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

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

This week we’re answering your questions about The Adventure Zone: Royale! Royale Theme: “Wizard Disco” by Louie Zong: https://louiezong.bandcamp.com/album/wizard-disco Original Music by Griffin McElroy Additional Music in this Episode: "The Fae" by Mark Lingard: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mark-lingard/. Native Women Lead: https://www.nativewomenlead.org/ Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/jointaz

Hello everybody and welcome to The The Adventure Zone Zone, the world's only podcast about a podcast hosted by the members of that original podcast. And appearing in the feed. And appearing in the feed of the original. Yeah, that's true. It is somehow part of the podcast and not part of the podcast. Meta. The podcasts they do about the podcast when they're not doing the current podcast.

Anyway. This is the true metaverse here. We are going to be talking about. Taz Royale answering your questions. Do you know what they call it in France? Here he goes. I'll be glad honestly to see the backside of this joke. I wanted to get it in one last time, you know?

And I'll tell you what's been, what was rough is life found a way to really fuck up our record schedule on this season, like a few times throughout the run of it. So we would have stretches where we did not record. and then I think we would just forget. Let's let the, what do they call it in France joke, like, rip again. And so this is a sort of 21 gun salute, I feel like. I never forgot. I thought it was funny every time. Oh, okay, well, never by then.

We got some questions sent in by you all to our email. Thank you all so much for sending those in. And you guys ready to get started? Yes. I would say so. That was the first question was sent by Mike. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Mike. Are you ready to get started?

Was that? Was that serious? Here's a question. It says, have a good time, guys. And that's from Susan. Susan's question is happening. Was that one real? No, that one wasn't real. That question for you was sent in by David Peterson. He wanted to ask Griffin, was that one real? Whoa. And David, you have your answer. Holy shit. How is this happening?

Here's one. Who is David Peterson? That's from Claude. Claude Peterson and his dad That sucks, dude Yeah, I know Dude, yeah, sorry, Sorry, Claude, you have a son And he's beautiful And he's a Taz fan

And he's not gonna change that for anybody Oh man Sorry, pal, you just don't get it If you can't handle the volume With the podcast, you're too old I'm gonna ask the first question in the list Because it's the only way out Of this, Ben

Was there any moment that made you decide You wanted to play your character differently, and that's from Valerie. Yes. What was it? Oh, okay. In the beginning, God created. Yeah, no, Rictus was a very, I wouldn't say pacifist, but like I was really making

an attempt because I wanted to play him as a kind of aspiring healer who just happened to have been born a necromancer, but wanted to like use his powers, you know, to show that like you could do good. And then Griffin stole my key as the gentleman at the end of the first thing. After I went through so much, like, Rictus went through so much to like not hurt anybody. And it forced him to like steal a key. And it ended up costing Bobby Dazzler his life. Yeah.

And that guilt weighed real heavy on Rictus and turned in. to a vendetta against the gentleman. And then that sent him down a pathway I had never expected. Yeah, I really enjoyed the pathway that Rictus went down and then had to try and sort of record with, because you were trying to be a nice guy. And then this one dude did this one pretty fucked up thing. And then it was like, I was honestly surprised at how kind of, I don't know, single, single-minded you were.

It was because of that moment because the death of Bobby Dazzler weighed very heavily on Rictus and he blamed the cowardice and sneakery of the gentleman for it and decided that the gentleman did not deserve to win

and in many ways live. So I think we were probably going to bump up against this phenomenon a couple of times but I feel like it's interesting. This is endemic to Taz Royale in the way it's structured. And part of what I found really interesting about it, like, none of these characters had a quote unquote story or a like destiny kind of story that they would be fulfilling due to the nature

of the fact that we were working at cross purposes. So like, you couldn't go in knowing that, you know, my whole thing is as Loravith is like, I always try to do the right thing. And I always want to help everybody and also there's this special sword that I'm supposed to get that'll let me kill the super dragon like that's not the story right and so I think what Travis is talking about was similar to what I encountered with duber where it's like we kind of need to find our own reason to fight and our own reason to like maybe motivation as a character is a better sort of way of putting it is where I think everybody kind of went in with this general sort of like

I want to go in and win this thing in order for us to have compelling stories that couldn't be everybody's main focus. Yeah. So I think that like at least both, I think all three of the characters actually really had like turns where it's like, oh, so this is the kind of story

that they are going to be sort of dealing with. And we were discovering that, I think, sort of as it happened. Yeah. I really, really enjoyed that about this season. We've done some debriefing ourselves which we didn't record, if you can believe it or not. Sometimes we talk about our shit, just for us, just for funzies.

And it's content right down the toilet. It's content right down the toilet, but it's, you know, that's how the sausage gets made, the toilet sausage. Like in prison. There were, I think that the structure of like the killing game, the survival game was at times something we had to kind of work against. but I do really, really, I did enjoy how it kind of forced us to sort of like localize all of the, all of the stories and all of the events to like what was happening on this island during this, you know, conclave. And I feel like it was a lot easier to sort of see what you guys were like jiving with and trying to just really, really hone in on that stuff, whether it was like

the beef with the gentleman or just. just in adopting an adult man or, you know, hell grammat's sort of will he, won't he kind of pursuit of power. And the bridegroom thing, I think was a big hook for Hell Grammar of like, what's the deal with Akari, I think, was the name of it, and Hell Gramat. There was also a moment, I don't know if you meant for it to be this big of a, like, lure for me and Richter.

