The Glass Cannon Podcast - Cannon Fodder 9/13/23

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

It's Premiere Week, and Troy and Joe reveal some of the final preparations happening at the Actual Play Factory before the worldwide release of The Glass Cannon Podcast Campaign Two! In lieu of We Are Stupid, the boys rank their epic campaign adventure openings from worst to first! For more podcasts and livestreams, visit glasscannonnetwork.com and for exclusive content and benefits, subscribe today at jointhenaish.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You are listening to the Glass Cannon Network, the premier source for role-playing game entertainment. Welcome to Cannon Fodder, a behind-the-scenes look at the Glass Cannon Network. Yeah! What is going on, everybody? Welcome back to Cannon Fodder. It is Wednesday, September 13th, 2023, and I'm your old pal, Joe O'Brien. And I'm Troy Redcarppet Premier LaValle. It's show week, good buddy!

And not that kind of show. Usually we're talking about the live show when we say show week, but no, no, no. It's a whole different kind of premiere this week as Glass Cannon Podcast Campaign 2 premieres tomorrow night! That is wild. Even when you said it, I don't

believe it. It is here. It is finally said it, I don't believe it. It is here. It is finally here. We've been talking about it for so, so long. And now it is finally on our doorstep. Tomorrow night, we share it with everybody. Everything we've been working on. Cannot wait for you all to see it. I asked you last week

how you're feeling and if this is going to be done in time. And I don't think anything has really changed. You probably feel horrible. And no, it's barely going to make it to show time. And it's the day before. It's still not ready. Let's put it off. Let's just put it off. Give us a week.

Another couple months. Another couple months. Well, the real problem is we had a tour date this weekend, which at the time, you know, we didn't know that the premiere would be on September 14th when we booked this. And so that just cut into some prep time. And I really just want to play Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3. And it's just this, all this work is getting in the way of that. It's really getting in the way. And, you know, in like three or four months, dude, I will not need to be as hands on as I am. I won't have to be the one compiling every second of this. But for right now, I just want to make sure that what goes out, I'm really on top of every single second of it. And so that's just taking a lot more time than it will eventually take.

But, yeah, I guess I'm not at the point of excited yet. Like, I've seen it now a bunch of times. I guess I'm excited. I am excited for people to see it. But, like, I can't see the forest through the trees at this point because there's just still a lot of puzzle pieces left to put in, you know, going right up until Thursday at 8 p.m. I mean, the work, the, like, creative work is pretty much done at this point. It's just now labor and like finesse. But, yeah, it's one way or another.

It's happening. And I'm also like already having to start to edit episode two, which is crazy. Yeah, so we just finished a little peek behind the curtain. We just the teas for the show compiling the teas for the show that's going to open it up and like the you know hours and hours and hours went into that 60 to 75 seconds you know what i mean like it's just so detailed and so fine-tuned and it was so exciting to be like and now it's done and we can put it in the episode let's rock and then i sent francis an email and it was so exciting to be like and now it's done and we can put it in the episode let's rock and then i sent francis an email and i was like can you meet in one hour to start the one for episode two like it's it's time you know what i mean now we're rocking and rolling yeah

it's uh the the you know this is one of the reasons we waited as long as we did is because we wanted to get these things banked um but there's just so much that's gone into the preparation for episode one. It really is, you know, going to the 11th hour to get it ready. And then a lot of the work that was done to get episode one ready. Now that's all done. The intro video,

the, this, that, that the stinger, the music, the bum, like all that shit's done. So now it's just like,

Oh, I got to edit an hour episode. He's do that all the time. And then eventually I'm just, I won't even be editing them. I'll just be watching them and giving notes. But for right now, I like jumping back in there. It's fun. I'm not saying I miss editing because we did that a lot.

But it is kind of fun to get back in. Yeah, I actually, yeah, again, I also don't want to say i enjoy editing like i'd rather not have to do it but there is something there's a little like uh injection of uh what do you get when you exercise i'm not familiar with exercise people talk about yeah like you get like this little injection there's like this little natural high that comes from a great edit you know like yeah when you cut something perfectly well and it just sounds like it sounds like you invented something. Yeah. You know, you're just like this didn't really happen.

