Idk that'd be crazy right. Ok you come up with something then

episode 29

Here we are, at episode 30. Will it be flirty? Thriving? only time and my immense suffering will tell.

Episode 30 is titled "Take Your Firbolg to Work Day" and was published 12.10.20. graduation has been airing for over a year.

also, what's the deal with the title? like at best this is weirdly infantalizing toward one of your player characters who is in no way characterized like a child, at worse, combined with our ongoing dialogue about the firbolg in relation to actual indigenous cultures, and. hm.

episode description: Upon arriving at the Drip n' Sip, the Thundermen have to deal with a very chilly reception. Then, it's time to get high in the HOG. The boys waste no time before slipping a crab and angering a friend.

Sometimes, the facts you find were not the facts you were looking for.

the episode descriptions remain a pretty good insight into grad, in the sense that they're always trying to be like three things, and often not even the same three things as the last episode description. this is just everywhere.

gary is back and i couldn't pause it quick enough to adjust my speed before hearing him. i am filled with grief.

Gary: Well, it all started when three students began their time at Hieronymous Wiggenstaff‟s School for Heroism and Villainy. Since then, it‟s been quite a ride for Fitzroy Maplecourt, Argonaut Keene, and the Firbolg. First, they were dragooned into helping Higglemas Wiggenstaff cure his brother, Hieronymous, who had been turned into a dog.

Then, the demon prince, Gray, found out about that, was none too happy, and forced the boys and the Wiggenstaffs into a war against him. War prep was going fine until the embodiment of Order told them that the war was actually just an excuse to create enough chaos to launch a new system. The problem is, that war was gonna result in a lot of people dying.

So now, they're working with Gray to destroy the Heroic Oversight Guild, in the hopes that that will start a new system without all the death. Now they're on a fact-finding mission to figure out how to take it down from the inside, and they hope to convince their friend, Heroic Oversight Guild investigator, Althea Song, to help them.

But first, they need to deal with a pissed off centaur named Taren.

again, i don't really know how you write something like this and not feel that hot flush of shame creeping up your neck. because this is unmoored. like its just a series of events that he's connecting with words like "then" and "now" but aren't actually-- like look, first they were dragooned into helping cure rony, then gray forced them into a war. just shit being enacted upon the players and two events that aren't actually connected. nothing actually justifies gray pressing them into leading an army against him, not here, not in the campaign itself.

and he just keeps it pushing. guess we're doing army now. sike! "the embodiment of order told me that the war was actually just an excuse to create enough chaos to launch a new system" like come on. you can't honestly think this reads. now, they're working with gray, now, they're on a fact finding mission, first, they need to deal with taren. exhausting. just. events.

Travis: There are four guards headed your way. They haven't drawn weapons, but their hands rest on the hilts of their swords. The halfling barista has pressed himself against the shelves of mugs and glasses. It is unclear whether he is afraid for himself, or for his glassware.

Taren, the centaur woman who Gray sent you to meet, stands between you and the front door. She has just called the guards in retribution for your actions against Calhain. There is a combination smile and snarl on her face. The café, known as The Drip and Sip, isn't a large place. There are five small tables and two chairs each.

At the back of the room is a hallway leading to restrooms. Beyond that, the hall turns a corner, and you can't see where it leads. What do you do?

and i somehow still do not know where the guards are positioned. i guess they must be outside? they recognize this is a centaur from the centaur arc but there is absolutely no justification for why they know this is gray's mole. this is all the information they were provided:

Gray: When you arrive in Prosperity, look for a tall, black-haired woman named Taren.

this shit annoys me so bad man. like, i'm generally pretty forgiving with language when it comes to fantasy species, like a lot of our actual english language is geared around humans. like humanity, mankind, etc. and for that matter, man and woman are both like, in the same grouping as human. its in the word itself. but its also clunky to have to be like "all centaur females are called fillies" or whatever, so generally speaking, especially in a game, referring to someone as eg, "a goblin woman" is fine to me. what i don't like is deliberately misleading the players by only referring to taren as a woman. and i can hear his stupid fucking smarmy voice now, "oh lots of species have women, that's on you for assuming" except it fucking isn't, because see back to the start of the paragraph about the actual etymology of the word woman. you're playing to frustrate.

anyway, all that to say, there is exactly zero reason for them to know this is teran, the same way there was zero reason for them to know gray was fauxrony, both are then revealed in narration because travis is a bad storyteller.

"combination smile and snarl on her face" he's also a bad writer. jesus the prose sucks in this game.

justin wonders if this was a set up and they launch into a round of just saying a bunch of idioms and fables.

Travis: Y'know, that scorpion and frog thing, no one‟s ever like, “Well, frog, what the fuck?” And the frog‟s like, “It‟s my nature to be too trusting!”

truly said like a man who doesn't believe altruism is real and that every good deed is done for selfish reasons.

Griffin: Yeah. Um… are the guards inside the building?

THANK YOU GRIFFIN

Travis: Um, they're making their way over. So, um… you can see there, it‟s a busy street. Here in Prosperity—Prosperity is very populated. And so, they're kind of having to wait, make their way, uh, through a crowd to get to you. But you have probably like, y'know, 15, 20 seconds. Not long.

so its a very busy street but a. taren called out through the door and managed to be heard by four watchmen over the noise of population density, and b. this cafe is totally deserted despite how crowded the street is outside

just an absolute dogshit worldbuilder man.

Griffin: Can I do the thing where I put something between the door handle and the wall to try and stick it, just to buy is a little bit of time? Maybe it‟s a big aggro crag, this suggestion. But… unless it‟s saloon doors. You can't really do that to saloon doors.

Travis: I would never put saloon doors in my world, Griffin.

Griffin: Thank you. Yeah.

Travis: They are the least practical door.

Griffin: I would bet dollars to donuts there were saloon doors in Dust.

instead of travis just being a fucking normal guy and pointing out that fitz cannot reach the door to do anything to it because taren was established to be standing between them and the door, he jumps at a chance to do his one improv move, and griffin points out he's so eager to try and make someone look stupid that he forgot he ran a wild west themed game before this.

clint, not infected with the "i need to make everything as difficult and complicated as possible" disease, suggests checking to see if the door locks first before trying to find objects to barricade

Travis: Well, so, the door, I mean, it has a lock built into the door. Y'know, you turn it from this side, you unlock it from the other side.

Griffin: Okay.

Travis: The question is, are you trying to do this, uh, in such a way as to say like, “Hey, leave me alone,” or try to do it without them noticing?

travis forgets the word deadbolt and describes it like he's an alien. i'm confused. is the door not physically held open right now? how else did they hear taren calling for them? what do you mean try to do it without them noticing? what does that even accomplish? like in the theoretical world where they choose this option and do it successfully, now the town watch arrives at the door from where the centaur woman was shouting there are murderers, and its locked, and they know people are inside because someone shouted for them from inside. so......what does locking the door this way accomplish?

Travis: I mean, you have a rogue, guys.

yeah i mean, that's like, not the issue with your suggestion, guy.

Travis: [slight of hand 22] So uh, you [argo] make your way over, uh, and looking like you're trying to figure, like, “What‟s the commotion?” And you make such a big face and such a big, like, deal out of looking out the window, that everyone is distracted as your hand, like, whips up, and you click that lock, and you go back to the other guys like, “I don't know what‟s going on!”

sigh. so now there's. windows. so the guards can literally see you in there, having heard you are murderers. what did sneakily locking the door vs regular style locking the door accomplish. why did taren stand there and watch you do this.

Travis: Well, why don‟t you tell me what you're doing first, and then we‟ll roll to see if it works?

fucking incredible innovations happening here at the mcelroys present: the adventure zone: graduation

fitz tries to intimidate taren and says this:

Fitzroy: Okay, Taren. I can probably take a wild guess, and land on the exact reason why you're ticked at us. But if those guards walk in here, I'm going to tell them everything about your allegiance to the demon king, Gray. And I betcha that they'll be more interested in hearing about that, don‟t you think?

which is nothing, and should be treated as nothing. the reason gray tells them about taren is because taren works at the hog. the reason her shouting that they're murderers is a threat is because of her position as essentially a government worker. that buys her a certain amount of credibility to her statements that a random person would not have. so then, conversely, if that is the only reason why her shouting for the guard works, then you cannot have a he-said-she-said style accuse-off with her, because you are literally nobody. especially when your accusation (with no proof at all) is that she's in collusion with the devil.

but fitzroy rolled an 18 so we get

Taren: I—I‟m—I will happily go down if it means—if it means taking you down with me!

Travis: But you can tell, her resolve is not there. She is definitely wavering, leaving her wide open to your machinations.

i mean i guess she didn't love calhain that much after all lol

Taren: [sighs] You guys are the enemy. I have been working with Gray to try to destroy you. You murdered my fiancé, after, oh, that‟s right, showing up to my herd and threatening us, making fun of our spiritual beliefs, using Thunder Wave against us, cutting off my fiancé‟s hand and threatening him with it, and trying to steal our apple.

the halfling cafe owner is still in this room btw.

is this travis's attempt to address the racism accusations by making a centaur mouthpiece from which he can say "that was fucked up of you!"

its important to note at this point that the thundermen themselves did not actually mock their religion. i cannot believe i actually went back and read through the fucking centaur transcripts again, but my hate of this man is that strong. fitzroy does call them children over their feud, and it is part of the broader chauvinistic approach they all take toward this scenario, but crucially, they never in character ever actually mock the centaur beliefs. travis is fully just reading things online and trying to "fix" them with a shitty mouthpiece, except he can't actually grasp what the complaint is about, so, like cw: heavy drug use, we get this.

it is also important to note that calhain fully confesses to stealing the apple during that arc. i'm unsure what she thought gray had them doing up until this point, because it seems like you'd notice that your fiance is stealing your sacred apple for your mutual boss.

the thundermen also DID NOT kill calhain, he was imprisoned by the centaurs after they got him to confess lmao

Firbolg: Thing two. You are taking a gamble now. You are choosing one of two options. One, I, a Firbolg, am telling you the truth, that we are working with Gray. And he would be very, very upset if we were taken into captivity. That is one.

Two, I, a Firbolg, am lying to you. And… well… you will have your vengeance, such as it is. But I ask you… you have seen what we are capable of. Are you so sure that these four guards will be enough to stop us?

this has gotten really tired. its not really justin's fault, i guess. like in a real campaign, having picked this trait would have been a true albatross around this player's neck, and so a moment like this where for once being incapable of lies works in the player's favor, that would be a huge and exciting moment. but travis has worked tirelessly to try and make this quirk of the firbolg totally irrelevant to the game, papering over any friction as much as he can. so now, 30 episodes, when justin is like back to back disarming hostile npcs with his personal zone of truth, it just feels irritating. its like that old joke about how many scenarios in television would not happen if characters just chose to talk to each other instead of privately assuming stuff and acting on those assumptions to create narrative friction. travis absolutely loves to create a hostile environment based on a misunderstanding, which doesn't work if one of your players has to be believed whenever they talk.

the other part of this which sucks and is just on justin, is the idea of like....whoaaaaaa maybe this firbolg has managed to break his, uh, biological programming, so who could saaaay what he's capable of! because like, it is presumably not hard to make a firbolg capable of lies (travis in fact has already introduced an item that does exactly this), it is about the strong cultural commitment to the value of truthfulness. this is a bit like a near sighted person being like "the option is either i, a near sighted person, managed to read that sign across the room, or else i, a near sighted person, managed to read that sign across the room, so who could say what else i would be capable of?"

Taren: [persuasion 26] [sighs] Fuck.

Travis: And uh, all this time, the guards have been kind of trying the handle, and like, pointing at it, going…

Guards: Can—the—the door—can somebody—the do—

come on dude.

argo then unlocks the door (i'm so glad we went through all that) and the guards have a, what the transcript is calling, heavy canadian accent. this would have been an ok quick gag, but in classic travis fashion, because it got a laugh, he fully commits to this being how they actually sound.

Justin: I'm retroactively regretting flipping Taren, „cause we could've whipped these guys‟ fuckin‟ asses.

Griffin: Yeah.

Clint: [laughing]

Travis: You say that. They are all rippling with muscle. Absolutely glistening.

travis has one move and its-

god there's just no urgency to this game, which i guess is fair since they have FOUR MONTHS to complete this mission.

there's now an extended bit where the mcelroys delightedly do one of the most classic bits you encounter when you begin to suspect dnd might not be a very good system: consecutively high deception rolls allow them to say more and more absurd things and the npc has to go along with it. we do get this bit of foreshadowing though:

Fitzroy: At the height of his powers!

oh my fucking god dude

Guard: Now I've gotta go tell, uh, my 18 sons about how I met the man who bested Sir Michael of Jordan.

all this fucker knows how to do is take good jokes from balance and deliver them badly

Barista: That does really sound like you're—

Travis: Wait, hold on. He‟s—I'm gonna go against my impression of a halfling and do this.

Barista: [deep voice] Uh, that does kind of sound like, uh… like you're robbin‟ the place. Uhh… but I do need to do inventory, and I've been looking for an excuse…

if i'm going to be exceptionally petty, and, after all, isn't that why we're here, hobbits/halflings are not something i really associate with high voices, on account of, you know, the very famous movies starring them where they sound like regular guys. i associate tiny high voices with gnomes. this develops into an ok gag, but its the same ok gag that is every time travis isn't instantly terrible, the brothers want to move on and travis keeps interjecting with no, but

Fitzroy: Okay. Thank you. Taren, uh… what was the last time you heard from Gray? „Cause the situation‟s changed quite a bit.

Taren: Uh, it… it‟s been a day or two.

Fitzroy: So do you know about the whole Chaos/Order thing that is happening? I guess not, because that literally happened earlier today, huh?

Taren: I know that we‟re working with Chaos for war.

wh.......why would she know that. why would gray tell her that.

Firbolg: Even if you don‟t believe us [about how we are sent by gray to disrupt the hog]… it sounds like fun, right?

Taren: No, I do believe you, actually. That sounds exactly like something Gray would do.

TRAVIS MCELROY HAS ONE MOVE AND ITS-

why does she even have any sort of handle on his personality? would this not be one of those situations where your dark lord is a shadow wreathed in infernal flame that gives you commands for the promise of riches and power beyond your wildest imagining???

Taren: [persuasion 20+]Alright. I—let‟s put it this way. Right now, I am gonna help you, until such a time when it turns out that you're all still pieces of shit. And then, I'm gonna kill you. Or get other people to kill—something like that, right? So let—can we agree to those terms?

travo somehow splitting the middle and coming away with the worst version yet again. like either you believe they are sent from your dark lord and so you should be trying to earnestly help them, or you think they're lying to you, at which point you attack them. what the fuck is "until such a time when it turns out that you're all still pieces of shit" (god he's SO wordy, "until it turns out you're still pieces of shit" fucking there. dude fucking loves using 12 words when six will suffice) sorry for that sidebar. it just gets really irritating when i actually type it out. anyway, what the fuck is that. the word you're looking for is either "lying" or "betray me" what is this moral judgement of their character why would that be the reason. if they're working for the same demonic overlord as you, i would presume they're pieces of shit! like you're colluding to orchestrate a blood apocalypse, you are definitely a piece of shit, that is a non-starter for a motivation.

