Speaker 1: Tale of the Mantigor bonus material reflections on season two
Shartoon's Breath. It's been four years of solo gaming, and
though I can hardly believe it, season two is over.
I remember feeling melancholy when season one ended, and this
is well, it's the same. I've had a yellow Fly
and his team living rent free in my head for
two years, and their absence has left me feeling a
little hollow. On the bright side, there'll be some new
tenants soon enough, because I've decided that there will be
a season three. Before I talk about that, I figured
I do a little review cap of this past season.
The past two years held a lot of firsts for me.
I went to my first ever cons, to which I
was honored to be invited as a guest. Thanks so
much to the Dungeon Minister for having me at Clarcon
twenty twenty three, into the Indian Podcast Awards for inviting
me to common Con twenty twenty four. I had a
great time at both and I'm looking for to MORCNS
next year. Another significant event was the podcast hitting the
half million download mark. That number has grown significantly since then,
and now I have my eye on one million. I
enjoyed similar growth with the products I have on Drive
Through RPG one Shot in the Dark one gold and
is not far from going platinum. It also inspired a
few sister products that I'm sure you'll hear me talking
about in the near future. My world building tool Pendulum
achieved the Electron badge and is not too far from
going gold. As for Encyclopedia Mandicorca, I'll be preparing the
free season to update for that PDF in August. Thank
you so much for making these products successful. He was
also during season two that I noticed a community of
semi actual plays beginning to form, and this was a
real joy to see. Now in addition to the Iron
Realm and Tales of Miss Dara, I can also enjoy
Legend of the Bones, Echoes of Hinton, Legends from the Fireside,
Always from the First Watch, and the new Sorts Against Madness,
and I suspect there will be more yet in the
near future. In a sense, the birth of this new
semi actual play community is the best thing that's happened
in my little podcast world in the last two years.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If
you are listening to this and you've thought about making
your own, you should absolutely do it. There is so
much room here for fresh and new ideas and approaches,
and the community is very supportive and enthusiastic. All you
really need are a mic and some dice. Reach out
to me or any of the other great creators I
mentioned if you need a hand getting started. Finally, in
my personal life, I took early retirement from my job
as a high school English and history teacher. That alone
has made an enormous difference in my life and in
tail of the Manticor's workflow. Sometimes I miss the classroom. Oddly,
I still don't miss the marking. I think that mostly
covers the looking back part. Let me transition into some
plans for the future by pointing out some of them,
the mistakes I made in season two and what I
can do to improve the show. The most egregious mistakes
I made in season two were errors in bookkeeping. The
worst part about this is that they were stupid and
totally avoidable, so I need to be more vigilant with
that aspect. There were also a couple of problems with
technical issues, where certain episodes disappeared or replaced their season
one counterparts at first, I thought these were random glitches,
but I eventually learned what caused them, and so going forward,
I think that we'll see that particular issue has been solved. Finally,
I made a couple of continuity errors that I really
couldn't fix in story. But these are all fairly minor,
so I think I'll post something on the blog about
that in the near future rather than itemizing them here.
So that brings us to season three. What will it
look like? Well, I want to make a few changes
and take some risks without throwing the baby out along
with the bathwater plot Wise, I have no idea what
the story will look like. I do have some stylistic inclinations. However,
in season two I want to explore an urban setting
with mostly human characters. Now I find myself inclined towards
a wilderness, sandbox hex crawl, using at least some non
human player characters. I'll also put aside the bleak horror
aspects I explored in season two and try something with
a bit more beauty and wonder at least to start.
Despite these changes, all core elements will remain the same.
I still think home Brewed BX works as an engine
episode length and current story parts like narration, DM, talk
between the lines, dramatis personae, and combat will all remain unchanged.
Ascending armor class and season two level advancement rate. I
think we're both improvements over season one, so those will
not change either. I'm also going to permanently add my
favorite element from Tona Pigeon's mythic GM emulator, the event
Meaning's table, to my methodology. I won't be using them
quite as intended, but more on that in season three.
Once again, the story for season three will be a
fresh start, an easy on ramp for new listeners. This time,
I'm going to begin one year after the final events
of season two. I'm moving the action to a new
and currently blank spot on the map, Zeisha's unsettled Eastern Borders,
because there's no human civilization in this part of Merith.
I won't be using the Pendulum world building tool in
advance of the new season. I might end up doing
that sometime in the future, but only if the story
makes it appropriate. I'm taking a little inter season break
this time around, but I'll keep putting out content to
bridge the gap. Actually, I have a couple of pretty
cool things in store that I think you might like.
In particular, I've been making a four episode mini series
with my good friend Steve Morrison of Errant Adventures, where
we take a crack at semi actual play with two
players and no GM. Another inter season item is my
intended switch from Podbean to iHeartRadio. iHeart approached me with
an offer and I accept it, thinking it might be
time to trade my usual cross promotional ads for paid ads.
More than anything, I'm hoping this move will improve my workflow,
as finding and setting up ad swapping partners can take
a lot of time and even bottle neck product on occasion.
This move should also solve the problem of sometimes having
an inconsistent number of ads. Some episodes tend to be
very ad heavy and others are light. With all this said,
I'm going to strictly monitor the number of ads and
kind of ads that appear on the show. I've even
paid my current provider, Podbean, for a full year of hosting,
just as a back up in case the new direction
is not a change for the better. Ideally, all these
things will happen behind the scenes, and as a listener,
you won't notice too much at all. Before I sign off,
a word of appreciation to all of the voice actors
I've had a pleasure working with, to the folks who
purchase my products on drive through RPG, and to everyone
who's given the show a rating or review or simply
told a friend, thank you very much. Tale of the
Manticor is a joy to make. It's so satisfying to
watch it grow, and I have all of you to
thank for that. When season three, episode one does launch
in October, I'm hoping, I hope you'll come back and
join me as I try to recapture the wonder, nostalgia
and chaos from the game we all love. Until the
season three premiere, Let Chaos roll.
Speaker 2: Reload your three bladed sword, yet comfortable in your studded
leather kerdle or your chain mail bikini. Fire up the
wizard band. It's about to get weird. Swords Against Madness
is a hybrid storytelling and solo OSR roleplaying game experience
where I take you through a world of pulpy, weird
fiction and gonzo OSR roleplaying game goodness as my player
characters deal with telepathic squid, crashed spaceships, deranged cthulhu culpists,
immortal space barbarians, and priests worshiping ancient robots. And that's
just in the first two episodes. Come and party like
its nineteen seventy four, with Swords against Madness available anywhere
where you can download your finest podcasts.