The Adventure Zone - The The Adventure Zone Zone: Balance Finale Edition

Episode Date: August 24, 2017

Everyone’s favorite talk show about a podcast hosted by the participants in said podcast is back! This time, we’re talking about the end of the Balance campaign, answering a bunch of listener questions and talking about what’s next for the show! 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

This episode of the Adventure Zone Zone, brought to you by Dove Soap. Dove, love the skin you're in. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Adventure Zone Zone. How come I can't do that voice? Can you just? Let me fucking do the adventure. Sure, fine. Guests of the Adventure Zone Zone stay at their respective houses.

The Adventure Zone is also sponsored by Viking Cruises. I'm Laura Dern and have been the whole time. Winters the Adventure Zone Zone are going to space camp. Really? The Adventure Zone is filmed at Buena Vista Studios, Buena Vista California. Hey, what are we doing here? Right now, funny jokes.

You're not letting me fucking host. I'm hosting it. This is the... It's such a good name. The Adventure Zone Zone, a podcast about a podcast called The Adventure Zone that we all made together, and we still do, but different. My name is Justin McElroy. I played the character of Taco on the Adventure Zone.

Balance. I'm Travis McRae. I play Magnus. Justin, do you think there are people who are listening to this episode who don't already know that? It's a weird place to start, y'all. I'm Griffin McRaei and all the other characters. I'm Clint McElroy, and I played Merle High Tower, the... Nope.

Nope. I love it. High church. Hi, high church. fucking shitting me. That, uh, that was an incredible, probably the best loved character of the entire best love least remembered in terms of last names. Well, I, the fans remember me.

Um, if on the odd chance you are starting this, like, this is going to be completely a spoilering thing for the previous arc of our show, Balance, which now at the end of it, I wish we'd called Bonds, but I think balance is fine. Okay. Well, it's too late. I wish you had said something earlier. I wish I had, it occurred to me as I was listening to finale for the umpteenth time. Can everybody say?

I just heard two different phone notifications go off. It's dad. He's always got his shit cranked. And I was trying to turn it off. You don't. Everybody's hitting him up now like, hey, I heard you on Avengers Zone Balance. Will you come on my thing and forget how to play a game on my show? Everybody wants Dad to come on and forget how to do stuff on their show now.

Griffin. Yes. I want to start out with like a general. And we've got a bunch of questions from listeners, but I want to ask some of our own questions. Yeah, I think that would be good if we started out by just sort of, if you all have questions for me, now that the campaign's done and you all know everything. I am curious if you can, and I mean, I know that this stuff is always sort of like, what's wrong, Dad?

I don't know why this is still making sounds. The iPad? Yeah. Okay. Give me your iPad. You're going to turn it off. I'm going to, now I'm going to sit on it until it breaks like I'm a gorilla. No, you, okay, that's muted.

it shouldn't be doing this. You heard it. This is a top knot. So, Griffin, can you describe to me, in an abbreviated form, I guess, how the, like, in what order the sort of main keystones of the story sort of came to you? Like, what the inception of it was and how it sort of built over time in your head. So, like, it all, it started with the Lost Binds of Fandelver book that comes with the starter kit, fifth edition starter kit, which is really,

which is really great. I really enjoyed when I was in town for when we were making the TV show, Justin ran a quick game for us, for me and the Smurals, and we all played basically the same adventure. And so Justin got an idea of like the other ways that it could have gone because there's a lot of other stuff in that book that I kind of condensed and fast forwarded through so, because by like episode two really, like I knew I wanted to move on to original stuff. And by the time we reached the end of Here There Be Gurblands, I had an outline for like

what the structure of the story was. I talked, I've talked about how like it had a very video gamey structure of you all getting the seven, you know, goals. It's it's got to be seven always every time. They could have been fucking

power pendants. They could have been magic crystals or whatever, but this time they were the grand relics. and Griffith, can I ask because this is something I always want to ask people who like run shows like this.

At that point, how far ahead did you know? Like, did you have a concept for the finale? Did you know, like, what characters would end up being a much bigger part of it? No.

And I don't want to give away too much because we're going to be, like, diving. There's a lot of, very, very granular, very specific questions about stuff like this. But the answer is, like, I had, like, the very, very, very loose structure of the campaign in mind. I had, like, all of the Bureau of Balance stuff figured out. But the arcs, like, I figured out what the next arc was going to be while we were doing

the previous arc. And really, I think by the time we got to Crystal Kingdom, I kind of realized, like, okay, the rubber really needs to meet the road here. and I need to start setting up sort of the bigger picture stuff. And that's why we got a lot of stuff in. It's funny, if you go back and listen to Gerblins and you go back and listen to Rockport Limited, those were both, I think, good little self-contained things that ultimately like have very little bearing on the rest of the campaign at large.

When we meet the red robe at the end of pedals to the metal, like that was the first sort of hint that I was giving like, okay, there is a bigger thing going on here. And then in Crystal Kingdom, it was like, that was me setting up the, you know, the planar system stuff and the multiverse stuff and more red robes stuff. And yeah, that's where you all got the patches, which sets up the IPRE. So I think by Crystal Kingdom, I had, I pretty much knew what was going on. I knew that you all were the red robes. I knew that, I knew a lot of that stuff. But it really took, sorry, go ahead.

But it really took a lot of playing to get to that point to know what the story was going to be. Do you remember, for me, so much of the story sort of hinges on the voidfish. Do you remember when the idea of the voidfish came to you and what problem that was trying to solve? I mean, partially, I think when it started, it was solving for the structure of it, right, of you all trying to get these very, very powerful relics. and the question would have been like, if these relics exist, why isn't everybody trying to get at them all the time? Why wouldn't your characters know about them already? If these like seven immensely powerful objects existed in the world and you all were adventurers and these things were capable of like mass destruction, how would you not know about their usage up to this point?

And so it was kind of started as a way to like introduce this thing in a way where your characters wouldn't have known about it. But obviously, like, what the void fish was, after I'd introduced it like that, I realized it could, it could mean, like, a whole lot more. And we could, you know, introduce a lot of different narrative stuff involving, like, you all having other memories that were suppressed. And yeah, so the voidfish became a much bigger thing. I think when we meet Lucas and I think, like, Lucas and Johan have a scene with the void fish, that is kind of where I started to like figure out like, okay, no, the void fish is a bigger, is a much, much bigger thing here. And is that where you decided you would kill Johan and make everyone sad? Or did that just come

later because you were just feeling really bloodthirsty? Or, I mean, I can talk about that. Like, Johann's whole deal, that was one of, in my mind, like, one of the bigger themes of the show is like, um, uh, how people respond with the, to the idea of how people, how people, you know, people respond to the fact that, like, you aren't always going to be here and that the works that you create and the things that you do outlive you. And so, yeah, a legacy. Like, so Johan was like a big thing there, right? Like, a lot of the conversations you had was like him talking about like, oh, well, I want to be a great musician, but I'll never be remembered because of this. And when I first heard void fish plural, the track from Rachel Rose Mitchell that we

used in the penultimate episode. When I actually, like, heard that song, that firmed up in my mind what that, what those moments were going to be, what that payoff was going to be. And I really liked the idea of just, like, Johann's work, not only, like, outliving him, but being fucking, like, broadcast to every person across all of the planes. I thought that that was, like, a really cool moment. And so, like, that's kind of when that firmed up. Was Johann, okay, was the voice at the beginning of

every episode's supposed to be Johan? No. Okay, so this is also a question that we got. The voice at the beginning, and I don't know if I did a great job setting this up, and maybe I should just leave it a little bit more obscure, but the voice in my mind was the story of the story and song that was being sent out, that was being like broadcast by, I guess, Junior. I guess the voice was Junior, right? Because Fisher put out the song and Junior put out the story.

And so I thought it would be cool if the podcast was kind of the story in a way, and you were hearing everything that that junior, like, knew about this world and the events that happened in it. And so, like, that's why in the finale, there is no— You don't hear from it, yeah. You don't hear the deep voice in the finale because they say it in the penultimate episode, like, that's all I know. It's—you're all caught up. That's everything that I know. Let's find out what happens together. And then the finale is like all of us seeing what happens together.

It's no longer the story being told by Junior. It's just like the thing. I really, I dig that shit in basically all forms of media, this idea of just like meta, meta narrative and like the things that you are experiencing in whatever it is, the game, the movie, the book, whatever is part of a character inside of the work transmitting it in a way. The Zero Escape Games do that in a way that I. I think is like really cool. And so like I kind of wanted to take a stab at that.

I'm gonna, we got more questions for Griffin, obviously, and I'm sure we'll have some organically that come up. But since we could blow V8 or about our own bullshit for hours on end, I'm gonna try to keep this on the rails a little bit with another question from a listener that's directed to everybody. You all mentioned, and not Griffin, so get bent. You all mentioned you cried during the finale, which specific moment made you emotional enough to cry?

And I will direct this at Foggling. first. Oh, um, I, uh, this sounds, I don't want to sound self-serving.

Okay. Dad, we're literally doing a show talking about our own show. Yeah, we are serving ourselves. I guess we're supposed to be self-servely. I don't think you got to worry about that. Like,

okay. You start talking about your favorite episode of Battlestar Galactic. I think that'd be way weirder. Oh, man. The one where, uh, Nope. Starbuck. Okay.

