Listen to this episode here.
In The Wildsea, you play as sailors on a sea of trees in a climate post-apocalypse where the climate won. And in the My First Dungeon mini series of this game, today's co-cohost Brian Flaherty took it on himself - along with co-player J Strautman - to write an original song, a “tree shanty,” that played on each episode.
Today Brian and I, along with his Talk of the Table cohost and Wildsea GM Elliot Davis, break down one of those tree shanties: how it came to be, and how this moment blends together preproduction, production at the table, and post production in a bunch of compelling ways. We also get to see some lessons on display about how to pace a campaign and how when you know you can trust your fellow players, you can take more risky creative swings. Take a listen!
Further Reading
The Wildsea by Felix Isaacs
My First Dungeon: The Wildsea episode 5
Talk of the Table podcast
Socials
Brian on Bluesky
Elliot on Bluesky and his games
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Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and sing it from the rooftops. My name is Sam Dun Wald, and this is another actual play episode where instead of covering one mechanic, we cover one moment from an actual play.
This week, like last week, that moment is from the show, my first dungeon. This time it's their Wild Sea miniseries. And to break it down, I'm joined by two of the creators of My first Dungeon, Elliot Davis and brian Flaherty, Elliot and Brian are the co-hosts Of the RPG interview podcast Talk of the Table and two of the co-founders of many sided media.
You might be familiar with them because this podcast is on the many Sided podcast network. Elliot is also a game designer under his brand, More Blueberries and he's got a new game out today, The Time We Have, a game about two brothers, one of whom is turning into a zombie and one of whom is not, which you play by sitting on opposite sides of a closed door and answering prompts. gonna have to cover this fucking game on this show.
Uh, but let's get into the I've covered the game before, but this is a game where you play a sailors on a sea of trees in a climate post apocalypse where the climate won.
And in the My First Dungeon mini series of this game, Brian as a player, took it on himself along with coplayer J Strautman to write an original song, a tree shanty, if you will, for each episode which they then performed on the episode. And in the particular tree shanty moment we cover today, we get to see a moment that blends pre-production, production at the table and post-production all together in a bunch of compelling ways.
We also get to see some lessons on display about how to pace a campaign and how when you know you can trust your fellow players, you can take more creative swings with them.
So let's get into it. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon, and here are Elliot Davis and Brian Flaherty with a Wild Sea Tree shanty.
Elliot and Brian, Thanks so much for being here on DYS Splitter.
Brian: Thanks much for having us.
Elliot: thanks for having
Sam: So I wanted to start like, more broadly with actual play. I kicked off this series with an episode with Rowan Zeoli, where we spent a lot more time on, like, what's the deal with actual play? Like, but I'm, I'm curious to hear y'all answer what's the deal with actual play, like when I say actual play, when you are thinking about it as a medium? Like to, to the standard tabletop audience, to like your audience, what's the median actual play look like in your mind,
Brian: I mean, just starting from like a definition space, it is improvised narrative storytelling using a game as a narrative vehicle. And that's just a bunch of words to say, Hey, we're gonna play a game, or we're gonna record it with a eye towards an outside audience or, or at least the way that we do it, always with an out, an eye towards the outside audience and are allowing ourselves to give over some narrative control to random polyhedral nameless and careless gods that are the dice or whatever other mechanic we may be using.
Elliot: Yeah, I would agree with everything Brian said and I would add that I think it's when artistic intention meets game mechanics. I think that actual play broadly is when you take like people who want to make some kind of artistic product or entertainment product, and they say, I'm gonna use a game in some way to do that.
And I think broadly you can apply that definition to 90% of what people are considering actual play.
Sam: Yeah.
So I'm really curious with My First Dungeon in particular, my understanding of the show is that one of the main intentions of it is also to like, offer people a chance to like, learn how a game works.
You know, you're kicking off these series with like, interviews with the designer and doing a lot of like, recap and checking in after the fact. And all of that feels in service of that. But that feels like you have kind of Two goals that maybe not in conflict with each other but are not the same. Right. Like of teaching people and entertaining people.
And I'm curious to hear y'all just like, talk about that push and pull in your experience making the show.
Brian: Oh boy, if we've been talking about this a lot internally,
Elliot: We talk about it a lot.
Brian: because you're not wrong. They are in conflict with each other because a lot of times we, we've built with ourselves the format of our show is that for anyone who's not familiar with My First Dungeon, the format is we do a season focusing on a new indie role playing game.
So like Orbital Blues or Zas Bed and Breakfast or Die, the first episode, the designer of that game teaches the GM how to play, gives them a bunch of tips and tricks. Then that gm, who's never run the game before, runs the game for new and experienced players. We add in like you know, award-winning, sound design and original music by behold and other musicians. And then at the end of the series we go back and talk to the designer about like what went right, what went wrong, how we can make things even better.
And that is a format, but it is also very much a cage because,
Sam: I'm familiar. Yeah.
Brian: Right. Because every time as we've gone on this show was initially designed to like my girlfriend at the time, my, now my wife wanted to learn to like gm.
So we started a show where I like taught her how to the rules of Dungeons and Dragons. And now it is this like big, bold thing that we want to keep doing more and more expansive and wild things with.
But the problem is the more experimental and weird we get, the further we get from teaching people the core way of how to play the
Sam: Yeah,
Elliot: Yeah, I think about, this idea that there is like a spectrum that we, we slide around on with my first dungeon between educational and aspirational. And I don't think that either is more explicitly valuable for bringing a game to the table. I think that the longer we've done this, the more I do truly think, and this isn't just justifying the way the show has gone, I do truly think that sometimes aspirational actual play can be more effective for getting people to bring a game to the table and try it than purely educational, actual play.
Because I think that, you know, you can lose people if you go to, it's harder to find the balance of like what level is my audience gonna be at from an educational perspective. Like you teach a kid differently than you teach an adult who plays games versus a, an adult who doesn't play games.
And like with aspirational, you can make something really cool that highlights what makes this system interesting and you keep enough mechanics in for them to then recognize it when they bring it to the table and you've done the job of like, hey, now that person is excited to bring to the table and try and kind of create something similar to what we've used the game to create.
