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loquaciousquark · 2 years

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Game Masters of Exandria: Round Table

Good evening, good evening, good evening! Welcome to a special CR episode with our fabulous DMs of the CR Expanded Universe: Matt Mercer, Brennan Lee Mulligan, and Aabria Iyengar. Matt opens us up! Don’t forget that the Tal’Dorei campaign guide is out now. He’s so excited for more people to play in this world and expand it at their own tables.

Session Zero: very important, even with people you gel with and know well. It’s important to make lines and veils explicit. Aabria likes to have a tone check-in so everyone has a chance to give input. “It’s an amuse-bouche before you start the story.” Brennan sidebars all of us by just being so excited Matt opened up this sandbox for all of us to play with. Matt, cheerfully: “It was all an accident. It just kept growing like The Blob.” Brennan likens this to James Lipton meeting God at the pearly gates and discovering God has no idea what’s going on. Back on topic, Brennan quotes Voltaire: “I apologize for not having time to write you a short letter so I wrote you a long one.” Prepping for a confined campaign is very different than prepping for an open-world game.

Brennan tangents into a discussion of railroading vs. player agency; when you have a short campaign like this where a story has to hit certain beats, the railroading shouldn’t ever come from the DM. Instead, it should come from the players knowing their characters really, really well, which is all established in session zero. If you can establish really strong player backgrounds and motivations before the campaign begins, the plot can be wholly driven by them/their choices and still achieve the beats needed without ever taking away from player agency. “The rails are gonna be who you tell me you are.” The rails for short campaigns should be designed by the player, not the DM.

Aabria praises Brennan’s character creation style; she went into creation with him with half a thought and came out knowing everything about Llaerryn, and also knowing Brennan completely understood her too.

Brennan has a 13-year-old home game that had no session zero; he talks about how that had no creation session because he knew that game had time to expand and grow with the characters & the players would be okay.

Matt likes having everyone create characters together, or at least a session zero shortly after: this is how relationships started with Vex and Vax, Caleb and Nott, etc. Brennan thinks it’s critical to allow unfilmed sessions as well so the players can find their voices. Matt also likes to make sure people will be comfortable with their characters in the long run, not just the short run. He hates the idea that anyone is ever “locked in” to something they don’t want to play.

Sometimes, like for oneshots/charity games, you can’t have the session zero; in this case Matt likes to email the players just some brief back-and-forths to nail down one or two elements. “Who else in the party owes you a favor and why? What’s one regret from your childhood?”

Brennan tells us the GM is like a one-person Greek chorus. “When you are baking, you find out what you forgot to put in in the oven.” Backstory is meant to give you a trajectory; it’s not where you come from, it’s where you’re going. Backstory has to be a connection to the world; if you just show up with gear and no desires, no goals, “that’s just enlightenment, buddy, I don’t know what to tell you!”

Matt likes one-two page backstories; the more complicated it gets, the harder it is to incorporate things, but he’s also had a player whose whole character was a monk wandering in search of power, and he made that work too.

Backstory should be an invitation, NOT an expectation. Players should anticipate that not all backstory elements may come into play, but the GM should also communicate if they realize they may not be able to use the backstory at all. Players don’t want to wait for three years only to never get into their backstory, but also do have a responsibility to make sure it can be integrated into the world. Communication is key in both directions!

Brennan loves backstory in order to incorporate plot hooks he knows they’ll say “yes” to. If he has a party with no clerics, he knows he doesn’t have to work so much on the pantheon. I identify with this laziness.

Matt made his own settings at first because he was too scared to ruin or incorrectly run an established setting. Brennan enjoys making up canon in established settings, which makes Matt hilariously nervous. Matt: “For most of you, this won’t be livestreamed, so you can fuck it up as much as you want!” Brennan: “Dani Carr, in the corner, with a blowgun.” Aabria advocates taking a break and looking something up for something super critical that you can’t improv. Players always go off the rails; give yourself leeway when DMing for that. Matt also suggests telling players familiar with a setting ahead of time that “this is YOUR version of the world; some things might be the same, different, or conflict with canon, and that’s intended.”

Niirdal-Poc was super fun for Aabria to create. Creating something new in an established world, especially for someone not in love with high fantasy, gave her an amazing chance to pick out the themes she valued. This city was her love letter to the potential of power, whether it’s nature, divine, or wizardly. She ugly-cried when she saw the first map including it.

Brennan was incredibly relieved to get the Age of Arcanum over Aabria’s Kymal, because he was able to use the full weight of the established canon to build the world in retrospect. He especially loved the Aeor arc from C2, so this tied in beautifully with that.

“Fantasy is bad with time!” In Middle Earth, the best sword ever made was made 10,000 years ago; so are blacksmiths today emotionally distraught that they can’t get better? He much prefers Matt’s insistence on a calendar and growth and holidays and such to make it more grounded.

Brennan, on Aeor: “Yes, we have this lapsarian, Edenic thing necessary for the fantasy of populating a world with tons of dungeons and magical items because you need an ancient history for them to have come from,” but Calamity allows a grounding of that history’s existence without undermining the deeply tragic fall of the Age of Arcanum. He loved leaning into the differences between the ancient & modern worlds: Avalir had more technological advancements, Byzantine bureaucracies, etc., and he loved exploring the evolutionary paths of how to feed that into the modern world & Aeor's ruins. It let him fuck shit up without ruining the canon.