And I created it like I'm a god. Like, yeah, because you and I will agonize over like things that the end user would never even know or care about that. We put all that work into, you know, just because we don't want you to know that there was an edit there. And so sometimes we take, I mean, I fucking will agonize over a millisecond just to make it sound like there isn't an editor,

but I think that's, that's why we, you know, we are who we are because that's the giant slayer was tight. And it has a lot to do with you and I being pretty damn good editors. Well, we have, I was going to say like every fodder episode. I'm like, we've got a lot to get into today. We don't have a lot today.

This is going to be like a little relaxing, chill ass fod because we have two huge situations that are like, well, three huge situations, I should say, that we can't really talk about that much. One, SideQuest, SideSesh. It's over. And it didn't, you know, well, the season is over. And so we don't have a new app, a fresh app to talk about. We have the premiere, which is tomorrow night. We can't talk about that at all because we can't give anything away. And then we also have the huge news that we mentioned last week about the alpha working for the new subscription service well the beta is underway we'll talk about that for a little bit but uh you know that is also kind of in limbo right now and it's working through the testing process so there isn't a whole whole

lot to talk about so i'm just gonna do a few news items and then we're gonna hang out and have some fun even the boston show we can't talk about that because if you weren't there, you haven't seen it yet. But man, that was a really good time. Hell of a show. Hell of a show. The whole tour this year has just been fantastic. It has. It has. And you know what else it's been?

It's been a little bit tighter just because there's less shows. Yeah. You know, and the whole year there's just less shows because we got started late. So it's a little bit more focused and pinpointed in each one we're sort of enjoying so much and putting so much into that i think that they're really they're really shining on stage also there isn't a single venue that should expect you to do a show less than two hours and 40 minutes now i guess this is the new the new normal i've been going long well because i'm really enjoying playing i said it at the talk back to the Boston show.

It's like, I could have played till midnight. Easy. It just, I didn't want to stop. I didn't want to stop. It does. It gets like,

it gets frustrating. You know, it's great being on a stage. It's the coolest thing ever for sure. But like, imagine being at your friends and, and having like the best session ever. And you're only two hours in and you just have to stop.

Yeah. You know, like it's just, come on. You want to just keep it going it's a good time we only have three shows left we got uh october shows chicago and st louis st louis was sold out we opened up more tickets and now those are almost sold out i think there's like 27 of the 60 tickets that we released for st louis and then chicago chicago started to wake up. We're well over 200. I think we still got probably 75 or so left. Let's go Chicago. Don't be that town that we don't come back to. And then

Philly, already over 200 sold and we got months to go for the Christmas Spectacular. Yeah, Philly is going to be fantastic. My whole family is coming. It's going to be a blast. I think my wife might even be there. My wife. Dude, I'm excited for the after after party where I just get to hang with your fam at a bar somewhere that no one knows about. Yeah, and they are all like just glass-eyed, like no one at home. They're just so plastered, like the chance to get away from the kids. Oh, man, it's going to be a night. All right, let's just go through a few news items here and then i got a

little fun game for you for the end of the show first off i want to go through details like we were talking about being detail oriented in editing we want to be detail oriented in the release of glass cannon podcast campaign two let's be very clear if we haven't been already if we have been for you and you understand then great sorry just give us a second here but for those that are still maybe a little bit confused about the process here tomorrow night at eight o'clock this show is going to premiere on youtube on our youtube channel 8 p.m eastern time the only time that matters it's going to be an awesome awesome like a the same thing that we used to do on Twitch, you're going to be able to get together, watch it as it airs live. It's not actually live, but as it premieres on TV, you will get to watch it with the niche and everyone will be there.

You get to chat. You can hang out. You can make comments or whatever. That is going to be on YouTube, not on Twitch. That is going to air from 8 p.m. until the end of the show. And then at midnight, it's going to release as a podcast on the main Glass Cannon Podcast feed. And that will be the new cadence from now on for Glass Cannon Podcast campaign two. It will premiere on Thursday nights on YouTube. It will

release immediately after on podcast. So every Friday morning, if you're not a YouTube watcher, every Friday morning when you wake up and you head to work, you should see the next new episode of Gatewalkers should be on your phone. Yeah. So for if you fell off, you know, and you stop subscribing to the Glass Cannon podcast feed, resubscribe if you're a part of that Spotify mishap, because basically we moved to a new hosting thing and the hosting thing that we were a part of fucked it all up, basically. And in the 301 redirect, everyone that was subscribing via Spotify

lost it. Now, we're talking to the CEO of the Spotify podcasting to try and fix this so that people don't have to resubscribe. But in the meantime, you do have to resubscribe. And hey, while you're at it, how about you leave a five-star John for your old buddies? Because that really helps.

