusing on is these maps are great [ __ ] i'm gonna back this right thanks for the recommendation so what we're doing is uh i've been i've been reading lots of adventures from old school games and the adventures we're writing are for 5e though i'm leaving all the rules stuff to the minimum so that we focus on the lore and the consequences and what i'm what i'm trying to do is like doing uh adventures that have um i don't know how to describe it usually what i say is that plots that do not always end well like do not have happy endings like even if the adventure like advent the adventurers get to to a situation where everything is already so messed up that they can fix some things but there are some things that are unfixable that have real consequences like i don't like um like cookie cutter adventures where where at the end everyone's happy usually the adventurers trying to solve like trying to solve the the plot they create some like unintended consequences or maybe they kill the bad guy but the bad guy's family are not bad people and they come and say why did you kill my dad or something like that um or like tragedies that already happened and they have to deal with them so that's what we've been trying to do we've been investing in art like we do the maps but now we're doing like cool cool covers and cool interior art we're working on layout it's a small operation but we're doing our best yeah you keep saying yeah your your maps are incredible and you keep saying we you mentioned you're a two-person company who's the other person in your company the other person is my brother he works like like on the backstage is like on tour you can find him as arthur ruiz um he's my brother like he joined the operation on february when we started doing like longer more complicated to do adventures so with like i do the illustrations we split the writing i do layout i do the marketing he he manages the stores because it's it's just it's a ton of stuff we have to upload the drive through and the dm's guild and every upload takes time so he's working with that and since he joined the project we're also um publishing all the adventures on roll 20 all with uh dynamic light like so all our maps have dynamic light and tokens and everything if you buy them oh that's cool oh cool awesome yeah it's ready to go it's cool because there's a lot of a lot of people who are playing online and like like i mean you can buy the pdf on drive through if if that's uh how you play or you can buy it on roll20 and it's got all the handouts and the maps with dynamic light and everything so i will say that having just started using fantasy grounds dynamic lighting i found it um obviously go go check it out on roll20 because the dynamic lighting is built in world 20 seems incredibly feature rich but as a native fantasy grounds user i have found it very easy to take a map and just draw the line of sight stuff on it it takes you know three minutes it's pretty straightforward so even if it's not baked in you can still use it in at least fantasy grounds who is one of your players says now you're publishing in spanish as well that is super cool what what is the market like for role-playing content in spanish uh is there enough of it should there be more of it i i can answer that question with a single word it is small yeah it is small what like i had i had like an interview podcast like three months ago with some like mexican youtubers in the rpg space and they were talking about this about how there's so little stuff in spanish so i got inspired and we have published i believe three of our modules we translated them locally to spanish and we were selling them on drive-through and our patreon and roll 20 and we're about to publish a fourth one but i can say um it's low it's really slow however um i can see the the rpg scene growing in latin america as of late it always happens like sure everything that happens in the u.s happens in mexico like four or five years later like uh interesting like it it goes for everything it goes for politics for for drama if it goes for hobbies it goes for everything so all the growth we've seen in the dtrpg scene in the last few years we're starting to see that in mexico so i'm trying to position my products like i'm trying to get it i appreciate the hustle that is cool that's what i'm trying to do but i don't know how much it's gonna grow but uh we're gonna be translating some stuff well i mean you'll be happy to hear that we often when my live streams we often get people asking us about translations into other languages so i think the demand is definitely growing so i think that's super cool yeah it's growing i don't think it's profitable as of yet but it's going to be uh i hope so that's yeah because i think it's a it's a hobby like the cultures are different so what types of games and what types of adventures different people might like is going to naturally change and evolve as it moves around the world but there's nothing about role-playing that anyone around the world shouldn't be able to get into people and people in latin america you know were you know a lot of my a lot of my favorite progressive rock bands are huge in latin america and if you're into progressive rock you're gonna love role-playing you're gonna love or whatever so yeah i i believe i think that's cool uh jerry is telling me that willie is ready go ahead oh yeah i was just gonna say to help if wizards of the coast released the game in spanish well i think that um that's a good question i think that there's um i i have my own pr my own i have my own suspicions about why that should be but um i don't basically i don't think they expected fifth edition to be as popular as it was because they didn't know stranger things and critical role were coming right so i think that they had a plan that was kind of smaller than as far as um production goes not as far as design goes but as far as production goes i think they were being a little bit more modest and so i wouldn't be surprised if we saw more translations or really any translations eventually i hope you hope so i hope it happens yeah yeah well derek our our next guest is ready but before we go shout out one more time where people can find you on the internet uh so that we are able so that everybody can go find you and throw money at your patreon and stuff thank you um okay before i go matt i'm a big fan of your work thanks for having me james right it's awesome uh that we finally have to have i quote face-to-face conversation uh exactly yeah yeah i hope we get a chance to work again together later on um now about the same the shameless self promo you can find our stuff on twitter at elventower and you can if like you can help uh our