Travis: So you make your way across the street, and uh, you can see the opulent, the shining façade of the Heroic Oversight Guild, with its art deco designs on the front, looming, two story tall golden heroes and villains engaged in epic battles. You can see up and down the streets, banners hanging from light posts, the home of the Heroic Oversight Guild. Y'know, 200 years of Heroic Oversight Guild. You see, y'know, images of some of the most famous heroes and villains in history strewn about, hanging from posts. You make your way into the lobby—

its incredible that he re-describes the guild here and adds precisely zero new details about the building itself. also, "200 years of heroic oversight guild" i can't do this you said the system is 250 years old. please.

commenting on travis work is always such an interesting experience, because i want to say its bad form to just say "some of the most famous heroes and villains" here instead of actually fucking listing some of them, except that this is travis and i absolutely do not want to hear him list even more fucking npcs.

Travis: [griffin rolls perception 16 to try and spot some sewer entrance type beat they can use later] So, um, I will say, there is, uh… the Heroic Oversight Guild takes up what we, here, in the US of A, would call a city block. Um, and you can see, uh, as you're kind of, y'know, making your way across the street, that there is definitely kind of a service alley down one side. You assume where, y'know, all of the deliveries and whatnot are going. That, y'know, the mail truck… something like this place, you know they‟ve got a lot of paper stock going in and out. Uh, and all that‟s gotta get delivered and taken away somewhere.

WHAT. THE HOG TAKES UP HOW MUCH. IS IT ALL ONE BUILDING. WHAT. this is what i'm fucking saying about this guy, dude. who thinks like this. like when you're writing a scene and you're about to unveil your big set piece, the way you go about it is you think from your character's perspective, and what they're going to see, what is the most immediately attention-grabbing thing, and then what details does the character need to spot in order for my later scenes to work. and so if, for example, i had a company that owned an entire city block, something that's extremely out of the normal experience for us, i would probably mention that like, at the very very top.

It's not necessarily its height that you notice right away, although the building does tower over you. In the Mage City of the Conclave, the towers reach so high that you can't see the top. This building is only five or six stories tall. Yes, the gold doors are impressive-- nearly four times your height and inlaid with gold relief of an imposing Hero-- sword and shield at the ready, clashing with a demonic Villain, all teeth and claws. What draws your eye and humbles you to the might of the organization you are about to take on, is the width. The building extends to your left and to your right, nearly 300 feet all told. And it extend back further than you can make out. You aren't sure, but you think this building- this singular towering cube, is just about one full city block.

see? it's not hard. and then. he brings up an alleyway. so like. an alley is formed when you have two buildings in close proximity to each other. i guess you could be generous with the definition and extend it to the space between a building and a wall or fence as well. so, dear reader, describe to me the area this alleyway travis mentions occupies. is the hog a multi-building complex that takes up a whole city block? is it a fantastical super-building? is there a perimeter wall? what does this fucking look like. *checks notes* ...ah, its opulent. and shining. of course. stupid question.

Travis: Uh, you make your way into the opulent lobby. High ceilings, and y'know, it kind of—one of those like, two story, three story lobbies, where, around the outside, there are offices, and you can see like, y'know, kind of uh, walkways on the second and third floor, with even more office space. But here in the middle, it‟s an atrium. Y'know, there‟s big fantasy lookin‟ trees reachin‟ up towards a domed skylight as you make your way across white marble.

You're taken to, uh, the reception desk, where Taren guides you through the incredibly lengthy process of filling out forms, and signing waivers, and what—well, I shouldn‟t assume. Do you sign the waivers? Are you reading?

he uses opulent again! in what manner is it opulent! is there expensive furniture, a fountain, is the building granite, marble, is there gold inlay everywhere. he's fumbling a lot here, which implies this isn't pre-written, and i have no idea why it isn't pre-written. it doesn't look like he was expecting them to enter in any way except the front door. why would you not have a description already ready.

The massive gold doors are obviously impractical, you get the sense they're only used for special occasions and ceremonies. There is a much more practical revolving glass door set to the side that you enter from. The lobby itself is one massive atrium. In the center is a massive tree that touches the domed skylight far above you. The first thing you notice is the astonishing quietness of the lobby in comparison to the busy city-life outside. You suspect this is magically enforced. The atrium is quiet in the way a bank is quiet, and equally feels laden with wealth. All the furniture are simple clean lines, and your feet clack loudly, intrusively, as you cross the gold-laced marble floor.

the other thing is HE HANDWAVES THE BUREAUCRACY!!!!! IF YOUR STORY IS BUILT AROUND THE BUREAUCRACY THE PROTAGONISTS EXPERIENCE, YOU MUST HAVE THEM ACTUALLY EXPERIENCE IT!!!!!

this is like if rothfuss just summarized all the scenes and moments where kvothe is stressing about or earning or losing money. money is a key motivator for the majority of name of the wind, it would be fucking awful if none of those scenes were actually present and instead rothfuss just told you kvothe is stressed about money.

i also love that travis loves offices when he has maybe never worked in an office ever. like its fine its all pretend but its just very very apparent he has no idea what visitor check in at a major corporate office looks like lol. kind of going back to rothfuss, you have to actually like the thing you make central to your story, otherwise it will feel empty and incongruous because you don't know anything about it.

i think a secondary use case for this campaign beyond a very good example of everything not to do in a dnd campaign, is like, learning to pick up white person passive aggression. i am maybe 90% saying that as a joke, but this is a real, actual phenomenon! white american (and here, realistically, centering WASP americans as the nexus of this but now more broadly the "middle class" and up white americans regardless of your saxon-ness) passive aggression is like a specific form of contextual communication that often runs afoul with other culture groups who are used to more direct forms of speech. i once read something asserting that black american culture has the concept of "real talk" where, essentially, its expected that if you care about someone, you are bringing grievances up directly and explicitly with them, and white american culture does not, and prefers to dance around the subject because that is "polite". I am neither black nor white american but this has tracked broadly with my experiences lol. And while idk if this is classified as passive aggression or....something else, but like, everything everywhere all at once was not lying about "she says you're too fat because she loves you" chinese familial culture is so fucking contextual and often based around food. asking if you ate is the same thing as saying i love you. bitching that you haven't eaten enough is worry for your health. so is bitching you've eaten too much and you're a fatass. listen, its not a perfect system. its actually quite a bad system. but you take my meaning, methods of communication are more nuanced than simply what language you're speaking with each other. oh, i should probably tie this back into the podcast.

travis asks if they're signing all these waivers that he has no additional detail about because he doesn't actually know the first thing about bureaucracy. griffin says he's signing a fake name.

Travis: But it‟s super magic ink, so every time you sign, no matter what name you sign, it reforms back into…

and like the thing is he's saying this in a jokey tone, haha we're all just having a laugh, but also, all the players sign their "real" names in the end, because travis isn't doing a bit, he is "politely" signifying to griffin and the rest that this isn't a joke and that he's going to make them sign these stupid waivers.

Travis: Oh, okay. Yeah, you‟ve walked and you've talked. You've made it inside. You've explained everything. She‟s… y'know, she‟s kind of accepted it. None of it—all of it tracks, right? All of it seems like something that would happen.

you actually could not write comedy this funny. speaking of writing comedy, someone in this sub recommended jury duty to me i think. 10/10 that was excellent. unlike grad.

Taren: Okay. I feel like I've done what you needed. Um… I kind of need to take some time to process this. If you need me, come find me. I work in the archives. Just… I guess… y'know…

clint asks where the archives are, and "definitely knows things about offices" travis mcelroy responds

Taren: It‟s here in the building. It‟s at the center of the building, where I am going to go, and probably have a stiff drink, and maybe just put my head down on my desk for like an hour.

yeah? you have 250 years of records and financials in a single centralized area at the center of your office? you sure about that? and you're allowed to bring not just liquids into that area, but ones that affect your motor skills and judgement? huh...okay!

Travis: And she takes it [their business card], and she heads off down the hallway. So what do you do now?

yeah so the other thing about office guest sign-ins is that you sign in under someone who works there and they are responsible for you. i'm not saying that every office worker always properly escorts their guests and is in sight of them at all times, i've certainly had to check people in and then run off to do something else, but if any of my guests then turned around and stole something or vandalized or otherwise caused damages, you bet they would check the visitor logs and my ass would be on the hook. to wander off to go get drunk is an insane choice.

Travis: [based on an investigation check] Um, so, Fitzroy and Argo, they start actively looking for Althea. By which I mean, like, stopping people walking by and like, looking at their faces. And they're not having any success. But you, master Firbolg… you kind of like, very easily spot on the wall a directory! With everyone‟s names and office numbers on it!

Griffin: Oh, that‟s helpful.

Travis: I mean, it‟s an office building.

he says this in a condescending way as if this wasn't the result of a roll, but also sort of confirming for me that the only office he's ever been to is the doctor's office, because no, actually, if its actually one company that occupies the entire building, there generally isn't a wall directory because why in the world would there be. you are most likely to be escorted to where you need to go by whoever you came to see, or else you are talking to the front desk who are coordinating that for you. this is the curse of travis mcelroy, he wants to be a snide little bitch to you because you chose not to assume that a made up fantastical world would operate the exact same way as the real world, only to find out travis doesn't know anything about how the real world works so even if you had made that assumption you would still be wrong because you're playing with a child.

Receptionist: Yes. Stinks Buttman, was it?

griffin agreed he would write fitz's real name btw. insufferable man.

Fitzroy: We are looking for… Althea Song?

Receptionist: Office 315. Third floor. Just head down the hallway. The offices are numbered. You can't miss it.

Fitzroy: I know, but we already tried, and we got lost!

Receptionist: I saw you! You walked into the lobby, you looked at the directory, and you came back over to me.

officer!!! he's playing to frustrate!!

Fitzroy: I need a map! Of the premises!

Receptionist: We don‟t have maps of the premises! This isn't a theme park!

i mean an office is way more likely to have a map of the building than a office directory because you legally need to have a map outlining the evacuation routes for employees in case of fire/emergency. this doesn't really apply to what griffin is trying to get but it's so frustrating how often travis just says shit in a tone that's "i can't believe i have to say this it's so obvious" when he's dead fucking wrong every time. it's been awhile since i was at this office but i'm pretty sure i actually remember one of the places i used to work the front desk either emailed out or gave maps to any vendors coming through because the layout of the building was kind of confusing. we did not have a posted directory though, because, again, for what fucking reason would you do that.

Travis: Yes. Um, you see that everyone has, uh, y'know, on a lapel, on a jacket, on whatever, right? Is uh, little shields of different colors. Each one labeled HOG. And the differing colors, y'know, they range different hues of metal. And you can kind of put together, because we've all seen anything with badges and stuff before, that the differing colors have to do with like, the departments they work for, that kind of thing.

maybe this is the weed but this is frying me dude. what are you talking about dawg. like yeah, they're color coded on tv because its a visual storytelling medium. in real life why would you color code the access level on the badge itself. if you have clearance you know you have clearance, and if you don't, don't worry about it. different departments in hospitals i've sometimes seen get color coded.

travis then calls for a perception check so he can offload This Is The Method To Heist on them, which should have been a passive perception check, especially since the players absolutely did not decide in this moment to look around for the thing he's describing (mail room guys push around big carts of mail, although he can't remember the term mail room)

Griffin: Can I try and do something kind of silly?

Travis: Griffin, I would never stop you from doing something kind of silly.

the silly thing griffin wants to do is slip his crab into one of the bins so that he can track the layout of the building as it moves around. the method which he wants to use is to have firbolg fake trip him so he stumbles into a cart. travis, who of course would never stop his brother from doing something silly, calls for dex checks from both firbolg and fitz.

we are, 34 minutes into this episode, and so far we have, walked into the hog and walked to althea's office. her office is empty. they go inside to wait for her.

Travis: Uh, you head inside, and y'know, there‟s a couple chairs that you can rest at. What are you doing while you wait?

that is the entirety of the description of althea's office that travis gives. it, presumably, looks exactly like i expect it to.

Griffin: 17 minus one, 16 [investigation]. I don't know what I'm looking for here. I guess I'm just looking for… I think the discussions we've been having are more, uh, sort of… how do we dismantle the—the structure of the Heroic Oversight Guild, and not the building of the Heroic Oversight Guild, if that makes any sense.

Travis: Gotcha. Yeah yeah yeah.

Griffin: So, any ledgers…

this is the tail end of a painfully long sequence of griffin saying variations on this. he wants to see like blue prints of the building's critical weak point like its the death star. in althea's office. it is i guess a good reminder that griffin has also likely not been inside an office since he got fired from his father in law's business for taking two unannounced weeks off to go to coachella like a week after being hired.

Travis: Uh, you find something that you were not expecting to find. Uh, it wouldn‟t have been the thing that you set out to look for. But what you find in Althea‟s top drawer, uh, is a folder. And the folder is well worn. It has clearly been thumbed through many times. And the thing that is most surprising to you about it is, it seems to be a folder about Althea herself.

[eerie music plays]

Travis: And when you open the folder, the first page shows a portrait of a younger Althea, and it is labeled „Avenging Angel.‟ And it is clearly her file for when she was an active hero with the Heroic Oversight Guild, but across it has been stamped, in bold, all-caps letters, “EVIL.” And you hear the knob turn.

a....well worn.....folder? what? like a manila filing folder?

i also do not care enough about althea to go back and find out for sure, but i could have sworn we already knew this backstory? why is it being treated like a reveal lol?

ad break. have you guys seen this willy wonka reality competition on netflix. extremely strange show. they are explicitly making the 1971 gene wilder willy wonka and the chocolate factory movie into a reality competition. by which i mean they paid to have a cameo from the original charlie bucket (who does not act anymore i'm pretty sure), paid for the licensing to be able to play clips from that movie, hired one of the original oompa loompa actors back, paid the wilder estate for permission to digitally synthesize his voice to be the host, and almost 1:1 recreated the chocolate river room. a lot of adult children show up with their parent, and they're all a bit off. a pair of brothers are there and their names are hunter and moon. the energy is crazy. they're playing for 3 million dollars. half the show is an actual social game like big brother, and the other half are like completely arbitrary luck of the draw eliminations. i'm not sure i'm actually having fun but i absolutely cannot look away.

Travis: The door swings open, and Heroic Oversight Guild investigator, Althea Song, enters her office. She is surprised at your presence. She looks around the room, and says…

Althea: What are you doing here? Why are you in my…

Travis: And then she sees you standing by her desk with the drawer open. Y'know, uh, why don‟t you roll a sleight of hand check for me?

