if you like what you hear, consider subscribing and giving us a review over on apple podcasts, especially early in the feed, subscriptions and reviews are super helpful for bringing new listeners are away. Thank you. Yeah. Mhm Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the goblins and growlers podcast. I'm josh maltby at black cloak DM on twitter, I'm Brandon Dingus at a way of Brandel or on twitter, thank you everybody for tuning in.
Um we've got kind of a loose plan for just sort of a freewheeling conversation today, but first we got a quick little news item I just wanted to touch base on uh because several episodes ago, like episode three, we talked about Boy Problems, The Carly Rae Jepson themed heist RPG, that's I think it's uh derivative of lasers and feelings.
But anyway, so um I bought it on each like last year when I learned about it and because of that I get messages from the creator and I haven't got an email the other day that the sequel was coming out.
Well, sort of like an expansion, it was Boy problems colon Side B. I love given that it's a heist themed around not only Carly Rae Jepson and her music, but also with lots of like puns on Carly Rae Jepsen song titles, I love the idea that side B is like, these are the things you didn't steal last time.
Oh no, no, it it goes into even more depth than that when I like I bought it for like $3.75 definitely go to boy problems dot itch dot io and support this creator because this is kind of balls out hilarious and ridiculous. But the first thing I thought after I read it was like the world's gotten bigger. Uh it's got some new mechanics. Um I think it has some new character roles, it has three new heist scenarios, not all of which are carly Rae, Jepsen centric.
Um There's uh let's see, let me scroll through here. There be side plots, first of all, uh where it's like if your, if your party doesn't want to go through with a regular high sting stuff, they have suggestions for like maybe the party can go to a beach or a cultural festival or something like that. Finally, the enemy side plot episodes that your RPG needed.
So like the three new settings that they have, one of them is basically you're trying to save this nightclub that has sort of a studio 54 or hip hop vibe or something like that, but it very much has the um like break into electric boogaloo, we gotta save the youth center kind of vibe to it, where you have to like stop some some evil corporate person from buying it and uh it uh their GM prompts for and everything.
It lists new gear that you can get, It has a little three paragraph description of the highest and then it's got several N. Pcs that you can go through. Oh my God hell yes. Yeah, it's really cool. The, the art on this is is pretty fantastic to the, they refer to the boy problems. The whole thing is a cyber pop heist tabletop RPG. So like cyber pop is a thing now and I was not aware of that.
Um there's another one where um Taylor Swift disappeared in the early 21st century and uh like she vanished from public life. And this takes place in cornwall after uh like London seceded from the UK and formed the Greater London Republic. And it takes place in uh Tintagel Castle, which is like really closely related to the Arthurian legend and everything. It's very crazy. I read through the whole thing.
So I know like how it, I know how it ends and I don't want to spoil that for anybody, but it's really cool. And then there is another one that takes place in sort of a uh post apocalyptic Southern United States that involves having to like rescue or like steal the collective record of the internet from the before times. And one of the N. P. C. S. Is jeeves and it's supposed to be an ai representation of the now defunct Ask jeeves search engine. This is amazing. I love this. It's it's so cool.
I still haven't had a chance to run a game of boy problems, but it's just so fun to read and the work that was put in to the pdf for this one. Like as far as like the design and formatting and everything is like 1000 times more detailed than the original. So definitely if you're looking for something cool, especially if your your tastes lean toward heist games and perhaps like Canadian uh female pop artists. Uh this is definitely the thing for you.
It's it's uh Boy Problems dot itch dot io side B was like $3.75. But you can obviously pay more if you want to help support the creator more back when I bought the base game for boy problems, it was like $7 I think. But it's totally worth it. This person is putting out pretty fantastic stuff. So check it out. High quality worth investigating. Yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes on for that. But having gotten that business out of the way.
Um I think we just wanted to have sort of a soups cash conversation about magic and in our fantasy settings like high fantasy, low fantasy, no fantasy. Um You know, I know both of us sort of have opinions on that and I don't think we've really like done that before and we like just having sort of unplanned conversations sometimes because if you guys could hear the stuff we end up talking about before we actually hit record, it is usually more interesting than anything else we are talking about.
We have on a couple of occasions been like doing it, we should have just hit record before we even started this planning conversation because after editing out the bits where we're actually planning, we had had a great episode. So yeah, that's just how it goes sometimes. Yeah, so talking about like how much and I'm going to, I'm going to use fantasy and kind of a fantastical kind of context. But how, how much like fantastical stuff do you want possible in your games?
