The Dark Remembers | Shadowdark RPG Episode 9 | The Glass Cannon Podcast

Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there, integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time, from startups to scale-ups online, in-person and on-the-go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com. Hey, what's going on guys? It's your good buddy Joe O'Brien, and I want to thank you for listening to the Glass Cannon Network. Because you are here, because you're listening, you know that we're committed to making high quality entertainment. We want you to feel like you're here at the table, laughing with us, crying with us, celebrating with us, because you are becoming an official member of the NACH by joining our subscription service is by far the best way that you can support all of the creators here at the GCN. And not only that, you'll also unlock hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of exclusive podcasts, videos, campaigns, side quests, and behind the scenes high drinks that you just can't get on the public feed. And it's all ad-free. If you're ready for even more laughs, for more danger and more GCN, head to jointhenace.com and subscribe. Let's join thenaish.com. I can barely see the road from here I can touch and hold the things I'll never be In my shadowed eye I'm the same It's fight or flight on a judge's front day I can barely see the road from here and we'll be back Hello and welcome to the Glass Cannon podcast. We're a bunch of good time pals. Yeah, get it up, Boston chops and play an actual play podcast of your favorite tabletop role-playing games. We're making them. We're not just playing. We're not playing actual play podcasts. I don't know what the proper verb is. That's not it though. No, it's definitely not playing. We are playing, but we're making the podcast. Creating. Creating is fun too. Yeah. So we're not playing. We're not having fun is what Jerry's trying to say. That's not what I was saying. It's a lot of fun. But if you're having fun, here's what I want you to do. I want you to subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you're watching this right now, just go like this. And you subscribe. Freedom, cause any money. Do that. And then if you're just listening to podcasts, leave a review, a little download on Apple podcasts or Spotify. It's huge. Even if you subscribe and get the ad free version, give us that sweet little download and review. It really helps. Follow us on Instagram at the glass cannon and the fourth and most important one is check out our subscription service, service, service, service, join the nash.com. We are recording this in the past, but you in the future might already be experiencing a very exciting update to our subscription service. So I wish I knew for sure. So I could tell you more, but I can't. In the meantime, what are you having for lunch today? Oh, I hadn't even thought about it. It wasn't expecting that question. What did you think I was going to ask? I don't know what you were going to ask. I wasn't expecting you to talk to me. I was going to ask you something. Oh, okay. Is it lunch related? And then I forgot immediately. When you pointed at me and said, what are you having for lunch? It went out of my head. It was something about what you just said. Something about podcasts. Oh, no, I was going to say you're open was so sloppy. I feel like we need to do actual theater warm-ups before episodes. Oh, yeah. The stretch our lips. The tip of the tongue. I don't like that stuff. I know. I used to like in high school, we first started doing it. I was like, this is so weird. And then you started to think it's normal. And then when you look back again, you're like, that's insane. Oh my God. I mean, I had a whole process every time before I took the stage. It was different for stand-up. Stand-up, I would just run through my bits over and over again. But like for theater, I mean, I had this whole warm-up that it had to be alone for 45 minutes. I'm not surprised at all. You sound like a joy to be with. Yeah, but I mean, like it really helped me get in the zone. But then other times I remember just showing up to the theater light and be like, fire, I'm doing it. And then having a color performance to be like, I really need to be doing this. Right, exactly. We're such different performers. So different. I come into auditions. I'm like spilling my coffee on the script that I have not memorized. And I'm like, hi. Sorry, I'm late. You don't show up to the first rehearsal with your script memorized? She said audition. Audition, audition. Okay. If you show up to the first rehearsal with script memorized for any of my plays, I would be like, no. Yeah, I wouldn't show up. If you're constantly rewriting it. Yeah, and also we have to figure it out. Very unprofessional to not have it. No, I need the blocking. I need the blocking. That's how you say, well, if you're doing Shakespeare, I'm not expecting a change. If I'm doing a Matthew Capricasa joint, then now I know. But now we know. If you're going out for Matthew stuff. They need lots of rewrites. Now we know. I know an actor who... So work in progress. I knew an actor, he was late. He ran, he was running late one day. Didn't get to do his warm. He's like, okay, I gotta figure out something to do to get me warmed up. So he was like a... Give me a hand. ...brought my house. Yeah, that was nice. Can you get me warmed up? That would have been nice. He ran the seats of the theater. So he went down to the theater. And then he was like, great, new warm up. Because he was like, he had a great show. He felt great. And then he started doing shows at the Muni, which are 10,000 seat theaters. And then he was like, he's super position is bad. So now he's like, I guess I gotta run. He gets there three hours early. We had to run the seats in the middle of the summer. And then go and then take a shower and then go into the show. Well, you make fun of warm ups, but you guys do push ups backstage before every live show. Is it just to make your packs look juicier? Like to get that pump? Is it to wake you up? Are you hoping people are like, look at the fucking set on caps tonight? Number one. Tell what you're hoping for. Number one, obviously. What a silly question. Number two, I'm not making fun of warm ups. Okay. And also we do the push ups backstage because of competition. And I have yet to ever beat Matthew or Kate. So I do it just to shame myself continually because I'm the worst at them. I've seen these push ups, none of them count as push ups. I had a little, a literal former Navy intelligence officer who was embedded with seals. Tell me I had perfect form. Oh, okay. Well, then far be it from me. Were you a Navy seal? He might not been talking about your push ups. Well, talking about perfect for sweet ass. Well, that's fine too. Either way, I had a, I was doing a warm up, a group warm up in college for a guest director. And there was a, like a chair, put a chair in the middle of a circle of like 30 actors. And so we call people, this is like, describe the chair, describe the chair. What do you see? It's like, uh, it's black. Uh, it has metal legs and he's talking about, he's coming around to me and he was just like, taste the chair. He literally said, it's like, if he was like, they say, Oh, well, I imagine it tastes like licorice. I was like, no, no, no, taste the chair. And so I walked up and I licked the chair. And he was like, what does the chair taste like? And I said, it's funny, it tastes a little like chicken. And I did not get cast in his show. Wow. That's a good bit. It was a fun bit. I thought it was pretty funny. And at the time, that probably wasn't hack. Like that was probably the first time someone ever said, early, early fifties. So the everybody was like, chicken joke hadn't been made. I think I was the first one. I think I pioneered that. Wow. Impressive. What about you? Do you do anything before a show? When you're on the train or drive, you don't drive in anymore. Do you sit there and be like, getting in the zone? That's the thing is like, I train in now rather than drive in because of stress. And so I do lose some of that opportunity. I do miss that. Like in the car, like running lines or talking in character or singing music even just to get your throat loosened up and pumped up. I do find and maybe it's just getting older, like I do have to warm my voice up. I never had to warrant like not properly warm my voice up. I used to sing and just like scream and do whatever. And now we record so often, voiceover work, acting like all the other things I do, I will lose my voice if I don't really properly like wake it up in the morning. If I just go like full in on a recording day or live show or something, especially with like our VIP meet and greets, I'll like fully lose my voice. So I find now it's not like the mentalness of it. It's literally like do some vocal, like do some, you know, the stupid shit, but it works. So Bob Odenberg, I really should do it. He tore one of his vocal cords and he was, he messed, his voice is messed up for like a couple years. That's a fear of mine. I find as long as you talk, that that's enough warm up for me. And a lot of my warmest acts, Hey, leave your brother alone. Doesn't mean you have to hit him. Those are my warm ups. You really appreciate your full vocal range. Ready to record. That's why you come in already. Get him emotionally ready too. Oh man. I should have kids. I did better performance. We'll be right back after this quick break. Get ready for some Shadow Deck. Hey, what's up, Nace? Quick break here to thank one of our sponsors for this week's episode. The Huckleberry RPG is back to keep sponsoring us. So excited to be sponsored by such a cool product. Another RPG out there in the space that I'd love to play if I had some time to get into play it. But for you guys, if you're looking for something new, something to shake up your, your game night with your friends, your good buddies, how about checking out the Huckleberry RPG, which is a weird West RPG. If you're looking for something Western, something where you can play an iconic rough as tough as nails sort of hero in a Western landscape, but one that's touched with a bit of the supernatural called the weird. There's all kinds of different monsters and strange energies that twist the environment, uh, you know, making a, the rough life on the