The Adventure Zone - The The Adventure Zone Zone: Abnimals Wrap-Up!

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

This week we’re answering some questions about The Adventure Zone: Abnimals, as well as talking a bit about our upcoming projects!Link to the Abnimals Game Rules!Center for Reproductive Rights: https://reproductiverights.org/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointaz

Hi, everybody. Welcome to The Adventure Zone Zone, the premier podcast in which we talk about the podcast that we normally do on a different podcast within the podcast feed itself. It's called Gaze Into Our Navel with us. Yeah. I want you to come to the very edge of our navels, our collective navels, and stare into us with them. Don't make us stare into our own navels alone.

Join us. In our name. Clim into our belly button world. Look. You can go all the way in there. There's a little bit of lint in there. We're going to be discussing the season we just wrapped up. Abimals talking about the next season.

Ooh. And we have lots of great questions here. So let's dive right in. From Devin, where there are other animals you consider choosing? If so, what were they? Bonus question for Travis, if you were to make a hero character, what animal would you choose and why? Devin, did you listen to the season?

because Travis made about 40 hero characters. Yeah, but I don't know that I'd play as any of that. I think if I was going to make a character, it would be like a golden retriever. Yeah. Kind of, like, that was just really, you know, ready to do anything, you're here to please,

happy to be anywhere doing anything. I like the idea of like a hymbo, like a Mr. Peanut Butter kind of like hymbo. That's your vibe. I mean, that's the vibe. Yeah, it's my vibe in general, yeah. I never consider another animal because I actually came into abnoles with the concept of a spy cow already fully formed. I pitched a children's book called Bovine International Cow of Mystery.

Wow. That was surprisingly not picked up by a publisher. They were just too afraid. They were too afraid of the concept. Yeah. Yeah, it was too real. Breaking the mold. So I already had the cow.

spy thing and the ridiculousness of him trying to be a master of disguise and a dancer and all that stuff. So I was on Roger right away. So in a way, the character was also a funeral for this other. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. A living memorial. Kiss that goodbye. But if a publisher wants to pick up the adventures of Roger Moore, give me a call. Navy SEAL is my first thought, best thought. Didn't come up with another one. Got it in one. I think I was the last one to make my case. character because I wanted a good gag and this was I think soon after our um Mbim Bam year where I dressed up as a like a sailor boy and so I guess I had stolen valor on the on the on my brain um and that's where Navy SEAL came from I just know kids like

axolomms yeah that's yeah it's real big they're big they're big so I I did that so my kids would like me I mean like period I feel like if it we all kind of kind of had the same thing of like finding our thing and settling on it because if this specific game and this specific world, I feel like if you look at the full breadth of what, you know, the entirety of the ecosphere offers to you, like it would be impossible to choose, to choose just one. from Larry. Speaking of Roger, Roger Moore's backstory of being an alien is awesome. What inspired that and will we ever get more stuff about it? I love that this is the question that you picked Mac. Yeah.

Just by random chance. What cartoons were your biggest inspirations for the season? I think it's just to all of us. Which do you think Abnibals ended up resembling the most? Thank you for the great podcast, Macrood family. I look forward to hearing your answers. Um, basically Roger being an alien, uh, Travis said there are three ways. The three origin point was it three, Trave or four?

Three, three origin points. And he, to be a mutate, to be evolved or to be an alien. Yeah. And Travis said, the other guys have kind of taken on mutate and evolve. So why don't you take aliens? And I said, yeah, great. So it was kind of a natural after that. And, uh, we really didn't discuss the, um, I don't.

know the the major sort of things that that would bring to our characters the fact that you were an alien and that Justin I think axelile used to be a human and then turned into an axolotl is that that is so interesting Griffin that has kind of gone back and forth a bit of a moving target there yeah you would think there's some context like it would come up in conversation like by the way my planet bovlax nine or whatever yeah I think from what I remember the can I came up with is that if he was an axelotl before he does not remember it because as an axelol he wouldn't have formed memories in the sense that we do think of them so axel aisle only knows himself to be a axelile love that but i think along those lines to answer the second half of your question larry so the cartoons

i mean there's a long list of abnambles cartoons that i pulled from uh cowboys the moom mesaa bite mice from mars uh teenage me into turtles of course um even stuff like gargoyle um, road rovers. There's a lot, right? And one of the things, uh, there was, of course, you know, the inspiration of the abnormal stuff. But also there was a lot of like, yeah, man, there's backstory and justification for things, but it's all very like surface level.