But when, you know, we set his house on fire. Right. And you talked about like near the end as Rictus avoided like the time freeze that there was like a look of pure hatred in the gentleman's eyes. And I was like, oh, this dude sucks. He's got to go down. Like this has gone from like, we have a beef with each other to like, oh, I hate him. This is what's interesting to me about the gentleman and about Rictus is like all the stuff. the gentleman really did to you,

you guys were also kind of, like it is a game of betrayal and killing, and I feel like at certain points, certainly you participated in that. You all kind of participated in that. So like, you being set off by the gentleman's look of hatred after you burned his house out is like, yeah, he's gonna look, he is gonna look that way.

I tried my very best to play the gentleman not as like a mustache twirling like, yeah, he stole your key. because that's what his power allows him to do and so he did it. He used his power to survive and it really wasn't anything personal. I didn't have any kind of like plans for him

to be your nefarious kind of arch rival, but it kind of, I had to go that route because you hated his fucking guts so bad. He was just such a weiner. He was a huge weaner. Don't get me wrong, absolutely. I felt like hell Gramut was pretty much on task. almost the whole season.

I mean, I think what varied was what he let people see. And for us, that was kind of tough to play to try and keep Hell Gramet's motivations and his real state of mind hidden from you guys. Yeah. You did it so well, though, Dad. You did, Dad. I, we've, again, we talked about this before when we started debriefed. I loved Hell Graham. It's whole fucking deal, man.

I never knew what you were going to do. Like, I really truly didn't know what you were going to do. And whether or not you were having this change of heart or whether it was like all, all for, you know, for play pretend. I mean, I guess it's all for play. You were so consistent and yet indecipherable at the same time. It was so fun. I'll also say that like I'm not down with the bug man is one of the first angles that I found a way in with Loravith. Like that was like and it was very, I will say this, that energy can get kind of like, yeah, to listen to.

And especially if the other player is like taking it personally. But like you, Hell Grammet rolled with it in such a like accepting way that it was fun every time. Like it never felt bad. It's like because you knew it was like go ahead funny man You got your own dislike me all you want I got a kind of my own thing going Which like worked because I never really like had insight to it Yeah, it was just always sort of like fuck this guy

It was one of the things that I really enjoyed about this season Because it's fun to play with of like the three of them ended up Working together a lot But I don't think they ever got like close you know And we were never having deep conversations about about our backstories and our wants and needs. Yeah. I mean, discouraged.

They didn't. Yeah. We talked about that on that train trip. When we first started talking about Royale was that the big challenge was going to be that, you know, we weren't going to be, weren't going to start off as buddy buddies. And we weren't going to come together as a team because that is antithical to what the whole setup of the, of the, of the, of the, of the. arc was that eventually I mean the three of us would be pitched

against each other and two of us were not going to survive speaking of Hellgrammet Nicole asks Hellgrammet might be my favorite character Clint has played I found his pathetic and self-serving nature hilarious and unique

what was the inspiration behind Hellgramette Black Adder Oh yeah That makes sense. And kind of a combination of the four main seasons of Blackadder and the fact that Rowan Ackinson played these different Blackadder as sometimes obsequious. And, you know, sometimes, you know, acting like he was hungry for friendship and, you know, camaraderie and all this other stuff.

but always with a little bit of a sneak. So Blackadder, one of my all-time favorite TV shows of any kind. And so, yeah, especially Black Ed or two. And Zorak, right. Huh? And Zorak. And Zorak physically, yeah. And the voice came from Zorak. Yeah, yeah.

And I always had a little Zorak right there next to me, you know, for inspiration. So, yeah, I loved playing him. He really was fun, and I kind of, I mean, I missed the team coming together kind of angle. I'm not going to lie, that's always one of my favorite things about, you know, TAS. But this has such a fun, cool energy to it that, you know, it was kind of a joy to see. Justin, did you ever get a little John Blackthorn from Shogun, a little poplitz? into that, I think a couple times talking about.

Guys, guys look at D&D Beyond. Yeah. That's my that's been my character icon the entire time. I locked it right away. Because it's like, I don't know, it's a great, it's like, I'm just going to do. As much as I love show the show, the thing that really

sticks with us is for some reason doing impressions of show good is really funny. Yeah. There's like this one. And I don't know, I really love that. No, because I I remember you doing the impression of him describing the world as you know it to me a couple times after we started watching the show. Yeah. And that's like, yeah, I don't know.

That is, that's absolutely my inspiration for his voice. There was a question from Kelly and Julia towards y'all and me about whether you picked your spell that you wanted to do first and then basic character around that or if you had the character and then you just kind of picked the spell for it. I'm curious what your guys answers. With the initial spell that we had? I think that Swarm was always hellgrammets go to... But did you pick Swarmes first or did you decide to play infestation or decide to play like a Thrikeen and then find that spell?

Yeah, this is a chicken and egg question. Did you pick your spell first or did you pick the character first? Because I found Wither and Bloom in the list of spells and I liked the idea of a necromancy spell that harmed and healed at the same time. Yeah. Right. And that gave me the idea of like the dichotomy for a necromancer that wanted to be a healer. And like we, Griffin allowed me to like, because it was a level two spell. Right. And I was like, can we make a level one version of this? Because I have this idea for a character.

I think the character came first. I think Hell Grammet came first. I think the Thrykine angle of it was was a big part of it. But I did it informed of insect powers and insect magic because there's, you know, quite a few insect-based things, you know, wall crawler and, you know, other stuff like that. So I kind of, I think now, hellgram it came first and then I was lucky enough to find infestation because I had used something similar as Zooks. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think it was even infestation, wasn't it? But it was sea-based creatures. I mean, he had other spells.