stuff on patreon it's patreon slash alvin tower it's just the same it's just elven tower everywhere like the blog facebook everything and um you can also find our stuff on drive crew like some people don't like patreon so you can buy stuff directly either on roll 20 or drive through but i personally think the best option like like best bang for the buck is patreon and i appreciate uh some some people have already subscribed during the live stream i appreciate it wholeheartedly thank you me i subscribed yes you did thank you so much no well because somebody who just started running a new campaign online using a virtual tabletop um i think the ecology of like maps and modules online is incredibly robust like your maps look great so more is always but the thing with maps is more is always better and you get inspired like i i don't know i'm gonna the adventure that i am running right now i started by just grabbing a bunch of really cool maps and then i figured out what the adventure was so that's something i love about playing online using a virtual tabletop so i strongly encourage folks to check out elven tower on patreon absolutely absolutely yeah yeah your work is incredible derek so it has been awesome to have you and uh hopefully we'll see you again soon how's it going willie oh hey i really hope that we all get with that all of the arcadia authors really i hope we all get a chance to get together at a convention sometime and have like like an arcadia party wouldn't that be cool because everybody that works for arcadia just seems so cool everybody that writes for arcadia is cooler than i am and i want to hang out with cool people so no cool tracks cool you're the reason why we're all here right or i don't know about that but you too yeah i think james is yeah yeah fate brought us together i am a victim here as much as anybody else [Laughter] uh willie it's so good to have you back um you wrote swimming through santa see more mounted adventuring here for us for arcadia for uh people probably remember you from arcadia one and our interview back when our kd1 dropped and you wrote jumping on mounted combat but if they don't give us a quick give us the quick spiel who is willie willy is the willy boo at the willy boo fun posting online and usually having a good time uh more often than not we're making weird stuff uh happen for d so um usually that involves clouds or frogs or any other sort of weird systems that we can come up with yeah yeah and apps like in between arcadia one and four you've had some weird stuff come out uh that i definitely want to talk about as well build aware workshop definitely one of those what a great idea what a great idea yo oh go ahead so leon came up with the name for build aware workshop just for the record that that was all on leon um i i just went and kind of built up whatever we already had and make it into a full book so that's awesome well leon who was also an arcadia one and we'll be getting some more uh leon action in arcadia 5 which is very exciting um so i'm excited about that uh but so and and you often work hand in hand with leon so uh and we're gonna get to the difference between aware octopus and aware squid uh at some point in this conversation yeah just as a heads up to you that that question is coming but in the meantime let's talk about more mounted adventuring um obviously this one swimming through sand to sea we've got borrowers we've got swimmers um and we've got a bunch of magic items that help you take those swimming and burrowing companions into other environments and also take other mounts into swimming and burrowing environments um but but talk to me a little bit about why did we want to do this one why why was it important this is our first sequel arcadia sequel article that we've gotten that's right yeah uh why more mounts um because people wanted more mounts basically um i actually took a look at sort of our paper trail before coming onto this stream in particular and originally this article was basically all sea mounts um it was just sort of like a whole like marine themed sort of environment had a whole underwater cowboy sort of like cattle drive adventure attached to it and all that other stuff which is cool but it might not work for most tables i believe was the original concern um so i did an exercise like okay how do we work through sort of the logistical problems that come with underwater mounts and that just went into more of a general like what are the problems of having a mounts on an adventure more than just them possibly you know dying to a rogue fireball and what have you like getting up a ladder or taking a fish out of water um and they're coming with three different categories and that extended into sort of a series of magical items to fix those problems and from there i believe we generalized it to be a little bit more interesting so it's not just underwater mounts that we were introducing here we had underwater and land mounts um some more interesting sort of burrowing mounts as well um but we still kept the pun for the name so i was happy with that that's important and you uh throughout this process from from the pitch stage to publish you were like there is one mount that will be in this article come hell or high water uh and and why don't you talk a little bit uh about that mount uh what what was your like this mount must be in this article if we're going to do this now um so i was pretty stubborn about making sure we had this uh the axolotl um not the actual little axolotl my only contribution my only contribution to the arcadia issue is a footnote joke [Laughter] but i wanted something that was big it was approachable kind of like meaty you know kind of nice and calming presence but still had sort of like an effective use um in combat and out of combat and yeah i i love these little salamander dudes um they were originally called the megazolotl uh just getting the a out of the mega and making it into axolotl um but that didn't translate all that well so we just kind of like went with the other name and from there they just kind of stuck um but yeah i had a whole bunch of unique sort of interesting new creatures um lined up for this article but we kind of held them back kept a little bit more familiar um just things that people are familiar with would get excited for especially with the jewel and the bullet um in particular so but i want to make sure we had at least one uh new creature on board yeah absolutely and i think it sort of uh opens the door too for maybe uh getting a little more unique in the future and and that kind of thing so we've been talking a lot about monsters and and things like that i don't think it's any secret mcdm is is talking about a monster