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Finale finale finale!

Not that it's over...

Vigil: Quarry, Act 4

In which the Hunt is at bay; a hound bites its master; and a mentor has nothing more to teach.

Prefer your podcasts audio only? Follow us on your usual podcast app - search Merely Roleplayers or head to www.merelyroleplayers.com

COMPERE: Matt Boothman

STARRING:

Christopher Starkey as Cameron Jarvis, the Wronged

Helen Stratton as Melody, the Constructed

Strat as Brier, the Monstrous

Vikki as Renko, the Flake

ROLEPLAYING GAME SYSTEM: Monster of the Week, designed by Michael Sands

MUSIC BY: Alexander Pankhurst

SOUND DESIGN BY: Helen Stratton

EDITED AND PRODUCED BY: Matt Boothman

If you're the type who likes to watch for hints, listen out for the bits of this episode about other realms - they will pay off in the next Vigil production (which I'm editing right now!)

Disbanding (Vigil Backstage)

We look back at Vigil: Quarry. Did we truly stop the danger or just put it off until later?

Prefer your podcasts audio only? Follow us on your usual podcast app - search Merely Roleplayers or head to www.merelyroleplayers.com

COMPERE: Matt Boothman

STARRING:

Christopher Starkey as Cameron Jarvis, the Wronged

Helen Stratton as Melody, the Constructed

Strat as Brier, the Monstrous

Vikki as Renko, the Flake

ROLEPLAYING GAME SYSTEM: Monster of the Week, designed by Michael Sands

MUSIC BY: Alexander Pankhurst

SOUND DESIGN BY: Helen Stratton

EDITED AND PRODUCED BY: Matt Boothman

I've been looking forward to letting this one loose! It's a ton of silly fun. No need to have listened to anything else @merelyroleplayers has ever done, this is a clean jumping-on point for a daft three-episode story about geriatric prog rockers, one of whom may or may not be an avatar of Death.

Monumental Exit, Act 1

After 67 years, Bilbo Biltong’s quitting the band. Somewhere out there is a star worthy of stepping into his well worn shoes - but where?

Prefer your podcasts audio only? Follow us on your usual podcast app - search Merely Roleplayers or head to www.merelyroleplayers.com

STARRING:

Josh Yard as Bilbo Biltong

Natalie Winter as Sue Sherpa

Alexander Pankhurst as Mike Sherpa

Matt Boothman as Gregg Nevin

ROLEPLAYING GAME SYSTEM: Fiasco Classic by Jason Morningstar

MUSIC BY: Alexander Pankhurst

EDITED AND PRODUCED BY: Matt Boothman

Do you normally skip our Backstage episodes? Don't skip this one. Trust me.

Jam session (Monumental Exit Backstage)

The cast of Monumental Exit jam on the Fiasco playset ‘When the Music Stopped’ until they find their characters.

Prefer your podcasts audio only? Follow us on your usual podcast app - search Merely Roleplayers or head to www.merelyroleplayers.com

STARRING:

Josh Yard as Bilbo Biltong

Natalie Winter as Sue Sherpa

Alexander Pankhurst as Mike Sherpa

Matt Boothman as Gregg Nevin

ROLEPLAYING GAME SYSTEM: Fiasco Classic by Jason Morningstar

MUSIC BY: Alexander Pankhurst

EDITED AND PRODUCED BY: Matt Boothman

It is an absolutely genius feature of Fiasco that just when you've played enough scenes for your character to claw their way out of the muck they start in, just when your character maybe gets a glimpse of something like resolution, the game has you generate a load more complications - one of which is usually "something precious is on fire"

With all the pieces in place for the final act, the cast finds out some new complications that are sure to upset the board.