frontier, just a little bit rougher for our heroes. But the thing is your hero is yours to build completely customized. It is, there aren't like classes per se. There's just ways that you can build your character in the way that you want your character called a Maverick is the way that you take it in there. And it can be any kind of a range of personality and abilities. Also, speaking of personality, the mechanics, the rules, all that stuff is very bespoke and flexible and takes a backseat to narrative. It's a really a narrative focused game where you can learn the rules in about 20 minutes and just start playing, especially if you get the, uh, what's it called, the quick draw edition. So I urge you to support those that support us, go and check out the Huckleberry RPG, go to www.huckleberryrpg.com slash pre-order. I can't believe I said, but you know what I mean. Huckleberry RPG.com slash pre-order and use code GCP5 to get five bucks off. Go support them. Thank them for supporting us and have a good time with your friends playing a little weird West RPG action. Huckleberry RPG.com use code GCP for five bucks off. Or exploring some incredible history with your family. With up to a third off most rail travel, a rail card can help you save on train journeys all around Great Britain. Find the one for you at railcard.co.uk. Deas and Seas apply. Hi, I'm Brian Lucci, a former Chicago cop, now I'm a producer at Chicago PD, and I'd like to introduce you to the official one Chicago podcast. The first ever behind the scenes look at the iconic TV shows. We're talking Chicago Fire, Chicago PD and Chicago Med. Join me each week for an exclusive conversation with the writers, the crew members and the stars. Void's doing the right thing for Void. Check out the One Chicago podcast from Wolf Entertainment and USG Audio. Available now wherever you get your podcast. Of the Regency Era. You might know it as the time when Bridgeton takes place, or as 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. Volcker history's new season is all about the Regency Era, the balls, the gowns and all the scandal. Listen to Volcker history, Regency Era, wherever you get podcasts. Hey, welcome back. I want to thank our sponsors for our shadow dark campaign. I jump right in and make them nervous. It scares me every time. It's our sponsors. Where are my notes? Where are my notes? Norse foundry for all your random number generating needs. That's a Natty 12 and a Natty 18. Fuck. I mentioned last week, New Year, New Dice. They do this promo every year, but I forgot to mention that you do have to put a code and it's called New Year, New Dice. So if you put that in a checkout, you get 15% off your order. Well, hopefully that was in the description notes. It was in the description notes, but New Year, New Dice, all together, all small. I want to throw this bag at you. What the fuck? Troy. For the listening audience. Troy crumpled up a paper bag and chucked it right at Joe's forehead. Are you okay? Are you okay? I think I'm all right. It's still tingling. Let's see it, Doctor. I saw the bag and I'm like, I think this will be fun and I just nailed you. It sounded really good. What would you say if one of your kids did that to the other one? Oh, it's happened three times this one. You should know. That was so mean. It made a fun sound though. They got to hear the crumple. Throw it back, but you have that hat on. It's like armor. I'd have to get such a perfect straight on. It was meant to hit you in the chest. You had no idea it was coming either. I didn't know what was going on because you picked up the bag and you crumpled it basically on your mic. And then you were like, I should have crumpled it. I could see you through your thought process going, I didn't thought crumple was on mic. And then you did it again. Yeah, I know. It was just kind of fun. Oh, whoa. It was a much better shot from here. It was the audience Cindy tried to throw it at you. I was trying to sneak it. I was trying to figure it out. The no look, she had Francis. Shockingly, the no look pass is a little inaccurate. Also want to thank Foundry Virtual Tabletop, our other sponsor. Thank you Foundry. Thank you Foundry. And bags, our third sponsor. All right, before I forget, I'm going to throw these at you too. These are your caps. I'm good. Thank you. Oh, over here. Max capacity. Max capacity. Oh, we'll never get that one. If you can't reach it, it doesn't count. Do you need a cap? I need one. So bad. Look at that. That was weak little bounce. You want a bounce kick? Whoa. We're doing not bouncing caps. This table is one of a kind. Yeah. Let's throw more stuff. It's just cringing every time one hits a table. Stop it. All right. So let's do this. This will be fun. It's new year. This is where seven episodes in the can. This is starting the eighth episode. I don't want to wait 40 episodes before I check in. How is everyone feeling about the new campaign? Wait, we're eight episodes in the can. This is the ninth episode. Sure. That doesn't sound right, though. We're seven episodes in the can. Oh, you're right. You're right. You're right. Eight episodes in. This is nine. This is nine. Yeah. Sydney, you were right. I got mixed up. I take another cap. No, I'm kidding. How's everybody feeling about the campaign so far? I fucking love it. But I'm also too worried right now. I'm so mad at this point. Right. Yeah. I'm so frustrated because we made so much progress. I think I said in the last episode, I felt like I was playing a Bloodborne game because it does feel that way. We made so much progress and we just lost some footing recently. It's so frustrating knowing that to accomplish all these things we want to accomplish, it takes days. It takes rations. It takes fatigue. This world is so hard. It's realistic. It's so hard. We're not big magic. We're level one. I feel... Never trust big magic. Never trust big magic. We hate... In the pocket of big magic. All my homies hate big magic. But I feel very into this story. I feel super immersed and I'm feeling like these feelings because I just want to see what happens. I want to know, how does it end? What happens? Okay. So you like it. You're scared but you like it. Skid, you're enjoying things. Okay. Yeah, I'm loving it. I feel like you're in a warm blanket. You're like, yeah, this is home. Anything you'd like to see differently or like to see more of. Well, I made my feelings now in a couple episodes ago and we implemented my suggested changes and I think they're good. Okay. I'd like to see more treasure. More treasure, yeah. More XP. I feel like we're going too slow. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we're doing a lot. I think if the way that it might be meant to work is like, I don't think it takes that long to get to level two, but it gets progressively... It's possible. Longer each time. There are... Once you start crawling, things change. You know what I mean? I have a feeling. That's true. Without saying too much. I just have a feeling once you start crawling the XP. Aren't we crawling? Not in the traditional sense. No, we haven't had a dungeon. So a dungeon is... I thought crawling was everything basically. Crawling can be whatever it wants to be. Moving through danger. But when I say crawling, I mean like straight up. A dungeon. And whatever that can take, it doesn't always have to be a dungeon or a cape. It could be a cape since we get whatever. Castle in ruins, for example. Then you're going to see more of a bump. I think I agree. Like I... More treasure, more XP, but also like we've found unique ways to deal with situations because of our low level. Like not attacking things necessarily. It's sneaking in, doing these things. And I feel like we deserve some sort of reward from that thinking, even though we're not technically... We didn't slay everybody in the camp and take their treasure. Because why would we do that? Right. So we didn't get a pearl, but we did it. We rescued the prisoner. I don't know. I just feel like maybe more XP. Yeah, we're used to a different way of rewards. Like action and reward. And it definitely feels slow, but it feels right to me. It feels appropriately dark, grim dark. Speaking of grim dark, there is one other change I would like to discuss. Let's get you cooking with changes. From curse scroll to the enduring wounds. Alternate rule. Okay. Whereas like if you do go to zero, you roll on a table and there could be some lasting effects from your injury. Oh, yeah, I like that. Especially where it only affects Joe. We're going to go to zero more than you'd think. No, I know, but I think that I would love for their... Oh, wow. This is intense. During wounds. I mean, is everyone just so debilitating that you can't... A lot of them. A lot of them. A lot of them are pretty bad. Tastes 26 from curse scroll too. If a PC survives going to zero HP after a severe injury, they might suffer an enduring wound. Oh, yeah. That character must pass a DC12 con check. Oh, okay. Yeah. Roll D20, Joe. I'll let you decide if you want to add this to your character or not, as we are just toying around with this rule. Natural four. All right, so you biffed it. All right, so give me a D20 roll. Let's see. Let's just see what it would be. Cheating. I'll throw it in the bag at you. 16. All right, you're permanently dead. You're groggy. You lose your next action. So it's not a... That's the best one. Oh, but it's meant to be in combat. So it's not enduring? No, there are... Give me another D20 roll just for an example. Yeah, you permanently lose one hit point. 12. Stubborn bleed. Lose one D4 HP per round. Last one D4 rounds. This has to be... You permanently lose a point of charisma. But it says from a severe injury. You go to zero. Which is just going to zero. And failing a con roll. Ruptured spleen. You permanently lose one point of con. What permanently lose strength? Dax like... That's gotta be from my gut. If you're only natural 20. Well, look, I just think it requires play testing on our part. Like, I'm totally down for that if we don't go to zero all the time. Right, right. This is the worst. If we're always going to zero, maybe I'll get a little... This is the first time. This completely destroyed individual. Maybe we can like rebalance that. But I mean, with the caps, the cap... Sure, sure. Yeah, that's true. I could just spend a luck token on the con roll. I'd really love the idea of... Because it's just like... This is some of the things like in going down in other modern games, you go down and it's just like, you pop right back up. And it's like, I want to feel like the fear of having a near death experience. I want to... That I want that to be meaningful. Yeah. And some of these are just really interesting role play opportunities. Yeah. Muzalim. Yeah. How the... Yeah. And I mean, you can just retire a character whenever you want. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you roll 20, natural 20, it's a miracle. You have advantage on your next attack. Yeah. Oh, of course. Just roll the natural 20. Real quick, boom. Natural 20. Sand everywhere. You're blinded from 1d4 round. Sand everywhere. You like go face down in the sand. Or so are like the enemy kicks it up when you're... Toad toad. Let's start about... Hold on. We need to make a decision on this now if we're going to do it or not right now. Well, I feel like... We can always change our mind, but like... The spirit of it is... But the next time it happens... You go down from a severe wound. I feel like that should come from a real like... Big hit. Big... Something big. Like that was a combat. A crit maybe. If you go down with a crit, you get a lot of hurt. You're in full HP and you go down. Yeah. Something like that. I feel like we'll feel it out and I want to leave it to you. I like that. Like a one hit down or a crit. Or a crit. I like a crit. A crit. Do you feel like we should go to the table for this? You know, we can like talk about... Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I love the idea of... Definitely a crit. Like a crit. Going down from a crit. That makes a ton of s-hits. This is one too is... Offer this up to the Nash and expand upon the D20 table to a D100 table. Sure. Things can really involve all the Nash. This is the thing because I always reflect on the old Middle Earth role-playing, the Iron Crown Enterprise game. They had like a really extensive critical table, like sort of like this with like really gory kind of results. And I always love that. I always implemented that in like my D&D games and everything. So I love the idea. Yeah. It's in Alien. It's in the original Alien RPG. Yeah. Like the D66 table. Oh yes. Yes. Right. Blade Runner 2. The same thing. Of severe wounds. Yeah. Let's talk about a little recap from perhaps Maddy Caps. From last week's... Maddy Recaps. Last week's the output. I always forget where the episodes begin because so many things happen. I know they blend together. But we begin... That's what I believe. We begin with our Wookie Prisoner trick. Yes. We don the robes of the cultists of the Embered God and we snuck into their camp. We did a two forked or two pronged fork maneuver. We forked them up. We forked them up. Yeah. We forked the shit out of them. What the hell is doing this? And we put a few to sleep and then... And we killed another one. And then unfortunately they raised the alarm as we were springing Regina and the remaining brothers as we got them out of the cage. However, then we created some chaos on the camp. We started a fire work. We laid some caltrops down. Everything we got away. However, that was awesome. However, we then got back to where we left the kids in a tree to wait for us. Guarded by a Lansing shire. He was dead. He put up a fight but had been slashed terribly. And... The fight is immense size. The fight is immense. And scimitar. Size, scimitar and chainmail. And the kids were gone. We assumed, I think, we deduced relatively with evidence that it was probably the werewolf or were creature that had captured the kids before had taken them back. And then we got into a large discussion, a lengthy discussion about what to do next. Warwick and Ellison wanted to go after the kids immediately. And Farrow and St pointed out that that would be exceedingly dangerous in an already exceedingly dangerous world near low on rations. And for the moment, we gave in. Then we camped and St did some hunting. And however, all he saw was a brown bear. And wisely decided not to pursue. Not to engage. Not to engage. That's where we left off, right? So we're basically... Oh, and we burned. We burned. Nelvin. Nelvin Lansing Shire. And we're basically out of food. And we're out of food. Right. But you didn't want to try and kill the bear because you were afraid it would kill you. So... Also, it wouldn't be good, right? Bear meat. Very gamey, right? Bear meat? You can eat it. If you're starving, sure. Yeah. I also said other traps. Bear meat's good. Maybe the rabbit traps will be good, but that's... It's musky too, right? They have arm bears. They have a musk gland. They have a musk gland. I don't know. Am I making that up? I never hear about people eating bear. You turn your nose up at bear. People eat bear? Yeah. Of course they eat bear. Did you play Red Dead Redemption 2? No. Skin a whole bear. You eat all kinds of bears. Yes, bear meat can be good. Described as a dark rich red meat similar to a mix of venison and pork. That sounds delicious. Oh, man. The flavor varies based on the bear's diet. Why are we eating more bears? Gotta make sure you cook that bear through though. Don't want to eat a raw bear. Killing a bear is... Aren't they also endangered? Aren't there some species of bears that are endangered? Yeah. Is that what you're worried about as we're in the woods? Are we killing too many bears in the glowing for your taste? I mean, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say of the ecology is after the cataclysm that hit this world. I do. I want to give a shout out to the Marty Stafford's Wild America and the man who loved bears, Ark, on that show on PBS. If you haven't watched it, check it out on YouTube. Sounds familiar. Yeah. All right. So you burned a Nelvin Lansingshire. Nelvin Lansingshire, the brothers wanted to carry him back to Marin's hold, but having carried him... Idiots. Day, day and a half. You were like, we can't... It's a rotting body. We can't do this anymore. Open wounds. Right. It's inviting, inviting more bears. A bunch of flesh we can't even eat. We could eat it. We could eat it. But I think, I feel like they would put up a... Be upset. They'd be upset about that. I'll say as the night continues, we just, we come back to that funeral pyre and it's just, it's all blackened now. Maybe wisps of smoke are still coming off. What was once the body of Nelvin. But we'll say one of you has the watch and the brothers aren't sleeping. They're just sitting nearby. Regina has fallen asleep, but the brothers are just sitting nearby the pyre, kind of not looking at it so much as through it. Taking all of this in. Grateful to be alive, but... They lost their youngest brother. Who's up with them? I'd say that I am, Warwick is tossing and turning, basically. Okay. He keeps like shuffling around, shuffling around. Eventually just sort of sits up, gives up. He goes over and sits down next to the, he'll put some more wood on the campfire in order to keep us warm. And he'll sit down next to them, just in silence for a bit. I can't sleep. Keep thinking about those kids. And he rubs his brow. Seems like your brother put up a good fight. His, if he was hit full strength, I don't know what would have taken those children, but he would have, he would have saved them. He was a good man. Was. I have to get used to saying that. Glad I brought him up. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. Glad our parents are dead. And want to have to tell them their baby's gone. How'd you start working for Regina and Martin? We, we had been a part of this village a few miles to the west that suffered heavy casualties during the war. There wasn't much left. So we had evacuated with several other villages. And there was a disagreement at a certain point, a schism between the survivors. And my brothers and I just decided we should go our own way. And so we found Marin told and we're looking for work. And met Regina and Martin. And they were in need of our services and they took good care of us, fed us, housed us, made us feel like family. Were you in the army? No, no. We don't want to get involved with that. But sort of inevitable that everyone is touched by it. I can't be sure what it is. Unlike anything I've ever seen, you hear these stories, fairies and werewolves. This place has them. And I don't know how to kill something like that. But I feel like I have to find a way. Why? Why do you have to stop these things? You've survived the war. Not many people can say that. Start a new life. You don't need to be a hero. Not trying to be a hero. Just trying to do what I signed up for. Just help these people have a peaceful life. I mean, I'm not interested in going off and have a peaceful life myself, while others are suffering. And these children, I mean, can you get more innocent than that? To be grabbed up, lost in this place, kidnapped, taken away from home, terrified, alone, and know that I'd want to know that someone was coming for me. That's all. Yeah. Guess you just learn after a while that no one's coming. There really is no safety other than what you can provide yourself. Find a job, get a roof over your head, make sure you can eat, and keep your head down. Monsters, there's no winning against them. We found ways before. We found ways before. I mean, the army was very strong, very powerful. I feel so cut off, so alone. When you work as a unit, you're so much more powerful than you are by yourself. Need more people. With more of us, we could take this thing down. Stop it from plaguing the lands. Or who knows, maybe we can't. Maybe it needs some sort of magic. So I wish he would help. And he just looks over at Sleeping Faro. He's so powerful. I can't do it without him. I hate to admit it, but you start to learn that in the army. You learn that you can't do it yourself. And that's why you're all together. And Faro's awake. He looks asleep. His back turned away, but he's hearing this. And he feels this hot burning shame. He's recurring cowardice that he's still feels it. And it's like, he just can't get away from it. And the skin is flushed. He's sitting there. And he's kind of cursing himself in his own head for not wanting to help, for not offering to help in this moment. Why don't you want to go get them? You're looking for a, you're looking for peace, quiet, solitude. It's a terrible tragedy, but it isn't my