book uh i've seen matt talk about that on stream so hopefully that's gonna happen almost the only thing i know about it is we're gonna do it right yeah exactly exactly so hopefully um you know the plan would be to see some some more mounts and stuff like that in there as well uh but i do want to talk about your pun game uh because it's on point um i mean i think when i first showed this article to the testers uh like the conversation lit up and they were like have you read the different actions and traits that the the purple worm has like mauve the earth um uh for a purple worm it's just a freight yeah i mean a pun is short it's evocative and it works especially well in a monster stat block sort of environment like you kind of get the idea of what you're going for um especially bullet proof for the bullet um yeah that's like you you know immediately what you're getting out of this sort of bullet in fact actually most of the names for the bullet were kind of based on sort of armory and artillery um just kind of give you the idea of how to use this thing as a mount so i mean if if a stat block is fun to read the dm is more likely to use it and have fun with it and and it's not just puns right you've got a lot of evocative names um like at one point i think you had i had said to you like oh i see that the you know the axolotl is using constitution for its attacks we should probably call that out in the stat block so people don't know that so people know that that's intentional uh and so you created this ability called vim and vigor right um like you didn't just call it like constitution attack which is probably what i would have said or something right you you have these really evocative names that i think are great um so let's talk a little bit about uh the mounts that you did choose right we've got the axolotl we've got the chaol the boule and the purple worm um um let's see i i think the true and the bullet were both sort of suggested in our sort of uh discussions back and forth as just sort of like iconic creatures you might not necessarily see a tool all that often but it's a nice marine animal animal uh monster uh that could definitely shake up an adventure um especially because they're treasure hunters so like okay cool let's let's uh work into that let's kind of lean into those abilities a bit um the bullets i've had a lot of fun with uh engaging as a monster um especially in our princess of the apocalypse campaign i remember just kind of making that kind of flatten um my pcs a lot that was really cool uh so it was fun to actually play with a little more burrowing options there um but then we get over to the purple worm um james we have a history of really enjoying our worms and i wanted to find out clip that and take it out of context it's true yeah in my experience no one can resist the worm well and and we've got two we got two worms in here because we've got we've got the worm mount but then we bring in the omni mount talk to me and this was you were like yeah we've got to get omni mounts in this article uh and i was like i don't know what that is but i'm excited to find out so talk to me about that so by the end of this article we didn't necessarily have enough room for a full-on underwater cattle drive nor did it really make sense with the sort of options that we're introducing in here um so i was looking for more what are other functions that we can add alongside the mounts um in the first article we had the option to kind of like capture and tame your own beast and that was kind of cool some actions you can take like leaping off a mount and like these are fun things to use in conjunction with the mounted like blocks um so then i was thinking about what else can we do along those lines um considering the fact that we kind of had to reduce the purple worm into a baby to make them a little bit more accessible to more adventures um i wanted to stick in the worm sort of environment so it's like okay what if you did have a big worm that you could ride um and that kind of turned into more of a bus um for the record i learned that bus is short for omnibus um and that's very angry um but i told i stole that and kind of just attached it to mount now we have omni mounts which are just generally these huge monstrous vehicles that could be used on a societal level or just a legendary level like oh hey you have a new way of getting from place to place that isn't just limited to one rider you can have the whole party take on the omni mount um and yeah the the worm uh flocks kind of came hand in hand with the omni mount idea so yeah yeah absolutely and so that is all of the art in this article including um phlox his nick to spain who did the art uh the art for your first article he's a full-time mcdm employee now uh and just one of them congratulations i've ever worked with yeah we um jason the art director and i both worked with nick at turtle rock studios on a video game called evolve where he did a lot of uh monster creation and that's where his heart lies and nick's stuff the stuff that dude draws is the stuff i like like there's this weird synergy it's like that there's a certain kind of classic fantasy element to it but also there's a lot of whimsy and anyway sorry oh yeah no it's awesome comfortable yeah yeah yes um but that's probably one of the best parts about working on these articles too is sort of getting the art drop like oh that's what you went with the worm yes thank you yeah it looks like the illustration makes it look like a sleepy worm right like it's not like it doesn't mean yeah it's the only it's the only time i've seen a purple worm that isn't like being violent and aggressive and people love flocks uh they've like adopted him as a mascot basically which is really cool yeah it was like five minutes after arcadia dropped and people were like i would die for flocks yeah you know i must protect flocks and you were like you did read about flocks right you got you better be ready to die for flocks and a fun story about that illustration is uh when we got the layout there was some space on that page at the end and lars who uh you know is sort of in charge of all the production for arcadia uh he came to nick and said like nick you know you want to draw flocks right you know you want to draw and so that's how we ended up with art of flocks on that page um which is really great and nick a champion came in at the last minute um i do want to know so some people have been asking in the discord uh about one of your uh magic items which is called the bell of the extra stable staple um great great magic item you ring a bell opens up this extra planar portal um that you can go into and that's where you're keeping all of your various mounts