Prefer your podcasts audio only? Follow us on your usual podcast app - search Merely Roleplayers or head to www.merelyroleplayers.com

STARRING:

Josh Yard as Bilbo Biltong

Natalie Winter as Sue Sherpa

Alexander Pankhurst as Mike Sherpa

Matt Boothman as Gregg Nevin

ROLEPLAYING GAME SYSTEM: Fiasco Classic by Jason Morningstar

MUSIC BY: Alexander Pankhurst

EDITED AND PRODUCED BY: Matt Boothman

I think it was very restrained of us not to bring up the murder until act 2

Bit of terminology clash here - we call our episodes acts, and Fiasco calls everything before the tilt act 1 and everything after it act 2. So Monumental Exit Acts 1 and 2 are act 1 of the game, and Act 3 is act 2 of the game. I had to leave a couple of bits in the edit where I'm like "here we are, im act 2!" but it's in Act 3 😬

Monumental Exit, Act 2

Everything’s ready for Bilbo’s swansong at the Beanstalk, but one roadie’s vendetta against the venue owner threatens to stain his perfect farewell.

Prefer your podcasts audio only? Follow us on your usual podcast app - search Merely Roleplayers or head to www.merelyroleplayers.com

STARRING:

Josh Yard as Bilbo Biltong

Natalie Winter as Sue Sherpa

Alexander Pankhurst as Mike Sherpa

Matt Boothman as Gregg Nevin

ROLEPLAYING GAME SYSTEM: Fiasco Classic by Jason Morningstar

MUSIC BY: Alexander Pankhurst

EDITED AND PRODUCED BY: Matt Boothman

And now it finally becomes clear why I put all that fire in the episode art 🔥🗡🐯

Monumental Exit, Act 3

A geriatric crowd fills the Beanstalk Show Club for a gig that’s sure to go down in rock’n’roll history.

Prefer your podcasts audio only? Follow us on your usual podcast app - search Merely Roleplayers or head to www.merelyroleplayers.com

STARRING:

Josh Yard as Bilbo Biltong

Natalie Winter as Sue Sherpa

Alexander Pankhurst as Mike Sherpa

Matt Boothman as Gregg Nevin

ROLEPLAYING GAME SYSTEM: Fiasco Classic by Jason Morningstar

MUSIC BY: Alexander Pankhurst

EDITED AND PRODUCED BY: Matt Boothman

Where to find me at Dragonmeet 2022

(Sat 3 Dec, Novotel Hammersmith, London)

10am, Beaujolais, Mezzanine:

Jason Statham's Big Vacation

(Live play organised by The D20 Future Show, as part of the Podcast Zone. I'll be playing one of Jason Statham's entourage, trying to make sure he has a nice holiday and protecting him from the Wesley Sniper. Game designed by Grant Howitt)

4pm, second floor:

Indie Games on the Hour

(No need to book, just turn up a bit before 4 and I'll pitch some games for you to pick from. Likely some combination of galactic 2e by riley rethal, Mission: Accomplished! by Jeff Stormer, Our Haunt by Rae Nedjadi, or Lichcraft by Laurie O'Connell)

For the rest of the day I'll be pootling about, checking in with people I know, going tk seminars, and buying things I don't need in the trade hall...

I've been working on a new thing

Over the past few months I've really been getting into solo journaling games like Yourself by K-Ramstack or The Wretched by Chris Bissette. One of my favourites is Anamnesis by @goblinmixtape and published by Blinking Birch Games, who recently announced an Anamnesis Jam for projects inspired by the game, running from November until the end of January 2023. As it happened, I was inbetween creative projects and was looking for a project to make on stream. Soooooo...

I am turning a playthrough of Anamnesis into an audio drama, and I'm streaming the entire creative process, from playing the game through to scripting, to recording to editing to sound design and music, all on our Twitch channel. We stream every Monday and Wednesday from 8pm UK time.

At time of writing we've finished the playthrough of the game, and we're about to start the process of adapting it into an audio drama script. You can catch up on all of the streams so far on Youtube, where I've made a playlist of the stream VODs.

If you like The Tower, or anything Tin Can Audio has produced, and you're curious as to how we make things, this is a great opportunity to see the entire process, as well as some chill background listening!

Whatever comes out of this experiment will be available on our Bandcamp page sometime in February, as well as in our Rusty Quill Network feed Tin Can Audio Presents

Are you curious about solo tabletop RPGs, but not sure what to expect?