Like if you had to play a game where there were no healing potions or no healing spells or you know, take it a step further, there was no real offensive magic or anything like that. You know, what would that look like? How would that flavor the play and how would you as a GM enjoy that And how do you think your players would enjoy that? So, I feel like when we start talking about doing things where it's less fantasy and more realism.
You start getting into those campaigns and I've played with GMOs that are more or less, you know, in this vein where you have your travel time and there's like a random encounter table that you roll every day that you're traveling. You've got your uh rations all planned out. You've got your water, you've got how much you can carry, you've got, how much the wagon you have can carry, You've got paying the ferry every time you need to cross a river.
Like all of these like nitty gritty details that really make a world, I don't know, it's like playing Lord of the Rings. Mhm. I personally am not for it, like I the thing is when it comes to playing something in a fantastical world and kind of exploring like oh these are like dreams I've had or ambitions or wouldn't it be cool if kind of deal But those are the things I'm way more interested in exploring and doing in that space and so like the gritty realism of it.
It just, I don't know, it's not my scene so much. I mean, you know, you're almost talking about two different things there because you can have gritty realism but still have sort of a high magic, high fantasy kind of thing. Because I mean, I mean that's what you just said it, that's essentially what Lord of the Rings is like. Yeah, they dealt with the travel time and all that stuff over the course of the movies and the books and everything.
Um you know, they dealt with wounds and you know, people dying and things like that. But I don't think anybody would say that Lord of the Rings was a gritty realistic setting. Like the fellowship was not like the sharks and they were going to mordor to fight the jets with switchblades. We're gonna get those greasy Jets were gonna I'm going to shoot an arrow right into small dogs, weak spot you're conflating your token stories.
Well, you know um so I think for me, I think they relate a little bit and you can still you can still have magic and have it be gritty realism to me that is actually a little bit less high fantasy. It is a little bit more like rooted because when I think high fantasy, I'm not just thinking like oh elves and dwarves and magic, I'm also thinking oh like fairies and like a hero's journey and you know, teleporting through space and time to reach your foe like those sorts of things.
So if you had to boil down your definition of high fantasy to maybe like one or 2 cogent sentences, what would it be? Rather than that bulleted list you just gave me Oh that's tricky. I think for me, high fantasy is defined as being so far beyond the scope of reality that you can't possibly confuse it with things that are real. Mhm Okay, so really what you're making a distinction between is like high fantasy and maybe historical fantasy. Yeah, that sounds right.
Okay. Yeah, because I mean, yeah, because if we take all of the fantastic elements out of out of it, then it's just history. Right? Well and like I wouldn't consider, even though it has magic and elves and fairies and things like that, I wouldn't consider like the harry potter universe to be high fantasy or um what's the name? It's totally escaping me. There's another series of books about a young boy who like captures elves and fairies and then sells them to this organization.
Like he's like a super genius kid and it's probably escaping me. I know the one you're talking about, I can't remember the name of it either, but it's the one where Disney did that movie for it and josh Gad was in it and they released it on Disney Plus and it got horrible reviews. That's the one. Yes, yeah, yeah. It's like, right on the tip of my brain and I can't remember it, but I'm not going to worry about looking it up. Artemus fowl. That's right, that's right.
Such a relief to get those things. I actually watched like maybe 15 minutes of that movie on Disney Plus and it was insufferable. Oh no, but some of the books and I enjoyed the books that I read. I think the problem was from what I understood is that The movie is 100% not reflective of the books.
Like they essentially had to change it to make the main character, not an asshole because his whole journey involves going from being an asshole to being like a really good guy, but they couldn't start the first movie with him being an asshole.
I think they 100% could, but they were too afraid to do so well yeah, I'm just talking from their perspective, But yeah, it all the only reason I know about this is because it got so many bad reviews and I'm like I have to read a little bit about this to find out why this movie is so terrible. Yeah, like I wouldn't I wouldn't consider harry potter, high fantasy, I wouldn't consider Artemus fowl. High fantasy even though they have fantasy creatures in them. That's magical realism.
Yeah. Yeah. Which is a whole genre unto itself. Okay, so it sounds like it sounds like we're splitting our categories up into sort of high fantasy um magical realism and then maybe something in between. Okay, well I I just got grilled for a few minutes about what I think about high fantasy, what do you think? High fantasy is high fantasy? I think almost always involves a small person and I don't mean like a halfling or something like that.