inside um that they're within there there's a a spirit who takes care of uh the animals and that spirit looks like a bug bear and people were like what is the significance of the bug bear is there why why a bug bear why do we pick a bug where what's up with that and i was like i actually don't know so i was hoping you could enlighten people uh as i show my ignorance of like oh yeah i probably should have asked about that um so if you saw with the previous article uh rally at rashkar that adventure was sort of an orc goblinoid sort of hybrid civilization um i have a fondness for my goblinoids and i thought okay let's take something that's usually sort of a captain of this low-level mob and give them sort of a gardener vibe right um you have this ranch hand bug bear spirit that's in the middle of the stable and it's sort of an odd detail you don't expect it going in it preserves that sense of whimsy um especially when you're using this sort of item that is more just a sort of functional thing you kind of like oh hey i'm just gonna put my animals here and leave okay bye-bye um there's more flavor to it um but yeah no i i love my bug bear um ranch hand yeah i and all of these are are really cool magic items you know like some of them help your mounts swim or fly or move across the land when they they are swimmers or that kind of thing but the i think the most unique is the meld harness um which allows you to meld into the mount wearing it or your mount to meld into you um so that essentially you can become sort of one creature walking you know with with another creature inside of you uh and i have seen the internet uh start to talk about all the ways that they're gonna put this on their friends so that like you know like oh the rogue's really sneaky but i'm not so i will meld into the rogue when the rogue wears the melt harness or that kind of thing did you intend this when you uh when you when you came up with the male harness um i knew the consequences but i am still a foolish individual um in that regard um oh no we tried to make it so that it was still kind of fair um even if you were melded into another creature it wasn't gonna disrupt too much um so even if you were going to like exploit it in a way where you can kind of like put a bunch of your friends inside of you in a weird way and kind of walk across the town um even that's kind of an interesting story right you're harnessing you're harboring a criminal and you're trying to get across town without being spotted like you can still get a lot of really cool utility out of that um so i don't mind it as much yeah and because it's not like suddenly you you absorb the powers of your friends right your friend is pretty useless when they're they're riding along inside of you uh and that was sort of my point when when things like that were pointed out in play testing i was like yeah that just sounds awesome like that sounds like if i was a gm and somebody wanted to do that i'd be like hell yes please do it if you think about it it's sort of a meld into stone spell except the stone is you so yes meld into me that should be right yeah yeah yeah exactly oh that's awesome so i think there was an 80s one hit wonder i'll stop the world and meld into you right yes exactly yeah modern english uh they were they were all about flesh melting [Laughter] anyway listen i love your worm uh what does chat have to say uh william harris said master willie the mounts were my favorite uh james c says willie can you release the underwater cowboy adventure separately because i need to pay money for that and that led me to a question and i i and i this is a question from from me uh saying like a lot of your um there's a ongoing theme and a tone that to your stuff willie that i perceive as being very kind of western themed when are we going to see like a western themed adventure from you in arcadia at some point i think i i i'd be great unique ideas to play with um definitely more ground to cover with mounts i've been kind of putting hints and sort of like pieces strategically throughout my article so far to set up for a bigger sort of mount idea that i've been cooking up in particular that might also have a western flair to it um but i think once we're all said and done with all the unique sort of extra supplement uh like add-ons to dnd we could start playing around in my cowboy world um awesome i think we have a lot of fun with that um oh sorry have you played any like western themed rpgs um i want to i haven't really had a chance to um i turned mines off and delver into a western in fact i was gonna mention the fact that uh i turned uh the dragon that is in mines of vandelver into an old blue dragon named old shock ma um and i kind of like build into that sort of um grady sort of villainous well you don't want to mess with me partner sort of really win most of my work so is that it is it in your is it your um preference to layer western attitudes and tropes onto the existing kind of fantasy genre or are you interested in an actual like contemporary like 1860s 1880s uh american west style game is that is that do you have that in your locker or is it mostly fantasy um i am kind of indoctrinated by fantasies so that's where a lot of your strengths lie and taking those western things like applying it to fantasy kind of resonates with me very strongly but even if i were to take away the fantasy aspect and go into more of a realistic sort of setting i feel like i can get a lot of out of that and kind of yeah bring that back into fantasy too once i've experienced it sort of wholesale you know that's cool yeah well i recommend if you ever get a chance to play i don't know if it's still published i think now it's done with um savage worlds but oh gee deadlands was awesome definitely a ton of fun yeah it was a ton of fun it was impossible it's a great example for anybody who's interested in um how the writing writing and layout and language can further the themes of your game because like the table of weapons and how much damage they do which every rpg has in a dead lens it was the table was called hurtin thangs the whole the whole book was like that it was it was impossible even to read the book without role-playing being in a western which i i i took i thought was hugely inspiring so anyway yeah that's awesome almost digestive right is that the right word yeah yeah yeah it's almost yeah it's almost like you're reading a book from from the 1870s or whatever i thought um so brighton had a really interesting question that i'm going to try and summarize and synthesize do you think that having these mounts that um are especially adapted for other environments than the normal like land-based stuff that players are used to