We didn't have that. He was also a ranger, if memory, such a wizard. Jeez, what about you? Just a cool. It's a good, if you get one spell, it's a good sort of all-purpose, you know, you can lash things, you can grab things. you can pretend it's a grappling hook and see if the gym will let you get away with it. You can use lightning lure. I also read that it's the, it's a, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, for, for, for a can't trip. Yeah. So, uh, I went, it just, yeah, man, cool.

Dad, dad, I had a follow-up question for you. Did you ever figure out what your biokinesis school of whatever it was that you took was? Yeah. Or what it did. We never... Really scared the shit out of me when you... Biomancy, I think. Biomancy. That was that.

I kind of goofed around with... There was one where you could detach your hand and another one where you could grow in size or shrink in size, but there's already a power, I mean, like enlarge and all that stuff. You know, I think it got to the point where we had two months. many spells. Yeah. I think that's a good, a good observation. I think that because, and I mean that when you just have a handful of spells, it forces you to try to think of creative ways to do it.

And I'm kind of infamous for getting yelled at for that. But now, I love the idea of the biomancy, but I just don't think we ever, between me and Griffin, I don't think we ever really got a handle on. on what to do with it. The bigger issue, and there was a question, let me see if I can find it, about sort of the way that we handled magic and not utilizing a lot of the wizards

kind of defining class features. Ray asked a question about this. Things like scribing additional spells on top of what they learned from level up, having a huge spell list, et cetera, whether or not, like, why we did it that way. I actually really, really liked this, idea of like everybody gets one spell because it helped kind of like shape the laws of of

magic in the world and and really did help shape the characters I would say it's a great shorthand too if you have to introduce like a bunch of you know second second tier third tier whatever like oh yeah he's a he's a guy shoots a lemonade out of right so like 95% of the aspirants were I started with the spell and then kind of worked back from no way burger man wasn't just bouncing around in your brain already and you're like, I gotta let Burger Man out. I really like Detective Magic. I think Scorching Ray was used by

scorching Ray, Scorching Ray, who was like Ray Romano. That was like all that I had. I love that guy. I had a list of names from like a couple years ago of just like wizard names. The only one I ended up using off of it was Randolph, which it says in parentheses Gandalf.

There's one on. here called Cream Supreme. And I didn't use Cream Supreme and I feel bad. It says here in the notes, Cream Supreme, a big hype beast boy who can conjure food and water. I just forgot to circle back to Cream Supreme. But I really liked it because I feel like when we have too many spells, especially during like live shows, it really slows shit down sometimes. Yeah. I feel like there's a choice paralysis that happens. And I felt like this would be a way kind of around that. And also to sort of like encourage you guys to think of other solutions for things. Like I really, really enjoyed all the shit you guys did in the, in that that first trial, the trial of abjuration, when you only had

one spell and you had to like figure it out. And also like it gave us some moments of when you got new spells, it was like an exciting thing it felt like and not just like a, you know, you leveled up and you got 50 fucking things and you're not going to use half of them. I don't know. I don't know if anybody asked this, but I'll say, like, favorite trial, the trial of necromancy survive in the house with the zombies attacking, I think was my favorite. That was just so fun. It felt like suddenly we're in, like, Resident Evil, but with magic, it was great. My was illusion. I really thought that ending. I did not see that coming, and it really got me hook, line, and sinker. That was cool to be caught unawares like that in a, and get to, like, roleplay that, really? Like, because that's not, you know, that was a lot of fun. Dad, did you have a favorite trial? It wasn't a question.

Griffin would just like to hear a few more plodons. No, I liked illusion too. I liked the way it, yeah, the twist was very cool. And I think the final challenge was really. The fight with Chris? Yeah. Was really, really cool. I really liked it.

I really didn't have an ending sort of like in mind. It felt sort of disingenuous to have an ending in mind. I kind of knew that like the octave wasn't necessarily real. And I feel like there were a few moments where you guys kind of glanced off of that realization. Specifically, like you guys were never able to touch them. There were a couple times where like, I think you took a swing at them, Rictus and your hand, like, went through them. And he was like, oh, it's a good thing. This is an illusion.

in form of myself, but also, like, you tried to use your telepathy to talk to the thrikea, and it didn't work because he's not, he wasn't real. Right. And so there were, like, a few times where I kind of hinted at that. The idea of, like, Chris being, I also had a sort of general thing of, like, these memories stones were being kind of taken from people and being ingested into a hive mind to situation, sort of as a, you know, I guess an AI kind of analogy and having that sort of be the sort of big bad, I think, was something that I knew that I kind of wanted to get to.

But it was not something I had set in stone. Like if you guys started to really take swings at each other to like kill and get to an ending where just one of you guys like pulled it out, I was fully expecting like Hell Gramat to just go full mask off at some point. point and start offing, just start offing people publicly, I guess, in a more public manner to try and like take home the victim. I wanted to leave room for that kind of stuff to happen. So all of the kind of like big finale stuff was a bit later on in development. Well, we also have kind of a follow-up question from Amanda. Was Chris always planned to be the

big bad of the campaign with all the members of the Octave Dead? Did the guys make any gameplay choices that changed that storyline? Okay, so yeah, I mean, a big one. I think I just kind of laid out my ideas for like the octave not being, not actually being there, not being real in what I just said. One big choice is like that was not going to be the trial of illusion. I had another trial of illusion kind of like in mind. I had like a whole, a whole thing that was going to happen.

