Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #843: Tempest Story, Part 1
Episode Date: June 18, 2021This podcast is part one of a two-part series where I sit down with Michael Ryan to talk about creating the story for Tempest and integrating it with the set. ...
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I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means.
It's time for another Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition.
Okay, so I've been meeting and talking with people about sets of Magic's Past.
So today I have Michael Ryan. We're going to talk about making the story for the set Tempest.
Hey, Michael.
Good morning.
Okay, so a lot of times when we're talking about sets, when I'm talking about sets with people, we're talking about the mechanics.
But this one's a little different.
Today, you and I were responsible for at least the beginning of the Weatherlight story, and we were responsible.
I'd like to not say responsible for.
I'd like to say get the credit for.
Get the credit for.
Get the credit for.
So Tempest, we did Tempest. So I want to sort of walk through what we had done and what the set was and how we,
because we had to sort of make some changes to adapt to the set.
So I want to sort of talk through that.
So first to start with, we had pitched a three-year story.
So let's talk a little bit about like where we walked into Tempest.
Where were we in the
larger story? So I'm sure that most people who have done any writing are familiar with the three-act
structure. I say anybody who's done any writing is familiar with the three-act structure, but if you
don't write, you may wonder what that is. Well, a three-act structure is you have three parts to a
play, generally speaking, and each part has a climactic moment. Something happens
at the end of each act that defines we've moved into the next act. At the end of the first act,
you've pretty much said, okay, this is the hero's goal. The hero now knows what he or she is trying
to accomplish. At the end of the second act, you have a sort of an all is lost moment where,
oh gosh, I can't believe all this thing has gone against us and all these complications happened in the second act.
And the turning point of the second act drives the hero toward the conclusion of success or failure.
So our original thought was that we would do nine segments, a three year, you know, one big expansion, two small expansions each year.
segments, a three-year, you know, one big expansion, two small expansions each year,
and that it would be this massive three-act structure, and within each of the three-act structures would be three-act structures for each of the three parts. So we had this massive board,
a white board, in one of the conference rooms that was filled with, well, here's a character,
and then we do this character, then we bring this character in, and then here's these 15 other characters we'll bring in,
because that's the way you and I think,
is in terms of dozens of characters all at the same time.
So Tempest was supposed to be the launch,
the first part of a three-act structure
that combined would be Act I of a bigger three-act structure.
Right, so in a lot of ways, if you think of like trilogies,
it's very common to have trilogies in movies and stuff.
And the idea is each movie,
or in our case,
each block is its own story.
It has a three-act structure,
neatly broken into three parts
because the block had three sets.
And then that,
each of those fit into a larger story
that was a three-act structure.
Now, the interesting thing is we pitched this as
nine sets,
but they were so excited
that Weatherlight,
the set before Tempest, were like, well, we gotta start
in Weatherlight, and we're like, but we're telling a three-act
story, so we did kind of the
prologue
in Weatherlight, sort of
setting up the story. Which just laid the foundation
for everything that was coming in Tempest.
It put Gerard in the story, our main hero, who's looking for his former captain, Sisay, who was kidnapped off the Weatherlight.
It was all designed to bring Gerard out of hiding from where he had sort of abandoned his heroic status and his long-term goals to sort of go about an ordinary life of a
pirate kind of guy, and they needed him back.
And the legacy, this collection of artifacts, was at the center of forcing him out and kidnapping
his friend was designed to make him basically come to the bad guys.
Right.
So real quick, just some background so we can explain what's going on in the story.
come to the bad guys.
Right.
So, real quick,
just some background so we can explain
what's going on in the story.
Gerard is born
and supposedly he's,
there's this thing
called the legacy
and that he and the legacy
play this vital role
and it will save the day
and he is actually
given away
to Siddhar Kondo,
a leader off in Jamora,
to raise because they want to hide him out
because the bad guys want to get him
and want to get the legacy.
And so his whole life,
he's supposed to be,
he has all this responsibility.