But you've got to subscribe to that and then the new episode will drop right away at midnight. And the video will be available for everyone after the show airs. Where it's going to be on YouTube, it immediately becomes available as a VOD. And you can just watch that for free.

And subscribe to the YouTube channel as well because that'll update you when things are happening and it looks good for us. We want to the YouTube channel as well, because that'll update you when things are happening, and it looks good for us. We want to get to 100,000 subscribers on there, because then you get a nice little plaque. That's it. I'm not going to talk about it anymore. I don't want to accidentally say anything about the

experience. The experience you're in for tomorrow night. I suggest you watch it on YouTube if you're able to. Even if you're a podcast listener, just check it out on YouTube. It'll be worth it. You to. Even if you're a podcast listener, just check it out on YouTube. It'll be worth it. You're also going to see some other stuff. So just check it out.

Now, here's the thing. I asked you a couple weeks ago, and I misspoke. I said, are you going to watch the premiere, or are you going to watch football? And I said, it's going to be Chiefs and Lions. And you're like, I'm watching the premiere. Well, it turns out I got my weeks mixed up, and it's going to be Eagles-Vikings during the premiere. Joe, where do your allegiances lie? My allegiances?

Yes. I am an extremely fickle fan, so I will be watching the premiere of the Glass Cannon Podcast campaign, too, so that I don't have to watch the garbage Philadelphia Eagles lose at home to the minnesota vikings oddly enough i'll be watching the eagles because you will take a certain joy in watching them lose i i'll be betting on the vikings and uh but i'll be watching the chat but i've seen this episode now four times do you want to watch it before the premiere uh i've got i've got a cut you can i don't have time anymore like i between now and then i really just don't have it so i thought about that and i just don't have it so that's another reason i'm excited to watch because i haven't seen huge chunks of it yet so i'm excited uh all right so we'll i mean most of us will be there we'll be hanging out hopefully

you know we can see in chat and all that kind i don't know how it's going to work i don't like sign into youtube with my own personal thing i'm such an old man like i just use glass cannon youtube so like i i have to like get my own youtube profile so i can chat with people we're bad ambassadors yeah as well as the same thing of me being like lobbies logged in as glass cannon if i chat people are like oh hey big d and when you say something horribly offensive it's like oh that's the official word from the glass cannon. Yeah, but man, that's happening. It's crazy.

So many months, I guess a year at this point, and then some leading up to this day. And at the end of the day, it's just the beginning. Let's get people excited about this. Let's continue to build the niche and get back to where we were when Giant Slayer ended. Yeah. All right. So a couple more pieces of news. For those of you that were at Gen Con, you may have seen we released Series 2 pins.

Oh, man. All new characters, a whole new slate of awesome pins. They have gone up in the merch store. So for those of you that haven't been back to the merch store in a while, maybe we're looking to refresh and see some new items. Head over there now. What is it? GlassCannonNetwork.com slash store. And you can check out these new pins. If you're a pins person, you got to see Angeline's artwork and the new slate of characters from GCN history, epic characters from GCN history in series two. However, not surprisingly, Roger Comstone pins are completely sold out. You got a reorder, dude.

Yeah, we have not done a reorder of series one. These are like limited edition Johns, but it might have to give the people what they want. If you have like, I think we ordered something like 50 of each. Does that sound right? Or a hundred of each? A hundred of each, I think. It might've been a hundred of each. And like, once? Or a hundred of each? I don't know. A hundred of each.

I think I might've been a hundred of each. And like, once they're gone there, they have been gone. Uh, we sold out of some of the series one. Um, but right now,

old Roger Comstone is the only one sold out series two. They're pretty sweet. You got Ethel Merman, Suki, Eris, Zantar, tiny murder clown, love tiny murder clown,

Della, Nestor, Sir Willamette in Lexington, Bobby Walford, Vicky Ricci and Neil Bachman. Good crew. A good crew. Definitely go check that out. Bunch of new shirts too. You jumped on and played a little Baldur's Gate last week.

We teased on fodder that it was going to be happening. And then you actually jumped on and played. And I heard that there was some nudity. There was. In your stream. Yes, it was me. I flashed my penis to the camera. It's not appropriate. I'm really trying to.