do you think that is going to mostly inspire players to go to those or dungeon masters to go to those environments or do do you see it as for adventures where you're already doing that here's this cool mountain you can use um definitely a bit of both um i think the latter is sort of like oh hey this is convenient um this option is fresh in my mind i can absolutely put this into my game that i'm running right now um there are def i've seen a number of seafaring adventures kind of come out while we were writing both um articles and facts um and keeping that in mind is definitely a very big possibility um for these mounts in particular but i mean you saw the flavor blocks that came with uh this article in particular they they are sparks that kind of inspire adventure right like the bullets are being written by these land or sand pirates um i could see a dm absolutely kind of running with that idea and kind of making a whole short story out of that too yeah probably that would happen more often i think well that's one of the things i like about your content is that i find that it is very strongly themed with lore and i find that when you've got really strong design and you marry it to really well themed lore it makes it easier for the dungeon master because now even if they don't like that specific take on the lore now they've got some nouns that they can wipe out and put their nouns in right and be like great all this work was already done whereas when it's just raw design and there's no theme and there's no flavor and there's no lore to it i think it's more work for the dungeon master so i i i appreciate that i think that stuff is super cool in addition to your rules you kind of have to sell it in a way you have to give them something to latch on to in addition to sort of the rule set that you're presenting to them otherwise it's it's a fancy machine that kind of sits in the corner yeah exactly and also that's that's one of the reasons that like when strongholds and followers came out one of the criticisms about it and there were some very valid criticisms of that book but one of the things that kind of made me go what was when people said um oh he put in the he put an adventure in here just to pad the word count and i was like like you gotta you can't just you can't just bust this stuff out especially especially something as crazy as strongholds and followers there's so many unique like um subsystems in there you need to show the dm how to use it right you need to show the dm how it is intended to be used and to me lore lore can go a long way in that direction without actually having to write an adventure because like you said you read these little uh nuggets of inspiration and you go ah now i know how i want to use this uh and it inspires it could inspire an entire adventure an entire kind of underwater adventure or underground and it's especially in a written sort of context too um words can be interpreted many different ways if you provide those extra bits of lore you kind of give them a little bit more context to work with context oh this is what they meant by this ability so yeah yep context is important in all things yeah and also do people think writing adventures is is easy like that's a great way to pad word count there are much better ways people had already paid for the book like it was kickstarter they had already paid for it so what would what would be the benefit of padding that meant less money for us what well there was no it was what's the i don't understand what padding there anyway anyway she should have put out a scene [ __ ] hard yeah correct yeah adventures are hard um because adventures are everything right their design and flavor and lore and plot and character and tone and theme and sometimes even like dialogue and stuff adventures are the hardest things i think that we do in this industry clancy craig says do you have any ideas what about raising an exotic extraordinary amount from infancy the classic the classic you find a dragon egg um ooh yeah no i've i've definitely made the mistake of letting a an adventurer have a dragon egg um letting that hatch and let them use that along with their adventures it's a lot of fun um but that was actually kind of something i was leaning into especially with the juvenile purple worm um in fact i had actually built out sort of a small system of how to make juvenile versions of larger creatures that kind of got cut out of this article in particular it's a little bit too crunchy to kind of wrap your heads around um but i wanted to make it in a way like oh hey yes purple worms are fearsome but people want purple worms so i want to give them that purple worm why don't you find a baby purple worm that could be cool like harness the power of that um even in the owl bear um sort of flavor block too they mentioned how owl bears raised from infancy become like valiant defenders of a territory if a little reckless but yeah like they're still they're still wild animals but um there is the influence of the the creatures that raise them willie this is your second time around in arcadia and your second time dealing with the testers were there any surprises this time from the play testers or was it pretty like you knew the ropes um i'm very much familiar with the procedure now i love working with the testers my biggest surprise was that it didn't seem like there was as much feedback this time around it felt like we kind of had a well-oiled machine by this point good that's that means the system works yeah yeah yeah well we definitely you know we we had because of the the tester feedback and and going back and forth on the first article this article was much i think far fewer revisions at every stage probably i would say right because the first time it was like what is this what are we doing here you know like like figuring out cracking that nut of mounts and everything took a while exactly well plus you were you were at the vanguard uh willie you were in the arcadia one so you were one of the you were sort of one of the guinea pigs of this process so i hope it was relative yeah you were literally the first arcadia draft that i got from anybody on any arcadia article ever i think it's the first one well it worked uh good good news we we the the great experiment works so the the the pressure's off now i guess i don't know write more what i like working with investors is kind of like finding sort of uh what they're looking for behind the feedback text that you kind of get back um i know james you do a little bit of translating for them but then i also read sort of the original text too and i try to like kind of get behind their sort of position where they were at when they were trying to deal with