Non-Fantasy Tropes with Jackson Lanzing, Eric Campbell, and Matt Colville | Roundtable

To be continued... Op shop of 5.8. Tonight on The Roundtable. The amount that this is illuminating my personality and allowing me to recognize the kind of person I am. It's like therapy. Yes. Jackson Lansing, co-writer behind the hit comic books Joyride and Hacktivist and the RPG Vast. Like, I spend a lot of my time on my YouTube channel trying to explain to people that, like, there's a million different ways to be a GM and that whatever it is that excites you, then that's your path into it. Matthew Colville, a video game writer with Turtle Rock Studios. Sci-fi opens the door to doing everything. Like, if I want a fantasy episode, I can go and do that. We can time travel to, you know, anywhere. Eric Campbell, game master of Eric's TBD, RPG, and GNS Live. Talking about stuff apart from fantasy makes me happy. There's plenty of settings that don't have dungeons. Correct, yeah, exactly. Oh, hey. You got dessert. Yeah, I did. I got a smooth. I didn't know. What did you get? So this is a smooth Lansing, which is a drink created by Shea, one of our fans on Vash. You got nice tea. I just got nice tea. Yeah, I don't drink. It's funny, because I'm drinking such a traditionally just like, but because my great ancestors used to drink this. But this, in this wonderfully beautiful delicate glass, is honey mead. Nice. Did you have them like make it from scratch? I did. I even had them burn a village when they were doing it. It's the first time we went off them. Well, cheers. Cheers. To Brave New Worlds. Yeah, to the round table. Yeah. What were we talking about? We were talking about. Oh, dang, that's good. We were talking about Star Trek. We were talking a lot about Star Trek because we learned very early that we all have this thread in common. Right. I've spent a lot of time designing a Star Trek system because I couldn't find a system I loved. You designed apparently a system that's the closest thing to the one I would have loved. Two different Star Trek RPGs. And you have obsessively collected the books from his system. Which is crazy. That is wacky because, yeah, like I said, I mean, the Decipher RPGs have been out of print for a long time. So people who wanted to pick up and play a Star Trek RPG have been kind of left out in There have been a lot of fan made stuff out there, but for the most part, I think Decipher's RPG has been out of print since 2005 or something like that. Which is weird to me, because I feel like there should always be a Star Trek RPG. I think so too. It should be evergreen. Don't I agree? I'm so glad there's finally this new one coming down the pike. That's coming out, yeah. But it drives me out of my mind that because the flip side to the rising popularity of tabletop RPGs means that suddenly it's becoming a collector's market. Oh wow, yeah, I hadn't thought of that. Now, because Decipher RPGs, I paid $100 for the game. for my Starships decipher. Are you serious? Yeah. That one was one of the hardest ones to get. I wish we had no shows because I've got like 50 of them. Oh, God. Can I flip this table? And by the way, I'd flip the table. I spent my tax return collecting the decipher RPG cards. I mean, there's some really like talking about storytelling outside of the fantasy genre. There's some if you go if you just go by like the GM books that we wrote or the core books and the DMs advice in it, there is a ton of like how to take a TV episode and break it down into an RPG episode and into a mission, into an adventure. Like you were talking about watching Deep Space Nine and trying to translate those episodes, and I'm like, a whole bunch of them make great adventures. You have a lot of shows. The thing that I think you can go back to over and over again is like, do you want to know how to run a mystery in a Star Trek system? There's an episode for that. It's like, you want to do a Klingon episode? There it is. It's all there, and it's ready for you. Well, you were talking about doing like Game of Thrones in Star Trek and the Klingon Empire, and there is more than ample material just in the show. Klingon Empire, yeah. You're right. What I love about running sci-fi games is sci-fi opens the door to doing everything. like with sci-fi, like in the Doctor Who RPG that I'm running right now. If I want a fantasy episode, I can go and do that. We can time travel to anywhere. We can do all of these things. Star Trek kind of does the same thing with holodecks and whatnot. I myself, as a storyteller, I feel limited. This is so bizarre to say, but I have felt limited by fantasy. And I'm not saying one is better than the other because I would never do that. But I would never. I would. Not because I'm worried about flack, but because I can never make that call. I love them both enormously, but the thing is, is with sci-fi, I can go from space and then immediately go into a setting where everyone just has swords and they're fighting a supernatural, you know what I mean? And that makes sense. In a Star Trek show, you can have characters rolling around with their phasers as much as you want, but when you're fighting Klingons, one of those Klingons is gonna pull a Bat'leth, and now you're in a sword fight. Or a Makhleth. Or a Makhleth, exactly, or a Dukhtah, or a, we can just go down that list. I know, I love Klingons. That's one of the things I like about Star Trek, guys. I think it's like the great