tricksters and villains apply within

In the D&D game I play in on Mondays, my druid has recently come into guardianship of a young red dragon wyrmling. Against the better judgement of part of my party I gave him a name that was NOT food related. This party is constantly at odds and rather than attempt to save the poor thing (while he was still an egg), they wanted to make him into a dragon egg omelet. Hilarity did not ensue. Anyhow, thanks to me, our party is +1 protective dragon. It's pretty great so far. Since our party is mostly in travel mode at the moment, escorting part of our npc group home, my druid has been spending her time teaching the little guy to forage, speak, fly and fight. I'm working on skills that she has, so she can better train him, so tonight I opted to teach him about Religion. She's a worshiper of Silvanus herself and thought this would be a good start. Our DM is never the best at spur-of-the-moment dialogue but the exchanges we've had as druid & dragon have been pretty ...

Aside from Critical Role, The Adventure Zone is the one actual play D&D series I've been able to get into. Maybe I enjoyed it so much from the beginning because I was already a huge fan of the McElroys. I enjoy Griffin & Justin's work at Polygon and I've been listening to the three of them on MBMBAM for a long time now. They started sort of at the right place, right time for me. I'd been watching Tabletop on Geek & Sundry for a couple seasons, I'd started getting into Critical Role and looking into story-like podcasts that were something other than Welcome to Nightvale. And then the McEl-bros started The Adventure Zone. And as I mentioned in yesterday's post... they just sort of started.  There was no long lengthy introduction to their characters, there was no overly detailed explanation of anything. Griffin just started narrating and they just ran with it. As much as I love Critical Role (and that's a lot) something about the tight time ...

Maker bless these nerdy-ass voice actors. Season 2 is off to a fantastic start... well, after some technical difficulties that kept the Alpha stream down for a little bit. Although even before that, I thought that I might miss it given that the weather is bad here and we went without internet for a few different hours earlier in the evening. But, it came back on and stayed on for the entirety of the new episode. I switched back and forth between YouTube and twitch to watch a steady stream until the Alpha stream was back up. Alpha has people's names and character portraits and they were slowly being updated throughout the evening as we learned who was playing what. Here's the biggest thing I enjoyed about tonight. And it's one of the things I like about Matt's storytelling, about the way Critical Role began in general and one of the things I like most about new games I DM. There was no extended discussion at the forefront of who was playing what and which classes the...