Brian: And the aspirational part is part of the reason why we do intense sound design and scoring and, and like highly editing. And it's, part of that is, it's fun. It creates a better product from our perspective. But really what we're trying to recreate is the sensation of playing the game. Because when you're playing a role playing
Sam: I was just about to underline this a hundred percent. Yeah.
Brian: you hear the score in your head like that, the five minutes it takes for someone to look up a rule and roll the dice, that feels like it happens in 10 seconds because that's like, you know, you're going crazy. You're reading your character sheet trying to figure out what the hell you're doing next, but in a recording that's just dead air and it's, and it's incredibly obvious. So we cut that out partially to make a faster show that moves quicker, but also to better recreate what you would experience playing this game.
So that, as Elliot said, this is aspirational, but also gives you a great glimpse into what playing this game could be like, which will hopefully get you to pick up the game and actually try it after you've, you know, learned the rules from the designer
Sam: Yeah. You know, I've, uh, I'm really interested in the dichotomy in this and also in actual play at large between nonfiction and fiction, right? Because you are, you are sort of operating on those two different levels, right? On the nonfiction level you have like the players sitting around the table, maybe learning how to play the game. And then on the fiction level you have, you know, the story and the audio drama and all that kind of stuff.
And I feel like balancing those things is something that is really tough in any kind of after the fact, like media that comes from playing games, including like traditional actual play. But it's also like something that I think rarely gets thought about intentionally and I'm curious to hear how y'all think about it.
Elliot: I think it's an interesting thing because I think that there are, there are, and so I'm gonna be self-indulgent for a moment and talk about, a new job that I've taken on this, these recent months is I just started teaching podcasting at a university here in New York. And one of the first things I talked about in that class was the idea that making a podcast, and I think this applies to actual play making a podcast, is thinking about where you land on multiple spectrums of creative choice.
And one of those spectrums that you just brought up, is fictionally. Whether we're sitting in the fiction and the nonfiction and in podcasting, that is somewhere where you can sit in kind of all the different places. And I, and I never really thought about until you just said it now, talking about play as nonfiction, but it a hundred percent is the more play you leave in, the more you are putting nonfiction into the product into the podcast.
So I don't know that we think about fictionally necessarily in my first dungeon. I think we're often thinking fiction first when we're making our show. But I think it's the idea of like every single actual play, I think you can set out these creative spectrums and say, where did this person decide to land on it?
Editing. Number of people who you're hearing. Like how much of the game is shown, how fictional it is, how sound design it is. These are all like spectrums of creative choice.
And that's kind of the reason there's so much beautiful variety of podcasts and actual plays that you get to, you get to just turn those dials and like, as we've learned over time, you get to adjust those dials as you go where like we have cranked up our sound design and production value dial and probably cranked down the nonfiction dial in that way.
Brian: I think our show, especially as the season goes on. So, like our Wild Sea season was six episodes. And in the interview, obviously that's very nonfiction. In the first episode, it is incredibly fiction forward, but the first episode or two is where you're gonna get the most like cut-ins from me as the gm, like explaining the rules or like teaching someone a thing and like we're learning how to play.
And by the last episode, we're probably not getting any of those because we now have like learned the core rules we're playing fully within the world. Now it's fully in the aspirational, inspirational story, like a hundred percent story dial. And then, you know, we go to the, the talk back with the creator, and then now it's a hundred percent back to the nonfiction dial.
Elliot: But I think that also beautifully mirrors how people learn games. You know, like, I feel like when you look at your first session of a game and how much you're like looking at your character sheet and asking for rules, clarifications versus your 10th session when you're, barely thinking about the rules. You're barely thinking about the mechanics.
I think that that is one of the beautiful things we've been able to capture in these more fiction forward seasons, like the Wild Sea, like Orbital Blues, is that it feels like those players are learning to play because they are, and like they're doing it on like, you know, a professional level, you could say. But, but it's, it's exactly how it will kind of ramp when you bring the game home.
Sam: Yeah.
Brian: and also having the like, like we do talk backs for each episode on their Patreon, which is just one way for me to plug the many Side media Patreon. Go to patreon.com/many side media if you wanna become a member of our Patreon we have, you know, cast talkbacks for each episode, which a, is just kind of like part of the format of actual play these days. Like Dimension 20 has their talkback show. I know Critical role does, it's an easy bonus content thing.
But when you are a show that is so focused on teaching people, that becomes a great way for us to twist the dial one way or the other of the episode ends up being very heavily fiction and then the talk back ends up being very heavily nonfiction where some some of what we're talking about is story forward, but a lot of it ends up being like, oh, that game mechanic worked a little differently than I thought. Oh, wasn't that interesting that this worked and this didn't?
Sam: Yeah. you're like separating out the fiction and the nonfiction layers into different episodes or, or trying to, to some extent there maybe.
Brian: Yeah, and I think there's a blending between each. Like you'll find some fiction in the Talkbacks and you'll find some nonfiction
Sam: of
Brian: the core episodes, but. Part of that is also us coming up against that cage that I talked about. Because if we were sticking to the, like most core idea of what my first dungeon was originally intended to be, there would be way more interruptions by the gm.
We'd be like very specific about looking up rules. It'd be something maybe closer to what Quinns Quest is doing with their podcast Play to Find Out. Which Quinns is like very hyper specific on going in and making sure they play like rules as written. 'cause they wanna see how the game is actually played.
like, we'll mess up rules, like pretty much every interview we ask the designer like, Hey, what rules did we mess up?
Elliot: There's always a core one.
Sam: Yeah.
Brian: our Wanderhome season with J Dragon Jay was like, well, you guys seem to have fun, but you didn't use the core mechanic at all. And I was like, oh no. which is from the perspective of this show, being a teaching tool is a fundamental failure.
Sam: Yeah.
Brian: But I think we've pushed up against that cage enough that we've expanded it to be like, now this is more aspirational. We're trying to get you to be interested in Wanderhome. Even if we did all the rules wrong, we've now been a little bit more careful on not messing up that explicitly.