science fiction RPG setting because everyone knows it. It feels like the story, the beginning to end for fantasy, is you start small, you end big. Like you're the Hobbit, you end, you know what I mean? Whereas in sci-fi, it feels like you start determined, you end victorious. Sure. Do you know what I mean? Yes. Dude, that's interesting. I think you can still start small and end big. I think so too. I think it's about. But I've noticed that the journey's a little different. Because it seems like, whenever I play D&D, like in Critical Role for example, you start doing some questing, and you start doing some, you're helping out and you start by making a difference and then by the end of it you're fighting fucking dragons that are destroying mountainsides and all this stuff. Whereas in sci-fi, the story seems to change from you have a couple of missions and then you go rescue a few people and then you get involved in political conflict and all of a sudden there's a war going on. I'm wondering what it is about fantasy that draws us because there's something wholly unique and sort of intimate about fantasy. Fantasy, you know where you're looking. So you walk into a town and you know where the tavern is. There's a term they use in criticism called fantasy land, which is the implied setting that all fantasy novels and games take place in, where you know there's gonna be a blacksmith to fix my weapons. I'm gonna be able to get a horse to get from here to here. I have a basic understanding. And the problem when you throw, I think, players into new, not well established, apart from Star Trek, science fiction settings, is that they don't know those things. They don't know if they're playing Traveler, for instance. They don't know, like, well, are there space stations around here? How do we get, do we have faster than light travel? Can we be anywhere we want? Fantasy as a default setting for RPGs is great, but I actually believe it's very limiting. I've always had a hard time running fantasy as a setting. I find that if I'm going to run a fantasy setting, I always feel like I've read the story I want to tell. Like I've read too much fantasy maybe. I'm going to run into those things where I go, damn, I feel like I'm ripping something off. Whereas if I set it in a universe that runs by a different set of rules, but I'm telling a relatively similar story, I feel like I'm getting something else out of it. With knights and orcs, I feel like I'm always gonna be walking them through planes and putting them at campfires and walking them up mountains and having them fight dragons. Like, with these guys, I can be like, you know, you hit a planet that's filled with rock monsters that act like knights. We can go into these weirder settings. I mean maybe it just I have a harder time being creative in fantasy now that I saying it out loud Again I mean the existence of fantasy land are answers to questions that you don want answers You want to come up with your answers to them Yeah. You're like, well, I don't, what's the point of playing in this sandbox when everything's already been solved? So it's almost like you gotta be mindful of walking in the shadow of the typical. Yeah. When it comes to fantasy. Because like when I. Great, great, great. What is it? Yeah, at least our modern fantasies that are huge today are springing, of course, from Granddaddy Tolkien and his story. Completely disagree. Which, well, there's really good reason, because there's such a huge, rich library of mythology and fantasies that have sprouted up that we've discovered, of course, Dungeons and Dragons being heavily influenced by Tolkien going forward, and that being the big kid in the room, basically, when it comes to the fantasies that we know today. Maybe sometimes we fall into the trap of that traditional fantasy trope. You know what I'm saying? Like what you were just saying. You just accept that this is what fantasy is. And you're like, well, we already all know that, and that's not interesting. It's much more interesting to find out what a hyper-intelligent cockroach with robotic legs is going to react to the situation than it is to find out what another human with a sword is going to do. We've seen that a million times. I hope we haven't created a narrative that sci-fi is better than fantasy. I'm not saying that. That is no freaking way I'm saying that. I feel like I'm going to be the defender of fantasy. But it's fine. I'll do it. I'll do it if I have to. Maybe it's just because there's such a renaissance in fantasy gaming right now that people want to get back to that. They're excited to get back to that roots. And so it feels like all we're doing is recapitulating The Hobbit and Heroes Quest over and over again. But I've got a one-shot that I run whenever friends are like, hey, we haven't played, that's just Tears of the Sun, the Bruce Willis movie, where these fantasy characters are like, they start at seventh level, and they're a Delta Force team, and they have to go on a mission. That's great. And it's got politics. It's just all done in, I think you can do anything in anything. I agree. I completely agree. I'm not trying to say that fantasy is limiting in and of itself. No, it becomes personally limiting. We find it personally limiting because of our own experiences. I get that. I'm just curious because the thing is when it comes to fantasy, I could never, that would be like removing half of my body if I decided to step