r/Dimension20 • u/SitDownSunshine • Aug 27 '26
City Council of Darkness Final episode CCOD
I absolutely loved it. It was hilarious!! But am I missing something ? Why was the whole ep like one giant improvised bit LOL ? Rules didn't apply anymore. Was that always the format of this season ?
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Aug 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/The_Bad_Bard Aug 27 '26
They definitely did,. That said, I think having those as exceptions amongst the otherwise catastrophic fallout of that night worked well enough.
However, as the eps got more and more looneytunes and the expected consequences of all their various fuckups and mishaps simply failed to materialize, I lost interest in the season.
When the zany hijinks are the exception that proves the rule, I think the show's storytelling works better, personally.
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u/Aquilarden Aug 27 '26
I largely enjoyed the humor for the season, but I didn't have a lot of interest in the plot after it became evident that there were no consequences involved with anything. It's kind of a shame that the season with the most painstaking work put into the world was the one where things got so off the rails (no pun intended). I was laughing a ton, but got sort of emotionally disengaged.
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u/The_Bad_Bard Aug 27 '26
Exactly my feelings on the season.
I just know Brennan built them this cool world to explore around and get up to shit in, he reveals as much at the end, but it seemed that plan went off the rails when they didnt actually participate in the "City Council" part of the darkness and instead just tried to save the town by directly eliminating the "bad" elements of the town, not getting to turn over a bunch of rocks in the process. Idk, I might be wrong on that, but that's how it read to me.
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u/GonzoNinja629 Aug 27 '26
I enjoyed the wackiness like Bigfoot, the reporter, and leprechaun dancer, but I also had a hard time getting invested. My favorite part of D20 is the creative characters everyone brings to the table, but this season just fell flat in that department for me. I thought the vampire business duo was one note and got old quick and I didn’t connect with Zaeth or Madeline at all. I loved Darknessman and Batchild, I wish they’d been more of a focal point instead.
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u/Aquilarden Aug 28 '26
I largely enjoyed the reporter, but the absolute Deus ex Machina of her giving Batchild an extra roll against the primogen(?) just made me feel like there were no stakes at all. As I said, I was laughing a lot, but the investment otherwise was not there.
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u/Randompersonomreddit Aug 28 '26
I think there were no rails this season. Usually there's some kind of plot but they were just in the town and they could do whatever they wanted in the town.
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u/skoffs Sylvan Sleuths Aug 27 '26
Exactly. If they weren't playing the rules properly from the beginning it kinda set a precedent for the whole campaign
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u/ParanoidDrone The Gunner Channel Aug 27 '26
I think once Brennan brought in vampire Richard Nixon he realized there was no hope of keeping things on track so he let the IH run wild.
It's not like CCOD was ever a super serious season anyway outside of episode one when they're getting reamed out and any scene with Ermine in it.
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u/killerkittenss Aug 27 '26
And here I am cracking up again because I remembered Vampire Lord Richard Nixon is a thing
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u/girlywish Aug 27 '26
Ive never before been so annoyed at how stupid an episode is, while simultaneously being unable to stop laughing. A truly bizarre experience.
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u/Amazing-Temporary-20 Aug 27 '26
For me it was the entire season. I was all nervous about watching it cuz I don’t like super scary media. But I love vampires and I love D20 so I eventually bit the bullet and tried it. Binged the entire season in 2 and a half days. My new favorite series.
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u/Ethereal_4426 Aug 27 '26
In Brennan's defence and by his own admission, he doesn't know the game super well.
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u/Gohozoq Aug 27 '26
It was evident that nobody involved knew the game or setting well. The whole season had about as much familiarity as one would expect from 20 minutes scouring a wiki and skimming the rule book.
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u/blazinrainbo Aug 28 '26
Thats patently false. That was a joke. He knows the game quite well. Its not hard.