Um, all right, if it's about the finale, the one time I can remember, crying was was Merle's last scene with Stop looking at me, Jules Merle's last scene with Mavis

When she talked about how proud she was of How well he was doing And he said, I love you baby Because that was That was kind of me Telling you guys the same thing. Gross. Yeah, it is gross.

But a nerd. but because I was. I was so proud to be part of it and, you know. And so, yeah. So, and I cried every time Tom Bodette died. How's that? You're out. Travis.

Then you cried zero times because I don't think he ever did. Travis, bear your soul. So for me, I think this will not come as to surprise to anyone who listened to it, but basically like every... The last 20 minutes. Yeah, everything that happened in the wrap up. But I based a lot of... a lot of Magnus's backstory and motivation stuff on, oh, not to get too super real for him.

We lost her mom when I was 21. So I based a lot of like his motivation to do good on that. And so the moment where Magnus says to Julia that he just tried to make her proud of him is from a very personal place for me and how I live my life day to day. so like that. And I think also just getting, just having a resolution to the story of Magnus was very, very fulfilling for me because

I really liked over the course of so many episodes and so many years having the chance to kind of unfold it as we went and the fact that you really didn't get a lot of his backstory until like

I think the fourth arc, I think until 11th hour maybe. Yeah, in the in the flashback temptation episode. Yeah. And so like getting to like slowly kind of build to that moment and getting to have an actual cap on it was both emotional for the character, but also very satisfying for me as the creator of Magnus. And just it was it was a relief to have that moment. So that I want to I want to add one quick. Let me add one quick. Let me add one quick thing before we that your mom's fingerprints are all over this story absolutely yeah and i want to tell everybody the the whole choose joy attitude that was leslie mackleroy i mean that was that was her defining uh personality trait and you know we that rings out through i think the whole series

and uh so certainly certainly in like most of merrills like serious interactions with people of which there were like a lot in the back half of the podcast. Juice, did you get weepy in the, I was, I, I, I, I, I edited it obviously, but I didn't, I didn't, I didn't hear any, you know, deep Travis sobs. Uh, no, no sobbing. I'm 36. So, okay. You fucking tweeted a whole thing about how crying is good and, yeah, I, I, I'm not trying to put everybody on blast. You know what got to me. I, okay, I didn't feel that way while we recording because the that part of my I couldn't I felt like I couldn't let myself get that

sort of emotionally I there's just too much going on in my brain it's show wise right like re-listening especially the parts I'll tell you the parts that hit me is the parts that we didn't hear but we would relisten I had a um this is kind of weird but when new adventure zone episodes come out, I will often like sneak into a rabbit stream or a discord. I did that in the finale and I totally goes, I did not announce that I was there. And I know it's a creepy thing, but I really wanted to know what it was like to see people listen to it for the first time. Right. And I did that.

I listened to the end of the penultimate episode. And I, I mean, I cried and I like cheered and like fist up in the air like yelling. Like I was like so jized. And we hadn't heard that part during the show, the part about Johan, you're going to fight and you're going to fight and you're going to win. And like, I just found that so inspirational and sort of like, I don't know, like a very good antidote for a lot of the messages of the world at that time, which is this time now. Yeah. And I found that. And that actually leads me to a question.

Griffin, like, well, I wanted to, I wanted to mention real quick. I had a moment, and I don't think it kind of came through, but I was getting really choked up, and it was really, really hard for me to keep talking. And for me, that moment was Travis had just said in Thieves Cant to Carrie, are you ready? And carry gestures back, I'm ready. And then I go into like the description of the wedding, which was really, really, really important to me. And not only that, I knew that was it. That was the last monologue. You guys were done talking.

The game was, this was it. This was the last thing. And for me, it had nothing to do with, like, what was happening in the narrative as much as it had to do with, like, when I said I'm ready, I was literally saying, like, I'm ready to send this story that we've all worked on and is so, so, so, so, so special to me, I'm ready to, like, send it off. And so that whole last monologue, I was fighting off, fighting off tears the whole time. Can I can I also to that point I do also want to say so during Magnus's sendoff is you know when I was like crying but my favorite kind of emotional payoff for me just in like the more organic collaborative storytelling is the fact that Magnus got to have like a best friend. Yeah, for sure. I loved everything with Taco and Merle, but that was like a relationship unto itself. But like the fact that we got to build really organically a relationship that was just like a very interesting friendship between Carrie and Magnus made me so happy.

That's that kind of thing in media when you get to see people become friends is way more interesting to me than any like romantic storyline. in a TV show or movie is watching two people you would never expect be friends become friends and that's that's tough to pull off like romance is is tough to pull off and obviously like this was this is all our first stabs at like making fiction in this way and so like that was something I was nervous about you know delivering on some different romance threads but like I and I really love that stuff but like I I really loved like Taco and Angus's you know friendship and mentorship and and Taco and Joaquin's friendship and Magnus and Carrie and John and Merle. Holy shit. Like all of that, all of those like relationships that started from zero and then, you know,

turn into something else. I thought it was like really good. It's really, it's kind of interesting to me that a show that is made by a family is not, is more, is much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much more about found families than it is about family literally. I mean, even if you think about it, even the family that is our literal blood had to be found in the story. You know, it wasn't inbuilt in the characters. But, like, I think that there's something so moving about people choosing to be family that I think is, like, really powerful and beautiful. Okay, listen, we're, we're, like, almost 20 minutes in, and we've gotten one listener question. So we need to speed things up.

I need gravity in your answers. Griffin, how soon did you know you were going to bring back Barry Blue Jeans? Um, so obviously I knew by seven birds, right? End of Crystal Kingdom. At that point, when I said who the seven birds were going to be, I knew, I knew who they all were, right? Loop Davenport, Lucretia, Barry, and the three of you. Um, so probably, probably during Crystal Kingdom. During Crystal Kingdom, again, like I mentioned, was the time where I was like, okay, I need to figure out what the bigger thing is, how it's going to wrap up, and I need to start setting down breadcrumbs to get us there.

and so probably around then. I said a lot of stuff like Barry's dead. I think I did actually at one point say Barry's never ever coming back, which was the only. That was the only lie, right? And I'm sorry I did that. But the rest of the time I tried to be coy about it. Like, yeah, Barry's dead. He is dead.

He's a litch. But whatever. By the way, and the boys can attest to this. That episode, I think it was like 58 where I brought Barry back. I was so scared. Like I wanted that payoff to be so good And you guys could hear it in my voice I remember like we had to stop a couple times

During that bit while we were like getting to the end of like the Wonderland stuff And I was like okay Give me a minute because I needed to like collect myself Because I really really really wanted that to to land And now that we know that he listens You're welcome Tom Arnold Holy shit Yeah that's been a for bringing back your career

Yeah your career I don't know about that Also thank you for the stupid it's a great movie It is Uh, uh, sniper Joe, I should mention Kate was the one who asked that question. I don't think I got that in. Yeah, and also Aqua Foshet asked the one about crying. Okay. Uh, sniper Joe asked Travis, did you consider calling on Julia during the fight with final John? Holy shit, did people in the live feed that I was watching. Oh, they were so ready for it.

Well, so here's the thing. To that point, I have always invasion and people have asked about this, I do envision Julia being a very, uh, a bad, competent. Yeah. Being a badass. People have talked about like, did they fight side by side? Yeah, duh. But I think, um, in that moment, honest to God, it never crossed my mind because that would be not the right moment for that to happen. Yeah. As somebody who, like, thought about who you all might summon with the bonds, I thought that there was a chance that it would happen. And we could do the, we could do the reunion there, right? And Julia would do like some cool stuff because I am fucking all, all about women having power and agency in this world, obviously. For me, I thought it could go either way.

If you did it, we could, I do not think it would have been, it would not have been difficult to find a way for her to have, like, some powerful effect, right? I would have removed a lot of the power from the ending. I think it would have, I think it would have been, I think it would have taken away something from the reunion at the end of the episode. So that was the tradeoff. Like, we could either do it then and have, like, a cool reunion thing there and, like, a cool moment of Julia doing some badass stuff, and then maybe the ending wouldn't hit quite as hard

as I think it absolutely did, thanks to that incredible song by Reader. The song just called Julia, which, by the way, that was a tricky thing to include in the show and a tribute without giving the moment away. Or we could just like, you could just not do it, and we do have that sort of powerful. Well, to the thing, the convention of the bond summons, was tricky because I was still trying to play strategically while also thinking story-wise. So, like, I will say that as far as did I consider, it really didn't occur to me because just from a storytelling perspective, that was not the right time for that reunion. Like, it just, it wouldn't have felt, it would have felt forced.

And I bet at least subconsciously you had faith that Griffin was going to resolve. Yeah, I think, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Here's a question from Eva. Somebody's got that highlight, and I can't, okay, it was me. Dad, did Merle ever try to resolve things with Hecuba?

No, I don't think so. I really don't. A strange wife. Okay. Here's the thing. One of the things we tried to show in like the second half of the whole arc was that Merle was trying to be a better dad. but Merle was a horrible husband.