a certain mechanic or a certain system and understanding the underlying problems behind it i just enjoy the testing process in general so yeah yeah in general the way testing works is the testers go through the articles and uh write up their thoughts and and play stuff and uh and then i sort of it goes through me right i synthesize a lot of it because sometimes people have the same comment uh or their comment stems from the same issue or whatever and so i try to make it simple than for willy and i include testers often include their own suggestions for what they think would work i i don't want to send somebody a problem without a solution so i often include a thing and then say but it's but it's yours right so like often an author will either think of their own solution or will say well this is what i wanted that the fact that you feel this way about this is exactly how i wanted you to feel or or something along those lines or they'll say great uh you know i took one of these suggestions and this is what i did um so that's sort of the uh the very broad strokes way that we test at mcdm i think the test i think our testers are kind of our secret weapon because i absolutely i think i think it it say it this is just obviously my opinion obviously i would think this but i feel like um our stuff the the first time the audience sees our stuff it feels like the revised version like it feels like we already released the product once and it was out there and this is the revision right uh and to me that's that's huge it makes me you know mcdm is incredibly lucky to have the resources it has but i would love to see more mid-list publishers take testing more seriously yeah please do [Laughter] it's huge so we're almost out of time here willie but before we go let's talk buildaware workshop is out okay uh tell people what it is and then please tell me the difference between a where squid and aware octopus okay so uh turning back the clock maybe about three years ago we released the book the book of house right it was a splat book i had a whole bunch of different options in it but one of the things that we introduced in there was lycanthropic adventurous sort of a bigger subsystem for lycanthropy or sort of wear creature options for players um leona and i kind of sat on making that released a la carte like the rest of the other options in that book and never got a chance to do it until they decided oh hey we're going to release another raven lock book hey guess what um you have a fire underneath your ass get this book out now okay sure so we got to work we took uh the original rule set and we kind of turn it into a way where you can make your own lycanthropy options um so you aren't just stuck with whatever's in the book or any other sort of um expansions like the where raven is a part of curse of stride you can't even use that in the srd which is unfortunate but i digress um in media you have things such as the wear mole um in previous editions you have the wear mist which isn't necessarily a lycanthrope but like it sounds cool um in dexter's laboratory you have the where clown um so i want to give the player the option to make those things and give them a whole bunch of uh bestial features that they can kind of like build it out themselves to the point where it's still relatively balanced compared to those original lycanthropic adventure sort of options that we presented um but in the book we did have both a wear squid and a wear octopus as standard options for the player now the difference between a wear octopus and a wear squid is that the wear octopus is intelligent sneaks in through the shadows and grapples um their victims whereas the where squid wants to get away um they're the ones who get the inkjet that are very smashed not smashed very small and very fast um definitely a much different play style compared to a were octopus and having both i feel was very much enrichment of sort of this expanded lore of where creatures um so to speak also octopuses have have um tend to have tentacles and legs because two of the options two of the octopuses tentacles are specially adapted that they can use as legs to walk around the bottom of the ocean floor and they look very silly while doing it too they do it looks like it looks awesome yeah yeah there was a whole chart that was going around that included uh not everything is a tentacle some are suction cups some are arms uh i don't remember it off the top of my head but you can build aware that actually you know makes that honest um instead of just all of them being typical that's cool either um you can also use it for magical girl transformations common writer transformations like the rules are very robust for a variety of different flavors so that's awesome yeah absolutely yeah i think i think i sent you an email yeah yeah where can they get it um they can get it over at the dms guild underneath the word build aware workshop so i can find a link just right now and you should uh click on willy's name uh and you'll see all sorts of products that willie has created uh along with uh leon who wrote the workshop watches and something special coming in arcadia 5. um a lot of their work is done together can you give us some spoilers of what the uh what the upcoming arcadia 5 uh article is i mean if i tell you i might get cursed um that's that's foreboding yeah okay fair enough well i don't want to get cursed so yeah it might be like a like a very long term curse that maybe can't be cured by a remove curse spell i've seen i've seen some play tests sounds cool yeah that would be awesome that would be the worst thing ever let's hope it let's hope it comes out soon [Laughter] excellent excellent so uh other than the dms guild willie where can people find you um i'll give this feel one more time i am the willy boo at the willy boo usually fun posting online and having a good time you can find me on twitter at the willy boo although right now i've got my head down to the ground as i'm working through a few other things in the background um but that's usually where you can find me rambling on so awesome uh clown warning many clowns on on willie's twitter yeah content morning clowns willie it was great seeing you again thank you for your work arcadia it's fantastic yeah thanks buddy all right thank you jerry jerry jerry jerry bennett who is uh our director of uh audio video magic is the person responsible for making the stream happen all the technical behind-the-scenes stuff um we're all in a vmix call so uh he's managing scene transitions and stuff and jerry did the little uh name plate animations at the bottom and uh even from the very first time we did this i was blown away at how smooth it was and how easy it was for