And at some point he just leaves and goes,
I'm not doing this.
I never asked for this.
And that's where the story starts
in the prologue is Gerard.
Gerard had previously been on the Weatherlight
and he had started trying to embrace it and and then things went horribly wrong, his,
one of his really good friends gets killed, um, Elod, not Elodomri, um, uh, the elf, uh,
I'm blanking on his name, Raphelos, Raphelos, Raphelos and, um, Mirri and him were all trained
under Multani, and were very good friends, so anyway, so the beginning of Tempest is the ship enters into Wrath.
Sisay's been kidnapped.
They learn that she's been kidnapped by Volrath in the world of Wrath,
and they have to go rescue her.
So there's still that connection there, right?
I just want to make sure that nobody misses that connection.
Yeah.
Volrath is a wrath.
Just to be sure. Wrath with an R, but it
sounds like wrath with
a W. You know who the
bad guys are, right? Yeah.
I want to be clear. Yeah, the funny thing is
the bad guy, his real name is
Vol, and so he's Vol of Wrath,
which is where Volrath, for those that care,
Volrath comes from. We have logic that Volrath comes from we had logic
behind all this
okay so the Tempest
the start of the story
is they arrive on
in Wrath
so all of Tempest
was going to take place
on Wrath
this new world
because we
magic for some reason
we spent all this time
and we rarely ever
left Dominaria
we're like
we have the whole multiverse
let's go somewhere
let's go places
let's go places
right the story starts with them going to Wrath and it ends on them Dominaria. We're like, we have the whole multiverse. Let's go somewhere. Let's go places. Let's go places.
The story starts with them going to Wrath, and it ends on them getting to
the Stronghold, which is where Sisay
is being held. And so we had to sort of
enter Wrath and make an interesting enough story
that it could end with them getting to the Stronghold.
So one of the first things that you
come up with, obviously, is that
if your good guys have a flying
ship that pretty much lets them
fly above all your villains you probably need to make sure that the bad guys can have a flying
ship too or something comparable and so they had a flying ship uh they had the predator the predator
is is volras sort of uh counterbalance to the weatherline and he sends it out. He sends it out
right away, because that's what you do.
You want to start with a big fight.
That's the hook, right? Right, so this was Act
1. So real quickly, a little story structure
thing. This is Act 1
in the...
The Tempest block is telling the story.
This is the first act. And in the first act,
what has to happen
really early in the story is your hero
gets their butt handed to them because you need to set up what's going on right like in order for
them to save the day and be triumphant in the end they kind of have to lose early on that's important
right right and so they get attacked they show up they don't know that anybody's waiting for them
but the one of the characters on board the weather light a a fellow named Crovax, has a link to a bad guy.
They have a history.
And because they have a link, sort of a link between planes that tells them where each other is, the bad guy's ship is able to find the good guy's ship really fast and promptly attacks them.
They didn't expect it.
Boom, they get attacked right away.
And that's the start of our story.
We wanted to start with a bang, right?
Like, the end of Weatherlight was,
and they leave Dominaria to go to Wrath.
And the beginning of the Tempest story
is they arrive in Wrath
and get attacked immediately.
Immediately.
And then you go for the next
bellix-logical thing.
You've seen this in everything you've ever read, anything you've ever seen.
In Lord of the Rings, they all get together, and then two of them go,
all right, well, we're leaving.
We're going this way.
We're going to go take care of it.
You split your heroes up.
You get Luke and Han and Leia on the Death Star.
You split them up.
You get your good guys in a really tight bind,
and then you screw them by taking them away from each other.
So as soon as they get attacked, people are falling off the ship.
The ship is wounded, and it's sinking,
and everybody goes scattered to the four winds.
Right.
So, for example, we're trying to set up the story.
So Volrath, the main bad guy, does not show up here.
He sends his main, I don't know what to call him,
but his right-hand man, a guy named Grevin Ilvec.