Like they don't get into the science of like, their street sharks. How do they breathe? Right. Like, that's not as important as, like we all need you to accept that these are half human half sharks that like ride motorcycles and stuff and play you know street hockey or whatever and if you can buy into that enough we're golden it's great so like the backstories are pretty malleable uh within those shows as to like what's going on and why and how they got there um and you know

It was less about strict factual adherence as much as it was like, yeah, that's fun for this episode. That's great. Yeah. You know? Here's a question from Frankie. I'd love to know what writing and creating the theme song for this season was like, since it's so unique compared to other seasons. Juice, do you want to, I feel like you spearheaded the sort of coordination on this. Yeah, I wrote it.

Yeah, I wrote it. I wrote it. I wrote it. You sort of were on the baseline. Yeah. So I wanted to try it and I came up with like sort of a very, very, very loose song idea. And then I went to Eric Neer, who has done a lot of the jingles for us for Backward Family Clubhouse. And Eric's also done the music for both of the Charlie Verse episodes. And I was like, listen to this.

We're kind of messing around with it. See what you think. And then Eric reworked the melody in some of the words. and then we were talking to Jonathan Colton about recording it, and he changed some of the lyrics and tweaked some of that, the music, and gave it really cool sound, and so it was a very neat kind of collaboration. I just wanted to do, I thought it would be fun to try something,

to try writing a song, or at least like the basis of one, and it was fun, and I think it came out pretty cool. We had a question here. let's see from L while some Lamar are somewhat self-explanatory I was wondering where the inspiration of the names

the Greenback Cardians came from I don't know why Lamar is self-exploits but basically I took inspiration from the Teenage Muti Ninja Turtles all being named after I believe Renaissance artists

and I like the idea of like a theme to that so I went with like Adventers instead of artists in a similar line. So Lamar was Hetty Lamar, who, along with being an actor, she also

basically developed Wi-Fi and GPS and she developed frequency hopping technology. And then there's Ada Loveless who is like the creator of the idea of

programming computers. There's Isaac Newton for Newton and George Washington in Carver for Carver. Really, the trickiest thing was picking names that worked, one, as names, like, singular, we were just going to call them this. Right. And, like, kind of sounded cool as well.

Carver's, like, such a good. Carver, Loveless, Lamar Newton. And so, like, I went through, I tried to, like, I was thinking about Curie in there. Yeah. And I just couldn't, it was too hard for me to say repeat. repeatedly and not ended up saying curry a lot. That's a good point, actually. People don't think about that kind of stuff.

That honestly separates us from the answers. When I am naming NPCs, I will noodle on it so long, especially for like major NPCs, see it out loud so many times to find one that I can say repeatedly and not sound dumb, do you way. As opposed to the early days when we like snatched Tom. Bodette out of the ether. Well, but even Tom Bodette, you could say over and over again. It's fun to say. It works.

Can we do this one from Margaret? Love this season of Taz and have been loving the shorter form goofiness of recent seasons. I have two questions for y'all. One, for Travis, how far in advance did you have the big walrus reveal planned? Was it hard to keep it hidden from your players? Two, for Clint Justin and Griffin, who was your favorite abnimal NPC that you encounter? This could be from a pun appreciation standpoint or a narrative one. Travis, do you want to tackle that first, the first one?

Right. So I told them right away, there is going to be a character called the Walrus, and there is going to be an NBC who is half walrus, half man named Walter Russell. And it will be obvious to you as players that he is the walrus. But it is important that your characters don't make that connection until it's revealed because once again, this is kind of playing on a lot of like the Abimals TV show, of having a person who's very obviously the bad guy to the audience. Like, I was thinking about the, I can't remember the character's name.

I think it's Magnum or Magnus or something in Gargoyles, who is like so obviously bad, but he's the guy who, like, moves the castle there and the gargoyles, like, live on top of his building for a while. And the gargoles are, like, working with him while the audience. it's like, he's the bad guy. Yeah, clearly. This guy's the problem. And I, so I like,

Magnus, get him. Yeah, come on. And not like a cool Magnus like we've seen before. And so like it was kind of a running joke amongst us that it was so obvious and the characters never put it together until he revealed it. There was a fun point in this season, maybe like 10 episodes in or so where I feel like I was kind of spinning my wheels trying to figure out. trying to piece some of the clues together that you had given us. And I think my brain was operating in a more, I don't know, an abstract sort of fashion. And once you like talk to us very frankly about the Walrus of Walter Russell, the pieces kind of fell into place of like, oh, this is, this is a, this is as simple as, you know, the villain arc in a, you know, Saturday morning cartoon would be.

Exactly. And I feel like we all really got on board after that. Favorite NPC. Yeah. Mine was Eel Patrick Harris. Come on. You took mine. Yeah, that's the best.

