Latest / Tale of The Manticore, a Dark Fantasy Dungeons & Dragons Audiodrama / S2 Mail of the Manticore

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S2 Mail of the Manticore · Tale of The Manticore, a Dark Fantasy Dungeons & Dragons Audiodrama

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Tale of the Manticor bonus episode. It's been a while,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: but once again it is time for Mail of the Manticor.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: According to Lore, a Manticore occasionally gets questions in their mailbox.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: There would be much answering in the minutes ahead. Hey,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: this is John. I'd like to thank you for all
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: of your questions over this past season. I've selected around
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: a dozen really good ones to discuss on the show.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Let's get into it. The first question comes from Mike Foster.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: They ask did you play solo RPGs prior to Tale
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: of the Manticor, and if yes, what did you try. Well,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: this is a quick answer, because no, I didn't play
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: any solo games prior to starting the podcast. Actually, I
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: would have scoffed at the idea and I would have
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: thought that it couldn't possibly work, And boy was I
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: ever wrong. And it's kind of a good lesson to
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: myself to not knock something until I've tried it. For me,
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: my first experience with any solo game was through the
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Iron Realm podcast, and if it wasn't for that podcast
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: and for the Pandemic, I never would have gotten into it.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: And when I did start Tale of the manticor I
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: didn't even know about the existence of various products that
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: would help you play solo, or that there was a
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: vibrant solo community out there. And I didn't learn about
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: the mythic GME until several months into making the show,
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: when I discovered the incredible me myself and I YouTube channel.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Of course, now that I have fully embraced solo play,
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: I actually find it to be in many ways, or
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: at least in different ways, richer than a table game.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Thanks very much for your question. The next one comes
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: from Ernest Klants. Arnest asks, where are you coming up
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: with the story? Is it just kind of winged or
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: do you have an idea of how the actual story
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: is going to go even if a PC dies. That's
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: a great question. I'll talk about the last part first.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: If a PC dies, I certainly feel it in all
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: of the ways that you would at a table game,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: sort of bond with your characters, even if you're playing
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: multiple characters. And certainly the longer that I live with them,
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: the more I bond with them and genuinely stress over
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: the chance of their dying. But I do think it's
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: very important to have that chance. There's got to be
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: stakes otherwise, at least for me, the excitement is gone.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: In the case of a TPK, even that is something
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: that I would embrace. It's not something I would hope for.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: But as long as I keep the mindset that the
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: main character is the world, or the main character is
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: the story, I think you can roll with any eventuality.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: In the case of a TPK, you could turn that
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: into a prologue if it happens early enough in the story,
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: and then the main story starts after that, and hopefully
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: you connect that TPK or use it as a springboard
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: to your next story. If a TPK happened mid season
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: or late season, I think it would be much tougher
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: to deal with, and luckily I haven't had to deal
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: with that, but I guess the process would be kind
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: of the same. You would have a story that was
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: in two halves, almost as if it were two mini
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: campaigns or too mini arcs. In terms of where I'm
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: coming up with the story for the first say a
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: dozen episodes, I'm just making stuff up completely at random.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: Often it's the first thing that comes into my head.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Quite often I have a second idea that is better
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: than that first idea. So if I moved through it
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: slowly enough that tends to produce the better ideas. After
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: around that ten episode mark, something magical happens because there
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: are enough elements in your story and you know enough
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: about the characters in it by then that the story
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: just begins to write itself. It's a little hard to explain,
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: but it really is true that once there is a
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: momentum to your plot and a direction for the characters,
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: then there's a certain causality that starts to occur where
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: the way things go is almost the way they have
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: to go. And then you add in the dice, and
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: that's kind of the engine. There's inevitable causality and random
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: chaos through the dice. Gods. Actually, that's still what I
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: find so exciting about this mode of storytelling. I'll finish
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: up by saying that in season one, I think it
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: was about episode fifty when I kind of knew where
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: the story was going to go. Ultimately in that season,
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: I knew that once that horn was blown, and I
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: didn't expect the villain to blow the horn until it
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: was actually happening, But once that did happen, and I understood, ah,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: this is summoning a dragon back to get its revenge.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: As soon as that happened, I kind of knew, well,
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: eventually this story ends with a climactic mountain top battle
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: with the dragon, and how the characters get there and
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: which of the characters make it there those I didn't
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: know and I didn't want to know, but I kind
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: of did have that final scene in mind. With season two,
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: I kind of had an idea even from the beginning
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: that there would be these three demons and that they
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: would have to be dealt with eventually in the ruin
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: under the castle, and that's kind of all I knew
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: about it. Basically, I just wanted to do the opposite
