The Glass Cannon Podcast - Glass Cannon Radio #14 – Druid Builds, Oblivion Remastered, Fey Adventures

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Blood of the Wild's Mary Lou joins Joe and Jared to talk Druids! Everything from their real-world history to builds and party roles in Pathfinder and D&D 5E. Plus, reactions to the Oblivion Remaster, and some of the darkest and most mystical elements of a Fae (or Fey!) Adventure. 0:00 Intro 7:07 Mary Lou's Earth 17:36 Druid Builds 1:10:40 Nerd History 1:23:27 Oblivion Remaster 1:34:14 Fae or Fey? Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/UnLwMuOjohI Access exclusive podcasts, ad-free episodes, and livestreams with a 30-day free trial with code "GCN30" at jointhenaish.com. Join Troy Lavallee, Joe O'Brien, Skid Maher, Matthew Capodicasa, Sydney Amanuel, and Kate Stamas as they tour the country. Get your tickets today at https://hubs.li/Q03cn8wr0. For more podcasts and livestreams, visit https://hubs.li/Q03cmY380. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Nice. Now the offer? Lease a 2025 Escape Active all-wheel drive from 198 bi-weekly at 1.99% APR for 36 months with $27.55 down. Wow, that's like $99 a week. Yeah, it's a big deal. The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or Ford.55 down. Wow, that's like $99 a week. Yeah, it's a big deal. The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or Ford.ca today. You are listening to the Glass Cannon Network. This is Glass Cannon Radio with your hosts Jared Logan and Joe O'Brien.

Welcome buddy to Glass Cannon Radio where the circle of life is alive and well. We are celebrating Earth Day here on the Glass Cannon Radio today. I'm Jared Logan. This is Joe O'Brien. Joe, have you gotten out in nature recently? Have you experienced the Earth in any way? Yes. And I mean, today is a big turning point. Have you experienced the earth in any way? Yes. Yes.

And I mean, today is a big turning point. It feels like on the East Coast, it's April 23rd and it just, I think it's turning, dude. I think it's like today, this morning, I walked my kids to school and it felt like we have finally returned to what LA has all the time. So yeah, it was like 62 degrees, sun shining, just gorgeous. Yeah, perfect weather. And so yeah, I think this is absolutely a perfect time of year to celebrate Earth Day. Yes, I love getting out in nature when the spring calls. I love it. Yeah, that's lovely. LA is actually a nightmare climate. Um, it, uh, I always imagine it is paradise. It'll be like 50, which feels really cold to us.

And it'll be like 50 and gray. And then no matter what, from two to five, the scorching hot eye of God parts the myths and fries everybody like an egg. And then around five o'clock, it's like, okay, back to gray bullshit. And that's what's happening today. And then in the summer, it's just the scorching hot eye of God all the time. It just goes away. Yeah, so I've got family in Santa Clarita and that area up there, kind of like that high desert-ish area. And there were days, I remember when I would visit in the summer where I'd be like, I want to go out for a jog. And a mile in, I would just be like, I'm going to die. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It's a very different

sun out there. It's a very, very different sun out there. I'm trying to think of the last time I kind of went out in nature and did something natural. I guess I go on. My daughter's in Cub Scouts, so I've gone on little hikes with them. Yeah, that's a shame. You should do them. There's a lot of parks here.

LA has great hiking, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's got great shame. You should do it. There's a lot of parks here. LA has great hiking, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's mountains so close. And yeah, yeah. I just, I'm more of a, you know, indoor kid who's constantly playing role playing

games on my computer in my garage. Well, one of my favorite things in the world is hiking. It's one of my favorite hobbies. And so I'm very excited to talk about it today. And why don't you tell what we're going to do today? Because we're getting into all aspects of nature. Today is hiking, all hiking. All hiking. It's all trail analysis.

Yes, the Appalachian Trail, Griffith Park Observatory, the greatest hikes in history. No. Observatory, the greatest hikes in history. No, today in honor of Earth Day, we're going to be talking all things druid in a little bit. We're going to bring out Mary Lou who plays a druid on blood of the wild. Mary was going to talk to us about druids. Then we're going to get into druid builds for Pathfinder 2E and maybe you could throw in your D and D there if you want to. Pathfinder 2e and maybe you could throw in your D and D there if you want to. After that, I've prepared a lecture on the factual historical druidic tradition. Awesome. I'm so excited for that.

So excited. Then we're going to talk video games, a little bit of the new oblivion remaster. Big news in the video game world. Yes. Just released yesterday. And then we're going to close on our favorite Faye. We're going to talk about Faye. Oh, man. You know, the other worldly beings of Tiernanug.

It's going to be awesome and very obviously we have a wonderful guest coming on here in a minute with Mary Lou. And then it's going to be a caller heavy show. I just feel it. I feel it's going to be a caller heavy show because this is going to be fun to hear people's builds, build ideas. And then also when it comes to Faye, I think people are like super into all different kinds of Faye and I'd love to hear the callers take on that. So probably a lot of Akatar fans out there.

Perhaps, perhaps. How do they call into the show? A court of thorn and roses. It's a series of books where fey creatures have sex. Yikes. Uh oh. Sounds like a personal problem. So yeah, maybe there's Akitar fans out there.

Yeah, I'm super into all of this. Uh, and the druid history was really interesting. I can't wait to share that. I'm psyched to hear about that. But if you do want to call into the show, you just, uh, go to join the nation.com. You can find it access to our, uh, discord server through that. And, uh, you, that's how you have to become a member of the nation in order to do that. But you can get a free membership by using code GCN 30 at checkout.

You can get a free membership 30 day trial to try it out and you can literally jump onto the show today. We use the discord server to bring on callers and have them talk live and join us on the show and get involved in the conversation. So hop in, do that, check it out. And if you're listening to this after the fact, we do these on Wednesdays. Wednesdays live at noon Eastern, 9am Pacific. It is it's live on Twitch and on Discord. So you can come join in either one of those. You can hear the show there. You could watch the show on Twitch.

But either way, you can come and check us out live and become part of the show. We'd love to have you. And get on here and argue with us because I'm going to argue with you. Oh yeah. I don't know what we can argue about regarding druids, but I'd love it if someone was like, you got through it's all wrong. You idiot. I know we can argue about regarding Faye. So I'm excited for that part. Get ready. Okay. Hot takes from Joe. Hot takes on the Faye. I have hot takes on the Faye. All right. So first and foremost, I mean, could you have a better start to a show on Earth Day? If you're talking about druids, you're going to talk about animals, you're going to talk about in real life and in gaming.

I couldn't even imagine a better person to have join us for this. So first joining us in Discord, and then we're gonna bring them right up here to the show. Please welcome from Blood of the Wild and many other things on the Glass Cannon Network, the wonderful Mary Lou. Mary Lou! Hello!

Good morning! Good morning! Good morning! Hello! Good to have you here with us. Oh, this is wonderful. Joe, point of order, I think Earth Day was yesterday. I know, I'm sorry, it was yesterday.

We're celebrating it today. We're celebrating it today. It says it right on our screen here. It was April 22nd. And also at midnight, it's the new day. I just wanna like be a very pedantic about dates. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with being accurate.

Oh, nice, good. Something the Earth cares a lot about about dates. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it's nothing wrong Is dates I'm passionate about the Julian calendar I'm here for druids. I came dressed. Oh nice. That's a cool shirt Yeah, so the shirt. I'm jealous of that shirt. Hold on, do that again. Do that again. I wanna get a better angle on this in description.

All right, so for our audio listeners, it's like a tree man whose tree is kind of like a hammock, like laying in a tree hammock, and through that hammock you see a misty forest in the evening in the moon in the distance. A crescent moon. Crescent moon, but it's like a vertical crescent. It's crescent at the top, which you never see on Earth, right?

So, or rarely at least. That's very interesting. Well done, Mary. You only see that in Lands of Fantasy and Adventure. It does, it kind of looks like a portal. Because the tree is like a circle. That's amazing. Skid has joined us on Twitch chat and calls your shirt tree-mendous. Thank you, Skidlee.

You say Skid. Bottle cap. Listener cap for Skid today. Mary Lou, thank you so much for joining us. We're so excited to have you here. Before we get into the whole Druid thing, let's talk about nature. We bantered about it for a second. I said I love hiking. Jared said he's an inside cat. What are you generally, do you like getting out in nature? I know you're a cat owner. Tell us about your relationship with nature. So I actually do, I love nature.

I'm not like, I'm not a real like clean person. Like I, I don't mind getting in the dirt and in the sand and like playing with sticks and bugs and stuff. But I am incredibly lazy. The same relationship to nature as my children. Yeah, yeah. I really do. You just get muddy on the ground.

Yeah, I like when there's mud on the ground. It's kind on the ground. Yeah. I like when there's mud on the ground. It's kind of fun. Um, uh, but I'm very lazy and I don't own a ton of like camping gear. And so I don't, I don't get out there as much as I mayhaps could. Have you been camping? So I camped now, but for my LARP. I camped for my LARP. Oh, the LARP involves camping.

It does indeed. It's a little more glamping thanARP. LARP involves camping. It does indeed. It's a little more glamping than camping, but it's for sure camping. We're in tents and we're like cooking on stoves and stuff. We may talk more about LARPing next week. Next week. Hell yeah. So you have some relationship with the outdoors.

Oh yeah, just to let people know before we dive deeper into it, next week's gonna be a fun week. I will not be here next week. This is about 15th Glass Cannon Radio. It'll be the first one that I miss due to a recording conflict. So I have to record something else at that time. So I can't do Glass Cannon Radio, but Mary Lou is gonna guest host in my place.

So we're gonna have a Jared and Mary Lou run Glass Cannon Radio next week. I'm very excited. I think they'll definitely get into some LARPs, but outside of that- Joe's going to be busy putting down some tracks for his musical album. That's right. A cup of Joe. So we're getting ready to hear those songs. Joe, that's your experimental jazz.

My experimental jazz album, that's right. That's right. And we're really proud of you for pursuing this sort of solo side project. How's it going learning the saxophone? I love you guys. Because I knew you were worried about that. for pursuing this sort of solo side project. How's it going learning the saxophone? I love you guys. Because I knew you were worried about that. It has been going better than expected,

better than expected. Oh, I'm so glad. Yeah, really hitting those high notes better than I expected. So get ready for my solo saxophone jazz album coming out soon. We're really excited. We don't have a release date yet. We're really excited. We don't have a release date. We're really excited.

Joe is always mentioning how much he loves jazz and the rest of us kind of, we kind of wait for him to walk away and then we kind of roll our eyes at each other, but you're committing and I appreciate that. You love jazz. I'm committing to this bit. Yes, you are. I'm committing to this bit. It's still going.

Jared, what is among all, I know you don't do it a lot, but what is, what stands out to you as like the most awe-inspiring or interesting or, I don't know, most powerful moment you've experienced in nature or one of them, whether it's seeing a beautiful sight or being, you know, seeing an eclipse, right? Like, is there anything that stands out to you? Yeah. When I was in Hawaii, we went snorkeling. It was my first time ever doing that. They took us way out into the ocean and we jumped off a boat and we looked down

in the water and I couldn't believe that I saw thousands and thousands of colorful fish just kind of living down there, swimming around my ankles, all different types, like this beautiful rainbow of fish, and I laughed my ass off because I don't know, that's how I was experiencing joy that day, and my wife was a little worried about me, but that's how delighted I was to see that. It's pretty, uh, it's pretty miraculous, I would say in a way when you don't, like you never see it. It's always under that water, right? So you just see water. That's all you see ever. And the first time that you go to a tropical place like that and put that mask under. And it's like an alien world, like an entire world you never knew existed. And it's so vibrant and there's so much life and so colorful.