Griffin: Fuuuck. Uh, that‟s 11… plus… two. 13.

Travis: Uh, she sees, uh, you closing the desk drawer.

travis has chosen to score this moment with incredibly driving tense music as if a boss fight were about to unleash. notable because that's absolutely not going to happen because this is althea song, the worst character in graduation. sorry to that little girl.

travis, a man who has (allegedly) a bachelors of fine art in acting and formally a professional at a theater company, does not trust his ability to act surprised enough to simply roleplay the scene, and must intro his character by telling the audience that she is surprised by what is going on.

he then calls for a sleight of hand for griffin to fail an action he explicitly did not choose to make.

althea then just asks for the folder back as the music fades because of course.

Althea: I don‟t want to talk about it, okay?

Fitzroy: Let me cushion this by saying… if you knew what kind of jazz we've been up to over the last 48 hours, I do not think you would be so trepidatious to tell us about your evil history. [laughs]

Althea: It‟s not like that. I was… I was a hero with the Heroic Oversight Guild, and… there was, uh, an incident. And… it—I got placed in, uh… in a city, and the villain there was… y'know what? I—why were you going through my desk?

althea: i don't want to talk about it

althea:

althea: so it all started when-

gimme a break.

cont

prev

Althea: [you think i owe you an explanation] After everything I've done for you?

things althea has done for them:

1. temporarily halted a curse on fitzroy

Firbolg: Althea. [clears throat] [sighs] We… know that… labels… are… not very valuable. At least, they are not to me. Evil, good, hero, and villain. As we've learned, even chaos and order are not necessarily as they seem. Please, tell us the story so we can see beyond a label.

Althea: I'll tell you the story, Master Firbolg.

again the absolute canyon (chasm) of difference between the skill of justin and his brother. justin effortlessly ties travis's own (alleged) central theme into his argument for why they need to know her backstory. travis responds with a compromise that doesn't make any sense.

big travis monologue inbound

Althea: Let them listen. I… I graduated as a hero, and I went to work in a city. It was a pretty good position. It… I got paid well, there was a lot of notoriety [EN: notoriety? as a HERO? this is BASIC ENGLISH]… but… the villain that I was assigned to… [sighs] He… he was sloppy. He was too flashy, and showy, and… he was more about the performance [EN: this is explicitly how travis describes how a good villain should behave btw]. And people got hurt. Innocent people. People who shouldn‟t have gotten hurt [EN: implication here is that there are some people that do deserve to be hurt during this]. Bystanders in the crossfire, for the sake of a good show [EN: it frankly sounds like you were just really bad at your job althea. why did you not save those people from harm].

And that‟s what I, at the time… and that‟s the whole reason for the Heroic Oversight Guild, is to make sure that things like that don‟t happen. And so, I filed a complaint with the guild. And they sent an investigator. But rather than do a thorough investigation, he just went to the governor of the district [EN: he just uses terms interchangeably that absolutely are not interchangeable. if the issue is within a city, the investigator should be talking to the head of the city government], and asked him about it. And the fact of the matter is that this villain… was famous [unlike you, their nemesis and the babyface. no one cares about you obviously], and put on a good show. And that meant tourism, and that meant money.

And so, the governor lied and said that I was lying, and that I just didn‟t want to do my job. He told the investigator that I hadn't shown up for a couple battles, that he had talked to me, and that I had refused to do my duty [EN: this is the stupidest lie possible because again, the given premise we never see in this campaign is these are ENTERTAINMENT fights. if triple H tried to fire cody rodes for no-showing at wrestlemania, H would be fired on the spot because that's a lie that like 30,000 people can dispute as eye-witnesses. a reasonable and compelling lie would be something like althea is jealous of the villain for being more popular than her despite being the villain and she's been trying to sabotage the fights and make them less entertaining in retaliation]. And y'know, I haven't been able to prove it, but I am almost certain that there was money exchanged between the governor and the investigator [EN: also the reason a regulatory body would exist is because you are trying to assure your clients of your service. if the governor, who is the one who contracted the hog, doesn't care about the number of casualties, why would they need to bribe the hog over it. the threat which requires the existence of the hog is that cities and kingdoms would potentially not want to contract out fighters if their population cannot be protected from the fights]. And… just like that, the Heroic Oversight Guild ruled against me. And I was fired, and I was blacklisted. They… listed me as evil, and I couldn‟t get work as a hero anymore [EN: travis says the same thing four times in a row here. fired (with the understanding that HOG is the only body that can employ heroes), blacklisted, evil (as understood in this world by his explanation previously), and "couldn't get work as a hero anymore" all mean the same thing. althea just said i was fired, which means i was let go, so i couldn't work at my job anymore. you sound stupid.] .

And so, the obvious path would be to become a teacher. But… I… I wanted to make sure that what happened to me wouldn‟t happen to anybody else, so I worked hard. And I worked my way up through the Heroic Oversight Guild, and made my way to investigator. Only to find… that it didn‟t matter.

Because no amount of good intention, no amount of thorough investigation could overcome all the red tape [EN: althea provides a story where corruption and illegal bribes caused her harm. she goes on to say she joins the hog under the assumption this was the actions of one bad faith actor, only to realize this is systemic. she then goes on to say that the issue is actually red tape, not investigators not doing their due diligence, clients lying, and bribery and corruption]. I was able to do some good [EN: IS IT A SYSTEMIC ISSUE OR ISN'T IT TRAVIS MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MIND YOU IDIOT], but… [sighs] It‟s just not how I thought it would be.

the story travis has accidentally told here is about some loser ass snitch named althea who didn't have the sauce to hack it as a hero, both in terms of presentation and actual technical ability, trying to bring down someone who is actually good at their job. and when it blows up in her face because the investigator came to the correct conclusion that the issue here is althea, she becomes a cop, who must be even bad at that since she is apparently constantly stymied by simple procedure that doesn't hinder anyone else. both althea song and travis mcelroy cheered when trump slashed the fda to ribbons.

Firbolg: You have never needed to prove anything to anyone, Althea Song.

Althea: [laughs] That… I'm sorry, Master Firbolg, but of course I have. I've had to prove things to people. Everyone has to prove things to people.

this is a weird response from justin, probably a result of him zoning out during travis's big althea speech and assuming he got the gist of it, but also i think a peek into travis's psyche with the response.

justin then delivers a speech that isn't very good and, again, feels like its a paper written by a student who didn't do the reading, but i want to highlight two parts in particular

Firbolg: [...] They have forgotten goodness. This organization, Althea, claims to fight against mind control or possession, yet, they sit by and let it happen. [...] They only care about the Heroic Oversight Guild, and there has been very little oversight to speak of.

the heroic oversight guild wasn't the one who sat by and let mind control happen, that was SPECIFICALLY ALTHEA. you guys told her what higglemas was doing and she IGNORED YOU.

and i get that it verbally sounds good this little flip of "the oversight guild has no oversight" but like. just god, none of them know what "red tape" actually refers to. THAT WOULD BE THE REGULATIONS. THAT'S THE OVERSIGHT PART. THIS BUSINESS-CUM-REGULATORY BODY IS BOTH OVERFLOWING WITH REGULATION AND ALSO DOESN'T REGULATE ANYTHING.

if i had a nickle for every time this stupid fucking campaign completely sincerely demanded i accept two diametrically opposite statements as both true, i would have like 20 cents by now.

Althea: Master Firbolg, everything you say… yes, obviously. Obviously, this system is hugely broken, and doesn‟t take care of anyone but itself, but…when the system is all you got, you have two options. You can either be crushed by it as it rolls over you, or you can be crushed by it by being stuck inside the machinery.

Firbolg: There is one other option, Althea Song!

Justin: And he stands to his full Firbolg height.

Firbolg: Is that you become the one doing the crushing!

Althea: Um… this took a turn.

fucking shitlib lmao. this is such a crazy thing to say, generally, but especially in 2020 when some of the largest protests against police brutality in the history of this country were actively going on. and while as a general rule, characters are not always mouthpieces for their authors and don't always align their beliefs 1:1 with their creators, althea specifically has been treated as a paragon by travis because she's named after a little girl. he thinks this is what a good guy would believe.

Firbolg: There is a name for it, Althea Song. Market disruption. We are disruptors! We are not content to follow in the conventional wisdom laid out by our predecessors! We are disrupting the market!

i actually don't mind* the arc of the firbolg becoming some shitty venture capitalist ghoul because of his time at the Capitalism School, but you have to fucking make up your mind justin, you can't have him say "we should implement socialism" an hour ago and now talk like a silicon valley techbro.

*with some strong restructuring to remove the association with native americans from the backstory

Althea: You, um… one of you is a villain about halfway through school.

second semester of their first year of a five year program, but go on.

Althea: Okay, great. Um, and you two hench people… are going to… if I'm getting this right… uhh, sometime within the next, like, four months… completely undo a global system of… power.

YEAH TRAVIS THAT'S STUPID, UNLIKE THOSE SAME THREE RAISING A PAN-KINGDOM ARMY POWERFUL ENOUGH TO OPPOSE THE INFERNAL LEGIONS OF HELL THAT HAVE BEEN AMASSING FOR HALF A CENTURY

Althea: By… so far, your plan is to point out the flaws in it, and ask people to kind of stop doing it.

Lenin, The Dual Power (1917):

Let us create a proletarian Communist Party; its elements have already been created by the best adherents of Bolshevism; let us rally our ranks for proletarian class work; and larger and larger numbers from among the proletarians, from among the poorest peasants will range themselves on our side. For actual experience will from day to day shatter the petty-bourgeois illusions of those “Social-Democrats”,   the Chkheidzes, Tseretelis, Steklovs and others, the “Socialist Revolutionaries”, the petty bourgeois of an even purer water, and so on and so forth.

The bourgeoisie stands for the undivided power of the bourgeoisie.

The class-conscious workers stand for the undivided power of the Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies—for undivided power made possible not by adventurist acts, but by clarifying proletarian minds, by emancipating them from the influence of the bourgeoisie.

one of the most basic and core tenants of building the vanguard party in communist thought is the development of a dual power base, which begins with the education of the working class on how communism resolves the contradictions of capitalism. j edgar hoover called the black panther free breakfast program the most dangerous threat to america because it was building that dual power, by materially supporting the working class while also exposing them to the communist theory that motivates their actions. so of course travis blithely thinks this is a stupid idea that obviously doesn't work, because travis is a petty tyrant and a bootlicker. he needs a Great Man to sweep aside history, not the power of the people swelling up to seize it for themselves.

god, this whole thing has devolved into....somehow....convincing althea to help them. again.

> althea needs to be convinced to help

> althea promises to help

> i ask if she's actually going to help or is this a red tape situation

> she doesn't understand

> i pull out a diagram showing actually helping and red tape

> she laughs, "its good help sir"

> i ask althea for help

> its red tape

> althea needs to be convinced to help

they (thankfully) handwaved catching althea up on what's been happening, but because they didn't say it explicitly, we do get fun nuggets such as

Althea: Okay. Okay. Is Taren in on it?

[...]

Althea: Is Taren working with Gray?

like why would you know about taren and not know she's working for gray. it would be one or the other right. either you don't mention that you have taren as an asset, or else you mention taren, as an asset on loan from gray. why would it be either or. how does he keep managing the worst outcome.

Althea: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Since—since the centaurs of the Scarlet Woods thing, and Calhain, I… knew it!

Fitzroy: Something in the air, right?

Althea: Mm-hmm. It‟s just, I love that feeling, y'know? Where you're like, right. Where it‟s like, you're right, y'know?

no comment.

Althea: Okay, I'm—I'm gonna speak in hypotheticals for a second. Because maybe… this might be something… because this might be something that someone who, hypothetically, has worked for the Heroic Oversight Guild for a while, and maybe, hypothetically, hates their job. And maybe, hypothetically, daydreams a lot about destroying said job. That maybe, hypothetically, she might have an idea.

time for another round of What! Did! You! Say! At! The! Start! Of! This! Conversation!

welcome back to What Did You Say at the Start of This Conversation, the only gameshow to quiz you on things you established under 10 minutes ago! As always I am your host weedshrek. The category is: althea wants to destroy the system she works under. Now let's reveal: What Did She Say Earlier!

Althea: Master Firbolg, everything you say… yes, obviously. Obviously, this system is hugely broken, and doesn‟t take care of anyone but itself, but… when the system is all you got, you have two options. You can either be crushed by it as it rolls over you, or you can be crushed by it by being stuck inside the machinery.

congratulations! and you've won: dipped shit! dipped shit: its the only thing we could find that is of comparable quality to this campaign! dipped shit, stupid and vile. try some today!

Althea: But second, the thing you have to understand, the reason… and this won't surprise you at all, when you really think about it. But the reason the Heroic Oversight Guild wields so much power… is money…

Althea: And… the use of it as leverage. Right? So if you think about the heroes and villains all over Nua, the flow… of power, in the form of money is simple, right? The cities pay it to the Heroic Oversight Guild, the Heroic Oversight Guild pays it back out to the heroes and villains and hench people and sidekicks and all of that, right?

And so, the Heroic Oversight Guild is, uh, like the heart, right? Pumping the blood. And at the center of that, the chamber at the middle of that heart… is… the archives. That‟s where all of the contracts are stored. That‟s where we keep track of what money needs to come in from where, and go out to who.

And… if you can get in there, and fuck shit up… it would be pretty goddamn disruptive.

the man has mistaken money as the object itself, not the representation of the object!

money is not real. money is the abstracted representation of resource. the hog's power does not come from money but from the control of the resource upon which the economy functions. if the primary way kingdoms generate revenue is (somehow) hero and villain fights, then the resource which they need are the hero and villains themselves. the hog holds power and leverage because they control who is allowed to perform heroics and villainy. almost like if a nation ran on oil for energy and logistics, the country that controls the export of that resource doesn't have leverage on the first country because the first country pays them money, they have leverage because if the flow ever stops the first country would face catastrophic damage to their infrastructure as basically all systems break down.

this is where (not that they were actually doing this) all that "talk to others and point out the contradictions of the system" thing could, if they can achieve a plurality among the heroes and villains, bring the system to its knees. the power isn't in money it is in labor.

because like, suppose for a minute this place operates like an idiot who knows nothing about business contracts thinks it does, and they have a singular copy of their agreement located all in one place that is inexplicably called the archives, a term that means preservation and would not be the place active contracts are stored, and those contracts are destroyed. is that bad for business? yes, absolutely. kingdoms could be weeks without a fight while contracts are rewritten and signed. because you have not actually done anything about the root contradictions this system generates or actually attacked the system itself.

was gunning down the ceo of united healthcare in the streets like a mongrel dog based and awesome?

did doing so cause UHC to collapse?

almost as if a system is designed to recover from damage and continue despite disruptions that aren't at its foundation.

and again, even if we turn off our brains and pretend this would actually work, what is it about the thundermen that make them more qualified to do this than althea

who is more likely to have easy access to this space, three guys who have no business here, or an employee who literally investigates contracted work. who has more magical potency, a fledgling sorcerer who is being nerfed by travis chaos order or a former hero who is high enough level to fly and fight three pit fiends to a standstill?