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: of what I'd done in season one, and instead of
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: a mountaintop battle with the dragon, I thought I would
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: go down and have an ultimate battle at the end
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: of a dungeon crawl. But again I didn't know how
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: they were going to get there, or who would get there,
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: or what complications would arise between A and Z. Now
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: that I'm starting season three, I'm in the anything ghost
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: stage where I'm really just getting to know my characters,
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: and although I have sort of come up with an
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: initial mission, I have no idea what the endgame will be,
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: and that's okay. I'm happy to be living on the
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: ultimate edge of the story as it moves forward without
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: knowing what happens next. It feels a little dangerous and
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: it feels exciting. My third question is from Samuel Marconi.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: Samuel asks a really interesting question. He wants to know
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: if the villains in Tail of the Manticor could earn
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: their villain hood a little bit more, What if the
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: villains could be under the influence of the dice more
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: or even maybe as much as player characters. He points
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: out that a lot of the villains are protected by
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: some kind of plot armor until they do come face
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: to face the PCs. That's true. They absolutely have been
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: protected by plot armor in the past, and I have
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: kind of kept them as separate from the player characters
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: in the sense that they're more a part of the
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: fabric of the story. So could it work. I think
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: it could work. An idea that was kind of rolling
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: around in my head in season two was that NPCs
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: and PCs were starting to lose their distinction and I
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: was beginning to question if those terms even had value.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Part of me thought that I would abandon those terms
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: entirely when I got into writing season three, but now
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: that I have started writing season three, I do find
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: that I'm coming back to those terms. So will NPCs
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: suffer the dice? I think that that's a definite. Maybe
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: I won't know until I get there. Certainly not every NPC,
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: because with minor NPCs, I think that might just slow
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: things down too much. But with a major villain, I
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: think that could be interesting. Just on a final note, Samuel,
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: I would say that your question is a great example
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: of how this kind of fiction is still developing and
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: experimental and very hackable. So I could imagine a show
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: where they do exactly that. Everybody PCs, NPCs, good guys,
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: bad guys, is subject to the will of the dice.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: Thanks for that question. The next one comes from Thomas Murghy.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: Thomas writes, I play solo sometimes, but I have some
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: difficulties to render my story, and he means like through
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: writing or making a podcast or a video. To be short,
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: do you have some tips to describe the action using
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: a few sentences? This is a tough one for me
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: because I don't play any solo games outside of Tale
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: of the Mandicor so I don't have any experience and
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: I probably don't have any good advice specifically on shortcuts
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: to bookkeeping. For me, essentially it's like writing a novel.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: But with dice, I can imagine a situation similar to
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: what Steve Morrison of Arrant Adventures does where he talks
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: into the microphone and he's playing and doing his bookkeeping
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: and everything live at the mic. So I could see
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: if you were to make an audio recording of yourself,
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: not for publication, but for your records, I could see
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: that working. And I do think it's important to have records,
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: And probably this is the part of the question that
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: I can add some value to. You do want to
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: have some record of the game because all of the
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: little details that you throw out almost as an aside,
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: some NPC, some Chekhov's gun, those are the things that
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: come back later in ways that surprise you. And you
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: can almost hear an audible click when some old idea
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: comes back into play in a way that you never
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: expected it to. For those that have finished season two,
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: there's an event in the finale where that exact thing happens,
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: and it's a really cool thing when that occurs. In
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: terms of making your writing and creative life a bit easier.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: I do have a couple of suggestions for that. One,
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: I would say, always move the plot, so every session
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: that you sit down or every section of the story.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: For me, it's episodes, but for a personal game it
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: may not quite be organized that way. But whatever section
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: of the story or that you're telling, always move the plot.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: Because passages of just character development or passages of just
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: description are great, but if it's too much, I think
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: it can drag. I make tell of the manticor with
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: an audience in mind, so I'm always thinking about pacing
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: and variety. But I think those same principles would apply
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: to a personal game and make it a better one. Secondly,
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: I would say, if you can end your sessions on
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: some kind of cliffhanger or unresolved event, this will have
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: a couple of good effects. One it'll make you want
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: to come back to the game, and secondly, when you
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: do come back to the game, you'll find that you
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: can just jump in with the wind at your back
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: and true momentum. If you end on a clean resolution,
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: then you might find that the car stalls a little
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: bit when you come back to that game and you're
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: not sure what to do next. With a cliffhanger. You
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: always know what's next and you're always looking forward to it.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Thanks for that great question. The next one comes from