tragedy. What's happened to them is beyond our control. Stuff like this happens all the time doesn't make it right, but we can't move through life fighting everyone else's battles, there's enough battles on the home front to fight. The, my CEO who died when the blast happened. It was a night gallant, the 10th cavalry. And he spoke to me often of the concepts of honor and chivalry and justice. But rolled in it is this, his faith in the lost. You know of the lost. Heard of it, but it's not something we believe in. Well, he convinced me pretty well. These nameless guards that represent those forgotten about. Those who perhaps can't find their way back. And the thing is, that sort of all of us, we're all lost. We're all wondering. And the way we said it in the 10th, all we have is each other. At least that, at least that makes you feel like you're moving in a direction. And with all of them dead, I don't know which direction I'm going. So I envy you, your certainty for what it is you want. And I'm torn in a lot of different ways. I want to help those kids. But Pharaoh's right. They're already infected. I don't have the means to kill a wolf, a werewolf. I don't have the means to heal them even if I got them out. I don't have any food. And I don't have a bloody army anymore. What are you going to do when we get back? Your caravan's been destroyed. You're going to be out of work. How are you going to get back on your feet? Be honest, I haven't thought that far ahead. I just assumed Regina and my wife were dead. And I don't know what to do. I just assumed Regina and Martin would figure that out, but maybe that was naive of me. Just grieving has sort of thrown a wrench into my plans. All the plans of my brother sure will figure it out. Just be good to get back behind those walls. Well, I'm sorry for your brother. I'm going to find the creature that did that to him. And I'm going to kill it. Well, that's very noble of you, but what would of advice if you're interested? Try and figure out who you're doing that for. Is it for my brother, these kids, yourself, something else? I'd make sure you know they answered that question before you go. Trapsing back up there. Sorry, I'm just rambling now. I probably should, probably should sleep. He looks over at his brother. His brother's already kind of nodded off. He's just sitting there sleeping. We get some rest. I can't sleep. I'll stay up for a while longer watching and then I'll wake up seat. And he just kind of like tucks his brother neatly, like leans him over. So he's not sitting in that awkward position. So he'll wake up with a pain in his neck and he lays nearby. And you're left alone in the camp. He's just staring into the fire, just thinking over and over again. Who is he doing this for? What is he doing this for? At least you said you were waiting for Saint. I think it'd be more interesting if you woke up. My turn for the watch? Yeah, your turn to watch or leave him. Okay, yeah, I'll walk over and wake up. Alison. Alison. And he wakes up and you can tell like his eyes are all spuffy and like he's been crying. Like if he was asleep, but he clearly like was weeping quietly in his bedroll. You're up on watch. Thank you. I'm gonna try to get some sleep. Can't sleep. No, keep thinking about this. Keep thinking about Marin. Born to be. Me too. Yeah, I know. I did, it occurred to me. Nelvin. He was able to wound the creature. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. This might be our only opportunity and if we can find her when she's in her human form. Wounded. That's possible. Moving back and forth between the forms would heal her. But we can get there during the day and find her wounded. We might have our best shot at killing them. And it's possible. I don't know. I'd have to research it more, but it's possible. Killing the one that turns you might restore kids to their original form. I don't know. I don't know that for sure though. Alison, I've been over and over it. How can we just leave them? We know where they are. We know where they are. We can leave them because, look, we might not like it, but Pharaoh's right. Pharaoh's right. We don't know how to kill it. And even if it's not there and we just take the kids, we don't know how to heal them. And if we bring them to the Maran's hold, the creature's going to track us. And we bring a werewolf to Maran's hold. There's so many questions. Unless we kill the wolf. But I've heard these stories, these stories that they can't die. But even if you kill it the way you would kill a man, it comes back. And I don't know what the secret is. I don't know what the magic is. Burn it. Dismember it. Do you know that? No, I don't know it. I don't know it for sure. I mean, we also have nothing to eat. That's true, whether or not we go. Can I tell you something? Yeah. When I fall asleep at night, I dream. I dream. I dream. I dream. I dream. I'm back at home. My wife, my daughter. There never was a war. I never left. But here's this strange thing. Said every time, every night, it doesn't feel like a dream. It feels real. Every day. Foraging for herbs. People from the village coming to us for poultices and remedies and just a hard scrabble, everyday life we lived. And this, I wake up to this and none of this feels real. Like this is the dream. Like this is the dream. Or the nightmare. Part of using magic. My teacher, the one I learned from the war, is being able to hold two realities in your head at once. Rules the world as you know it. And then a whole other reality. And then a whole other reality. It can break those rules. It can make people fall asleep. Fire off. It's four sat in my hand. But here's my point. I don't know which one is real anymore. So I have to behave in my dreams. And in the real world, whichever one that is. As if they're both real. Or as if they're both dreams. If this is a dream, you could kill a werewolf, right? Yes. But also if this is not a dream, can we live with ourselves if we don't? Sometimes death is the easier way. You say, I want to go do that thing. This happened to me. I wasn't with the unit long. And we had gotten into, that's a long story. I don't need to go into details, but rest assured, some villagers had been taken off. I owe them the Bayordos. And we knew that they were going to enslave them. And I wanted to go after them. I was insistent that I was a low ranking soldier. I see, oh, he, he refused to let me go. He said, he said that was the easy way. If I went there, if we all charged off after them, away from our supply lines, without using our without keeping our wits about us, we die and we die heroes. Perhaps we don't help those people. We help those people by getting stronger and defeating the army. It was hard for me to take them, but it's easy to follow orders. You're told what to do when you do it. But now, I'm not used to voting, Ellison. I usually don't get a vote. It was easier that way. It was hard, but I didn't feel personally responsible. So I know how you feel. I feel like we're making the decision to let Marin and Barnaby die. It's worse than death to become monsters. Right. There is a chance, and Pharaoh's a very wise man. There's a chance that if we get stronger, if we get fed, if we learn how to defeat this thing, the kids will still be alive when we finally track it down. It didn't seem interested in killing them. No. That might be true, and it might be the best shot we have. But the thing we should consider is that with every day we let go. And if it is true that that creature wants to become their mother, incorporate them into their brood, they may not want to return. Well, I can't. Well, I can't help what they want. I just, I know what their parents want. And I'll tell you what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to go to Wardenwood and tell their parents that we left their children behind. I mean, we could go. We could just go. And if they don't want to come, they don't have to come. And I, I don't think we'll help them that way. We could get lucky, but I think it's a low percentage chance of success. I put the odds. Five to one against. Never tell me the odds. Never tell me the odds. We're going. Well, let me try to get some rest. I'm not. Yes, I'm sorry. I'm keeping you up. So we can ask him again in the morning, see if a little sleep changed their minds. Remind them that it's hurt now and it won't be hurt a week from now. And it won't be one werewolf we're facing a week from now. There'll be three. Get some rest. And he'll lay down to sleep. She lay down to sleep. We flash to the morning as you're all breaking camp. Breone Corvin are like collecting some of the ashes from the the pyre, the makeshift pyre that you made. Like they don't know if they're taking leaves or whatever. They're just, it's more of a symbolic gesture. They're just trying to collect something that was their brother. And Regina looked to you and says, so what's the plan? I'm not exactly sure where we are, but I think we're at still at least about two days back to to Marin's. Am I correct? Three probably, right? It is minimum three actually. Three days. And where are you are out of running out of food? I think during that when she's asking Saint is collecting the rabbit traps as he's coming back to camp. Did he? She caught two rabbits, so two rations. So he comes back holding two rabbits and flings them up and kind of looks at the group with this look in his eye of like this, this is it. And he flings them over his shoulders as he continues to pack up. I just imagine this like melancholy over the camp, you know, everybody's quiet. And then Allison looks at work and he looks at the group and he goes, I would like, I'm, I just want to say one thing. I'll respect our vote, but I want to make one last attempt to sway you to go after those children. The creature is hurt now. Come back. All right, I'll go. I listened to your talk for fucking hours last night. All right, you got to me. All right. We'll go. We'll go get the kids. We're going to starve to death either way. So it's fine. It's fine. We'll go. And Saint also just raises his hand. So you'll go then? So you'll go then? Yeah. Ow. Don't. Don't. It hits Allison and smiles. Just if you're going to have conversations like that, just keep them away from the camp. It could come fucking sleep. Sorry. All right. I'm sorry. I know you were awake. Who could sleep? Exactly. Sorry. From your, this is