(Lapsarian: one who believes mankind has fallen from a higher state)

(Edenic: in the manner of Eden)

(Brennan also talks SO FAST y’all, criminy, and so many of his sentences are abandoned half-thoughts)

Aabria loves that he explained the Shattered Teeth. Matt jumps in here talking about how much he absolutely loves worldbuilding and collaborating on these pieces because it’s so much more freeing than coming up all of it in his brain by himself in his room.

He and Brennan spent an hour once discussing the cosmology and pantheon of Exandria while Marisha was at the vet with Omar (their corgi), including how gods relate to mortality. “I don’t get to have that conversation with just anyone!”

Brennan panicked when Sam & Luis went after Purvan in the show. He meant it to just be a cameo, but they expanded it past his plans. “Don’t make me explain this! This is a part I can really fuck up!”

Both Aabria & Brennan were so worried about breaking canon, but Matt loves that their choices instead clarified and enhanced canon, giving him things to build off of in future: “That’s much cooler than I was anticipating!” They expanded his world rather than breaking it.

“If you’re doing this at home, you can do whatever the fuck you want. Stop the Calamity!” Aabria: “If you see a tree and you don’t know what it’s doing, maybe just leave it alone.”

Aabria: “Every wizard is a yuppie. They wear their shoes to bed.”

What are Aabria & Brennan most proud of contributing to the world? Aabria: being light and irreverent about tragedies like the Chroma Conclave (Chroma spa cave), showing that nature heals and the past is not sacred. Matt loves having Taste of Tal’Dorei as Exandria’s own Casa Bonita. Matt loves finding humor in the darkness of humanity. Brennan: Humorlessness does not occur in nature. “Death is not a punchline, but it is a perfect setup.” He and his wife Izzy loved Everything Everywhere All at Once for the same reason (amazing movie!).

Brennan is most proud of how easily the Calamity crew handled the massive lore dumps he threw at them. Aabria had to learn 40 spell engines as part of her background. Brennan laughs about having texted Matt, “My job today is I’ve come up with 30 fake wizards.” Aabria felt really bad about how Llaerryn treated Madara, ha!

Brennan liked establishing that Vespin wasn’t a nihilist, he was hubristic. Vespin didn’t set out to release the Betrayers, he set out to achieve ambitions, which tied into the pattern of hubris evident in the Ring of Brass. Brennan loved painting the entire Age with this brush, showing that it wasn’t a coincidence, it was a trend over the entire age.

Matt loved how vibrantly Aabria brought Byroden to life--it’s better than he would have done himself. It completely changed his perspective on the city. Aabria shouts out Aimee regarding their conversations about Laredo, TX, and talks about how they wanted to find common threads that would reflect Vex & Vax as well as contrasting against Syngorn, which we saw more clearly in C1.

Brennan asks Matt about the misty history of Exandria. “It’s a little bit of the Matryoshka doll of the genesis” since C1 started in medias res. Aabria: “Who were you when you built this?” Matt: “Younger.”

It started as a city, Stilben only, for a home game for his VA friends. It was a oneshot without a country/continent name intended to be played for six hours on a weekend. Session two he built Westruun; when they got to session 3, he began building Tal’Dorei in Photoshop. He still has the old files of the early country.

He developed the name of the continent Exandria as the players expanded into neighboring countries. It was laying down the tracks right in front of the train, just developing things as needed. He notes that a lot of modern high fantasy is beautifully developed in aesthetic, but breaks down as soon as you try to dive into it. Brennan points out long-lived races with 150-year generations could theoretically date descendants without realizing.

The Calamity came out of Matt’s realization that there needed to be a recent historical event to reset the world. The Divergence was his attempt to rationalize the existence of all-powerful, all-knowing gods walking the planes and guiding the threads of fate, but then leaving great world-shaking danger to a handful of PCs. He wanted to come up with a reason the gods were removed from the world so that the players had to solve the problems themselves.

Brennan loves the idea of visiting the oldest part of a homebrewed world. If he were in Exandria, he’d want to go to Stilben. Oh my gosh, me too.

The Kryn dynasty was partly born out of a book Matt read about the idea of past lives.

There has never been a moment where Matt felt Exandria to be whole/finished. The pressure of having wikis listing out every contradiction he’s ever said does mean there’s a running list of things he needs to correct/address in future, which is its own kind of stress.

Brennan HILARIOUSLY calls out Matt for saying Tal’Dorei isn’t finished while the campaign guide is sitting right on the table in front of them. “This is not done? I’m just gonna go home. Not DONE? I got three months between seasons, okay. Welcome to Biggityburg, here we go. New city, new season. You wackity-schmackity doo, 10 episodes. Help me!”

Brennan points out that a ton of worldbuilding comes from improv in the moment passed off as fact. The players love it when they get the sense that you would pass out before running out of things to tell them about the world.

Brennan made his villains hot because Aabria made a hot spider queen. Matt laughingly says that he doesn’t make hot villains, he makes villains and the internet decides they’re hot.

Matt loves playing with new players and very experienced players; there’s a cycle. “When you first begin, you don’t know a lot of the boundaries. When you’re new to it, you make wider swings, bigger choices, you’re a kid learning how to walk for the first time and bumping into the furniture. Then you start coloring inside the lines because you’ve learned the rules, and then as you get more experienced you cycle back again” to breaking the rules with youthful abandon.