Elliot: It does make me wanna see someone edit an AP where you take the talk back and you intersperse it docus style, where it's like talking heads about the AP you
Brian: that'd be a lot of fun. I I, I was thinking about this today of like, what I'd like to do, and I'm sure someone has done this, but do like a director's commentary for an actual play episode. I don't
Sam: hard. I don't know.
what the format looks like, but yeah, I mean, this is, that's like what I was trying to do with party by the Apocalypse, which I put out earlier this year, which was a mini series I did with Aaron King of the RTFM podcast, Keegan EXC and essay of, of various things. Also, they'll be a link in the show notes.
But we did a an actual play where the goal was teach people how to play Apocalypse World. And the way we're gonna do that is by like playing the game and very periodically just like stopping and being like, so what are you thinking right now? Like, how is this working for you right now? Like, what's your goal doing this? And like really leaving in all the negotiations around the mechanics and stuff. And then like pausing to do meta commentary on like not just how the mechanics are working, but like, I'm making this decision for my character, you know, because I think like you want to be pressed in this particular way, and I think that'll be good drama, right?
And I found that format worked really well actually. And there were still a lot of room to like remove the like boring parts, right? To remove the people just looking up rules and the going around and stick to the like talking about how and why
Brian: Because people, arguing about rules is not a thing that I think is inherently boring. It can be boring and it often is, but when it's an interesting conversation, then it's core,
Sam: depends so much on like, I mean, like, we're recording this a couple of days after Jay Dragon dropped this new Expressionist games manifesto, which sort of posits that like, this is sort of a secondary characteristic in that manifesto, but that like pro socially arguing about rules can be like a really fruitful, thematic space, right? Like if, if the game is built for that.
But also, I don't know, often the game is not built for that. So,
Brian: But in, in a world where I think all, all of us at this table have, played J Dragon seven Part Pact, and that is a game that is. Explicitly built to like argue within and like embrace that and, and like really revel
Sam: Yeah.
but it's also the case that like, it feels harder to make an actual play of that experience. Right. Especially because I think like that experience of of like wrestling with rules in a game where that is intended to happen so often blurs the line between player and character, between the nonfiction and the fiction, which then
it is really interesting and compelling and I love that gameplay. But also I dunno, I'm saying this and then I'm thinking like, y'all did a Triangle Agency series. Right? Like, I'd be curious to hear how that goes
Elliot: not
yet.
We haven't hit, We haven't hit, record
yet.
Sam: Well, there you go.
Elliot: We did the Patreon mini series, but we haven't done the like big series. We're planning.
Sam: well I'm in the middle of a triangle agency campaign and have a lot of feelings about exactly this topic that I'm sure. Uh, I think 2026 is gonna be a lot about unpacking on this show. So I'm excited to hear how all that goes on y'all's show too.
Let's move forward. I wanna talk about The Wild Sea. We're here to talk about a moment from an episode of your my First Engine Wild Sea Series. But let's talk about the series at large. Where did it come from? Where did it start from? What is the Wild Sea and like, what do you love about it?
Elliot: Yeah. The Wild Sea was born out of gen Con 2023. We met Felix Isaacs the designer of Wild Sea, and kind of got to chatting and the Wilde had just won its and then later that year, we started talking to Felix about how cool it would be to play the Wild Sea on my first dungeon. And Felix was like, Ray Chou is the, is the guy you gotta, you gotta convince. He was like, Ray, you know, he's not always down to spend money unless he thinks it's a good investment, but I can help you kind of with this conversation.
And so we spent probably three months kind of in conversation with Myth Works and Ray Chou pitching on doing the show, what the money would take, how we could prove a return of, of, of some kind. Because, you know, we didn't have data on. What the return would be. Wilde is now our kind of case study of data of like return on investment for actual play. But Ray largely took a risk on US
Brian: Yeah, to Ray's credit like, we couldn't prove that we had any demonstrable impact or return on investment. Like we could kind of point to a lot of indicators that were like, you know, our Die series got a lot of buzz and like ended up spawning some other Die series. And same with our Orbital Blues series. And like, there were all these like kind of intangible markers. They were qualitative but they weren't quantitative.
And so Ray, you know, very much to his credit took a significant risk on us. And I think we came to that recognizing that he was taking a risk, recognizing that the Wild sea and myth works, though they are a relatively bigger indie company or still a very small company. And like we wanted to meet them with where they were coming at, like they were taking risk on us. We wanted to reward that risk.
And we did that by, you know, BE/HOLD did a whole album of original music. Me and Jay Straumann wrote like six or seven original tree shanties. We, really went hard on our sound design and like really made this probably our most immersive season ever question mark. And really like, leaned in on this one
and I think we had before, but we were like we gotta make this one work. This is like our time to prove that this is a, not only a great artistic investment, not only a great qualitative investment, but also a great quantitative investment.
And luckily that
Sam: Yeah.
How, like you don't have to get into the data in particular or the numbers if you don't want to. But I'm curious to hear like, how did you like collect the data that shows this was a financial success?
Elliot: yeah. Super straightforward. We had a discount code with trackable purchases and on that discount code we saw a two x return on the investment brian?
Brian: I think it was like 2.1 x and to be fair, that is, that was as of seven months after the lease of the first episode. I haven't gotten an updated number since then. I probably should,
Elliot: Mm-hmm.
Brian: but yeah. So we had this discount code that anytime anyone used it you know, he had it on its backend and that ended up netting them like an additional I think it was 12,000 134 at last time we checked, dollar and that was trackable.
And we knew a bunch of, like, on our discord, there were people who were like, oh, I didn't even know you had a discount code. I bought it because of you. Or like, I was just working a booth at GenCon not too long ago. And PI was at the Rowan working Decker booth and people would come up and be like, oh, wildly, I just bought wildly because of you.
And I'd kind of be like, Hey, you know, we got this discount
Sam: yeah. Yeah. yeah.
Brian: They'd be like, oh shit. No. So that is like the low end of what the reality is. It is likely higher than that, but that is the only like demonstrable number we can prove. Which is great though, to be clear, if Ray was to spend that same amount of money on backer kit ads or like Instagram ads, Facebook analytics, it is very likely that he and anyone else doing it who had good assets would get 2.5 x return on investment
Elliot: Or more.
Brian: or more. Now, the way that we always pitch it is that, hey, we're getting you close to that. Or we've had case studies where we get close to that and you're getting this polished product that will exist on a shelf forever.