So yeah, that's a really good one. What about you, Mary Lou? Is there a moment that stands out or a place? Yeah. I live in California, but I was born and raised in Southern California. One time, I did a road trip through the Avenue of the Giants, which is like Redwood country. Oh, like Northern California? Yeah, Northern California. I was coming down from Seattle or Portland or something on a road trip, and we decided to go through the Avenue of the Giants, which is just this road that takes you through a bunch of big trees. And you think you get it, right? You're like, yeah, a big tree. Okay, that'll be fun.

And then you see exactly how big the trees are. Yeah. They're big. Yes. They're big. Yes. They're like skyscrapers. They're so big and they're so like... In order to be that big, they have to be so wide. They've got to be big, yeah. To be that tall, they've got to be that wide.

It is, and then some of them fall over and you see their like root system lifted up and it's like a whole, like a house. And it is, and there are just hundreds of them. Right. If one comes to the point where it falls over and doesn't manage to break or splinter and just falls over it'll create like a 15 to 20 foot hole in the earth. Like a dangerous hole that you could fall into. So yeah, it's amazing how large and embedded in the earth they are. That's a good one.

A dangerous hole. If you guys walk away with one thing today from the show, think of the phrase, a dangerous hole. Dangerous hole. Well, I'll do one real quick because mine, I've done a ton of hikes in a ton of different places and there's so many beautiful ones I could mention, but one that always stands out to me and it's not far from where you were in the Redwoods, Mary Lou, just keep going up into the PNW.

And for me, it was the time that I hiked Mount St. Helens. So I was, so I didn't actually hike the mountain. So I was like right near there. It's a Mount St. Helens hike, but it's not on the actual mountain. I was with Nick Lowe and our buddy, Land Keith, who people know from an episode of Mary a long time ago. But this is like 15 years ago,

we did this trip with some more friends and we did this hike. And you set out from the visitor center at Mount St. Helens. And I remember being like, not interested. Like we had, as a group, done an itinerary and I was just like, Mount St. Helens is so front door. It's like the most touristy place you can imagine.

Like, let's just go to, you know, Mount Hood or something like that. We'll go to Rainier, whatever. I was like, Mount St. Helens was the lowest on my list. Well, we do this hike and basically you walk along the edge of a, another sort of mountain, just not as big as Mount St. Helens and you come around until you're looking at this unbelievable view directly into the maw of like where it blew and collapsed and fell and everything.

And you're far enough away that you can see the whole thing, but it takes up almost all of your vision and you can see all the land around it and how blasted it is and is just now 25 at that time, 25, 30 years later, starting to grow back. Like, I feel like if I ever went to that crater, I would throw in my wedding ring. Okay. How would your wife feel about that? It's like Mount Doom. Yeah. My wedding ring kind of looks a little like the one ring.

Which to the fires of Mount Doom. Yeah. You know, my wedding ring is actually, it was custom made by a friend of mine and is modeled off of the one ring It's very from the film. It's a little thinner, but it's exactly cut like the one ring. It doesn't have any Mary Lou Where's your wedding ring? Unmarried woman

Do that according to my religion Mother I'm not allowed to do that according to my religion. Too late, too late. Mother, I'm sorry. You already did. Mother. Anyway. Straight to hell. The power of nature on display there, it was really, it was one of the coolest places I've ever been.

That's crazy. Let's talk. Let's talk druids. Let's talk druids, Mary Lou. So you start playing Pathfinder 2Eaf with us in Blood of the Wild for the first time and you elect to be a druid. Your first character in Pathfinder second edition.

Talk to us about why. Why druid and why did you go down that path? Well, to be honest, it was because I had an idea for a character and it was exactly what Raga is, a feral child raised by polar bears. So you had this idea before you looked at the book, before you looked at druid builds. Okay, great. Yeah. Yeah. When we talked about this sort of vibe place, that was the idea that came to me. I've talked about this on other shows, but nothing makes me more creative than limits. I love being told, you have to play this class or this is a thing about you.

I love being, in improv they're called gifts. And to me, I love gifts. But sometimes I get an idea in my head and I just like can't get rid of it. And this is one time that I like got this real idea deeply lodged in there and was like, Jared, we gotta make it happen. And so the classes that we thought about

were based on other parts of the character. It was obvious it was either Druid or Witch, if you remember that. Yeah. Yep. And then we talked about it more and Witch seemed super cool. I'm still into the Witch. Oh, I'm sure we'll see a Mary Lou Witch one day. I'm sure we will.

I hope so. Oh, I'm sure we'll see a Mary Lou witch one day. I'm sure we will. Oh, I hope so. Oh, I did, I actually did play a witch in the Pathfinder, when we did like a Pathfinder tutorial when I played Charlotte Anne. And you were the so loyal. Right, Charlotte Anne. The right, yeah, something it was the right of something. Was that, did that air?

Or was that behind the scenes? That would be- No, that aired. Okay, I don't even remember what that was. But it was like a long, light shot. But I remember the character Charlotte Anne. Troy ran it, yeah. It was a stream, yeah, it was a stream.

And so I, speaking of witches- Joe has no memory of this. They all just- You were in it, Joe. They all run together. Joe, you were there. Who did I play, Nesh? Who did I play in? You were the son of a lawyer.

You said a lot of pretty offensive stuff that day. Oh, oh, I was- Remember, you were a sort of power of character. Yes, I was Dr. Llewellyn Pierce, who- Yeah. And as soon as I said his name, Troy and Matthew were like, did you say Dr. Pierce? And then they just called me Dr. Pierce the whole game. Now I remember.

Indeed, exactly. Yeah, it was awesome. Oh, charming, charming me Dr. Piss the whole game. Now I remember. Exactly. Yeah, it was awesome. Charming. That was super fun. And so I finally let my, I got to play a witch then, but I would, I mean, Charlotte Anne is perfect and I would bring her back 10,000 times. But it became pretty obvious pretty quickly that it, she just had to be a druid just based on the character and based on like what made sense and then I could have like an

animal companion that's a polar bear like my baby brother like it was just it was obvious and so really I came to druid not for the class but for the flavor like how it fit my character but I've come to really love the Druid as a class in any game because it's a Jack of all trades, right? It's a magic caster, but it can also be melee combat, but it can also be a healer. It can be ranged damage. It can be melee damage. It can do ranged.

They're good scouts. They're usually good scouts because they usually get those animal forms. They can be good trackers. They can be good. They're very perceptive, which is- They can be very stealthy. So things are so versatile. Would you say they're not awesome at any one thing, but they're good at a lot of things?

Or I mean, I don't think that. I'm just asking the question. I would ask the chat to correct me, right? Fight me, bitch. Um, we let Jared, I, Jared and I are on the same page that we love when people are like, you're wrong. Um, cause we like that. It's fun.

Um, but yeah, I actually would say that at least I felt it the way that I played a druid. Um, I, I do remember I didn't max out her spellcasting modifier at the beginning because I had a couple feats that I just really wanted and couldn't get all maxed out wisdom at character creation, which made me plus one behind what I possibly could be if I was totally min-maxed. There were a couple levels that I really felt like I couldn't hit or I couldn't do much. Then there was Olag doing 30 points of damage and AWOL hitting and Yelka doing her thing.

I just could not hit. Um, but I think the benefits outweigh that, right? Um, of just like being able to do so many different things. I do think I've been like super helpful to the party, to the tip of the spear. Yeah. But, but yeah, I don't think- Yeah, but what's interesting is like, you've been helpful in several combats in several different ways without ever being like Olog damage, right? But you also have been the number one diplomacy character, like the face.

Now that, that helps that this happens to be set in a very wild campaign. Like it's the campaign is in a very wild landscape with people that speak lots of animals and also just straight up animals, right? Animals. Yeah. And that has been a really, really awesome part of your character that that I really love as well. And yeah, so the value is absolutely there. My question is, so what about this? And this is for both of you, just to kind of talk it out and we're going to take some callers here in a second. We'd love you guys to weigh in. Are druids a jack of all trades and masters of none in the sense and not, let me just say that neither one of

those is better than the other. It's not better to be a master at something and a jack of all trades is less than. That's not the case. But I'm curious if druids are the best class at any one thing. I can't think of what that is. Please call in and let us know if there is one thing that they are better at than anyone else. Pardon me for in terms of party roles. Or is that just the way that I'm playing it and like you could play it in a different way? You know, if we were in different builds. That's getting to my question, which is it seems like you can play them so many ways.

But is that is that that sort of variety available while you're in game at fifth level? Or is that variety really more available before you begin the character? And you can fit any role, but then once you start building that, you're kind of in that role. You know what I mean?

Now, I think that you could always do a little bit, you could always do a little healing and a little powerful offensive spellcasting. That sort of flexibility is out there. But if you're kind of spec'd to be a healer, can you still do offensive spellcasting? Call in, let us know what you think. Mary Lou, what do you think now being you're now seven levels in to this druid, do you feel, and we'll talk about your build in a second, but do you feel that you have a lot

of different ways to contribute or do you feel like your party role is pretty set? I think my party role is set in that I'm a swing. You're a utility player, we would say in baseball. Like you can play a bunch of different positions when needed. Absolutely. I'm not the designated hitter, right? I feel like that's, that's feel like that was our damage caster, which was—or not damage caster, damage dealer, which was Olog, now Harrod.

I'm not exactly a healer, but I can, right? Yeah, I think I'm a real good utility player, and because I'm a prepared caster, if I put in the work, I can really prepare myself to be especially good for different situations if I know what situation is coming up, right? Sure, which is always a tough part. But you then also have the ability to turn into a small pest, a cat or a rodent or something like that, and explore, investigate, do recon better than maybe even a highly spec'd rogue, because you could slip into areas others might not be able to. And even you can remember to prepare true name.

Hey, I don't want to talk about that. Now he's going to bring up table drama. That's when I learned to lie. If you know, you know, Blood of the Wild fans. If you know, you know. That's when I learned a really valuable lesson, which is just lie. Yeah, I think my role is set in that I'm flexible and like we can put me where we need me. I'm never going to do the most damage, but I'm going to be, I can maybe do damage that takes advantage of weaknesses. And you can also, and this is no small thing, at any time, you can make your animal companion a flanking partner for another melee character,

which is huge. Oh yeah, that's huge. And not to mention the fact that on occasion, your animal companion can do some serious damage. Now, the roles don't have to go your way, but. I was thinking, you know, the druid if takes an animal companion, such a good class for pathfinder because you know what to do with your actions. You're not wasting actions.

You're, you're not taking that negative five attack. You're using two, two actions for the spell and then sending Baba to attack something. You know, in fact, you are in a way a little, you can be a little action starved. But as you level up and you get mature animal companion, that's awesome. You almost, you almost get four actions a wrap, which is crazy. You know, compared to some other classes and you can, um, if you add onto that, that around that time, you're also have access to perhaps another spellcaster in your party. If you, if your party's built like that, might have haste. If you get hasted and get an extra stride or strike that you can use, you could

command, move, and cast a two-action spell. And then your animal companion gets two actions. So that's just amazing. It's huge. I mean, that's butter. That's just butter. Yeah, that's butter, baby. Oh, that's butter on the grill right there. That's peanut butter on the grill, baby. Peanut butter on the grill. Why are you putting peanut butter all over my grill? Crunchy peanut butter on the grill. That is gonna be an itch to clean.

