Speaker 1: Tale of the Manticor bonus episode. It's been a while,
but once again it is time for Mail of the Manticor.
According to Lore, a Manticore occasionally gets questions in their mailbox.
There would be much answering in the minutes ahead. Hey,
this is John. I'd like to thank you for all
of your questions over this past season. I've selected around
a dozen really good ones to discuss on the show.
Let's get into it. The first question comes from Mike Foster.
They ask did you play solo RPGs prior to Tale
of the Manticor, and if yes, what did you try. Well,
this is a quick answer, because no, I didn't play
any solo games prior to starting the podcast. Actually, I
would have scoffed at the idea and I would have
thought that it couldn't possibly work, And boy was I
ever wrong. And it's kind of a good lesson to
myself to not knock something until I've tried it. For me,
my first experience with any solo game was through the
Iron Realm podcast, and if it wasn't for that podcast
and for the Pandemic, I never would have gotten into it.
And when I did start Tale of the manticor I
didn't even know about the existence of various products that
would help you play solo, or that there was a
vibrant solo community out there. And I didn't learn about
the mythic GME until several months into making the show,
when I discovered the incredible me myself and I YouTube channel.
Of course, now that I have fully embraced solo play,
I actually find it to be in many ways, or
at least in different ways, richer than a table game.
Thanks very much for your question. The next one comes
from Ernest Klants. Arnest asks, where are you coming up
with the story? Is it just kind of winged or
do you have an idea of how the actual story
is going to go even if a PC dies. That's
a great question. I'll talk about the last part first.
If a PC dies, I certainly feel it in all
of the ways that you would at a table game,
sort of bond with your characters, even if you're playing
multiple characters. And certainly the longer that I live with them,
the more I bond with them and genuinely stress over
the chance of their dying. But I do think it's
very important to have that chance. There's got to be
stakes otherwise, at least for me, the excitement is gone.
In the case of a TPK, even that is something
that I would embrace. It's not something I would hope for.
But as long as I keep the mindset that the
main character is the world, or the main character is
the story, I think you can roll with any eventuality.
In the case of a TPK, you could turn that
into a prologue if it happens early enough in the story,
and then the main story starts after that, and hopefully
you connect that TPK or use it as a springboard
to your next story. If a TPK happened mid season
or late season, I think it would be much tougher
to deal with, and luckily I haven't had to deal
with that, but I guess the process would be kind
of the same. You would have a story that was
in two halves, almost as if it were two mini
campaigns or too mini arcs. In terms of where I'm
coming up with the story for the first say a
dozen episodes, I'm just making stuff up completely at random.
Often it's the first thing that comes into my head.
Quite often I have a second idea that is better
than that first idea. So if I moved through it
slowly enough that tends to produce the better ideas. After
around that ten episode mark, something magical happens because there
are enough elements in your story and you know enough
about the characters in it by then that the story
just begins to write itself. It's a little hard to explain,
but it really is true that once there is a
momentum to your plot and a direction for the characters,
then there's a certain causality that starts to occur where
the way things go is almost the way they have
to go. And then you add in the dice, and
that's kind of the engine. There's inevitable causality and random
chaos through the dice. Gods. Actually, that's still what I
find so exciting about this mode of storytelling. I'll finish
up by saying that in season one, I think it
was about episode fifty when I kind of knew where
the story was going to go. Ultimately in that season,
I knew that once that horn was blown, and I
didn't expect the villain to blow the horn until it
was actually happening, But once that did happen, and I understood, ah,
this is summoning a dragon back to get its revenge.
As soon as that happened, I kind of knew, well,
eventually this story ends with a climactic mountain top battle
with the dragon, and how the characters get there and
which of the characters make it there those I didn't
know and I didn't want to know, but I kind
of did have that final scene in mind. With season two,
I kind of had an idea even from the beginning
that there would be these three demons and that they
would have to be dealt with eventually in the ruin
under the castle, and that's kind of all I knew
about it. Basically, I just wanted to do the opposite
of what I'd done in season one, and instead of
a mountaintop battle with the dragon, I thought I would
go down and have an ultimate battle at the end
of a dungeon crawl. But again I didn't know how
they were going to get there, or who would get there,
or what complications would arise between A and Z. Now
that I'm starting season three, I'm in the anything ghost
stage where I'm really just getting to know my characters,
and although I have sort of come up with an
initial mission, I have no idea what the endgame will be,
and that's okay. I'm happy to be living on the
ultimate edge of the story as it moves forward without
knowing what happens next. It feels a little dangerous and
it feels exciting. My third question is from Samuel Marconi.