Oh, by the way,
so this set has six legendary creatures in it,
which by modern standards does not seem like a lot.
But all of these characters show up in the story.
So when they show up, I'll mention them.
Grevin is a card in the set.
One of the things that Michael and I talked a lot about
is with villains, usually
you have the main villain and you have a secondary
villain, and the kind of rule is
if your main villain is a brainy villain,
the sidekick is a muscly
villain, and if the main villain's
more muscly, your sidekick is brainy.
So, like, usually you have brains and brawns
between the two of them.
Volrath was more smart,
so that meant Grevin had to be
muscle, right? He had to be really
strong. Brute force, brute force.
And since that's his thing,
brute force, we
wanted him to fight Gerard right away.
We wanted, here's the second
bad guy, and we
want to have this big dramatic thing, so
not only do they attack the ship, but
Grevin just jumps on the ship right away and fights Gerard.
Like this happens right out of the bat.
And while Gerard's not a bad fighter, I mean, Grevin's really, really good, right?
So the other thing you want to remember, too, is in addition to just stomping on Gerard, they also want to get the legacy.
The legacy is all these parts of Gerard's future history to have power.
Right, they're artifacts that are on the ship.
And he's got them with him.
And the bad guys want them.
Volrath wants the legacy.
There's a long backstory to why he thinks he deserves it from when he was
Vool, but he thinks this belongs to me.
Graven, while you're there, get my stuff.
And so the mogs all swarm the ship and they're carrying pieces away.
And that includes Karn.
Karn is part of the legacy.
Right.
And so we said we wanted to pull our heroes apart, right?
We wanted to separate them.
So what happens is there's a big fight that's going on.
Meanwhile, the mogs,
which are the goblins that work for the bad guys,
they
go through the ship and get all the legacy pieces,
including Karn. And Karn,
by the way, won't fight back, because Karn's a pacifist.
That's the whole story of Karn.
But anyway, they take Karn,
and they take all the legacy, and they take it back
to their ship.
Tongarth, who's the first mate or whatever,
he's the minotaur.
He's a minotaur.
He's a minotaur.
He is not about to let this happen
without him doing something,
so he ends up jumping on the ship,
which will take...
So Karn and Tongarth end up going with the ship.
So that's part of the story.
And another big part of the story was,
how do we save our hero? hero like he's losing to Grevin
Grevin's a better fighter than him
things are looking bad
so what you want in the story
is some way to get your hero
like we want to save him, we don't want him to die
but we also want to make it harder
we're trying to, this is the beginning of the story
you want to throw
one of the things they say is
Act 1 is get your
protagonist up a tree.
Yep.
Act 2 is you throw
stones at him,
I believe is the,
and it gets worse
by the end of Act 2.
Right.
In Act 3,
you get him out of the tree,
so for those that don't know.
So anyway,
we came up with
this really cool idea.
What if there was
a second command
on the ship,
on the Predator,
to Grevin, and that guy, Vadi-El-Dal, who's also a card on the ship, on the Predator, to Grevin
and that guy, Vadi-il-Dal, who's also a card in the set, by the way.
And Vadi was named after, the codename for Tempest was Bogavadi,
which is like this mythic land of poison snakes in Indian mythology.
And anyway, we named him after the codename.
But Vadi-il-ldal gets this wonderful idea of maybe if I fire upon the ship,
I will dismantle the
ship and maybe kill
Grevin, and then I'll be in charge.
Because bad guys stab each other in the back, right?
So we also want to drop a hint.
From a story perspective, we want to drop a hint
that, well, if
Vadi Ildal is willing to stab
Grevin in the back, maybe Grevin will
eventually be willing to stab Volrath in the back.
And just as a side note, I want to note,
every single time that we
ever said Vadi Ildal
out loud while we were working on
this set, I kept thinking Vodio Do.
I would mispronounce that
name all the time and say, oh, we got this other guy,
Vodio Do. No, that's not it. Wait, wait, wait. I know
his name. He was a hard name for me
to live with. I just want to point that out.