Let's, sorry. He can do damage, but he can also soak up damage too, right? Right, exactly. Like he is a target. Even a target is so huge. It's gonna be so sad when he dies. It's gonna be so sad when he dies. It's gonna be really sad when the, when Baba dies. That's gonna be awesome.

That one is. Don't even say that. Don't even say that I will come to your house. I know where you live. That is kind of a scary thing because I'm not a hundred percent sure and I don't really wanna know where we cap out on a blood of the wild.

But in doing some of my druid research, word on the street appears to be that there's some, that the animal companions can get into some danger in double digit levels, that they can be kind of crushed by enemies at those levels. And so- Did they get death saves? Do animal companions get like dying one to four? Or do they just die? I don't know off the top of my head. I think they do, but chat. I mean, by the book, the GM can give dying one or two

to literally anyone they want. So they can give that to any enemy. Even though it says default is enemies don't get that, a GM it says can do that whenever they want. So I would think you can absolutely give. My house rule, is that at zero hit points, an animal companion dies. So that's going to be tough when that happens. That's your house rule? Well, what happens to the house rule when I burn down your house? My family has no place to live.

Yeah. Yeah. So I would consider that as a potential consequence. All right. We'll do death saves for the animal companion then. Thank you. You're a class act. Hopefully it never comes to that. I really hope it never comes to that. I would lose it. Oh, that one. That's tough. That would be tough. All right. Let's take it. By the way, you're also talking to a person here who has lost multiple animal companions.

And we'll talk about my druid in a second, which was my longest running character before we started the Glass Cannon Network. Love druids. Let's take a caller. Let's bring up singing zombies. Singing zombies, what did you wanna add in on the druid conversation?

Yeah, can you guys hear me? Yeah, sound great. Yeah me? Yeah, yeah. So my understanding is that druids have always kind of had the fantasy of being a jack of all trades and people love the fantasy of animal shaping into an animal, being friends with animals, casting with the power of nature, and the systems of D&D and Pathfinder, like first edition, I've always been in great danger of like making them too good at all of them at the same time. So historically, they've been kind of full caster can wild shape into a fighter can bring another fighter and they've been very, very good. Second edition Pathfinder is honestly one of the first systems where it said, okay, you can do these things, but focus. Not at the same time. Yeah.

Pick what you want to be good at. They're a full caster no matter what though. So that's kind of their baseline power as they get the same progression. Their fireballs are just as good as a wizard's fireballs. There's no difference. Yeah. That part. You know, I was just playing 5e with my friend who played a druid in 5e and at very early

levels he was able to just turn into a spider and then he just walked as a spider through playing five V with my friend who played a druid in five V and at very early levels, he was able to just turn into a spider and then he just walked as a spider through my whole dungeon and found out what was in every room. And I was like looking it up like there's no way you can do this. And then he could, it's five V five V makes characters so powerful. Sometimes I'd say I can't say that with authority, but talking tier lists and how good Druid is, I've been told in 5e Druids are also probably S tier. Very, very good.

Top, top, top shelf. Best class. Yes, so their class is always dangerously too good because the fantasy allures, they can do all the things. So then at that point, second edition is one of the few systems I first saw that tried to rein in the fact that they shouldn't be good at. So then at that point, second edition is one of the few systems I first saw that tried to rein in the fact that they shouldn't be good at all of them at the same time.

And if you take the animal companion feats and focus on the animal companion, the animal canyons first attack is always going to be better than everyone else's second attack. And then they are a bag of hit points, they provide flanking, they give you like battlefield presence and that is so innately powerful. And then they are a bag of hit points. They provide flanking. They give you like battlefield presence. And that is so innately powerful. Animal companions have always been one of the most difficult things to balance well in any system because they just, they give you a second character unit. And then, uh, Tui as well, you can focus on the wild shaping feats.

There's an entire feat line for around wild shaping. When I was looking at people's arbitrary ranking of druid builds or whatever, a lot of people were coming in at wild shaped druid being the most powerful druid. Yeah. That one's right to me because you can't cast spells while wild shape. That is one of the things where I think in second edition trying to brain back the druid is actually really tough to utilize the full but but but you could also build a druid that most of the spells they focus on casting out of combat.

They have the ability to prepare any common spell from the primal list. They are so flexible. Like, for example, to try not to spoil, but like you could get into a situation where your party could be saved by cleanse affliction and no one thought to take this spell. No one thought to buy any scrolls of this spell. But if it comes up, the Druid can just be like, oh, you know what, I'm going to prepare that tomorrow

before someone gets really, really, really sick. Yeah, hopefully it never comes up. Hopefully it never comes up. To respond to that really fast. Thank you singing good start to the show. Thanks for calling in. That was great. Yeah, that was awesome, Singing Zombies. I think bringing up the point of you can prepare any common spell on the Primal List, that is both a strength and a weakness in a meta way, because at least it was for me because I was so overwhelmed Yeah, the sheer you said you thrive on limitations you thrive the gift of limited choices

Having the whole primal list which by the way is Considered by some to be the best spellists if you know, they're all they're all great to be the best spellists. If you know, they're all great, but like Primal seems to have the most utility in the most different areas from healing, you know, cleansing, damaging, divination type stuff, illusory and what do you call it? And then wild shaping,

which has so many applications in and of itself. The Primal spell list is just so freaking cool. It's insane. It's sounding like Druid is the best class. Surely there are classes that are better, right? Well, this is what I want to hear from a caller. We're going to keep bringing people up. I want people to tell me if there is one thing, party

role-wise, that Druid does better than any other class, because I don't think there is. I don't think so. Yeah, yeah. I don't think so. So I'm curious because if you find me that, then maybe I will say druid is by far the best class, but I don't know that for 100%. Let's bring up Fisco. Fisco's here, friend of the show, Fisco. If you see the notification there, come on up.

Hello, can you hear me? Hey, I can. How you doing? What's up? Oh my my goodness I'm so excited hi guys. Hi so excited to have you. I have to say Druid is the best at everything because they're best at everything but Druids are the best at battlefield control hands down. Okay battlefield control area. Through spells or you mean through their animal companion? How so? Both.

So if you have an animal companion and you have, let me find the name of my favorite spell, Scatter Scree, which is one of the best spells. It's just a cantrip so you can do it constantly. I can sit in the back, half my spells are heal spells, the other half are buff and battlefield control. I send in my animal companion and I just sit back and like, total my fingers and wait for people to do stupid shit. And then I put them in a corner.

They can't get out of any kind of flanking. They can't, and then they, they get debuffed constantly. So like I don't do any damage whatsoever, but everyone else does two or three times the amount of damage they would have done otherwise, especially with a rogue. So it sounds like Fisco limits, you limit yourself. You say, I'm going to take buffs and debuffs and heals for my spells. I'm not going to worry about doing direct damage spells, right? Yeah, that's not my job.

Yeah, interesting. And so, so the argument here, I think in terms of party roles is that the Druid is the best support class. Like nobody can match their support, which is a role in and of itself and is very important. That is very interesting. Yeah. If you issue, and I think that a lot of players struggle with that. A lot of players are, they, now look, if you just want to do damage, that's the game you want to play. That's great. You know, build your whatever class, a lot of different ways to get to damage, including through druids. But if you see, if you have a player in your group that is willing to truly be

that support, because you'll see people will be like, Oh yeah, I'll be a buffer. I'll be a debuffer. That sounds cool. And then they get several sessions in and they're like, you know what? I really do want to deal damage. Like I want that thrill of killing something myself. Um, that can be tough to, to balance, but if you have somebody that is fine without that, like it sounds like you are, man, that really buffs the whole party in a huge way.

It does. I think it helps if you like math, because you can sit while everybody else is playing and figure out exactly how much damage you've done because you've provided that opportunity. Like this person can't step out because scatterscrew is there. These people can't see because everybody in the party has dark vision and I threw darkness on the entire... We wiped almost a mini boss because I threw darkness in the room and all of our characters had dark vision and we just went in and really made squid mad because he wanted to injure us

at all. Like I don't think one of us got hit because of it. It was so fun. Cool. So I can have three to six turns in my turn like actions because I have my animal companion and I have a familiar. Oh, what kind of animal is your animal companion? What kind of animal is it? A badger, and she is the best. A badger, hell yeah. Yeah, she's gigantic now. I'm a kobold so I can ride on her.

If I wanna stealth, the badger will stealth. Kobold riding a badger yeah that's awesome mushroom pies to everybody poor one out for my badger that I had as a druid Ben Doreen you had a badger to Ben Doreen the Wolverine, unfortunately, bit it in a campaign. Yep, that was a tough one. Tough one. Loved that. Loved that maniac. Yeah, I love how Badger's just, at least in one day, they had that trait where it's like, it's literally like Wolverine, like the Marvel character. When they get hit, they obsessively attack the target until it's dead or they're dead and they will not do anything else. It was so fun. That's awesome. And their stats all go up. They get rage, the benefits of rage.

It was really fun. Anyway, Fisco, thank you for the call. Thanks, Fisco. I still really want to make a druid or like someone with a hawk. Like I'm really obsessed with this idea. Someday I want to have a character with like a hawk that attacks. Well, I was researching for this episode, Jared. I came across this guide called the Magnificent Menagerie by Ritun. R-I-T-U-N-N. They are Shadow Decord on Discord. They created a really in depth.

I mean, this thing is long dude, just on familiars, a really long guide on familiars and I was like, Oh, this looks super interesting. It's so detailed and really, uh, explains kind of all the value they can have. If they're built in certain ways. Uh, so yeah, I'm going to, we'll get to more colors in a second. I want to hear if people, if anybody has went down that Leshy familiar route. So there's a build for it that uses a Leshy familiar. I haven't seen anybody do this yet. At least I think somebody did in one of our Gen Con games, but not you know in the

main games that we play. And I hear that can be very powerful. So I'm curious about that. Let's bring Sweet Threat up here to join us. Sweet Threat, you want to join the convo on Druids? Are you there? Hey guys. Hey, how are you? What's up? Hey there.

Last time I called in, I was heading out the door going to dinner. So I had way better time today. Oh, really? Oh good. Where are you calling from? I'm glad you don't have to leave. I'm glad we're not interrupting your schedule. No, I was just really, but you know what?

I have something to get to in 10 minutes. So I hope before we keep this short, you won't be offended. Jared, if, if you have to go, it's completely understandable. Okay. I just want, I also wanted to point out something, Mary Lou, for your Druid Belt. Is that you were one behind in wisdom because you were a feral child, which is one of the rare backgrounds that don't allow for a caster stat boost. Yeah, but I really wanted to take Feral Child. And so I know Joe told me, he was like,

this is the consequence of taking this background. And I, you know, I'd never played Pathfinder before, so I don't know if it was a totally informed choice, but I did totally make that choice on purpose. And I don't think I regret it, but you're right. Absolutely. You're right. It's a huge part of the character.