It's September on Twitch. Give the people what they want, as you say. No, it wasn't my penis, but I did show my character's penis. I don't know what the rules are, but you give me an option to show nudity. I'm going to show nudity. Yeah, we don't know the rules. Well,

I'm sure we'll be banned shortly from Twitch. It'll be taken down. It was a fun stream though, man. What a great, great game. And I knew this going in, but it's better than I thought.

The graphics are better. And the fact that it really feels like an RPG sesh. Where you get to roll the dice. And try and hit DCs for checks. Because I played Original Sin. 170 hours of it. I just didn't stream it. I played it because I enjoy it more when I don't stream. But I can't wait for Thursday.

Just because I have a dedicated two hours. Where I can just play that game. Because in my off time. I'd like to play Starfield. And now you're back into it tomorrow with a little bit more Baldur's Gate. So anybody who wants to check out. What's his name? Old Stiff Dickerson.

Old Stiff Dickerson. Elf Wizard Extraordinaire Stiff Dickerson. With Penis D. Check him out tomorrow at twitch.tv slash the glass cannon um what else what else what else oh so i had mentioned previously that the uh that the new subscription service we've been working on uh was in an alpha and we actually in the last week have instituted a beta we put out a post to people that were interested. And we got a ton of people requesting to jump in on it and they've jumped in. And now we've got lots and lots of people that are checking it out,

helping us out with little bugs. So it's, it's moving along nicely and we're hoping in the next few weeks we can bring everybody over is the plan, but a little by little. Yeah. Beta was super smooth. And,

and like any hiccups people are having at this point are mostly cosmetic, uh, like, oh, my subscribe button was to the left instead of the right. And, uh, the devs are working, uh, they super fast to fix any of those issues. But in terms of getting access to the content, connecting your Patreon so that it knows what you had before and, uh, is carried over to your new account. Everything has been super smooth and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. I saw someone say, I used to dread a new episode of Blood of the Wild just because of what a pain in the ass it is to find on Patreon.

I was like, I would just wait sometimes because I'm like, I don't feel like looking for it. And they were part of the the second uh the hundred people that we brought over to the beta last week and they were like that was the most enjoyable monday morning to just wake up and i'm like oh i have it right there uh so on its own feed bing bang boom that's great yeah so uh we were well i don't have to get into it well we'll keep touching base on this as we move forward speaking of moving yeah we'll have like updates on this service every week in the coming weeks. I think it's going to happen pretty fast. It's going to happen pretty quickly.

And once it fully happens, you'll have to move over. Patreon will be essentially defunct. For the next X amount of months, we'll make sure that we're still putting stuff on there. But at a certain point, it'll be an official switchover. So you'll have to make the jump. And speaking of moving forward and staying in tune with fodder in the coming weeks, fodder itself is changing next week.

I mean, those of you that listen to it on the podcast, you're not going to notice anything different. However, those of you that would love to see the video of Cannon Fodder as we record it, we're going to be releasing that video. So as we do this show every week, we just hang out on a video call and talk through the news of the week and the We Are Stupids. We look back at the episode, etc. And we're going to continue to do that, release it as a podcast every Wednesday. However, on Wednesday, there's also going to be a YouTube video of it if you'd like to watch it. So there will be a video component to FOD

if you'd like to join. And as part of that changeover, we are going to bring back listener mail, which I'm very excited for. It has been sorely missing in my life, and it was so fun to do it last week when FODder was live. So the way listener mail is going to work, because the show is not going to be live, is you're going to have to mail in like the old days like the original days of fodder we're going to have you email in your questions and we will pick the best of the best and we'll probably get in one or two each week on the show those questions can be anything from generic network stuff to generic uh g GM or gaming questions about your game to specific, you know, stuff about that week's episode of GCP campaign to anything that you want to get in there. We're not going to record it until the last minute.

So hopefully we should be able to get your questions before, you know, after you've already listened to that week's episode. And you could ask some hard hitting behind the scenes questions, questioning Troy's GMing, you know, those kind of things. That's what we want to hear from you. I think it's going to be fun, you know, because one of the sponsors is Demiplane, and we're really going to be digging into the back end of, or not, I guess the front end of the Pathfinder Nexus and showing, you know, stat blocks, showing different rules stuff visually. You know, I don't know.

I think it's going to be a lot of fun for people who enjoy to watch the show visually, but you certainly won't have to. We just think it'll be a good companion to the new show. Character art. You know, we could probably throw up some character art for people that didn't see it on the premiere. So, yeah, there's going to be a lot of fun stuff. For listener mail, email contact at glasscanonnetwork.com. Contact at glasscanonnetwork.com. And make sure you just put listener mail in the subject.