And then Rictus went into the crystallarium, which I was like surprised he did. And then it was like, okay, well, this is an opportunity to really kind of just move, to just jump the thing forward. Which is so funny to me, by the way, because like, honestly, and I told Griffin this afterwards, I thought that's what he as death was saying like, hey, get in there and find out what's going on. And then I did it. And Grim was like, I didn't expect you to do that. And I was like, but you were telling me to do it. I don't remember his exact. I mean, what he told you was like something bad is happening here and, you know, we got to do something.

But used your power wisely and be careful. I was like, got it. You got it. You heard the first part. A wink. Yeah, I'm picking up exactly what you're putting down. Yeah. So like, I had a general backup idea of like the trial of illusion, which is like, what if I called it something else?

Like, what if I said, oh, and this is the trial of enchantment? But actually, it was secretly the trial of. of illusion the whole time and that was like the big illusion. It was never going to be, it was hard to figure out how to do a trial specifically about tricking you guys while you knew you were in a trial about tricking you guys. Yeah. Like I had this idea of like what if there was a, um, what if you guys were like in a room and like everything, but a few things in the room were all mimics and you tried to like get to the bot. But that would just like, if I thought about how you guys would play that out, you just start fucking throwing shit at every object in the, it would just be you guys standing around

throwing shit, using big AEOE spells on stuff. Like, I don't know. If you know that something's trying to trick you, you can't really, it really does limit your, your options as a GM. But I'm happy things worked out the way they did. That was, that was the big one, as the ending kind of came about in a more expedited banner, I would say, than I was sort of expecting. Were you guys planning on Dover being such an important character, or did that just

happened by chance. I feel like his introduction really made this season special from Kate. Damn, okay, let's figure that out. How'd that happen? That one got away. That one got away.

There was, in the trial of transmutation, everyone was split into, I think, three or four groups, and him and Randolph were in y'all's group. That one wasn't necessarily random. Like, I was trying to think of who would be fun for you guys to have in your small group,

so I put some folks that you guys had some, like, contact with, some beef with in the past. I specifically didn't put the gentleman in there because I didn't want you to, like, do another trial where you're just focused on killing the gentleman over and over again. I honestly wanted to give that beef a bit of a break. And I just fucking, I thought Randolph and Dober Sweetleaf was just like, I just thought it was funny.

And I thought it would be a fun energy to put them in there and had the idea of like, what if Doobr just kind of is like a, can't really do anything. And so Randolph is sort of protecting him and he asks for help from like the biggest dude there. And I really did not think it was going to be much, much more than that because there was every opportunity, there's every chance that, you know,

you would just kill, like you would use that opportunity to get them out of the game to kill them. But you obviously went a different route that was, I think, much more exciting and interesting to sort of, sort of follow. Yeah, it was weird. Like, I didn't intend for that to be, I think it was a joke at first that was,

and I think the joke was that I mustook Duber for a child, even though Duber, and part of my fixation was, you have to understand. Part of my fixation was I legitimately thought Duber Sweet Leaf was a child named Duber Sweet Leaf, so I could not get it out of my head that Griffin named a little boy Dupor Sweetleaf.

I thought that was so funny. And then he talked like a little boy. So I just thought he was a little boy. And so I was being kind of paternal towards him thinking like, man, it's so funny. This guy's name was Duber Sweetleaf. And by the time I had sort of gotten it in my head that he was, in fact, an adult man that I had been cast. And I think that I had found a vibe for, for Loravit that made sense. because I like, this guy was not going to,

uh, okay, so initially, if you think about where he was living, he like won the, uh, the best hut and he gave it up so he could go live on the cliff side. And that had been my intent to sort of be about like this guy that couldn't

quite get comfortable where he was. And right around the time that the duber thing started happening. It started to feel in my head a bit too close to the Fearbold. Okay. It was very much that like fish out of water, like not really, not just fish out of water, but like outside of the rules of the thing and just kind of like, you know, what is it all? You know, I'm sort of an outsider here, even amongst all the other outsiders. And I just like, I don't know, it, in a season that was so much about all these different characters,

and all these different personalities, it occurred to me that, like, having someone who was by his own nature and outcasts, like, we just weren't going to have time for him to shrug that off. So it was kind of like, I realized he needed some sort of relationship, beyond the antagonistic one that he had developed with, like,

with Gricon. With Gricon and with Hellgramut. The truth about Travis' character, and I don't know, I don't think I've ever had this the entire season. He was creeped out by that stuff. And that's why he gave Travis' character why at birth.

Yeah. And we never talked about it, but we never really talked about anything. Because I did not, the whole thing kind of creeped me out. But I realized, like with so many characters, you're not going to just have a conversation about why these two guys don't talk.

It just doesn't come up. It doesn't matter. But just so you know, Lorveth was like deeply unsettled by all the Nekyllabic. Yeah. It worked for me. Honestly, Rick does felt very separated from everybody. And that was great because he had been like raised, locked in. Right.