Samuel asks a really interesting question. He wants to know
if the villains in Tail of the Manticor could earn
their villain hood a little bit more, What if the
villains could be under the influence of the dice more
or even maybe as much as player characters. He points
out that a lot of the villains are protected by
some kind of plot armor until they do come face
to face the PCs. That's true. They absolutely have been
protected by plot armor in the past, and I have
kind of kept them as separate from the player characters
in the sense that they're more a part of the
fabric of the story. So could it work. I think
it could work. An idea that was kind of rolling
around in my head in season two was that NPCs
and PCs were starting to lose their distinction and I
was beginning to question if those terms even had value.
Part of me thought that I would abandon those terms
entirely when I got into writing season three, but now
that I have started writing season three, I do find
that I'm coming back to those terms. So will NPCs
suffer the dice? I think that that's a definite. Maybe
I won't know until I get there. Certainly not every NPC,
because with minor NPCs, I think that might just slow
things down too much. But with a major villain, I
think that could be interesting. Just on a final note, Samuel,
I would say that your question is a great example
of how this kind of fiction is still developing and
experimental and very hackable. So I could imagine a show
where they do exactly that. Everybody PCs, NPCs, good guys,
bad guys, is subject to the will of the dice.
Thanks for that question. The next one comes from Thomas Murghy.
Thomas writes, I play solo sometimes, but I have some
difficulties to render my story, and he means like through
writing or making a podcast or a video. To be short,
do you have some tips to describe the action using
a few sentences? This is a tough one for me
because I don't play any solo games outside of Tale
of the Mandicor so I don't have any experience and
I probably don't have any good advice specifically on shortcuts
to bookkeeping. For me, essentially it's like writing a novel.
But with dice, I can imagine a situation similar to
what Steve Morrison of Arrant Adventures does where he talks
into the microphone and he's playing and doing his bookkeeping
and everything live at the mic. So I could see
if you were to make an audio recording of yourself,
not for publication, but for your records, I could see
that working. And I do think it's important to have records,
And probably this is the part of the question that
I can add some value to. You do want to
have some record of the game because all of the
little details that you throw out almost as an aside,
some NPC, some Chekhov's gun, those are the things that
come back later in ways that surprise you. And you
can almost hear an audible click when some old idea
comes back into play in a way that you never
expected it to. For those that have finished season two,
there's an event in the finale where that exact thing happens,
and it's a really cool thing when that occurs. In
terms of making your writing and creative life a bit easier.
I do have a couple of suggestions for that. One,
I would say, always move the plot, so every session
that you sit down or every section of the story.
For me, it's episodes, but for a personal game it
may not quite be organized that way. But whatever section
of the story or that you're telling, always move the plot.
Because passages of just character development or passages of just
description are great, but if it's too much, I think
it can drag. I make tell of the manticor with
an audience in mind, so I'm always thinking about pacing
and variety. But I think those same principles would apply
to a personal game and make it a better one. Secondly,
I would say, if you can end your sessions on
some kind of cliffhanger or unresolved event, this will have
a couple of good effects. One it'll make you want
to come back to the game, and secondly, when you
do come back to the game, you'll find that you
can just jump in with the wind at your back
and true momentum. If you end on a clean resolution,
then you might find that the car stalls a little
bit when you come back to that game and you're
not sure what to do next. With a cliffhanger. You
always know what's next and you're always looking forward to it.