I think that, yeah, absolutely. And I understand every single, I can, it's completely apparent why you make all the build decisions you make with Raga. But it's also indicative of one of the weaknesses of Pathfinders 2D as a system, I think, which is that for people who have an understanding of the fiction or

the fantasy already, Pathfinder 2e is a system where it gets so wacky sometimes, like with spells like Ancient Dust or No True Name or all these other things that get so specific or niche. People who already have played a Druid or another spellcaster or something else in D&D 5e, for example, can get lost in the souls really fast because they out of nowhere have so many choices and you go, oh, I don't just want to be another Druid like I could be in 5e. I want to be something weird. And then you get into these weird cases where suddenly you have only cold damage or

You you have to fight with Jared over no true name or something. Yeah These like random spells Are like so good if they're picked very intentionally not because oh I really wanted to use timber as my primary cantrip because belling trees on people is really funny but if that gets into a niche you just end up being like hamstrung by decisions because you pick such niche options also one of the best spells on the primary on the Primal spell list. Mud Pit. Mud Pit. I'm taking notes, y'all. Mud Pit. Mud Pit obliterated an over extreme encounter in one of my campaigns,

where the party at level two was up against an over 200 XP encounter, and they obliterated them because they stuck a primary group of melee fighters in a 30 foot area of difficult terrain and just got several rounds of free attacks on them. Sweet Threat, why were you putting a level two party against an over extreme encounter? That's unfair! You can't! It's not allowed!

I won't allow it! encounter that's unfair Jared love Jared doesn't believe in encounter levels that's what he says I do in Pathfinder now you know when I ran years of 5e you kind of had to go You had to swing wild with encounter levels because D&D characters are so invincible and Pathfinder I think I found out at one point like the the Challenge rating or whatever is real. So It's real. It's a little bit more finely tuned. I think balance and like finely tuned are weird descriptors for Pathfinder 2.

I think the thing is it's more exact. I really like the exact descriptor. A Bearded Devil, for example, will be a really, really fucked up boss encounter for a level where it's a potty level plus two or three. But they can become mooks at level minus three or something, whereas other creatures can be like difficult boss encounters, but still entirely manageable at that same like challenge to the party. But some creatures have these hidden damage amplifiers that you just don't see if you're just going off a like primary like, oh, I have to, I have to like cook

in the kitchen to make something up like you have in fighty. But, but there's some things they're hitting them there. But yeah, it's Yeah, I just remember the blood of the wild party getting trampled, almost getting trampled to death by a hadrosaur because they weren't quite at the level that they needed to be to take on that hadrosaur. Yeah, that was scary. Thanks for the call.

That was a... That was a... I missed... I missed... We didn't recruit the hadrosaur to the party or to the following and that one hurt. That one hurt. I think that was my first thing that I tried to recruit and failed. And that happened.

I didn't know about Mudpit. This is dope. It's pretty crazy. I took Mudpit during just a little behind the scenes. These already came out, but During the chase, when we were sent out an advanced party to ambush the Burning Mammoth, and then they ended up ambushing us back. I went through and I took a lot of area crowd control spells because we were anticipating them being a lot more numerous than us.

I took Mud Pit. I never ended up using it, but yeah. It's pretty wild for three actions to create a 30 foot in diameter circle of difficult terrain. That's just amazing. Another great spell to take like Mud Pit is Dangerous Hole. Dangerous Hole. I'm just going to re-flavor Mudpit is Dangerous Hole. Dangerous Hole.

I'm just gonna re-flavor Mudpit as Dangerous Hole. As mentioned earlier in the show. Both of those are on the Things I Call My Anus spell list. Mudpit, that is so gross, dude. Yeah, it's disgusting. I hate it. I will never be taking that spell now, thank you. And now I've done it.

I've stopped you from destroying my encounters. Also, Ant Hill, I think it's called. I think it's called Ant Hill, but it's a huge area of difficult terrain that's constantly pulling you towards the center. Oh my God. It's like, Cool. Yeah, something, or Sand Pit, or something.

It's Ant, I think it's something Ant Hill. It's funny. Ant, I think it's something ant hell. Um, it's funny. You know, I would also say Druid is the perfect class for the AP we're playing. Because the AP we're playing is all about recruiting these animals, you know, to the following and- I think I got very lucky there. No, no. I think that you, I think we talked about setting.

You were, you, you knew what to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I knew it fit in this setting I don't think I knew about like how many animals we'd be recruiting and how just how useful it would be to talk to animals Like it's always useful talking to animals. That's another thing Is that like talking to animals is just so OP because animals can be like yeah I went that way or unless they're you don't want me want me to kill you? Yeah, if they're a crow, exactly. If they're a crow, it's less useful.

And unless your genus is Troy, I mean, in which case, like he's, you know, tends to be pretty opposed to animals being able to communicate with you. You know, it's, I think him and Jared are similar in that respect, but. Okay, but rules is written. Hey, I let animals communicate with you. You do.

Yes, exactly, but we had to fight you for that. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was, it was tough. It is a tricky. I just don't want the game to turn into a Disney movie where you're like, this is my faithful pig Pua. Is it, is it okay in your fantasy game to talk to and get information from animals as a druid, is it also in the same

exact way, okay, to get the same sort of connection and information from plants or fungus, which is one of the builds. It's one of the druid builds. It's like you take a feed at early levels that allows you to talk to plants and communicate with fungus. Jared, your thoughts. I mean, if someone's whole thing was communicating with fungus, I don't know how I could deny that. Pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, that was one of the ones that I saw in terms of the builds.

Also in terms of builds, there is, I think a very popular build is the Storm Druid, which was my oney druid, was a Storm Druid. So controlling weather, obscuring mist, lightning bolt, whatever that kind of stuff. Super fun. And it looks like there is, you know, a build of that in 2E that is very well liked. 100%. Yeah, all of their spells look so cool. I never want to overlap too much with Yelka because she's a storm Oracle. Yeah she's a storm a tempest Oracle. Tempest Oracle and that just would be boring if we were doing the same thing but yeah super powerful spells and cantrips and for that subclass. spells and cantrips and for that subclass. Did you ever as a, all right, so when we look at the actual,

when we look at the actual build here, we look at your druidic order. What is your druidic order? Is it untamed? Animal. Animal order is my first one, but then I also took in a later feat, you can like spec into another one.

That's right. And I spec into untamed order. Okay. That's what I was, uh, it's a second level feat called order explorer. It says you have learned the secrets of another druidic order. Um, this is something I'm curious to get into in our next segment in a, in a minute here, Jared, about druidic history, because no other class has that, in my opinion.

Like the- Just multiple subclasses? Well, no, they do. Because you can take Order Explorer as many times as you can. Correct. And that was Sydney's druid build in Strange Aeons, is she just kept taking different orders, because she was like, I want to do all of these. They're all so cool.

Right. So the, as one of our callers said, that's the siren song of Druid. If you're not careful, you get to, you get to, uh, and Sydney started to get frustrated with that and she started seeing how low power she was in those different things at higher levels. So she sort of decided to start retraining some stuff. So that was fun. But what's it called? What was I going to say? Oh, I'm saying no other order, no other, I say order, no other class seems to have this inherent secrecy and like other, it's almost like an ancestry in a way.

Like it's an ancestry and a class in a way, right? Druids are so, they're secretive, they have their own language. They have their own, and even the way they describe orders in the 2E player core, it's as if they are secrets. They're secret orders that have learned these abilities and they only share them with certain people. I remember in 1E, you would be punished if you ever taught the druidic language to a non-druid, right?

That's anathema still in 2E. Interesting. Well, my historical lecture will have something about that. Yeah, I want to hear about that in a second. Let's take another caller here. Let's see what cosplay has to say. Cosplay, join us here and weigh in on druids. Hey, can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. How are you doing? Yes. Good. How are you? Cosplay, join us here and weigh in on Druids. Hey, can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. How you doing? Good, how are you?

We're doing great. Thanks for calling in. Thanks for having me calling in from South Jersey, just outside of Philly, not to brag. Nice, go birds. Very cool. All right, what do you got? So I'm playing in a five-e which I know I'm trying to convince, but

how dare you bring it up. Thanks for calling us play. Enjoy the rest. I think we're all done here. Now I brought up five earlier. Let's talk five. Yeah, I'm playing a circle of stars druid, which I think brings a really unique like change to the druid. It's very different. I agree.

So instead of turning into animals, you can turn into constellations. How's that work? Well, you don't literally turn into a series of stars in the sky, Joe. It's like, if a constellation is the archer, then suddenly you become badass at being an archer. That took me a second.

I literally was picturing you turning into different balls of light in a dungeon carter and I was like, what are, what does this do for you? What are the constellations Carter? Uh, so you can choose between three. There's the chalice, the archer and the dragon and each one gives. Different abilities, obviously. So you're not turning into an animal as much like you can still do that but the constellations allow you to get different

abilities like while you're in game so the archer gives you basically free bonus attack free just bonus where you just fire your spectral bow and then uh dragon allows you to concentrate more like you get a bonus to concentration. So if you're in the front lines doing damage, you're like getting attacked, you're more hearty, I guess. And then the Chalice gives you bonuses to healing. So to your point, Joe, I don't think Master of None, I think that fits. Jack of all trades, Master of None, but it allows you to focus a little bit more into one of those at will basically like oh we need more healing

Okay, I'm gonna take on my chalice form. I don't be a healer. We're doing okay I can take a damage and I'll just do more damage and you can allow Decisions live in combat not like during daily preparations or anything. No that is is, it takes the place of your wild shape. So instead of wild shaping into a bear, I'm going to wild shape into the archer. Different party roles. So you get, you get like a limited amount of changes, but you can change.

Yeah, and at higher levels, you can change between the two. Usually you kind of have to like spend the action economy to switch and that kind of limits you a little bit more, but it brings like a totally different flavor, my opinion to the druid instead of like, oh, I'm a vegan like Matthew would say. Instead I'm going to be a badass fighter or instead I'm going to, I'll take on the healer role this time. Yeah.

Well that flexibility live in play is, that's sick. You get more constellations later? No, they just get better. So you're limited to those three, but they just get better. Like eventually the dragon constellation, like it just allows you to fly. Like, okay, sick. I'm, I'm releasing a homebrew, a new list of constellations you can be. It's like cancer.

You get crab abilities. Okay. A Gemini. There's just two of you on the battlefield. Yeah. Well, you automatically cast mirror image when you use Gemini. That's good. Wow.

And then, um, Libra, you're very good at weighing things. Yeah. You can just sort of look at something and know how much it weighs. Tell an object's weight. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well you have to hold it in both hands. Oh, okay.

That's harder. Thanks for the call, Cosplay. So when building a druid, because it's a jack of all trades, I think there is something about your party, obviously to factor in. So you want to know what other kind of, um, characters is your party playing. And that'll give you the ability to, to fill a

role in terms of how you build when you start. There is an interesting idea that, uh, the animal companions value in terms of battlefield control, uh, I feel lessens a bit. If you have a largely ranged party, like if you don't have a rogue and you don't have, uh, you know, a, a melee fighter kind of character, um, I don't know that the animal

companion can hold their own as the party tank in a way. Right. You know, um, I'm not sure that they can do that so much. So maybe, you know, if, if you have that kind of range stuff, maybe not focusing on animal companion and focusing on, uh, the spell casting and debuff spells, like mud pit things that'll keep enemies away or, uh, obscured or, you know, lock them down or like tangling vines, right? Limiting their movement would help with a ranged party.