Oh, another thing real quickly. Something we built into
the naming. So there are three
different tribes that we built into the world.
The Kor, the Vek, and the
Dahl.
Rat, by the way, is an artificial
plane. All these creatures were pulled in from
other places.
So the Kor, we later learned learned were from Zendikar.
The Vek and the Dahl we haven't met yet.
I don't know where the Vek and Dahl came from.
Anyway, the naming convention was
either you were in favor
of the tribes, that you were with them,
and then you were in either Vek
and core and Dahl,
or you had been kicked out of the tribe
and then you were ill.
So you were ill Vek, ill Dal, ill Kor.
So Grevin ill Vek was part of the Vek.
Y'all thought we just made this stuff up at random, didn't you?
No, there's logic.
We spent a lot of time on this.
So, for example, Grevin ill Vek once was part of the Vek clan
and got kicked out.
Vadi ill Dal was part of the Dal thing and got kicked out.
So what happens, basically, is Vati fires on the
ship and it knocks Gerard off
the ship. In fact,
one of the things that we did
by the way, if you want to go
online and Google type
Tempest Storyboard Magic, you will get
to an article. What we did is
we wrote an article in the Duelist that's now online
that shows the entire story we're talking
about card by card as it's pictured on the card.
We pictured the vast majority of the story on cards,
so you literally could put them in order and see them.
Yeah, yes.
And then on the site, it'll give you the story as it goes along.
It's not just the art.
It'll tell you, this is where you are in the story.
And you'd be surprised at what some of the characters look like.
You probably don't have a vision in your head of Vati Eldal,
but he's got really wild
hair, he's got sort of crazy eyes.
It's totally worth going and taking
a good long look at the story we constructed
here visually.
Another thing, by the way, so one of the things
that happened is, while
Michael and I were writing the story,
I was in charge, along with my team, of
making the set. And there were some mechanics that came about because they were just in the story. I was in charge, along with my team, of making the set.
And there were some mechanics that came about because they were just in the set.
The two big mechanics were Shadow and Buyback.
And then Slivers were a big part of the set, too.
We'll get to Slivers in a second.
But the reason I bring up Shadow is
this was an artificial plane.
And so the idea was creatures had been pulled from other places.
The core of the Vek and the Dahl
kind of made it there, but
there were the Thalicos, the
Douthi, and the Sultari, and they
didn't quite make it there. They were stuck
in between, and so
they were trapped in the...
They were the shadow creatures. They were trapped in the
shadow realm, and so they were kind of there
but not... So, part of
making the story was making sure we explained
what was going on mechanically in the set.
And then part of it was, I also made
sure that we... I made cards out of the story, like
all these characters we're talking about, we made sure we made
cards out of them. And
we wanted to show the story, so we made sure we found
places. We worked... Pete
Venters was the art director. Or not the art
director, the continuity director. And we worked
with Pete to make sure that, you know, all the things were assigned correctly so that you could see the story through the cards.
So we've pushed our hero off the ship.
He's plummeted down into the Skyshroud Forest down below.
We've got the crew in a crippled ship trying to find some place to land it and fix it.
We've got our Minotaur tongars on the bad guy's
ship hiding so nobody knows he's there we've got karn uh also taken away karn is a pacifist and so
he won't kill anybody and so he won't really defend himself because he doesn't want to accidentally
hurt anybody and so everybody is scattered uh across across the the terrain now so we start
now now we've separated them all.
The objective is to bring them all back together,
but with an advancement of the story.
How does bringing them back together
move the story forward?
It's also worth noting, just as an aside,
that Grevin, in the middle of the fight with Gerard,
slashed him, put a scar on his face
in the middle of the fight,
which is also a very classic sort of motif.
Mark and I had read dozens and dozens and dozens of stories to say, what do they all
seem to have in common?
What are the high points of each of those kinds of stories?
And one of them is that you mark your hero.
