Audio EXP: #76 – Dragonlance, animals and anime

Welcome home.

This is Audio EXP for the 26th of December 2020, and the title of this episode is ‘Dragonlance, animals and anime’.

[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #76]

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Happy holidays, this is the last Audio EXP of the year. It’s traditional to offer messages of peace and to spend time with friends and family. I like to think we should strive for peace all year round and not forget that some people, more than ever before, will be spending the festive period alone.

If that’s you, if you’re alone this year, then get in touch and say hello. I’ll say hello back. We’re all geek natives together, after all.

Now, it’s a bit quieter than usual on the RPG news front at this time of the year. However, the 2021 anime line-ups are being announced, and I’ll take this chance to mention a few trailers shown on the blog this week which, I think, look promising.

I say the RPG news is lighter than usual, it’s not non-existent. Steamforged Games have announced Matthew Mercer, he of Critical Role, is on board to write a guest adventure for Bardsung.

Bardsung is an adventure board game that supports solo-play, which made over £1,000,000 on Kickstarter from more than 10 thousand backers.

It’s open for Late Pledges and, gosh, I’m tempted.

I can’t tell you why Steamforged waited for the Christmas lull for this news, but they did. Perhaps it was a case of announcing it while they could and perhaps hoping to transform the gift of Christmas cash into those Late Pledges.

The other big news this week wasn’t timed, it just happened when it happened. The Dragonlance authors, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, have dropped their suit against Wizards of the Coast.

As a reminder, the two had taken WotC to court with a breach of contract claim. They argued that the publisher had stopped making the required approvals to the next Dragonlance book script, which meant the book would never be published.

Weis and Hickman connected this, in writing, to sexism and racism rows within the company.

Now Margaret Weis promises some exciting news in the next few weeks.

Likely it’s the new trilogy. There may be a Dragonlance 5e setting in the works. We do know Wizards hopes to bring three old settings back.

My question is this. Do you accuse someone of racism and then go back to work for them?

Or had Weis and Hickman meant to say that the Dragonlance content was a bit too awkward for Wizards attempt to steer clear of old stereotypes and tropes?

I don’t imagine we’ll ever get the details. I’m not a lawyer, but I guess hefty “Never talk about this again” clauses are in place with the authors and Wizards of the Coast.

However, finding out what Margaret Weis’ exciting news is something else we have to look forward too in 2021.

There’s no timeline for this next piece of news, but Modiphius has confirmed they’ve extended their Star Trek license to include Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Discovery.

The company publishes Star Trek Adventures and this year gave the Klingons a core rulebook and the quadrants sourcebooks; all of which made DriveThruRPG’s top ten selling sci-fis in 2020.

Could we get a Star Trek: Discovery core rulebook? Or a Picard one? It’s possible.

There’s a trilogy of bundles that might interest you.

The first is Symphonies of the Lost Gods for Kult: Divinity Lost.

Kult is an extremely adult RPG in which reality is a lie, and horrible truths are hidden.

Symphonies of the Lost Gods is a fan bundle put together by a Kult Discord server in Ryan Northcott’s memory, better known as Mechanoreceptor, who sadly passed away this year.

The community finished off a bunch of Ryan’s unfinished texts, created more content, and the result is a bundle with more than a half dozen Kult supplements and hundreds of pages absolutely free.

It’s free, but a donation to Ryan’s widow and daughters is recommended.

Blades in the Dark have a bundle too. This one is in the Bundle of Holding and with a slice of the money raised going to Direct Relief.

You can get the core Blades in the Dark rules and four other books for about $13. If you beat the threshold price, which is the average amount people are paying, more or less, then there’s a bunch of Forged in the Dark settings for you.

The other deal comes from Highcraft Miniatures and is on Humble Bundle. In this deal, you get STL files of minis for 3d-printing.

3d-printing has become big business this year, and I think if you got a 3d-printer this year, perhaps for Christmas, this bundle is especially interesting as for about $1 you can get some initial model designs.

