Besides the trial, Episode 4 is fairly uneventful storywise, yet not without its charm. Highlights include the party’s conversation with the newly-awoken Toya, Beau’s solo encounter, Caleb and Nott’s spa date, and a lot of shopping and bargaining shenanigans. But my favorite part was Matt pulling out a beautifully-drawn map of the Dwendalian Empire by one of my favorite cartographers, Deven Rue. She does truly amazing artwork, and the map was an awesome surprise to bring out on the stream. If you haven’t seen Deven’s maps before, I urge you to follow her on Twitter @DevenRue and check out her website. Matt’s prop game has been on point all season, so I’m sure he’ll have even more surprises for us in the coming months.
As the first arc of this campaign wraps up, the party has to make their own way, free from pursuit of the law or demons, for now. With an entire region’s worth of fantastic locales to explore, I’m extremely envious of Matt’s players. Soon to be level 3, they’ve gotten their sea legs under them and come together as a formidable team. I’m a little disappointed that Ashley Johnson has been mostly absent from the campaign so far and has missed a lot of the best moments. But there’s still a lot of Critical Role ahead of us, and who knows what Matt will throw at the party tomorrow night. See you next week!
I’m half sick as I’m writing this, which is a shame, because episode 3 of Critical Role was fantastic. I really wanted to do a deeper analysis of it, but I think we’ll all have to settle for another surface-level recap this week. If you’ve neglected to watch the show up to this point, this episode is a great jumping on point. It’s got everything I want from an actual play with very minimal downtime for a live stream. I hope we get more like it and less like episode 2’s plodding investigation.
It starts as most good D&D sessions should, with combat. The party dispatches two more zombie creatures, but not without casualties. Mollymauk nearly dies, so Taliesin spends most of the session acting wounded or unconscious. It’s not a complicated encounter, but it does get the audience’s attention and gets the whole party rolling dice as soon as possible. The group then hides the zombie guard bodies and tracks the devil toad through the dead of night to the edge of a lake outside town. After a lot of negotiation and preparation back in Trostenwald, the party learns of an abandoned ruin named Crooked Stone on an island in the middle of the Eustaloch. The devil toad, of course, has made Crooked Stone its hideout along with the enchanting dwarf singer, Toya.
For the last hour, we witness a wonderfully tense and dynamic combat encounter that I strongly applaud Matt for setting up. He’s employed several elements that make the fight much more interesting than it could have been. First of all, it’s taking place at night, meaning the characters without darkvision (about half the party) need to create a way to see in the dark. Caleb’s Dancing Lights spell quickly takes care of the problem, but he still has to spend an action casting it, which critically reduces the amount of damage he can do. Secondly, the space isn’t completely flat. Trees, rocks, ruins, steps, and stone walls fill the arena, giving the PC’s and monsters interesting ways to interact with and abuse the environment. Finally, the devil toad and Toya have extremely powerful abilities that demand attention from at least one or two PC’s on any given turn. Because Beauregard spends most of her turns restraining Toya’s voice, she barely contributes to the damage done to the toad, leaving most of the demon-slaying to Fjord.
The rest of the party is left to deal with the monstrous toad and its three imp summons. Though the party eventually emerges victorious, I got the sense it was a very close fight and could have gone either way if the dice had landed differently. Even though I suspect Matt often tries to rule in favor of the party in order to keep them alive and having fun, I appreciate him posing real dangers to this low-level group, especially considering he has such a large audience to please. The episode ends with the toad blown in half and the dwarf girl unconscious in the party’s care. I can’t wait to see what she has to say when she awakes. Our heroes have some real clues to work with now and even got to test their mettle against their first boss battle. Is it Thursday yet?
Episode 2 is more cerebral than the first. We now have a faint idea of who the characters are and how they generally like to act. They even have some goals and can begin to move around Matt’s world making somewhat-informed choices. The party becomes a band of detectives, as they investigate possible causes of the carnival mishaps. They lie, deceive, trick, and sneak their way through Trostenwald and successfully discover that the devil toad is the culprit. They also free Mollymauk in short order, thankfully. For the most part, Matt lets the players do what they want and gives only subtle direction until the end, when the truth is revealed and more zombies head toward our heroes trapped in the tent. Overall, it’s a less exciting episode without a single combat encounter, but it’s still interesting. It’s the kind of session I’d be afraid to run with new players, as they might not know how to make their own fun yet. But for Matt’s seasoned veterans, it’s a worthy challenge and showcases a lot more fantastic role-playing from everyone at the table. I’m excited to see how the party fairs against more zombies and anxious for the inevitable showdown with the fiend. See you next week!
It’s been a long time coming, but we’re already one episode deep into the new season of Critical Role. And the state of tabletop RPGs has changed drastically since the show started almost three years ago. In March of 2015, I was wrapping up my first year in game design school and still basking (somewhat naively) in an Obama-led America. Games have only grown more prominent in every way, though, and I see that growth as a mostly good thing. Certainly, this is a golden age for RPGs, where anyone can publish anything they can think of and learning how to play virtually any semi-popular game only takes a few clicks and a few hours of your time.