Your bad guy gives him a wound that says, I was here.
And Luke Skywalker loses his hand. your hero. Your bad guy gives him a wound that says, I was here and, you know,
Luke Skywalker loses his hand.
And in our case, our hero got a nasty scar on his face
to say he'd been attacked.
We should talk about Joseph Campbell
is a, I'm sure
he's an anthropologist.
He's someone who studies stories.
And he wrote a
very seminal book called The Power of Myth.
And the idea is that there are certain stories
that just humans tell again and again and again.
They're just very resonant.
And so we mapped this story to,
what's the official name of it?
The Return of the Reluctant Hero?
Yeah, I mean, there's a name for this archetype. I think it's like The Return of the Reluctant Hero? Yeah, I mean, there's a name for this archetype.
I think it's like The Return of the Reluctant Hero.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
The Else has a Hero of a Thousand Faces.
It was one of the main arcs.
Yeah.
So part of what we were doing was we very much were trying to tell a very classic story.
And so when Michael talks about, oh, he gets injured,
there's a lot of pieces we're trying to do to really make it feel very resonant.
And a lot of the point of the power of myth is
there are certain stories that are kind of baked
into the ethos of humanity.
And that when you sort of tell these stories,
they just resonate with people.
Because on some level, the story we're telling,
you've heard the story before.
You know what I'm saying?
Star Wars is based on the same story. The? Star Wars is based on the same story.
The story of Moses is based on
the same story.
King Arthur is based on the same story.
Lord of the Rings is based on the same story.
It's told a whole bunch of different ways
with a whole bunch of different dressings.
But in the end,
it's the same story.
Okay, so
we land, so Gerard falls out
thanks to some magic
and Selenia and a bunch of stuff.
He doesn't die.
And the ship is damaged.
And so we've created some problems now, right?
The ship is damaged.
Gerard, you know,
doesn't know how to get to...
How does he get to where he needs to go
to rescue Sisay, he and the crew?
And two of the crew are now taken away.
So now they have to rescue Sisay.
Now they've got to rescue Karn and Timegarth
as well as Sisay.
And so we added a lot of stuff.
The other big thing about Act 1 is
you need to sort of parallel Act 3,
meaning you have to figure out
where your story is going
and make sure you set all the things
that are important in Act 1.
So that brings us to meeting El Adomery
and the Elves of the Skyshroud Forest.
Which is where they all
sort of rendezvous. They
land the ship, two of the characters go off,
Hannah and Mirri go off to try to look for
Gerard, because they lost him. Everybody's looking for everybody.
And the Elves sort of become
the centralized location
where everybody finds each other again. And the El sort of become the the centralized location where everybody finds each other again
and the the elven lord the lord of leaves um their their leader is the one who brings them all into
his fort they all find each other again and i have to note because i've told this story so many times
mark and i were in charge of naming we We got to name stuff. All the characters.
But Elodomri was up for grabs.
We have this Elven Lord that gives Grants Forest Walk, I think it was, to all elves.
And my stepdad had just started playing.
And my mom was playing with him.
And my mom is not a gamer.
You all have somebody in your family
who says they'll play with you and you think i should have asked you know my my niece to play
with me this is awful well my mom was trying to be a good sport and so we named eladomri
after my stepdad and my mom uh they are dale and irma so if you read eladomri backwards
it says irma Dale.
It just goes the other direction.
So the original piece of art, if you've ever seen the piece of art, which is a beauty, is hanging on my mom's wall now.
Because when the set came out and Irma and Dale found out it was named after him, they just had to have it.
Yeah, it's by an artist named Ron Cherona.
It's a very nice piece.
Yeah, Ron was really funny.
He did a couple of other pieces. I think I picked up one of his other pieces later on. He's by an artist named Ron Cherona. It's a very nice piece. Yeah, Ron was really funny. He did a couple of other pieces.
I think I picked up one of his other pieces later on.
He's a great artist.
I picked up Reap.