As it is the festive period, I looked for some more whimsical RPG stats and turned to Geek Native’s little archive of survey results. Back in October, when there was a copy of Twogether Studios’ Action Pups! to give away and to enter readers had to say which animals from a list they would have a pet if they lived the life of a D&D adventurer.

I’ll tell you the seven options they had and see if you can predict the top three. The options were;

• I wouldn’t have a pet.
• A dog.
• A cat.
• A lizard.
• A rat.
• A parrot.
• A spider.

As for the top three? Well, no one out over well over 100 responses picked spider. Sorry if you decided on that one.

In the first place; with a huge 66.4% of all responses was a dog.

I guess people spend less time in sewers and climbing up cliff faces than my D&D characters often do.

In the second place; with 16.8% of the vote was a cat.

So, if you’ve got two out of the three so far then the big challenge is approaching. What’s in the third spot?

The answer is; a parrot and with 8.8% of the votes.

How did you do?

Another piece of D&D whimsy on the blog this week comes from the Instagram comic Secret Goblin. The game played here to is changing a D&D spell by changing just one letter.

Vampiric Touch, for example, they’ve got Vampire Couch.

Instead of Arcane Lock, they’ve got… and I’m pleased to say they kept it clean; and went with Arcane Sock.

Rather than Speak with Dead, they go with Speak with Dad and instead of Calm Emotions, they move the L for Clam Emotions.

I’m sorry to say, but instead of Tasha’s Hideous Laughter there’s now Tasha’s Hideous Daughter.

The last one is subtle. Summon Lesser Daemons becomes Summon Lesser Damons, and in the comic strip, we’ve a bunch of confused Matt Damons hanging around in a summoning circle.

So, we’ve done the Dragonlance news and the animals. Just the anime and one other quirky bit of news.

Geek Native tries to include trailers when I write about anime, even if they are in Japanese. It’s often enough to get a feel for the show. Writing about what’s coming out in Japan, I think, gives us some skin in the game when platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Crunchyroll or Funimation tell us which titles they’ve picked up.

First up, Redo of Healer.

In this show, the adventuring party’s healer is mistreated by the so-called heroes. They treat him as a resource and useless outside the utility of healing.

However, at the end of the quest, it’s the healer who is left with the powerful magical artefact they had been looking for. He uses it. He goes back in time to start of the quest, with his current knowledge and skills and gets his revenge.

I’m interested to see how dark this anime gets.

Next up is Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki.

This show’s hero is a fantastic computer game player, perhaps the best in Japan, but he sucks at real-life.

However, he meets another gamer, who is as good as him, and who has a trick. This new friend treats real-life as a game and has some exploits that help her do better in social situations.

Why am I interested? Heck, I’d like to know these real-life tricks too!

I’ve seen plenty of excitement around this third title. It’s Record of Ragnarok and pits humans against gods.

I can’t say I know much about the series, but the fact that Warner Bros Japan is behind it and there’s an English subbed trailer already tells me it has the potential to go big.

Every million years, the gods of many mythologies come to debate whether to let humanity continue. This year, for the first time in seven million years, they decide we’ve finally messed up beyond redemption and its time for humanity to go.

Thankfully, Odin’s daughter, the eldest of the Valkyrie, raises an objection. To resolve the dispute, the best fighters from humanity are summoned to fight gods from anywhen in time.

It still seems pretty helpless for us mere mortals, but I think it’ll be fun to watch.

Lastly, there’s KFC are releasing a gaming console.

The KFC Gaming Twitter account had teased this before, and we thought it was a joke. Perhaps it was back then. However, KFC teamed up with Cooler Master and together have created a bucket-shaped device with gaming PC specs and… wait for it… a chamber to put your fried chicken in and keep it warm.

The shiny tech that you never knew you needed.

And let’s wrap it there, keep safe, stay out of melee range and see you next week.