Are we just talking name? Are we talking characterization? In the question, it specified exactly that. So we can do both. Mine is from a narrative perspective. I'm really, I love the sort of like cohesive tone of this, world being that of a cartoon and therefore not having dire consequences or much violence to speak of whatsoever. And it is for that reason that I love chlorophyllus because anytime chlorophyllus showed up,

like all the air in the room got sort of sucked out. And it was like, oh my God, there's an actual, actual dangerous killer here in this children's show. And I always found that very, very entertaining. Yeah, I don't know. I had a lot of fun with a hair dryer. Yeah. Oh, yeah, he was good, too. That was fun to play. I liked the guy.

I think maybe hair dryer came first, and then the name of the business, Dryeria came second. And then I was like, yeah, I love this guy very, very much. And I had a lot of fun playing him. Artificial as well was really fun. Yeah, Artie was good. That was a good character, too. Yeah.

Thank you. From Neil, the end-credit song of many action movies becomes culturally synonymous with the movie itself. Kiss for a Rose by Seal and Batman Forever. What I've done by Lincoln Park and Transformers and Extreme Ways by Moby and the Jason Bourne movies comes to mind. If you were to pick a licensed rock ballad to play during the live-action Abnimal's movie end credits, what would it be? Hmm. Hmm. Hot. For me, again, referring to chlorophyllus, I would say you two's, she moves in mysterious ways. That would be such a weird, wild, like, troubling pick for this show.

Um, uh, probably Keshe's animal. That would be good. Would be good. I'm not sure of the lyrics of it, but, yeah. I would say a fallout boy cover of Hungry Like the Wolf. Oh, God, yes. Okay, from Drew Davenport, Justin, were you prepared to evolve Axel if he ever encountered iodine? So, interesting question, Drew. There are people who have, one of the things that's interesting about axolotles, there's a lot,

is that they don't metamorphos in the sense that we think of amphibians doing that. But you can make them if you give them iodine. They will. That's weird. That's a weird thing that is true. And I thought about that at some point. I think that it's kind of a classic Taz stumbler, though, because you invest these sorts of private research times in,

and then you just wait for the opportunity to use them to materialize. But if you don't communicate them with the other parties, it's rare that you are just going to organically encounter eye. Right? Like it's rare that that just like pops up in the story. So it never became Salian, if that, if that makes sense. Travis, were you trying to think of like, how can I slip some iodine into this guy? Because I have to imagine that's got to be a tough sort of improv popped. Early days? Yes. There was going to be a temptation, you know, of iodine where he could have, because like Axl Isles, if I remember correctly, one of the reasons he wasn't more ingrati,

in the amphibophores was because he didn't evolve into a final form like they all did. Yeah. And the idea of having an iodine injection presented that he could choose to do to join them. But then that ended up feeling,

I don't know, way too heavy. Super heavy, dude. And I was like, yeah, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do that. It seems like too much. There was a question about your favorite fun fact about the animal archetype that you play.

and I don't know if the iodine thing qualifies for you, I worked in a lot of them. The limb thing is really good. I try to work in as many axolotal facts as I could because I had a, I mean, I had a bookmark that I just recently deleted that was great axelotel facts for kids. A hundred great axelotel facts for kids. And I had that tab open pretty much all the time we were recorded.

I'll tell you what, man. Speaking of working things in, I always had, in the back of my mind, trying to find opportunities to chop Axel Lyles limbs off. And it came up so infrequently. But I was trying to, I was trying to find opportunities to do it constantly. Well, Trave, I think the tough thing is it's hard to create the stakes of limb removal, but then keep that specifically targeted to one character. Yeah. So, like, if you unleashed, like, Limbore the limb-hating man. Yes. And it's like the one human in the world, it's Limbore, the limb-hating man. The limb-bore baby would have been in it.

But go on. Limpore baby, the limb-hating man. And everyone's disgusted by him, right? He's a human being. But if you put him in a room with some of the other turds, dad probably would have, like, farted on him so hard. Cut dad's legs off, and, like, Griffin would have been, like, stealing valor, and it turned out that he was in the reserves or something,

and then he would chop Griffin's limbs off and then he made out and get to my limbs. Yes, that would be ironic. It also just didn't fit with the vibe of a lot of Saturday morning crows. There's very rarely a time where shredder like rips Donatello's arm off. Well, you know. Despite the name, right?

Yeah, he shreds nothing in the entire run. And Lyle didn't really need anybody else. He chopped off his limbs more often than anybody. Yeah, that's true. By the way, that question about animal facts came from Sierra. Thank you, Sierra. Do you have a fun animal fact about, Cow must be a tough one, Dad, because I feel like cows are pretty mainstream as far as animals go.