His like castle and everything was his family. And he didn't have like friends and stuff. And so like he was very separate from everybody. And it's why it tingle me pink that I, I liked Pranklin, and Pranklin and Rictus became buds because Pranklin didn't talk. And it was like all just Rikta's being like, I like this dude. And it just developed over time, and it cracked me the hell up. Okay, I think the other thing that this, some of the relationships that we developed with NPCs,

I don't think that have clicked as quickly as they have since balance. and what I thought was if when I was thinking about this beforehand I think a lot of that is disposability it felt a little more safe to develop a quick well safe and required to have a quick decision about a

relationship you have with a character right and just start playing it because they could like be wiped out with the next round and it wasn't something you were necessarily going to get like stuck with so you just had to start like you know whoever you ran into first you didn't trust that you were going to bump into

them later because that's not guaranteed in the story. You know, like, you know, you had to kind of play everything as it, as it laid. And the element of subterfuge, too. Yeah, for sure. You bump up against somebody and, you know, you're, you're kind of using them, which I think we all learned from Survivor. Sure. I'm also just now realizing, like, as we were playing this game,

I was getting way deep into the dungeon crawler Carl books and, like, how much that probably indirectly influenced my view on this, where that's like a bunch of them competing in a game to survive through floors and challenges and how for Carl it very quickly becomes like us against them, the people running the games versus the people actually participating in the game. And it's just now occurring to me how quickly Rick this was like, actually, fuck all this. This thing where just like everybody I meet is dying and him instantly being like, so I'm going to help this person and I'm going to help this person and I'm going to help this person. I think it made sense for Richtus to be the first one to kind of lead that conversation of like, I'm not going to, I don't want to keep killing y'all, which is very convenient that that conversation happened after the gentleman was dead.

Yeah. It should have been more framed like now that I killed him. Like, kill him now. I'm not killing him anymore. But he didn't kill him. He didn't kill him. Well, he didn't. Because it burned off his gauntlet.

That was what set it off because Richard was so pissed to have that vengeance. taken from him. Yeah. That's when he like charged in and he was like, this whole system's like, that moment. I think that's when you took a swing at the octave. Yeah. Okay. I almost, I've been hesitant to talk about this.

John asked a question, was John R. Buckle, an illusion created by Chris or just a hapless human who took a job running the Adelaier who was suddenly without a job? I had a, when I put him in there, it was just like a joke because we had done, we always do cats and it's a joke show. It is ultimately at its core joke show. Thank you so much. It's a joke.

But I also, I started to think about what if this was set in like the far future of earth that got magic on the day of story and song. And there's some stuff that like kind of glances at that.

There's some stuff that kind of talks about that. If you guys, the whole like eggs and the history lessons thing, I realized, like, after the first one, like, well, they're not going to do that again. And so they're like a couple of times where they talk about, like, the first gift of magic they received was divination when they received the message of magic from beyond the stars. Like, that was sort of alluding to the events of story and song where people got sort of magic powers on that day. That was not really a thing that organically came up. And it was also a thing that, like, anytime I talked about, like, this is.

earth or you remember hearing about the Titanic or something along those lines like it didn't seem to catch your interest and I felt like I didn't want to I didn't want to go down any kind of like alley that would take us away from the more localized stories that we had found like doing this season so ultimately like I dropped it but like I had the thought of like maybe John Arpulke is Garfield in disguise and he's investigating I have to clarify something for myself yeah I have to Clarify something for myself. You're, part of the rationale that you have

for us not digging into connections between this and balance are that we didn't blink at references to Earth and the Titanic. Those were the watch words because we were on Earth. So this wasn't the planet

or the universe. Like here now, like some of the locations in the world of balance that might have been easier for us to detect might have been, sure. No. Well, I didn't want it to be said in that world, right? Because, like, I don't know.

We have been, we've talked about this a lot, like, very hesitant to really do a lot of shit in the world of balance to, like, expand that story. Like, uh, and I think we feel just as strongly now having, you know, just wrapped up the graphic novel adaptations of that. So I don't know. I wouldn't want to do like. But there's, like, threads, you know, if you look at, if you look. Here's the thing. You guys didn't seem interested in the threads. Like, you guys didn't, you guys didn't follow.

up anymore on like the earth stuff and I also like I don't know I stuff is boring Griffin I we have to deal with earth stuff every day yeah um so if it had been called the pie tannic can have been out of pie now we're talking oh hello hello cooking this is when I was curious about was there any connection between the necromancy octave member being called four and rictus being the fourth how did that octave member get his name and is there any other fun lore like that that didn't make it into the season. That's from Percy. There was not a connection there.

And when you just said there was, I kind of panicked because I was like, oh, shit. Because I had already kind of like figured out at that point that they were all kind of these illusions. And so I didn't think it would make much sense. There was a long period, Griffin, where I thought four was Rictus from the future.

Yeah. See, that's what I was very, very nervous about. Because I was like, shit, he's going to think it's Rictus from the future. Not a joke. I was like, oh, damn. And so I had him kind of stopped showing up. All of the names of all the octaves were numbers in different languages.

Oh, get the fuck out. Really? Yeah. So there was Coxie, which is Finnish. Then there's, gosh, I mean, Trace, Osham, I believe is Ukrainian, I want to say. They were all just sort of different languages for, Oh, my God. Different numbers. Deep as hell.

So, yeah, four was just like the number four being held up on four fingers was just like, I don't know, another version of that. It's just the number that was kind of left over after the other ones were given number names that sounded like names. And so, yeah, that's how that happened. And it just don't take more than that sometimes. No, yeah, I mean. I really don't. I want to read this one from Jessica because I think people would like to know this. How far in advance do you share what can.

characters you are going to play with each other. When you came up with this season, was there any bug stuff pre-planned or did it all get added when Clint showed off his character? Was it hard incorporating the bug stuff? Let me see if we, is this in Slack? Did we do this in Slack? Because we might be able to see who actually like came in first if we go by. I remember us having a conversation about it like on a tour bus or something. We're on a train, yeah.