Brennan loves that the game MASTER is actually in a position of service. You’re making dinner for everybody. He praises Aabria for reading her players extremely well and giving them what they want.

Aabria asks about encounter map development. Matt prefers theater of the mind for smaller groups unless they prefer minis. However, with more players, the minis/maps help out a lot. He has been collecting minis for many years.

Brennan extols the virtues of Rick Perry, the production designer for Dimension 20, his D&D show. D20 has a lot of culture mashups (Candy Land Game of Thrones, high school for heroes, etc.), but those beautiful set pieces are often only used once. In his home games he uses lots of dry erase boards, Blu-Tack, and Othello pieces, which can be flipped over and written on the bottom of to track HP directly on the piece. He does prefer maps because he likes tactical play. For theater of the mind, he recommends checking in with the players a lot, because certain classes can get short shrift without clear/tangible tactical advantage (rogues, AoE spells, etc.). Maps with created elements also can lead to grist for player creativity--Reyka in the Bloodkeep series on Dropout was inspired by decorative chains that she used to tactically balloon her way out of a tight spot.

Matt also likes grids and hex maps for simple alignment without requiring a ton of prep. He recommends considering the terrain, enemy advantages and disadvantages, and a few interesting elements (like the chains) just to see what the players can do. He cites Orym’s messing with the augur machine which he’d intended to just be part of the scenery and using it to trap the Shape Mother.

Brennan: if you’re doing theater of the mind, don’t just breeze past environment or mood because that can open doors for the players. In the reverse, Matt points out that going hard into maps/minis can artificially limit what the players may think is useful unless they are experienced enough to ask questions about things in the room that might not be represented by the minis/maps.

Aabria’s prep time is roughly equivalent to the run time of the game she’s planning, just so she feels comfortable improvising. Brennan laughs that one time Izzy found him in the kitchen in the dark holding a container of half-and-half because he was so deep in thought about D&D. Matt will often start thinking about an NPC and embodying the physicality/voice in practice, and Marisha will call him out for talking to himself.

Brennan: “If you’re a dungeon master and you need some voices time, just don’t do it in the bathroom because other people in the apartment need sometimes to get in there, and if you’re in there doing voices time, they might remind you that that’s not the best place for that, and they might be brusque even though it’s kinda quiet and meditative in there.”

Matt has dozens of voice memos on his phone with various NPC voices he’s experimenting with.

Matt obsessively closes every tab in his office every time Marisha comes in in order to hoard his secrets.

Brennan: a home game should never have rails. D&D shows, however, have tentpoles; Rick Perry has to have guidelines for sets to create, so that’s different. He has to have character designs eight weeks before the first episode airs.

Brennan on rails, again: A player is looking for full immersion. Players aren’t generally trying to be storytellers themselves; they’re trying to inhabit a character who doesn’t know they’re in a story and is just trying to achieve a goal. However, the PLAYER wants the arc, so the player and character are at artistic odds. Characters are like water: they are running downhill seeking the path of least resistance. The players, however, don’t want the straight line. The DM’s job is to be the irrigator shaping the river running downhill; at the end of the story, the character ran in the straightest line possible to it, but the DM shaped the channel into something aesthetically pleasing in the process. The DM’s job is to recognize that the player’s & character’s goals may be disparate, and shaping the story to please both.

Matt adds that character story beat prep should be modular so that you can implement pieces that are important when it’s the best time for the story. Don’t lock critical information behind die rolls; don’t tie one piece of critical information behind one single NPC that they might never encounter. There should be many ways to achieve goals. Aabria likes the three-act structure because most people are familiar with that for movies, and good players who are also storytellers are great about lining up their shot in order to serve the plot. Having players recognizing the structure of the form is like having flowers turning towards the sun.

Brennan doesn’t remember a PC doing something that made a weight lift off his back in 24 years of DMing more than Llaerryn blighting the tree. It was such a perfect moment of a player serving the greater story. Aabria also using the bow as the last piece of her machine was a perfect way for Brennan to implement endgame steps, and he credits her for knowing how to help resolve the notes of the story. She was generously giving him the tools she knew he needed in service of the story.

Brennan talks about the first time Aabria DMed for him and mentioned, “And here’s what you don’t see,” and describes his own head popping off in the realization that you can do that?? He stole that immediately and has used it in his games ever since.

Matt talks about being very limited in his own style because prior to CR, so much of DMing was learned in a vacuum or in a limited friend group. He loves watching other live plays and seeing what other people are doing in completely different worlds. That excites him more than anything.

Favorite GM snacks? Brennan immediately addresses the camera in a classic Brennan rant. I’m so happy. “Let me be clear. This was put into this fucking questionnaire to come for me. If you’re at home and you’re afraid to tell your gaming group that you’re a snacker, I’ve got your back, okay? Because it’s okay to fucking snack. Some of us sweat from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. Some of our bodies are betraying us constantly. Would I have chosen this paper-white, fur-covered, constantly sweating body? No! I wouldn’t have! Does it require constant almonds? Yes! Almonds all the time, okay? And I’m not going to apologize to these two elevated beings, these two hovering pre-Skeksis pre-mystic light beings from The Dark Crystal--some of us are pod people, okay? I’m a little podling, and I need to snack. If I could have another mouth in my back--the biggest obstacle in my GMing, okay, is that the same place I talk from is where food needs to go! And I’m not sorry! I like to snack! And to answer your question, almonds.”