I tell you what I had to stay away from was any reference to beef or steaks or, I mean, that just seemed to be a bit too much. Well, you're an alien, right? The thought of people eating your meat must be so insane. And so, you know, everybody knows they got multiple stomachs. And maybe I leaned a little too heavy into the fart thing, do you guys think? Or not enough. Or not enough. Well, it was interesting, Dad, because you leaned so, like, that was such a big mechanic you did, but your character was this, like, debonair, you know, like spy, cool dude

who just also farted a lot. Well, when all you have is a hammer, your farts, your flatulence this season, Dad, was your farts were your give-a-go's projector this season. You're right, yeah. There was a lot of, but the good thing is you can fit a fart through a round hole, no matter what. And so that's what, that is one good thing. Can you say the sentence again? You can fit a fart through a round hole very easily.

You don't have to force it. One good thing. Maybe the only good thing. I couldn't find a ton about Ross Seals, or at least not before I did just the zoo of us, where I learned a lot about Ross Seals. I think that the crazy siren calls that they do is the most biggest standout thing. That was fun. But the fact that they are so solitary and so territorial, I feel like influenced a lot of the, I don't know, character choices, certainly between Navy SEAL and Golden Seal. So that was a bit more coded, I guess, and not as silly.

The Wiz asks for the players, how did using a custom system affect your ability to inhabit the characters in the world? And for me, how did using your own system affect preparation for each session compared to Urban Shadows or D&D? Liz also asks, are there any plans to release the system publicly? Yeah, we're going to put that out. It's very bare bones. Yeah. Right? So it's not like, and this is going to be the one that sweeps the TTRPG nation, but it's a good start.

point, I think, if you want to build on it and stuff like that. I feel like games come at this question in different ways. Like there are some games like Blades in the Dark, where the tone and the world and the setting are so ingrained in the game and its mechanics and like maps and all that stuff. And then there are games where like the aesthetic is pretty well defined just by the genre. And so it kind of stays out of your way for the most part. And I felt, I felt that way about this, about this game. Like, when we made our characters, Travis was like, come up with your own special moves. So, like, there's a lot of, there's, there's, I enjoyed that process a lot, because it made

me feel a lot of ownership over my character rather than, like, you know, I'm trying to pick a, a power off of a list of powers and trying to make it fit in what the character was that I had that I had envisioned. That was my goal in the character creation aspect was I wanted it to be play these characters the way you want to play them so that they feel very unique to you and to the like animal you've picked and the, you know, the style you want to approach it with and everything. Instead of just being like, here's a rogue, right? Choose a rogue archetype that you want to do.

But we did still fill archetype. Like I do think there is a temptation there that is. It's hard to resist of like, I'll be the tank. And Roger will be sort of the infiltrator. And Axelio will be sort of the brawler. And I think that's just natural. And I like the flexibility of the system, too. I mean, you could.

And the fact that you could fail and it would still benefit you in some ways with the different points you could build up and everything else. I think it's also cool that it's sort of mixed for. or like team play, like combat is balanced, I think, for like to be, to make sense in a group context. Like it's not, it doesn't incentivize going off on your own and, and prioritizing your own individual goals, which feels in step with the sort of like, you know, TV that it's in conversation with. Yeah. As far as using the system to like prepare for sessions and stuff. I think that, like, combat is a great example where I tried to look at it, once again, from the perspective of, like, the TV shows that we were basing it off of. So the idea of, like,

you know, these four Ninja Turtles versus, like, a hundred foot clan things, right? And it not being, the danger isn't, like, the damage that's going to be done to, you know, the Ninja Turtle so much as it is the sheer number that they have to deal with. Yeah. And so trying to balance things that way where there was a lot more like swarms of enemies are descending and you need to make it easier on yourself by figuring out like ways to use your abilities and the environment and stuff to try to disable them for a couple rounds so that you can find room to maneuver and breathe and everything.

There's a fun byproduct of like this model where you're not. killing characters. There's not like a predetermined finish line for a fight, which is you killed all the guys. Instead, I feel like most combat scenarios we got into were while we were trying to accomplish something else. And I think that that is like, I don't know, the optimal way to do combat in any role-playing game is to have it not just be a, unless it's like, you know, you have your boss fights, your Walter Russell, if you will.

But for the most part, like, I don't know, I enjoy when combat is just kind of a thing you have to do so you can do the thing that you, you know, your mission objective or whatever. Yeah. And once again, I mean, once again, that's source material thing, you know, like the, you never, the street sharks weren't like, let's just go out and kill a monster. Yeah, right? It was, they were very much trying to stop something or, you know, intervene in something else. that was going on. It's why I really like, I think one of my favorite, like,

encounter things was the, uh, first time we met Artificial with like the robots smashing up. That was my favorite too. Awards gala. Um, you know, that, that was just a fun, like, environmental use of things and,

uh, all the stuff going on in different rooms. Well, and the baby, sorry, the house sitting adventure was my favorite of all of them just because. Oh, that was great. The combat there was sort of just, sort of preventative, like trying to stop the house from getting messy and trying to clean up the house while the combat was still happening was a real highlight of the season for me.