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Ryan Christofferson. Brian asks, how do you keep the story
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: moving and still have a few surprises for yourself as
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: the player? And can you have a cohesive story without
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: having it planned out beforehand? So I spoke to that
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: first question in my last answer a little bit, But
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: in terms of surprises, my all time favorite and I
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: haven't used it on the show enough and I'm going
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: to rectify that in season three is Ton of Pigeons
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: mythic GM emulators event meaning tables. It's a pair of
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: tables that essentially have a verb and a noun, and
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: you'll roll randomly against each of these tables. You get
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: a combination of words and then you try to interpret them.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: And this is a way that you can surprise yourself
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: with your own creativity. It's that whole idea of if
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: you have too many choices, you can experience a kind
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: of paralysis, but if you are very limited in your choices,
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: then you're forced to get creative with what's at hand.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: Your second question is can you have a cohesive story
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: without having it planned out beforehand and a very good question.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: Yes and no, And I guess it depends on your
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: definition of story. So if you're looking for that three
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: X structure, we have a character and they have a problem,
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: and then that problem is complicated many times, and finally
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: that problem is resolved. You can force that. I think
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: you'll end up using some degree of DM fiat to
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: make that happen. And the more cohesive that you want
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: it to be, maybe the more DM fiat you'll have
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: to inject into the story. Maybe this parkens back to
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: the question about the NPCs, and I think if you
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: were to say, roll dice for NPCs and villains, you
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: would be trading off some of that cohesive story for
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: something different. But that's something different isn't necessarily bad. It
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: just becomes an alternative to traditional storytelling. So if you
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: can divorce yourself from the idea that the good guys
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: have to win, or that the characters from the beginning
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: of the story must survive to the end of the story,
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: or that at all characters who enter the story must
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: play a pivotal role in the story, if you can
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: let some of those things go, then I think what
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: you're getting is something that's closer to a tabletop game
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: and further away from a novel. So the answer to
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: the question is, you can definitely do it, but I
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: think you have to decide where on the spectrum between
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: novel and game you want to be. I feel personally
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: like I'm somewhere around sixty percent novel and forty percent game.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: I suppose that's up for debate, but I do think
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: that that is a choice that you have to make,
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: and probably that ultimately comes down to your taste. The
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: next question comes from Psychic Machinery. Psychic Machinery asks, I'm
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: having a hard time locating a lot of the stuff
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: mentioned in the podcast. Has it gone into the internet
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: ether or is there somewhere to find it. I post
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: quite a bit of stuff on tail of themandicor dot
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: blogspot dot com, and for some of it you would
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: have to keep scrolling down and clicking that older post
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: link to get to it. I don't post everything on
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: the blog for sure. Shortly after season one, I started
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: to collect lore items and mechanics items, things like that
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: and put them into a collection that I called Encyclopedia Mandcorica,
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: which you can get for free on drive through RPG
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: and incidentally, right after I finish recording this mailbag episode,
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: my next task is to update that file with information
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: from season two. So those are really the two places,
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: the blog and Encyclopedia Manticorica. The next letter is from
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: del Tiegler. Dell writes, I have a quick question about
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: audio mixing. Which software do you use and can you
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: recommend a basic setup that won't break the bank? Absolutely, Dell.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: I'm a bit of a gearhead and I love this stuff.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: In a nutshell, you need two things. You need a
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: microphone and you need a DAW also known as a
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: digital audio workstation. The best cheapest one is Audacity. Audacity
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: is free, it works on any platform, It's been around
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: forever and it's great. Before I was into podcasting, actually
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: used Audacity for a few years to record music. As
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: for a microphone, the best bang for the buck is
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: probably the blue Snowball MIC. You've probably seen this one before,
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: as it's very distinct looking. It looks like well, a snowball.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: It's about the size of a grapefruit, and it's either
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: white or I think they make them in black now. Anyway,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: it's a USB MIC. It sounds good. I actually used
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: that microphone on a very recent video I did on
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: YouTube where I played through the top level of one
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: shot in the dark. And you know, since we're talking
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: about it, there's something about that video I could point
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: out if you are shopping for a microphone. When I
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: did all the editing, I actually had to redo the outro,
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: but I decided to do a little experiment and just
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: use my cell phone's microphone for the outro and see
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: if it made any difference, And it makes up big difference,
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: it turns out. So if you're curious, check out that
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: YouTube video. It's the recent one where you can see
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: a top down view and the audio that you hear
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: for the first ninety percent that is the snowball mic.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: When you get to the last outroduction where I'm in