Check out my solo live stream of The Wretched. I play the last crew member aboard a spaceship as a creature hunts me. Watch as I draw from a deck of cards, consult prompts, and pull from the jenga tower. The video is available on my YouTube channel!

The Wretched is a solo journaling RPG played with a deck of cards, a tumbling block tower, and a microphone. In this actual play, I am the last surviving crew member of the intergalactic salvage ship The Wretched. Adrift between stars after an engine failure, my ship was attacked by a hostile alien life form. The crew are dead. I thought I won. I launched the creature out of an airlock, and that should have meant safety. It didn’t.

See how my attempt at survival turns out! 👇

This is a general offer: If you're a creator of any kind looking at the updates WotC announced to the OGL (which suck shit, to be clear), and you're looking for another game which suits the stuff you make, I'm happy to help. I want to see artists in the space succeed.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Formally moving away from D&D in the summer of 2020 was the best decision we ever made for Party of One, from a creative standpoint, from a business standpoint, from a personal satisfaction standpoint, from a growth standpoint.

I see a lot of folks in Actual Play specifically getting antsy over this development, and I am here to tell you: It is possible to move away and make something even better, and find an audience outside of the "I only engage with 5E" crowd. You can do this. I believe in you.

D&D, The OGL, and a Better Future for Actual Play Content

So this is spinning out of a post I made on twitter about how I legitimately believe the future of Actual Play (or AP for short) is in working alongside indie rpg folks

You can see that thread here, but I'm gonna recap anyway

Lets talk about the OGL and D&D first

Thanks to some great reporting from journalist Linda Codega (I know they have a tumblr somewhere and I will come back and link it when I find it), we know the general shape of the new Open Gaming License (or OGL) that WotC is running for Dungeons & Dragons moving forward. In short it sucks, I am not super interested in getting into it here, especially because Linda (once again) did really solid reporting here. Generally this spells a very bad time for a number of bigger third party creators (Green Ronin, Paizo, Kobold Press, probably Critical Role if we assume they aren't in on it which I would not assume tbh), and it also spells out specifically that Hasbro's desire to monetize even harder is in full swing.

One of the more interesting bits to this whole thing to me though, is how Wizards is looking at Fan Content, and I think its very likely this is going to be a major rub for AP Producers in the future. The OGL is now much clearer that AP work needs to fall under the Fan Content Policy, which means in broad strokes there is to be no monetization of your content. This is an old policy, but one I think a lot of folks are blithely unaware of. Specifically

You can't require payments, downloads, subscriptions, or email registration to access your content

You can't sell or license this content to a third party

Your content must be free for others to view, access, share, and use without paying you anything, obtaining approval, or giving credit.

You specifically can run things like a Ko-Fi or a Patreon, but you can't hide content behind a paywall. It also is... unclear on the ability to do things like live shows for money? I'm not a lawyer.

Regardless I think its high time people left, and that brings me to part 2 here

D&D and APs

Fundamentally D&D has always been bad for Actual Play. It's a quagmire of conflicting rules and bubblegum fixes, it crunches in weird spots, it doesn't do half the things people play it for, and its expensive to get into. Furthermore, it requires a lot of prep, it doesn't adapt well, and fundamentally it makes bad radio.

Where we see the most successes in the niche of D&D APs is hyper edited, super slick, and wildly unachievable setups; with major changes in rules, players who can make a living doing it, and entire production studios working on them (looking at you Critical Role, Dimension 20, etc). Within these (and within a ton of other APs) we also see a wild amount of homebrew to bend an inflexible and inelegant system into something that tells the stories we're interested in telling in games. Be this the wild changes to death in Dimension 20's Neverafter, full new classes and mechanics across Critical Role, magic items and homebrew in every AP I can think of, etc.

Generally also D&D is bad radio. The exacting measurements on battle maps don't make great Theatre of the Mind (certainly not as well as games designed for it), the rolls + stat modifiers + misc. shit on your sheet requires a lot of boring and frequently had to follow math*, etc.