Thanks for that great question. The next one comes from
Ryan Christofferson. Brian asks, how do you keep the story
moving and still have a few surprises for yourself as
the player? And can you have a cohesive story without
having it planned out beforehand? So I spoke to that
first question in my last answer a little bit, But
in terms of surprises, my all time favorite and I
haven't used it on the show enough and I'm going
to rectify that in season three is Ton of Pigeons
mythic GM emulators event meaning tables. It's a pair of
tables that essentially have a verb and a noun, and
you'll roll randomly against each of these tables. You get
a combination of words and then you try to interpret them.
And this is a way that you can surprise yourself
with your own creativity. It's that whole idea of if
you have too many choices, you can experience a kind
of paralysis, but if you are very limited in your choices,
then you're forced to get creative with what's at hand.
Your second question is can you have a cohesive story
without having it planned out beforehand and a very good question.
Yes and no, And I guess it depends on your
definition of story. So if you're looking for that three
X structure, we have a character and they have a problem,
and then that problem is complicated many times, and finally
that problem is resolved. You can force that. I think
you'll end up using some degree of DM fiat to
make that happen. And the more cohesive that you want
it to be, maybe the more DM fiat you'll have
to inject into the story. Maybe this parkens back to
the question about the NPCs, and I think if you
were to say, roll dice for NPCs and villains, you
would be trading off some of that cohesive story for
something different. But that's something different isn't necessarily bad. It
just becomes an alternative to traditional storytelling. So if you
can divorce yourself from the idea that the good guys
have to win, or that the characters from the beginning
of the story must survive to the end of the story,
or that at all characters who enter the story must
play a pivotal role in the story, if you can
let some of those things go, then I think what
you're getting is something that's closer to a tabletop game
and further away from a novel. So the answer to
the question is, you can definitely do it, but I
think you have to decide where on the spectrum between
novel and game you want to be. I feel personally
like I'm somewhere around sixty percent novel and forty percent game.
I suppose that's up for debate, but I do think
that that is a choice that you have to make,
and probably that ultimately comes down to your taste. The
next question comes from Psychic Machinery. Psychic Machinery asks, I'm
having a hard time locating a lot of the stuff
mentioned in the podcast. Has it gone into the internet
ether or is there somewhere to find it. I post
quite a bit of stuff on tail of themandicor dot
blogspot dot com, and for some of it you would
have to keep scrolling down and clicking that older post
link to get to it. I don't post everything on
the blog for sure. Shortly after season one, I started
to collect lore items and mechanics items, things like that
and put them into a collection that I called Encyclopedia Mandcorica,
which you can get for free on drive through RPG
and incidentally, right after I finish recording this mailbag episode,
my next task is to update that file with information
from season two. So those are really the two places,
the blog and Encyclopedia Manticorica. The next letter is from
del Tiegler. Dell writes, I have a quick question about
audio mixing. Which software do you use and can you
recommend a basic setup that won't break the bank? Absolutely, Dell.
I'm a bit of a gearhead and I love this stuff.
In a nutshell, you need two things. You need a
microphone and you need a DAW also known as a
digital audio workstation. The best cheapest one is Audacity. Audacity
is free, it works on any platform, It's been around
forever and it's great. Before I was into podcasting, actually
used Audacity for a few years to record music. As
for a microphone, the best bang for the buck is
probably the blue Snowball MIC. You've probably seen this one before,
as it's very distinct looking. It looks like well, a snowball.
It's about the size of a grapefruit, and it's either
white or I think they make them in black now. Anyway,
it's a USB MIC. It sounds good. I actually used
that microphone on a very recent video I did on
YouTube where I played through the top level of one
shot in the dark. And you know, since we're talking
about it, there's something about that video I could point
out if you are shopping for a microphone. When I
did all the editing, I actually had to redo the outro,
but I decided to do a little experiment and just
use my cell phone's microphone for the outro and see
if it made any difference, And it makes up big difference,
it turns out. So if you're curious, check out that
YouTube video. It's the recent one where you can see
a top down view and the audio that you hear
for the first ninety percent that is the snowball mic.