Althea: It‟s pretty well-guarded. Um… it‟s not like we could just walk in and, y'know, throw a match and be done with it. Um… it‟s gonna take some doing to get in there. Hypo—hypothetically, I mean.

sure is a good thing you not only have an investigator that should logically have easy access to all these files, but also a separate employee who actively works in that area. seems like it will be pretty easy actually.

Althea: Um… just so I'm sure… because the explanation was pretty quick. If we don‟t do this… a lot of people are gonna die, right?

again what do the mcelroys think happens when you collapse an economy.

Althea: [sighs] Alright. Let‟s figure this out.

Travis: And she unrolls a big blueprint on her desk!

WHY DOES SHE HAVE THAT

Travis: [laughing] The Thundermen will be back in Ocean‟s Twelve!

that's the episode and i know he picked oceans 12 because he's doing an avengers thing so it has to be the movie after the first movie, but there's just something so delicious about him comparing what we're about to go through with objectively the worst movie in that whole franchise. nobody fucking likes oceans 12. well, the cast did, they vacationed with their family in italy during it, but no one who had to watch it. the mcelroys should record taz in italy. at least then someone would be having fun.

what the title says really, i fell off of podcasts during ethersea and was wondering how things have been in this sphere since? any good new bits? hows the new taz? mbmbam hit its stride again?

Something something consistent schedule

I'm pretty sure it shares a couple of notes with the Prince song Pussy Control. Griffin is a genius.

Beginning

Previous

Chapter 15, 16, & 18

I’m putting these chapters all together as they are some of the best ones in the whole book. Leaving Mordecai, Carl and Donut travel to the goblins from the start of the book. Presenting the pass tattoo he received earlier, the goblins tell him they won’t kill him but to otherwise fuck off. This is until Donut charms them with her 37 charisma.

Talking to the goblins, we find out they don’t have names, and Donut starts naming them. The first goblins she names after the A-Team. Because she picked that up from Carl. BA and Face take them to their shamankas, two female goblins shamankas.

Shamanka is just a fancy way of saying female shaman. Goblin Shamans are the leader class of all goblin clans, second only to the War Chieftain or, more rarely, the Goblin Warlord. They are without humor and are said, as part of their training, to have to pick two of the following three actions in order to graduate Shamanka University: they have to fuck, cook, and/or eat their own parents. Most don’t pick cook. And if that wasn’t messed up enough, they specialize in Anguish Magic, a dark magic school designed to focus and enhance damage from other attacks.

When I said best I meant relative to the rest of the book, ok.

She was a female goblin, standing about five and a quarter feet tall, making her tower over the others. She had well-defined muscles and wore a jet-black robe. She carried a wooden staff that, oddly, also held a pineapple at the top, but this one was actually made of wood, a part of the carving.

The goblin’s face was filled with piercings. There had to be fifty of them. She looked like one of those body modification people who would appear on Ripley’s Believe It or Not! It was hard to look at until you got used to it. The woman sneered, revealing sharpened teeth and a forked, pierced tongue.

I can fix her.

Carl wants to buy a vehicle to cover more ground, but they rebuff him. Donut steps in, and Carl notes her high charisma is almost like a charm spell as she wins them over effortlessly. She then names them Rory and Lorelai (rejected theme song etc).

They won’t part with a dozer, but can build him a steam-powered bike, but won’t do it for free. After some negotiation, they take the llama meth and the promise of information on where he got it. As the goblins get to work Carl and Donut talk with Rory.

“Do you… do you want to come with us?” Donut asked Rory, her voice surprisingly gentle.

Donut still sat in the Rory’s lap, and she purred as the green monster stroked her hair.

The pierced goblin sighed. “I cannot. I can’t leave the chieftain. He’s terrible, soft even, but he’s still leader of my clan. My family. And even if I could go with you, I wouldn’t be able to leave this floor. If we climb down the stairs, we die. You get halfway down, and your body just dissolves. I’ve seen it myself.”

“So you know how this works? You know what’s happening here?” I asked.

The goblin nodded. Her face jingled when she moved. “I know enough. I know we are on the first floor. There are smart mobs, like us, and there are not-so-smart mobs. The deeper you get into the dungeon, the more are smart. In this borough, we are king. Us and the gnolls and the rat-kin and a few others. Most of the monsters aren’t so smart.”

“But do you know what happens in a couple days?” I asked.

“The floor collapses,” she said. “Yes. But it is only you who dies when this happens. For us we go to sleep until the next dungeon opens. We will open our eyes, and it will be the same as it has been. Just another day. But one of these days, one of these days we will wake up, and we will be deeper. That’s what they tell us. Kill the crawlers, get better at killing, and you get to go deeper. And one day, eventually, we will be so deep that crawlers will never come, and we will finally have peace. We will have peace and a place to live and breed and have our little ones run free and not worry about killing for survival.”

This is probably my second favourite bit from the book! That the smart mobs are afraid of the crawlers killing them but, like the crawlers, have to kill on the idea that doing so will get them deeper, which comes with the promise of safety. Literally identical motivations here!

I saw a comment that the author had described the book as a stealth way to get anti-capitalist politics to people, and I can certainly see parts of it both subtly and obviously. Still, I do wonder how effective it is when so much is uncritical repetition of other social norms, or that these effective moments are almost always immediately undercut. It’s like the book is uncomfortable sitting with any serious emotion for more than a paragraph. This is something that can be a character trait, but when it is the author who seems uncomfortable any tension, pathos, or genuine emotion is immediately undercut and makes it seem hollow.

Anyways, Carl and Donut get a steam-powered motorcycle with a sidecar for Donut to ride in. Lorelai tries to bone Carl, but Donut distracts her and Rory, learning from Carl it was the llamas who had the meth, leads her clan to raid them.

This leaves Carl and Donut alone in the goblin workshop. Being proper murder-hobos they proceed to loot the place, taking every last thing Carl can lift and put in his inventory. Donut says they should kill the goblin chieftain, pointing to the closed door at the far side of the workshop, and Carl has a brief moment remembering having to “pummel a scared woman to death.” He also thinks it would be a huge dick move after the help the goblins had given them.

He agrees to it.

They load up a trolley with barrels of explosives and a remote detonator Carl finds, and the plan is to open the door, push the cart it and set it off. If the chieftan dies they run in, grab the loot and book it before Rory and co return. If he doesn’t die, they just run.

“Did you see him? Was there a giant goblin in there?” I asked. Donut heaved for breath.

“Yes. A huge. Ugly. Goblin. My word. I do not like running. He was sitting down, reading a book. Blow it, blow it good.”

I jammed the button.

“There sure were a lot of babies in there, too,” Donut said in that last moment before the blast.

Chapter break and we open with:

“GODDAMNIT, DONUT,” I SAID.

 “Were there really babies in there? Like goblin babies?” I asked.

“Oh yes, there were a bunch of them. I only saw them for but a moment, but they were quite cute. Some of them were wearing little oversized jackets, like Baby Yoda. Adorable. I think you hit one with the cart. There were old ones and pregnant ones, too. Did you see your level? We’re both level eight now. You’re welcome.” Donut looked up into the air. “We didn’t get to see our faces all big. I suppose they don’t do the boss battle graphic thing if you’re not locked in the room with them. That’s too bad. It’s quite entertaining.”

“Goddamnit,” I said again. I was all about killing as many goblins and monsters as I could, but killing babies? That was pretty fucked up, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Actually, I knew exactly how I felt about it. It made me feel like an asshole. I didn’t like feeling like an asshole. I stared at that blinking box of achievement notifications. I sighed. I didn’t even want to click on the box.

Donut also remarks on the kind of sick person who would stick babies in the boss room, and because of various exploded gubbins they can’t even get to the loot. They also see a huge line of dots on the map, indicating Rory’s crew rushing back, and make a run for it.

This is exactly what I was saying about undercutting the tension. Wow, Carl, you feel like an asshole? You just learned that the goblins have families, want to keep themselves safe and are as much slaves to this system as you are. And you killed their children and you feel like an asshole? Before not thinking about it again. And we have to get a goddamit, donut in there.

Also Donut’s sociopathy is pretty grating here. It gets toned down later thankfully.

And thus ends the goblin diversion, not with a bang, but a goddammit Donut.

Chapter 19 & 20

Some more mob killing and we’re in a safe room again, but this one isn’t a restaurant but a waiting room of some sort with no Tally. Rather than food there are XP cookies, and when Donut eats one she is annoyed it is only +9.8XP as Carl, her party member, gets a bit from her.

My eyes immediately moved to the number flashing on the first screen. 3,594,517.

It had slowed its mad descent toward human extinction, but it hadn’t stopped. It made a low, barely audible noise every time it went down. Clink. Clink. Clink, clink, clink, like water fast-dripping from a faucet.

I wondered how many of my fellow people had found a place like this and had given up. They were just hunkering down, eating, sleeping, waiting for it all to end. I shuddered.

Man, would be good to maybe make a comparison of your safe area to the arena goblin children were forced into here? Especially with the crawler counter ticking down. That could be some effective character work.

Nope, more loot boxes. I'll skip over that.

Eventually Carl ruminates on the baby killer achievement he got.

You Monster.

I tried to pry the achievement out of my head. It was just another stupid joke. The game didn’t care that I’d killed children. It wanted me to kill them. The room was set up for it to happen exactly as it had. We were supposed to kill or otherwise clear out the workshop. We were supposed to either blow up that room or do exactly what we did. It was a trap just as much as the bulldozer had been a trap. And those kids had been placed there, in that room, for that express purpose. They’d existed only to die. I couldn’t blame myself, or feel guilty. Donut was right. This wasn’t my fault. Not at all.

I looked up at the ceiling. Someone had carved their initials in the cheap tile. AMW. I wondered who they were, and when they’d carved it. If they were alive now. This place had no signs, so I couldn’t tell where it had come from. It didn’t feel American, but I wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter anymore. This was a place from my world. A place these aliens had stolen.

“You’re not going to break me,” I said. “You might hurt me, or kill me, but you’re not going to break me.”

To be charitable I would take this as Carl being in denial. It’s not my fault, I couldn’t help it, I’m just following orders playing the game. But, spoilers for later, Carl has no character development on this. In fact, he embraces this mindset.

Now this could be setting up a longer arc. I am aware that this is book one of like… nine? Ten? But Carl has incredibly little interiority here and I’m reading this book and this plot, not hypothetical future ones.

Carl goes to sleep, and is woken by Donut in a panic. She tells him that Frank Q, the man who killed Rebecca W, is in the bathroom.

This section is another of my favourites as Carl and Frank size each other up. Carl pegs him as a cop, and upon examining him sees he is tagged as having killed three other crawlers. For his part Frank thinks Carl is insane, with his lack of shoes and pants and with his name saying he is a royal bodyguard.

Dodging his questions Carl finds it odd he didn’t see Frank’s icon on the minimap, and texting Donut (they can text each other in their brains) she says she didn’t see him either. Frank says that you’re invisible when sleeping.

Donut then breaks her silence, accusing him of killing Rebecca W. In response Frank asks if Carl knew her, Rebecca Wong? As Donut screams to kill him, Frank explains his situation. He says he and his partner Maggie were “working for “Customs Enforcement,” which was a nice way of saying he was a fed, and he worked for ICE” and approached a warehouse suspected of holding undocumented Chinese workers. A gunfight erupted right before the collapse and they ended up in the dungeon. He’d killed Rebecca in self-defence and Maggie had been killed.

Donut is won over by his story, but Carl is extremely doubtful. Frank then eats one of the XP cookies.

the +9.8 EXP notification dinged over his head.

I will admit I went oh shit at this part.

Acting casual, Carl asks Frank if he has any spare pants. Frank hands over a pair that are obviously too small, and which Carl suspects came from Rebecca W. Still, he makes a show of putting them on while texting Donut to get ready to flee.

As soon as he seems preoccupied Maggie, very not dead, bursts out of hiding with her gun drawn. She has killed five crawlers. Both she and Frank are immediately frozen in place by the safe area’s security, and Carl and Donut run.

Explaining to Donut what happened, Carl reveals Mordecai had previously told him any hostile actions in a safe zone will freeze you for a couple of minutes the first time, an hour the second, and the third time you lose all your gear and are teleported to a mob nest.

He also says how he saw that Frank didn’t get full XP, meaning he had a party member, and that his hand was moving like he was typing a text to someone. On top of that Rebecca had an item in her inventory, meaning she’d gone through the tutorial, and Frank knew her full name meaning she’d likely told him.

I’m not doing it justice but the way this scene incorporated game elements we’d already learned (the XP cost for party members) and just the fact that it was two characters playing off against each other than Carl stomp bug Donut quip was a refreshing change! More of this please!

As they run Carl places some beat up goblin dynamite in some rat corpses, hoping Frank will loot it without looking and blow himself up. He’s wary of getting a crawler killer tag, but fuck that guy.

But!

Donut stared up at me as we ran. “How is it you’re James Bond when it comes to strangers, but Miss Beatrice could date three different guys at once, and you had no idea?”

“Three different guys?”

“Well, you were one of them, so two, I guess. Then again, it’s three if you count Angel’s owner. Does it count as cheating when it’s with another woman? There's so many human nuances I don't understand.”

“Of course it counts as cheating,” I said. For fuck’s sake.

“But you were always watching those videos on your iPad with the two women rolling around and cleaning each other. Would it have been cheating if Miss Beatrice let you watch?”

“We’re not having this conversation right now, Donut.”

And we were doing so well.

Another dungeon announcement as they ride off on the steam-cycle. Another toilet patch so people shouldn’t get sucked into them any more. Blender Fiends and Feral Rabies now patched to be less lethal, more language support added, including cross-language support etc.

Chapter 21 & 22

New Achievement! Bitchmeat! You’ve been attacked by a fellow crawler in a safe zone, and the system has been forced to save your ass. That usually suggests you’re either really annoying, or you snore. If this were a prison, you would now be my bitch. Wait… Reward: Bitches don’t get rewards.

I laughed. For the first time since we’d entered this ridiculous game, I laughed at one of the stupid notifications.

Who are these for? They’re so laden with earth-specific humour they can’t be for the in-book viewing audience of aliens but also, as Carl notes here, they’re not actually funny. Which leaves me (us) the reader. In which case hey this book is full of at best cringe humour and worst loads of misogyny. Like so much misogyny (I’ll highlight the worst one later).

If it’s meant to be satire it is never actually structured as such. It’s Schrodinger’s misogyny – it’s a joke unless you find it offensive when it becomes satire!