Aabria says Calamity was the least she’d seen him snack, which is how she knew he was nervous.

Brennan laughs that he hit the five-hour mark and his body immediately demanded a caffeine shot. As scary as the villains were, nothing scared Aabria more than Brennan saying, “We’re off keto.”

Aabria lusted after Brennan’s Funyuns, but couldn’t stand the idea of trying to have a romantic moment with Quay with onion breath.

Matt saw an internet comment about his eating early in the stream and stopped eating on stream after. :( However, he does find himself strongly in the moment DMing and loses his appetite anyway.

Brennan tells a hilarious story of getting in a car accident with some friends and eating a pizza and a half by himself out of anxiety afterwards. I have never identified with him more than in this moment.

And that’s it! What an awesome, meaty episode. Is it Thursday yet?

#talks machina #critical role #critical role spoilers #talks machina spoilers #long post for ts #very long post for ts #exu calamity

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otterlyart · 1 year

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From Table to Screen: Percy’s first act of love

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all-made-of-stardust · 1 year

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I want to imagine that after all of this happened, and suddenly all Sending and Scrying and other divination magic isn't working, - somewhere out there in Exandria, Percival de Rolo just rolled up his sleeves and began to invent the fucking telephone.

#cr spoilers #percival fredrickstein von musel de rolo iii #percival de rolo #vox machina #this man is Fed Up #Vex: darling we can just use spells #Percy: Vex'ahlia my darling I want to be able to chat with Keyleth for more than 25 goddamn words #he just wants to talk with his friends #critical role

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devils-yui · 1 year

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He's so happy to talk about his contraptions and about the trap, I adore him when he starts to talk about his expertise

#Get yourself a man who'll talk about his contraptions and traps with high interest and adoration for his work #ACTUALLY- get a man who'll talk about you like how Percy talks about his contraptions #All in all-- simplified and short: I love him #The Killbox #The Legend of Vox Machina #Critical Role #CR #TLOVM #TLOVM spoilers #The Legend of Vox Machina spoilers #Vox Machina #Vox Machina Spoilers #vm #The Killbox spoilers #live blogging #Percy de rolo #Percy de blorbo #Percival de rolo #Percival Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowki De Rolo III

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aquilaofarkham · 1 year

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shaun gilmore is the most man of all time

#aquila talks #critical role #the legend of vox machina #tlovm s2 #tlovm spoilers #shaun gilmore #i only just finished ep 2 of the new season but its GOOD

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bunnylove1 · 2 months

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.•Vox HC•.

•.~vox x bimbo!reader/vox x fem!reader

•.~warnings! Smut! Fluff! And some sensitive words! NOT PROOFED

•.~how have I not done a vox x reader on my account yet he’s literally my husband ANYWAYS enjoying baby’s!

•Vox loves when you give him your big doe eyes he finds them to be your sweetest feature

•If your talking to someone who’s way to touchy but your little brain cant realise it he’ll grab your hips and pull you close to him and he’ll introduce himself to the person that was grabby “hi I’m Vox the owner of Vox tech see you’ve meet my girlfriend”

•When he’s working he lets you and Velvette to hang out knowing you and her both like fashion he thinks it’s good for you to be around someone who likes the same things you do “baby you can go help vel with her new line she doesn’t mind, don’t go out of her sight got it” he most definitely tells Velvette to not let you wonder without her there

•He knows your not stupid (maybe a little) just a little (A-LOT) oblivious so he keeps you close weather it’s around others or around the towns of hell

•He calls you: “Bambi”, “Sweetheart”, “Sweetie”, “Sugar”, “My little girl”, “sweet cake” “baby cakes”, My whore”, “Baby”, “Slut”, sometimes “Dirty girl”

•He LOVES when it’s night and you both can’t sleep so y’all are in the kitchen getting glass of water and your sitting on the counter babbling your little head off and he just goes “Baby, why don’t you drink this and rest your pretty little head huh?” MAKES ME CRUMBLE

•Vox never EVER lets you near Val, he knows you and Val to well. “No baby you can’t talk to him” “but vox whyyyyy” “because I said so”

•If you have to be in a room with Val, Vox has you stuck to his hip no matter what “No little girl you stay near me okay”

•He loves when your babbling whatever you heard today while helping vel or whatever you watched on tv and Vox just simply kisses you to shut you up

•He loves walking around hell with you, it feeds his ego knowing that the sinners around hell would kill to have a taste of you but your Voxs and everyone knows that and he loves that he feeds off of it

•Now if you say something bratty or start having an attitude he will not hesitate to put your pretty mouth to work “Aww look all that big talks gone now that you have daddy’s cock huh?”

•MASSIVE DADDY KINK can’t tell me other wise

•He loves when you wear your short skirts but he will not let you wear them out unless your expecting a hell of a night from him

•He likes when you wear a choker with his initials on it

•everyone knows when yall had a intimate night because you have dark purple spots big and small everywhere on you and big teeth marks everywhere as well

•I have this head cannon that Vox doesn’t let you leave things on him one he’s a big owner and needs to look professional and two he likes being the only one to do that

•he’ll let you leave small bits but nothing to much but that’s only on good days

•Vox likes to dress you up, mostly like him but still in your bimbo look he liked matching he finds it endearing

•when Voxs comes home stressed from one of vals temper tantrums he likes to use you like a big fluffy pillow and just cuddle you

•never lets you drink while your out unless it’s a special celebration but even then you have to be supervised, can’t let his sweet girl get spiked can we?