A train. We had a train from, I want to say like Minneapolis. to Milwaukee or something like that? I had two characters, Bavage and Hellgramid. And Bavage was basically a sound-oriented

based on the old Muppet character from the first season of Saturday Night Live. The great and powerful Bavage who just screamed and sent out waves of sound. I'm glad you picked the other dude. Well, you guys kind of talked me out of the other. dude and talked me into hell,

Grimmett. Just from the screaming. Yeah. Yeah. Bugstuff was not part of the thing, but like it was an easy fix. Like the world being destroyed by like overuse of, uh, of magic in like a escalating kind of like magical arms race. Like it's pretty, I felt like it was pretty easy to like really toss anything in there.

And the, you know, existence of the of the, of the Thrykeen and they're kind of like, backstory as weapons that sort of threw off those shackles and then you know fell back into the traditional kind of like hive monarchical sort of arrangement and then sort of hell

grammat trying to fight against that like I don't know that was that's that shit felt pretty easy to to integrate I had because I had two as well and one of them was Ricketts and the other one was I'm trying to remember his name but it was like butt gumpins or something like that where he was like a dwarf who his family had the magic to like make fertilizer so that like things would grow

underground or like make enough light that they could farm underground damn he sounds cool yeah he was from like a long line of like poop magic yeah dude that sounds cool why did you do that one dude I don't know me I've pitched it sliding doors But we usually don't know.

We usually don't know. Would you say that's fair that we don't know? We talk about team makeup a lot, right? So that outside of this season, right? That it's not like, oh, we all made wizards to play or like we brought three Rangers to the party. Like we talk about like that a lot and stuff. But we don't usually share, you know, too deep into it until we get into it, especially if it's the kind of thing where they're just meeting for the first time.

Yeah. I remember going into Amnesty, because a lot of that is about like the connections of things and the characters. Like we had a session zero talking about like, how are the, how do these characters know each other? How do they know each other? That kind of thing. Yeah. So it varies. But this one, we talked about it a lot to make sure like that it felt equal, that they made sense in the world.

Yeah. I'll tell you how, why, how I picked my guy. I'll be honest with you. I'll tell you the truth about it. I really wanted to win. So you got a big strong guy. Now listen, I knew we're all going to be wizards, right? So like, if my wizard is also, I mean, you're seven feet tall, you can only be so weak.

So like, my wizard is also going to be a big, strong guy. I thought I could bully all the other wizards. You know what I mean? Because it's like, he's a wizard and also he's a big tough strong guy. Yeah. Yeah, it's like it seemed, I mean, it just seemed like a. very good strategy to be like also a big tough strong guy you know but there was something so pure and clean about you kind of like metagaming that way because then loravith was and and maybe this

was sort of like your your intent from the start like all about competitiveness of the goliaths are yeah that is like specific to them it's a big part of their culture this is like competitive nature uh because i was kind of like cruising through like races and classes and stuff that hadn't done before and that was one i was like when i was looking into it was like oh that like somebody who is competitive would probably make it a little easier to to role play that and not feel like awkward about trying to get a leg up on other people because like even though we joke about it it really doesn't it I mean if somebody's trying to do something it can't it feels bad to mess them up

everybody does want everybody's cool stuff to happen so it does like it felt a little unusual sometimes to be playing that like direct conflict or apathy maybe more specifically to not get wrapped up in people's stuff. I had an, like, there was a weird sensation that I kind of liked, but it wouldn't make sense every time, but like I kind of felt like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern through a lot of this season where it's like me and my boy are having kind of a different story over here. And the broader story is definitely like happening. I'm not necessarily, not everybody's going to be part of the like big overarching thing.

Right. And it just like, I kind of felt like a side story in a way that like, I don't know. It found, I don't know, I enjoyed playing it in that way. It took some of the pressure off having to be like the chosen ones. Yeah. The ones from legend. Which, speaking of which, let's talk about what would have happened if we had beefed it and why we didn't. Yeah.

A lot of people asked this. Emma sent this one in with the premise of the campaign being restricted to a finite number of characters in an isolated situation. did you think about what would you do if a player character perma died especially once it was narrowed down so that all remaining NPCs were known slash named characters did you have backups in mind were there contingencies or plot armor etc that that was a conversation that we had had and was fully an intention that we had um there were a few times where y'all got like pretty close like I was honestly, honest to God, tempted to, at the very first thing that happens, I think it's in the very first or maybe second episode is Hell Gramick gets absolutely butchered by these big nasty vines that I tried to lay out like, this shit will fuck you up and you went at it anyway and as happened so many times this season during an incredibly perilous thing, like you rolled like dog shit and got absolutely brutalized and I thought like, is this an opportunity to, you know, like, loss?

to like day one prison style, like, you know, make sure they know. But ultimately, like, I don't know, I thought that there was so much promise with Hell Grammett. And so that's why I sort of introduced these other characters. I didn't try to just make it not important. Like, that event left you a bit indebted to the spider and the spider and the spider and the spider. And sort of like then gave that to be like a vector of how you were introduced to those

characters. But we had talked about like you guys taking over the reins and then there was a certain point after a few trials where I think we had said every wizard's name that was currently surviving. I was going to take over Pranklin if I died. Yeah. Did you guys have your sights on anyone? I was going to and like you said, I was going to invoke the Arlo Thacker rule. Yeah. I was going to, I know it's not real. or challenging, but I thought about taking over Scorpus. Scorpo. You would have had to learn his name.

I did not think Scorpo was going to be as important of a kick. Scorpo was the result of a die roll. I rolled a dice to see who would be your guys fourth in the trial of transitation. It worked out so well. Evocation. A die roll, you say? In a D. Damn, Griffin.