Yeah. It was better to try to forge something new with his kids. And by the way, thanks to the one person who pointed out that Mavis was actually his stepdaughter. Yeah, yeah. And Mookie was his child. Right. And that he was, but he was still trying to be a dad to both of them. And that was, and that, I think we both, well, I don't know about Griffin, but that happened.

happened kind of spur of the moment, but I, you know, I think we needed a father's perspective somewhere in there. It was so weird. How many things in the show are spur of the moment things. And there was a lot of things, and this is a weird, I've never experienced this in other creative works, but a lot of times I opened my mouth on this show. And my thought was, I hope this is true. because like that that that a lot of the stuff especially early on we were just saying whatever dumb shit came to our heads and we never really stopped that impulse we just had like more footing and like I had I had to have a lot of faith in in them but also myself that like the things that I'm saying are I hope the things that I'm saying are true but they always were and that's one of the things that I think was great about the about the story we told is like it always was true. If you said it, it was true. That's kind of how D&D works.

Right, but at the same time, true to the narrative of what we're making and true to the game. And also, you have to remember, like, I've been in Taco Skin for three years. So, like, there's stuff that I hope it's true to, like, the beginning of the story. And the things he has said, you know, it is impossible to have a canonical sort of, like, understanding of everything he has said at every point in the story. But there were times when we couldn't do, I'll highlight one example that I can think of, when we were supposed to what looked like turn on the Bureau of Balance. Yeah, God, that was such a tricky episode. That was really hard because, and you and I, the background, Justin and I record in the same room. Right.

And so, you know, we don't make a lot of eye contact or anything like that, but I think we were. Just in life, they never look at it. It's very bad. Well, we don't look at people. But that was a very weird moment because, you know, I felt like we were being led in one direction, but it just didn't feel right. And we had to stop and tell Griffin like, hey, I understand the story needs to go here, but you're going to have to give us something more because we don't feel it.

That moment was kind of like a lot of my fears as DM and like storyteller for this podcast kind of realized in that I kind of understood. Like, I haven't. I have not set this up maybe enough. I do not know that I have necessarily earned this thing. Because ultimately, I wasn't asking you to turn on the Bureau of Balance and Lucretia and, like, betray them. And if you thought in that moment that, like, Lucretia was going to be the final boss or whatever, I could understand your trepidation.

And because I didn't, we definitely didn't earn that. I was trying to set up kind of a different thing of just like, I want you all to investigate this thing a little bit deeper. but I think I made it feel like the other thing just because I didn't necessarily set that up enough. It is. That's why it was so interesting just from my point of view of like taking Magnus, who was maybe the most lawful good of the three of them, and then investing like starting, I think, in 11th hour, like, nope, you're a red robe and there's a whole bunch of shit you don't know about and you have to break your own rules to figure it out. That was super hard, just to complicate things even further, because Magnus, I think, did have that. Magnus did have that context.

The context, Magnus did want to investigate, and Taco and Merle did not. And I think that led to some interesting friction. And ultimately, I love the way that it turned out, because what happened was, especially with Taco, Taco's reasoning didn't turn to, all right, let's fucking, I don't, his thing wasn't, okay, I don't trust the Bureau of Balance to find out what's going on. Taco turned to, I don't trust anyone. And that was such an interesting character thing to then work back from in the finale. And I think it makes, if you think about all that stuff all happening in the same day,

I think it makes a lot of the moments in the finale like a lot more powerful. And Taco goes from like, fuck everything to I'm going to save everything. Like, I think it was a good payoff. And it also is, moments like that are why the accusations that I sometimes see on Reddit, what's up Reddit? of like railroading from Griffin, ring hollow because we could not be railroaded into something we didn't wanna do.

I mean like, yeah, we create collaboratively and with guidance from Griffin, like, but if it's something that like didn't make sense for our characters or the story, we just wouldn't fucking do it. Yeah. While we're talking about Reddit, a lot of people talk about Homestuck all the time.

I don't know what that is. And they're, people have basically said, like, this is just like Homestuck, this is directly lived from Homestock. I have no fucking clue what Homestuck is. I know some of it. I know a little bit. I've read like a little bit of the beginning of Homestuck and I Do not at me. Well, I thought I understood what it was, but then I read like a wiki roundup of what

it is and it's like, oh no, it's completely different for what I was. But as far as I can tell, it is also like a piece of fiction that dealt a lot with like alternate reality stuff and multiverse stuff. And it was the first piece of media to ever do that. No, but I think it was a very popular piece of media that did that for a web audience that has a lot of crossover between hours and their audiences. It also apparently ends with a lesbian wedding between two characters. Like, that is also the ending of it. So like, okay, yeah, I guess there are some parallels. But there were a lot of people. I really, this stuff does not bother me at all. Because it's, every time we put out a new episode, it was like, oh, did you take that from, um, when we did the robot kingdom, a stolen century episode, people were like, ooh, somebody's been playing near automata. And it's like, I haven't played it yet. Um, And that's not to say, like, and that's not to try, like, I know we probably sound offensive at this point, but it's really, because there are many things that it's like, oh, was that, like, okay, when I called my assistant on the show, or my Unissela Pothaco, when I decided his name was Cezed, that's because I was reading the newsborne series at the time, and that was a character that I really liked on that show, and I was like, oh, yeah, here's a little something for you. So, yeah, I do do that. Some of this exact instance.

I'm not defensive about it at all, at all, because I can't be defensive about it, because I did pull a lot of inspiration from a lot of different things when we were making the story. And I try to be really forthcoming when we talk about that stuff, right? Like Crystal Kingdom was inspired by, I was getting into the Alien series. And so I wanted to make sort of a sci-fi, you know, monster hunt kind of thing. And Pedals to the Metal was all Fast and the Furious because I'd just gotten into that series when we were watching that. So, like, it really doesn't bother me. There are a ton of parallels, as far as I can tell, between Adventure Zone and Home stuff, but, like, I just have not.

I, it was not as enormous an inspiration as I think people thought it was, just because I, um, it sounds really cool. And I know some, some cool folks who have worked on it, but I, uh, I just, I don't know that much about it. I think it'll be connected to this. Can we read, can we do the question from Goal? Goel Shriek. Yeah, we can bounce around this list. I don't see why we don't need to.

Okay. Was there anything that was discussed for story or character development that happened in advance? Okay. Never, right? Yeah, never. You're talking about, like, did we have a call when we were not recording? We're like, okay, well, what if? No, no, we did not.

And I've seen that a couple of different times. And I think that is also ties in with what you were talking about before, because we did not discuss what was coming. If it ever happened, it was in the vagus of generalities where Griffin would say, you're going to have to make some tough choices or something along those lines. Well, there was stuff like the items that we crafted, right? During stolen century, Griffin would send us the mechanic and say, like, think about what you'd like or... Right. But never story stuff, because I...

Yeah. I cannot stress this enough. Nobody knew the things that I had planned. Like, Rachel didn't know. Like, I didn't tell Rachel. I didn't tell you guys. didn't tell anybody, which I talked about in the last one was like a really isolating thing that I kind of struggled with because I had no idea whether or not this stuff was going to pay off

like I thought it would in my mind, but I really wanted those moments where it's like, hey, Magnus, you're a red robe. Hey, Taco, you've got a twin sister. And that led to some, I think we were figuring it out on the fly how to respond to that stuff. I know when we started as Tullin's century, like Justin actually had some struggles with the fact that there was this major character in his life that I had sort of kept hidden this this whole time and how do I like all of a sudden since we're in the past like have this character be very very important to me when I know virtually nothing about them by virtue of like how it was also it was also this feeling of like I have envisioned an entire life for this character but if I had kind of had my head on a bit more of a swivel I would have realized that like that is exactly what taco went through I mean it's exactly what Taco had his reality shattered by the realization. It was so important to me not to take that away from Taco. And straight up, when we recorded the first episode of Stolen Century, when we were about

five minutes in, we had to stop. And we talked for maybe a half hour. This is maybe the most of, this is maybe the most this thing that you asked about, where we stopped for a half hour. We stopped recording. And we just, like, hash it out because I super didn't want to take away Taco. like independence and tacos, you know, backstory of just like, you know, sort of fighting for every scrap he can get his hands on because it informs so much about taco. And I think you thought

by me introducing Loop that I had taken all that away. And there were a lot of people who were super critical of the fact that I had done that, who thought the same thing. And I can't stress enough. Like, that was not my intention. And I don't think that's what introducing Loop did. It was just like, you both went through this stuff. And I was also also a little worried that it was like, well no we have two tacos you know like that but but at the same time but as we got to know her obviously loop is very different from taco which is cool and that leads us excellently into this question from laura kate dale uh at what point in developing the show griffin did you decide to have loop be a trans character and how did feedback end up i loved her um so pretty early on

i i knew that loop was going to be a a trans character um what kind of Can I ask a preface to it? When did you know Loop was going to exist? I'm curious about that. When did you decide Taco would have a sister? Yeah, I guess I can talk about that first. Like, a lot of people were like, well, did you know when Taco took the umbrella from the red robe that it was Loop? And the answer was like, no, not at that point.

I didn't. I knew that that character was a red robe. And all of the pieces kind of came together when I figured out who it would be. And I matched up the fact that, like, Loop made the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet. So that's why she was there. And that answered a lot of questions about that. I don't, when loop, when I figured out Loop was going to exist, again, I think it was probably around Crystal Kingdom when I figured out, like, who all the red robes were going to be.