Point here being, when we see it done well** it's less on the hands of D&D being good at these things, and more because production is changing major aspects of gameplay to make a game make good radio.

We should also talk about the messy legacy of D&D, but honestly that would be a few thousand extra words from me, and I don't have it in me. If the OGL doesn't scare you, it's worth thinking about what you're cosigning by staying around. Here's some extra articles if this is the first you're hearing about Wizards having major problems tho

Why Race is Still a Problem by Linda Codega gets into a lot of it

Wizards is still making money off of Oriental Adventures (and an article on that)

Mike Mearls still works there, this was weirdly hard to find a good article on, but here's a reddit post where its discussed

A Better Future for Actual Plays

This brings me to the point of this thread, which is that I don't think the future of Actual Plays has ever... actually been in making 5e content. This is a thing I feel pretty strongly about as a person who makes non-5e ap content (and this is a bias, sure). To me a better future has always been in indie rpgs, and in making content hand in hand with designers and producers working together.

What does this look like though? In short it rocks, and it's a thing bigger folks in the AP sphere are clearly already looking it. I'll list some examples below, and then I'll talk more about what it looks like on smaller scale, and what my experience with that has been like

So first off here's a few examples of what this looks like on the higher production end of the scale. I'm specifically looking at examples of campaign APs, working with the designer of the system, and not one shots which are doing this a bunch already.

Dimension 20's Shriek Week with Gabe Hick's Mythic System

Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast Podcast getting made alongside Possum Creek (it is a series of one shots, but also a shared universe, so I'm counting it here)

Into the Motherlands moving to their own system eventually

On the smaller end this is something I legitimately have some experience with, and this is where the thread was always heading. Let's talk about Renegade Racers, the game I made specifically for one person, what that has looked like for me, and why I think it's the future of APs to make content this way.

So a while ago I got on a Fast & Furious bend and watched all the movies. Not content to just watch movies though, I talked to some folks about if they had seen games based on it, and got linked to a video of @0sarahxfrank0 running a F&F inspired honey heist hack (I'm not gonna link it because the community it spun out of has had a lot happen and I don't wanna give them clicks tbh).

The short version of this is that I watched the game, built a system to better handle what folks were trying to do, and then sent it back to Sarah. She loved it. We made some changes, we rebuilt around the players and stories people wanted to tell, we released the game and the first AP together afterwards. Now Sarah and I do a lot of work together, we're planning bigger things like this for the future, and it's so far been a lot of fun and super rewarding for everyone involved.

We've seen some other stuff like this as well, even if not in campaign play. Offhand, Plus One Exp's home Down We Go system is a great example of working with a designer to stamp a system as the home system, and find community within it. We've been able to watch sorta in slow motion as DWG moved from a little one page OSR hack that potentially gets lost in the shuffle, to something big and exciting that both parties are happy to put a stamp on.

This is the exact future I see for AP campaign play, and not a wild dream I don't think.

What does Actual Play look like when it's tied to designers who want to help you tell your stories in the ways you want to tell them? What would it look like for a community to say "actually we've had enough"? What happens when we work with people who give a shit instead of faceless megacorps? What does it look like when we invest in people willing to invest in us?

I've seen the future and it's golden, we just have to reach for it.

*hard to follow in that if the players aren't saying out loud what exactly they're adding the numbers are nonsense **by well here I do mean "expensive and award winning" I do not mean I think they're particularly master classes in game running or production, but that's a whole separate topic

We're doin some noir!! I've had this feeling for a while that Fate would be a good system for noir, because it's a system all about people who are competent in different ways, using their own resources and the tools around them to get what they want. I think to do noir in a lot of systems, you'd end up with a party of oops all detectives, and all the interesting antagonists like the fatal/e or the local corrupt business owner would have to be GM characters. Whereas here the players get to play with those archetypes, and all push-pull the story around with their own agendas. It ended up quite light-hearted and silly by noir standards, but I'm pleased with how the game supported the genre in terms of everyone's secrets and ambitions driving things!