•he has a huge turn on for public sex idk why but I think he likes the feeling of being caught/ being watched letting everyone now you are owned by him and him only

•He’ll carry your heels if your feet hurt and even carry you princess style

•I feel like he knows how to do hair there’s no way vel hasn’t taught him, so he likes doing your hair in the mornings

•he likes to pat your head for no reason just likes how your shorter than him so he just kinda does it

•vox definitely likes to fuck you silly, likes seeing you drool and become a mess in front of him

•he likes giving you baths, cause he can’t himself so he likes to wash your hair and wash your body take a load off of you

•he’ll let you dress him up time to time

•has a special seat for you while he’s doing a commercial or anything on tv. It’s always next to him

•he has a good memory unlike you so he tells you what you need to grab or what you forgot you were doing and what time it is and what your doing today, basically a human calendar

•.~I DID IT OMG, I know some of them went just for bimbo reader so it’s like bimbo reader and just box head cannons, I love you darlings thank you for reading!

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puwumats · 1 year

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same energy

#critical role #critical role spoilers #critrole #cr #bell's hells #bells hells #sam talks a big game of being the most shameless until feelings get involved #vox machina

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flowercoasts · 2 years

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oh i can’t WAIT for bells hells to fully exploit their relationship with vox machina. they start telling keyleth about everything, all the time. keyleth’s in the middle of a diplomatic summit and imogen pops into her head and starts talking about the dream she had last night. whitestone becomes like a second home to bells hells and all of a sudden percy and vex have to deal with 7 absolute weirdos who keep claiming that the robot one is growing new body parts every day. meanwhile said 7 weirdos are just squatting in their house plotting murder and scaring the staff. pike gets calls from fcg asking how religion works.

#this is ideal timeline. vox machina bells hells crossover #but they don’t do anything epic or pvp. bells hells are just the dumpster cats they found one day and wont leave them alone. IDEAL timeline #i want bells hells to just get into really stupid domestic shenanigans with vm that’s all :]#critical role #flower talks #cr spoilers #flowers hits #1k

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crowreys-wormstache · 1 year

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I mean. I wasn't the only one thinking it right

#tlovm season 2 #cr1 #critical role #the legend of vox machina #avatar the last airbender #atla #king bumi #jess talks #tlovm spoilers

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crispysnake · 1 year

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when I said I'll never shut up about this I wasn't lying

the fact that Vaxs undeniable relenting love and passion for his family is the thing that helped them save the world against Vecna. and now that love and passion for Keyleth is what was used to destroy it. Their love broke the world.

#My brain is going brbrbrbrbrbrrbrbrb nonstop since last night #did I sleep?#....no #vaxleth #critical role #cr spoilers #vox machina #cr3 #bells hells #mira talks #vaxildan #keyleth of the air ashari

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waukeentide · 14 days

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God they just did a 4SD too, so we have to wait a month to hear Sam's thoughts on turning his own character nuclear. I really hope Sam and Matt are both on the next episode because I want to hear both sides.

#critical role #critical role spoilers #poor matt looked shell shocked lol #this is the only time i've ever missed talks machina #at least that was WEEKLY

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loquaciousquark · 2 years

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Exandria Unlimited: Calamity Wrap-Up (July 13, 2022)

Very belatedly, here’s the cast-full recap for Calamity. Everyone is here, including Brennan (excluding Matt) and Marisha is hosting-ish. Aabria wins her first game of rock paper scissors ever as part of the intro.

Aabria normally doesn’t care about optimizing characters, but Brennan’s alert that they would die she took as a challenge. Laerryn more than doubled Patia’s HP thanks to Toughness & her Arcane Ward. She did a lot of research to build the character as solidly as possible. Brennan’s direction to the cast to pick lots of magical items (in retrospect: OUCH) frightened Sam, who picked only a Wand of Smiles & a +1 Ring of Protection--and even that made him feel guilty. Luis asking for a Holy Avenger gave Marisha the freedom to ask for more. Brennan: “But there’s an element of verisimilitude to that though, right? These people, the movers and shakers of Avalir. ‘Can I borrow $20?’ No! These people would be fucking loaded!“ It wasn’t just a clever parenting ploy trying to wrangle children, it made sense in the world which doesn’t need an army, just a guy with a Belt of Storm Giant Strength.

Lou wasn’t as Calamity-infused as the rest; he was just excited to be on Critical Role & didn’t feel like he could just show up as a plain bard, so he did bard-sorcerer. (Sam didn’t want to do a plain bard since he’d done that before, but wanted to play something familiar at this high level. Brennan suggested the flavoring, and Sam picked his multiclass warlock patron from the first fey result on the CR wiki. Oh, Sam.) Lou used his Magical Secrets feat to get his dragon summon and the Cone of Cold, “’cause we never took a rest of any kind.” Brennan: “All the GMs out there, fuck a rest, all right? They don’t need ‘em.”

Nydas started as a sorcerer. Loquatius started as a warlock. Patia was a pure School of Enchantment wizard. She didn’t get to use a lot of her class features within the game, but the one thing she did get to clear with Brennan was that she got to use her vast library knowledge to have access to 10 extra spells.