As for Loop being a trans woman, I knew pretty early on. I kind of struggled with it because I wanted to, it was really important to me that I try to do a good job of that. And because I know that that particular form of representation is, there have been a lot of examples of that sort of not being so great. and I did not want to be just another sort of bullet point on a very long list of, you know, bad trans representation in fiction. And I get kind of uncomfortable being honest, if I'm being honest, like talking about this,

because it is a thing that I stressed out about because there, I, a lot of that comes from the fact that this is like our first time doing fiction, so like making good characters of any sort of type are, is a tricky thing. And I'm uncomfortable with the idea of like saying like, yeah, we, we crushed it. The, so Travis actually put out a tweet saying like, we, we want to have, you know, trans characters on the show. Will you please message us and tell us like what, what is important to you in how we handle that?

And we got a shit ton of feedback and Travis shared that with me and I went through all of it. And it was all super, super helpful. I read a few things online from some trans authors who were talking about like, here's how to have a good trans character on the show. Here's like a bunch of like shitty pitfalls to avoid. And so I tried to be like really, really, really thoughtful about that stuff in creating loop. And then also like everything I did as loop, I tried to view it through that like particular lens. so that I could try to do as good a job sort of realizing her as I as I possibly could.

And the feedback was really, really good. I think, like, across the board, the feedback was great. And Lupa is one of, like, people's, like, favorite characters. And so, like, I feel really good about how it turned out, if only because, like, I know that I was trying to be as thoughtful as I possibly could in including this character whose life experience is completely different from my own, which is always, like, a really really tricky thing in when when you're doing fiction and and I would also like to say just to sum up the the bulk of the responses we got in the the ahead of time that when we asked like hey we're

going to introduce this character and we need your input we need thoughts was pretty much like okay just introduce her like you would any other character because uh and and let that character develop over time um just like you would any other character and And, you know, when we introduce, you know, Johann, we don't sit there and give you a bullet point checklist of his, you know, of his sexuality and his background and his gender. We just introduce the character and then you get to learn about them over time. Yeah, I don't want it to sound like this was like so hard, right? Because it really wasn't. Like, once Loop was in the story and I knew, like, I had an idea of who she was.

It wasn't that difficult. It was just something that I tried to be mindful of, you know, whenever I was playing as Loop, whenever I was sort of inhabiting Loop, it really wasn't difficult, but I just, God, guys, I just really didn't want to fuck it up. I super didn't want to fuck it up. It was so interesting to have a character that in my character's mind had not existed for the first, like, six or five arcs or whatever. and then suddenly in the Stolen Century was such an important guiding force that suddenly

like kind of retroactively informed character dynamic and story in such an interesting way. And relationships, too. Existing relationships. I thought that way about Lucretia and Davenport and Barry and Loop of suddenly like, oh, okay. It all does start to make a lot more sense. It's funny how it colors retroactively the fact that like these three idiots made it as far as they did and it's and what you learn from like stolen centuries it's because they had these other like what you were seeing in the first five arcs or six arcs I guess is really an incomplete picture of like three sort of like the the dullest knives in the in the IPRE drawer um trying trying to like muddle through on their own and when you see how much. much better they are when surrounded by competent people. I do want to say, though, and this is

something that, like, we have talked about privately, and I, and I don't have a good answer for it, and I wish I did. But I think it's important to show that we're like, I think it's important to not try to pretend like we have all the answers. We're about to head into a few much shorter arcs. And something that I love about the Adventure Zone is that we, it has always had so many different points of view in terms of gender and sexuality and and and and and so many different perspectives from from those characters and we're about to go into and but like for taco it took me a long time before I was like sort of comfortable enough being taco to like deal with those parts of his life because it's not my own experience and I wanted to do a good job of it and I've

talked about those struggles in previous uh, TTA ZZ's, but I don't have a good answer for how we do that in shorter stories and still do really well by it. Right. And I don't have a good, I wish I did, but like I don't want it to feel like such a drive-by that it's like just sort of checking boxes, you know, but I also don't want it to be just four straight white dudes being four straight white dudes. really don't we don't have a good answer for that. I think I think the I think the like the short answer is like it this is something that is important to us and is also something that I recognize

will be a little bit trickier to develop out in a much much shorter format which is what we're going to be doing for a little while here once we get past the the live shows that we kind of have in the can already. But like it is something that is important to us moving forward and I think it was an important part of this world and is absolutely something that is going to be present in the future of Adventure Zone stories. I hope the character creation is more streamlined. I think that's what we're bringing to it now is the character, and we often reference that I wrote this huge backstory for Magnus. And I did, but that was all, like, you know, big, epic story. but still it took a long time to figure out

what he was like in conversation how he felt about you know walking into a room like what did he you know does he have a sense of humor is he funny is he snarky is he boring is he you know all that stuff happened as we were playing it and Tasnites is what I was thinking of as an example

because I think we we rolled up new character and while they weren't, you don't want them to be too well defined because then you have no journey to take. You got the story to take. But I, you know, I really liked those three characters and I liked the dynamic that came about from it. But on that, on that subject, though, like, I don't know that in Taz Nights, like, we got this idea of having, like, a bunch of representative characters just because, like, we didn't

have a lot of time to work with. And like Justin said, it's not something that I want to feel. feel forced ever. Like, we absolutely want to include characters that represent, you know, different, different folks. But, like, that is a tricky thing to do. Representative fiction in general is a really, really difficult thing. Like, that conversation is very, it's very fraught, and it is really difficult to parse.

There's, like, this conversation about deciding between, you know, having representative characters or just speaking your own voice. And I think it's really, really difficult to do good, good representative characters, but it's also really important because if we just spoke our voice, then all of our campaign would just be like four cis hat white dudes. And I, I can't imagine that. Like, I can't imagine that being the truth. And so, like, we're bloviating a lot. But, Like, this is, this, we're, we're going to keep, you know, trying to make a, a very inclusive world and do a better job of that. Specifically about race, like, this was something that we have talked about before.

Like, we were not mindful of this at all when we started doing the podcast because it was not a thing that we knew to be mindful about. We did not know that this show would mean this particular thing to folks. And so when we started, it was just like, you know, I'm an elf. And that was like pretty much the extent of it. And now I think we know. a lot more and hopefully moving on to future arcs we will be sort of better at this. I have a quick question. I think Griffin could probably answer this one a lot faster.

This is from Jeeves Bunny and I also have been very curious about this. In a past the Adventure Zone zone, Griffin mentioned a dark timeline for if Magnus had been tempted by the temporal chalice. What had been planned for that? Oh, okay. So let me think. If I thought Magnus was the only one that would maybe take the offer from the temporal chalice at the end of the 11th hour arc. And so he was the only one that I kind of did plan like a dark timeline thing for. But basically my idea was that we would then just like sort of hop on to a recording, just me and Travis, and record a little bit of like what life in this world, this happier world would be like. And then eventually Taco and

Merle and Lucretia and whoever else would, by some magic or maybe Lucas technology, cross over into this world, fucking turn left style from that really great Doctor Who episode and either convince Magnus that what he has done to their world is wrong and terrible. And also in that sort of timeline in convergence, I don't think Taco and Merle would know Magnus, and so that would have been very difficult. Fuck, I'm glad we didn't have to threaten this really. And then either, like, Magnus would have to give up on this world, which I think it would be a tough putt, or Merle and Taco and Lucretia would have to get that fucking cup back.

And I, this, you're all welcome. I fully, fully expected Magnus to take it. Like, I had prepped a lot for this. I thought Magnus was going to take it, and I thought that it was a, you know, going to lead to some pretty dark stuff, and I thought Magnus was dead. And you could hear in Griffin's voice, I think, a little bit of surprise when he didn't. Let's see. That's because I'm the best.

The best. Travis Rules. What was the other thing like this that we could talk about? So the next question from Ella, what was going to happen if the gang hadn't gotten Magnus's spirit back before it was sucked into the astro plane during the suffering game? Well, we can answer. Listen, I have an answer for this that also at least answer. How do you have an answer for this?

Well, not exactly. Casper Marie wanted to know what were the lines moments that have stuck with you the most. And that is one of mine, the arms outstretched. Arms outstretched to me was that was another time where I got teared up because we, just the reaction and everybody working together and the unity of it. and I, Griffin, we have never talked about this, but I got the impression that that one came out of left field for you. Yeah, it absolutely did.

And I think that there was this, the reason for me that moment was so powerful is because I think we all had this dawning realization that the three of you were not going to do what, what I had planned. Like all of us were like slowly realizing like, okay, this thing is about to change because of your agency, because of your power in the... Let's fuck Griffin over like we have in the past. No, no, it absolutely wasn't coming from like a mischievous place. It was just like, no, you know what?

Fuck this. And I'm going to save my friend. And I think that that was really cool. To answer the question of like what would have happened in the spirit world, I had this idea of like sort of a simultaneous across two planes sort of fight that would happen where Merle and Taco would be taking on Magnus's body with. Edward inside of it and Lydia's Litch form. While at the same time, Magnus and Kravitz would be sort of fighting against the hunger in the astral plane.