When you get to the last outroduction where I'm in
front of that yellow background, that's just the cell phone mic,
and you could clearly hear the difference when you ab
them that way. Anyway, I got into the weeds there
a little bit. I'll get back on track. Blue snowball
mic and audacity. That's the basic setup I think in
general for microphones. If you are looking at south of
forty or fifty bucks, well buyer beware. I think you
might be getting a kind of very cheap mic in
a decent looking package. I would stick with trusted brand
names as well. Oh one other little hack that's absolutely
worth knowing. If you do have an inexpensive setup, you
can make your own pop screen, which is going to
save you all kinds of headaches in the edit. Look
that up on the internet and you'll find all kinds
of ways to do that. Anyway, I hope I didn't
order on too much on that one. The next one
comes from RC and this is a very different kind
of question because it's about the story itself. RC asks
why didn't kat Spain set the Pixie free? RCA is
referring to season two, episode eighteen. I believe we're in
a dramatis persona where Kat Spain is working as an
apprentice to kerk Melmar and there is a weeping pixie
that kind of drives him crazy with its incessant crying.
I think my first inclination would have been for cat
Spain to release the pixie, especially as he had to
escape himself and there would be nothing really to lose,
and I think I decided not to mostly as a
way to give dimension to kat Spain's character. I didn't
want him to be too much of a goodie two shoes.
At the time, I thought it would be more interesting
if I characterized him as having a little sliver of
hardness inside. Earlier in this Mailbag episode, I talked about
how you should record small details, and that as you
make the story, you just create all kinds of small
details through small decisions. This would be one of those,
and by the end of season two, that decision to
give Kat's Bin just the hint of a mean streak
really paid off in the narrative, and I think made
the resolution of the entire season makes sense. So you
can call it a happy accident that I made that
decision at the time, I'm certainly glad I did. Oh
And as an aside, you're not the only one to
ask that question, RC, because Kyellen, who voices the character
Kat's Bain, asked me that exact same thing. Question nine
comes from Eric of Dragonspire Gaming. Eric writes, I wanted
to ask where you're getting the inspiration for shartoons parables.
Eric brings up a couple of these that resonated with him.
In the absence of experience, I disappear. I believe that
was from the parable of the blackness of Mulberry's And
there's another line that he quotes from Shawnee who says,
I think wisdom and good feeling keep little company in
this life. Every now and then Shawnee does uncharacteristically show
some wisdom. So to answer the question, how do I
get the ideas for the parables? So basically, if I
find my characters in a predicament, especially a moral predicament,
but not always, I find that I can reinforce the
thematic element of that struggle by constructing a dramatis persona,
whether that be a flashback or one of Shartoon's parables.
So these mini stories are reverse engineered from the problem
and might present a hint of a solution where they
might just kind of add some other layer to the
problem itself. And if there's an opportunity for me to
inject a little bit of irony there, I definitely take
that chance. In the one that Eric mentions, in the
absence of experience, I disappear, I kind of plucked that
from my experience teaching senior level philosophy. So anybody who's
familiar with David Hume might have recognized that empirical idea,
if that's something that's interesting to you. The branch of
philosophy I'm talking about is called epistemology. That second quote
that Shawnee said, I think wisdom and good feeling keep
little company in this life. That also comes from my
experience as a high school teacher. Most of the time
I teach English lit. So that is a paraphrase from
the character Bottom from a Shakespeare play called A Midsummer
Night's Dream, one that I have been alluding to fairly
continuously throughout the creation of this season. So the actual
quote is that reason and love keep little company these days,
meaning they don't get along or are incompatible. But I
love that turn of phrase so much I thought I
would give it to Shawne and change reason and love
to wisdom and good feeling. The next question is from Christopher.
Christopher says, I'm curious when it comes to character backstories.
Do you roll on a chart or something like that
to determine inspiration for the backstory or do you come
up with that on your own. Thanks for that great question, Christopher.
So I don't use any kind of tables to determine backstories.
Usually the first thing I'll do is roll up stats
using my method of ignoring anything five or under, and
then I'll look at those stats to get a very
very general sense of what the person is like. Often
I'm looking at intelligence, wisdom, and charisma, those kind of
mental stats. So those give me some kind of direction,
but it's really not until the characters are faced with
conflict when I start to figure out who they really are.