But yeah, you can see through the primal spell list, all these other options that a druid can lean on to, to build in so many different ways. Um, Mint, Mint, why don't you join us? So what do you, what do you want to say on Druids? Hey, how's it going? It's going great. Thanks for joining us. Pretty good.

I just turned my volume up for the record. Um, I hope that works. Um, I think it's great. Druids are fantastic. Um, the ending of the phrase Jack of all trades, master of none is that they're better than a master of one So I think that means very well Yeah, yeah, it's it's certainly fun as a player

I think to have that kind of flexibility and not be you know to one note for a two-year campaign Right like you don't want to always be kind of doing the same thing Yeah, sorry, I catch off. What else were you gonna say? No, that's fine. I mean, in terms of the like the flexibility at one point, it was like, right, you do kind of have to pick at the when you're making the build, though, what you're going to do, because you can't spec all in the decks and your wisdom and then be wild shaping into like a bear and everything and have the greatest to hit. So like in that regard, you kind of have to make the decision on what generally you're going to be doing. But right.

Right. Because I read that if you are a wild shaped druid, if your strength is better than the animal form strength or, or basically melee damage. You can go with your own strength. So if you were to build a wild shape druid, you might want to focus on your strength instead of the other attributes. Yeah. If your unarmed attack bonus is better than the wild shape form, you can take your better stats.

So like if you have a fighter with the Druid multi-class and you wild-shape, you get all the benefits of your master proficiency unarmed attacks and your bear can really start slapping them around. Holy smokes. Okay, so that's interesting. Never thought about that. I was curious like how the build works

because I haven't seen it in action in 2E. I think of World of Warcraft, right? Where the build toward being a tank, a druid tank in World of Warcraft, it was a completely feasible build. Like you can build to be a frontline bear that can soak up on unbelievable amounts of damage and be a great, be great in that role. I've always wondered if I could build a druid in 2e that is a straight up, they fill the role of melee fighter. That is really their role.

Can you build to be that effective? It sounds like you can if you're more of a fighter with a rogue dip or with a druid dip. Is that what it is? Yep. Yeah. That's maybe what it is? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe what it sounds like. One of my PFS characters is like an archer fighter with the druid dedication. And like if pressed by the enemy, you just take this elven archer, and he just turns into a bear and starts whooping you. It's great.

Wow. It works. It works. That is a really cool build idea. Thanks for calling in, Mint. That's awesome. That sounds really neat because I always like classes that have that. This was my first character in Giant Slayer had that, what do they call them? At the time, there was a name for the build. It's a, not a Jack of all trades, but a switch hitter. That's what they call it. Someone who can provide a volley to start a fight at range. And then once the enemies come up, can switch and be competent in melee as well. Um, and it sounds like that build is really neat.

A ranged fighter with a druid dedication that can turn into a bear as needed and fight. Oh, what I like about the druid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As a melee fighter, like frontline, is that you can get your animal companion

and then flank with them. And then your animal companions, they often get support benefits. So, like, I think you could probably game that pretty hard. So that you're essentially- If almost only ever attacking things off guard, like almost always. Uh, and you have control over that.

That's cool. But you'd have to have two orders, correct? Or am I mistaken? No, no, no, no, no, sorry. Uh, you're not talking about, well, if you're a bear, you would need two orders, right? Because you'd have to have the wild shape and the animal companion. Oh no, the animal companion isn't in order, right?

That's more of it. That's a feat. It is, it is. You get it with the animal order. The animal order. And the untamed order allows you to take a wild shape. But you could order Explorer that shit, and then next thing you know, it's, it's twin bears. It's twin bear takedown.

I've done it. Twin bear takedown. Pretty cool. It can happen. I've, I've seen it. It happens, man. That's awesome. By the way, I'm a switch hitter when it comes to mud pits and dangerous holes.

I knew it. I knew it was coming. I knew it was coming. We were, we were due. We were due a butthole joke. Theo Frastus, why don't you join us? What do you in a second? I want to talk about high level feats for druids.

Hey, what's up? There's some fun stuff there. What's going on? What's up, man? Am I saying your name right? Theo Frastus? Yes. All good. Perfect. Nailed it. Nailed it. I wanted to add something on role playing druids, not on the mechanical side, but something that I read online that opened up the idea of a druid to be in many ways. I didn't really like the hippie leaning, animal loving, nature loving idea that's often out there, even though it can be fun. But there's a really good blog post by a guy called Goblin Punch who wrote

a blog post about seven common myths about druids and he's trying to kind of make this pitch that think of druids as these nature enthusiasts that are like nature. They are unforgiving, brutal, vicious, capricious and strange. And that's how you should kind of think about the character concept that they're like, you know, like kind of psychopaths that they bring stuff down. They're chaotic neutral, right? Yeah. But it like they rip your throat out and then they drink your blood. And I mean, you don't have to go that extreme. But I

why is that the correct way to play a drug? I think he's just he's offering an alternate option for people that are like, Oh, I don't want to talk to plants. Like, that's not my thing. Oh, well, here's a different build. You are a... An eco-terrorist. Like an, you are a... A force of nature. Like an avatar of the force of nature, right? Right.

In a bad way. Exactly. That's fascinating. And it really kind of opened up the idea of how to access a druid as a character, and then kind of maybe the feats he would pick with that would be probably pretty different if you go down that road compared to the animal companion druid and times new skeleton has put the link in the chat so I

recommend to read it it's really fun that's good I mean it's a little tongue in cheek but but it helped me think about druids in a different way that was kind of fun that's cool yeah thank you for bringing that up I like that that's a really cool concept my first druid that I played for a very long time was inspired by my reading of, it's the exact opposite of what Theophrast was talking about. It was inspired by my reading of Into the Wild. That book was awesome. If you've ever read Into the Wild, the true story about the guy who tried to completely unplug and move to Alaska and live completely off the land, et cetera. Uh, really fascinating. And I was like, I want to be somebody that is shoes civilization in that way.

I had a lot of fun playing that character, but that, that alternate, that the flip side of that coin is like, what if you, while representing nature are like, you're going to kill or whatever, be a, um, you know, be there to harm anyone that harms nature at all. So like building villages and tearing down trees and that gives you the motivation to do what would be considered immoral things. But you're like, F you, you guys, you cut down these trees. My morality is defined by this and you're violent and ruthless like a hurricane. That's very cool. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, such a deep concept.

Let's see. Anybody else want to get in here? Drew or Jared, do you want to talk? Do you want? Oh, wait, I want to talk. Let me do a couple of high level feats because these get really fun. One jumped out at me that I thought was awesome at 14th level, a thing called reactive transformation. Very cool. It's a feat at 14th level that as a reaction gives you the ability to wild shape based on a trigger and you can wild shape instantly as a reaction and they're just so fun. One is the trigger, you fall 10 feet or more, you can just choose to wild shape into one of your flying forms. Oh, that would have been useful at one point.

You take acid cold electricity, fire or poison damage. You can immediately transform into a dragon that's immune to that type of damage and wash away that damage. Like, right. Uh, you know, uh, you take poison damage, you can wild shape into a plant form that is immune to poison. Like, anyway, I thought that that was a really cool one and very cinematic as well.

Yeah. It jumped out to me. Uh, no, there's a ton of fun. I want to create a druid as a master of different plant shapes, you know, Like when the enemies attack, I just turn into an oak tree and just kind of lay low until the fight is over. Just kind of relax. Yeah. Maybe an apple tree and I drop an apple on one of their heads. Knock them out or they discover gravity. Here's a high level feat. 18th level.

I think this would be more fun for an NPC probably. If you're building a story, I think this is a good one. It's an actual written feat. Perfect form control at 18th level. Untamed wild shape can be indefinite. So you can just wild shape and never have to wild shape out of it. Very cool concept.

And that's how you get those stories of, you know, a character who is, you know, it's someone's animal companion for weeks and weeks and weeks, whatever. And then you find out it's actually a person. Great twist. Yeah. Uh, fun, fun story. I'm and you can say, Hey, I did that with a real build. Um, anyway, we got to keep it moving. Jared. Yeah. Why don't you send me? I just want to throw in there. I really like the way it's written in the Wizard of Earthsea and other,

other things have adapted this where it's like, if you stay in animal form too long, you start to believe that you are that animal. That's, I think that's some really cool fiction that goes with wild shaping. Animorphs. I mean, let's talk about the Animorphs series in another episode dedicated to it. Two Animorphs.

Two Animorphs. I just want to say, yeah, it seems that that high level feat is recognizing that. And that's why you can't stay in these forms for that long. This one is like, it gives you the control to separate yourself from the animal, et cetera. Right. Very cool.

That's cool. Anyway, you said you wanted to talk about. You just have to make it to 18th level. You just got to survive that long and have a GM willing to run a campaign that long. Or you just start at 18th level. Yeah, sure. If you want to go down that route.

Osmob. Jared, talk to us about real life druids. Let's talk a little bit real-life druids. Let's talk a little bit about nerd history. Nerd history. The druids. Well, the druids, it might surprise you to learn that the druids in history

were a little different from the druids in Pathfinder. A little bit. A little bit. So the druids, they were a priestly class of the Celtic peoples and the Celtic peoples lived in what is now Great Britain and Gaul, which is now modern day France. And they lived there before this, but a lot of our records of who they were come from the time of the Roman Republic as it transformed into the Roman Empire. So that is when the Druids were very active and when they came under the scrutiny of the

Romans who wrote a lot of things about them. And what is significant about what you said earlier, Joe, is that the druids had a policy, they had a belief never to write any of their knowledge down. If you became a druid, you needed to memorize that knowledge. And this process took 10 to 20 years learning all of the things that a druid does. And it was never written down. So we don't have any records from this time of what the druids thought of themselves or all the things that they could do. But we do know that they were not just religious leaders, they were also judges for legal cases among the Celtic tribes. They were healers, so they were doctors or medicine people. They also were scholars.

They were basically a intellectual class among the Celtic tribes. intellectual class among the Celtic tribes. And a lot of times each tribe would have like, or each village would have like one druid. And that druid was sort of like the shaman or the medicine man of that village or that community. But what I would compare it to, if you want to pop culture reference is the maesters from game of Thrones. Yes. Where each house has like a maester, right? And the maester knows how to do all of this stuff that the other people don't know how to do. That is what the druid was.