Here's one from Poppy. I had a blast listening to animals and appreciated that it felt like a very tight narrative that explored each of the characters without losing the plot. Were there any story beats you wanted to explore but weren't able to for whatever reason? And if at liberty to say, what were they, looking forward to the next series on the horizon? For what it's worth, I feel like I got everything I kind of won. Like once we sort of found that a lot of Navy stuff was about his family. I don't know.

I feel like I got good. I was very satisfied by the kind of closure of that situation with the standoff in the tower. I'm not sure there was much meat left on the bones that I wanted to get to. I would have liked to spend more time with Nicole Squidman and Navy SEAL's burgeoning relationship. I always get so uncomfortable about it. in-game relationships. I don't know that that's a thing I'll ever pursue. Obvious reasons.

Yeah, fair, fair. Yeah. From the GM side, I guess I do have a history of being comfortable with it. On the player side, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Hmm, telling.

I think, uh, I maybe, like, I would have liked to spend more time with, like, Roger Moore and the All-Stars and, like, sports-related stuff. Once again, it just didn't really come up all that often, but the idea of like Roger Moore was from, you know, a planet of like all sports stars and that kind of being their main focus and his thing was like competitive ballroom dancing. So wait, he didn't come from a black sheet because of that. You didn't come from a cow planet.

You came from a planet of sports. Oh, yeah. Well, they were, it was all barnyard. It was the barnyard All-Stars. So it was a planet of all barnyard sports. Barnyard. Ophicionado. Yeah.

I didn't put that together. That's great. Yeah, I want to go to Sports Planet 2. Season 2, Sports Planet. We didn't get off planet. I think that's something I would have liked to do. And then there were like the dragon writers who were dragon abnambimals who rode dragons. That we didn't get to time to explore that kind of stuff.

I think there was just. In the hat file. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was the thing, right, of like, I had ideas for all these other abnables teams that you guys would like encounter. and occasionally go toe to toe with. And that kind of thing just ended up feeling too crammed in. Yeah.

And like I was, I found myself trying to manufacture like, and then you have a run in with these people. Yeah. And I was like, well, then I'm kind of forcing them into that. I really thought your restraint this season was really on point, Trave, and not sort of like overloading us. And what I really liked about it is that you would have some moments. where you had to kind of rip the valve off and let some steam out,

and then we would get nine characters named after celebrities with fish-based puns snuck into their names. And I saw those, and I was like, that's a lot of fish-based celebrity puns, but I know that he has to get this out of his system. It has to come out somehow, or else he'll die. Better out than in, I said. Yeah. Or I would have died.

And then we started doing our own puns, too, for catchphrases. And I still had a couple I didn't get to use. Like, do you veal like I veal? and but so dad you say a catch phrase but that's not a catch like I can't see that thing you don't know what's going to catch on but you know yeah that's fair yeah that's fair um along those lines there's a question here let's see uh from Mitch we know you had an entire list of celebrity uh abominable names who didn't get around to using let's hear them my brain doesn't work I don't I didn't have a bunch

prepared so much as I think I could come up with them easily on the spot. Like Lion Reynolds, Ryan Gosling was one I wanted to use. That one you don't even have to change. That's great, yeah. Yeah, I wanted to use that one. I got to use the Mark Buffalo

and talk about him, I think, at the sports gala, which I enjoyed. One of my favorites, oh, now I'm blanking on his name. Who's the guy who did West Wing? Oh, Sorkin. Oh, Har and Sorkin actually came. That was from Paul Foxcroft,

who voiced Krillium in the, like, phone call, voice messages and stuff. And I had him help me punch up that intro thing. And he came up with Heron Sorkin sponsoring the West Wing Wing of the museum. That's cool. And it's a great joke. It's one of my favorite jokes in the thing because it's just like a weird little flavor thing. And I also like Dr. Snyder Arden Fields, aka Snarf. Thank you.

Snarf. Yeah. Yeah, that was a tough one because incorporating an abnimal cat when so many abnimal cats exist. Right, right. And I was trying to be very choosy. So I decided to go with the Thundercat that was least abnormal-like and went with snarf. And plus, I like doing snarf voice. So that was fun as well.

Good. I'm glad you'd get that out of your sister. Thank you. Duck also asked to address this. How does it feel once again DMS season where you have to come up with clever episode titles? Our editor, Rachel, was in charge of that, and I was merely there refining them and helping with them.