away from it. When I play fantasy, the reason why I get so into it is when I'm in sci-fi, I'm dealing with these massive themes. But when I play fantasy, it just feels, I don't know why, it just feels more intimate to me. Like I can picture my character walking across the cold soil as they're approaching their campfire with food that they just, you know, got for the party. Stuff like that. Like that's the stuff I, as a storyteller and as a player, I would be like, my soul would be stuck dry. It's interesting because I wonder how much that is just because of our senses and the fact that like I can imagine. That's a good point. I can like, I actually have no idea what Dave Bauman smells when he walks around inside the Discovery. I don't know. But as far as like campfires and stuff like that, that basic, like I know what it smells like to cook meat. Like I know what it's like to get tired walking, right? And so these are tools. They're more approachable concepts. Yeah, these are things that are kind of built in. Like mentally. It's easy for the dungeon, or the game master to bust these smells and senses out. But I don't know what it's like. I don't know what a lightsaber smells like. I think you just got it. Like when I think about the never ending story and what it would be like to write on Falcor's back, all I had to do as a little kid was run just really, really fast. Sure, yeah. And feel the wind whipping past my ears and I could get it. And now when I'm playing Star Wars, I'm playing with a toy and I'm imagining everything and it's really liberating and it's wonderful and everything. But in fantasy, I could draw a plastic sword and go fight a dragon. You guys got to spend more weekends on spaceships. I feel like my experiences are so different from yours. It's funny. So I agree with what you're saying. I'm curious then, what was the first, I'd just love to hear what you guys, what was your first RPG outside of, because did you start with fantasy? Okay, so what was your first non-fantasy RPG? That I played in or I ran? Your first experience with Star Trek? Yeah, my Star Trek game. That's right. And what was yours? Because you started with D&D as well, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, we're going back into the midst of time. This is like, this would be like 1986, 87. It might have been Champions. It might have been a superhero game. Oh, yeah. It might have been Champions as an intent. By the way, Champions is a game where you have to do calculus. I know. I've heard about that. If you want to, like, it was the 80s, and people were like, we've got these cool calculators, we might as well use them. If you want to, if your character, if your Superman character is going to fly across the board and punch that guy, or punch something, it's like, okay, well, I've got this much movement. Grab your T82. I've got 100 feet of movement, but if I have 100 feet of movement, I'm not moving 100 feet per round at this point. I'm only moving 100 feet per round at this point. Yeah, you've got to do velocity calculations. You literally have to sit there. You have to do a derivative to figure out how fast am I going at this point in my movement. And at the time, we were like... I'm doing basic arithmetic in my head to keep up with my players. Well, you know, we were like, well, what's wrong? This makes perfect sense to us. Why aren't all games like this? Because you're a certain age, you just want that super intense. On my SATs, I was like 40 points away from a perfect on the verbal, and I crashed the math so hard. Which, actually, this is a little adjacent, but of all the classic storytelling games that I've played growing up, because we've been talking about fantasy and sci-fi, but I'm so disappointed that I never got my feet wet with Spelljammer in D&D. Did anybody ever play that? Did you ever play that? No, because it looked weird to me. That's the thing. It's so fucking bizarre. It's a polarizing thing either. Either you look at that and you're like, ooh, I want it. Or you look at it and you're like, what is it? Yeah, it's like opera. I don't know what that is. Spelljammer is Dungeons and Dragons in space. And it came out in the late 80s, I guess, or mid 80s. It's not science fiction though. No, it's not. It's like imagine back when they thought that everything was like phlogiston. It's like planetary romance. It's like John Carter. John Carter of Mars, planetary romance. Okay, got it. Like the ships that go, have sails. And they're going through space and they have. And they have, and a mage basically, a wizard pilots them sitting on this throne and some of them are giant whales, some of them are like ships with sails, and some of them are, and what's crazy. That sounds like a, I like that. It's so, it's so like, it just feels like so pulpy, like early 80s pop. Yeah, I've always, and I'm like, somebody has to have made conversion rules out there. So I'm like always just checking in. Like they were coming out with all these different sort of genres that they were trying to branch it out to make it more than just go on this quest, kill this monster and stuff like that. And this sort of brain shot. Right, getting out of the traditional fantasy. I mean, so even they, early on, were recognizing, like, the fantasy setting can be limited. But RPGs as a story format are so intensely engaging from a long-term story perspective. I think you can do stuff there that you can never do