▶️ Now playing in the Studio

Cadence Fairchild’s first big case washes up on her doorstep one rainy night in Fosshythe.

Follow us on your usual podcast app - search Merely Roleplayers or head to www.merelyroleplayers.com

COMPERE: Matt Boothman

STARRING:

Vikki as Cadence Fairchild, baby-faced P.I.

Ellie as Cam, cinnamon roll newshound

Alexander Pankhurst as Regonald Skinner, infamous corrupt businessman

Helen as Stella Sylvester, woo-woo femme fatale

ROLEPLAYING GAME SYSTEM: Fate (Condensed)

MUSIC BY: Alexander Pankhurst

EDITED AND PRODUCED BY: Matt Boothman

The pleasure of actual play is twofold: there’s the elemental pleasure of being told a story, intertwined with the alchemy of watching that story be created in front of your eyes (or ears). It is about craft—not in the sense of the well-wrought urn, but in the ways that true chance, fueled by dice or teetering Jenga towers or cards or a coin toss, explodes ossified, clichéd narrative structures.

Who Owns Dungeons & Dragons? — Dr Emily Friedman, LA Review of Books

This chimes pretty much exactly with what we found at the Open Space on theatre and RPGs a few years ago!

Vigil pretty much plans itself at this point – we have so many juicy plots bubbling that depending on who's in the session, the scenario usually just ... presents itself. In this one ... well, this demon's been lurking since Vigil: Playtime. It was time.

Act One of Five: In which Persephone Byron’s centuries-spanning cold war begins heating up for the final clash.

Follow us on your usual podcast app - search Merely Roleplayers or head to www.merelyroleplayers.com

COMPERE: Matt Boothman

STARRING:

Ellie Pitkin as Persephone 'Percy' Byron, the Exile

Dave as Mick, the Mundane

Strat as Brier, the Monstrous

Chris MacLennan as Kincaid, the Professional

ROLEPLAYING GAME SYSTEM: Monster of the Week, designed by Michael Sands

MUSIC BY: Alexander Pankhurst

SOUND DESIGN BY: Matt Boothman

EDITED AND PRODUCED BY: Matt Boothman

I say this with genuine love: I love this rash of small time internet creators starting the most unlistenable tabletop roleplaying podcasts you've ever heard. It feels like a companion to how every group of 20somethings in the 1990s used to have a shitty garage band. We need more of that shit.

For too long, the world of indie roleplaying has been beset by ANIMAL CRIME.

It's time to clean up these indie roleplaying streets. And the only way to tackle ANIMAL CRIMINALS ... is with ANIMAL LAWYERS.

I'm making my Twitch streaming debut (😱) on 23 June with Actual Play UK, in a game of Maddy Searle's I'm Not Lion, a game where you play animals who think they're lawyers, and the more animal puns you use, the more convincing the judge and jury will find you!

I'm playing Crawl Newman, an ambitious snake prosecutor who's determined to make partner, whatever that means??

source

I say this with genuine love: I love this rash of small time internet creators starting the most unlistenable tabletop roleplaying podcasts you've ever heard. It feels like a companion to how every group of 20somethings in the 1990s used to have a shitty garage band. We need more of that shit.

ESCAPE FROM WHEYFACE RADIO! AN ARDEN ACTUAL-PLAY MINISERIES COMING DECEMBER 4TH!

When corporate raiders initiate a truly hostile takeover of Wheyface Tower, it's up to Bea Casely, Brenda Bentley, Rosalind Ursula, Julie Capsom, and plucky security guard Janet Dogbury to save the day! Join us, won't you, as we play through the Arden RPG Escape from Wheyface Radio! with cast and friends, in a thrilling four-part miniseries beginning December 4th. Brought to you by Wheyface Industries, which is not currently being taken over. Ignore the men in business suits wielding scimitars and flintlocks. Everything is fine.

Starring: Michelle Agresti, Tracey Sayed, Shannon Estabrook, Lindsay Zana, Emma Sherr-Ziarko, AND ????????