Make the subject listener mail, and that way we'll be able to find which ones are requesting to be read on Cannon Fodder. Yeah, and don't get cute with it. Don't write listener mail zony, because when we search listener mail, it won't come up. Exactly. We are keyword searching. Listener mail, two words. Don't be a weirdo. M-A-I-L.

I'm just picturing some dude being like, I'm a listener mail. M-A-L-E. Don't get cute. Don't get clever. Just type listener mail. And then you can get cute and clever in your question. And we definitely won't answer those ones. We just answer the hard-hitting questions.

Right. So, yeah, that's pretty much it. There's no we are stupid this week. We have a week off from being stupid. So what I figured what I'd love to do in honor of the premiere this week and as a way to not discuss the premiere this week in any way and not spoil anything, I'd like to go on a little journey with you and look back at the many, many openings to campaigns we have experienced together. Oh, okay. experienced together. And I'd like in classic, I don't want to turn a bunch of listeners off here by saying sports fashion, but as sports people, people who love sports, Troy and I also tend to participate in fantasy football. And in fantasy football, you end up doing a whole lot of ranking.

So as part of this, this little game, what I'm going to do is we're going to go through the big opens of the campaigns we've played together. And not only the ones that the nation knows, but also some that they don't because they never aired. And we're just going to rank the best openings to campaigns. And we're going to rank all of them. So that means ultimately there will be a worse opening, and that's going to be sad for whoever's that GM. Wow. Yeah, this is going to be sad. Sadder still that I don't remember any of the ones I did in GM. Okay. Oh, really? Oh, good. Well, you remember this one because the one that I could not remember. All right. So there's going to be minor

spoilers here, Nash, for maybe APs that you want to play or haven't played or whatever minor minor spoilers because it's all going to be very vague but uh for example this these are the only notes that i have uh rise of the runelords the campaign opening is a goblin attack at a festival like that's that's the opening so that's that sums it all up it's not really all about our personal game so much. It also is not going to be, let's bring up Ruins of Aslan. It's not going to be the huge pre-written scene that Skid did to kick off that campaign. It's not that. It's the campaign itself. When the players first started playing, when were they first rolling dice?

What were they doing? So we're talking about inciting events, essentially, not the episodes and what we thought of the episodes. Okay. We're talking about inciting events. So Rise of the Ruined Lords is a goblin attack at a festival. There's one on this list I don't remember. What is Jade Regent's inciting event? um there is uh the sheriff uh wants you to investigate uh these um goblins that are using fireworks to scare travelers that are coming up the uh i feel like it's called like the long coast

road or something i think you're right i think that's exactly it actually so and then you go we met in a tavern yeah like. Like in Amako's tavern. And the sheriff just walked in and was like, I've got a mission for people who want to go hunt goblins. Is that how it actually started? I don't think the sheriff walked in per se. I think there was like a bulletin up that was looking for people to help with this problem. Okay. But maybe the sheriff walked in.

So we summed it up. Or we all mailed this bulletin. You showed up at the tavern to be like, all right, we'll, we'll take care of it. It was something like that. But so it's like, it's like clear the,

the road of dangers kind of clear the bandit, you know, the bandits out in this case, they're goblins, but it's like clear the road of dangers. All right. So just briefly going down the list, rise of the ruined Lords is a goblin attack at a festival.

Jade Regent is a mission to go out and clear the road of people that are harassing the citizens. Giant Slayer is a tug of war into essentially a murder mystery. So it's a tug of war into a murder mystery inciting event. Ruins of Aslan, from my recoll recollection is you are shipboard like toward a an unknown event and the inciting events are primarily meeting npcs and like intrigue it's like a lot of role play and intrigue and you're getting to know the factions and uh and the people on the boat and then there's like an encounter with some fish that are like like fish people that are trying to harm the boat you remember that's that what it is yeah vaguely but it's primarily like npcs on the boat um yeah oh you

don't know this one so it's gonna be hard for you to rank obviously but maybe i should just leave it out but quest for the frozen flame is a wild hunt it's like it just opens on a hunt of a big creature where everybody has to participate um strange aeons is a nightmare and death it's essentially character death it's like how it's the best when you wake up in a shared dream and everyone dies and then wakes up and so like oh god i mean to me it's sorry spoiler alert that's number one writing it down troy number one strange aeons good to know yeah it's my favorite dead sons inciting event is a shootout at the docks. Right.