And we would get a lot of, we would get a bunch of development there about sort of, because at that point, Magnus would be dead. And so there would be more, there would be sort of an easier way for me to roll out the returning memories because the Voidfish doesn't affect dead people and also sort of fleshing out Kravitz a little bit more. and also fleshing out. Everyone's going to be so sad. Well, no, no, no, including myself, I would have loved to see in a fight with, like, Magnus and Cravitz, like, back to back. It would have been, it would have been, don't give me wrong. It would have been really, really cool. I would not trade in the arms outstretched moment for anything, for anything. I know there's a lot of people who are probably going to go online and be like, oh, Travis, why did you do that? I would beg you not to do that, because for me, arms outstretched, established a tone that would literally carry the rest of the show through the finale. The rest of the show would not have been what it was, because, I reworked some stuff after arms outstretched. The rest of the show would not have been what it was without that moment. It was too powerful. Well, and I think arms outstretched is also one of the moments where I let it, there seems to be, if you look at Taco, broadly speaking, like holistically, it might seem like there's

inconsistencies in his self-serving attitude and the sort of strength of his connections to people. And I hope that it came across how the extent to. which it was a put on. I mean, like, you can listen to what he says about being self-serving, and certainly some of his actions early on, like, not going into the bubble city, stuff like that, that tacos good out here stuff, like would certainly seem to reinforce that, but, like, he does, for, he is hungry for connection, and he does want, and he is, like, you have to remember that, like, even if he says, like, this is, you know, he's in it for himself or whatever,

these two other guys are literally at that point in the story the only thing he had in the world. Like obviously he had a connection with Kravitz. For sure. And like, um, anyway, let's talk about it. So that was, that was a question that we got from a lot of people. I want to do real quick a speed round. I think we could answer a bunch of questions that compromise maybe 95% of the questions that we received.

Um, we got a lot of questions that sort of asked us to add to the lore of the world or add to the canon of the story. and I'm really hesitant to do that for so many reasons, like the largest of which being like, I like that the story is done and the story is a contained thing that we can point back to. And so I don't want, I don't want this episode to be like, oh, you got to listen to the Adventure Zone Zone if you want the full picture. I also want, like, there's a lot of stuff that kind of pops up in the fandom of fanon. And there's a lot of sort of like debate about that inside of certain communities that I like, I don't know as much about. and so I do not want to stumble into it and make it a big thing.

But I think that there is some stuff that we can kind of clear up really quickly and answer some of the more common questions that we got. The first of which being Travis, is Stephen okay? Griffin, did you not edit into the episode like I told you to? Oh, no, I forgot. Yeah. I literally said, I texted Griffin, oh, no, I forgot to mention Stephen. I'm going to be tweeted about this forever. And Griffin responded, I will edit something into the episode about that.

And then he did not... Stephen is... Okay. Okay, great. Was Angus... Did Stephen pass away and move to the astral plane? Yeah, I think you had Stephen in the astral plane for... That must have been quite the shock for Julia, I assume.

What the fuck is this? Yeah, it's a bitch. What is this now that's in my house? Was... I know what I said about Fanon and not wanting to step into it, but I have to address this. Was Angus a Silver Dragon the whole time? That was maybe my favorite fan theory. I never heard this.

So the idea was that, like, Angus was, we never found out about Angus's parents. And there was, like, there was a lot of jokey joke stuff about, like, him being super, super powerful in the train arc and him being, like, there's some reference to him being ageless or something like that. And he also had a horde, right? He had a horde of silverware. And so people want to know if Angus was a silver dragon the whole time. I don't know. I'm actually going to leave this one unanswered. Griffin, Griffin, wanted to read your question, but not answer it. Griffin, you're This was not something I thought of, but I think it's such a, I don't know, I like the idea of it a lot. And so I'm going to leave that one blank. Was Kravitz related to the Wonderland Litches? This one came out of a lot of people saying, because I said that the, the liches in Wonderland had a brother named Keats, who passed away. And that sort of like led them down this dark path. And when people talked about that, I think they thought I was, a lot of the stuff I've seen spelled K-E-E-E-E. And so it was like, well, that's kind of like Kravitz and maybe that's who that was.

But I- Nickname or something. Right, but Keats is like an, I was thinking, I guess, of John Keats, the poet, so like K-E-A-T-S. I don't know how it turned into K-E-E-T-Z, but no, that was not, that was not sort of my intention. Wait, can I ask one more quick attach to that? This is a bad speed round. I know, but you offhandedly said that Kravitz's hand was warm during the wedding.

Yeah. Was that a part of a bigger reveal that? now he's alive? No, I think it was just love. Okay. The power of the power of love. Who was the true love in exile in Crystal Canaan? That was in one of the verses. For me, that idea, because I used a lot of like plural pronouns when talking about, uh, whenever, uh, Legion talked about itself, because it was like hundreds and hundreds and thousands of souls and that, like, and like Maureen's shell house a lot of those whenever it sang these songs. Like, it was sort of a a community of people singing about people that they, you know, were sort of cut off from in the, in the, in the, um,

astral plane. Um, so that was that. Uh, what was, okay, this is when we get a lot, um, and when we've actually had to talk about recently, um, what was insert character here's last name? I don't, I'm fine with not every character having a surname. Like, I, I, I, I, I like this idea. We have, I said, by the way, during the show, that Taco's last name is Taco spelled differently. I do not think that that is accurate. No, I think that was a joke I made. A fun joke that Travis made. It was so interesting to me to see people asking about Hurley's last name, where I always

thought that Hurley was the last name. Like, wasn't she Detective Hurley or something? Lieutenant Hurley, yeah. Yeah. I think Hurley was her name. Her name was just Hurley. Captain, Captain Bain is still my favorite name. Yeah, his name was Captain Bain, and he just happened to become a captain in the organization.

What if Merle had picked up the Emperor staff? Yeah. Well, the whole Merle losing his magic powers 800 times wouldn't have had the same effect. Only happened the once, though, doubt, if you remember. But it lasted forever. I know it did seem like Merle didn't have magic through a lot of the campaign. Well, that's because what he did have, he did know how to use. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the short answer is he wouldn't. I don't think he ever, I don't think he ever was going to. Like, that was Taco's thing. And luckily, the dice were very helpful in this part. where just Taco didn't, but like, Merle didn't get it, but like, I would have had to figure out some bullshit way for, like, this was Taco's staff. Like, this was the cool staff I had envisioned for Taco and obviously became a bigger thing because his twin sister was up in there. But, but, yeah, I, this is one of my bullshit things. Like, that was Taco staff. It was tacos to get.

I don't know what some of these are referenced. Yeah, sure. So, uh, they get their braces off. I think, yeah. I think once you switch over the Bureau of Benevolence, like, sort of ironclad agreement that was required by the Bureau of balance to make sure that, like, defectors didn't happen was just not a thing. And so people could take their... I will establish canon. Magnus kept his because, hey, free bracer. Yeah, sure. The code on Lucretia's door, there was a puzzle in like the last episode of the reunion tour thing where to get into Lucretia's office, there was like a puzzle, there was a keypad with seven digits in it. And you had to punch something in. This is really grim dart.

and I'm really glad that you just hole through your fucking way through it. But the idea is that I thought you would just punch in a random string of numbers and it would let you in. And that number would have been the number of people from your home plane that got consumed by the hunger. And like that number, that like population number would be something that like somebody kind of could not forget about. So at least a million probably. Yeah, probably. In the seven digits for sure. Yeah.

So I'm glad that it didn't necessarily go that way. There's also one on here that Justin skipped of did Loop Get her $15 back from Greg Grimaldis? And all I want to say about that is Justin texted me something last night about that that I'm very excited about. So we're not going to get any deeper into it. Hey, okay, so this is Griffin, your dungeon master and all that stuff. I'm cutting in here. This is not the recording you were just hearing because we forgot to do the ad reads while we were recording this episode because we're all just so tired. And so I'm going to do it real, real fast.

so I can let you get back to the rest of the episode without doing the rest of the stuff I usually do here because kind of that's what this whole episode of The Adventure Zone is all about. First off, I want to tell you about Blue Apron. Blue Apron is great. I'm recording this at 647 p.m. And Rachel is right now making a Blue Apron. It's like some sort of pork bowl. And my house smells fucking incredible right now. And I'm very excited to finish recording this and go yummy down on it. For less than 10 bucks per person per meal, Blue Apron delivers seasonal recipes along with pre-portion ingredients that you can use to make delicious home-cooked meals. Talk about stuff like basil pesto chicken with summer vegetable panzanella,

whole grain pasta and summer vegetables with heirloom tomato caprizy salad, meatball pizza with fresh mozzarella cheese and charmed tomatoes, a lot of really, really good stuff and some sort of pork bowl situation. That smells fucking awesome. You can check out this week's menu and get your first three meals for free with free shipping by going to blue apron.com slash adventure. One more time, that's blue apron.com slash adventure. I also want to tell you about NatureBox.

Naturebox is a great service. where we all want to eat better, but when it comes to snacks, it feels like you're trying to decide between delicious and a billion calories or boring and tasteless. But NatureBox says, hey, fuck all that, because we have a better way of doing things. They have over 100 snacks that taste good and are better for you, and they're made from high quality, simple ingredients, which means no artificial colors or sweeteners. And they add new snacks every month, and they're inspired by real customer feedback. So you know that you are getting just the tastiest stuff. And if you ever try a snack you don't like, you can send it back and they'll replace it for free.