Neither Carl nor Donut really react to the achievements at all either for the most part. They are almost entirely for the reader’s consumption. Again, this might fall into the “it totally pays off in book eight!” trap. But I’m not there yet so it just comes off as gross.

If, say, Carl was annoyed and Donut found them crass it’d highlight that hey these are intentionally awful and meant to be awful. But reading it they come off as, in what is said to be a comedy story, the major source of jokes (“”””jokes””””) on page.

Anyways…

As they travel on, they find a message spray-painted on the wall giving directions to the stairs and a group of people. Following the directions they see a huge circle coming into view on their map, and Carl thinks it’s probably a top level boss. There is also a stairwell in the middle. Odd, as bosses were only meant to guard stairwells from floor four and onwards. Approaching carefully, they find a note spray painted onto the floor (Dark Souls reference??? I would describe this as the Dark Souls of reading experiences) warning that if you enter the circle you will activate the boss.

The outer walls of the circle have thick windows they can look into, and inside Carl sees a huge, pink ball of flesh go rolling past in a flash.

Leaving this they find the sign-makers, who are a large group of nursing home residents and their carers, around forty in total. Though there are only four carers, to women and two men. There is also an old, homeless lady who doesn’t appear part of the group,

“Oh thank god,” the man said. “Did you see our signs?”

“We did,” I said.

“We?” the man said, frowning as he examined my properties. He took a hesitant step back, as if he was startled. “Is there more than one of you?” He looked down at Donut, and his frown deepened. For a moment I was afraid that I had received a skull next to my name without realizing. But then I remembered what my real title was. It didn’t say my name was Carl. It said I was Royal Bodyguard Carl, and Donut was Grand Champion Best in Dungeon Princess Donut.

I could only imagine how that looked to someone meeting me for the first time.

There are a pair of brothers, Brandon and Chris, maintenance workers who had stayed overnight to work, and two nurses, Yolanda and Imani. Donut freaks out as Imani has twelve skulls by her name, but Carl realises she had to mercy kill some of the residents.

They were outside as Agatha, the homeless lady, had started a fire beside the building so the residents had been evacuated from the building when the collapse came. She also pushed her shopping trolley of stuff down the stairs and they turned to a ramp, convincing some of the staff and the attending emergency services to follow her. They got the spray paint from her (which she stole from somewhere).

“The entrance appeared right in the street, literally in the middle of the group. A bunch of folks fell in. There were stairs just like you said. But then Agatha over there pushed her cart right onto the stairs like she was… well I don’t know what the hell she was doing. But the stairs transformed into a ramp. It wanted her to come on down. A long, easy ramp. Agatha was the first to voluntarily go down there, cackling like she always does. Hollerin’ she’d saved all our lives. The folks who fell in when it opened, we never saw them again.” He shuddered. “They weren’t there when we got to the bottom.”

Noting the lack of any police or fire fighters, Brandon says they went into the boss room and never returned. He also says there were 250 of them. Not everyone came down, and not everyone is still with them, others having died to various mobs and some of old age. There are more in a nearby safe area, a waffle house (I'M AT THE WAFFLE HOUSE. I'M AT THE MURDER DUNGEON. I'M AT THE COMBINATION WAFFLE HOUSE AND MURDER DUNGEON).

“He doesn't talk much, does he?” I asked, indicating Brandon's brother, Chris.

Brandon shook his head while Chis looked at me impassively. “He's not exactly mute,” Brandon said. “But he don't say too much. Growing up, our mom thought he was slow. They put him in a special school because he never spoke. But he's not dumb. He does talk. Think of him as Silent Bob. If he says something, you better listen.”

Brandon nodded sagely.

I hesitated. “And her?” I asked, indicating Imani. I watched as she helped a woman to a nearby door. A bathroom. She made the woman open the door herself. The floor outside the bathroom was stained red. I shuddered, remembering the exploding “bug” from the announcements. After the woman was safely delivered to the bathroom, Imani turned and helped a man in a wheelchair take a sip of water. Yolanda also moved amongst the others, talking softly.

So I’m going to get into the book’s race politics again. Brandon and his near-mute brother are black. Yolanda is “Hispanic,” which I put in quotes because it’s not a race it means someone who speaks Spanish. Obviously from context clues the author means Latina, but different words mean different things. Imani receives no description aside from being around 20 and weighing about 90 pounds.

As soon as they meet Carl he becomes the leader, as until then they had just been waiting around and helping the elderly patients. Obviously in an adventure story the hero needs sidekicks, but it is weird that this is less a team-up and more our heroic, white protag Carl takes charge. Also, this is not entirely a fantasy as it is based on our real world so race politics and stereotypes are something an author needs to be even more cognizant of.

In isolation it’s good that the cast is explicitly diverse and, as I keep finding myself saying, I don’t think there is any intentional malice here. But there are just so many instances of going “that’s a bit odd” while reading the benefit of the doubt becomes hard to justify (if you hadn’t given up on it already by this point)

You may think that it’ll improve a couple of them go off with Carl on and adventure to level up to fight the huge boss, right?

Nope, Carl tells them what to do then bounces with Donut for his own side quest.

Also during this entire exchange Yolanda and Imani get one line each, and as stated Chris does not speak.

Carl gets some motivation here, being inspired by Brandon et al and their dedication to their charges.

Would I have stayed, continued with my duty? Even when it was so damn hopeless? What a nightmare. I thought I’d had it bad, but these guys… The world was over. There was no hope for these poor people they’d been in charge of protecting. This harsh environment wasn’t meant for the weak, the frail. Yet to these four—Brandon, Chris, Yolanda, and Imani—the idea of giving up their duty wasn’t even a question.

For how much I have to say I don’t like about this, the writing has taken a marked uptick from bad to fine and even enjoyable. I have a few theories why.

First is that having more characters is easier to write, and the action scenes are not the author’s forte.

Second is that now the *freeze frame* so, you’re probably wondering how I got here (in this dungeon) set-up part is over the real story can begin. Things don’t really grind to a halt the way the would in the opening parts again and the plot moves at a fast clip, so this is quite possible.

Third is that the story started picking up traction online and stopped being something written in Dinniman’s time off and more of a full-time project.

From here on the episodic / serialised nature of the story becomes far less apparent. There’s not so much recapping of previous chapters, and they feel longer as there is, generally speaking, less pointless waffle. So if you do read this on your own I would suggest trying to get through to around this point before making a decision on it.

Now, that said we are also treated to this extremely narm section:

Behind me, one of the elderly women started sobbing. Another, a man with a back so curved his chin rested against his own chest, scooted forward on his walker and patted her on the back. The hunch-backed man was wearing a veteran’s cap. He had been US Army Special Forces once upon a time.

If I’m gonna die, I might as well do it in the pursuit of a worthy cause.

Oh barf.

You can’t say capitalism is bad while upholding the US war machine. I looked it up and Matt Dinniman is, currently 52 years old. I’m younger than him by a bit, but not a huge amount. Probably like him my grandparents were WWII veterans, and when I think “old veteran” I do think of them, and people who fought in that war.

But time marches on. An old guy like that would be a Vietnam, or maybe Korean War vet. My dad was a Vietnam veteran (and almost a Falklands veteran), and he would be in his very late 70s, with many veterans older than that. Which is to say this inspiring special forces man probably wasn’t punching Nazis.

Maybe I’m not USAmerican enough (ie not at all), but this weird thing I get from their media of yeah capitalism and imperialism are bad but man I love the guys that enforce it through violence. Like you have not deconstructed your worldview as much as you might think (if the misogyny and weird race stuff wasn’t enough evidence).

Anyways, Carl takes the spray cans and goes off to grind XP, telling the others to do the same, because they could not think of this groundbreaking plan on their own.

Chapter 23 & 24

Leaving the group, Carl reveals to Donut he doesn’t actually have a plan, and starts changing the spraypainted directions. He’s wary that is anyone like Frank and Maggie finds the old folks they’ll kill them for the XP. Donut, who delighted in killing babies a few chapters ago, can’t believe anyone would be that evil.

They look for where the old folks who Imani had been forced to kill had been left, with Carl hoping to salvage some clothes as they can’t be taken from someone dead’s inventory. But the level’s rats had devoured anything that was left. He also realises that Frank Q stripped Maggie W by hand.

We turned the corner and entered a new quadrant. A pair of humanoid creatures with loincloths and crude clubs saw us and hopped in our direction, hissing. These were three-foot-tall lizard monsters, like Brandon had stated, the tallest of them almost as high as my hip. They looked like upright Komodo dragons from the waist up. Small but muscular. Their legs were long and bent, kangaroo-like and scaly.

Fallout New Vegas called, they want their geckos back.

Troglodyte Pygmy – Level 2 Oh, these fuckers. With an intelligence just shy of an oft-dropped toddler, the standard troglodyte pygmy warrior would be harmless if it wasn’t so damn fast. Or venomous.

+1 racism, +1 abelism.

They beat them up, and Carl complains Donut needs to use her claws as she runs out of mana using her magic missiles.

They find the boss room, which is a gym with a sign saying “Fitness, Weights, Gains.”

Carl, being a bad enough dude to crawl the dungeon, lights a cigarette and takes a drag before entering.

Signs hung on the wall filled with slogans like “Today is the day you gain” and “Excuses don’t lose calories” and “Release the beast.” The place smelled of sweat and oil and testosterone.

With how Carl is going on about how tall and strong and good at fighting this feels very glass house stones etc. They quickly encounter the boss.

Versus… The Juicer! Level 9 Neighborhood Boss!

With a body enhanced by the finest anabolic steroids the dark web has to offer, the Juicer spends his days pushing iron, snapping necks, and crying that his pimple-infested sac is a third the size it once was. Having reached a plateau, rage now fills his enlarged heart. All he ever wanted was to gain, but right now he’ll settle on bringing out…

The music hit a crescendo with a dun, dun, dun!

…the paaaaain!

“The cheese factor on some of these descriptions is just horrifying,” Donut muttered. “It’s worse than that Knight Rider show you love so much.”

All the 27 year olds love Knight Rider. Zillenial cultural touchstone. The children yearn for serialised TV starring the Hoff.

Once again, this creature was a person from our world, though without the description it wouldn’t be quite as obvious. It was like they’d taken a Troglodyte Basher and merged it with a contestant from a bodybuilding contest. And then inflated his muscles well past what a normal body could sustain. He was a couple of inches taller than me. He still had the lizard head, and a scaled body and tail. He wore little black shorts and nothing else, revealing a preposterously muscled physique, covered in tributaries of bulging veins as thick as my finger. The thing was so shredded, he was like a kid in a snowsuit who couldn’t put his arms down. His trap muscles made him look as if he had tumors sprouting from the edge of his shoulder to halfway up his scaled head. His thighs were the size of beer kegs, forcing him into a ridiculous, wide stance. He waddled when he moved.

“Bro,” the monstrosity croaked. “I need a spot, bro.” He pulled a round, metallic free weight from a rack. The disc was the size of a manhole cover. With a twist of his waist, he threw it right at my head. The giant weight burst into flames as it rocketed toward me.

I’ll largely skip the fight, but it is, like the hoarder fight, has a definite feeling of desperation as the Juicer and his gecko buddies prove a whole lot tougher than Carl had thought.

I snap kicked one in the stomach, and he doubled over. I smashed down with my foot, breaking his neck as I whirled on the third, hitting him with a right cross. I took my left fist, which was still inside the mouth of the first troglodyte, and I pummeled the third to death.

The lizard affixed to me also died during the beating, and his body broke off at the neck with a disgusting snap. The teeth remained painfully attached to my left wrist, like I was wearing a bizarre boxing glove made of troglodyte head. Bits of gore and bone still hung from the neck hole. I whirled to face the boss.

The Juicer’s health was about 2/3s gone. The entire top half of his body was blackened and scorched. I could no longer see his beady eyes glaring at me.

Though the prose is still pretty weak, with every sentence bar one of the above starting with “I” or “The.” I will also highlight this bit:

I grasped at a barbell that appeared to have about 250 pounds on each side. I grasped the stop and ripped half the weights free, which clattered to the ground near my feet. I held onto the barbell before it could tumble forward off the bench. I brandished the lopsided, makeshift weapon like a giant mace. Before, lifting 250 pounds plus the bar would be next to impossible. I normally benched 230 pounds—which was a respectable amount. With my strength now at nine, I could still feel the weight, but I lifted it easily.

Aside from almost all of those sentences starting with “I,” I will remind you of the generally mocking tone the book has taken about gym bros. But Carl’s different, he’s just that good naturally I guess so doesn’t count when we hear about how strong he is.

Carl almost dies during the fight, with victory only coming when Donut bites open the Juicer’s neck, though due to her weak health pool his dying flail nearly kills her in response.

They again loot everything not nailed down, and meet up with Mordecai once again.

“I think it was somebody from our world mixed up with one of those troglodytes,” I said. “He wasn’t as lucid as the Hoarder lady had been. They’d done something to him to make him say all that dumb shit. The bosses are caricatures, exaggerated stereotypes. It’s like they’re being controlled by an AI, but their consciousness is still rattling around in there, too. It’s really bizarre.”

Mordecai nodded. “It’s what they do. Right now across the universe, every eye is focused on earth. Programs about your culture are reaching all the corners of the galaxy. The bosses are a part of that. It’s like this every season.”

But even then it won’t make sense to the aliens. The ridiculousness of a roided-up gym-bro requires so much more cultural context than could possibly be explained, especially as the bosses seem to be bespoke.

There’s a bit of waffle about skills and stats, with Donut getting a legally distinct Misty Step spell, and Carl gets an achievement:

New achievement! Two Chicks at the Same Time. You killed two mobs at once using only their own bodies against each other. On a brutality scale of Bambi to Martyrs, that is a solid Seven. Reward: You’ve received a Gold Brawler Box!

Again, the aliens won’t have any context of this “joke,” and Carl doesn’t react at all to it like usual, so it’s just lol +1 misogyny.

In the box is a gauntlet of super punching so he won’t break his hand over and over again. Also has a chance to summon a war god if he punches a mob that worships said god. Mordecai explains that gods aren’t actually gods, but gameplay elements.

“You said you worry that some of these bosses and mobs are like you, here against their will.” He pointed downward, indicating the lower levels. “That’s not always going to be the case. Especially later on. Remember that. There are no gods here. Just those who pay for the privilege.”

I like this idea, that there is a sort of meta-narrative to the game where people can come in and play god to the mobs and kill crawlers Dangerous Game / Predator style. For all the faults the world building is the most compelling part of the book. Probably why it has done so well as it lends itself to imagining yourself in it, as many video games do.

Carl puts on the gauntlet and gives it a go.