But I think that there's clever titles. Rachel absolutely knocked it out of the park and did an amazing job with that. Incredible work. The editing, the sound design, everything. It was really fun this season. Let's get to what people really want to hear about, which is the cussing.

Can we get into the, can we crack open the data? We had some questions, a lot of questions about the profanity. Mel said, so let's be real, how often did y'all get unfamily-friendly, aka how hard did you make Rachel work? And I don't know who pulled this data, but it is exhaustive. I believe it was Rachel. Rachel and Amanda, I would bet. There were 65 total censored swears throughout the scene,

which I don't think is that bad for a whole season. No, out of what, like 28 episodes? Yeah. And that the results are surprising to me knowing the breakdown on the Bim Bam. Yeah. Trabb, do you want to read? Yeah, Justin had the most at 22. I have the second.

Okay, that's absolutely fair. Yeah. I think you think I'd have a defense? I don't have a defense. No, I think that there was a lot about Axel Lyle that would have made him a prime custer in a different show. Yeah, sure. Well, part, you know, that's for sure, Trave. and the other thing is I cuss in front of my kids all over.

Yeah. So I don't really have a setting for, I don't have a kid setting. Like, I really, I should. I don't have one. I should have pretended I was doing sawbones, but I would have asked you guys too many questions about blood. Yeah, that's fair.

And I thought, Justin, you did a really good job giving the questions about blood to a minimum. Thank you, Jeff. I got a lot of feedback. I had 20 curses, which I think what I found surprising was apparently, my descriptions and like emotional states of people tended, that's when I tended to curse.

Not like in character, but rather like I'd be describing how upset someone was. And I would just default to a curse word. Or how messed up a room was when you walked in. And I would curse in there. And I'm like, oh, darn it. The takeaway here is I had 18. The least of the brothers, which is at the inverse ratio of Mbim-Bam, because I try not to cuss in front of my kids.

That only cussed four times. Four times. Because it's a Boy Scout. Well, okay. We do need to get that one, so that's up to five now. Speaking of, while recording, Griffin caught and called out 28 of those curses. I caught 12. Justin caught eight.

Dad caught none. I love that. He doesn't either a user nor a notice or be. Judge the and judge not. Be not judge. We missed 17 in the process that Rachel, Sarah and Amanda had to catch. Yeah. And how many did they miss?

Good question. They didn't include that in their stats, did they? Episode one had the most swears with 11. Next was episode two, was six, and then we got better after that. We grow. Yeah, that's good. Only four episodes out of 28 had zero. Zero squares, 12, 16, 21, and 22.

Now, there's also some data here for who said baby the most times. Okay, now tell me, I didn't know we had a baby jar. Yeah, this was, you sort of made the baby jar a thing because in episode zero you kept saying baby, like a lot? Like, yeah, baby. You had four babies throughout the whole season. Three of them were in episode zero. Which is where the baby jar came up with. Okay.

I found it so repugnant, and yet somehow I had the most babies throughout the season, but 13. There are 35 total babies. I had 13. Travis had 12, 6 from Justin, and 4 from dad. So I do want to apologize. That's not an energy that I feel comfortable sitting in. So the fact that I created it is, I don't know, a reason for deep reflection. Very shameful.

Yeah. me out of nowhere to pull up the video we did with like the character artwork and stuff over and over again. And they're not, they don't really listen to podcasts in general, but they have asked me about every episode, what happens in it. And I've like shown them the prep for it and everything. And when I was telling Bebe about the like fight in Walter Russell's office, she started telling me things that I should do with like the water, It's so great. And the aquarium and stuff.

And I was like, oh, okay, I wasn't planning on doing it. She's like, why not do the thing I'm saying? The Charlieverse episodes have really turned our kids into all tours. Yes. And I wish it would stop. Daddy's working. This is serious. No, that's not.

That's not true. My kids don't listen to my things. The only content of mine that they enjoy is the intro to the Macroy family clubhouse. that I had absolutely nothing to do with. So, same, that's it for me. Juice, what about Charlie and Cooper? They are not fans of mine, broadly speaking. No, they honestly, they only like greeking out,

which is a podcast about Greek mythology. And any time I would say, do you want to listen to my podcast? They would ask if we had listened to all of greeking out yet, and I would say, no, we had not, and then we started to do greeking out. So that is how it's been at my house. That's my... And I would like to amend my answer when I said, yes,

have your kids been listening this season? I think they have, but it was only in that one hour before we were getting ready to record the next episode. I think that's when we... At two times speed, yeah. You can't get high on your own supply, man. I can't be entertained by us. I feel no.

I'll lose sight. That was from Max, right? Yeah. I said that. This was from Lex. now that you have done a few more silly-leaning, light-hearted seasons, do you think you'll ever give larger, more dramatic narratives another go? I personally think you do an amazing job of either.