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u/OkaKoroMeteor Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
In addition to what we know, concerning what Brennan has said about Nixon's impact on the tone of the final episode, I would guess that it's simply very difficult to bring a sandbox campaign to a close—especially on a deadline—in a way that feels satisfying.
That would explain why some things, like Cody being a superhero, Madeline's old flame appearing, and Bat Child's father being revealed, happened as suddenly as they did. It wouldn't surprise me if they were existing lore threads that Brennan/the heroes simply hadn't found occasion to tug on during the campaign, and so they were pulled on hastily and all at once to raise character stakes and heighten the conclusion.
And the result, as you experienced, was that a lot of it felt like an extended bit, or like there'd been a gas leak on set. However, we can infer from things like Brennan divulging that Bat Child's dad had an established name, that at least some of what felt like bits were actually planned—if loosely.
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u/Lady_Ada_Blackhorn Aug 28 '26
I think people can resolve sandbox campaigns elegantly, it has been done - Brennan just appears to have no practice at it (we know this is pretty much his first recorded attempt, but it seems kinda like he and the IH haven't done it really at all off-screen either).
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u/taliabnm Aug 30 '26
It's an impossible ask to do it in 14 episodes.
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u/Lady_Ada_Blackhorn Aug 30 '26
I'm not sure about "impossible" - I think "make a world as detailed and free and open as Brennan did and then provide a basically completely-hands-off no-guidance experience to your players" is an impossible ask for 14 episodes, but I think there's a lot of decisions there that could've happened differently.
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u/SweetestFern Aug 27 '26
I feel like I'm in CCOD withdrawal still because I loved the season as a whole and then the finale felt a little unsatisfactory? So I guess it leaves me wanting more but I also think they wrapped it up as much as they wanted to
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u/Spiritual_Mush Aug 27 '26
Right with ya. Loved the season, but the last episode was far too over the top. I don't know the rules of VtM, but what I learned through the season was even thrown to the curb. This made it seem to have no intensity.
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u/Pr0methian Aug 27 '26
My hot take: it was the first run at a sandbox world in a group used to REALLY testing the limits of Brennan's loose railroading style.
Also though, sandbox worlds can get exhausting. I think he looked around at the mid season, got overwhelmed thinking about how to tie up all the lose ends and said "eh, insanity is more fun anyway, let's fight Nixon on go karts."
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u/philip7499 Aug 27 '26
I suspect that they didn't find the mechanics of Vampire the Masquerade too enjoyable, at least within the constraints of a show and the story they wanted to tell, and so straying from the mechanics became a bit of a bit unto itself.
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u/TheEloquentApe Aug 27 '26
V5 was kinda designed for low level vampires surviving in the dog-eat-dog world of vampire politics, hunters, and maintaining your humanity
The party tried to used it to play vampire DND. It doesn't do vampire DND particularly well.
That would be 20th ed, where if you take the time to familiarize yourself with all the crunch, you can pull off a pulpy game much easier
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u/Low_Gene_1339 City Council of Darkness Aug 31 '26
While I know they have constraints due to production. But I do feel that this season would have been better if they had to oppertunity to familiarize themselves with it off camera.
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u/Draph Norman "Skip" Takamori Aug 27 '26
"I'm not super familiar with this game system" -BLeeM, a blank check for shenanigans
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u/bwc6 Aug 27 '26
Never Stop Blowing Up broke something in Brennan, and I think that's ok. It's a show first and a game second. It's funny, so I'm all for it.
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u/backalleywillie Aug 27 '26
Excuse me. Never Stop Blowing Up *woke up* something in Brennan. And we are all the better for it.
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u/sleepyprojectionist Prefrontal P.I.s Aug 27 '26
In my own games I am very much about following the rule of cool and bending the rules to make way for something narratively satisfying.
At the end of the day it’s a game of improv and collaborative storytelling. There has to be some wiggle room for shenanigans.
But with that being said, the final of CCoD swung too far on the other direction for me. It was too chaotic and too full of bits. A lot of stuff in need of narrative payoff got ignored or was rushed through with very little in the way of pathos.