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: front of that yellow background, that's just the cell phone mic,
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: and you could clearly hear the difference when you ab
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: them that way. Anyway, I got into the weeds there
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: a little bit. I'll get back on track. Blue snowball
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: mic and audacity. That's the basic setup I think in
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: general for microphones. If you are looking at south of
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: forty or fifty bucks, well buyer beware. I think you
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: might be getting a kind of very cheap mic in
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: a decent looking package. I would stick with trusted brand
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: names as well. Oh one other little hack that's absolutely
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: worth knowing. If you do have an inexpensive setup, you
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: can make your own pop screen, which is going to
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: save you all kinds of headaches in the edit. Look
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: that up on the internet and you'll find all kinds
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: of ways to do that. Anyway, I hope I didn't
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: order on too much on that one. The next one
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: comes from RC and this is a very different kind
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: of question because it's about the story itself. RC asks
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: why didn't kat Spain set the Pixie free? RCA is
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: referring to season two, episode eighteen. I believe we're in
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: a dramatis persona where Kat Spain is working as an
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: apprentice to kerk Melmar and there is a weeping pixie
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: that kind of drives him crazy with its incessant crying.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: I think my first inclination would have been for cat
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Spain to release the pixie, especially as he had to
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: escape himself and there would be nothing really to lose,
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: and I think I decided not to mostly as a
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: way to give dimension to kat Spain's character. I didn't
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: want him to be too much of a goodie two shoes.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: At the time, I thought it would be more interesting
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: if I characterized him as having a little sliver of
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: hardness inside. Earlier in this Mailbag episode, I talked about
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: how you should record small details, and that as you
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: make the story, you just create all kinds of small
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: details through small decisions. This would be one of those,
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: and by the end of season two, that decision to
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: give Kat's Bin just the hint of a mean streak
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: really paid off in the narrative, and I think made
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: the resolution of the entire season makes sense. So you
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: can call it a happy accident that I made that
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: decision at the time, I'm certainly glad I did. Oh
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: And as an aside, you're not the only one to
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: ask that question, RC, because Kyellen, who voices the character
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: Kat's Bain, asked me that exact same thing. Question nine
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: comes from Eric of Dragonspire Gaming. Eric writes, I wanted
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: to ask where you're getting the inspiration for shartoons parables.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: Eric brings up a couple of these that resonated with him.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: In the absence of experience, I disappear. I believe that
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: was from the parable of the blackness of Mulberry's And
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: there's another line that he quotes from Shawnee who says,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: I think wisdom and good feeling keep little company in
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: this life. Every now and then Shawnee does uncharacteristically show
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: some wisdom. So to answer the question, how do I
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: get the ideas for the parables? So basically, if I
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: find my characters in a predicament, especially a moral predicament,
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: but not always, I find that I can reinforce the
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: thematic element of that struggle by constructing a dramatis persona,
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: whether that be a flashback or one of Shartoon's parables.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: So these mini stories are reverse engineered from the problem
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: and might present a hint of a solution where they
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: might just kind of add some other layer to the
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: problem itself. And if there's an opportunity for me to
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: inject a little bit of irony there, I definitely take
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: that chance. In the one that Eric mentions, in the
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: absence of experience, I disappear, I kind of plucked that
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: from my experience teaching senior level philosophy. So anybody who's
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: familiar with David Hume might have recognized that empirical idea,
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: if that's something that's interesting to you. The branch of
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: philosophy I'm talking about is called epistemology. That second quote
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: that Shawnee said, I think wisdom and good feeling keep
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: little company in this life. That also comes from my
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: experience as a high school teacher. Most of the time
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: I teach English lit. So that is a paraphrase from
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: the character Bottom from a Shakespeare play called A Midsummer
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: Night's Dream, one that I have been alluding to fairly
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: continuously throughout the creation of this season. So the actual
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: quote is that reason and love keep little company these days,
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: meaning they don't get along or are incompatible. But I
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: love that turn of phrase so much I thought I
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: would give it to Shawne and change reason and love
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: to wisdom and good feeling. The next question is from Christopher.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: Christopher says, I'm curious when it comes to character backstories.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: Do you roll on a chart or something like that
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: to determine inspiration for the backstory or do you come
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: up with that on your own. Thanks for that great question, Christopher.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: So I don't use any kind of tables to determine backstories.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: Usually the first thing I'll do is roll up stats
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: using my method of ignoring anything five or under, and
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: then I'll look at those stats to get a very
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: very general sense of what the person is like. Often
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: I'm looking at intelligence, wisdom, and charisma, those kind of
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: mental stats. So those give me some kind of direction,
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: but it's really not until the characters are faced with