Like this is in the library. You can point to this anytime you want. This is a high-end thing that will get more people into the game, get current players more excited, and it's a great spot to point people to if they want to learn the game and actually start playing it. Which is ultimately what all the designers and the companies that we talk to want.
Like, yes, you want people to buy the game, but you really want people to play the game. That's why we got into this. You know, that's why no one makes the game is to play it. And you know, cynically, a person who plays the game is more likely to buy future
Elliot: Mm-hmm. Right.
Sam: if you're trying to make money, what are you fucking doing in this industry? Like if you, if you're like trying to get by, like, like I understand like being in this industry and trying to make money, Right?
But like, if your goal is making money, like
Brian: Yeah. If your goal is to make capital M money, you're doing the wrong thing. If your goal is to make a, a humble living, you can maybe do
Sam: Maybe. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Elliot: Maybe
Sam: Like like, like Elliot
is Elliot's crushing it and the jury's out. Yeah. Yeah.
Elliot: you also, I know mentioned just like what is the Wild Sea and what drew us to it for folks who don't know, simple pitch is the Wild Sea, is you are sailors atop chainsaw ships in a world covered in trees that has just been made capital w weird by up an apocalypse a couple hundred years ago.
And you can play mushroom folk and cactus people and moth people and it is
Sam: And a pile of spiders.
Elliot: an a pile of spiders that is sentient. Or in our case bats because we had a spider line with one of our players, so we had a bat cell Cree which was very fun.
And it is just my favorite kind of fiction, which is weird fiction, weird fantasy. And yeah, I just, I remember when we were talking about it 'cause the other, sort of shift was that this was the first time we were putting someone other than Brian in the reigns of a major season.
So I was really excited about the game. I like everything about the, like juice of it spoke to my brain in a particular way, but I was also deeply nervous about kind of taking the reins in that
Sam: Yeah, totally.
Brian: Crushed it.
Sam: yeah, you should. So I feel like that's like great setup, both like nonfictional and fictional as it were going into this moment. But then I, I just want to
Brian: That's a podcast host right
Sam: yeah. yeah. yeah. Look at me go.
Um, but let's, let's like get into this particular moment and like start breaking it down.
So I wanted to start with like, background for this moment. Like what context do we need to understand going into it?
Brian: Sure. So this game is a, it's a forged in the dark game. So it's D six dice pull based system. I believe in this clip that doesn't really come up, but one of the core features of this game is a thing called whispers, which is a It is a resource that your character has that is literally like a word or a phrase that you can whisper, say, or, or shout, and it will have different effects on the word by whispering it, you discover secret information. So you like learn something about the world.
If you say it, you are able to like twist the narrative of the world in your favor. So it's kind of like a very nebulous spell. And if you shout it, you force a change in the world that often has some kind of high impact twist that the the GM or the other players decide in our game.
Normally you get to choose whether you whisper, say, or shout it. In our game, Elliot had made a like tainting of whispers that now you had to roll a die to see whether you whisper, said or shouted it, which meant that whispers were these very volatile things where you may have been just trying to use this like phrase to get a little bit of information and you accidentally cause like a chain reaction of very bad things happening. Which was a very fun way to do whispers, having them this like weird, tainted, corrupted thing.
And in this scene we are all on our ship, the crackling heart. My character is a mothrin who loves singing. She see singing tree shanties, not sea shanties, tree shanties. And we are traveling to deliver, some strange and terrifying cargo back to its owners so we can escape a
Sam: Hmm. Mm-hmm.
Elliot: Yeah. And the preceding moment to this clip is that we did an intro after you guys left a kind of big conflicty previous episode, and we had done character moments. In the final character moment of this sort of intro to the episode was asking your character whistling. What do you sing that first night where everyone's sitting out on the deck?
Sam: Mm.
Brian: Yeah,
Sam: And so that's what we're gonna hear in the clip, right?
Brian: that's what you're gonna hear. You're gonna hear an original tree shanty written by me and Jay Straumann, and then something else.
Elliot: I had metal piece, you had a disc of Amber and Ezra had the metal, uh, rings that you guys combined into a chart.
Brian: Yeah, I, I'm playing with this, with this amber, this piece of amber and these metal rings that seem to be forming into some kind of like fancy like compass thing. And as I start aligning them at night.
They click into place and I hold them up to the stars and the bubbles in the amber line up to constellations and lead us in a direction. Damn straight. They do.
Elliot: I'd like you to take the whisper on the right path. Oh,
Brian: and I think as he. Recognizes the path. I don't think there's any choice in him, but to sing. A song about finding a path, and Jay and I are gonna sing it for you.
Singers: Give me a chart and I'll sing you a story. A story of sailors that sail here before they force the pathways. That all must follow, some follow with caution, but sail them with joy. Joy
Jay: reading out the char for the arrows and dashes. The dashes are foolish, the arrows are light.
Brian: Lies on a char. Find the.
Fruit in its branches. The branches that carry you into the world,
Jay: the world is not kind and the leaves, they are hungry. A hunger there are Russ and cries for your soul.
Brian: Your soul is not something with which you can barter. You barter with only the things that you own with it. Whitland
Elliot: stop
the ship. Tips 90 degrees. As you guys come over the precipice of a. Great Whirlpool in the waves, and Kelly grabs you as you get tossed forward. Threatened to fall off in the midst of your reverie and in the midst of your song. At the center of the Whirlpool is a great pitch black hole, you know, to be the whisper.
Well,
Singers: oh fuck, fuck, fuck. Oh my God.
Elliot: What do you do?
Sam: So I, wanna start actually not at the very beginning of this. I wanna start with the shanty. You'd mentioned earlier in this conversation that you'd written like six sea shanties or something for this show.
Brian: think we wrote and wrote eight and I think we recorded like seven Sure. When was that happening? Was that a thing where you like wrote all those in advance of the game and looked for places to plug them in? Or is that something where it was like you were writing them for specific moments? Like, what was the timeline for creating these things,
Yeah.
Sam: to the game?
Brian: What I love about this clip is that it is the best combination I can imagine in our entire ovo OO
Sam: Ra.