us on this end thanks to the work jerry's doing a bunch of people in chat are saying we love jerry all hail jerry jerry is kind of the least one of the least seen people uh behind the scenes at mcdm but one of the most important so hats off to jerry yeah you would have a hard time seeing a lot of the people you see on streams like this if it weren't for jerry so correct yeah absolutely thank you jerry yeah yeah uh man these are always so much fun uh thank you there's a lot of folks watching yeah yeah thank you man i hope you folks live and i hope folks watching the video on demand to get a kick out of this because i really um you know like on thursday night is our movie night and it's not at mcdm and it's not unusual for me to be up to like one in the morning and at one in the morning i'm not looking forward to waking up and having a deadline in the morning that i have to be up for right but every time we do this i'm i'm super juiced and i'm super glad we did it and it's always fun and this is often the first time i have seen these writers and designers in person you know a lot or i should say live you know visuals of them and it's always super cool they're all awesome we have there are amazing writers and designers out there in this space and ah we are just incredibly happy that we get to bring awareness of them to you folks you know we want more people to learn more about the third party content that's out there yeah absolutely and and it's great because some of these people like willie show up time and and time again when we like working with them and everything like that and obviously cats working on the heist too so being able to introduce these people who it's like and you'll probably see their work in other mcdm stuff is really great and rewarding as well yeah yeah yeah and i think that putting a face to the name when you're reading this stuff i think it's like it's like giving context i think it makes people just um they they're gonna like the writer's work more when they know who the writer is that's yeah so absolutely absolutely james thank you so much for doing this james is the architect of arcadia james is the person that makes sure so james is the person to make sure that we've got killer killer content in arcadia every month uh and we intend on continuing we've got i mean how far in the future are we working james so uh we are have articles all the way to arcadia 11 which would take us to the end of the year if we uh to have an arcadia each month so yeah and at some point we would love to do a hardcover best of arcadia we don't know when that's going to happen but also special thanks to another person that labors labor's long and hard behind the scenes which is lars lars is the arcadia producer lars is the person that makes sure all the articles all the art the layout any graphic design that's necessary um all gets scheduled and there's you know there's so many moving parts for arcadia as a whole figuring out which articles are next and making sure it all gets taken care of and managing all the testing is super important arcadia could not happen without lars working behind the scene so thank you very much lars one of my best friends yeah he's incredible yeah he's awesome lars is so good um and we just have such a crazy good team thanks to pesto uh pesto the best otesto yeah so pesto anna and uh and john uh certainly getting these these issues out and also then like notifying people that they're out has just been huge so um yeah one of these things one of these days i know that not not everybody is as um not everybody enjoys being on camera as much as i do uh but i would love to get all the folks at mcdm into a stream just for a live q a or something because honestly the amount of work it takes to get kingdoms and warfare and arcadia all done um and arcadia we're trying to get it done to a schedule you know kingdoms and warfare were trying to get it out soon and we have minis and a damn screen it's so much work and so much of it is behind the scenes and you folks never see it like just getting um the patreon stuff working getting the store working it's a pain in the butt and thank god i couldn't i could under no circumstance could i do even a tenth of this without this team i know i know right we just spent a lot of time talking to three authors but every so many other people's work went into just one issue of arcadia um yeah so it is it's incredible to uh to to see everybody's work here at mcdm and uh and yeah well and thank you matt a big part of the reason stuff gets out there is because you are a boss who has a direction and a vision and then you trust people to get it done which is really good too well yeah but you're also there when you're trusting people to get it done that didn't work so it's just purely purely pragmatic but also a special thanks to grace chung who's another one of our staff artists was the uh and she came you know somewhat at the last minute grace did this is a story you folks don't know but some somewhat at the last minute grace did this cover for arcadia and it's one of the most popular covers we've done people love it and they want to know more about that character so yeah yeah yeah i know that might be a future arcadia issue like or maybe maybe maybe some fiction you know and uh and glader is correct also special thanks to hannah and jen thanks to our editor and our layout artist um you know i think our stuff is some of the best edited stuff out there oh yeah absolutely and hannah's the best in the biz and i also like it you know arcadia is something that we can experiment with so we we may see a different take on the layout in the future we don't have any plans for that right now but when i open up arcadia and i look at the layout i just think it's beautiful it's not just beautiful it's tasteful it's easy to read it's it's thematically well designed the fonts and the header choices and everything so good so yeah i think um everybody who worked on arcadia should be super [ __ ] proud yeah yeah absolutely it's uh it's awesome the whole team is great so uh yeah we've got some cool stuff coming uh i can't wait i can't wait we've got such cool stuff coming too you have a lot of cool stuff if you want to if you want to get the straight dope on what mcdm's working on on a week by week basis i strongly encourage you to come by our twitch channel because i'm there a couple of times a week typically just like just like this just hanging out on twitch and i basically can't keep my mouth shut about what we're working on um yeah i will try i have i have learned a couple of important lessons and so i think talking about like price points and stuff like that and keep my mouth shut about because i always want to