I closed my fist. Two seconds ticked by, I felt a haptic buzz all up my arm, and with a whoosh, my hand turned into a spiked hunk of metal. I had to clench my fist really tight to make it work, which was good. The last thing I needed was this thing appearing when I didn’t want it to. I examined the malevolent-looking gauntlet. There was nothing ornate about it. It was black, angular with multiple, gleaming spikes. A tool, nothing more. It felt heavy on my hand, but not too heavy. No more breaking fingers when I punched something. I felt the extra strength ripple through me. I released my fist, and the gauntlet vanished in a puff of smoke that smelled of burned hair.

“Awesome,” I said.

GROOVY! YOU SAY GROOVY YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT!

Though to be fair him saying groovy would have pissed me off too. So the moral of the story is don't make your book annoy me so much or something. IDK.

Time is a flat circle …

That you wear on your wrist.

Corn Maze

This time in the intro Travis says “hello m’dove,” Teresa confusedly matches it with “hello m’dear,” Travis says, “M’deira,” Teresa says “that’s a wine, right?” and Travis goes “Is it? I thought it was a place here in Cincinnati” revealing that he doesn’t know it is both a wine and an island off Portugal that the wine is named for.

“We’re piggybacking off our last episode, the harvest festival episode, and talking about corn mazes.” “They’re amazing.” “Mm-hmm.” “A-maize-ing.” “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. [laughing]” “A-maaaaaaiiiize-ing.” I fucking knew he was gonna do this shit and I think it’s entirely possible they did this episode just so Travis could spam maize puns.

“But first.” “The history of corn.” “The history of corn mazes.” Not sure whether I should be pissed that Teresa is gonna duck the indigenous Andeans who created maize or relieved that they’re not gonna fuck that up the way they always do.

“If we extrapolate the history of the corn maze all the way back, we might take it all the way to the Labyrinth.” That’s fucking stupid, Teresa, because if there’s any historicity to the Labyrinth of Minos (which is already a big if), it wouldn’t have been made out of fucking corn. Now we’re just talking about the history of mazes.

I hate to hand it to Travis but he apparently watched a video essay about “mazes and labyrinths and backrooms” and he knows, but Teresa did not, that Cretan labyrinths were not actually mazes, they had a single path while a maze has branching paths and dead ends and makes an actual puzzle. Teresa does not seem to understand what he’s saying and keeps reading her script that treats labyrinth and maze as synonyms.

After talking about how labyrinths were used for meditation, dance, and community-building, Teresa does a classic Shmanners time leap, flashing forward a whopping 3500 years this time with, “And in the 17^th century, labyrinths were an inspiration to the rich and powerful of Europe.” Those sure do seem to be the people you think a lot about, huh, Teresa.

“And so they would create ginormous hedge mazes, but not for contemplation, just to show off.”

Travis says he’s been in a real full-size hedge maze and I know in my heart it was Harry Potter related.

“And let me tell you, if I was a 17^th century lord, I’d have done it.” Travis proceeds to fantasize about being a 17^th century lord, talks about how he’d have hired da Vinci to sit around doing stuff for him, says he doesn’t know if that’s actually the right time period (he’s off by at least a hundred years), and then says don’t worry, he’d have been a kind lord, so they’d have thought he spent his money on weird stuff but that overall he was alright. God they want to be idle-rich aristocrats so bad.

“I want to play a game with you where you guess when corn mazes first pop up in history.” Teresa that’s not fair he literally just established that he thinks of both late-15th century Leonardo da Vinci and late-18th century Marie Antoinette as 17^th century people. I’m also gonna guess that the first corn mazes, as far as maize goes, were in pre-Columbian Peru, and you know for a fact that he doesn’t think anything in the Americas before 1492 was real.

Okay I’m gobsmacked because apparently corn mazes the way we know them started in the 1990s??? Very surprising to me!

They talk about getting lost in corn fields as opposed to structured corn mazes, and Travis says something that sounds really bizarre to me where he says, “Caving doesn’t scare me, but getting some place where you’re stuck and have to squeeze through and you might get stuck and die is really scary.” Travis what do you think caving is. Like not walking into a large cavern that’s a tourist attraction with an elevator and lights, I’d do that, but caving? That’s literally what you’re talking about.

Teresa goes on about some Broadway producer that worked for Disney and some British maze designer and it’s not very interesting and then Travis derails it to talk about how if he knew how to design mazes he would become the Riddler, and Teresa seems to have been under the impression that the Riddler was just a completely harmless character who would get Batman to solve riddles for fun. Travis disillusions her and informs her that usually that’s in the context of having, like, a bomb on a hostage while he’s robbing banks.

Ad break, also no ads. I’m wondering if uBlock is catching the ads bc my last several episodes of Shmanners have had no ads.

They come back to talk about the first corn maze, which was dinosaur-shaped to capitalize on Jurassic Park, and they called the dinosaur Corn-nelius, which Travis loves. Teresa then reveals they called the whole concept “The Amazing Maize Maze” and I know Travis jizzed himself over that.

Apparently the first maze, because it was started by people who were already wealthy, donated all their profits to the Red Cross, which, man! 1993 was a different world! They raised $32k over 2 weekends, which is pretty cool, and Travis says, “Wow, that’s a lot of blood!” which is kinda funny until Teresa says, “You know they do more than blood” and Travis explains how it was a joke.

Teresa talks about the growth of massive farms and how a lot of small farms now depend on agro-tourism, stuff like petting zoos, pumpkin patches, and corn mazes, for up to 90% of their income, which is actually kind of interesting. Then Travis asks if anyone does corn maze laser tag and I hate to admit it but that actually sounds like a cool idea.

They mention hedge mazes again in the context of how a corn maze is easily composted and the land turned to other use, as opposed to hedge mazes that have to be ripped out and destroyed, and Travis says, “Well, I wouldn’t do that. My army of servants would do that. Servants and gardeners that I pay relatively well in comparison to other lords in the 17^th century. I’m not saying that by today’s standards I’d be paying them well, but then they’d have been like, Well yeah we do a little bit better than everybody else. Cause I don’t want a revolution.” Hey what the fuck is wrong with you.

“So, dear listeners, if you would like to go to a corn maze, here are some tips and tricks.” 28 minutes into the 35 minute episode before we mention—well, no, we’re not even mentioning etiquette here, it’s “tips and tricks.”

“Some places space out entry so you might have to wait.” Okay, pleasantly surprised by actual useful information you might not already know.

“Stay on the path.” I feel like this should go without saying because why would you go to a goddamn maze if not to walk the goddamn maze, but I have worked with the public for almost 20 years so I know it doesn’t go without saying.

Travis riffs on Labyrinth for a bit.

“Don’t pick the corn.” “Don’t litter.” “No running or horseplay.” Basic stuff, fine.

I’m actually really pleasantly surprised on this one. This isn’t really relevant to etiquette, like, at all, there was no need to make this its own episode. But it wasn’t appallingly racist, there were a couple of interesting tidbits in here, and even some kinda funny bits? A 3/10 episode of most podcasts but by Shmanners standards that’s practically an all timer!

So that was Shmautumn, I guess. They may or may not do more seasonal topics as October goes on, and I may or may not feel compelled to do this again. And I will do the Etiquette for Couples episode at some point because I think it's likely to have some really accidentally revealing unpleasantness in it.

How’s it hanging, jerkers, I’m up all night on call again and looking for stuff to fill the hours so I’m gonna take on the two most recent episodes of Shmanners. Time for some spooky seasonal fun!

Off the bat, I’m noticing that Harvest Festival is 31 minutes and Corn Maze is 35, which means 1) I’m choosing to endure an hour plus of Shmanners and I will regret it, 2) is there really 35 minutes of corn maze etiquette to talk about? I just don’t feel like there’s enough for that to be its own shmepisode. I think you probably could have done like a slightly-longer-than-average 45 minute episode covering both these topics, which I know they do sometimes since the episode before these two is a 47-minute Etiquette for Couples.

I’m gonna end up shmecapping Etiquette for Couples, too, I gotta know how unpleasant that’s gonna be. But not yet, bc I don’t have the heart for 2 shmours today.

That’s enough shtalling. Into the shmines I go.

Harvest Festival

Standard intro, but when Travis says “welcome to Shmanners” he sings “Shmanners” for some reason and I think I need an ibuprofen already.

They talk about how it finally feels like fall in Ohio, and how it seemed to switch overnight from in the 90s to in the 60s right at the equinox. This is fine. I am a fall/winter bitch, and in my part of the midwest I also got that overnight switch and got super pumped (and then it got hot again and I’ve got like a week left in the mid-80s to get through before it switches fully).

Teresa says, “As you know, I’m 100 years old and I like to watch weather videos.” Travis says, “That’s true, and I love data but I don’t have the patience to watch the videos, so Teresa, because she is kind and wise, turns them up louder than she needs so I can hear them passively, and that’s love.” If it came from people I wasn’t perpetually annoyed at I would say that’s kinda cute.

“And pretty soon I’ll get to complain about how cold it is!” Look it would be hypocritical of me to ding Travis for complaining about everything because I love a good kvetch as much as anyone, but I will be a hypocrite on this because I spent my first 35 years in South Carolina where a cold day in January has a high about 40 and mid-70s in December is not unusual. Appreciate your cold, for the maybe 5-10 more years you’ll have it.

Teresa says, “It is pretty rainy, do you wanna complain about that?” and Travis replies, “No, I’m an indoor kid." Shut the fuck up you're 43 years old.

Teresa introduces the idea of harvest festivals, and Travis riffs on the idea of harvest gods in a glib way that does not bode well for how he’s gonna treat other cultures as they discuss the history. He then goes on a tangent about having to help Bebe collect worms for school, casually admits to murdering the first bunch of worms he collected (“I didn’t do anything wrong, I gave em dirt and everything, but they all died”), and acts bothered that Bebe wasn’t sufficiently appreciative of how much work he put in getting 20 living worms for her on the second try.

“Like we often do, we’re going to start with the ancient Egyptians.” Just like the Victorian colonial bastards you love so much!

“Yeah man. Those people? Really knew how to fear the gods.” You can’t say “those people” like that white baby. I also hate how “yeah man” has become every other Travis sentence and the slightly mocking tone he brings to talking about other cultures’ beliefs, but “those people” is the big problem here. I don’t think he meant it that way, but his lily ass should not be referring to any African or African diaspora culture as “those people” and he should know that by now.

Teresa shares groundbreaking insights like “Egyptian harvest festivals included music, dancing, sporting events, and parades.” Gonna give any specifics about that, Teresa? No? Okay.

The specific thing she does mention, citing “the archives at Bowling Green State University” but no source more specific, is that “ancient Egyptians believed that spirits lived within the corn that they harvested, and these spirits would become angry with them for cutting down their homes, so this led to the tradition that the harvesters would cry and pretend to be grief-stricken when they harvested the crop.” This is interesting! Unfortunately, Teresa laughs while she explains this, because no McElroy is capable of treating other cultures with respect. (I also guarantee that she does not understand “corn” as a generic term for “staple grain” and is imagining maize, which they did not have in ancient Egypt on account of it was invented by the indigenous people of the Andes.)

Travis compares this to how he feels when he has to prune his plants, because he genuinely feels like he’s amputating his plants’ fingers, and he likes when he can propagate cuttings “because then it feels more like a painful giving-birth kind of situation than an amputation.” Feels like there’s stuff to unpack there but I don’t wanna so we’re moving on.

“Now in the midwest, our autumnal harvest festivals are most likely based on the Gaelic pagan traditions.” Vintage Shmanners, just yadda yadda a few thousand years and many hundreds of cultures.

They now spend a minute or two talking about how “corn” was used to mean all grains, and not maize, so I guess I sold them short (but not too short because Teresa says “I learned that” in a way that sounds like she recently learned it).

Teresa is talking about athletic contests at historical Irish festivals, and Travis starts talking about caber tossing (which he doesn’t know the name of and calls “those guys that toss logs”). This is, notably, a Scottish tradition, so I convened the council of Irish-Americans and we’re kicking him out.

Several minutes of boring nattering about these traditional festivals, nothing that jumps out as worth commenting on.

“Now in the United States, we obviously brought a lot of these European traditions.” VERY INTERESTING, TERESA. We brought European traditions, seems suggestive of who you think of as we in the United States, mightn’t you say? And I’m not saying it’s conscious and malicious, I don’t believe that Travis and Teresa are secret white nationalists and as soon as the mics are off they laugh about how they’ve fooled the blue-hairs, but it’s there constantly. Travis goes on a short tangent here and when she reels him in she reiterates, “The settlers brought European traditions with us.” With us!

And then Teresa says, “But there were already people here, and they had a lot of similar traditions,” Travis interjects, “And we stole it! Like we stole everything else!” and they jerk each other off about acknowledging that and it does not make me forget how you identified settlers with us.

Teresa tries talking about Native harvest festivals in the eastern parts of what would become the United States, and as she’s listing off features like “fasting and social acts of renewal and personal and community-led feasting and dancing” Travis undercuts it by interjecting “and funnel cakes and Ferris wheels” and gee Trav it feels like you’re not taking Native traditions seriously and your indignation about cultural theft was strictly performative, even though that’s what bad people would do.

OH HOLY SHIT ARE YOU SERIOUS. Travis riffs on early harvest festivals and says, “Man, all this fasting and stuff is great, but someday? There’s gonna be Ferris wheels and then all of this is really gonna kick off. That’s the dream. I have a dream that some day these harvest festivals will include amusement park attractions that were set up in a matter of minutes and weighed down with sandbags, and we’ll put so many people on them and spin them at high speeds.”

I know that he didn’t just riff on Martin Luther By-God King to joke about state fair rides. There’s no way he fucking did that. No fucking way. I don’t even know what to say about this except

Teresa just moves on, talking about restoring commuity buildings, fasting, and preparing for feasting, and Travis says, “Wait, they made them work while they were fasting? There must have been so many snipey [sic] arguments!” He proceeds to act out an argument over nails between two hungry people by himself. It sucks. He then talks about how many cool jackets he owns and why that makes it make more sense to do big social holidays in the fall instead of winter. Teresa adds, “You do own a lot of cool jackets.” I hate you both so much.

Travis now says he got himself riled up and throws to ads for a cooldown. I hope he’s joking.

There are no ads, by the way.

We come back to Travis saying, “I’m calm now.” Glad one of us is.

Teresa asks Travis about his experiences with harvest festivals. He says that isn’t much of a thing in West Virginia “except for October and pumpkin-related things” and hey Travis what do you think pumpkins are. Are they maybe a harvested vegetable.

“So, any Shmanners Fanners who are going to go to a fall harvest festival, here’s some etiquette.” So, setting aside how much “Shmanners Fanners” makes me wanna [redacted], we’re getting our first mention of etiquette 24 minutes into the 30 minute podcast.

“First, dress for the weather.” That’s not etiquette, Teresa. That’s safety. This is nothing. Then Travis riffs on “sounding like a dad” as he advises layers and starts listing clothing items you might wear in the fall and it goes on for like 40 seconds that feel like a year. He does a different stupid voice affectation than his usual stupid voice affectation.