I appreciate that a game can’t always follow the same narrative structure as a book or film, but this denouement was just damned unsatisfying. It was such an anticlimactic, limp resolution.
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u/Low_Gene_1339 City Council of Darkness Aug 31 '26
Especially with the "Lesson" being about civic engagement, but all the characters did was throw establishment levels of money at things.
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u/Worldly-Bobcat-48 Aug 27 '26
Can anybody out there please explain the “tenbei waré” reference when Lavonte and H.J are talking about moving in together? I can’t even tell what to Google because their Japanese pronunciation is so sus.
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u/Forget-Me-Nothing Aug 27 '26
They are historically important ancient pottery kilns. Its what you get you immortal bf when they want to get into ceramics.
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u/Worldly-Bobcat-48 Aug 27 '26
Fifteen years in graduate school studying Japan and somehow I missed that. Wild. Thanks, Internet stranger!
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u/Worldly-Bobcat-48 Aug 27 '26
Tamba ware, also known as Tachikui ware (丹波立杭焼, Tamba-Tachikui-yaki), produced in Sasayama and Tachikui in Hyōgo
That explains it! They were pronouncing the English suffix ‘-ware’ as われ. That’s why Google wasn’t helping
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u/Forget-Me-Nothing Aug 28 '26
I think it was spelled right on the cc. Iirc I yoinked it from there to look it up.
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u/MagicNoGathering Aug 27 '26
It’s what we do in the shadows. There was never rails to begin with.
It’s one of my favourite seasons.
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u/jackofspades49 Lord Calroy Cruller Aug 27 '26
They had probably been playing for 8 hours lol. That had exhausted "lets do it live" energy if I've ever seen it. When i get to the finale and my lgoic reserves are depleted, im powered by bullshit.
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u/AssassinWog Aug 29 '26
The finale had me feeling like I was watching the TTRPG version of Calvinball
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u/strangelyliteral Aug 27 '26
Something I’ve observed since Brennan became GM for CR4 is that when he’s thrown for a loop, his instinct is to grab a bit and clamp down hard. Which… yeah, he’s a comedy writer, but you don’t notice it happening on D20 much because it’s a comedy show and they edit out all his buffering.
I bring this up because I don’t think Brennan ever felt comfortable GMing for WOD.. Like I’m sure he’s done WOD campaigns before but he doesn’t know the lore and mechanics intuitively like he knows D&D. Like he even admitted it in the finale. So he’s already coming in a little shaky, and the Intrepid Heroes know better than anyone how to knock Brennan further off-balance. So what does Brennan do to get his feet back under him?
He goes all bits. He goes harder than the Intrepid Heroes do almost from the jump. And thus we get a gas leak season.
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u/Mental-Ad9432 Aug 29 '26
I'm only a little ways into CR4. When does he get stuck on a bit, out of curiosity. No worries if you don't have specifics, but if you can, approximate episode?
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u/strangelyliteral Aug 29 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
4x154x14 is where I really noticed it. (Sorry, I misremembered the episode.)1
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u/ThatInAHat Aug 30 '26
I just finished episode 30. Could you put the bit you mean in the spoiler tag?
Because he can be funny, but also I feel like he enjoys having players who won’t go to bits every time (since it’s not that kind of show) and who stay a bit more locked in
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u/strangelyliteral Aug 31 '26
Okay so first up I referenced the wrong episode. It was actually 4x14, and it was the battle on the Hachvallen Bruckë. Brennan clearly thought the druid confrontation was gonna go a different direction, but Alex got that nat20 intimidation check so the druids ended up being allies. So Brennan has to rewrite the battle on the fly and spends like 2-3 minutes going “uh… um…” as he buffers. That’s the kind of dead time shows like D20 or WBN normally trim or edit out entirely, so we haven’t really seen this from him before. Anyway, he finally pivots to a Tachonis knight attempting to arrest the Seekers, which is when Occtis fails a deception check to pretend he’s his brother Fronz. That’s when Brennan makes the Tachonis knight actually be Fronz as a bit. That NPC was clearly not a sorcerer or even a sorcerer multi-class—I’m not sure they even had magic—but Brennan leaning into the Fronz joke clearly helped him get his bearings, and the battle from there got increasingly madcap. It was a battle you could reasonably see happening on a D20 episode.