I think I have Reap hanging on the wall.
So the elves bring everybody back together and explain.
Among them, there was an oracle who knew who Gerard was,
or thought she knew who Gerard was, at least, and said,
oh, you're the guy we've been
waiting for. You are this
prophesized guy
named the
Cor, is it Coriel Vekmark?
Cor Vekdahl.
The Cor Vekdahl. You're this prophesized hero,
and you're going to bring these tribes together,
the Veks and the
Cors and the Dals.
And Gerard was like, yeah, okay.
I still need to find Sisay and Stronghold.
And you know what?
I don't have time for this prophecy stuff.
So I got to get on with business.
So can we talk real quickly?
Prophecies are an important part of stories.
Like once again, we're playing in space.
The idea of Gerard being destined for something,
and he already had a different destiny to deal with
because he was supposed to be
the leader of a legacy and stuff.
It's kind of funny that there's
a different thing that they tie him to.
The Korvec doll was supposed to
bring all three tribes together,
and the Oracle Invec
is a card on the set. The reason it's
not legendary is when one Oracle Invec dies, another one the set. The reason it's not legendary is
when one Oracle Invec dies,
another one takes their place.
So it's a role rather than a specific person.
Although when we talk about Oracle Invec,
it is one person right now.
And she believes that he's the Corvik Dahl.
And in our...
The story changed a little bit
from what we had originally pitched.
So our third act of this story was different than the third act as it actually ended up.
We stopped being involved in the story really before the third set of Exodus in this case.
So in our version of the story, the elves were going to save the day.
They were going to defeat and overrun.
So he was the Corvac Dahl in our version of the story.
He kind of doesn't, he's not really
in the story that it ended up being.
We wanted the prophecy
to be right. That's why we told you there was
a prophecy. And the trick is for
Gerard to actually own it.
Right? Usually
in Act 1 when you say there's a prophecy, in Act 3
the prophecy comes true. That's usually Act 3.
You know that old
Oscar Wilde thing where if there's a gun in the first act it needs to's usually in three. You know that old Oscar Wilde thing
where if there's a gun
in the first act
it needs to go off
in the third act.
We knew that
and so we put a prophecy
in act one
and we know
we've got to pay it off.
We had a plan.
Yeah, we have a lot
of Chekhov's guns
in the story
where we show you something
and then it comes back
to be paid off later on.
Later on.
In fact, so part of this is, by the way, when Gerard first shows up, he has to fight the merfolk.
We're going to show you the merfolk were there.
And then the elves are kind of the good guys here that are the rebels of the story, if you will, right?
Wrath is run by Bo Wrath.
He's an evil guy.
He has all the evil forces.
We need somebody who's fighting against him.
The elves were the rebels in our case.
And so they come up
with a plan. They all meet.
And the plan is that
Gerard...
They inform Gerard that there's a back way
into the castle. Now it's really
dangerous. You have to go through the
Furnace of Wrath and the Death Pits
of Wrath. And it Pit's of Wrath and
it's very dangerous, but it's a back way
in. And the idea is that
they were going to sneak in the back way while
all the elves and other people
charge and attack on the front.
That's the master plan.
I want to note for your listeners
who will
understand the logic of this.
When Mark and I were in the meeting
and there was a discussion of,
oh, and this is the back way.
There's the back door.
You know, there's always a back door, right?
I distinctly remember Mark saying,
let's tell everybody that there's these murder pits
and these death locations and these horrifying hot places
and that's the way to sneak into the back.
And then let's have Gerard say, no, we're not going to do that.
We're going to go right through the front door and never go back to it,
just like sidestep it.
I know he was joking, but I remember at the time thinking,
that could be fun because people expect it.
Oh, we're going to tell you the secret way in.
Yeah, I don't want to do it.
No, really, it's the secret way in.
No, I don't want to do it.
We're going to do it a different way.
We're going to do it the most basic way possible
as opposed to the sneaky way
that's in every single story you've ever heard.