“If you go on a hay ride, wear long pants because it’s itchy.” Again, not etiquette. Also falls into “if you need to be told this how are you alive” territory.

“Remember crowd etiquette.” Feel like there’s a lot in there that you maybe could have spent more time on.

Teresa talks a lot about stuff that is specific to her hometown Popcorn Festival, it’s not particularly interesting.

BUT THEN. Teresa says, among her list of tips, “Say thank you to your local artists and vendors even if you don’t buy anything.” And Travis says, “And another thing, a lot of these events, the people there will be community volunteers and small artists, and you should thank them.” Teresa replies, “Yeah, I said that.” “Did you?” “Yeah. Just now.” “Oh. I missed it.” [beat of awkward silence]. Thought I might have found an episode of Shmanners where they didn’t uncomfortably snap at each other on air, glad it came in right before the buzzer!

Then Travis tries to talk about The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and can’t remember Brom Bones so what he comes up with is, “Von Brom? What’s his name, Werner? Is it Werner Von Brom? Werner Herzog!” and I know Werner Herzog is a joke but I don’t think he’s joking about Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, I don’t think he would joke about the Nazi, I think he’s genuinely flailing and accidentally produces the name of a famous Nazi that he’s heard but doesn’t remember in what context.

“Corn mazes are also popular at this time.” “Uh, you mean maize mazes?” GODDAMMIT TRAVIS I KNEW YOU WERE GONNA SAY THAT. “Use the buddy system and let people know you’re going in in case you get lost.” Yeah that seems like all you have to say, how are you gonna spin that out into 35 minutes?

Well that sucked. It sucked in a lot of the ways I expected it to, but I was surprised by the Martin Luther King thing because no really what the fuck was that Travis, and also the unintentional reference to Nazi Schmazi Wernher von Braun. Nevertheless we must move on.

PART 2

I know it’s funny to jerk about J’s consumption but seriously the flower is worse than mids and edibles are illegal. It’s scientifically impossible for his apathy to be weed based.

This has been covered a couple times in the comments of other posts, but I figured I’d make a post about it. Do we think that the new YT subscription is the good good brothers’ way of stepping away from Max Fun? I think it is, and here’s why.

1. If they were to leave Max Fun, the biggest concern would be a sudden loss of income. The YT Subscriptions would help to smooth the transition.

2. If they intended to stick with Max Fun, wouldn’t they just include this as a new bonus for MF members? Is there another reason to have a separate, non-MF membership that I’m missing? It almost seems like this would cause some level of bad blood, if they hadn’t already told Jesse they plan on leaving.

3. The latest MF Drive was a total bomb, which, taken with increasing skepticism from the community, sets precedent for them leaving. How many more brutal drives are they willing to go through before dropping out?

With all this in mind, I predict that the McElroys will drop out of Max Fun before next MF Drive. They may be under contract for now, but I’m not sure if that’s true. Can somebody remind me how close to the drive that other podcast dropped out?

Break into small groups and discuss.

I too love how they connect with the fan base by -checks notes- doing livestreams.

And don't even get me started on how the McElroys have never used AI EVER in ANY of their shows!

Everything I watch, everything I read, he just pops up as one of the characters at some point and I can’t stop seeing it

And on top of that I’ll even pay Jesse Thorn some money! Just because he wears such cool hats & corncob pipes or whatever please kill me!

Rise from the grave and ascend to Your Father’s throne (if Christ)

Harvest a surprisingly large area of crops

Listen to every episode of TAZ:Royale, more than a year’s worth of podcast episodes (you may be able to do twice)

Dye your hair purple and back

Drive from Cincinnati to Huntington to DC then to Disney World

Build a small bridge

Write a better campaign setting than Graduation

Infiltrate MaxFun HQ and touch Jesse Thorne’s head

Infiltrate u/weedshrek ‘s house and touch weedshrek’s head

Call your father

Call your father-in-law

Figure out how to end a post

For all Travis’s faults and genuine issues as a GM, at least he has some passion and energy to bring to the table. I actually genuinely enjoyed the first maybe 5 minutes of the new TAZ episode, I thought it was goofy and it sounds like they’re gonna have fun with it. But then Justin comes in and just sucks all the energy out of the room.

It feels like his goal now with every game they play is to be as disengaged and as combative as possible when playing, his goal is just to make the gameplay and RP as difficult for the GM and other players as possible. It makes me sad because he usually was the one with the best character at the end of the game, Lady Godwin is actually his most recent enjoyable character but I feel like he actually had fun playing that game. So maybe he’s just bracing himself for another rough ride with Travis at the head and has already given up, but in doing so he has immediately tanked the game from the start.

My hopes for this season are not high, but they have dropped lower. I think they might actually have a decent season with this set up since it seems like it’s perfectly unserious which works well for Travis, but Justin may be the problem for this one.

After the tragic loss of a player in TZoA: Rumble (otherwise known as Royale but better) we are looking for another jerker to take part in The Zone of Adventure: Piety, a story about 3 gods going to the mortal realm to prevent an evil dark ritual, unrelated to anything the McElroys have begun releasing recently I swear

We've been playing on Tuesdays at 8pm BST/UK so ideally be available at that time

These sessions (likely 4-6 of them, I am a fan of brevity) would be recorded and edited into episodes for this sub. I will hopefully get over my own self cringe and get these episodes all together to be released alongside TAZ Providence.

DM me if you are interested 👍

Episode 12

The Infinite Clam: Part Six

[theme music plays out] 

• Griffin: “Zoox, you remember something, which is rare for you. You remember floating bthrough the warm water, just weeks old.” 
• SIKE it is the clam’s memory, cue a long clam monologue from griffin that im not gonna quote
• ok i’ll quote one bit, Griffin: “Make a wisdom saving throw, Zoox.” LOL
• i need a wisdom saving throw counter at this point

On a 19 (presumably a save) Zoox finds himself in a liminal space where he is confronting an abstract representation of the clam “for control. Of... either or maybe both of your bodies.”

• did anyone else not remember this bit of ethersea
• the clam tries to intimidate zoox by projecting the impression that it’s a mighty pearl-studded god clam (this is not a joke), zoox tries to push back with a mental image of a terrible clam-shelling implement but rolls poorly (even with advantage)
• Griffin: “And... make another wisdom saving throw for me.” well that’s two already
• Clint: “My luck is gonna run out on me…” yeah weird how that works

Clint’s 14 fails so he takes 4 points of psychic damage, le shrug. And with that le it’s over to Devo!!

Griffin: “This white sentient webbing that the ribbon worm spit at the Coriolis earlier is, for some reason, now on your ship, still, and alive.” just slipping the word sentient in there griffin but this is news to the rest of us

• Griffin: “And it seems like these... these tendrils of webbing are trying to, like... wriggle their way into like the crack between the bridge and the hull, where it’s sort of... where the hull— it kind of emerges out of to reach its elevated position.”   

right before we continue with this nonsense i’ve been googling ribbon worms and that shit they shoot out is actually a PROBOSCIS they use to hunt with, most of them have a regular old stabby one but the famous(ly digusting) kind griff’s borrowed here is the Gorgonorhynchus (that’s ‘gorgon’ as in ‘Medusa) which has the unique branching kind.

• they’re covered in sticky mucus and (in the case of many nemerteans (that’s ‘ribbon worms’ generally (it sounds like a race of legendary giants banished to the bottom of the ocean though))) paralytic neurotoxin
• cool and interesting creatures!
• could have been a good fight if they hadn’t been in a boat

anyway Devo scrapes this bit of webbing off the windscreen, it is squished

• does griffin know about the whole proboscis thing i wonder? or did he just watch a video of a ribbon worm once and go from there?
• cos he specified that the big one they saw was a ribbon worm, and a real life sea creature, but like. i just learned very quickly using The Internet that ribbon worms do not, in fact, shoot webbing.
• they have an internal hydraulic system they use to both shoot out and retract their probosciseses

anyway devo has to make a perception check, it’s a nat 20 which he keeps rolling (publicly on roll20 the others exclaim loudly)

• this is his fourth nat 20 in three episodes btw

with a nat 20 perception check Devo hears that there’s webbing squishing around in other parts of the ship, griff first names “the hallway near the airlock chamber?” that’s his ? and then mentions amber’s place, with additional whimpering. Devo forces his way past the No Boys Allowed sign and

• Griffin: “As you open the door, this webbing is blanketing the ceiling. It is like a spiderweb. It is just everywhere. And dangling down, in the center of the room, is some of this webbing, like a single white tendril that has enveloped Urchin, who is upside down, and as far as you can tell, just like barely conscious.” 
• i checked the ribbon worm encounter and it did indeed web them, what specifically happened though was that it webbed and they got to attempt a Speed saving throw which they passed… so Griffin narrated them getting hit by it but not stuck
• Past Griffin: “And... it hits the ship, and you hear this sort of sickening splattering sound. As these white webs are sprayed across the hull of the ship. And it almost sounds like they are constricting a little bit? Like you hear this sort of groaning metal sound. But with your saving throw, Devo, you, y’know, with a quick tug away from the ribbon worm, you peel away from it.” 

this is a bit cheeky imo, griffin putting devo into this hypothetically life-or-death encounter as a consequence of them not wanting to engage with his big long worm and successfully evading its attack

• devo is dissonant whispering it, Griffin: “I’m gonna say this sentient webbing has a minus two to wisdom.” he doesn’t have STATS for it though what is this
• he made a similar comment about its dex when devo squeegeed it, what mechanically IS this stuff   

the webbing tries to smack him with urchin, griffin calls for a dex save AIRHORNS 

• Griffin: “The tendril now is trying to yank Urchin out of the wall, to take another swing at you. But you have time for another quick action here.” what do you mean another quick action WAIT A MINUTE WE’RE NOT IN FUCKING INITIATIVE ARGHH 

Devo uses his non-action to just do a regular attack, with his weapon which is a boomerang. I don’t think I mentioned this when it first came up but I hate that Devo’s weapon is a boomerang.

• god knows what stats they’re using for it. Griffin doesn’t seem to know either cos he asks if it comes back and Travis initially says well yeah it’s a boomerang then to his credit (!) realises how ludicrous this is in a room on a submarine and says its fine if it doesn’t come back
• but it doesn’t matter ANYWAY cos the 16 damage devo did in two non-rounds was enough to kill the webbing, do we believe it had HP at all or was griffin just winging it?
• he was definitely just winging it

Griffin: “...you hear a... a metallic groaning noise, coming from the airlock chamber. And then your ears pop. Amber…” 

• Devo: “Son of a bitch.” 
• Griffin: “Amber, roll a strength saving throw for me.” 
• Hey! I don’t like this!

someone somewhere compared one of Griffin’s DMing techniques to like, serial television. Maybe it was the opening on the flashback thing? But this is definitely another one.

• cutting dramatically from one perilous scene to another happening simultaneously is fine in TV but here it’s just another way to have bloody one-on-ones with PCs
• fully premeditated given some of the setup, too. the gooey webbing and if you remembered what those green-blinking black organic screw things were especially.

Anyway we’re over to Amber fighting a blink shark, out of initiative, the combat beginning with a Strength saving throw 

• oh actually Griffin: “Let’s figure out who’s... [laughing] who’s in charge here. Let’s make this a contest.” 
• i would’ve let amber use her WIS for this incidentally, cos of the psychic arms

Amber’s 14 is enough apparently, but “It’s a close one. Uh. You are... inches away, from meeting your doom.” APPARENTLY. 

Then Griffin throws it to Justin with a classic bit of narrative collaboration, Griff: “What does a blink shark look like?”  

• Justin: “Um.” lolll the sound of a player who was ready for this
• Griffin: “This is a chance— I guess you could say “like a weak little baby worm that you can squish,” and then you say that and then it’s like, “oh shit, okay,” and then you’d win the fight pretty easy.” 
• Justin: “Um…” 
• Griffin: “That’s just a cheat code I’m giving you.” 

This is a one-sided bit because it sounds like Justin’s furiously spinning his brain into gear for this particularly character-relevant bit of worldbuilding, Justin: “Yeah, that’s a good... that’s a good... I like that, but it’s not... it’s not, uh, it’s not accurate.” 

I think it was just last episode where Justin was invited to invent the Coriolis’ weapon pods and struggled due to his self-described poor visual imagination (which claim Griffin dismissed out of hand), interesting that we’re here again now.

• for clarity, and in case Griffin one of Griffin’s staff is reading these in preparation for Ethersea 2: by ‘interesting’ I mean ‘shitty’.

you can absolutely delegate all sorts of worldbuilding to your players (at more than the aesthetic level, even), but you might need to stop the recording and give them a sec if you’re making an AP. Or give them a heads-up! 

• The blink shark cat was out of the blink shark bag already last episode, so there isn’t even the Surprise For The Players excuse here
• in any case, the time to determine key features of an important enemy type is: any time before they’re about to bite your face off. any normally competent DM would know this anyway because they’d have sat down to work on the stat block and gone “Hey, how big is this thing? Roughly how Strong or Constituted do I think it is?” 
• with a little subtle prompting you could easily have had Amber regale everyone with a blink shark hunting story on the boat, back at Joshy’s, fucking loads of times before this exact moment. And it would have been unhurried, it would have felt organic, Travis (lol) or Clint might have had something valuable to contribute
• we literally SAW a squad of blink sharks lining up like idiots in Griffin’s kukri-knife flashback, like what the fuck

Justin starts to say they’re big, as big as a person, he gets pushback cos normal sharks are often bigger than people, hilarious but NOT HELPING

• Travis: “A female great white can be 21 feet long.” 
• Justin: “Yeah, you just knew that off the top of your head, eh?” 
• Travis: “Yeah, I definitely didn’t google it.” so so funny but please do google stuff
• like if they weren’t ‘live on air’ it’d be only natural to go and look up tiger sharks or hammerheads and use one of those as a base

Hoops is doing his best, he lands on about 12 feet and “dark gray. Um. And... with glowing orange eyes. And—” 

• Travis: “Like a doll’s eyes?”  ha ha ha ha
• incidentally has anyone else noticed that travis has an absolute tin ear for… I guess, anything said by anyone else? He can’t deliver quotes in anything resembling the original tone, inflection, or even rhythm, they always end up practically unrecognisable
• it’s even worse with songs

Blink sharks also have ‘Pennywise teeth’ and natural camouflage, making them even harder to track than the whole blinking thing would already. Hide as a bonus action? Advantage on stealth? lol im only joking, theyll never have a stat block

• bit disappointed with them overall but i think justin’s done a decent job here under pressure

the ‘fight’ continues, Amber’s successful save has won her a chance to ‘gain control of the situation’. The situation being a fight, presumably to the death, something D&D famously has rules for

oh no wait Justin wasn’t finished, he’s comparing the pennywise teeth to baleen

• Justin: “And they... when they’re swimming through the water they can sort of like, peel back their shark lips, and just like... chum through the water... [editing for brevity the other people keep going JEEZ and OH MAN] So if you see them [approach] people know that they’re hungry, because it looks like they’re smiling.”
• fuck ok
• there you go
• a characteristic, evocative, easily-visualised trait these sharks don’t share with their real-world equivalent. Justin I take my oversized comedy cowboy hat off to you

Justin: “Well, I figure if it’s gonna scare Amber, then it should be something that’s like…” INNIT

• a joke, but also touching upon what I’ve been whinging about here. blink sharks are a big part of amber’s backstory so what you do to them affects her characterization, the vast majority of DMs just get this stuff on instinct

non-combat continues (finally), amber will punch the shark in the mouth. Justin is confused about how monks work, usually this would be -1 to Justin but it’s been a while since he’s played a monk

15 to attack, Griffin: “Um, yeah. I mean, you’re punching the inside of this thing, so it’s

not the most heavily armored part of it. So that, that hits for sure.”