That's essentially what it is. It's a shootout at the docks. You go to meet your contact, and he gets shot and killed. Yeah. And you're like, what? No! It's very, very cool. I was going to put in here something for you to weigh in on if you wanted to.

Agents of Edgewatch watch i know you played a little bit of that opening uh off screen i never played it can you sum it up was there like a clear inciting event or was it not really no memory i have no memory of it yeah i i don't know and then uh i think i have one more here wrath of theeous opens on like a mythical war of beasts over a fucking festival. A dragon fighting a demon. It's a dragon fighting a demon over top of a festival as like the demons swarm on this small village. Echo Quest, I guess Emerald Spires, it doesn't really have a – No, it has no real inciting event per the book. The one that I chose to do was like you all met at like this druid's hut and she was like creepily telling you about the legend of the Emerald Spire or something like that.

So I tried thinking of these and now thinking of Gatewalkers because you know, I know. It's so different. I can't do anything. Same thing. So I left out getting the trunk. I can't say anything. That's the same thing. So I left out Get in the Trunk. I left out Time for Chaos. I don't know if you want to include those. Get in the Trunk is essentially investigate a dead agent's apartment.

Like that's the inciting event of the whole thing. It's like someone that was a part of this died and you have to go root through their shit. And I don't know how time – I can't remember how Time for Chaos opened. What the inciting event – but that was a part of this died and you have to go root through their shit and i don't know how time i can't remember how time for chaos opened what the inciting event but that was a prologue yeah i think wrath of the righteous is probably my number two okay um i think strange ions just rather righteous would have been one if strange ions didn't have such a cool premise like i remember doing that live in la and you died right away. And I was like, how do I do this in a way that the first person who dies thinks that they really fucking died immediately? And so I was playing it up. I'm like, oh no, 36 points. You're like, what? And you die.

And then when the second person dies, you start to realize, okay, we're all going to die. But then of course, you actually die in the episode. It's my favorite. Like when you wake, it's just, it's my favorite sort of culmination of things that happen. But to me, that opening, you wake in a shared dream and you are helpless against this thing that just kills you. And then you kind of wake up in an asylum in a jail and you see this woman torturing someone and you're like, how do we break out? Are we next? Unbeatable, I think, in my opinion. I agree with you. And I think, honestly, I think that that's going to make it a clear top two. However, I do go Wrath of the Righteous as my number one. I think it's the most

epic opening of anything I've ever played, but strange hands is obviously so creative and clever and awesome. So we swap one and two there. I am number one, wrath of the righteous. Number two, strange a ons. Number three,

you would have to choose between rise of the rune Lords, giant slayer, dead sons, maybe dead sons might be a number three. Rise of the Rune Lords, Giant Slayer, Dead Sons. Maybe – Dead Sons might be a number three. I think that – like if I start to work towards the bottom, I think that Rise of the Rune Lords is my – is probably the least interesting to me, followed by Ruins of Aslan. Those campaigns get more interesting, although I actually didn't like Rise of the Rune Lords. One of the reasons I left.

But I think Rise of the Ruins just goblins. At the time, that was probably really cool. But I remember, I don't like goblins. And so I just, that's low for me. And then Ruins of Aslan, I remember it being a lot of role playing up front, which isn't what I like. And then when it got to the fish people, that was cool.

But like, you have to include both, which would also make Giant Slayer very low on the list for me. I'll put Giant Slayer slightly ahead of Ruins of Aslan. But like, that's a lot of role playing and info dump into a tug of war. Now, obviously, if you have. Yeah, I mean, we made it into Tom Exposition, which was a wonderful thing. But that's not actually the inciting event. The design of the AP is more about – I don't know. I think it might go a little higher on my list just because of – I think that the tug of war is an interesting mechanic. Sure, we might have looked back on it with – what's not what's the word i'm looking for uh nostalgia

right like it might get an extra boost because of the nostalgia of actually finishing that long campaign but i think it's a really interesting way in a pre-written adventure to get adventurers rolling dice and getting to know each other and not have to actually fight anything, you know, and not have to have any intrigue either. It was like a weird middle ground that they found. So I thought it was pretty clever. Yeah. Yeah. And also it's symbolic, this tug of war and the war to come.

