We just released the premiere episode of the fifth season of our actual play podcast Out of Depth Plays and I’m so damn proud of the work we put into it that I wanted to share it with folks. Every episode is edited down to about 60-75 minutes. I sound design each season with music, sound FX and ambient noise. The end result is a kind of a hybrid between an actual play and an improvised audio drama.
This season is particularly special because I actually learned how to make music myself, so all the music you hear in Sapphire Doom was made by me and some synthesizer plugins. I drew every note.
Sapphire Doom tells the story of three Ka’tek, my version of fantasy dwarves, as they try to create a child. Ka’tek literally cut pieces of themselves out to mold a child and this process requires a kind of midwife, called a Reckoner, who insures the process is balanced to produce a viable offspring.
I really wanted to focus on a different kind of story, one that’s a little more introspective while still maintaining some of the hallmarks of fantasy role playing. Yeah there’s combat, hexcrawling, puzzle solving and we even start the game in a tavern. But we also explore the insecurities of becoming a parent and reconciling our hopes and desires for our children with their own autonomy.
So that’s the pitch for why you should listen to our show.
You can check it out on youtube or any place you listen to podcasts:
PLAYING KNAVE
What I’d also like to discuss, is how much my players enjoy using Knave and some things they’ve mentioned to me about the experience.
When we’re choosing a rpg system for the show, I usually try to pick something that’s lite on rules.I try to make an entertaining show, and I don’t find discussions about math and action economy to be particularly engaging. So I try to use rulesets that feel more loose and free. In the past we’ve used Mothership[1], ICONS, Electric Bastionland, and Call of Cthulhu(which is probably the crunchiest of the four but it’s still pretty simple dice mechanic. Not that different from Mothership.)
We’ve recorded 8 episodes of the show already and my players mostly enjoy how much combat feels more free form. I think with other systems, there’s a clear optimal way to handle combat(cast fireball!) and so you feel like you’re letting people down if you don’t do the best move. In Knave, there’s not a a strong hierarchy of weapons or skills that allow you to deal a ton of damage. In fact, out of the 100 Wizard spells in the book I don’t think there are any that explicitly deal damage. Not even a magic missile! And yet my players have used those spells to creatively deal with foes in combat, and it’s been really entertaining.
They also like utilizing the environment and using improvised weapons, which I think is really fun, and makes me want to create more interesting environments for them to fight in. There’s a bag of charcoal that has kind of become the ultimate weapon of choice in the game. And there have been multiple occasions where players would rather wrestle or grapple a creature than just swing a sword.
So overall we’ve really enjoyed Knave. I think it inspires creative game play that feels very collaborative, and encourages rewarding players who think outside the box. We’ve had two sessions, where I don’t think the players even rolled dice because their ideas were so good it was dumb to not let them work.
Motehrship is easily our most popular season ↩︎