The druid knew how to take care of your eye infection, but also the druid would act as a mediator when two tribes who are having a beef would meet each other. And the Druids had an organization separate from their tribes. A Druid wasn't just, I'm my tribe, do or die, like I'm just for my tribe or my village. The Druids would meet independently in these big convocations. So they would have like a big meeting in central Gaul where Druids interacted alone. And then they would go back to their various communities with the knowledge that they had shared with each other and that they had learned. And a lot of times when two tribes would meet, the Druids would be like,

Oh, Hey, I remember you from the convention. I remember you from Druid Gen Con 55 BC. That's narrow. I think that that comparison to Maesters is perfect BC. Um, that's narrow. That I think that that comparison to Meisters is perfect. I mean, that seems to be really what it's drawn from because the Meisters, they all, even the, even the Kings, Queens, lords, whoever that they work for always know that they're kind of, they have their own order and they're never sure like how much they can trust them. Right. They have their base of operations. I can't remember it now. It's like, I think it's in

Old Town. I think it's called High Tower or something like that. It's like some great tower. Yeah. The High Towers are a family that hail from Old Town, but Old Town is exactly correct. Yeah. Like that's where they would meet, have their conferences and then they go out and then they get assigned to different houses, the lords and ladies of the different houses. Very cool concept. Also just wanted to jump onto your, cause I feel like there's a concept of that cause we just got done playing Pendragon. It's like there's, that's the concept of Merlin in Pendragon and, and some of the other sort of casters that you can run into. As growing up, as a kid, watching the sword and the stone and stuff, I always thought of Merlin as a wizard. But in

Pendragon, he's named as a druid. That's what they call him, as a druid. And people of that order, they don't necessarily in that fiction all talk together or whatever. But the people that have these strange and otherworldly powers, they're drawing them from primal sources, which is really cool. Right. Um, and, um, that is very appropriate because Merlin, if, if Merlin were real would have been a Celtic wizard or a Celtic magic user because King Arthur is traditionally seen as a pre Anglo Saxon Britain who fought the Anglo Saxons.

Um, so, uh, those are Celtic people before the Anglo Saxons. Okay. So did Druids have anything to do with animals? They sure did. Ooh, routinely sacrificed animals. They like look in their guts and stuff. Yes, they did. Ooh, routinely sacrificed animals. They like look in their guts and stuff. Yes, they did. A lot of Druids were, uh, Harrow spec Harrow specks, which means that they

would predict the future with animal guts. So they would sacrifice like a goat or a lamb or something, and then they would pull out its innards and based on the arrangement of the intestines, they would see omens or things about the future. Um, interesting. Another thing about their sort of cosmology or their religion was they did venerate the earth. They did, but they didn't really necessarily believe in earth gods. It's, it's complicated. They saw their gods as their ancestors, right? So it was almost like ancestor veneration, which you definitely see in the far east,

or you see a lot of in native American cultures. They thought that the gods were, they were descended from the gods, but also the gods would sometimes become actual parts of nature, parts of the environment. So for example, there is a goddess that they think was revered by a lot of druids named Danu and Danu became literally in their mind became the Danube river. Uh, the Danube. Got it. Wow. Interesting.

Uh, some cool things about the Druids was that they believed in gender equality. They were, um, they were as many females as there were males. And although the tribes that they worked with and worked for did not have that belief, women were very marginalized in those tribes and kept to, you know, child rearing and household, uh, you know, kind of keeping up the household. The Druids had a lot of, there were a lot of female Druids and they were allowed to fill that role. And the female Druids were allowed to advise the leaders that they were, whose villages they were a part of, and they were allowed to mediate in disputes.

So they had like kind of equal rights. If you were a druid, they were also a kind of socialist. They believed in collective property. Um, they believed that the community owned property, not an individual person, and that really didn't jive with the Romans when they started conflicting with the Romans, because the Romans had a very different view of property, uh, which I bring that up. It, you should know that one of our biggest references to druidic culture

comes from the Julius Caesar who wrote treatises on his various military campaigns. Cause he can't paint in gall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he would, he wrote a lot about the druids, a lot of which was lies. And they think a lot of Julius Caesar's writings were actually taken from someone else, like he just basically cribbed someone else, but we know them as Julius

Caesar's writings, that's how they come down to us. And he said that they engaged in human sacrifice. That they put people inside the wicker man. You know about the wicker man, Joe? Yeah. Yeah. If you've never seen the wicker man, like path, right movie. If you've never seen the original wicker man with Christopher Lee, I've never seen it. So good. Great movie, but not a lot of bases. In fact, uh, not a lot of bases in fact at all. Um, uh, just a couple quick little extra, um, extra factoids Mary Lou, if you wanted Raga to be a more historically correct druid, she would wear more swastikas on her garments. Oh, okay.

The druids used the swastika as a symbol in a lot of their iconography. Now, of course the swastika got a bad rap later, uh, because some very despicable people used it as their symbol. But before that, you know, I didn't know that symbol predated, uh, the Nazi movement, but I didn't know. It's all, well, it's a Hindu. It's a Hindu symbol as well. It's also a Eastern symbol as well.

So, um, it got around. Skid in chat says that's how I always pictured her anyway. Skitt. Finally, another thing that you could do, Mary Lou, if you wanted to be more like a historical druid, is they preserved the heads of people they respected. So if they respected elder died, they would decapitate the corpse and then pickle the head so that they could keep it because they respected them so much. I should have pickled someone's head. I won't say Olog's head.

You should have pickled Olog's head. I should have. Decapitated Olog and pickled his head. And just one final thing. Do you know when Druids became a TTRPG class that you could play? Does anybody know? Well, that's a good, fun factoid. I don't know,

because they're not in the original D&D, right? Like the original. Actually, they are in O, OD&D from the seventies. They are from the first edition of D&D. Wow. Really? There was a 1976 supplement. I believe if I remember my reading correctly, it was the third supplement ever for D&D besides the main rule book. And it was called Eldritch Wizardry. And in that book, druids are introduced as a subclass of the cleric.

So that is when druids finally got into TTRP cheese. And that is my lecture on the druids. That was great, man. That was some real, some good fun. Hey, great job, Druids. Thank you, Professor. Great job, Jared. Those are some good, those, some good fun. Hey, great job, Jared. Great job, Jared. Those are some good, those are some good facts.

Clorp Donk in Twitch chat says you had to be true neutral. And then Great, Great Gray says they were in the first supplement to D&D. You said they're in the third. OK, don't know who's right there. I'm right. I'm right. And then Spitfire. And I'm not just reading Wikipedia, clorptunk. How unbelievably rude. I used multiple sources. Wow. So rude. I mean, just so rude. Jared, just reading Wikipedia A Spitfire just beat you to the cleric thing, saying, weren't they a subclass of a cleric? And yeah, you were right, Spitfire, they were.

That's really cool. I did say that. Thanks. Guys, if everybody could go and fact check me now, and then in any way that I got something wrong, throw that in the chat, that would be great. That would be great, because I love learning. And isn't about learning the pursuit

of truth above all else. No, it's not Mary Lou. Okay. My bad. That's not bad. It's the pursuit of the chat learning manners. That is okay. And how to be respectful to someone who's trying to give them the gift of entertainment. And that's fair. The gift of entertainment. And that's the gift of entertainment. Uh, that was awesome. That was awesome. Um, all right, let's move on to, uh, big news, big news in the video game industry. Uh, there was a big leak, uh, just at the end of last week, I think it was a

middle of the middle of the end of last week, there was a sudden release of, of a leaked, supposedly AI robot response to a fan question on X or something like that, that that Bethesda was going to release a remaster of the Elder Scrolls for Oblivion. I played myself a lot of Oblivion back in the day after having coming off of Morrowind, which I loved so much. Curious, Mary Lou, if you have any, did you ever play Oblivion? I watched my high school boyfriend play Oblivion and then I've played hundreds upon hundreds of hours of Skyrim. It is the one game that I own on every single platform. I have it on Steam, I have it on PlayStation, I have it on Switch.

I was a giant Skyrim fan. What is the setting or like the story of Oblivion? The basic setting story of Oblivion, I don't remember a lot of details, but- The Elder Scrolls? I know it's an Elder Scrolls game. It is set in Cyrodiil, so you are in the capital of the whole empire and surrounds, right?

So it's not only in the city. I don't believe, um, wait, is Syradil the name of the city or the nation? I can't remember, but it is the emperor of the whole sort of landscape as a character in the game, uh, voiced by Patrick Stewart at the time, which was so dope and, uh, is about, it's sort of oblivion is a, is sort of a, it's an extra planar. It's a place. It's a place that is sort of through the, it's like the upside down in a way. And it's one of the, it's one of the Daedric planes? Yes, it's a plane of the Daedric, yes. And it starts breaking into our reality in this world. And so part of your job in the game, part of the main quest, as I recall it,

is finding these tears in space time where the plane is leaking in and then going in and closing them. And the way that you have to close them has a fun kind of game loop where you're always walking into like, Deblivion is sort of like a hell plane of fire in a way. And you encounter horrifying monsters and creatures. You do these dungeon crawls and then you have to always resolve something in that part in order to seal that particular rift. And then you move from rift to rift.

And so it does. It gets a little bit repetitive. Some people I think found it boring at the time. I really liked it, Mary Lou, and the way you were saying earlier, where it's like, give me a clear goal and understanding of what's happening here, because open world games can get a little bit dangerous with that, right? Like where there's too much. What is the actual story I'm playing here?

This one was pretty clear cut. There's tons of side quest options you can do, of course. And you have the classic Elder Scrolls. There's a fighter's guild, there's a, a, a thief's guild, a mage's college that you could do. Well, mage's guild, I think it was college in Skyrim, but you can do all those different things. But the very clear threat is the gates of oblivion are opening into our world and they're going to take over our world. So that's the basic concept. Now what does it mean that they're remastering it?

Does that mean that it is getting completely new graphics and new content? So the way that my initial understanding of the leak is that they would be remastering it which is sort of like instead of rebuilding the game from scratch, they are giving it a better paint job, right? Like, they're just kind of... They're not using a different engine. A new engine. I do believe now that they actually were doing

a bit of a rebuild. They were making it in an Unreal Engine, I think, that was built from scratch. So this is my understanding. All right, so the reason this is confusing is because this information was leaked. There were three or four days of tons of fan speculation. And then just yesterday, they came on

and did a whole reveal video about everything. And I missed it because I was recording our Gatewalkers campaign. So I haven't seen the full video, but I've seen parts of it. But I believe they rebuilt it, like from scratch in a new engine, it's supposed to look incredible. They did a lot of work with the animation of characters,

because the original Oblivion didn't have like, it's similar to Morrowind, it didn't have characters like reacting to hits, right? So like, if you were hitting, it'd just be like, you were swinging swords back and forth at each other hitting, it'd just be like you were swinging swords back and forth at each other and the guy would just be standing there and the health would go down. This one actually has, you know, hits that land could have, you know, reactions where the guy stumbles back or they also talked about the importance in the engine of separating the lower

body from the upper body for different animation angles. So that was kind of a neat thing. Like the upper body can move, but the lower body doesn't or vice versa. And that obviously those graphics came. I love that. They're like the new oblivion, the lower body moves now. Right. Exactly. You know, things they didn't have back in what 2006 when it first came out.

Yeah. Oh wait. So I'm sorry, Mary Lou. So you never played Oblivion? No. And actually, I'm so glad that we got to this section because it reminded me to go buy it on Steam. So I am currently, I just added it to my cart. Yes. Yes. I'm continuing to pay. I'm going to be so excited for you to hop in. I'm actually going to stream it tomorrow, right here on Twitch, right here on this channel. I actually going to stream it tomorrow right here on Twitch,

right here on this channel. I'm going to stream it at 1 p.m. Eastern tomorrow, and we'll take a look at it. We'll see how these graphics look. We'll create a character and get into it. Yeah, I'm excited to dive back in because I don't remember the whole thing. I want to play it with updated graphics. They also did some updating of the mechanics of the game. They definitely did some updating there, which is cool, uh, in terms of like how you level, how experience works. But then also like the actual controller, how it works is been modernized because games since in the last 20 years have made fundamental quality of life improvements to how games like that work and they've made these kind of changes.