Brian: library of content that most shows pre-production, production and post-production all at once, and how those can combine really well because the reason we had tree shanties at all, I just like liked the idea of tree shanties, but I didn't think we were actually gonna like write any, it was just gonna be kinda this nebulous.
And then I said that in like Session Zero, and Jay Straumann, a phenomenal musician and professional bassist sent back a tree shanty that like blew my hair
Elliot: Which is Auburn. Love the trailer.
Brian: in, yeah, in the, trailer song that also ended up being like a key part of the
Sam: Yeah.
Brian: So sent me that and I was like, okay Jay, let's just do this. And so we met before we recorded anything, I believe, I think we'd recorded Session Zeros, who knew who the characters were. And I think we wrote in like one three hour session, like three or four shanties.
And we didn't have anything in mind with them. They were just, we weren't trying to like get them to be moments. We were trying to get them to feel like songs existed in the world. So songs that were about, you know, charts and tides and were about whispers and were about things in the world, but weren't like, this is a plot thing.
And then I think midway through the season we met to do three or four more because we wanted to have one per episode which was like a thing I, in like one or two episodes, kind of ham fisted in just a little bit. But I was like, we wrote these things, I wanna put 'em in and they're fun.
So then we re I think in all cases, but one we had fully recorded them and Jay had like produced and mixed them and stuff. And so I played the song through my mix board for the
Sam: Mm. Mm-hmm.
Brian: I would be like, and whistling starts singing this press play. And they'd hear the song, they'd hear the track.
And usually that was kind of my like sacred Brian player time. Like this is the, this is the thing I wanted to do with my character. I got to press play and I got to watch all my friends listen to me and Jay sing and do a
Sam: Yeah.
Elliot: But I would note that this was the one or one of two that you sang live on the day.
Brian: Was it okay? Okay.
Elliot: I distinctly remember that. You and Jay sang
Sam: Oh my God. do you remember Elliot, like, is the backing track playing or are y'all just like acapella going for it?
Elliot: This one was acapella, I
Sam: Wow.
Brian: Yeah. We wouldn't have had a backing track
yet 'cause it was either, it was pretty much all or nothing. And I was so in my head of like, what I'm doing right now is I'm gonna perform this whole
song and this is my sacred time and no one will touch it.
Sam: Yeah, because like why would you? Why would you fucking touch it? It is a player singing a song. This is incredible. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Brian: Exactly. And then. This is, keep in mind the fifth episode of six. So I've done this four times and it's never been interrupted.
And this time Elliot jumps in. And that A startles me as a player, B, startles me in character. And C allows for this great moment of, in the final product in with the post-production, we have the fully made track and then whistling stop.
There's so much that that allows me to do as a sound designer of you can pull stuff out, you can have the creaking of the ship, you can have the warm of some kind of weird thing opening up. That creates a great distinction between two moments. That is like the stuff that makes sound design pop.
So we had pre-production of making a thing. Production, we're singing it. And then Elliot now has the chance to interact with this thing and then post-production because of that interaction, that seemed probably would've been a bit dull if I had just sung the whole song, because that's not a very dynamic song. It's just about people liking charts and like sailing. Now Elliot made it a story moment, and not only that, a very impactful story moment that wouldn't have hit as hard if he hadn't cut through something that had been so previously set up to be like a kind a pseudos sacred
Sam: Yeah, well.
Brian: was defiled
Sam: It,
it,
Brian: GM eruption.
Sam: feels like you really do kind of need that buildup because like imagine your player shows up your, at your table and like has a song prepared and starts singing and then you cut them off. Like, that's, that's like the worst thing I can imagine doing. Like at a table, like just such a like horrible thing to like shut down that creativity unless they've already done it four times. Right.
Like once it's a thing where it's like we've given that person that moment, we like, understand this space. Like it makes it exciting and like gives it all that energy that you were talking about without stealing your spotlight because you've, you've had your spotlight, you know?
Brian: On the fifth song, shut up already. We get it. You can one song this is my game,
Sam: I don't know about that. Five songs. You're right out the door. Yeah.
Brian: What's also great about it though is that now fifth episode Elliot has done this new thing. So now this space that you once thought was safe and you just listened to a song now can be
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Brian: Now there is an additional tension of that is not a sacred space anymore. something bad, could happen in the middle.
Elliot: which is very thematic for where this story, this is a story turn for the entire arc of this season is like, this moment is a turn where in the immediate following scene, they learn a several revelations about themselves and their captain and sort of the nature of like why they're transporting this cargo that they've been transporting all season.
I don't know how spoiler we
Sam: We've, yeah, I don't think necessarily we need to be precious with spoilers.
Elliot: okay. I know going into that, that episode, there's a pacing thought where I am like, I have two episodes left. They need to get all the way beneath the sea to interact with the source of everything that has happened this season. Like. I need to get them down. And so how do I do that? With a whirlpool, of course.
And so it's like, it's it's a tree whirlpool, which is a thing that happens. But it was, it was a snap, switch in the season where it went from, like, we are above the sea handling our adventures relatively well. Things are scary. Things are like, you know, we're dealing with some like icker zombies and, and things like that. Like things are, things are fucked.
But I needed it to be, Hey, no more, no more like softball, where like everything is just ramped up in seriousness. Your songs can be interrupted. Like this is not, this is not a safe place anymore. Like fictionally, like table's still safe. I don't like that's a, that's a loaded word to say this is not a safe place anymore, but like the Wild Sea is not a safe place for you anymore, for the rest of the season.
Sam: Elliot, I'm curious to ask you like, when did you know you were gonna interrupt Brian? Is this like a spur of the moment decision? Did you like have this idea in song number two? Like, you know, where, when were you kind of plotting this?
Brian: When did you think you were gonna interrupt my special song? Time?
Elliot: I got, it's, it is either in the prep for this session or the session before. I remember so Shen uque Tissera also of many side media produced this season so was kind of like my guy in the chair the whole time. And I remember the call where I said Shenuque, I think in this episode, I wanna do something a little risky. And they were like, okay, let me hear it. And I was like, I wanna let them have this song moment, but I want to fucking interrupt. I want to just jump in the middle and scare them. Do you think that's all right? Do you think that like, that will like throw the vibes off or whatever?