There's a lot of reasons. I'm trying to not be sentimental about it. I think if you take it at face value, less interesting than what we did with it. Jade Regent, I don't really fully remember, but I knew you were investigating like stolen't know. I don't know if that's something that you share as part of it, right? Like, is the open of Giant Slayer a tug of war? Or is the open, in a larger sense, you know, the murder of Roger Grath? You know, is that really the thing? Because with Jade Regent, it's not the missing fireworks are not really the thing

in short order maybe in a at the end of the first session or second session for a regular game you would discover the thing that really kicks off that mystery and it is so cool so yeah i mean i think if you get to to be more fair to it you got to give it a little bit more juice some of them get it in quicker like dead sons you know you just you don't even really need to know what the mystery is your contact is killed right in front of you and then you're in a firefight in in a dock with pete with strangers you've never met before and you all have to be on each other's side it's so cool so some do it quick some do it a little slower but they are all all, you know, opens in their own way. Yeah.

Now, I don't know anything about the Rise of the Mammoth Lords. What the hell is it called? A Quest for the Frozen Flame. A Quest for the Frozen Flame. But a Wild Hunt sounds pretty fucking cool. It was. And it truly was like the opening scene is basically in the snow at like dawn. And it's just like all of the hunters moving together.

And that's how you introduce each character. And then before you even like really talk to each other, you barely talk to each other, but you do actually get some agency to decide, like, how are we going to approach this attack? And it's a big ass creature. I don't want to give it all away. But it's like, how are we going to all work together to bring this beast down? And and then immediately, you're just rolling dice. And it's just, you know, determining things about your character in a very early way, in an action packed way that you can kind of carry through. So I'm actually going to put that fourth for me, quest for the frozen flame behind dead sons.

I think I also have to put dead sons third, the way you did. I, it's just so good. It's so good. The way that it opens. Yeah. Wait,

dead sons has moved to third now. Oh no. Yeah. Third. That's where I have mine. Yeah. Yeah. You,

you had dead sons at that third. I thought you said a strange answer, but that's crazy. Uh, I just downloaded, uh, the Brian wall legacy, uh, book one, I thought you said Strange Announcement. That's crazy. I just downloaded the Brinewall Legacy. Jade Region. Book one.

Just to try it. And you're like browsing through it? Yeah, I'm just browsing. Man, this is the first thing I ever GMed. It's bringing you back. Yeah, I remember seeing the map for Brine Stump Marsh and being like, how the hell do I do this? There's no maps. It's just letters.

I got to draw the maps maps how does this work yeah there's the first encounter and everything you head off to brine stump marsh is that what it is yeah yeah fires ever brands bryant's up there's like reports that the licktoed goblins of brine stump marsh have grown unusually aggressive uh because they've found a supply of fireworks and all these caravans that are coming up that road, the Lost Coast Road that connects Magna Marta to Sandpoint. They're being harried. And so basically the sheriff, Sheriff Baelor Hemlock, has restored Sandpoint's old goblin bounty

after several years of inactivity. So you guys are just chasing that bounty. He's the guy in Rise of the Runelords. Yeah. He's the sheriff. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

all the Rise of the Runelord character, a lot of them are here. It's like a connective tissue. Oh my God. That's really, really good. This is so cool. We'll never finish this,

but man, was it fun. We'll never finish. We didn't know what the hell we were doing, and we loved every second of it. We didn't need to know what we were doing. It didn't matter. Yeah. It didn't matter.

Yeah. All right. Yeah, I think I'm going to put Quest for the Frozen Flame. Then I'm going to go Giant Slayer because I honestly really like the tug of war into the murder mystery. Then I'll do Rise of the Rune Lords. Then Jade Regent. And then Ruins of Aslan. Last, I do not like role-playing early in a game.

I just want to roll dice when I get there. It is fun just to jump in uh and start playing um but it's interesting like now that you know gatewalkers where would you put it i can't i can't say and we'll talk about it next week it's different it's it's definitely different and i think you and i share the like we just want sometimes you just want to learn by rolling that's why i love strange aeons it's because you you get it's back-to-back encounters. One is a fake-out encounter and one is a real encounter. But you're just thrown into it. And you also don't know anything about yourself other than maybe your name. But even your name,