So yeah, it should be, it should be really cool. I'm excited for it. So far what I see on Steam, it opened up to good reviews, not great. You know, not a ton of reviews yet. About 10,000 we're in as of this morning and it's listed as very good, but Overwhelmingly positive which we always like to look for but how long has it been out? It's been out since 2006 No, I mean how long has the remaster been out since yesterday? Yeah. Okay, so the reviews like give it a week guys Well, yeah, I'm just yeah exactly Well, dude, how many hours is yeah, exactly. Well, dude, you don't know. How many hours is the game? Dude, some of these, I bet you some of these 10,000 people

played like 30 hours since yesterday when it came out. Like, it's crazy. Dead life. They don't have children. They don't have- It doesn't matter, go outside. They don't have to work? No? You hippies. Wow, you really sound like my dad now. You're like, what, I don't have a job? You have to work, you. Wow. You really sound like my dad now. You have a job.

You bought a video game on a Tuesday. Didn't you have worse is Trump's America. You've got to work. Anyway, I'm not sure why they did it this way. I don't know why they didn't talk about it all through the process or give us a release date months in advance and hype it and everything. It was very strange. They just didn't say anything about it. And then something leaked and perhaps that leak was engineered and that's fine. That's fun. And it caused a whole bunch of a whole stir. And then they announced everything that's like cool and in and knew about the game the same day they released it. So interesting take. Yeah, so it was it was available yesterday and I have not fired

it up yet. I've downloaded it onto my Xbox, but I haven't fired it up yet. I'm gonna do that tomorrow. So Yeah, I gotta free up some space. Yeah, it's big. I hear it's a beast. It's like 120 gigs or something like that. The download 120. Yeah, so well, because they also packaged it with its at least one major DLC that it came with so it all comes together one

thing there was that the Knights of the Nine or something like that and I played that DLC a new is the DLC new or is it really no it was one of the old it was one of the old DLCs but they remastered it packaged it in with the original game cool yeah yeah I I don't know Jared maybe this is how we get you get you back It was one of the old DLCs, but they remastered it, packaged it in with the original game. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, Jared. Maybe this is how we get you back into it. I don't know, man.

I mean, this is my favorite kind of game. Skyrim is my favorite game of all time. So yeah, I would love to play this. Unfortunately, I eschew all technology and am going to go live on a mountain. Oh, I'm sorry. I guess I'm misinformed. The DLC costs $10 extra. Yeah, the base game is 50, but you can include the DLC, which is like some extra weapons

and the horse armor. I thought I read something that said that, well, I guess they were shipping together and maybe that was during the leak stage that I heard misinformation. So apologies for the wrong information. Um, yeah, but we're hearing it from both sides. Guys, we just like to take a second to apologize for everything that we've gotten wrong today. You know, um, it's our duty as journalists to give you the truth first.

And we have failed in that duty. But Joe's also right that the base game includes some of the original DLC content, but there's also a DLC. We just want you to know that we're going to do better in the future. We're going to make sure we're going to learn. We're going to listen to you guys. We're going to make sure we're going to learn. We're going to listen. We're listening and learning. We're listening and learning. And we're going to make sure that our dangerous holes and our mud pits are ready to receive

your switch hitting in whatever way that you deem necessary. So many phrases in today's episode that were thrown out. Before we get into the last segment here, I just want to thank Mary Lou again for hanging with us. She's going to hang through the last segment as well, but also is going to guest host next week. Mary Lou, I will not be here. I'm going to miss my first class at Canter Radio next week. I'm devastated, but I got to do some recording.

And as we discussed, we're recording my solo sax jazz album. But during that time, Mary Lou is going to co-host with Jared next week. I know you guys are going to talk about LARPing. I'm not sure what else you're going to get into. It should be a fun week. So tune in for that. Mary Lou co-hosting next week. What's our final segment here, Jared?

Yes, our final segment. Fae or Fae? We're going to talk about something that is close to the Druid sphere, which is the Faye, the Fair Folk, fairies, the creatures, the beings of the Faye wild. And to start us off, I would just like to say, you know, Faye or Faye, what does that mean? Why do we call it Faye or Faye, what does that mean? Why, why do we call it Faye or Faye? And Faye or F-E-Y that's for those that are listening at home. F-A-E or F-E-Y, which one is correct, Jared? Well, listen, I looked this up,

I looked this up on Wikipedia only. And what I learned was that nobody really agrees with me, but I think this is absolutely correct. F-A-E should be the spelling you're using if you're talking about the ethereal beings from the realm of Faerie. F-E-Y should be if you're talking about the adjective that describes those beings. Cause you can also use that adjective to describe normal people as elf like or ethereal. F E Y is more of an adjective. And F A E is sort of a name for the creatures themselves. And if you do it, if you, if you use F E Y to describe the creatures, you are wrong. And that's how I

hope that you have a streaming show so I can send you a comment about it. Okay. So it's the Faye, but Faye can be Faye. The Faye are Faye. Yes. But if you're saying the Faye, it's F-A-E. The Faye. That's correct. Thank you. Yes. And, uh, and look, uh, that's not official. What if you were running, what if you, uh, got your friends together and said, uh, look guys, I want to run a little homebrew campaign. Uh, it's going to be a Faye campaign. Yeah. F-E-Y. It would be so funny if you said, if you said it's going to be a fae campaign and you spelled it F-E-Y and then when they came, there was nothing about fairies in it. You were just very whimsical and ethereal about your campaign. Oh, okay.

And you did these hand gestures a lot. So that would be incorrect. My fingers are very wavy right now. Woooo, wooshy. So F-E-Y in that case is incorrect. In my opinion, in my opinion, I must ultimately tell you in my opinion, I guess some people use F-E-Y for the creatures,

but to me that's not as clean because F-E-Y is an adjective that's used in just normal literature to describe someone's characteristics as Elfin or Ethereal. Well, this spelling doesn't appear anywhere in Pathfinder that I know of, at least in 2E, they are referred to as the Fae, F-E-Y, and the way they define them is creatures of the first world.

I love the first world as a term for the realm of fairy. You know, I think that sounds so cool. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Also hearkening to game of Thrones. There's a, there's a whole, the first men, right? Like this existence before, uh, with like the children of the forest and all that

stuff, that kind of has feyish vibes. The first world is its own realm or dimension, right? No, for sure. For sure. I'm saying like some of those concepts enter the game of Thrones fiction where it's like before this whole civilized world existed here, there was something before. But yes, I agree that they're, they're different, but it's, they're adjacent, adjacent. And in Pathfinder, the first world is an infinite plane of constantly varying wilderness with trees as tall as mountains living bodies of water and traveling fairy courts

Wow, pretty cool. They should have they ever did an AP where you spend some time in the first world. That sounds awesome. I Don't know. I'm sure that they have. I'm sure. I know that, um, five V has a campaign called the wild beyond the witch light that I have read where you spend a lot of time in the Feywild F E Y. Yeah, they spell it. That's how they spell it. They spell it like that, but maybe that's okay. Cause it's a wild that is a elephant and a theory. So maybe that's okay.

Um, the Fey wild and I read it and it was, it was very whimsical. Look at his face. He doesn't like whimsical. If you want to get your seven year old into Dungeons and Dragons, I recommend the wild beyond the witch light campaign. Gotcha. Uh, all right. Well, let me give my quick, uh, opinion on, on Faye.

I mean, obviously it's like, it's a large concept, uh, and there are a lot of different angles to it, but I will say upfront, like, and I've said this for several years now, um, I have no interest in it. In Fe, Fe creatures, Fe combats, Fe encounters, Fe stories in, uh, my tabletop RPGs. I kind of feel like I'm over it. And well, there's two rea- two primary reasons. One is it's in, it feels like it's in fucking everything and I'm sick of it.

And two is for me, and this is just a me thing. I have more, I have such hatred for, how can I describe this? It's like things being evil in a campaign, makes sense. You know, I want to fight against that. It's, it's evil. There's darkness, whatever. Like I, I want to fight against that. It's evil, there's darkness, whatever. I get that concept, and those themes are interesting for me to explore. I really dislike themes of chaos. I don't like themes of nothing makes sense. Everything has, there's no order to it. Topsy turvy. Yeah, it bothers a part of my brain that a lot of people love chaos. They want to lean into it in their stories in any way they can get chaos, whether it's in their characters or in

something they're against or whatever. I like to understand to some degree, like what my enemy is after, what my enemy's goals are, right? Like when you enter Faye, a lot of times the GM just gets to be like, they're just messing with you just cause. Just cause they want to. The goal of the Faye is japs and jests. Exactly. Which I hate as a player. Now I've enjoyed running some Faye stuff. I enjoy messing with players. But I'll say as a player, if you said to me, for example, like I just said, if you said I'm running a Faye campaign, I would say I'm not interested. Thank you. Like I won't play in it. There were quite a few Fae in Quest for the Frozen Flame already.

Um, at your lower levels, but yeah, they were in there. And it's because they're in everything. Like, like people use them all the time. Now I know that that might be kind of like saying, Oh, there were beasts in this campaign. I'm so over beasts, right? Like it might be such a general topic that it makes no sense as an argument. Yeah.

I think the thing can be played a lot of different ways. So I don't know if I totally agree with you, but I do think you are pointing at how they are often portrayed or the stereotypical portrayal? Yeah, or a campaign that is just so only focused on a face story. It bothers me because I feel like it has no direction. It is going to struggle to make sense and those kind of things just that they bother my brain. I mean, we're talking about what I just read about the first world, about how it, you know, it has things that don't make sense.

Trees the size of mountains and living rivers and stuff like that. You start to get into a fantasy that is so fantasy. It's like so far away from the real world, right? It's like already Galarian or the Forgotten Realms or whatever, already, that's really out there. And then when you go to the Feywild or the First World, you're going even more out there to where it starts to feel like a little Alice in Wonderland, right? Yeah, I was just thinking Alice in Wonderland. That might be what you-

When I hear people speak about the Feywild in 5e over the years, I've heard a lot of like, oh, I'm so excited. It's a new Feywild supplement or a new Feywild story. Or my GM is running through to a Feywild game, whatever. And they're excited about this prospect. And I'm always just like, ugh, like, no, thank you. I want nothing to do with like a landscape that is entirely first world mind bending forest.

I think the regular forest is scary enough. A lot of people are super into fairies. I agree. A lot of people. A lot of people. I mean, I like fairies if they're a certain flavor. Can I tell you one of my favorite fairy world things that we haven't talked about on the show?

Yeah. Yeah. So there is from White Wolf who created Vampire the Masquerade. The final game in their line of like supernatural games was a game based on fairies called Changeling, right? And the original Changeling was called Changeling the Dreaming. And you were basically people where they have like a fairy soul inside them. So like, uh, it only other fairies could tell that you were a fairy, right? Like the only other people that could, could tell that you were like a goblin or like a, a she noble fairy Lord or whatever.

Um, and, uh, you were kind of trapped in a human body. So you could be like a rock star who's really kind of one of the one of the changelings or whatever. But what they introduced in a later version of the game, which was called Changeling the Lost was that, okay, the reason you were that thing is cause you got kidnapped when you were like years ago, you got kidnapped and you were trapped in the realm of fairy for what felt like thousands of years.