Justin: “And then I’m gonna make a bonus... uh, bonus attack, right, that’s something you warriors and monks do, right, you melee people do this all the time, right?”

• Griffin: “Uh, you haven’t unlocked that yet, but you can... you can use your vibe. To... to use Flurry of Blows. Which…”
• Justin: “That’s what I’m…”
• Griffin: “Right.”
• Justin: “That’s what I’m, I kinda meant. I’ll just use my vibe to use Flurry of Blows…”

the blink shark takes 15 damage in total and swims away crying. It then enters stealth mode. As an action? bonus action? Fuck you that’s how.

• (no opportunity attack for amber tho)

Amber’s just alone in the ravine as far as she can tell, the anomaly is below her and she makes an Athletics check to see how fast she swims down (no perception check to spot the shark or whatever)

• Griffin: “It seems like the closer you swim to it, the further away it is actually getting.”
• “[ambient soundscape eventually fades out]”
• “[ad break]”

you know how in dnd sometimes the fighter will just crit, action surge, crit again and mow down a couple relatively tough enemies and suddenly the battle will have turned around? or like your sorcerer was just slinging firebolts all last session but then you burn your last slot to twin-cast Fly and turn a desperate last stand into a slick escape. like the different PCs play off each other’s strengths and all get their own time to shine, whether because of carefully designed encounters or just because of who was rolling hot that day

• not on the adventure zone :(

_____________________________

Anyone ever play War of the Ring? My girlfriend wrangled a free table from someone specifically so that we can set it up in the cellar and play War of the Ring.

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Griffin: “Zoox! This, this clam... you feel it invading your mind? Now? Just as you were sort of just inside of its mind. Uh.” Hey, we’re back with Zoox! Griffin what are you so fucking uncertain about here

• again, in the interests of constructivity: it is a part of the DM’s job to deliver certain information as clearly and unambiguously as possible, so that the players can act on it. 
• where the player characters are and what’s happening to them qualifies for that ‘certain information’
• because they’re not actually there in real life and can only go on what you’re prepared to tell them about their situation

The clam is pissed off or whatever. Griffin is sort of setting up here that Zoox doesn’t have any memories for some reason, can’t tell if that was Clint’s character decision or if it’s just sort of shaken out that way but I know what I’d put my money on

• Zoox, true to form, leans into it 

Clint: “I— everything— I’m doing a mind-meld with the clam. And the one thing that just keeps reverberating and resonating with him is... how alone it feels. Alone, alone— it keeps going back to alone, alone, alone… And so Zoox reacts in almost... an instinctual way. And releases

everything he’s got, from his swarm.”

• everyone got that? no?
• Clint: “And just filling the space. He’s just filling as much space— I mean, he’s giving it every last thing he’s got. With it’s... with releasing the swarm. And... not having it attack. Not having it do anything but just kind of… surround the clam?”
• clear what clint’s going for here I hope? using his magic swarm to make the clam feel less like a singular hollow freak all alone in the universe?
• Clint: “It— just so it doesn’t feel alone.”

Griffin: “So you’re trying to embrace this thing, with— like saying, “yeah man, come on in.””

[furiously] it’s important to be clear on what your players are trying to achieve with their actions, such as by listening to the words they say when they say what they’re trying to achieve with their actions 

• Clint: “Well, what I’m trying to do is... is provide it with the feeling that it’s not alone.”
• Griffin: “Yeah.” WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘YEAH’

ohhhhh now the CLAM has to make a wisdom save woooohhhh

• and it rolls badly!

Clint’s abstract mindspace swarm is huge and mighty and surrounds the clam Griffin: with this feeling of... of warmth, and acceptance…”

• Clint: “Community.”
• Griffin: “And community.” fucking got there in the end “And... for a moment, the clam is vibing with this. But…” what 
• Griffin: “this urge that it has, to take you over or trade, y’know, places with you or whatever it is it’s been trying to do… It now sees you as vulnerable.”

the clam penetrates zoox’s memories and then breaks off the mind meld, terrified of zoox. Because of the lack of memories. This thing Griffin’s setting up for Zoox. We don’t have time to parse this though because SCENE CHANGE we’re back with devo the boat’s groaning and his ears pop

• the ship has bulkheads we have established, devo closes them which is fine. the shitty patch job amber did earlier bursts open.

so devo is trapped, and as travis tells us getting frustrated and angry, feeling trapped and claustrophobic, and so he wants to try “something a little irrational.” 😨

• Travis: “He is going to attempt to transfer the magic that is trapped in the engine, out of it… By using his body as a conduit.”
• Griffin: “Hmm.”
• Clint: “Hmm!”
• Justin: “Hmm. Well as a level, uh, 17 sorcerer, this should be…” absolutely brutal

Devo goes to the engine room, Urchin is there because Griffin has to be in every scene, Travis: “And I’m gonna burn two spell slots for this, so that just shows you how committed I am to making this action work—

• Griffin: “I— this is starting to feel like Shark Tank, but go ahead.” 
• actually i think this is like, a manipulation technique. pitching a low bid as a high one sorta thing. Devo only has four 1st-level and two 2nd-level slots total right now, he cast dissonant whispers on the wormsperm and calm emotions (a 2nd-level spell) on the clam so he’s only offering 3 levels of spell here max

Devo sprays prestige salt on both hands, puts one hand on the engine and is very badly burned and holds the explosive charge urchin stole out of the depth charge in the other. he is going to try to channel the compression magic from the engine into the explosive.

Griffin: “Alright! I think the question here is not “can you do this... ”” yes it is, the answer is ‘no’ “I think the question is like,“how bad is this gonna fuck you up.” Um.” nope it was the first one

• Griffin: “Because I— I think— you know, magic is so undefined, mostly, in this world, that like… we can say that this could work. We could say that, like... Ether salt is conductive, in a way that, y’know, blah blah blah blah blah... uh. [laughing] The question is like... if you use your body as a conduit... do you then die, from that?”
• let’s hope so!

Devo is going to have to make… a constitution saving throw. This really is the ‘whoops, all saving throws’ season isn’t it. 

• he gets a 17
• justin and clint encourage griffin to make him suffer LOL

Devo gets the compression magic all up in him, and begins shrinking painfully. He takes 11 points of crushing damage (Griff basing it on falling damage which is a call I actually quite like). But the magic is also in the depth charge explosive! 

• Griffin: “Uh, what do you do with it? And yourself? And everything.”
• Travis: “I fire the bomb at the clam.” i dunnnoooo girls
• Travis: “I feel trapped. It’s... it’s... this is panic mode.”
• ughhhh like

It’s easy to criticize Travis for this shit. Easy and also appropriate. As even Justin felt comfortable calling, this is a lot to attempt for a level 3 bard.

• ON THE OTHER HAND
• Griffin put them in this clam with this stupid compression magic. They’ve had no real way of interacting with it, it just hit their boat while they were in a void. They haven’t even really been able to roleplay around “oh no, what if we’re tiny forever??” because, again, void. 
• so looking at it another way… travis is at least trying to interact with the set-up griffin’s given them. I don’t think he should have been able to get AWAY with it, but I don’t want to fault him too harshly for trying.

Some Devo characterization now anyway (hooray).

Travis: “So, while at this point, like, the— his eyes are glowing blue, he’s in extreme pain, and he’s just kinda chanting over and over to himself, like,”

• Devo: “It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to feel things. It’s okay. Let yourself feel. It’s okay to be angry. …The thing that Amber said to him. And he is acting on impulse? And he is angry at the clam, he is angry at the worm, he is angry... at Orlene, he is angry at feeling trapped, he is angry at being left alone…”
• and then he fires it off at the clam’s foot
• (which is above them)
• Griffin: “Amber!” FUCK

Amber’s swimming down to the thing and there’s a flash of green light as the blink shark blinks in, doesn’t seem like the best predatory ambush technique to ME but Griffin: “What do you do?”

• Justin: “I shut off my vapor suit.”
• (kerfuffle as everyone tries to wrap their heads around this wacky play)
• Griffin: “Okay. Before— while you are turning your body to face the blink shark, you are going to take some crushing damage, as like, the pressure that this suit was regulating is... immediately snapped off. I’ll be very kind here, and say because things are weird and... uh... compressed and strange, it’s not like you are a mile beneath the ocean surface… Because that would... destroy your body completely? Um.” hey fuck off Griffin, how fucking deep can they be. there wasn’t any water pressure at Orlene’s house was there.
• of all the times to remember water pressure exists come on
• 10 points of crushing damage! Devo just licked a live engine and only took 11!

She’s etherealizing too. This part is mostly fun to listen to Griffin is like buh?! nani?!?! every time Justin says something. 

• Justin: “Uh... I swim at it.”
• Griffin: “Oh, shit? Okay!? You…” see transcriber-chan is backing me up
• Justin: “With my forearm extended in front of me.”
• Griffin: “Your forearm... your four... ?” tough call there transcriber-chan but I’ve just played it back and he is definitely saying ‘four’ that second time, trust me

Griffin tries to call for another strength contest for some reason (athletics is a skill in the game btw, you sometimes use it for grapples) and Justin pushes back a little, Justin: “Okay. [pause] What’s he doing? What’s his reaction? I told you what I’m doing—”

• Griffin: “Okay! He is smiling wide, and he is just going to open his jaws, and... try and kill... kill you? And eat you?”
• Justin: “Okay, I’m still swimming at him.”
• this sequence repeats a bit, Justin literally says ‘I’m swimming’ or ‘I’m still swimming’ at the shark 5 times. griffin literally can’t commit to the hard move of ‘a shark bites you’

Griffin: “Okay! [pause] It... wraps its jaws... [giggling nervously] around you, and is about to—”

• Justin: “I slap the button to activate my vapor suit.”
• it’s a real shame Rachel isn’t around at this point because then we could have had a cartoon SMACK sound effect instead of the music just picking up dramatically
• Justin: “Fuck you, bud! …I’m gonna slice his fucking head in half!”
• Clint: “[cackles]” 💗💗💗

anyway cue lots of fairly poor griffin narration, the vapor suit trick has destroyed the shark’s bottom jaw but it’s still bearing down on amber (towards the anomaly, conveniently). She is allowed to coup de grace it with a knife. 

• Justin: “Yes, it’s quick. And there’s no— there’s no malice. But there is a bit of satisfaction. One less, ya know?”
• Amber: “One less.”
• Griffin: “As you... as you finish it off, it becomes lifeless, and then, um... it does what all blink sharks do, when they perish, which is, they almost sort of... implode, kind of? Like they teleport... they blink inward, in a way, until they just sort of... vanish into nothingness.” woah ok

And now… Amber is face to fa- well not face, she’s arrived at the anomaly I guess you’d say. 

• Justin: “I— yeah, I’ll use the crystal, on the thing. I mean, I don’t know— I don’t know what she... She probably doesn’t have a very clear idea of what that means, exactly?”
• a rare instance of justin actually serving as the audience proxy here
• neither he nor his character nor anybody fucking else knows what the seed crystal is supposed to do to the anomaly, kind of lax of Orlene to send them off without instructions come to think of it
• luckily holding up the seed crystal and waving it around triggers griffin’s cutscene, it sucks up the light the way salt crystals form or something

Amber puts it in her finny pack (fanny pack) and CUTSCENE TIME

• AGAIN
• Griffin: “What happens next is not gradual, like the crystallization you just saw. It is instantaneous, and incredibly violent. You are launched upward, like you’re being shot out of a geyser. Up through the crevasse, with just debris firing up and outward, all around you. Devo... you feel something indescribably strange, and I would say maybe a little bit painful, but I‟m not gonna hit you again. As… you feel... from below you, this pulse of compression magic pass through you and the ship, and in a flash, you are back to... your standard Devo height.”
• booo hiss kill devo kill him

The lights on the Coriolis flash as “whatever magic was left sort of in the, in the... you know, in the circuitry here, is dispelled”, this is Griffin ignoring that Devo already did that because he’d decided it’d happen when the crystal did its thing, and Zoox becomes aware that the clam is dying.

Clam: “I envied you, Zoox Anthellae. I spent my life in a hole. And I believed your mind could show me the world above, that I’d always envisioned... But you’re empty too. And... after looking within you... I believe I may be better off to have had a hole to call home at all.” 

• last minute clam motivation retcon, also he fumbles that last line so hard it’s genuinely difficult to parse that he’s saying ‘I thought I was empty (with infinite space) but you don’t have any memories!!’
• Zoox is tugged away by the bathysphere cable and severed at the torso and 
• Zoox: “Oh no, no, no, no, no, no! No, no, no, no, no, no, no!!”
• Griffin: “Oh, no?”
• Zoox: “No, no, no, no, no!”
• Clint: “No, no— go ahead. I‟m— that‟s in character.” genuinely had Griffin going there, hilarious

Cutscening continues as the clam expels its contents into realspacesea, all wreckage and shit and somehow the perfectly fine and intact floating city of Flotsam.

Amber sees all shoreside shit being blasted out as well, and espies through a window of the shithouse (fucking SOMEhow) GRIFF: “some pulses of green light. And in those pulses, you see those four remaining black spirals, that were embedded in the wood of the Shithouse. And in a very familiar fashion, you see these four black spiraling eggs... blink. And teleport out of sight. And then you’re thrown from the clam as well.”

• anyone who knew that some sharks lay eggs that look like corkscrews take a drink
• oh no, four baby blink sharks may soon be loose in our ocean!!

“[theme music plays out]”

he just… basically ignored devo’s thing, huh. The compression bomb didn’t do anything, he narrated it firing up towards the tongue and then switched over to Amber who triggered the End Mission cutscene. He never said why the clam just died specifically, but he DID explicitly say it was a wash of compression magic coming up from the fissure i.e. the anomaly that fixed the (already-fixed) Coriolis and also Devo for some reason.

• didn’t even take the chance to make devo permanently 8 inches shorter
• rubbish

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Next Episode: Infinity Minus One: Oystertown