They each shine in their own specific ways. I will say to kind of pre-answer that question, I think one of the things that, as we've discussed, you know, like post-mortem and stuff after seasons and everything, One of the things we found is what, at least, correct me if I'm wrong, but what we find we like doing best and what works best is to start the season not with, not with the intention of like telling, you know, these like dramatic narratives and stuff. And if they develop, they develop. Yeah. If it happens, it happens. But like if we set out to do it, it will often feel kind of manufactured. And so I think maybe animals, well, definitely animals and like TAS versus maybe weren't as conducive an environment for those. Yeah. But I don't think we said like, and there won't be any, no dramatic narrative.

No, but I would rather do a season where we have like a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun to record this show. knowing that you don't like it is not the goal to tie together some like grand narrative it is easier to run a season like that and I feel like it's more organic like that's kind of how that's kind of how balance went and I think that is sort of where our heads are at now there's one I wanted to talk about real quick sure from Jacob is Is there any aspect of the Abnibnibemales theme you wish you could have done more with? We had talked early on about like kind of a toxic Avenger kind of thing where there would be like a character made of ooze that had been like a former member of the like three, you know, the Axelio Roger and Navy's team that like he had left to get a real job because it wasn't taking off and wasn't doing anything.

and not having, I think if we had continued or if the opportunity had arisen, having like kind of gross out mutant characters would have been fun as like another hallmark of like 90s and early 2000s, your garbage bail kids, your creepy crawlies, your that kind of thing, toxic Avengers. I think that would have been fun to play with

that we didn't get to do. You keep lumping toxic events. Avenger in there with the other stuff. And I don't know that Toxic Avenger. Well, there was an animated Toxic Avenger. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Yeah.

Yeah. Was it Toxic Crusader. Toxic Crusader. That was that. The anime, The Toxic Avengers is the movie. I think Toxic Crusader was the, because it's like sounds better for kids to have a crusader rather than an Avenger. The toxic crusader, yes, because Toxic Avenger was a much different property. But I feel like there is a theme that's kind of in the questions and answers.

It's worth mentioning. Like, when we, talk about things that we like wish we had gotten to or whatever it's worth noting that like that is the game for a lot of this it is how much you prepare because if you like the the discarding a lot of the stuff you prepare is just kind of par for the court right because if you only prepare the stuff that you get to then what you're doing is like railroading yourself and trying to steer moments into the stuff you prepared yeah but if you don't have stuff for for any of it, then you know, you're kind of working without a net.

So it's really always kind of a balance of how much stuff do you have on hand, you know, thinking about I, I, when I was DMing, I thought a lot about the backpack full of little toys and crayons and notebooks that I take for my kids on vacation. Like when we're just like, it's stuck in airports or whatever, I have this bag that's like snacks and wipes and you know I may not need everything but I have all of this yeah you know that's kind of that's kind of the process yeah because that's the thing is really like another version of this question would be like what do you wish your players had been interested in that you threw out at different points and like I don't know man like I was just trying to say like and here's a

character and here's a care and if they'd been like I want to hang out with that guy it would have been a different scene or different storyline entirely. But that happened like a lot. Yeah. I mean, from the beginning, the first episode, I think when you guys were on the bus and you're like, what other people are here? And I was like, uh, there's a koala man named Dean. And then that became a thing.

Like the way you guys reacted to chlorophyllus is a great example of like, yeah, I wanted her to be kind of like a blown out poison ivy of like, not only does she care more about plants than humanity. She's a psychopath. Right. When it comes to that kind of thing. And if you guys have been like, we want to party with her, okay, cool, though. Would have gone differently.

You know what I mean? I definitely did not party with her. No, no, definitely not. Too scary. So I don't know that there were like, Gasha with Darnett could have been kind of a Casey Jones-esque character, but ended up being a bit of like a Dufus. And so that went a different direction, you know, stuff like that. It is also hard.

I think when the characters have such goofy names, it's really hard to lend them a lot of interiority. I'd say, I, there's nothing about the name, goshwood, whatever it was. Goshwood, darnet. That makes, goshwood darnet that makes you think, like, I bet there's a rich tapestry. I want to dig. I want to dig through. See, I got the sense that there was a rich tapestry, and we were willfully choosing not to explore it, which I, and that's fine.

I liked a lot. That was actually, I chose that name. There's no joke as a tribute to Dad's Darn Tutin from Dust Season 2 that he didn't get to use. And so I went with gosh darn it. for a character. God, Travis, didn't even put that together until you just said that right now.