Just based on the decisions that they make, I might
decide that a character with a low wisdom score is
a little bit reckless. That's what I did with Shawne,
where I decided that she would have this motto of
live for today because you never know if you're going
to be around tomorrow. So after those kind of initial
traits have been decided upon, then I can use dramatis
personae and flashbacks things like that to reinforce those ideas.
You know, why are they a little bit reckless? Did
they have any experiences in their early life that made
them that way? And the same could be said for
a character who was prudent or studious, or had difficulty
relating with other people. So the stats are a starting place,
and then the backstories kind of reinforce the why since
we're talking about characters and their traits, I think it's
really interesting to take a character like Shawnee who did
have a low wisdom score, and so I did decide
that she would be reckless and then give that character
a bit of an arc. So with Shawnee, I thought,
wouldn't it be interesting if, over the course of the
season that she could start to change, and specifically if
she could be influenced by another character. So in this case,
it was Tamlin who kind of influenced her and sparked
that curiosity about wisdom in her question eleven is from
anonymous because actually I received this question quite a bit.
The question is did you know that you're pronouncing dramatis
persona incorrectly? And the answer is kind of yeah, I
kind of did. I can remember four years ago, in
one of the very first episodes, I was happily writing
away the script and I wasn't even thinking about it
until it came time to record, and that I came
up against this term that you know, as an English teacher,
I've seen that before, but I wasn't one hundred percent
sure how to pronounce it. So I ended up looking online,
as I often do, for things like this, and I
found both pronunciations out there, you know, dramatis persona and
dramatics personai, and eventually I think I found something from
Cambridge University that said dramatis persona, and so I went
with that. At the end of the day, I know
that this is probably nails on a chalkboard for somebody
who knows the correct way to pronounce it. But English
is kind of like that. It's famously full of loanwords
from other languages, which then get their pronunciation mangled, and
then that new pronunciation just becomes English. What's off the
top of my head, A word like mountain would have
originally been Montaigne from the French, but eventually that gets
corrupted and mispronounced enough times that mountain and then even
mountain becomes the new way to pronounce it correctly. Question
number twelve is the last question in this mailbag, and
it's another anonymous question because it's another one that I
have gotten quite a bit, And that question is will
there be a Tale of the manticor novel? The short
answer is not for a while. The longer answer is,
I almost started doing a season one novelization, really starting
to experiment with how that would look last summer. My
feeling was that it would be extremely quick and easy
to do. The transcripts already existed, and that it would
really just be a matter of re editing and reformatting
and figuring out how to get that into a EPUB
file format. But as I started making it, I realized
a couple of things. One, it was really difficult to
format and still keep the same kind of energy, especially
where dice rolls were considered to just have the number
appear in text. Something was lost. And I experimented with
a couple of different ideas for that, and I never
really found a way that was completely satisfying. Another thing
I realized is that even though the scripts existed already,
they would take a lot of work. At the end,
I did a five chapters sample and I sent it
out to a couple of close friends and asked for
their feedback, and they were all gracious and gave great feedback,
And at the end of the day I thought, I'm
not quite ready to do this, And despite being asked
about it many times, I wasn't sure that there was
enough of a market out there for it to justify
the probably couple hundred of hours of work that it
would take to do that said, I still really liked
the idea, and one day it might happen, but I
think doing it concurrently with the season three might just
be too much work for me right now. So who knows.
Maybe after season three, if I need a real change
and a real break from making audio, that's something I'll revisit. Anyway.
That is it for the mail bag. If you've stuck
around this far, thank you so much. Thanks for all
your great questions people that write to me. I love
getting your emails. It really just gives me incredible joy
and inspires me. From people that write in with questions
to people that just write in to say that they're
enjoying the show. Thank you so much. I am grateful. Anyway,
thanks for listening. If everything goes to plan, the next
thing that you hear will be a mini series four parts,
two players, no GM semi actual play in cooperation with
Steve Morrison of Arrant Adventures. So watch out for that
because it's coming soon. Until then, let chaos roll.