otherwise. Sure, I mean, every time in 30 years that I've had one player be the mole, there's at least one other player who gets legitimately upset because of how intense an experience on RPG, like I trusted you, I literally trusted you, right? And my character trusted you, and I trusted you, and look what happened. The experience of being a player is so different than the experience of being a Dungeon Master. Like the Dungeon Master is literally, I am having to read all these players constantly, and judge what are they responding to, what is, and then, and that gets into like, my friend Dave, when he had kids, all of a sudden, if there was, if you needed to engage his character, you could put a child in danger, and he would have an intense visceral reaction to that. Whereas that same, I've known this guy since we were 15, he would not have reacted that way when he was 15 or 16. It becomes intensely personal. It's funny that you have a, I mean, this is a footnote. Like, I spend a lot of my time on my YouTube channel trying to explain to people that, like, there's a million different ways to be a GM. And that whatever it is that excites you, then that's your path into it. And that comes from me, like, my first DM. This was Dungeons and Dragons, and this is like 1987, 88. This is somebody who was not a writer and had serious, like, stage fright. It was dyslexic and yet in spite of that this dude was an amazing DM And he put this huge map it was actually a map of the city state of the Invincible Overlord And it was a Mayfair product from the Judges Guild and it was about as big as this table And every single building on it was keyed. So you could literally go, I want to go here, and he would go flip, flip, flip, okay, that's an alchemy shop. And it was all about urban intrigue and murder mysteries and stuff like that. So my first experience had very little to do with kind of knights questing and going and finding an inn and that kind of stuff and riding on horseback from one point to the other. And that complete, I feel like I've spent most of my life trying to be a DM like that guy was a DM. I had the same experience. Really, are you serious? That's awesome. So I grew up in South Texas from a Southern Baptist family who absolutely believed that Dungeons and Dragons was going to summon the devil and that we were all gonna die. And it will. So I had a very rough childhood growing up with regards to my education. because starting from first grade to the day I graduated senior year, I was placed in special education with diagnosed with a learning disability. And they told me that, because apparently I tested very high in like IQ and stuff like that, but I was not taking the material in. So I got diagnosed with anxiety and attention deficit disorder and all of this other stuff. That young age? Yeah, really young. And I got pumped on Ritalin and they put me in spec ed and I stayed there. And so I had that typical like geek story where I loved, I'd wanna come to school with my Transformers Trapper Keeper and I'd get my ass kicked for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was kinda the thing. By the time I got to middle school, I had run into my friend Curtis, who was a dungeon master, and I decided to give it a try because I saw them just rolling dice at the lunch table one day. And then he as a DM, playing in his game, I will never forget this, but the way he would deliver everything, the way we would come to, there's a door, and we'd be like, all right, well I'm gonna try to open it. And he'd be like, he would describe it's not opening, and then he'd be like, and that's when you realize there's no lock. In fact, there's no keyhole. This door is remaining closed, and you can't figure out why. That's how he would deliver everything. He would be just as amazed by the fact that you couldn't open this door. It's informed everything about who I am as a DM today and as a Game Master today, because I never felt like I was just narrating a character that existed in some fantasy world. I felt like I was standing in a room, and the GM was next to me going, but why? Why are they similar story, but it operates on kind of different terms? Obviously, I got into RPGs a little bit later. I played my first sessions at 25 or 26. Right. I built Vast, the universe of Vast. I built it when I was... Ah, the Regency era. You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place. Or it's the time when Jane Austen wrote her books. The Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history. Volker History's new season is all about the Regency era. the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal. Listen to Vulgar History, Regency Era, wherever you get podcasts. Oh, please, not that music. That music gives me nightmares from my childhood. Could we get something a little bit lighter, some lighter music here? Are you a fan of true crime TV shows? And what about Unsolved Mysteries, the show that jump-started all of our love of true crime? I'm Ellen Marsh. And I'm Joey Taranto. And we host I Think Not, a true crime comedy podcast covering some of the wildest stories from your favorite true crime campy TV shows all the way to Unsolved Mysteries. Baby, you will laugh. You will cry. You'll think about true crime in a whole new way. And you'll also ask yourself, who gave these people mics? New episodes of I Think Not are released every Wednesday with bonus episodes out every Thursday on Patreon. And every Monday, you can listen to our True Crime Rundown, where we go over the top true crime headlines of the week. So come and join us wherever you listen to your podcasts. The war is over and both sides lost. Kingdoms were reduced to cinders and armies scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight. But in the Shadow Dark, the darkness always wins. This is old school adventuring at its most cruel. Your torch ticks down in real time. And when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job. This is a brutal rules light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make. This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s. And man, it is so good to be back. Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the Shadow Dark. every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on youtube.com slash the glass cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark. I couldn't have been older than 10. And I built it on a little, I had a little tape recorder that I would walk around like Agent Cooper just like talking to myself in my room because I had no friends. And I would just sit around because I should have been diagnosed with a bunch of stuff and I wasn't. So I was walking around just being like, what about the Siren and what are the Paka? And I was literally coming up with all of it back when I was a kid. And I would write it all down, it was the first stuff I wrote, and it was the first stuff where I was like, oh, I think I'm a writer. I had a really, really good friend named Dan. He was writing a fantasy novel, and I was writing a bunch of sci-fi. And so he would tell me all about his fantasy stuff, and I would read his fantasy stuff, and I would tell him all about my sci-fi stuff, and I'd read my sci-fi stuff. And we'd workshop worlds with each other, which wasn't really like RPGing, but it was a lot like game mastering. Because we were sitting there and talking about, like, what's over here, and how do you do this, and how does this mystery get set up? By the time I was playing, which was in a World of Darkness campaign with just two other guys, but here's what I liked about my DM. He'd lean in and he would have conversations with me as the NPCs. And his conversations off the cuff were really good and he wouldn't break eye contact and he would do voices and he would challenge everything I said. And if I wanted to beat back on this stuff, I had to roll socially to get him past that stuff, right? And I found myself thinking like, the amount that this is illuminating my personality, that it's illuminating what I'm good at and what I'm bad at, and allowing me to recognize the kind of person I am. It's like therapy. Yes, it becomes therapy. So all the combat stuff, all that, sure, it's there, it's fun, the mechanics are there, it's fun, but what that GM taught me was to be like, engage with this on a level that has nothing to do with the mechanics. Sure, yeah. Engage on this on a level that is demonstrable to you and your character, And that's what I took. My high school experience was very, this is a hallmark of the 80s, I think. Maybe this is still true, where there are like the guys that listen to heavy metal and they didn't hang out with anybody else. And the surfer guys. That's not a product of the 80s. That's a product of being a teenager. It was super, super tribal. Intensely tribal. And D&D was the way out of that for me because I would intensely judge these people at the age of 16 or 17 for what I thought was their wrongheadedness. And then one of them would be invited to the D&D table and would be an amazing DM, and DM in a completely different way than anyone. And of course when you're young, I only had one or two DMs, I only had a couple of examples, and I'm like, okay, so obviously I was completely wrong about everything. Everything I thought about these people, or about that person, got thrown into a cocked hat. That's a fantastic point, because that happened to me too. I got socialized really by playing Dungeons & Dragons, and so half of my gaming group were all women. And so when we would sit down at the gaming table, we always had a diverse group. I learned to love things that I had never been exposed to, but I fell in love with musicals. I used to think Rush was the most ridiculous band but people would kind of make fun of you for your wish fulfillment like your fantasy wish fulfillment for like playing oh I gonna be a fighter because I can really move in real life Like that how you be portrayed or whatever But what I discovered was there is some truth to like the character styles that you pick. I started to notice throughout high school that I kept choosing a character that had some secret awesome power, but no one ever knew about it. And I didn't realize that what I was actually doing was telling my story to myself. Like that I felt like I as a person was buried deep down inside, and that I had something special to offer, and I just needed to find the right situation to give it. So I have a similar story. I was born with Spina Bifida. My back is all messed up, and for a long time before I knew how to deal with that, before I knew the exercises and things that I needed to do to make sure that my body worked properly, I'd have whole periods of time where I couldn't walk. When I started playing, I was always playing these hyper-capable. I was the, oh, I can't fight in real life, so I'm going to fight. because it was seriously