Right now you can save even more. NatureBox is offering Adventure Zone fans, three free snacks, and the first month of your membership for free when you order when you go to naturebox.com slash adventure zone. That's naturebox.com slash adventure zone for three free snacks with your first order. One more time, naturebox.com slash adventure zone. I have a call to action here in the jumbo-tron space. This one is that I just, I really want you to, I'm sorry, I have to read the exact ad copy here, which is fuckwith ghostfruits.com. The website is ghostfruits.com, not fuck with ghostfruits.com. The fuck with part is sort of just like a request.

Hey, hey, you, go fuck with ghostfruits.com. They are a group of collaborating artists producing web comics, art, mixed media, and music, encompassing offbeat, surreal but organic stories. We make everything constantly, realist, deadest, worst. A ringing endorsement for ghostfruits.com. Hey, can you do me a favor? Maybe go fuck with them real quick. I have another personal message. This one's for Leah, and it's from Charlie, Francis, Josh, Kelly, and Rachel. And they all say to Leah, congratulations on running your first game of D&D.

We've had a lot of fun as Gin, Marial, Phil, Tyric, or Tyrek, and the professor. I hope we continue murdering. Oh, sorry. I hope we continue helping Storm Giants, not murdering them. please don't murder the storm giant. And sailing the skies in our murder boat. Okay, so that's where that came from, for a long time to come. Murder boat is just going to write that down, season two. Murder boats, storm giant.

Okay, got it. Hey, thanks to everybody who tweeted about the show using the Zonecast hashtag. It really means a lot. If you tweeted that, you're going to end up as a character in this episode of the Adventure Zone Zone zone. That's not true. Yeah, we're going to be putting that on hold probably for a little bit, but, man, we sure do appreciate it if you spread the word

and tell folks to go listen to the thing because it's done. Go tell folks, hey, go listen to this thing from the beginning because you can just listen to all of it now. You can go binge it and it's all done and you're going to dig it. We are really going to appreciate you continuing to spread the word as we move into new arcs and stuff like that and helping us sort of expand as we try out new stuff and we are going to be talking a lot more about that. I assure you at the end of this episode that you're listening to right now. I want to say thanks to Maximum Fun for having us. You can go to Maximum Fun.org and check out all that.

a great podcast there. I'm talking about shows like Lady to Lady and One Bad Mother and Baby Geniuses and Stop Podcasting Yourself and Jordan Jesse Go and Judge John Hodgman and a bunch of great shows that you can go check out for free at Maximum Fun.org. We have a bunch of other stuff that we do. Also, you can go check out McElroyshows.com and see all the projects that we are involved in. And now I'm going to clam up and let you get back to the episode. And thank you all so much. And we love you. And okay, bye. Are there any other questions on here that we want? But here's one. Griffin, were there any character interactions or scenes that you never got to that you wish you had more time for? And this is directed at Griffin, but I will say that I really enjoyed any time that Taco and Angus spent together. And I feel like there's a lot of these. And it's part of what makes it good, right, that we don't exhaust all of these possibility threads to the point where they get, like, boring. But like, I will say that I was loath to leave any scene that was like Taco and Angus. Because I thought.

that was so, that was such a fun relationship. But there were, there were a lot of Taco and Angus, like, relationships that could have happened in this, in this world, right? Like, I think Magnus and Carey's friendship boiled up because of Magnus wanted to become a rogue. And so it was like, okay, well, I know who you can train with. And then that thing sort of turned out from there. A lot of my, um, a lot of my, um, a lot of my sort of, uh, regrets on this particular

subject are about stolen in century. I feel like maybe I didn't do enough with Davenport with you all. and that just happened to boil up because of the actions that you decided to take in each cycle. I feel like you could have all done more with each other, with a few exceptions. Like, I was happy with how much Taco and Loop interaction there was. But yeah, I think I could have done more with Davenport. I think I could have done more with Lucretia in those things. Like, particularly, like, I would have liked to explore Loop and Lucretia's friendship a little bit more.

But that just, I am very hesitant to, to, whenever I, I try to do a scene that's just two NPCs interacting that you all are not involved in. Like, that is a, I'm inherently, like, not inviting you all to the party a little bit. And so I try to be kind of, I try to limit that and only use it when I think it really needs to be delivered. And I think it needed to be delivered a little bit more with some of the characters in Stolen Century. So that's where most of my regrets come from.

I would have liked to have had more stuff with Kravitz, I think, because we went a long time without seeing him, but again, that was partially because of what happened in the end of Wonderland. I would like to answer some quickly. Let's see how quickly. I know we haven't done it up to this point. Yeah, but really quickly. Yeah, Matt asks if you could have kept the bond summoning for one more round in the last battle, who would you have picked next? I had it in my head. I wanted to bring back Hodgepodge, the robot from the Lucas Laboratory, but I couldn't quite figure out how to do it and have it like what to ask hodgepodge for but I thought that would have been really fun

but instead I went with the power bear on the last round but I did have hodgepodge in my head I really wanted to to have one of the characters that Stuart Dan or Elliot played from Flop House yeah I think I edited that out you originally called in Elliot Elliot's character but but what we decided

was like you had never met scales actually in the flesh, and so we didn't cut it. Here's one from Barzard, who really was Jeff Andrew? There were a lot of people who thought that this was a self-insert of me. Was it not? I thought it was. I'm okay with that being it. It was super not how I thought about it. Like when I was sort of figuring out the multi-plane stuff and like the nature of existence

in this world and sort of this shows this world's philosophy about like existence, I really like this sort of recursive idea of just like every, but he's making worlds all the time, whether that world is a story or, um, I, I had set this up a little bit with like the light of creation, not being from the gods, but from the people who made the gods. And so like, this was that. But those people who made this world and made everything had their world made by somebody and those people had their world made by somebody in a sort of infinite chain. And that chain is like existence. Um, I got sort of, I went pretty deep down the rabbit hole with that idea. And so, like, Jeff Andrew was this, just this person who collaborated to help make

the world of this show. And I think it's not difficult to draw a direct line between, like, that idea, that, that philosophy and what we actually literally did. I think, I think Travis tapped into this a little bit. And he's like, oh, Gary Gygax, when I mentioned, like, they made the rules of this world. And, like, you know, Wizards of the Coast made D&D and made the rules of D&D. Is that who it was? that was like it was not my intention to like say that Jeff Andrew was me and I was referring to us making this world

but like I think that that by definition of the philosophy I just kind of laid out I think that makes sense but I I super didn't want to do a self insert Griffin Kane asked why did tacos give taco magic energy I have an answer but I want to hear

what your theory is yeah so like Istis's whole thing I like the idea of like thinking about predestination and deities and like if there's a deity who designs fate is everything that happened in the podcast completely meaningless because all of it was sort of the design of this deity and the answer was no my idea for istis is that she does have sort of a design and with and bonds are sort of there was a connection between like bonds are these white threads that's how they're visually represented and she is um you know she she does you know celestial needle

point in a way. And so bonds are, they represent these connections that are extremely powerful in this world. We saw them being used to accomplish these like incredible things, whether that was like Roswell's creation was the result of a bond and Hurley jumping into the vines and healing Sloan. Like that was a bond. And so like Istis has these designs and tries to fulfill these designs by giving out some power in some way to to the people who are involved in the designs. And so Taco and Joaquin's connection was part of this fate's design. And this moment where you, you know, cooked together and you ate this dish represented sort of the culmination of this bond. And so both of you received the power of the bond in a very, very, like, a very powerful way. Huh. Interesting.

My theory was, by the way, that tacos are good. They're just really great. Tocas taste very good that's really good um you three have grown up together why i have been with you the whole step of the way we all know what each other can do and we the i love what i love about the podcasts are that it's an extension of the dinner table at our house where everybody tried to out do each other and impress each other and it was a blast but what was your first WTF moment when we did this. And I'm going to preface this by giving mine. When you, when we did something that surprised even you.

And the reason I'm saying this, maybe I can define it by example, the car race in pedals to the metal was phenomenal. If you think about it, we described this amazing moment using just, our words, it's just our story, and that is when I thought, what the hell? How, what are we doing? This is incredible. That was the first WTF for me. I actually, I felt mine way earlier than that. When Fandolin was destroyed, because I remember in that moment, as Griffin is describing, oh, now I'm thinking his name is Bogart. What's his name? Barry Blue Jeans. No, no, no. Gundran.

Gundran rock see you're kind of going nuclear. And I was trying to figure out how to fix it. And what was the solution to it to save everybody? And then we couldn't. And suddenly this arc where we had been very jokey and like making masturbation jokes throughout and, you know, making these like very juvenile jokes. We then climbed out of a well to see that like hundreds and maybe even thousands of people. people were now dead because of our inability to diffuse the situation. And like, that was a really big like, oh shit moment for me. For me, it was the end of the Rockport Limited. That sort of

conclusion to that sort of set an outline that I think a lot of the good moments that would follow would would follow of like all of you working together and doing this really badass thing of like jumping off a moving train and Taco making it disappear at the last second and then all of you having these like pretty nice moments with the other characters that came off the train that was when I was like

oh okay well this is that ruled and that's what the rest of the show is going to be like yeah that was huge for me too like as I cast that spell I was thinking like oh wait this is a satisfying conclusion I'll be damned we actually did it we did it I think Hurley and Sloan's relationship and the way that scene culminated.