That's great, sir. I did that with him, and there was another moment with Hasty Jane. Just happened to be like the result of rolling dice to see. what was the character, and then they became sort of important to the plot for? Was that when I spit in Hasty Jane's eye? I mean, it was before that, it was like to determine who you, like, ran into while you were going over there to do that trial, and it just so happened to be Hacy Jane. That was it. That was it. He broke his own foot to get the key.

Yeah, that's why he was so mad. Yeah, no, I mean, he went through, you went through a lot. I was prepared for, for Hill Grimmett to die in that first encounter. I really was. Clearly. I really did think it was going to happen. And then so I thought, well, okay, but I've done all this work in my own head of a backstory and, you know, what could it be? Then I thought, well, okay, shifting over to Scorpo would be.

And then I honestly, this is just make him an agent of chaos. I just, because Hell Graham had always had a secret game to play. And I thought that jumping over to Scorpo where he did not have a secret game to play, he just wanted to win much. Yeah. Much like Lorvith. I thought that would have brought that kind of a fun dynamic. That's one of the things we talked about on the train, if you remember, was it was going to kind of be freeing to just go for it and do whatever we could without forming alliances and all that other kind of stuff. Oh, yeah.

I was just thinking taking over Prangling because Griffin hadn't done a voice for him, so I wouldn't have to copy a voice. so it would be very easy to just pick that up. Yeah. Juice, why about you? Um, I mean, not that you ever considered Lorvith was going to die, but. No, I did it, but it did give the whole, you were talking dad about like you had,

you'd say this backstory and that, uh, you know, that's why you, like, fought to stay alive. It reminded me of, like, I think another part of this season is the threat of that happening. it sort of took the backstory thing, like it lessened it for me because in a sense, the backstory that you have is only meaningful

if you relay it in the podcast. Right. You know, it's not like with other media where like a backstory is going to inform every single part of your character. There's definitely like you, there's things you come up with,

but if you don't talk about it on the podcast, it doesn't matter. And I think that like having that looming threat did kind of force you to just play. to like just go ahead and start making choices pretty quickly. And I think that that served it, even though it didn't like happen that we actually. Yeah. To return to the question, there was, I think after the necromancy trial, we had reached a point.

I think we had started to have a conversation and realize we didn't necessarily have an answer for it. Of like, well, what happens now? If someone dies, there's like eight people left. If Laura, okay, here's all I will say. if Lora Vith had died and I had taken over Duber, we would have ended up with a much more traditional ending because I would have played him as the chosen hero,

Luke Skywalker, Link, all of them in one man. He would have been the guy. The destiny revealed. That's why Lorvith had to die. That's why his old dad had to die. It's like all led to this. I also, once we got down to eight people, I was like, oh, Rick's going to be a ghost, right?

Because his family has come back to a ghost. That was absolutely. Oh, okay. Yeah. He was going to have far less influence, but way more, like, be able to observe everything and move quickly. Yeah, I mean, we had ways to sort of, I also had a, a, I don't necessarily want to, like, expand on it because it's, like, one of the things that just kind of never came together. But, like, what happened? Where do you go when you die, right?

like death talked about something's wrong. People aren't like crossing over to the other side in this world. But it was like not really a thing that kind of came up because your guy's characters didn't die. I had it sort of in my back pocket, but never really came to fruition. I kind of thought that's what you were doing with the zombie magic. I thought, well, maybe he's got that in his back pocket. No, that was very much. And this, I mean, you guys clocked this especially Rick does like, that was bullshit.

Like, all of that was bullshit. Rictus's, like, constant sort of, like, disgust with what was happening was, uh, was, was, I, like, very, very insightful because, like, that is not what he had sort of discussed being what, what necromancy magic, like, looks like at the crossroads, like, where he is from. So, like, that was also sort of, like, a clue of, like, this is not actually, like, the highest level practitioner in the land doing the, like, this is a bullshit movie. magic version of what necromancy is.

Yeah. That is, you know, is incredibly suspect. And I think, I think Rick just picked up on that very well. That was not like a hint at when you die, you become zombies. Boz asked, what were your favorite spells you used in Royale? And I just want to say, unseen servant is O-P. Yeah, clutch. Like, I realized looking at the spell description that there's like four things listed that you can't do with it,

which means you can do anything else with it. Right. Right. And this idea of like, when I realized that I could have him hunch down behind someone and let me push them over him like a school yard bully, I was like, oh my God, unseen servant is the best. This is the best smell ever. Did you pull that maneuver off in the transmutation trial

on like the constantly descending stairwell? I remember trying it at one point. I can't remember if it worked or not. You tried to kill, you tried to kill Hippocrates at one point. And you guys kind of got past that, which I thought was cool. Yeah, because I saved him later. Maybe that's what it was. Yeah.

I found, and I had just gotten it too, right before that trial, Misty Step. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that is a cool, especially in something that's, you know, a race or something, you know, against time, that's quite a nifty spell. Yeah, I use that one in Boulder's game. Yeah, I was just thinking, I used that

fucking constantly. I was thinking the exact same thing. Bonus action? Forget about it. That's crazy. I kind of split my spells up into three categories in my head. There was like, big choice, which is fireball. There's little choice, which is color

spray, and there's go away, which is spider climb. So like for a narrative podcast, that's great. Because it's like if you need to do something, but not a huge thing you can't walk back from. Color spray is a hysterical spell, too. It is so disconcerting to think that you would be like in a conflict with somebody and they would just be like, dazzle. He's like, ah, I did not expect this in any way, shape, or form. I really like Thunderstep, too, because Thunderstep is the teleportation spell like Missy Step, except the exact opposite on the scale of self.