Brennan: GMs & DMs shouldn’t be stingy when the character designs should allow for expansion. Find non-gamebreaking ways to expand character powers.

Travis walked into character creation with zero prep, despite instructions to come with ideas. He happened to be the last one at the table to describe his concept, and after everyone else was full magic, he & Brennan landed on the non-magical investigator rogue. Travis always builds characters by starting with an item. Fjord began with a pair of silver forearm bracers/greaves which he got from a costume shop. Likewise, Cerrit came from these very cool hawks (a type of handaxe) from a fighting system called Sayoc Kali in the Phillipines (wielded by a Navy Seal named Jack Carr). That turned into the Philippine Eagle, which came together beautifully with the Sightwarden elements.

Travis talks about being blown away in the first episode with how natural a rapport some of the characters had with each other (especially excluding him). He felt like he’d missed a meeting. However, it turns out there was indeed a secret meeting between Marisha, Aabria, and Lou in which they talked about their characters’ secret nasty histories with each other.

Brennan wanted to know all the ways that the 75% of the energy dedicated to the Replenishment was actually being misused, siphoned, or otherwise misdirected, and his few suggestions (lichdom, people extending their lives) paled in comparison to the players’ ideas (making the city capable of interplanar travel).

Brennan explicitly wanted members of the Brass Ring to be up to “asymmetrical amount of shady shit.” It was also funny for Brennan to hear these characters talking about how nasty they were as corrupt city officials at the same time he was emailing Luis to discover Zerxus was “not doing good. He’s like, ‘It could all burn. It could burn today, tomorrow, who knows?’“

It’s hard for Luis to be objective about a character he’s been inhabiting for so long. He wanted to challenge himself with a hard commitment to a full redemption paladin. He wanted to parallel his experience as the lonely First Knight with the connection of the Betrayer Gods’ experiences. He didn’t have any longstanding secrets--the dream happened that day. There were two times he wanted to talk to the rest about his issues: first right after speaking with Purvan, and second was during the Zone of Truth until Nydas scolded him. However, Brennan could see the desire to confess in Luis’s eyes and moved the story forward. :O Lou loved the dynamics of the conversation--Zerxus challenging others on their reticence only to be yelled at by his best friend.

Brennan loved how much Luis got into storytelling. His emails were full of notes about Zerxus’s strong convictions and ways he could be manipulated. Brennan likes that 5e moved paladins from wisdom to charisma casters because it allows for the examination of a morality system based on CHA. Zerxus took the universal truth of “everyone can be saved” and never questioned the following conclusion that “I am the right man for the job.” Luis deliberately built in this toxic trait: “I am going to change you.” However, he also felt it was important to have a fervent, unkillable hope. “Let’s have this person who is the most well-meaning, the goodest person in his own heart, and let’s give him this blind spot.”

Marisha talks about the dissonance between the players knowing the characters are being shady but having to justify them internally because they genuinely believe it’s for the good of the city.

Sam talks about Quay being the opposite: instead, he was a liar all the time; his flaw (figured out during the playing) was that he lied to himself more than anyone else. He couldn’t admit to himself that he just wanted simple things, “to be a gritty indie reporter” and to have a lady, and he hated the bending of truth required to be the Herald of Avalir.

Cerrit was a good dad for that day only--he had years of not being a good dad before this. The implication was that Wrayne and Cerrit were not doing well because he had his eyes everywhere except the house with his family. She took off looking for meaningful work and Cerrit just said, “Okay.” He put some of his fears about being a new dad into the character. Travis said he wanted to be Jor-El who got his kids out of there.

Everyone made character choices which elevated the story. The ties to Vespin & the Betrayer Gods were helpful, but everyone was corrupt in some way except Cerrit. Even Quay is introduced by influencing an election. Brennan didn’t want the viewers’ lesson to be, “that’s what happens when everyone’s bad. Not like me, who’s good.” Having a good character whose attention was just in the wrong place was also a great lesson. Travis found it fascinating that even when playing a good character whose entire job was to investigate at the end of days, he had a hard time pushing his friend the Herald on his obvious lies.

The kids being so cute destroyed everyone. Travis picked a dad character because he wanted collateral damage; the character needed stakes. His favorite superhero is Superman (correct) because he is omnipotent and still chooses to be good (also correct, and I’ve never felt so close to Travis), but he’s also been fascinated by Jor-el, who was so prescient he could see the planet’s impending explosion but couldn’t make a ship big enough to fit all three of them. He talks about building characters with priorities: if the first priority is the threat, the job, the enemy, the second is the family, implying you have then put something above the family. As a new dad, he doesn’t know how to do that: his heart is outside his body now. He wanted to explore that conflict of priorities in Cerrit.

Luis doesn’t have kids of his own, but he likes the pretense--he likes trying to access that part of his imagination. He wanted to have a kid that wasn’t his to parallel the relationship between the Betrayers & mortals (wow!). Zerxus’s child was staying with Nydas’s family (Lou’s idea).

Sam & Aabria very quickly decided they didn’t have kids. “There’s something slightly hilarious about exes who fucking hate each other, and there’s something not hilarious at all about exes with a kid who hate each other.”

Travis is incensed that he missed out on all these coffees with other players to pre-prep character relationships. There was early discussion about Laerryn being Elias’s mom with Evandrin, but it never got cemented. There was some idea of it coming up if Elias were ever orphaned in game.