And Shenuque, who, if anybody listening listens to my first dungeon is a little chaos gremlin and was like, no, do it. No do it. Fuck 'em up. Fuck 'em up, do it.
Um, and so, yeah, right? And so I had, I had the like devil on my shoulder being like, yeah, that's a great idea. Go for it. On something that, like in prep, I was like, this is a risk, like this is a risk to kind of, you know, table vibe or, or what have you.
Sam: yeah. What
Were you afraid might happen?
Elliot: You know, Jay and Brian put so much work into these shanties and like, what I didn't want was them to think that I didn't respect that work and like, every time a song got included, it was a really special thing. We always would like clap after in session after they played and like be like, oh, this fucking slaps. So I didn't want to take away from like that joy from them.
But like, thankfully, like Jay and Brian are not only two players I've played with a lot, but like two very close friends. And so I might not, not have necessarily done that with any player depending on my experience with them. But I was like, these are two people who I feel I have a certain amount of kind of trust to. Like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna step, I'm gonna step up to the line of like GM player dynamics and, and mess with it a little bit. And know that whether they didn't like it or not, I can check in with them after and they will tell me if it was like, actually I didn't like that.
And you, I think we leave it in the tape where I go like, Jay Bryan, you okay with that? And they're like, oh, fuck yeah. That was awesome.
Sam: Yeah.
it's, I, I find that navigating of trust at the table to be I don't know, like the most important thing about playing, well, playing games, like on mic or off and like, it's really tricky because it is just navigating like real life social circles, right? It's, it's just the real life thing.
And I think it is really magical when you are playing with people that you trust enough that you know, you can take those kinds of risks and like, even if it doesn't go in a place where everyone is happy, that you'll be able to recover well, right? Yeah.
but I, I don't know that it doesn't, that doesn't come easy, you know?
Elliot: No, it doesn't, and I mean it it comes from, you know, a like, trying to intentionally create an environment where people feel like they can,
you know, we, we say a thing on the show a lot, which is take big swings. And like I think we really mean that. And I think that like we try to create an environment for players and GMs where it's like, we'll catch you. You know what I mean? Like, if you, if you take a big swing and you trip over yourself, like, we will catch you and like, it's gonna be all right.
And like worst case that could have happened is I go like, Hey Jay, Brian, you okay with that? And like, one of them seems a little upset and it would've been like, all right, let's top for a second. Do you, do you wanna redo that scene? Do you wanna do the song? And I can have the Whirlpool come in at the end, like, worst case. That's what it would've been like. Like because of the kind of relationships and, and, and table culture that like we've cultivated,
Brian: Yeah, and there was an element of like, I'm, trying to say this in a way that doesn't sound weird, but like casting and building relationships with people outside of the game is kind of, in a weird way, an element of pre-production,
Sam: Yeah.
Brian: which sounds weirdly cynical. I don't wanna like, you know commoditize friendship.
But, but building those relationships, even though you're not doing it for the purpose of like making an actual play podcast or making some kind of artistic thing, is one of the most valuable things you can have going into a project like this.
Because it's like great, we have that shared language, we have that trust. We've probably just having talked to each other enough or hung out enough, we've probably come up to various lines or boundaries that we've negotiated as friends and have found like where each other's good and bad buttons are and where the lines are that we can and cannot go up to
Sam: Yeah.
Elliot: Yeah.
Sam: Another thing I wanted to ask about Elliot was to dig more into, you were talking about thinking about the pacing of the whole season and like knowing that you only have two episodes left and you know, like kind of where the season needs to end and you're timing this in part around that.
And I think that that's a really important skill for a GM to have. I mean, I think one of the benefits of a GM role is being able to put a lot more of the power of controlling that pacing into one person's hands, where it's maybe easier to manage for the group.
But it's also, it, it's like, on the one hand it's unique to actual play that, you know, you have six episodes and you know, you're like making a show and what the constraints of that show are.
And also like sometimes you know that like Christmas is coming up and this group's falling apart, or that we've agreed to play for six episodes and actually like Brian has a hard out after that is like getting busy in his life and like these kinds of. restrictions on how many sessions you're gonna play are, are things that exist in real life too.
So, just in sort of a practical advice sense, I'm curious to hear you talk about, like, advice for listeners on being in that position and how you are thinking about it and how you handle it.
Elliot: Yeah, I mean, you're exactly right. And I'd add one other consideration for us, which was budgetary. Like this was a sponsored season and we had a certain budget we could afford to pay players. And so adding a session just like throws the math off at the small budgets we're working at, in a big way. So it's like it has to, it has to happen that way.
I think that there is a thing, and I feel like it's maybe a little bit of like a, a, dirty conversation. People don't like to have, but thinking about prep for a game is fundamentally different when you make an actual play. Like it's something i, I really, really strongly believe, like it's something that Brian and I talk about.
Or like, I'll ask Brian, like, when we get into a new season, I'm like. Like it's a game can be pitched as low to no prep. And I'm like, okay, is it low to no prep for an actual play or like, do we still have to do like. The prep of making sure that we make a good entertainment product, which is really important to us. And like that is one of our like core tes, is consider the audience, you know, make sure we make something we would wanna listen to.
And I think that the, tension there is that, what I'm not saying to do is make your story beat by beat and just kind of push your players into it and you know everything that's gonna happen.
when I thought about this season, and I want to again give Shenuque credit because Shenuque was right there with me in all the planning and helping me think about pacing was we chunked this season out into three and we said these two episodes are roughly going to take place in this setting. And here's like, here's the key thing that I want them to know about the world. And maybe like. A big encounter, and we did that across three chunks. And those were the only three chunks we knew we were gonna be able to fit.
And we knew that when we got to the second episode of a chunk, Shenuque would hit me with a message sometimes in session and say you know, we need to be out of here in the next 50 minutes. So we gotta find a way to, you know, push them along, you know, like move the pace.
It's a lot of, that's my, like, my advice is like chunk, your seasons when you're making an actual play. Really think about like what those chunks are. And then, you know, you have the freedom of play and the emergent narrative within those chunks.