Obviously, it had its own sort of like tropey baggage that we unpacked as the show went on and we learned from it. But I think the fact that those two characters had that relationship within the context of this podcast, I think was the first time I realized like, we've talked about this being a car that could fly,

and I think that was the first time for me that the car flew. And I was like, oh shit, wait, this thing can do that? Like this, this tool has the ability to do that? I thought that was, uh,

pretty, pretty wild. And on a smaller level, Abraka, fuck you was a moment too. Yeah, that was also really great. Yeah,

I have a question here. Yeah, man, I'm great. Like, I have a question here I really want to get into because it's,

uh, I've also seen this and I think that there was even some sort of debate inside of this podcast about this. And so I wanted to get into it. It's from Marissa who said, one of the biggest debates I've seen in the fan community has involved Lucretia. People have very strong feelings about her story. I'm pretty pro Lucretia while my friends are not. So I was curious about how the players and the characters, but mostly you guys

feel about Lucretia now that everything's been revealed. Was she a complicated person who made some poor decisions when she saw her friends in a desperate place or someone who felt like she knew better than her friends and made choices for everyone that she had no right to make? On this subject, as sort of the person who made Lucretia and sort of designed this story, in my mind, she was never a villain. Like I never, I never, ever, ever, ever thought of her, not even for a little bit as doing evil in this world. In my mind, I think Lucretia is probably my favorite character, especially because of like the things that happened in the Stolen Century and her growth there and the way that things changed. Like for me, that growth was the most concrete growth that I think

any character went through in the entire show. And what I really tried to set up in Stolen Century is that like, this was a really tough thing you all were going through. And you all had different ways of dealing with it. And her way was very, was perhaps overprotective, right? And so this thing that she did, she knew that you all were hurting, and she had this idea for how to solve it, and everybody else's idea was different. And she thought that the idea that you all went with was wrong,

was inherently wrong. And so she grew from being this character who was very much on the sidelines, writing about the things that other people were doing and taking actions into her own hands and simultaneously, like, making her friends forget this, like, really, really difficult and painful ordeal that they all had gone through. And so on my mind, she was, she was not, she was not evil. She was never, ever, ever, ever, ever the villain. And, but at the same time, like, I think the way that you all sort of reacted to her actions in

different ways was, like, really interesting. I think that what it comes down to, because I think we ran into this a lot, too. And, and honestly, in games like D&D and stories like this, it's one of the hardest things for me is realizing that much like in real life, there's very rarely a yes or no, like, good and bad way to do something. And so I remember when we landed on the planet with the robots and we found the gym and we had to decide like, if we leave the gym and the hunger consumes it, it will grow that much more powerful. But if we destroy it, we're basically killing life on this planet. Hey, let's talk about this. We re-recorded that bit. Yeah.

Because originally, they destroyed the fucking world. They all destroyed the world and then flew away. And then that was the ending. And we finished recording and almost like, we hung up on the Skype call. And then like a minute later, we started texting like, that sucked. That was not the tone of this show. That was not what we should go for. I felt bad.

Like, I went downstairs and talked with Teresa afterwards. And I was like, that was wrong. The thing we did was wrong. And I feel bad about it. It was not a situation where, like, you all made a tough choice and then regretted it. And maybe that regret could have been like in the show in some sort of tangible way that would have been good. And so we betrayed that.

This was like a, this doesn't match the tone of the show. It doesn't match what these characters would actually do. It's just like it is what happened and it was wrong. But that, but that leads me to that feeling of like it, it allows me to relate to Lucretia in that way of like what she had to do was she didn't relish it. I don't think the difference between a visual. villain and a tragic hero is a villain thinks that the wrong thing they are doing is right. And a tragic hero does the wrong thing because that is the only way they can see to do good. Like it's a subtle difference, but I don't think Lucretia reveled in erasing people's memories.

I don't think she liked lying to her friends. I think it was my take on it was it was very isolating and it was the hard thing to do. and it's the only way she saw of protecting her friends was to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. And so I actually see her as a very tragic figure and that is why Magnus hugs her when he does is like this feeling of like, I understand that the thing you had to do

you didn't enjoy, but you were trying to protect us. And if there's anyone that understands that, it's Magnus. Okay, just to put a button, in this real quick. This show, a lot of this show is about the power of stories and the, the way that people's stories impact you and the power that those stories have to change things. And I think that Lucretia, from Taco's perspective, Lucretia robbed him of the most important story in his life without a 100% guarantee that she was going to be able to restore that.

And like, Taco has impulses. towards making connections like I've talked about, but like, Taco's not a hero. Taco would watch the world burn if it meant, like, the people he cared about, really cared about were safe and protected. And Lucretia, like, approached this situation from the exact polar opposite sort of. Exactly, right. But, like, she wasn't losing a sister in the deal.

Taco was. And I think that, like, that imbalance is where Tacos' distrust came from. And, like, I'm here to tell you, I do not know if that. will ever, I don't know, like, we're not like, uh, filling in plot gaps or whatever, but like, I, from my perspective, I don't think that that, it probably softened over time, but I don't think the sting of that is something that Taco would ever sort of let go of, even though things worked out. I'm okay with that.

I think it's really interesting that you all responded to the truth of this situation in different ways. And I don't think it paints Lucretia with any kind of brush. And I think people who say, like, I think this idea of just like, oh, well, Lucretia's a bad person or Lucretia's a villain is sort of like looking at this situation as if it had an easy answer. I tried to put it. I tried to inject a lot of nuance into what she had to do because like I think that's the only way that it makes sense with her character because she's not an evil person. She's an incredibly good person who did this really, really, really, really difficult thing. And so people who say I got personally kind of frustrated because I had never thought of her as a villain and I saw a lot of people who did. I think it is reductive to say, like, oh, well, she's, she's evil because of what she did. She's not. She, she just isn't.

I want to jump back to a completely different thing. Dad mentioned the question from Casper about moments that really suck with you. And, like, I just saw that as I was scrolling down. I want to say the bank fight with, uh, in refuge with, uh, Roswell, where we were trying to, like, find the book and say the code. Basically everything in the 11th. I think 11th hour was my favorite conceptual arc. of the reset. But like that moment was such an interesting, like, what we are doing is wrong. Like, I remember playing as Magnus and having to do bad stuff to move the story forward and, like, go,

well, this is going to reset. So I guess I got to deal with doing this terrible thing to this nice person. And like, a lot of that was a really interesting kind of dichotomy of like, how do I move the story forward? and balance the fact that I know that I wouldn't do this if I was afraid of the ramifications. It was very interesting. I was just going to answer a quick question. Charlotte wanted to know, is Magnus allowed to bring his dogs on the Bureau's moon base? And the answer is the first thing Magnus trains his dogs not to do is runoff of moons.

It's very important. Here's a quick one from Lauren. How much stop down gets edited out? How many takes of each thing? It's wonderfully produced in a compact way, but when D&D has played, there are tons of stopdown moments, Rules Reading and audio dull discussions about what to do next, what a character wants to do in particular, et cetera, et cetera.

I, we edit a lot. We edit, like, a shit ton out. And I think in, like, the finale, we recorded probably close to three and a half hours, and I edited pretty much a full hour out of that. So there's a lot. And there's a lot of people who hear that. I'm like, oh, come on, release the tapes. No, this thing is, no fucking way.

And it's not takes. It's not, the question was. phrase that way, like how many takes of each thing. We're not actors by trade. Yeah, you all didn't do that. You all didn't do that, but I did a little bit. Especially in the later episodes, I recorded some sort of more monologue-y stuff that maybe I didn't have prepared when we started playing. And so I recorded those in and dropped them in later. And I would take sort of multiple takes on that. Yohan's line of you're going to fight, you're going to have to fight and you're going to win. I worked on that for like 45 minutes, like just doing a hundred takes of it because I really wanted the best delivery of it. But that's different deliveries. It's not like we were improvising different shit every time. It's not like Anchorman. We never, I don't think we ever had to re-react to a thing that we had done before. Like, we never, we never once, like, did another take of something.

Except destroying the gym. Except destroying the gym. Well, that was a different, I mean, but, like, that was a meaningful story change. We didn't, like, redo a moment. It was just changing how that moment went. Should we, there are a lot of other questions that we could talk about, but I know we kind of have to wrap up here. But do we want to spend some time talking about what we have planned for coming up? Because I really want folks to understand that we're not done doing the Adventure Zone.

Yes. So we're done doing the Adventures Zone. No, stop. So we have two live shows that are going to go up. Our live show in Austin, which was my sort of persona a little bit inspired one that, man, that one got really out of hand. And then the San Diego show, which. was our, oh, our take on the Tomb of Horrors. It was very, that one was like one of my favorites we've done live. So we're going to have those go up in a while, for the next, I guess,

months since this is biweekly. And then we're going to start doing a bunch of different stuff. We're going to be doing more short form, probably two to three episode long mini arcs that will be essentially, well, I guess you could think of them as pilots, but really it's going to be us playing new games, taking turns DMing, I guess we have to say GM now for playing non-Dungeons and dragon stuff, um, taking turns GMing, exploring new worlds and new genres. And part of that will be like us sort of searching for what we want to do for a longer thing as like season two. But it's also like going to like, I think, help us learn how to tell stories in this in this way. For me, I started listening to Friends at the Table, another actual.