And then eventually you escaped back to the real world and you were all changed by that traumatic experience. And the true fair hunting you always to take you back and they play the true fae as scary as possible. They are like horrible, malevolent gods who the nonsensical things about them are kind of creepy and off putting. And, and that game is all about like you've banded together with these refugees who all, you know, managed to escape the true fey and you're kind of hiding out

in the real world. And, um, and it's, it's very cool. I would love to play a game of it sometime. Um, that's cool. That does sound cool. Like to me, I do find those chaotic Freaky elements of fae to be terrifying like if you play it as a horror game I I really like that what I don't like is the like, you know

What you said before like japes and mystery or mystical whatever It's like that kind of shit is what I don't I'm not just not interested in but yeah the idea of But some people go to fantasy for cozy fun Joe. And that's fine. That's fine for them, but I'm just saying it's not for me. Some people love shenanigans. I like when the fey can be both. We have a lot of fey in our LARPs and they talk about their two different realms in the fey realm. There's the paradox. So the fey realm is called Paradox. There's Paradox Dusk and there's Paradox Dawn.

All fey are not human. They cannot be killed and are ultra-powerful and are insane. Full fey. There are some fey that are more like benevolent and find humans like interesting and will help them. But most fey are malevolent and find humans like more fun to like play with and mess with and fuck with. But they're all not human. In what fiction is this? In LARP. In my LARP. Oh this? In LARP!

In my LARP! Oh, in your LARP! In my LARP! I'm sorry, I missed that for a second. Which we'll talk more about next week. Mr. Enight on Twitch says, I want to know everything about Mary Lou's LARP. So tune in next week, Mr. Enight. Can you play a fae in your LARP?

Can you play a fae? You cannot play a full fae, but you can play somebody who is fae-blooded. So they're like descended from the fey. Your LARP has its own game system and world? Completely, completely. It's so cool. We'll get into it. We'll get into the lore and like-

Yeah, looking forward to hear about it next week. Well, you talk- Oh, maybe we'll make you a character. Oh, that'd be so cool. Okay. You talk about how much they hate humans, right? And they like to fuck with them and everything like that. So I will say I ran a campaign, a short lived campaign here on the network called EchoQuest,

which got killed by COVID. But it was one of our first forays into 2E. And I was playing a game that was not Faye-focused, but it was on the borders of a forest that in Galarian called the Echo Wood, that in Pathfinder has like Fae elements in it that I read about in like a gazetteer kind of thing of the forest. And one of the things that I found really cool,

not just really interesting is that the Fae to mess with characters, and I really liked this element of how it would mess with them, is the faeries would have the capability to move, and to move the forest in ways that were disorienting. And that was really fun. So like, you're not dealing with creatures per se that are in front of you,

you're dealing with not trusting your own mind, which I found really fun. Things like the path, the trail that you took here yesterday is not, it turned right when yesterday you swear it turned left. And then you, the players start wondering if they're misremembering something or if there's a spell cast on them or if they're just survival check failed or whatever it might be, having no idea that there is a fake creature messing with them. So there were things like moving huge rocks that are like place markers, right? Like if you were hiking, you could say like, oh, that rock formation.

I remember that rock formation. And that was the point where we made this turn or whatever. And like the rock formation can appear in a different place and make them think they went in a circle when they didn't. And those kinds of things were fun to play with, with PCs. So like the idea of twisting forests around to get people lost. Yeah, that's in the Lord of the Rings too, like Fangorn Forest does stuff like that. Okay, cool. Yeah. There are no explicit fey in the Lord of the Rings.

I think, you know, the realm of middle earth itself is sort of a realm of fairy in a way, but, um, that's, that's really cool. Yeah. I love that. You know, the idea that they trick you, they trick you in ways like that's almost more like the actual superstitions about Faye, right? That you go into the forest and you'll never come out because the Faye are messing with you or whatever.

Jaggedy gaming on Twitch says, Joe does a 180 on shenanigans. Let me be clear. And I think I said this a little bit earlier when I started the segment. I like running it. Like I'm not, I just don't like being messed with. It bothers me. Uh, but yeah, there are those fun things as a GM that you can do with fey that I think are neat. But let me say one more thing on what you said about them

not liking humans and kind of getting after humans. And I just want to bring up my one fey. If you say fey, this is the first thing I think of. And to me, it's awesome. And I never get tired of it. And that is we have a very famous Fae in the annals of Glass Cannon history, a Fae who got charmed into joining our party for a time, went by the name of Rasmutaz and was one of Troy's greatest NPCs ever. And normally that kind of silly shit would be stupid and I wouldn't be interested in it. But because of this, this creature was what it was. It made it amazing. This is the red cap,

the red cap. Oh yeah. Red caps. Red caps. Oh yeah. Red caps are in that change link game. I was talking about. Yeah. So this is a very old folklore creature. Like this goes way, way back, old folklore creature like this goes way way back but uh redcaps in the in the pathfinder entry are sadistic and capricious fey who thrill in bloodletting and murder they're they're so they couldn't be more crystal clear they have this addiction to murder that is so fun to play with and it's night as a character to as a PC too, because you're just like, whenever you see them, you just kill them. Like there's no question. And they in the Pathfinder entry, they also small troops of redcaps travel together sharing bloody kills and reminiscing about their brutal exploits. They loathe the company of other creatures.

And they're called red caps because they die, their caps. In the blood of their victims. And McD just made a really good point that America has brought back red caps. As a thing. As a fashion style. And the people that wear them are very similar

in outlook and personality to red caps from Pathfinder. That's so funny. Red caps are back. Brown shirts and red caps. Holy smokes. Oh, that is amazing. And since we're on a dark, since it's taken a dark turn,

have you ever heard about the murder of Bridget Cleary? No, it sounds Irish. Uh, it was, uh, it was Irish, I think. Uh, but basically there was this woman in 1895 and her home had been built on what they call a fairy ring. had been built on what they call a fairy ring, you know, kind of like a ring of stones or land that looked like it was in a ring formation. And people attributed that to the fairies, right? And this woman, it seemed like she had become very independent of her husband.

She had found income streams of her own and had kind of stepped out of his shadow quite a bit. How dare she? Anyway, she kind of went missing and people started asking about her. This was right after she had had some bronchitis. And when the priest and the doctor had come, her husband was raving about how she had been replaced by a fairy. Uh, and, uh, everybody was kind of worried about that, but of course it's 1895. So, you know, you just kind of leave the woman there with bronchitis and the guy that's raving about her turning into a fairy come to find out that under the, under the assumption that she had been replaced with a fairy, her father and her husband and a group of neighbors had murdered her

by setting her on fire. Jesus. Scary. Yes, and they truly thought, they truly thought that she had been under the influence of, you know, had become a fairy because she wasn't doing exactly what her husband told her to do.

Oh man. So let that be a lesson to you wives out there. I mean, this is terrifying. Good thing I'm not married. Yes, very good thing. Nobody can kill me because I'm not a fairy. But the only reason I bring it up is to, well, first of all, it's kind of a fucked up, creepy story. And I like stories like that, even though it's very sad as well.

And I think it points out some, some issues with culture. But can you believe 1895 people were still that convinced that fairies existed and that they had influence over people? Um, I think it's a, it's pretty interesting. Yes, it was Ireland. I'm checking on Wikipedia right now. Clorpe. You hear that clorp? Well'm checking on Wikipedia right now, Clorp Don. You hear that, Clorp? Well, you son of a bitch. That is where the fairies are the most powerful, the Fae.

They're in Ireland. Mr. Enight on Twitch says, 1895 in Ireland was like 1500 everywhere else. Little offensive to the Irish. Yeah, come on, but yeah, no, I think that a lot of those superstitions still existed in droves before the modern era. The industrial age and stuff is very interesting that those kind of things. Oh, that's horrible. And obviously like there are many stories like that. Right. How many more people that aren't in the annals of history were murdered because someone said, oh, it's a fairy. Oh, it's a changeling. Yeah.

Yeah. So we experienced a story similar to this. Brian Holland wrote an amazing story in Pendragon. In Pendragon. Paul was telling me about it. Yeah. An amazing story in Pendragon where this exact sort of thing happens. It's basically a mother that is experiencing what we would now call postpartum depression. Basically just had a baby and the father disappears and the father just starts saying that the fairy stole the wife and replaced the baby with a changeling. And it says like, it's not my baby. That is, I, I wreck it. Like, that's not the baby we just had. That's a changeling. And there, and there's like people that believe it and people that don't, but in pen dragon, most people believe it.

You know what I mean? Like in that, in that time, uh, or it was obviously it's a fantasy, but it's also like, you know, there was a lot of mysticism that went around, uh, you know, in, in, in that time and so very interesting. If you want to make the Fae very scary, that's how you do it. The actual real historical beliefs. It truly is. You don't really have to go too far. A lot of people also think that, um, modern UFO mythology, uh, especially in terms of

the grays, you know, the aliens with the big eyes and the gray heads and their abduction of people is the new modern mutation of fairy lore. Right. You know, they used to say fairies would take people away into their fairy mounds to live in fairy for a while. And then they would send them back. That is, people think that today we think of, we've just transferred it to UFOs and

aliens. Hmm. Interesting. To explain things like, yeah, to explain away a bunch of different, you know, what things could be that are really explained by mental illness or mundane, main to mundane situations. To explain why, you know, someone might claim that aliens anal probed him. You know what I mean? He needs an explanation. He needs to tell everybody, look, it was aliens. Look, it was aliens.

But I wonder, like, UFO cranks are so, they're so not believed, right? In today's culture, we're like, oh, UFOs, you're crazy. Were people who believed in the fey, like, as, you know, initially disbelieved or was it more popular back then? I mean, I don't think it's that crazy. Like, I mean, in terms of our pop culture- Found the UFO crank! Found it! I'm just saying, in terms of pop culture culture. Found the UFO crank. I'm just saying in terms of pop culture, there are fully produced documentaries that back

all this shit up that could come out in the last year or two. There are definitely UFOs. Is there alien abduction, I think is much more controversial, to put it mildly. The Navy came out, what was it, a few months ago and was like, yeah, there for sure are UFOs. And we were all like, yeah, there for sure are UFOs. And we were all like, guys, not now. We have too much going on. Save it.

I've got a friend who's deep into UFOs and we're all worried about him. But the point I was going to make to answer Mary Lou's question, did people believe back in the day? I mean, like based on any kind of history reading I've done, even way back in Roman times and before, there were always like people who were rationalists, who were like, this is a belief, it's not real. And then there were always a bunch of putting heads who thought that a woman needs to be murdered because she's started her own sewing business. So ask yourself today, are you one of the rationalists or are you one of the pudding heads? That's what you have to ask yourself. And on that note, let's

wrap it up. This has been such a blast. Mary Lou, thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us. Thanks for having me. It was so fun. I would say we'd love to have you on again, but we already will. But you're gonna. Next week. Maybe you'll like it or not. I know, it's amazing. Next week, Mary Lou is going to host. How cool is that?

She's going to co-host with Jared. We're going to have a great time. Unfortunately, I'll be indisposed, but Mary Lou is going to be here next week for another whole episode. We're going to dig into that LARPing, among other things. Should be lots of fun stuff coming. But yeah, thanks guys for hanging out. Thanks for all the callers. Great calls today. Fun new Druid builds to explore. And I want to make a Druid. I'm like psyched about this. It's awesome. Me too. Yeah. All right. Take

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