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: conflict when I start to figure out who they really are.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: Just based on the decisions that they make, I might
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: decide that a character with a low wisdom score is
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: a little bit reckless. That's what I did with Shawne,
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: where I decided that she would have this motto of
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: live for today because you never know if you're going
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: to be around tomorrow. So after those kind of initial
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: traits have been decided upon, then I can use dramatis
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: personae and flashbacks things like that to reinforce those ideas.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: You know, why are they a little bit reckless? Did
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: they have any experiences in their early life that made
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: them that way? And the same could be said for
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: a character who was prudent or studious, or had difficulty
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: relating with other people. So the stats are a starting place,
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: and then the backstories kind of reinforce the why since
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: we're talking about characters and their traits, I think it's
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: really interesting to take a character like Shawnee who did
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: have a low wisdom score, and so I did decide
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: that she would be reckless and then give that character
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: a bit of an arc. So with Shawnee, I thought,
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: wouldn't it be interesting if, over the course of the
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: season that she could start to change, and specifically if
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: she could be influenced by another character. So in this case,
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: it was Tamlin who kind of influenced her and sparked
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: that curiosity about wisdom in her question eleven is from
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: anonymous because actually I received this question quite a bit.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: The question is did you know that you're pronouncing dramatis
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: persona incorrectly? And the answer is kind of yeah, I
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: kind of did. I can remember four years ago, in
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: one of the very first episodes, I was happily writing
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: away the script and I wasn't even thinking about it
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: until it came time to record, and that I came
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: up against this term that you know, as an English teacher,
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: I've seen that before, but I wasn't one hundred percent
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: sure how to pronounce it. So I ended up looking online,
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: as I often do, for things like this, and I
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: found both pronunciations out there, you know, dramatis persona and
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: dramatics personai, and eventually I think I found something from
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: Cambridge University that said dramatis persona, and so I went
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: with that. At the end of the day, I know
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: that this is probably nails on a chalkboard for somebody
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: who knows the correct way to pronounce it. But English
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: is kind of like that. It's famously full of loanwords
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: from other languages, which then get their pronunciation mangled, and
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: then that new pronunciation just becomes English. What's off the
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: top of my head, A word like mountain would have
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: originally been Montaigne from the French, but eventually that gets
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: corrupted and mispronounced enough times that mountain and then even
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: mountain becomes the new way to pronounce it correctly. Question
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: number twelve is the last question in this mailbag, and
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: it's another anonymous question because it's another one that I
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: have gotten quite a bit, And that question is will
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: there be a Tale of the manticor novel? The short
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: answer is not for a while. The longer answer is,
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: I almost started doing a season one novelization, really starting
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: to experiment with how that would look last summer. My
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: feeling was that it would be extremely quick and easy
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: to do. The transcripts already existed, and that it would
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: really just be a matter of re editing and reformatting
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: and figuring out how to get that into a EPUB
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: file format. But as I started making it, I realized
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: a couple of things. One, it was really difficult to
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: format and still keep the same kind of energy, especially
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: where dice rolls were considered to just have the number
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: appear in text. Something was lost. And I experimented with
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: a couple of different ideas for that, and I never
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: really found a way that was completely satisfying. Another thing
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: I realized is that even though the scripts existed already,
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: they would take a lot of work. At the end,
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: I did a five chapters sample and I sent it
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: out to a couple of close friends and asked for
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: their feedback, and they were all gracious and gave great feedback,
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: And at the end of the day I thought, I'm
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: not quite ready to do this, And despite being asked
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: about it many times, I wasn't sure that there was
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: enough of a market out there for it to justify
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: the probably couple hundred of hours of work that it
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: would take to do that said, I still really liked
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: the idea, and one day it might happen, but I
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: think doing it concurrently with the season three might just
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: be too much work for me right now. So who knows.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Maybe after season three, if I need a real change
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: and a real break from making audio, that's something I'll revisit. Anyway.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: That is it for the mail bag. If you've stuck
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: around this far, thank you so much. Thanks for all
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: your great questions people that write to me. I love
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: getting your emails. It really just gives me incredible joy
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: and inspires me. From people that write in with questions
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: to people that just write in to say that they're
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: enjoying the show. Thank you so much. I am grateful. Anyway,
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: thanks for listening. If everything goes to plan, the next
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: thing that you hear will be a mini series four parts,
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: two players, no GM semi actual play in cooperation with
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: Steve Morrison of Arrant Adventures. So watch out for that
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: because it's coming soon. Until then, let chaos roll.