Play Podcasts I talk a lot about. And that was very, that, that was relative to me because it kind of, like, showed me, like, what else you could do with, with, um, actual play storytelling. Um, and so I think once we all kind of, and they play, like, other games that aren't D&D. And so I think if we take some turns playing some non-D and games and try telling other stories, we're going to learn so much, regardless of what we end up doing for the, the next season, um, that that will help us make that season better. Um, It's going to be pretty experimental and like... I'm worried, and we're all really worried about it, right? We're all really nervous because we made this thing that we love and we're so proud of and we know really resonated with people. And to move away from that into a new venture is like really, really, really, really scary. And I hope that... I hope everybody is as down with this idea as we are, because I know the first time we put out a new episode in this new world with new games and new rules and new GM, there are going to be... And new characters.

A new characters. There are going to be people who say... say like, ah, this isn't as good. Or, ugh, I wish you would go back to the other thing. Or, ugh, I wish, you know, whatever we do for season two, whoever ends up GMing, they're going to be people who say, like, oh, I wish you'd done the other thing. Or, oh, I wish somebody else was GMing. I thought that they had done a better job.

I don't think that's going to happen for these mini episodes. It's absolutely, absolutely going to happen. Let me go ahead. Let me just go ahead and say, if you complain enough, we will just go back to the old characters and the old story. So make sure you tweeted us a lot. Travis, God, Travis, you're a, that's not true. It's not true.

What Travis just said is not true. This story is done, and I would know, I don't want to touch it. I love it. I love, we have this thing now, and it's finished, and for the rest of our lives, it's finished, and we have it, and it's done, and I'm so proud of it. Can I say on a side separate note to that point, I, I had a child over the course of recording the Adventure Zone balance, and like, the idea that an example, and, like, the idea that an. couple years when she's older, I can play this for her as like this thing I made. It's really special. We made, it's very important to me. But it's, but it's, but it's, but it's, but it's, but it's, but it's, but it's, and it's done. And so, we have to move on. We have to try new stuff. We have to do this new stuff. And I hope that you all give

us the benefit of the doubt and understand that we are going to be improved just by playing the stuff. Even if it doesn't work out, if we do a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, I, you know, it never really clicked and we didn't really like it. We hope you understand that, like, we will be better now because because we have tried that thing. There is no downside to this experimentation that we are going to be doing because I really think it's going to result in us having a super clear picture of what we want the next thing to be. And starting out with that clear picture, which we did not have in balance, is going to lead to a story that I cannot fucking wait to get into. And I would, and I, and in that benefit of the out what I would say is this like we will of course is always like listen to what y'all are saying

and and hear I'm anxious to hear you know once we get somewhere uh that we're happy with like of course I'm I'm anxious to hear what people think of it and like use that feedback to sort of help us guide whatever but like the two things I would say about that is one please understand that it is going to be us experimenting and I would ask you to try to be respectful of that the fact that you are hearing experimentation and not the finished product as like it is not going to be on the level that balance was towards the end it just took a long long long time to get there so like please try to keep it constructive is what I would say and also please understand that like whatever we do moving forward and and and whatever like this is not a public voting process

there is no like we are not you know 51 votes for this thing 50 49 votes for this other thing okay we do the 51 votes thing that's not in any way what's happening so like don't feel like you need to weigh in to make your voice heard so we'll like it's not understand how messy that would get for us as creators and also family members like we all try to approach this thing from a ego free standpoint and so like the introduction of like a well the introduction of us whoever's thing gets the most votes is going to be the next thing. What we are going to do is the thing that we are most excited about that we think is going to lead to the best story. And it may not be, I would argue that like the best version of this may be that like the second season of the Adventure Zone is not one of these sort of like many things that we do.

I like the idea that like maybe the many things are things like nights that we can return to and revisit and that sort of thing. but not necessarily going to be those shows. It's not necessarily going to be these stories either. So, like, I understand what a big ask that is to, if you've been listening to the show for a long time. And we have talked candidly, like, we understand that, like, we will lose some people. Like, there will be some people who want to bounce. And if you're listening to this, I hope that's not you. And I hope that you'll hang in there with us.

But, like, we understand that, like, and you know what? Honestly, that's fine. I'm really happy with balance. I'm really proud of it. And if that's all you wanted and you want to move on to other stuff, like completely get it. Like we, I, I, thank you so much. And just as not being snide and we are not being snide when we say that. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's the truth.

Not all stories are going to resonate with the same people. And so, like, if you do not like the next thing and you want to go, like, I fucking completely, completely totally understand that. I absolutely get it. I'm not being shitty when I say that. It is, it's just the truth. That's how it works. I would say, though, don't do that because he's going to get pretty buck wild.

And you do definitely want to be on board for how buck wild. And let me also say, wait a minute, on the other side of the coin, just for a second, let me say, as the dad, it's still us. It's still the four of us telling stories and the things that we brought to the table in balance. For now, there's some contract stuff that we're. Oh, yeah. Why don't you ever tell me about that? I have a big ask, frankly, like, I'm, if you want me to be. back.

I will say I'm especially nervous because I'm building mine from scratch. Yeah, Travis making a game for a Western arc, right? Yeah. And let me also say to that. There will be a lot of, once again, people saying like, oh, that's very similar. I don't think I'm, like, reinventing the wheel. I don't think that mine is a standalone thing, but I, like, had an idea for a story I wanted to tell and couldn't find the perfect thing.

So instead, I came up with the story I wanted to tell. and now I'm building mechanics around it and building a set around it. And that's a big risky thing. And I know because I kind of made a game for Stolen Century and there are things that would go back and change.

So, like, this is what I'm talking about. If like, for some reason, if like the mechanics, if we hit the end of it, like, oh, there's stuff I would have changed about that game. Okay. But we're still going to be better. Travis is going to be better because Travis is going to understand game systems

in a way that is going to be like really, really, really, really informative. Can I be very quick, because I have to go to Can I talk about... Yes. Mostly because it's a worst kept secret in the world. I had five people come up to me, five students come up to me during class yesterday and say,

so, you're the new GM, huh? So I'm going to do the first pilot. It is going to be a superhero-based. Can I say the game system? Can I go ahead and... Yeah, we're playing fate. We're going to play fate. We're going to use the fate system, so it's all new there.

and the name of this arc, if you want to call it that, is Taz commitment. Commitment. I like that. I have two ideas. One is sort of a one is in a game called Monster of the Week that I want to be kind of like persona based while still having sort of the monster hunty element of shows like Supernatural and stuff like that in a town in West Virginia that I'm very excited about. and I have another story that I want to do using a game called Uncharted Worlds that is kind of a post-earth space opera about people who try to preserve the things that they want to preserve from Earth that I think is going to be really neat. Those are my two ideas right now. I'm going to do the greatest detective story ever.

It's going to be great. Live shows. We want to mention the live shows real quick. Yeah, we got. We've already said, haven't we said that? I think so. We got one coming up in November and then October and then we in Nashville and then we have another one coming up in Tacoma.

Those will still be Trace Horny Boys and we'll keep doing that. For the first year of future. Let's wrap up because Juice has to go. But I just want to say I've said it 100 times. Thank you all so much for listening and for giving us this experience. Like it's not it's not a like I don't want people to think about it in like a crass way. Like, oh, you all have helped our careers by making this show successful. You all helped me, like, personally, because I didn't know that this was a thing that we could do.

And now I do. And that experience and having this finished thing that was also really special to a lot of other people. Like, that is the thing that matters to me and is going to matter to me for literally the rest of my life. Like, this show changed my life. And that is, like, in large part, thanks to the community that sort of grew up around it. So thank you all so, so much. I grew creatively, not just from doing the show, but from how people reacted to it and the feedback they gave.

And it taught me a lot about being a creator and what that can mean to people, the things that you create and how important those things can be to people, was way more informative to me than any actual thing that happened in the story, was learning about the impact the story had on other. and the kind of responsibility of that. So, yeah, thank you everybody for listening and being a part of it so far. And I made a whole bunch of new friends. I mean a shitload of new friends.

I love the supporters and the fans and the people who listen. And I got to do it with the three most important people in my life. I mean, there's no downside there. Charlie and Henry and Beebe. And I guess for me, just you're welcome. Okay. I want to make sure. You're welcome.

That's it for the Adventure Zone Zone. That's it for balance, really. And now we're going to move on to the next thing. We're going to put out a couple live shows while we all take a, I think, well-earned rest. Especially you. You were amazing. Yeah. Hooray for Griffin.

Griffin. Finally, someone tells Griffin he's doing a good job. Good job, Griffin. So on that note. Oh, oh, oh, the new album is up on band camp of all the music for the. the last three arcs of a reunion tour and Stolen Century and Song. You can get it at griffordmacquay.bankcamp.com and all the album sales through the rest of August are going to the SPLC.

Cool. Okay. That's going to do it for us. Bye everybody. Hang in there. We love you. Next time we talk to you, we'll be doing a new story. Bye.

Bye. Maximumfund.org. Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Listener supported. Hi. I'm comedian Emily Heller. And I'm cartoonist Lisa Hannawalt.

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