Right, so the key to the sneaky way
is the sneaky way has to be hard, right?
It just can't be easy.
So we, as we'll get to,
we set up a couple of really hard things to deal with,
which we'll get to.
Okay, so there's one other piece that's going on
here, we're talking about
the third act, is
okay, this is only part one of a three-part
story, right? So,
the idea was each year would take place on a
different plane, that's how magic did its
blocks. And so, Wrath was
just about this year, this year took place on Wrath.
Act two was going to take place on
Arcadia, act three in our original story
was going to go back to Dominaria.
It got changed a little bit.
So how do we get off Wrath, right?
And that one of the things that we did was
the ship originally had the ability
to travel between planes,
but when it gets attacked by the Predator,
it breaks and it can't do that anymore.
And part of this is,
in good storytelling, you want to throw
a lot of problems at your
characters, so they have multiple problems
to solve. So not only do they have to
go rescue Sisay and Tongarth
and Karn,
oh, they also have to rescue one more person.
So Stark of Wrath, who is
another card in the set, by the way,
Stark is this shady character who used to work for Volrath, but Volrath kidnapped his daughter, Takara.
And so Stark says, I'm willing to help you, but the cost for me is not only do I have to rescue Sisay, you have to rescue my daughter, Takara.
And so that's an important part.
At this point,
we didn't feel like we had enough complications to deal with.
So let's make another one.
Well, I mean, it's a good storytelling.
There's a lot going on.
There's a lot of pieces to it.
Let's face it.
This could have been called Tempest the Soap Opera.
Because that's what we were building.
Everybody's got a story arc.
Everybody's arcs lap over with everybody else's
so that you have this constant motion of characters.
Yes, yes.
Well, of course.
That's the way you want to be.
You want to have a lot going on.
So all the characters have character arcs.
Michael and I spent a lot of time, by the way.
We took every single character and said,
okay, you know, for example,
what is Orm up to?
Orm is another card in the set. What is Orm up to? Orm is another card in the set.
What is Orm up to? She's the
healer. She's sort of the doctor of
the crew.
What is her arc? What does she
start? Where does she go? What does Stark do? Where does Stark
go? Gerard, like, every character, we
figured out what's going on with the character.
Now, some characters have bigger roles in different
parts of the story. Orm, for example,
has, ironically, a smaller role in the first part of the story, even though she gets a card.
And then the second part of the story, she has a major play, and she doesn't have a card there.
So I'm not quite sure why that played out that way.
So we would write all this on the board.
What does this character want?
How does this character get it?
And that was for the bad guys, too.
You know, Grevin, how come I'm ugly?
I don't understand.
Why am I ugly? No, I'm ugly? I don't understand.
Why am I ugly?
No, I'm kidding.
Mark isn't even smiling at me.
We're talking together.
He's not even smiling.
Grevin, why am I ugly?
Oh, I'm a bad guy.
So, resolved.
Okay, so, sorry.
You heard him almost be defensive there, folks.
He almost wanted to say, I know humor, Mike.
That's not funny.
So anyway.
Everybody had an arc. Everybody had an arc.
So I'm realizing something.
I'm about to get to my desk here.
I'm almost to work.
So Michael, can I...
I know.
Can I call you in the next
show so we can continue
the story? Yes, we can continue later on.
Could you just drop me off right up here?
Right there.
Ignore those police.
So to wrap up for this thing,
our heroes have decided on a plan.
They're going to go sneak into the castle.
They're going to send Erte to go work on the portal.
We'll talk more about that next time.
And the elves are going to attack
up front. That's the plan.
What could possibly go wrong?
Almost nothing. Almost nothing.
Get me on, Mark. It's fun.
Okay, guys. So I see my desk here.
So we all know what that means. It means this is
the end of my drive to work.
So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making
magic. So I will see you next time
along with Michael. Michael, thanks for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
And join us next time and we'll talk about the rest of the story from Tempest.
Bye-bye, guys.