Regina. She's like from your discussion the other day, we'd be at least 24 miles, two days away from this cave, which would put us even further away from Marin's hold. We owe you our lives where we will travel with you. And I'm useless. That's why I have guards. They've got these daggers. Sickles now. Sickles. And armor. Sickles. And armor. We will help as best we can if you really think this is the best decision. It's the right thing to do. There's better game that way too. We hunted in those woods before. All that's here is a big bear. And I think it would be better we get out of here regardless. Yeah. I'm like, part of this is, is, is shame being shamed for cowardice, feeling, you know, kind of like called out. And part of it is just like fear that a rift between any number of our group could destroy this, what little sort of chance at safety that like that I have, you know, can't lose anyone, can't afford to lose anyone. Anyone decides to like go their own way or just to part up with us and everything. And that would, could be, could be completely disastrous. And I think similarly to Pharaoh, who couldn't sleep, Saint, who was sleeping, had horrible nightmares. Like doesn't feel like he slept at all. Just had these insanely bizarre dreams of being chased by a wolf and being a rat, like transforming into a rabbit himself. And then explaining to Marin, like having a flashback of talking to little Marin about the rabbit traps he had set one night at camp and like showing her how to catch a rabbit without killing it in the snare and then how you like prepare. So it was like a weird dream where he kind of remembered that they had spent so much time with these kids. And it just, he also feels this shame and guilt and knows that if it came to splitting the party, he would just agree to go with them because it would be a death sentence if that was the case. So when he was getting the rabbits this morning, just like had flashes of these dreams and stuff and just feels so somber and quiet. And that's why he agreed immediately. Yeah, for the record, we didn't talk about this at all. No. This wasn't something we discussed like pre-ep. Like we should go get the kids. Let's pivot the story that way. Yeah. Whatever. Like I seriously sat down thinking we were not doing it. I mean, you know, that's what I thought driving it. All right. Which direction do you want to go? We'll follow the blood trail. Yeah, follow the blood trail. Yeah. That'd be back up to the this northwest. Oh, well, no. Oh, well, let's go northwest and see if we can catch the blood trail. Yeah. All right. So you're going to, because if we can't, we still have a destination. You're going to make your way in the direction of the cave where you originally found the children. Yep. Let's see what happens right after. Hey, everybody. It's me, Internet sensation skid mar here to talk to you about Othera from Crit Head's Gaming. Crit Head's Gaming is a U.S. veteran owned one man operation focused on classical gaming adventure module writing. And Othera is a new world for you and your table to explore. Their debut adventure module introduces you to this world as you race to uncover the elves' treasonous plot to reignite a world war gone cold. It is a steampunk meets sword and sorcery setting. Fireballs meets gunpowder. What to go wrong? Seriously, check out the cover art of this. That's the air. I love airships. It's awesome. The book has everything you need to introduce your table to Othera. It is available in three variants, Shadow Dark, Castles and Crusades, and a system agnostic variant that uses an intuitive one to 10 scale, five being average. So it's easy to play in any TTRPG system, even non-D20 systems. You can follow at Crit Head's Gaming on the platform, formerly known as Twitter, and share your stories in Othera, and it could become official canon in the game. Which is pretty cool. So yes, follow at Crit Head's Gaming, A, at C-R-I-T-H-E-A-D-S-G-A-M-I-N-G, on the aforementioned social media platform for new product releases that pick up Othera Cataclysm today and steal yourselves for the Cataclysm. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great. We love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent, decoveny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. Welcome to the realms of peril and glory. Explore the mechanically magical vistas of veil, the paranormal mysteries of liminal London, and the cyberpunk chaos of cyborg. Be awed by our incredible guests from familiar shows like Ox Venture and No Rolls Bard. Search realms of peril and glory to find out more. 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. We're back and we're moving. Cook it! There we go. Sidney doesn't like it. No, Sidney hates it. Roll to the Northwest to see if you're able to catch a trail. You're rolled to the Northwest. And who's your best tracker? Would that be you, Saint? Probably both Pharaoh and Saint. Go ahead and give me some wisdom rolls. 13. That's definitely, that'll be better than mine. 16. 13, 16. I can roll too. I've got, okay, wisdom. 17. Don't really have tracking. I don't really have tracking. Yeah. It's just, I'd be guessing. From here you don't see anything, any trace. If you had imagined, this is a huge swath. Unless you're going back to that tree and seeing if there's any trail from there, you're not seeing anything. But you're also not bothered at all in the first half of the day. And then... Sorry. So we already consumed our rations for last night and now we've got two more. That we'll need two. We didn't have enough for everybody. We didn't have enough for everybody. We did last night. We did rations last episode. Yeah, rations ran out yesterday. Everybody ate. Now we have two and that's it. So Saint also needs... I do, I have one. Okay, so we need four more to cover everybody. So Saint would also hunt during our time. I can hunt too. Like I have the Ranger background too. Yeah. Okay. So you're hunting as you're walking, which would slow you down a little bit, but you're trying to... Do you need food? I actually don't... I don't think it'd be the worst thing in the world to slow down, because as it's... We don't... We want to... The one thing we want to ensure is that we arrive at the cave during the day. That's true. We don't want to get there. Let's do one hex per day instead of... That we're eating more food then. I think if we do one hex today and hunt, we stay here and hunt and we do whatever we can, or move to the next one, hunt in regardless. That way, but that way tomorrow, we can... Tomorrow we'll move two, and then the next morning we can hit the cave. Yeah. Tomorrow we'll move two. All right. So you want to stay in this hex for the rest of the day? And hunt and get some rations. Okay. No, no, no. We still move. We have... Oh, did we move already? Yeah, you moved. Okay, great. Oh, no, I see it. Okay. Okay. Great. Let's see if you're able to find anything. Between the three of you, you find three more rations. So not enough to feed everybody, but... Regina is like, you know, we're more mouths to feed. We can go a day without it. Much more than that. We are putting ourselves at risk by not feeding these men. You know, we're very grateful, but at a certain point, we need to go home. This is just not enough food. You're welcome to go if you like. You'll be putting yourself at risk. Understand. So going alone, but this is something that we as a group have to do. You can accompany us or you can go home. That's your decision. And I can set traps tonight. There's only so much game when we're here making noise, or a large group, if I could scout ahead, it would be better, but we can't do that right now. But I can set traps tonight and hopefully we'll have something in the morning for you. Okay. Okay. All right, so when we first started doing this, you know, when you had your rabbits for sale, I didn't think too much about it. And now as we continue doing it and realizing like, this food situation is going to be a situation. You know, I was going to be able to just buy rations. We might as well bring in the rules for Curse Scroll 4 and just kind of be consistent with it. And it just in a paragraph, it says PCs can go three days without consuming a ration. After that, they take 1d4 con damage per day and they die at zero. Like death at zero. It's not like you get your rolls. You just, you starve to death. A PC can forage for one ration a day with an intelligence check. So I think in lieu of, you know, sort of this homebrewed hunting, we should just straight up everybody rolls intelligence check. You succeed, including these NPCs. You get, we add rations to the fault. I think that's the best way to do it. Now you can, What about hunting? Could they use a wisdom check for hunting? It's different for courage. Yeah, hunting, you know, we'd just be making something up at this point, I think. I'd almost rather than me personally, I'd almost rather an intelligence. Oh, that's fine. I'm just asking if there was a way to cover that. My two worst stats. I've known some dumb ass hunters and they're very successful. True. Yeah, I mean, the hunting, I've just been kind of making up my own system back here that works. But I like the idea of you forage with an intelligence check. And maybe hunting is just, if you're setting traps like that, I'm just rolling randomly to determine if you find anything and if you do how many. And I can continue to do that. That's, I think that seems fair. Yeah. All right, so, and we can forage as we walk, as you were saying, like we can. Yeah. But I still think we want to stagger our arrival at the cave anyway. So, to be doing that. All right, but anyway, this is a day and we need to eat. So, here we go. We'll just see what happens. One NPC succeeded. So they were able to get one. I failed. I failed. What's the success? I got 14. Oh, so great. I, so Allison succeeded. And I succeeded as well. Okay. So you got three more rations. Plus the three that we had, right? Two rabbits. Two rabbits. We had five, right? Two rabbits and, and there was three from something. No. Three was from what the made up hunting rule was that we just did, but are we scrapping that? No, you can keep those. No, no, no. So we have five, six, eight. So eight and I already had one. Nine. That I will eat today. Yeah. Tonight. So we'll bed down tonight. So before bed, how many do you have? So mine is now gone. Not nine before bed. Nine before bed and there are seven of us. So there's two left. So there's two rations left in the morning. Brigida's just looking at you like, this is a bad idea, but we're so grateful. And if we leave, we'll die. But that's a thing. Like even if we're going back home, we'll still be facing pretty much the same situation. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Okay. So we are getting like we're, we had to get to the road. Yeah. So now we're just going. A little further. A day off the road and then back to the road and down. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Bed down for the night. Bed down for the night. So anything happened? You were asking about whether I liked this campaign. And one of the things that I do really like is like, with the campaigns we've played for the last 10 years, it's always felt like random encounters aren't really that random. They're kind of like, the GM decides if it's a moment or not to have, not to have an encounter, but to roll a random encounter. And this definitely feels like, like even when coming in today, I was like, we're heading back to Marin's Hall. That's what I thought we were doing. And I was like, that's still a journey. I like, we still, any night we could have a horrifying fight. Whereas in our previous games, it'd be like, oh, you got the people from the quest and now you're going to return to the quest giver. And you, and you just get there. Right. Like this is so different. It's so funny. Like I, and if we had been tracking rations in any other game we played, I would have been like, oh my God, this is so. But this is so intense. Yeah. So evocative. They're like, oh, we have to figure out food every day. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. So on Saints watch, you're sitting there at the camp now, a lot more bodies here, but full belly, at least for tonight. And the night air is chill, but nothing out of the ordinary. Until suddenly you feel this intense cold, localized, and almost feels like right around you, the hairs on your arm begin to stand up. If you look down at any of your exposed skin, hair starts standing up. And it's just like the temperature drops 10 degrees. You look around to see if something or someone is causing this. And in the woods, amongst the trees, first it looks like a tree, this long shadow. But then you see the shadow start to move like sway back and forth. And then dart, dart, dart. And then you lose it. From out of the woods, a figure walks towards you. I'm getting my bow. I have my bow. Okay. And I think he would yell to wake people up, but also yell to this figure and say, Hey, stop! Shadow! Stop! Don't take another step. I wake up. Huh. Guys all come. Chainmail. You all come too. On your chainmail. Chainmail, sword. Like Iron Man. Hey, silly dog. Hey, silly dog! Guys all come too and you see Saint with his bow trained on the woods and you look and you see this figure coming towards you. It does not stop. But the reason you don't fire right away is as it comes into the moonlight, you can see directly through it. It is a spectral man. And as he comes to the edge of the camp, you see Melvin Lansingshire. Oh. And he's standing there and just has like huge junk taken out of his neck. Oh my. Large claw marks on his chest and he has this sort of like blue ethereal glow about him. And he just looks like past you. It is the stench of death hangs heavy on you all. I see thousands of bodies clawing at your heels. Can you see them? No. You have left much destruction in your wake. It goes with you. Soon you will see as I say. I know not why I am here. But I will speak what I do now. The shadows that surround you are hungry and they will feast despite your best efforts. I tried to hold the line for the children, but still the night took them. And now you, you will go towards them. And suffer the same fate. You are the children now. You have been taken by the night. These tragedies will persist until you accept your fate. Choices will always be left undone and haunt your every step. And while there is no right, no wrong, no just or unjust, the dark watches and the dark remembers. And this constant agony will weigh you down as much as your open wounds. Turn back or make the only logical choice before the choice is made for you. My brothers, I look forward to seeing you. It is so much easier here. Leave them. They are cursed. Regina, thank Martin for me. And I thank you. You just sort of stands there staring. What do you do? What was it that killed you? Tell us. Was it a creature? Wolf. Wolf that walks on two legs. You injured it? Yes. I stuck the sickle in its side, but it overpowered me. It had the strength of 20 men. When you love us, leave it. Never. Take the kids. Take the children. And not try to help them. How do you give your life for it? It will destroy you. Choose your own death. Don't go that way. He looks at Ellison. Looks back at the specter. We don't have a choice. I thought that as well. I wish now I had ended my life in that cage. You still have the choice. I, Pharaoh is going to stand and pull from his pouch this makeshift holy symbol of geese that he put together himself out of like branches and rope and he holds it out. This big on specter. And I'm going to turn on dead. Yes. Classic. Okay. That's your old 20. Oh. You, you put out your holy symbol of key. What is the holy symbol of key? Do you think I got to think about that? Okay. All right. So you put this out, this aforementioned holy symbol and you turn on dead and you see Nelvin's face very quickly changed to something vile and horrible as it lunges towards you lunges towards the symbol and then just dissipates. Looking wide-eyed at Pharaoh. I mean, I think I were all this like drenched in sweat. I'm dry. Elvin is drenched in cold sweat. How did you do that? Pharaoh, what was that? I don't know. What did you do? I think I killed it. I go over to where it was and I just start kicking around in the dirt. How do you kill a ghost? See if there's anything left. I don't know, but I did it. I mean, I let a ghost tell us what to do. That wasn't him, right? Who saw it first, Regina says? Who was the first? I did. What? He just walked out of the woods? Yeah. Weird. Just showed up and it wasn't him. That wasn't him. We burned the body. We did what we were supposed to do. If it wasn't him, who was it? Something trying to stop us, something trying to lie. It was lying. We're not- How do you know it was lying? We're not cursed. How do you know we're not cursed? I certainly feel cursed. I decide my own fate. As do I. As do I, but we do all of us carry a trail of the dead with us before we did in the war. Of course we do. We fought in a war. That's what war is. I don't carry my guilt like you two do. I don't have to prove myself to anyone. Now I agreed to get the kids and I stand by that agreement. Do you? I don't know. Yes. I don't know. Yes, I do. I mean, if it has the strength of 20 men, if we knew the kids were held by 20 men, we wouldn't go. I didn't know you were such a fickle fucker, Warwick. Fickle fucker? I'm trying to keep you alive! We're not- We're not facing a wolf. Fucking lying thief. No, Sora. Why can't you stand by your name? Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Why can't you say who you really are? You're gonna draw more attention to us from whatever is out here. There are things in this forest that are beyond our knowledge. Don't let it get to you. There are things that feast on fear. Damn straight. And Saint just looks at Warwick. Now I made an agreement. Should we take another vote? I stand by our mission. And if what- if we're- We're not gonna be told what to do by a specter. If that was Nelvin... Well, he's gone now. We're not facing a wolf. If it is a wolf, we're facing we die. We're trying to face the human. It wasn't Nelvin. It wasn't Nelvin, one of the brothers. Is that how he- yeah, did he sound like that? Is that how he talks? He would have never- never suggested taking- taking our own life. If that had any connection to him, it was a- a bastardized version of him. That's not our brother. That's not our brother. We left our brother back there. That's what I- it's- it was a- it's a trick. The forest is trying to keep us from doing what we agreed to do. Well, if I- if I can still- if I can find the courage to do this, like- Of course you should. You're the one that convinced me. You know, let this fucking Casper fucking tell you what to do. Spooky. Just relying on- unreliable intelligence is all. Well, I can't speak to intelligence. All I've got is wisdom. I've got very low intelligence. The wisdom is telling me that this was a trick. We shouldn't have- dissuaded us from what we were planning to do anyway. It's just a 20-men thing. It bothered me. I pictured 20 men holding the children, and then we'd never go without help. That's all I'm saying. It just baffles me because this is exactly what I was saying before. And you didn't listen to me at all. And then a ghost shows up, and then I kill it, and then you listen to the ghost. Ghost is dead. Of course I listened to you. I listened. Let's get some sleep. We have a full day's journey in the morning. I'll stay up first. I'm not done with my walk. I'm not done with my watch. And he puts his bow back down next to him and just sits down. Where to go? Never gonna get another great sleep as long as I fucking live. Never get- never. Never get a night's sleep. Until we get back to town. Hopefully we use some of our gold, too. You gotta roll a Jonski. Guys, just think about how much we're gonna be able to get all the punch. Is that what you're asking for? That's what he's asking for. Do you want me to make sure you all have a nice sleep? No. Is that all you want? My anesthesia, though. It's not real sleep. I wish- I wish my girlfriend knew that spell. That would be amazing. I know. I can't sleep, people. God, it'd be so good. Where were you at 4 a.m. today? Where were you? Okay. All right, so another horrible night in the forest. Awesome. Oh, awesome. Another horrible night in the horrible forest. So the con roll. Con roll. Like, is this a- are you not worried about this? Because you don't have any spells that you've lost? Yep. I didn't cast anything today. Got it. Okay. You cast turn undead, but you succeeded. Yes. So it doesn't matter. If you didn't fail to spell, then that con roll doesn't really