As a nod to when dad didn't get to use Darn Tudin. Wonderful. For Duss, that I was like, well, here's gosh darn it. As a tribute

to Darn Tudin. Let's talk about the next season of the Adventure Zone. If we may. So for the next season, I'm going to be running it. We're going to be playing

Dungeons and Dragons. Both of them? Both of them this time. the fifth edition of it. And, you know, a lot of the feedback that we get on our D&D seasons and a big problem that people run into when they play D&D with their friends

is that there's maybe like one wizard or two weeks. And it's like... But there's no way of fixing that. And unfortunately it's one of the great unsolved problems of Kerry's perfect game. What could you even do? Well, my bold vision is this.

What if there were 64 weeks? Wizards. Okay. And what if those wizards were competing in a sort of battle royale style high stakes death game for the ultimate magical power in the world? This is feeling less and less hypothetical. No, it is feeling quite material because we've already recorded in an episode of it. It's called Taz Royale and it's going to debut on June 5th. And it is a battle royale inspired season. more in the squid game style than the all-out death match battle royale winner take all

series of trials with survivors and not survivors and which one will our heroes be I don't know they're wizards and so are the other characters there's lots and lots of

it's filthy with wizards this season filthy with you'll be spoiled for wizards and it's gonna be a lot of fun and one thing we are going to, for this season, we are going to switch back to a bi-weekly schedule. And there are, there's a lot of reasons for that. A big one is just that abdimals, we kind of felt pretty rushed, both on the production side and the scheduling side. I want to speak on that real quick because, like, episodes were shorter in abnambles.

One, because attention span for kids was kind of part of the goal. But also, like, prep time. doing that sound design stuff, doing the post-production, doing all of that. Like, we didn't maybe get to spend as much time on it as we would have liked. I made no music for the entire season. Yeah. Which, you know, there's still some incredible sound work done by Rachel in there. And a great theme song.

And an amazing theme song. Justin and Eric and Jonathan really took it to the hoop on that one. But that's like a part of the, that's a part of the show that I really enjoy doing and doing it every week. There is just not any time for it. And also, we also got some feedback that like some folks had a hard time keeping up with, you know, a weekly release schedule for a narrative podcast like this. So, so there's a lot of reasons why we're going to jump back to biweekly so that we can, you know, spend a little bit more time on, on this season, Taz Royale. And somewhat longer episodes. Yes, the episodes will be a bit longer.

So that's the next season. June 5th is when it starts. And we hope you'll join us. And September 14th is when it stops. And we can't tell you why, but I've just decided. That's wild. I hope not. That's a pretty short season.

For me, that's an actual long season. Yeah. But yeah, that's what's next. Thanks for listening to it. And if you're a kid or you let your kid listen, And thanks for the trust. Yeah. We appreciate that.

Absolutely. This next season is not going to be kid focused. I will, if you couldn't. It's not going to be family friendly. If you could. There will be 65 swears in the first episode. Wow. Well, and also, if all things go according to plan, 63 character deaths,

which is significantly more than Taz Abdomals. So, yeah, we. But I will say, as a final thing, Along those lines, the family-friendly kind of theme for Abnambemals was inspired by how many, like, while we were doing meet and greets and convention and piances and stuff, how many, like, families came up with kids that said that they listened with their parents and, you know, 12-year-olds and stuff who their parents had shared the show with them. And that's just wonderful.

It feels really good when, you know, you find out that kids have gotten inspired to get into role-playing games and get into this kind of stuff because of the stuff we do. So to the parents who have shared that with their kids and felt, you know, the trust in us to share stuff with their kids. It means a lot. It really does.

And we really appreciate it. I would not make any promises to this effect, but I do feel like this season, Taz Abnambemals, has moved me a little bit closer to the light of Christ in terms of not necessarily weaving a tapestry of profanity. every other, every other sentence. And so I, hopefully it will be,

but it's fun to listen to with some kids, but not, it's not explicitly made for, for them as TAS Abnambemals was. And, and prove that we can do it. Well, except for the 65 times that we blew it. Yeah, but think of how many words we say in the course of a 28 episode. That's true, Dad.

And I think about the curse words we didn't say. We've saved them all up for right. now. Yeah. Here we go. Pooh. Well, this has been a lot of fun, and thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate it.

And stick around for the next season. And we hope you enjoyed all the live shows. That were saved. Those were a lot of fun. We have more live shows coming up. So we've put out the Taz versus Robin Hood and Taz versus Hamlet that were two Taz versus Live shows. And if you enjoyed those, you can come see them.

Live coming up, all the tour dates and information is at bit.O.I. forward slash macaroid tours. All those tickets are on sale now. Go get yours as well as the My Brother My Brother and Me shows, everything like that. So make sure you check those out. Bye, everybody. Thanks. Bye.

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