And also you can adjust the later chunks. But chunking out the whole season means that at least those first two, you're gonna get there. And then you can think about adjusting things as you go from there. But then you've already thought about pacing and at a, at a blue sky kind of
Sam: Yeah. Well, I think this is good advice. Like, one of the things I was trying to get at was like, advice for people who aren't making actual plays, who are just like playing games at home. Right.
Because like, I think a lot of people think of railroading as a dirty word. I also think a lot of people just like write their D&D campaign and, and like, you know, shuttle their players through it or whatever.
And like you know, in the same way that you are thinking about like, Hey, we only got 15 minutes left before our time's up, and like, we gotta get these people outta here. Like, hey, that's true on Tuesday night for me, right? Like, people got bedtimes. Like I, and I think like just being aware of that that out and like trying to plan accordingly. Like, it's a, it's a hard skill to learn in a lot of ways.
and like, I think it's really, really helpful, as you were saying earlier, to have like a guy in a chair for actual plays to like do that job separately from the gm who can just kind of be in it.
But I, I don't know. I think this is one of the things that makes me a good GM is like having a really strong sense of that kind of pacing stuff. And I, I don't know, I just think it's a skill that people should practice.
Elliot: Oh, I, I agree. And I think like, yeah, if you're thinking about things that apply to everyone, I think Wildsea in particular is a game where it gives you really good tools for pacing in that it tells you to use tracks for everything. And I used tracks for everything.
And like, you know, it is a, it is a sense you develop of how long it takes to tick a track a little bit in when you first run the game. But by the time I was in the like fifth or sixth episode, I was like, okay, if this thing is an eight track, I'm gonna get 45 minutes to an hour out of it. You know, if this is a sixth track, we'll get it done in like 30. And then like really practically, you can build a three hour session out of a handful of tracks.
So that's like for this game in particular, a good tool. But like, I totally agree like that. Like it is a sense you just have to develop as a GM that you know, what kinds of things take a certain amount of time.
And I think you can do your own chunking. Even if you're not thinking in a production schedule, you can say like, Hey guys, like this next arc is gonna be six sessions roughly. And then you adjust.
Sam: Yeah. I think there's a really interesting tension in here that exists at home games, but especially exists in actual plays between like railroading and scripting , versus wanting to stay flexible. Right. Versus wanting to embrace the improvisational nature of the medium. And like the more you are planning, the easier It is for pre-production, right? Like the easier it is for a film shoot to like do the thing that a film shoot does or an audio recording session does, whereas, you know, then you lose the magic of improvisation that I think is like fundamental to this medium.
Elliot: Well, I would, oh,
Brian: good ahead.
Elliot: I was gonna, well, I was gonna kind of turn it to you, Brian, because I think that I can have a perspective on this, but I will probably be warped because I did the planning for the session, but I'm curious from the player perspective, Brian, how that, how you felt that tension came, came through at the table between like railroading versus emergent.
Brian: I never felt railroaded at the table. And I also have like a bit of a skewed perspective. 'cause I'm also a producer on
Sam: Yeah.
Brian: in some, like, I'm not queued into what's happening in the story, but like I'm also looking at the clock being like, Hey guys, we gotta go.
Um, And you can, you can kind of hear me every now and then, like from a player producer perspective, like
Sam: Well,
Brian: like recognizing the cues that Elliot's giving me and being like, oh, okay, I see we gotta get
Sam: yeah.
Elliot: Which is a bit of our
Sam: well, but that's also like a skill that I think players just at home should also develop. Right? Like, I think that there's, there's, you know, I've, I've played in a D&D campaign a couple of years ago where I, like, I just wasn't, I didn't wanna do the thing that the GM had written and like I should have left the campaign and eventually I did. Right? But like, I just like wasn't on board. And if you're gonna be at the table, if you're gonna try to engage in the thing, you should get on board with like, what's the plan here? Like, what do you need from me to like, make this game function in the way that we want it to function, you know?
Like that buy-in is really important.
Brian: I think also the thing that happens when people start talking about railroading versus not, railroading often happens because the GM plans too much stuff. Not necessarily plans too much. Like you can plan a whole big wide world as long as you're spreading it out of a very long campaign. But if you have 10 story beats, you want your players to hit in one session, then yeah, it's gonna be a railroad.
But if you look at Wild Sea as a season, the arc of the story is not particularly wide. There's only a few major events that happen. What that means is that like each episode kind of has one big thing that happens because of that we have two hours or whatever to do that one big
Sam: Yeah. And to put your fingerprints on it. Yeah.
Brian: yeah, we can really put our fingerprints on it. We can go down side streets and find circuitous paths to that direction. And then Elliot gets to like any path that he finds interesting is like, great. Now we're gonna adjust the story to kind of go over there a little bit more. We're gonna adjust the story like, this beat that was supposed to happen here will now happen over here because you guys seem more interested in this.
And also it like still fits my Yeah.
Elliot: Yeah. And I think that like one thing that more and more as I've, as I've grown as a gm, I am much more reactive to players. Like what I planned largely for the Wild Sea was moments that I thought would be great.
Like a couple episodes earlier, there is like an ichor zombie kind of situation where they get overwhelmed with these ichor zombies and and I'm like, I think it would be cool if this weird ichor I've introduced created a bunch of zombies. How's that gonna happen? I'm not entirely sure yet. And then like we get into the episode and Kendo playing bats uses this twisty whisper method and it goes haywire. And I'm like, that's a pretty good thing to make some icker
Sam: Yeah. Yeah,
Elliot: that be the consequence of this.
So like, I'm usually thinking in like, what are the big moments that I like and like, I think would be cool in this, and then let the player chaos kind of lead that way or like shake it up in a different
Sam: Yeah. Cool.
Elliot: And like if that's the thing is like if I had interrupted the shanty and there was a whirlpool and they were like, we're gonna do everything we can to go in the opposite direction of the whirlpool, we would've done that and like something else would've happened. But it's also, again, like Brian said, everybody at that table knows that like, man, I bet Elliot's got something cool for us down in that Whirlpool, so let's
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Brian: There's also an element of that just thinking back to our orbital blues season of a time when this doesn't quite work, when the players either misread the GM or decide like, nah, we don't like that. The whole season I'm telegraphing that like, Hey, Reno 12 is where the, the big showdowns gonna happen, but also it's the most dangerous place you can go to.