The city put a lot of pressure on Zerxus to become First Knight because there weren’t many other good options after Evandrin died. They needed the eldritch knight-oracle power of Evandrin to study.

Brennan loves playing kids. “There’s a convenience to orphans” due to their lack of attachment. See: Luke on Tatooine. He loves familial relationships because people are like gems, and certain facets only show up in family relationships (Spy x Family vibes, tbh). Even characters who tried to avoid family still had critical moments: Eadalus and Nydas, Patia and her grandfather.

Nydas was based heavily on John Hammond from Jurassic Park. The goal is not just to make the city great, it’s to make it great and show it to the world forever for the recognition. “I think, in the moment where you killed us--”

Brennan: “I just wanna say something. Matt Mercer made up the Calamity, okay? Matt Mercer made it up, and I’m over here bad-copping it--” Sam: “So you gave birth to us, and Matt killed us?” Brennan: “In a way. I’m in the delivery room.” Lou: “Well, I specifically mean when you killed us with the tree. Which is you. The tree didn’t have to be that wild. It could have just split open. And then in the fourth episode for the first second, AKA two hours, you murdered us ruthlessly. That was you.” Brennan: “All I’m saying is that everyone loves it when Matt says two-thirds of Exandria’s gone, but when it actually starts to happen and we’re making saving throws for an hour of gameplay, all of a sudden people got some shit to say. That’s all I’m saying.”

The moment of death was when Nydas realized he had something of value to lose: a community of people doing great things. The slow moment of Laerryn casting Blight was his slow-mo realization of “uh oh, I might have been sitting on something really important” regarding the prophecy. After that, he had this single-minded impetus to try to mitigate the damage. Brennan loved seeing the prophecy incite a character to panic in real time without a saving throw. He thinks it reflects the differences in character backgrounds & Nydas’s grounded struggle in growing up on the earth vs. the elves’ air-based privileged upbringing.

Brennan thinks Cerrit’s decision to leave is right up there with the Blight & pulling the heart through the tree in terms of critical game moments. He could have completely shifted that fight or even persuaded them to stop. Travis thinks Patia & Laerryn were the no. 1 & 2 targets if he’d been there, with Zerxus behind at 3rd. He OOC thought it was a good chance for them to weaken each other before he had to come in to fight them.

The drive to get the Leywright done was because it was the best timing & would free her up to fix her marriage. “Once we get this done, we could do the little things” like visiting Quay’s home plane.

Sam reads his text history with Aabria. “Lorwyn is her first name. ... My first name is Loquatius Hambrick-Zucker.” Aabria had forgotten she’d named her something else first. Next text: “Maybe I should simplify my stupid-ass last name to something much more fey, since that’s where I’m from. How about Loquatius Seelie, implying that I’m from the Seelie court, like Elmenore. Wasn’t that something you did with Fearne on ExU?” They figured out the relationship timeline & number of years divorced, as well as the faults for the marriage. Aabria honestly thought this was just going to be a bit. They were planning to just be sniping at each other in the background for the campaign, but Sam kept coming at Aabria with genuine emotions. Sam had lightly discussed Quay discovering parts of himself with Brennan over the course of the story, but didn’t know what that would look like. Brennan had his hands off that relationship more than any other.

The scandal with Elena Tuvaris was the mark of the end of Loquatius’s reporter-y honesty.

The speech in episode 4 comes up, oh God. “The most beautiful woman in the world” makes Brennan choke up every time he watches it (apparently hundreds of times, God bless). Sam’s emotion in that moment was fully & completely honest. “I’m not a very good actor. I fell in love with her during the game.” Marisha talks about a conversation with Sam she had during C1 about roleplaying styles. She asked him about influences & callbacks, and Sam said he likes to remember what has already happened like rungs of a ladder. Marisha thinks the speech was a masterclass in being 100% informed by what had happened before. Travis reveals Sam wrote the speech in the shadows of the break in illegible chicken scratch on a legal pad. Brennan was blown away by the sheer gravitas of the speech coming from a character who’d only moments before made the deliberate decision to die, to go down with the ship--and then to transition into the Market of Wonders...

Brennan: “That is a perfect joke. I’ve been lucky enough to see a couple of them in my life. That is a perfect joke. There’s something that [Joseph] Campbell says: ‘comedy completes the realization that drama begins.’ I have not contradicted the depths of my sorrow. I have not contradicted the meaningfulness of my sadness, but I have introduced something profoundly absurd and wonderfully silly, and I am not uncommitted in the moment of doing it. It’s hysterical, and it makes it even more sad.”

Aabria volunteering to be the divorced partner of Sam was the best RPG decision she’s ever made. Marisha loved the sediment layers of trauma.

Marisha wanted Patia to be like a Kennedy. It was hard for her because D&D is built on scrappy ne’er-do-wells, and to be someone integrated in society was hard. Brennan thought she did an incredible job bookending her completely absent parents with “Happy Replenishment, Grandfather.” Brennan didn’t realize how alone Patia was until she said that Laerryn was her best friend. There was a moment where everyone was having connections with everyone and Patia was alone with a statue. That led to the in-game realization that somehow Patia’s parents had failed, which is why she’d erased (or someone had erased) them from her memory.

Brennan consulted with Matt before linking the Gau Drashari with the Ashari. He blew up Matt’s phone in his own planning. He had to negotiate balancing the stakes of Avalir with the Primordials’ historically canon focus on Vasselheim. Matt named the Gau Drashari when Brennan asked if there could be a druid group at the mountain the Betrayer Gods would want to destroy. Matt created the idea of the Tree of Names when Brennan came to him with a story beat he needed.