Enter Critical Role’s second campaign, the inaugural stream of which drew about 95,000 viewers at peak. There’s probably terabytes of fan art for it already, yet we barely got a hint of the cast’s new characters and Matt’s new setting. As CR is undeniably the most popular and most accessible form of D&D ever created, it’s important for designers to take note of what Matt, his players, and Geek & Sundry are doing. The show is responsible for so many people getting into RPGs, and I’m sure thousands of viewers are happy to only experience D&D vicariously through streams. So every week I’d like to do a short recap of the new episode and see what important nuggets we can use from each to inspire and inform my own work. I didn’t watch much of the first campaign, so I’m excited to watch the new one from the beginning. I hope you enjoy coming along with me on the journey.
Production-wise, it’s immediately apparent G&S has upped their game since last season. The new gaming table is amazing, the overlay looks cleaner, and the camera work has improved as well. After 10 minutes of ads and plugs, we get to see CR’s new intro video for the first time. It looks and sounds like a window into 70s stereotypes (reminding me a lot of high school yearbook photos of my parents), from the unpainted lead miniatures and disco-inspired music to Sam Riegel’s ridiculous rainbow suspenders and Matt’s aviator glasses. It’s a welcome improvement over the old intro, and importantly shows D&D as a time-honored game to play with friends rather than just an excuse for cosplay. The game inspired a lot of the media we remember fondly from the 1980s, just like what CR may do for the the 2020’s.
Next, Matt gives us a lengthy monologue about an area of northeastern Tal’Dorei known as Wildemount. He frames a kingdom called the Dwendalian Empire that’s both ruled by religious and military powers and threatened by wild monsters that roam the outskirts of civilization. To me, it sounds a lot like Dark Souls and seems more Gothic than the episodes I caught of the Exandria campaign. After flooding us with details that may or may not be relevant, Matt tells us this particular story starts in a small, agricultural village called Trostenwald. This is not the kind of slow opening to a campaign I would use with my friends, but it is a great way to open a season of Critical Role. As viewers, we need to know where this story is taking place and why we should care, and I think Matt gave us just enough to stay interested through the proceeding 90 minutes of character introductions and role-playing.
Then the actors’ take the stage, and they take their time doing so. One by one, we meet each new character, in a tavern no less, and see how the cast interacts with each other in their new roles. Liam’s reserved and soft-spoken wizard, Caleb Widogast, is my favorite and reminds me of characters I’ve made in the past. He even comes with an orange cat named Frumpkin and Sam’s excitable rogue, Nott. Nott, Sam laments, is a tiny, goblin female with a British accent. I wouldn’t want to try to keep up that voice for three more years, but it will be entertaining to watch Sam do so. Laura easily steps into the skin of Jester, the comedic tiefling cleric, and Marisha embodies a much brasher character than her former half-elf druid. Her new PC, Beauregard the human monk, mainly likes drinking and money. Travis’s half-orc warlock, Fjord, has a gunslinger air about him, and it’s refreshing to see a more serious character in the group. Taliesin and Ashley come as a pair with Mollymauk, the tiefling blood hunter, and Yasha, the aasimar barbarian. Molly’s efforts to swindel the other characters out of their gold are quite entertaining to watch, and Jester bonds with him over his made up card readings. Ashley plays a good bodyguard and portrays the most headstrong character of the bunch.
Eventually, Matt prods the group away from the Nestled Nook Inn towards the adventure, and he paints an alluring carnival scene inside a large, medieval circus tent using more of his written material. We and the characters watch in awe as Matt spins rhymes of contortionism, music, magic, and strange creatures. The beautiful illusion is suddenly shattered, however, as one of the elderly carnival-goers morphs into a zombie-like monstrosity and throws the crowd into chaos. The combat encounter takes up most of the rest of the time in the episode, and Matt has set it up to be both interesting and challenging for a large level-2 party. The map, miniatures, and models keep the fight engaging for the viewers and give us a good idea of what’s at stake. The players have to contend with killing two zombies without harming any of the carnival-goers or allowing more zombies to be created. The crowd provides decent cover for the ranged attackers, though, and the melee classes make short work of the abominations.
The session ends with Molly and the circus company under arrest and the remainder of the party under investigation from the imperial guards. Someone has to be blamed for the mayhem, so it might as well be the player characters. It’s a fitting ending that leaves us with a few key questions. How will the party get Molly out of prison? Who’s actually behind the zombie menace? What kind of magical affect, if any, did the dwarf singer, Toya, have on the circus crowd? I’m excited to see how the group discovers the answers, and I’m fairly invested in learning more about each character. Overall, Curious Beginnings was a great introduction to a new campaign that I highly encourage you to watch if you haven’t already.
And that’s it for now! I’ll aim to get a new recap post up every Tuesday or Wednesday night, so I hope you enjoy them. Feel free to leave me some feedback in the comments or on Twitter as well. Until next time, farewell!
Grue Ate My Homework 