And so the players very wisely were like. Yeah, we're not gonna go there. Like the, the place where I'd planned all like the, the third act of the thing they didn't want to go to. And I was like, oh, okay, let's follow your fun and like we will rewrite it. We'll find a new thing. There's still cool stuff happening. The world is still
Sam: Yeah.
Brian: but now it's just gonna follow you where you want to go.
Sam: Yeah.
All right. I wanna bring us out of this particular moment and back into actual play at large to kind of go out on. Where are you excited for actual play to push to as a medium? Like what, what do you see as like the frontier that you would like to see the medium move towards?
Brian: Man, I got a lot of thoughts.
Elliot: I think that I'm very excited about actual play of difficult games or like of games with antagonistic rules, text and experimental mechanics and stuff. And what happens when that rubber meets the road of actual play of, of like, you know, I think that what we've seen in a lot in the last, like five years especially, is really, I, I mentioned those two things about like, artistic intention, meeting game mechanics, and I think we've seen like a real breath of the creativity that people are bringing when it comes to artistic intention, often to games we know already, like D&D and like, you know, in the indie
space people are playing in a lot more games.
Sam: Do you have examples?
Elliot: I would put world beyond number on like a, as like a big example of this, of like bringing like really epic storytelling with like high class performers to D&D in a way that hasn't quite been done, I think, by the other big players. But they're playing D&D.
And so what I wanna see going forward is like, what happens when we take the height of like our artistic attention and, you know, talent and creativity and we start bringing in these, these more experimental, interesting games. You know, last train to Breman. triangle Agency. Seven part packed. The time we have.
What's that? No but just like what happens when we like I just read a, an upcoming game that I probably can't talk about, but Ryan Khan is working on a game the, the one true Ryan Khan, who is an
Sam: Who I, I, I wanna call out, Ryan came on this show in its first season and did an episode on Wild Sea Whispers that people should check out. So
Elliot: so.
Brian: read, oh, I got a legal
Elliot: I gotta Listen to that. 'cause I love Ryan and I love whispers. Um,
Brian: walk.
Sam: go.
Elliot: but Ryan is making a game that is kind of taking the whisper and, taking it to its logical conclusion in a game. It's, it's called Capricious. and I won't say anything more, you should read it when it comes out. But take these games. Take these games that are antagonistic, that ask you to fight against the rules. And then what does that look like when we bring them to actual play? That's what I'm very excited to see more of.
Sam: Yeah,
Brian: Yeah, and not to like, you know, blow smoke up your ass, but the, your, this isn't necessarily actual play, but your City of Winter episode of Dice Exploder, of, of after image was so interesting and cool. And it was, it was the type of thing that I'd seen in other podcast formats, but not in the world of actual play.
And that was really exciting to see someone playing around in a genre that I was familiar with from other types of shows. From like, you know, a all
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Brian: but not in the world of actual
Sam: yeah.
I want to just uh, throw my 2 cents in here too, of like, I'm really interested in anyone who is trying to capture not the feeling of improvised narrative fiction, but the feeling of what it is like to play these games that, like, that the combination of the nonfiction and the fiction elements, right?
Like the, the fiction is never not gonna be a part of that. But that like, people who are, and I think of like Jeff Stormer has been really influential on how I've thought about this too. Where he's starting to think of his show Party of One as an interview show where like, instead of doing a traditional interview, you're playing a game together and like that really blends the nonfiction of having on who are we playing with, with what's going on with the game.
And I think I, I just think there's so much, I, I think that's what's special about this medium. You know, there's plenty of like fiction podcasts out there. There's movies out there and novels and like other media that in some ways I think just like have a huge leg up practically on doing purely that. Whereas like what those media are gonna struggle with more than actual play is capturing that the feeling of, of real life people creating something and, and also what that thing is at the same time.
Brian: I am also very interested in seeing more people. Like two years ago, Rowan Zeoli said something that like really stuck in my craw and it was, we haven't really seen anyone do like the feature film actual play yet,
Sam: Until last train show, brooklyn coming next week or the week after on Dice Splitter. Anyway, go on.
Brian: But, but, and I know that like really got in my head and I, we tried to do it with our season of nine Lives to Valhalla or like, that's what I had in my mind. And from that perspective, we utterly failed to do that. But it was fun to attempt and fail at.
Elliot: four episodes, right?
Brian: It was four opposite. Yeah. We, it didn't happen at all. but I like the idea of seeing more people doing cooler and cooler stuff and taking big swings on shorter seasons. Elliot and I are the first ones to tell you that having shorter seasons and anthology content is harder than having long form things because it's harder to get listener investment and it's harder to like redraw the wheel every time when you've gotta do like new character art or new assets and start from scratch again.
But it is really interesting, especially when there are more and more games coming out
Sam: Yeah.
Brian: that these shorter, like last train of Bremen
Sam: Well, and the,
Brian: or or two to three episode
Sam: the benefit of it is that you get more entry points. It's more accessible to new players. You know, I, I was listening to your, your conversation with Taylor Moore about World Beyond number on Talk of the Table. And he was talking about how like we had this huge thing out of the gate and like the numbers have been pretty flat since then.
And like part of that is because it's really intimidating to start listening to that show. So i, it's all, it's tricky.
We could keep going for another year on this probably, but,
I think we should call it here. So guys, thanks so much for coming on Dice Exploder. I'm excited to, you know, have you back when I'm doing my next one of these in a, a couple years or whatever.
Brian: Yeah.
Excited to be back.
Sam: thanks again to Brian and Elliot for being here. You can find Brian on Blue Sky at Brian Flaherty at Elliot at more blueberries. You can listen to Talk of the Table wherever you get your podcasts, and you can buy Elliot's new game the time we have today. There's the link in the show notes or Google it, you'll find it. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon. As always, you can find me on Blue Sky at Dice Exploder or on the dice Exploder discord, and you can find my games@testonal.itch.io. Our logo is designed by sporgory. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray. And our ad music is Lily Pads Buma Boy, Travis Tesser.
Thanks to you for listening. I'll see you next time.