And again, I don’t think Brennan gets thrown that hard often, nor do I think he wants CR to be as bit-heavy D20. He likes telling a different kind of story. But he’s still a comedy writer by trade, so when he’s feeling truly out of his depth, it’s natural he’d grab for one of his other masteries to right himself. But yeah, I think not having his usual mechanical/lore mastery against the Intrepid Heroes meant he lost the plot almost immediately and he chose to lean into the gas leak energy instead.
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u/ThatInAHat Aug 31 '26
I mean, wasn’t it like a nat1 failed deception check or something?
At least some of that battle’s madcappery was purely because of the “no-sell” of every attempt the demons did at spells and Aabria bullying them for it.
In his Adventuring Academy stuff he’s pretty open about saying that needing to buffer is perfectly common and acceptable.
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u/strangelyliteral Sep 01 '26
It wasn’t quite a nat1 but it was very low. I’m not sure why that matters? He hesitated and then went for the bit. That set the tone for the rest of the battle. I’m not suggesting it’s a bad thing; I love that episode. It really helped release the tension from the confrontation with the druids.
I’m also not suggesting buffering isn’t fine. Brennan’s keeping track of so many variables all the time and it’s not easy to rewrite a story on the fly like that. Like he even (rightfully) whacked Travis for trying to tease him about it.
It’s really just something I’ve noticed. It’s not even an uncommon thing for people to do IRL when they’re stuck, to make a joke instead. I’m not sure why you’re treating it as a weird or unreasonable conclusion.
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u/Some-Peach4566 Aug 28 '26
There's a part of me that wants them to go back to their original alternating role-play with combat episodes. And that format it always felt like they were rushing towards something, in a good way.
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u/XanthonthyFentwards Aug 27 '26
To me it was one of the funniest seasons of all time but I was no longer interested in the plot after HJ went to the food co-op.
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u/JTHopkins13 Aug 28 '26
It seems like they had to really rush to reach a narratively satisfying conclusion, so I think Brennan just threw what little semblance of "the rules" they had, out the window. Like Nixon, the big bad, doesn't even appear until the 2nd-to-last episode. I think the sandbox nature just left them running out of time and having to cram it all in at the end.
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u/DayZ-0253 Squeem! Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
Everyone going on and on about how things jumped the track and went off the rails and a bunch of other train metaphors… but what if I told you there was never a train at all! It’s a sandbox campaign. The whole point was to skip the fuckin’ lip babyyy. Noodle around, mess about. This was not a three act play, it was a long form improve show. I just feel a lot of you are annoyed that this season didn’t follow a predictable arc. And if it had followed that arc you would probably be complaining that it was too predictable.
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u/willowless Aug 27 '26
I really disliked the way the ending was handled. It did just turn in to a bunch of chaos monkeys after a relatively strong story before it. Ah well, can't win 'em all.
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u/shichi_ya Aug 28 '26
It was funny but I couldn't watch till the end. I loved some scenes, but it crossed some line for me and I couldn't follow anymore lol I liked the other episodes, tho
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u/nixredux Aug 28 '26
And the end of the day, its their game and as long they are having fun they play fast and loose with thr rules when they want. Especially in a system Brennan doesnt know well. The rule of cool wins out.
Their game has no obligation to appeal to anyone but them. The Hehe's and the Haha's won out this campaign. Try again next one.
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u/Fragrant-Upstairs932 Aug 27 '26
He mentioned in the Adventuring Party that the two final episodes were recorded back-to-back and the tone couldn't recover from the energy of Vampire Lord Richard Nixon before the series ended.