matter mechanically, right? What does the con roll do? If you fail a DC-12 con roll on an interrupted rest, you don't get the benefits of rest. Got it. So- For you guys, you would want to do it because it would be secular. Yeah, I'll try to spell clock. Was this- was this interrupted? I guess this was interrupted. I am. Oh, yeah. I mean, I haven't cast anything, so it's fine. I made it. You're good. All right, so you get that other- Awesome. Made it. Free turn undead, for example, without losing it. Right. That's the thing is getting the free one. Yeah. For our house rule, for the per the house rule. And for us, if we fail it, we don't get hit points back. Yeah. If we hit the lost hit points. Right. And you still lose the ration. Which is awful. Oh, horrible. So mean. Okay. I really do though. I love the turn undead thing. That's pretty cool. That was great. I mean, the national's funny too. Yeah, and it just made you think like, oh, maybe there's something else going on here. Okay. So- I mean, not I wasn't awake to this, but we did- St. saw something and then saw Nelvin. So I don't know. Right. I don't know if there was a specter that- Yeah, and I didn't- Took Nelvin's form. Took Nelvin's form. It didn't seem to know things that Nelvin knew, but maybe they could also pulled it from our thoughts. It really did. I mean, that's my guess. That's the thing. We have to guess. We can't- But only St. saw that and St. didn't mention. That's what I'm saying. I'm Matthew's. Right, right, right. But I think St. immediately was just like, that wasn't him. He said it out loud. He was like, that couldn't have been him. It doesn't make any sense. And nothing he said was something we didn't know already. Yes. So like if the specter is pulling from our fears and our thoughts- Right. To create itself then. Yeah. It's a boggart. Boggart. Boggart. Mm. It picks your worst fear. Yeah. 20 men is your worst fear. Yeah. 19 million would have been fine. 19 million is fine. Yeah. 21. 21? A bridge too far. I guess that was the failure in my argument was that I argued it would maybe 20 men. Yeah. Or 19 men. All right. All right, so do we want to go- Everything else is fine. You wake up the next day. Traps. Traps. You get four. Wow. Oh. Wow. Four. Four. Scrolls and records. St. didn't say the game was better this way. Yeah. All right. So do you want to go- Which way do you want to go? Southwest and then northwest? Why don't we just go to- Yeah, southwest. To-south. Why don't we just go too straight across- I mean too straight across west to right below- There was no straight across west. So southwest. Oh, I can't quite- Sorry, southwest and then yes, north. Southwest then northwest would be the idea. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, so- Across the road. You get onto the path with the first half of your day and then on the second half of your day you go northwest to be one. Yeah, to be one hex away from- This is crazy. So let's do our forging. Let's do our forging. Yeah. Oh boy. Natty 19. Natural 20. Natural 20. All right. I'm going to luck token this. Oh really? All right. So I'm going to say you get two rations. Okay, awesome. I feel like I can do it. And I think I did. Oh, did you say it was 12? Well- Oh yeah, then I got it. Natty 14. All right, so you got one, you got one, you got two. None and let's see if the PC's got any. Oh man. Good at hunting, bad at intelligence checks. PC's did not get any. Dumb bastard. All right, so that's two, two, eight. We literally got seven. Did we want to find any four? Because of the good traps. If it was a spice you're after, I could find that, but food. We should talk. I'm a nervous. We could go into business. We should hang. We should hang. We should hang. But we had one or two left over from the night before? Yeah, we had two left from the night before. So we have nine again. So we have nine again. So we have two left over again. Two left over again. Two left over again. I'll tell you what's freeing up. My gear slides. Your gear slides. I have so much space in my backpack now. How much room for activities? Now that I'm starving to that. Also toss the cow trips too. So those came off. Can we quickly just, so we don't now go like 30 episodes into the future and be like, wait a second. We made a sledge with the wolf pelts and we carried it to the ravine and left all our shit with the kids in the tree. When we went back, I assume the werewolf didn't take our stuff. All that stuff was there. So then we're still carrying that. We still have our pelts and all the other stuff we want to sell later. I just want to make that clear. You're carrying a bunch of shit along. Well, let's be honest. Corvin's dragging it. I'm not talking about that. Okay, Corvin. But we do. Was Melbourne the biggest of the three? Yeah. The youngest and the largest. Youngest and largest. Who's the second biggest? Corvin or Breon? Breon. All right, so Breon's doing it. Yeah. But we do. Who was I talking to? You're talking to Breon. Breon. Yeah. But we do have a cash. Would they all look the same to you? We have our cash. We do. Yeah. Okay. If we live to get back to Marin's hold and sell all the shit we've got. I was saying before. Deliberately. So rich. Organize a cash creating expedition. Play the drop. All right, so the plan is we sleep tonight. Hopefully survive whatever comes our way. Hopefully quiet night. Hopefully quiet night. And then the next morning, first light, we go to the cave, scout it out. Yes. And try to get the, see what's going on. Tonight, I'd like to do the same thing we did on our OG visit to the cave. I would like to scout and stake out the entrance and see if there's any activity. I think we did that on the cave. We have to be on that. Yeah. Yeah. We did. We did. Yeah. Okay. We'd be six miles away. I guess so. Yeah. At least. That's a great point. Let's go split the party. No. All right. It's my pity. I mean, don't even. I don't even. I don't say anything. Don't. Okay. So you, you get close one, you know, a half a day's journey away from this cave. Hoping, assuming that the children are there in some way, shape, or form, and perhaps whatever took them. The people, the prisoners, Regina and her two brothers are getting a little grumpy. They're tired. They're, they're barely eating and they're not adventurers. You know what I mean? Like they had planned to go out, get their stuff, come back, and then they got interrupted. Stay on the road. So there's this weird tension between them being grateful and also like kind of being a little passive aggressive at every turn, like finding little things to say. Like, you know, if you go the wrong way and have to double back or something, they'll say something that's kind of neat. So this is weird, like uncomfortable tension within the group. And as you're getting ready, Regina says, so you think we can take care of this by tomorrow? What happens if the children aren't there? Do we just keep going deeper into the forest? Or there's no sign of them. We return to Marin's hold. Okay. What if you find a map to where they might be? We keep, we keep going. You're welcome to head back to Marin's hold. I see. Okay. So you're just going to look endlessly for these children. Nope. We'll look until we find them, then it'll end. Okay. Yeah, the search should end once we find them. Yeah, that'll be the end of the search. And if you don't find them, you just... That's company policy. Okay. We go there. They're not there. You move on or you keep looking. Well, no, if they're not there, we return to Marin's hold, as I said before. Okay. We're eager to get you back there. Yeah. No one wants to get you back home. Uh, more than we do. One of the brothers says, if this is your being eager, I'd hate to see what it is when you're in no rush. Who said that? Corvin. Eat that guy. You're a fucking Corvin. Your favorite. Uh, Saint is just like picking his nails with his dagger as everybody's arguing. Just he now hates their company. He is just, it has been nothing but stress. And he's just kind of like looking at Corvin as he picks his nails. What are you looking at? You. Got a problem with it? No. Won't you have a rabbit to catch? Feeling hungry? Not for rabbits, squirrels. Then no. He puts his, his, she's his dagger. You know what? I am going to go catch some fucking rabbits. Thank you, Saint. And he walks off to set his traps for the night and also do a little perimeter walk some alone time perimeter walk, um, quietly. Make sure to reinforce to Troy how alone you are. Very. He's using the word alone. He's alone. So alone. That's a good idea. Out of, out of earshot. First, first level. He's going to make sure I'm out of here. I want to make sure if I scream, no one can be heard. Thick cover of tree, thick cover of tree. Okay. Um, great. And you're just kind of looking around doing some perimeter checks. God, I saw, I saw it. Sneaking, sneaking. I'm, I'm, I'm. Sneaking, sure. Quietly. Okay. You can give me a, a sneak roll with advantage. Stupid, stupid idiot, a dumb girl. Eighteen. Eighteen. All right. So she's skulking about and. I'm skulking now. I'm going, stupid. Not sulking. Skulking. Not sulking. That's what I'm talking about. But you're like, I'm sulking. You're suckling, skulking. Hating is what happens. Stupid merchants. Stupid merchants. I hate Corvin. Corvin. Coral. Oh, God. Uh. Corvin can eat my poo. Bring him back some poo. That'll show him. You get, uh, not too far away from the camp where you notice that the bark on a lot of the trees near the base has been like, uh, scratched. Like it's missing, missing a lot of chunks. A lot of the trees in this area have been marked in such a way. And then not like a deer antler when they're shedding their velvet marking. No, this is much lower to the ground. Much lower to the ground. Like something is scraping up against these trees. Missing huge chunks of bark. And it's very noticeable because all the trees in this area are like almost barren. From the waist down, uh, as it were, but at a height, you know, at a height from basically your waist, but some large, larger, uh, quadruped must have done this. I stopped walking immediately and I listened. Do I hear birds? Do I hear bats? Do I hear? You hear, uh, you hear a little, uh, normal nature sounds of birds. Maybe, uh, sound of a raven nearby. And, uh, you know, I would say someone like you would know that ravens are very, very smart. And