sell stuff cheaper than is smart so i got to stop doing that but apart from that yeah we're working on some great james and i just had like a two hour long conversation yesterday about um some future content that we're talking about oh yeah it's awesome and i also i love watching the twitch streams because i then know what you're excited about too like it's like oh yeah i just sent this to matt and i because i'm on east coast time i'm often like all right i'm clocking out for the day and then i'll come in the next morning and flick on your stream from the the night before and it's like oh matt immediately started talking about this thing when it was sent to him that's great i'll tell you it's got to be it's got to be weird working at a company where like you feel like you got to watch a twitch stream to figure out what the hell is going on this company that's gotta be weird i can't i can't imagine how like i that's you know um the thing i i worked um at a video game company had an open plan right so there's no cubicles or anything and i actually like that i thought that was cool i know some people don't um and i think the people who don't are also right but the uh there were two owners and we had these little pods because of the way the you know it would be eight people in a section of the building because that's the way it was laid out and i always said like if you're not sitting in one of those two pods with one of the two owners you basically have no idea what's going on this company right because they're making decisions about what to do basically like on the fly because there's no other way to do it and they're talking about the stuff that they they were very open about the way they ran their company including like how much money we had in the bank you know anybody who wanted to know anything about the running or operations of the company could find out and that was super awesome but the flip side of that was it was really easy to just be head down in your work and not know what was going on so i sort of kind of like outsourced that to twitch we talk about what's going on in mcdm all the time and so if you want to know just come hang out and it's like you're you're in the same pod with coalville at work that's basically what it's like it's like you're in you're sitting in the same area as as me at work and you're hearing about what i would be talking about if we were all in the office together it's dope it's dope it's good for me for somebody who's uh remote especially to be like oh okay cool this is very cool so i'm a fan uh john champion who is the king of the mods also known as lord dark says very common for me to ask anna how an mcdm project is going and she'll answer with what the [ __ ] is that and uh i'm gonna try and get better at that but uh yeah there's a bunch of stuff there's a bunch of stuff that is in the pike uh between me and james and uh and and anna needs to know about this stuff yes yeah yeah we got to be better operations officers these are ceo so she needs to know about this stuff yeah yeah otherwise it's just me and you in a word document uh talking about great ideas yeah well it's um you know uh it's one thing it's one thing like it's one thing to pay a writer uh to help write something uh that i don't think that freaks anna out too much i don't think actually paying that writer for that work freaks and out too much what freaks around is but then there's more then there's the art and the layout and what kind of product is this gonna be is it gonna be print is it gonna what are you guys doing right and so that's that's that's the part that i i totally respect and we're gonna have to make sure that we're a lot more professional uh and when i say we i mean me we're gonna be a lot more professional about how we treat this stuff so yeah saffidan says would be the best way for a creator to become part of an arcadia issue um i would go to our patreon there's a public post on our patreon where i talk about how we source authors and how we source articles it's basically the same for artists except on the art side so that that information is out there also hive indicator points out that you have a 4e gamma world on your shelf which i was just showing off in a stream the other day never got a chance to play but love the character creation super unique fun character creation you literally just roll a 20-sided die twice and look up the result on the chart and that tells you your that tells you your equivalent of like class and ancestry like one of the options are you going to roll a 20-side die twice to find out what you're playing in gamma world and one of the options is i'm a radioactive cockroach yep yeah or a swarm of rats that shares a hive mind it's awesome yes or i'm an android yeti so cool so cool ah so yeah really great things if i like right now for me if i could just go to fantasy grounds and download that gamma world stuff i would i would run it next week for me for me that right now i love i love the ease of use that the virtual tabletop brings and i love the automation of fantasy grounds so for me that's that's where my heart lies right now uh lots of stuff i want to run i just want to find a way to do it easily anyway james thanks for hanging out after the stream yeah thank you matt uh no worries and uh uh we'll see some of you folks on twitch and you'll all of you in chat right now will know well why i should say we'll be happy to know that i'm working on a new video script and uh it's super cool i'm excited to show it off we're plugging up if you're interested in the behind the scenes stuff of mcdm uh running the game script and i'm not 100 sir this is a running the game video it's all about game design and how i approach game design so i think it's gonna be useful for a lot of people but we do pick some classic optional rule from d and we talk about my way of doing it um so there what we typically do is i read the script for the new video live on twitch and then i watched the stream back later to see what people's feedback was and that feedback informs revision and there was at least one video we did recently where i actually read the script out loud a couple of times in a given week because it changed every time based on people's reaction to it so if you want to get in on that kind of juice come by twitch that's it absolutely cool all right thank you james have a great day have a great weekend thank you yeah thanks everybody for for chatting thanks matt thanks for hanging out and until next time be seeing you you

Channel: Matthew Colville

Views: 17,267

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Id: 9lM4Vacu_V4

Length: 111min 40sec (6700 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021