we didn't discover until X amount of episodes in. It's just – it can't be beat. I want to play more like that. Yeah. And so, let me expand for a second before we wrap up here on Wrath of the Righteous. I loved Wrath of the Righteous so much and is my favorite ever because not only is it do you see creatures beyond imagining that are part of this initial combat, but the real inciting event like you don't you kind of fight in that event but not not really what really happens is it basically destroys the city to such rubble that you are kind of knocked underground remember and so you actually it's like it feels like a video game prologue because you truly like pick yourself up out of the rocks and the people you have happened to fall through the ground with is your starting party is like you're you know what i mean because it's just random people in a town square and so though but then there's also like three npcs that also fall down there with you and they all have their individual personalities motivations stories

to like you know and then you have to start working your way through the old tunnels under the city to find your way to the surface again to see if there's anyone even alive up there i mean it's just a really strong really strong open yeah um yeah i'd put that yeah so i think that's it so for you it's strange aeons wrath of the righteous dead sons jade regent ruins of aslant giant slayer rise of the runelords i'll put that looks like the way i put giant slayer ahead of rise and ruins okay and jade and jade okay yeah so giant jade ruins rise giant jade ruins rise okay great so yeah we're pretty we're pretty close on these i mean i think that there isn't too much of a stretch one to the other um i really like rise of the rune lawyers again because of that you know yes it's a classic festival but i like when the enemy just like comes on you you don't have to do

any investigating and you just have to start defending yourself and i like that concept so yeah um that's why it's up there but yeah ruins of aslant i like the imagery a lot skid's opening scene was wonderful um going you know his opening scene if you recall was 10 000 years before the events of the campaign started. So that's just very cool. But like the idea of being on a ship in the middle of the ocean, heading to an unknown place and just talking to people is interesting. It is. It's just not my favorite way to start because I like to, I don't know my character yet. So it's hard to role play before I've, I get to know my character by fighting and losing or, you know, trying

something else and rolling dice and seeing how these events play out, then I start to get to know my character a little bit better. Yeah, I think it's one of the problems with the AP for us is that like, I think a big part of that AP was getting to know the colonists and forming relationship with them. And then doing these what i assume were like mini games that gave you points to other things and we like could not be less interested in in any of that like i didn't what's the shame i didn't know any of the people's names i didn't care like i just wanted to go explore the mystery uh and so that that made it tricky and right out the gate it's like here is 50 npcs i'm like i'd rather jump off this boat and drown than learn. I know, and I feel bad for Skid, too. I mean, running 50 NPCs

is so much work. It's a lot. I know. He's up there tap dancing. We're just like, can we get to the combat? Yeah, it is a shame. But it is hard because it's such a fascinating mystery. Like, that's what you want to go do. You know, I mean, we even said it out loud multiple times

where we voiced this exact frustration where it was just like, we don't want to deal with town politics. You know what I mean? Like colonial politics is really uninteresting to us. We want to go slay things. But, you know, the reality of the situation was in order to be a strong and defended colony it had to stick together etc etc so i mean skid knew what he was doing but it was it was tough to get uh to understand what was going on with all of those freaking npcs yeah um yeah i like giant slayer for that too giant slayer also had a lot of npcs early on but at a certain point you just sort of like head out and

you're just on this grand adventure for a long time. And there's no home really, you know, which helps with adventuring because you just keep adventuring. You don't have to keep coming back and like, we'd like to vote on building a wall. Yeah, the only reason those NPCs had any significance beyond the beginning of book two is because we made it significant. We made true now. And those people significant as written. Once you leave at the beginning of book two,

you never talk to them again. Yeah. A wild adventure. Well, a new wild adventure is going to begin tomorrow night at eight o'clock Eastern on YouTube, the premier of glass kind of podcast campaign too. You'll get it Friday at midnight on your podcast

on the classic GCP feed. You'll find it there. A new adventure begins. I hope you guys enjoy it. I'm so excited for you to check it out. It's happening. That's all I got, buddy. Let me know if you got anything else before we get out of here. No, it's probably about two, three years of a new show starts tomorrow night starts tomorrow two to three years of a new show

can't wait to share with all of you alright have a good time tomorrow night everybody can't wait for fodder next week it's going to be on YouTube we're going to have listener mail email contact at glasscannonetwork.com with your questions put listener mail on the subject until then enjoy the premiere of Gatewalkers. We'll talk to you next week.

Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to the Glass Cannon Network. For more podcasts and live streams, visit glasscannonnetwork.com. And for exclusive shows and content you can't find anywhere else. Subscribe today at patreon.com slash glass cannon. you