usually if there's a raven nearby, um, it can sometimes, uh, be there to signal that there's bigger game about because then it can feast on the entrails after you take care of it. So you hear like a ravens quark somewhere. Cary and bird. Caw, caw, caw. I'd like to look at the tree. There's a tree near me at the bark. Is there any residue of anything? Like there's no blood or anything, right? Like it didn't... Give me a wisdom check as you try to examine this. Wow, work. Something sharp, uh, made these, uh, marks to what end, uh, you don't know, but you don't really see any blood. Um, it's just very disconcerting to have this be not too far away from camp. All right. Yeah, I will head back to camp then, fill everybody in, um, explain. I didn't see whatever it was. I've never seen marks like this before. I mean, we could check it out together if you think... I don't know. It feels dangerous, but then again, everything feels dangerous, so. I did hear Cary and birds though, which means it could be that whatever this creature is, is killing other smaller creatures, leaving out its body so the birds can eat, but... I don't know. Doesn't feel safe. Well, we don't have much of a choice, do we? Not interested in hunting this thing? No. Yeah, no. We'll stay close to our fire, and if it comes at us, we'll be ready. All right. Um, all right, so we'll rest for the night. You'll rest for the night, so... Comfortably with no interruptions? You lay down, um, and you don't... Go to sleep before, uh, you know, the... You hear some noise now far away, like, uh, snorting. Oh, I know. Uh, and it's, it's, it's, it's a little ways off, but like, as you're getting settled for the night, and everyone is like, stopped talking, and the watch is set, so you haven't actually bed down, you hear this, like, snorting sound. Uh, it sounds like there's several of them. Uh, and they all, the good, the good thing is that it sounds like it's all coming from the same direction. It's not all like coming on you, but there is something not too far away, uh, snorting in the woods. Get behind me. My thought is, bore, I think, wild boars, which will... Yes. Havilinas. I mean, one is hard enough, multiple, but I mean, what are we gonna do? Could you imagine 50 feral hogs? Get behind me. Oh, I can't. Do 100 hogs. Do 100 feral hogs? I'll get behind you. I also, uh, get my bow out. Yeah, I'm gonna load my, okay, armed, shielded up, and behind Ellis. And we tell Regina, yeah. We're gonna incorporate them, got their sickles, and, and Regina's like, What do you think is out there? I don't know. Bore, maybe? Boars? Wild boars. Single boar could tear all of us apart. What are we gonna do? Pack up camp and leave? More than one. Can your traps catch anything more than rabbits? Can you... Technically, yes. A snare could pull a boar, but they're heavy. So they could snap it. They could snap the line. What do we do? Do we just wait here until they come? Yes. Right? Yes. We want 100 boar. We could climb trees. We could climb trees. They can't climb. True. And we could try to hit them from above. Yeah. Anyway, as many people as can climb trees. Say it's gonna climb a tree. Absolutely. He's got ranged weapons. Climb trees? Can you give me a boost? Debrion grabs Regina and tries to put her up in a tree. And you all just start climbing trees? Yeah. All right. So you climb trees and you wait. And within about eight minutes, seven fucking boars roll into your camp. And they start sniffing around and they start going into your packs. And they start eating your rations. Get the fuck out of there. And they just talk. Sleep. Okay. Give me a casting check for sleep. Natural nine plus three is 12. That's the success. Sixth sleep. So you like to wait until they all get like within a space where you can get all of them. The tree, the tree, like the little branches of the trees around me wither. The leaves. The branch dries and cracks. Yeah. I do fall to your death. I make sure. You fall to your death. Hold on. The little the leaves go, they go as if it's mid-autumn. They go bright red and they lose their color and just shrivel up. I love that. As you tap into your war and everything drains around you and you cast it and then wait where you like I got all of them and they fucking keep moving. Oh, I just start fucking tossing your camp about there. They're eating the rations and then one of them spies like we'll say Regina in a tree and goes over the tree and like, blam, bangs its head into the tree and the tree shakes a little bit and it just starts like scraping its tusks on the edge of the tree, marking it with its glands, getting sharpening its tusk. Blam again. And we're doing this like what? It's the same. St is just the good news is we only had two rations. So have fun boars. Like we didn't have that much. They just like start. They tossed the camp all up. They bang at the tree a little bit. Should we try to take one down? Like I imagine. Yeah, I'm I think St would shoot the one hitting the tree. Yeah, if they run, they run and if we get one then. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I have no ranged options. That's right. Just I could throw a dagger once. I'd like to shoot while I'm. Oh, no, I gave my dagger. Oh, no, I got it back after the sickles. Right. I'd like to shoot while being quiet. That's why St didn't want to talk yet. So the board doesn't notice him, but he would like to. I roll for initiative. Let's see what happens here. Wow. Okay. Interesting. Natural 20. Okay. Oh, wow. There you go. All right. I won't waste my time. This is the best possible situation. Best possible scenario. Nice. Best time to roll a natural one. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. This is all right. So I started thinking about what I was going to do, but now all of you get a chance to act. And my heroes will act when I want them to. So okay. Are your boars of heroes? My NPCs. I think you meant for the boar, right? They can't dig. Guys just have sickles and Regina's used. Yeah. Yeah. Just hang out. They just hang out. Just hang some cinnamon at them. Worst case scenario, we get the mad they run away. Yeah. Like in the climate tree. They pour out the rest of their nutmeg. Yeah. If you all take fire on one of them, you might be able to get a boar. Yeah. Good eating. I'm going to fire my loaded crossbow at the nearest boar. Natural 18. That's a hit. Nice. Let's go. That's it. This is actually one point of damage. Amazing. Okay. All right. So, wham, you hit and they start. They notice something's off. What do you do? I would like to do my back stab. They haven't seen me yet in another tree. I'll shoot at the same boar that Pharaoh shot at. And that's going to be 17 to hit. That's a hit. Okay. So then double. Five. Five damage. Okay. Boom. That's a magic missile. The same. Yes. That's a great classic hunter's technique. Going to the woods. I mean, it keeps the meat nice. It does. Seals for juices. I fail. Oh, fail. A two and an eight, right? No. No. Eight. Eight is a success. Oh, it is. Yes. Oh, eight is a success. Okay. So a magic missile, the same boar. And that is going to be four points of damage. Nice. Okay. It is still up for work. That's one boar. Yeah. He sees it knocks it over. Maybe it's disoriented by the force and blasts. And he's just like, I've got one and only one chance. And he pulls out a dagger from his sheath at his belt. And he just eyes it up. Let's see. Oh man. This is awesome. Come on. I've never thrown a dagger. Dude. 18. 18 hits. I'm going to spend a cap to make it a crit. Oh, good idea. For double damage. Double damage. Wow. See if we can get anything out of that. I'd love to. Oh, I should have done that. I should have done it too. I'd love to save it for a- I get so excited just making this project. Thank you. Oh, wait. Oh, do I double the damage dice? I don't double the number. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Come on. Come on. Come on. Three points of damage. Oh, bad roll. Okay. All right. Well, here's what happens. The boars start scattering and they start running off in all directions. But this one is badly injured. So it's just kind of like limping away. Breone looks like, should we go after it? The guy's like, should we go? Should we go? Stay in the tray? All right. So it goes to you. Can you get this boar? Yeah. I'm going to- I'm going to load with my move action and fire again. Natural 15. Nice. And I have one hit point left. Oh, good. Oh, good job. Oh, God. All right. So they all scatter and run off. But this last one is so beat up. Took 14 points of damage. Huge. Good eating tonight. Oh, for sure. You got food. Yeah. You got food. That's good eating. Yeah. This is going to be a pretty decent amount of rations. I'll need a week to think about it. We'll see you next time. And on a victorious boar kill. Wow. How? Seven boars. Who knew a boar hunt would be so good? I know. I know. Who said to get up in the tree? Was that you? That was genius. Yeah. We would have been dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Story Stories, awe-inspiring sound and endless adventure. Welcome to the realms of peril and glory. Explore the mechanically magical vistas of Vale, the paranormal mysteries of liminal London, and the cyberpunk chaos of Cyborg. Fall in love with our core cast, or be awed by our incredible guests from familiar shows like Ox Venture, Three Black Halflings, and No Rolls Bard. Ignite your imagination and discover the realms of peril and glory today. Go to realmspod.com or search realms of peril and glory wherever you listen to podcasts. One, two, three. For eight years, we've been asking the same question over and over again. How did this happen? My name's Mandy. And I'm Melissa, and we're the hosts of Moms and Mysteries, the true crime podcast with over 55 million downloads. We're two Florida moms who are obsessed with mysteries. Each week, we do deep dives into fascinating true crime stories. We cover everything from infamous cases like Casey Anthony to the bizarre and complex crimes right here in our home state, like the shocking murder of FSU professor Dan Markell. We bring you the facts, but with warmth and width, you'd only get from two friends who have been hooked on mysteries since childhood. Join us for new episodes of Moms and Mysteries every Tuesday and Thursday. Listen to Moms and Mysteries on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.