therapeutic to me to have a character that was never gonna be told, oh, you can't walk over there, right? Like, I would play the biggest, baddest thing I could. And the thing that I've realized now, having done this a few times, is that I've also always attached that character to a really difficult personality. Like a personality that, like, yes, I'll be hyper capable, but I'll also have, like, pretty strong opinions, and I'll be pretty unpredictable. And I'm like, yeah, I'm just writing myself with capabilities. It's like I'm just taking my best aspects and my worst aspects and I'm funneling them together into something that I can play in a safe environment. I love that. It is therapy. There is definitely a psychological component to the first characters you make. And it's one of the things I'm lucky in that I played with the same group for years. And there eventually comes a point where you just get bored playing a version of yourself. For the first time, you're making a character and you tend to want to play characters that are like you. But there's nothing wrong with that. But then eventually, if you do that enough, you're going to get bored doing that. and that's when you start branching out into characters that are wildly different from you, and that is a great exercise just as a human being. I agree. Just as a person, it's just like, okay, well I've done me certainly enough now. Like, let's play somebody completely different. I mean, that is the bedrock of empathy. I was wondering if this gets back to the kind of science fiction versus fantasy thing, because certainly if we talk about fantasy and the idea of fantasy land, we are talking about that classic, medieval, Western European tradition, right? And there are ethnicities that are kind of built into that, And there's feudalism that's built into that. But if we talk about science fiction, we are deliberately throwing all those things out on purpose so that we can have anybody in there. And again, that's the thing I love about sci-fi is you can take all the social mores off. There's something about fantasy where you kind of have to accept, there's gonna be a lot of human social mores that you have to stick to. That lets the players dig into the concept of their own relative morality, of what I believe versus what you believe versus what you believe. We're all talking and we're all agreeing right now. But if we talk long enough, we'll find stuff that we fundamentally disagree about. I feel like it's limited to say that I can't do everything with a fantasy setting when I can do anything I want with sci-fi, but fantasy feels like, if fantasy it almost feels like if it doesn't have that feel of opening up an old book and telling a story with a pipe in your mouth kind of thing, you know what I mean? I feel like if I move too far away from that then I've lost the charm of fantasy altogether. Do you know what I mean? I do, yeah. But isn't that kind of like what Game of Thrones is taking like hoary old fantasy cliches and just marrying them to like soap opera plotting that we've all seen a million times No one done that before. All the people who are coming to fantasy through Game of Thrones, and man, there are a lot of them. Like more I think than maybe any of us realize yet. That you're gonna see a whole generation of people who are coming down the pike whose primary fantasy is not one that exists wholly on a swords and sorcery level. I'm looking forward to the fantasy that it births. Because that's- It'll be more political. And it'll be more multicultural and it'll be more alien. And for me, again, I think maybe I've come across a little bit as the anti-fantasy guy here. And that's to some degree true. I am a bigger science fiction fan than I am a fantasy fan. But you're not anti-fantasy. You're just a science fiction writer. I'm just a science fiction writer. Yeah. But I look forward to writing fantasy someday, right? It's just not my core, my core belief system was raised on Star Trek. It was raised on science fiction and raised by scientists. So for me, I have this very like, that is where my perspective comes from. But in playing games, I think the only advantage that science fiction has had for me is that it allows for the world building to be less limited, for the perspectives to be less limited, for the cultural perspectives to be less limited, and I'm wondering if that's a temporary thing. It's funny that I find myself in a venue talking about mostly science fiction now, because, but isn't that great that we are in a position where, look, if you're here watching this because you're interested in role playing and you're interested in Dungeon Master being a GM, there's a colossal variety of things you can do with this, and so let's talk, like, talking about stuff apart from fantasy makes me happy. Plenty of settings that don't have dungeons. Correct, yeah, exactly. The world of Sonic the Hedgehog has been thrust into a not-so-dark, not-so-stormy, hard-boiled detective story that probably nobody saw coming. Follow Sonic and the intrepid Chaotix Detective Agency as they take on their biggest case yet. This high-flying, action-packed adventure will take them across the world, fighting for every clue they can find. It's one heck of a tale Which is good Because this story might Be the only thing that can save Their lives Well if that's all I can just dispose of you Wait what? 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