Right? It's like, yeah, you can teleport. and you're going to let everyone know you did it. Right. Let's wrap up here talking about sort of next, next sort of steps. Because usually at the end of these, we talk about, like, here's what we're doing next season. But we don't have a, we have a few things that we're kind of kicking around, but we don't have a next sort of big campaign thing that we are really all kind of like dialed in on at the moment. moment. We're going to put up some live shows for the next few episodes. If you're a Max Fund member,

you've already got access to these. And then, you know, after we take a sort of short break, we'll probably come back with a sort of a shorter, more lightweight kind of campaign, maybe not a D&D thing, but something more akin to our, you know, live show format, almost sort of one-shot style stories before we, just so we have time to kind of really percolate on what we want the next big thing to be. Now, Griffin, apparently a lot of people asked, so I did wanna get to this before we wrote up. Either C season two, is there a plan for it?

Are you working on it? What are your thoughts? I've got an idea for what an Aether C season two could be that I think, I mean, Amanda messaged us the other day, like she was the one who put this list of questions together. Thank you so much Amanda. And she said like, hey, a lot of people are writing in about doing more Ether C.

And I feel like this is not the first T-Taz where that has been true. I think I feel differently about EtherC than I do balance where, like, I don't want to go back to balance with EtherC. Like, I think I do think there's, like, a lot of interesting stuff that we could do in that world. And so, yeah, I hear you. I would love to go back to Ether C, and I think that there is an opportunity to do it. I just don't have the, I don't got the nugget. I don't got the nugget for it quite yet, quite figured out. So you're saying we will get wet again.

If you guys could see the gesture that dad did. Oh, no. What? It was very like, what's up, fellow kids? Yeah. It was like dad had snuck into an MTV, like, beach party spring break thing and was trying to pass himself off as one of the VJs. Mm-hmm.

It was horrible. I meant we're going to be underwater. You knew, you know exactly what you did and what you were doing. You know what it was. You know what you did, and you should feel bad about it. Thank you, Juce, for not jumping in on this attack on me. I lost the thread. I'm sorry.

Oh, okay. So we will let y'all know when we are going to be putting up, when we're going to start doing this next sort of shorter season as we get ready for the big thing. Taking a few episodes putting up, putting up live shows as we get all that stuff going. We would really, what we've really kind of talked about, and this is more inside baseball, is like trying to do, trying to like sit down and block out like a week where we can just like knock out a whole season of recordings

because it really, it really, the number of times this season that like one of us had a major life thing happen that completely kind of destroyed any semblance of normalcy in our broader lives, but also in our kind of like work schedule that just really, really made it, made it tricky to stay in the moment with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with,

with, with, with, with, with, with, I don't, I don't, I don't think any of us really want that to keep being true. Um, and ultimately, I think it is more than norm to do it in a sort of like batch style. So, um, we've got, we have lots of ideas and we have ideas that we are, uh, pretty excited about, but we, we, we just got to figure out, like, how, what that looks like, and what season would be sort of the best fit for it. Um, and we'll let y'all know. We'll let y'all know once we know. Yeah. And hey, great news if you're the sort of weirdo that would like this sort of thing.

We have a pupating is always a bonus action t-shirt available for a very limited time at macroymerch.com. If you were inspired by the finale of the show and you'd like to support it and you're a nasty dog, pick up the pupating is always a bonus action t-shirt. Now it's available through the end of September. timber and then it'll be retired for good. I think that's it. I had a really great time doing this season. I truly, truly did. I loved coming up with all of these wizards and I loved the stories that came out of it and

just the whole vibe. I loved the ending of you guys kind of turning on each other and turning on hellgrammit. Like in the last moment. Like I really, it was a tough season just sort of systematically, but I really liked how it turned out. I feel like this would make a good board game. Don't you think this could make a good board game? Like 64 wizards and everybody chooses which wizard

and then you throw Nerf balls or something. I don't know. I don't have all the rules. That's more of a LARP, but I do like it. Worked out. Yeah, I just would like to LARP, I think. God, wouldn't that be a great direction for this show to go? LARP?

I don't know how you listen to a LARP. It is an audio podcast, like, first and foremost. So, like, you would hear a lot of panting. Just panting. Oh, yeah, a train larp. a folly work too flump flump you know well no dad if we did it larping you wouldn't need to do the

fully it would the real it would just be your body but I'm saying if it required us to run ever then the whole show would just be like yeah yeah I am not no I'm too old for that yeah hey thank you so much for listening and that's gonna do it for us for this week's episode thanks for all the questions yeah thank you all

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And guys, thank you for all your great work. You're welcome. Griffin, do you want to give them the song? Hit him with the song. Hit him with the song. Yeah, I mean, hey. A huge, huge, huge, huge thanks to Louis Zong for letting us use Wizard Disco is the theme for this season. Honestly, was inspirational for what the, what the vibe of the season was going to be almost as much as anything else, almost as much as like, you know, watching Battle Royale movies and TV shows and stuff. that song beats us and I'm very grateful to Louie.

Louis song's an inspiration. I want to be as funny as Louis's song makes me seem in his cartoons. Yeah. That's my dream. That's what we all aspire to be. We all want to be as funny as we are in Louis cartoons. That's all. That's all it is.

Thank you so much for listening. Thanks y'all. Bye, y'all. Thanks, guys. Bye. So, Maximum Fun. A Worker-Oned network of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.