Sam praises Brennan’s balance of the need of the short-form story against Matt’s gigantically huge world.

Travis heavily commends Luis for starting the story off super strong. Lou had told Luis that Brennan likes to start off with character vignettes, and Luis knew of course that meant he wouldn’t start with him, ha! Luis had asked for an encounter with a Betrayer God, but expected it to be a big distance shadow, not something so intimate that resulted in him caring for the character. Zerxus establishes attachments very very quickly--unhealthily quickly. He fell in love with Evandrin immediately and loved Elias as his son immediately. Lou was agonizing over the PC vs. NPC knowledge of Luis having had this intense encounter with Asmodeus but not bringing it up in game. Luis talks about the crazy intimacy of the Lord of Hells looking like Evandrin, like Elias, being super receptive to everything Zerxus offered. Sam thinks it was a crazy unusual bold choice and he loved it.

Blighting the tree & pulling Asmodeus through the portal were key moments for Brennan. Travis could see Brennan’s face change with delight when that happened. Aabria loves how beautifully Luis played the scenes with Asmodeus because he never asked for anything, never insighted, never Zone of Truthed--he tried to do a bunch of things that Luis mechanically knew would never work instead, like Remove Curse. There were certain things he was willing to question and certain things it would never occur to him to question.

Brennan: “In terms of being a liar, the God of Lies--I don’t flimflam a person with a steel resolve. I do what real evil is, which is I find somebody who already wants to believe. You go, ‘Is there something you’d really like to be true?’ How much does the devil even lie in those scenes? You say stuff, you say, ‘The Prime Deities did this to you,’ and homeboy’s like, ‘Yeah, sure, man.’ It’s so much him just letting you walk to where he wants you to walk.”

Travis was very creeped out by the non-conniving, non-arch evil of the devil by way of Brennan. Marisha felt like she genuinely saw something new about what Brennan is capable of. She is horrified at how manipulative he could be when he wanted. Brennan says it’s important to have high cognitive empathy and low capability of caring when the target is hurt; you have to be very emotionally intelligent and aware of what others feel/want to be successfully manipulative. You just don’t care when they’re wounded by it. Asmodeus’s manipulation of Zerxus wasn’t that he lied to him, it was that he showed up to him wounded.

Brennan had a line if Zerxus had ever questioned Asmodeus on his lies: “Yeah, I showed up to you hurt, because you guys love it when people are hurting.” Luis: “Well, a savior needs somebody to save.”

Aabria was more scared that Brennan’s Asmodeus didn’t have an affectation or accent.

Brennan had so many contingency plans if the characters had failed to end the world. He had plans where the Septarion came after them in case they tried to get the city’s authorities on their side. Sans Blight/pull, Vespin shows up and is evil, the Taxmen turn & it’s a fight at the tree: boring options. Most of the contingencies in absence of hubristic folly involve brute force being responsible for the Calamity instead. Others for the final combat included the Taxmen overwhelming them, and contingencies for if Laerryn went down in the final fight: someone would have had to make an insane Arcana check to finish her work--probably Loquatius.

Travis could not have rolled the 31 without the inspiration, the buff, the teamwork. Cerrit had atoned and focused and killed the evil, but had one thing left to do to make things right. He couldn’t have succeeded without the Ring of Brass wanting to help him escape. “It mattered that we were friends.”

After the orb, Travis texted Marisha in game “What did you do to my daughter?!” because he didn’t realize initially what Patia had sent her. Patia’s knowledge hoarding came about because Marisha mourned the loss of the Library of Alexandria. She asks Matt often what’s happened to her orb. Brennan worries about it too: “The camera stops rolling, and suddenly canon leaves you! I immediately wanted to run and find Matt and be like, is the orb okay? I’m not--I don’t have any say anymore. It goes back to you now. Is it fine? The little library, where is it at?” Marisha loves the fan theory that the library going to the daughter of a master detective was the origin of the Cobalt Reserve.

Brennan would love to come back and play Kir or Maya as an adult. Adult Kir in his mind is huge & jacked.

It was really significant to Brennan that Laerryn used her leywright to save Exandria, and for Zerxus to get his cleansing redemption power to get Vespin back for a moment. He didn’t want the story to say that science, innovation, or compassion were bad; it was all a product of a single moment in a specific inspiration. He loved the bookending of these same focuses of failure being later used for a new, more selfless purpose to great success.

Bolo is dead. Matt is hereafter conscripted into doing Slavic accents for Aeorians. Or Bolo is hit by a wagon. Or Bolo was an Aeorian master spy who later worked on threshold crests. Or Bolo polymorphed into a dragon and flew away safely.

Marisha to Sam: “You were sleeping with a dragon, ha!” Brennan: “Dragon fucking! Thanks, folks!”

We end on a lovely thanks to the production crew, including the graphics team with the overlay degrading. The Calamity is here, but the Calamity is not here forever. Aabria: “So we’re alive?” Brennan: “Five of you are dead. That’s what the dice fucking said!”

And on that cheerful note, we’re out! Is it Thursday yet?

#critical role #critical role spoilers #exu calamity #calamity spoilers #talks machina spoilers #long post for ts #very long post for ts

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