I mean somebody who within the greater scheme of the world around them is relatively insignificant and sort of rising sort of like the hero's journey like you were talking about to face some sort of supernatural foe and having supernatural adventures along the way.
Um I guess for me my definition of high fantasy is like sort of I guess the common definition of like fe species like elves and things like that, but also the common use of magic which sort of runs against talking about Lord of the Rings as sort of a prototypical high fantasy adventure because one of the things that they did that Tolkien did really well was keeping the mystique of magic behind the curtain because like the history are 100% magical creatures because you know,
and like the veil is lifted if you read the summary lamp. But as far as in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy um Gandalf I think uses magic like overtly maybe once or twice. And even like there's you shall not pass where he shatters the bridge and he and the bell rock fall for you know, age upon age and all that stuff. And then there's the time where he raises his uh staff. I think it's during the battle of telenor field where he shines the light to blind the enemy.
And those are the only two situations I can think of like immediately where he was using just straight up magic and I think like sorrow man too wasn't wasn't it's like thinking about casting like sure he used the palantir um and he and Gandalf had they're sort of like distance duel and everything. But there was no like all right, I'm gonna cast fireball like nothing like that. And to me that is definitely a required trope for high fantasy.
So I would almost say Lord of the Rings exists in sort of a realm of like literary fantasy which may be a um that might be just like an artificial construction for what it is just because it doesn't necessarily fit into my preconceived notion of what high fantasy is.
But um I think it involves the elements I talked about plus some sort of regular magic now whether or not that magic is accessible to the common person through things like um like pay for play, clerics, resurrections, healing things like that, healing potions or being able to learn spells either because of your bloodline or because of years of study or something like that. I feel that is necessary for high fantasy.
Now, magical realism I guess is sort of somewhere between literary fantasy and high fantasy um or it's like an offshoot of one of them because like Lord of the Rings isn't magical realism unless you want to be like well you know technically um you know Middle Earth is actually Earth before it became around um which is kind of a silly reckon,
but and so Lord of the Rings almost exists in its own thing and we should set it aside as existing in its own thing because it was the prototype and everything else sort of like in modern fantasy, everything sort of like flowed from that. So you almost can't categorize it. It's it's like comparing current English two Olde English.
Yeah, kind of like you can see influences but there's no direct parallel um because even like the definition of a wizard is different, I think that's fair, I was based on the and I may be the prevalence of magic will change your answer, but when you started describing what you felt like high fantasy was I was going to ask do you think Star Wars a new hope qualifies that? No, and I hate that argument, I hate like it's fantasy, but it's fantasy from like a trophy perspective.
Like it's you know, plenty of people say Star Wars isn't science fiction and there's like a really solid logical argument you can make for that. It's you know, a space opera, which is kind of its own thing. Um It's a space opera with fantastical elements. Um but it's set in a space milieu kind of like how the baz lurman Romeo and Juliet movie updated the story from you know, medieval Verona To you know, I think it was like Los Angeles or something in the 90s.
I was in high school when that movie came out, so I don't remember, I was not 17 so I couldn't go to my theater to see it. Um So yeah, I mean Star Wars it's fantasy but definitely in the most like lower case f kind of way because they like their magic is the force which was would go on later to be described as something very scientific for good or ill.
Um So yes, it's fantasy, but I do think it's outside the scope of what we're talking about because like you can even say that a back to tank is like a fancy version of a healing spell or a healing potion or something like that. And when I'm talking about like a low fantasy, no fantasy setting or at least low magic, no magic, you know like we're talking about fantasy but we're talking about like degrees I guess.
Like I always go back to this game that came out in 1992 is called Dark Lands and it's set in the Holy Roman Empire. Uh and It's in like the 15th or 16th century or something like that. And the whole idea of the game is it's like you have to be a human, there are no character classes or anything. People just get get experience for skills and things like that.
Um You can go to like Denmark, Luxembourg Switzerland like all over the place like it's it's very very you know german but the game doesn't really have anything in terms of like magic. You fight supernatural creatures and enemies and stuff like that, but you don't really cast spells if I remember right. Most of the healing is done from like Tink Cher's and like potions but not like a magical potion kind of thing.
More like you know ligaments and uh home remedies, things like that and like lots of rest to heal you.
Um that kind of stuff appeals to me more from a storytelling perspective because when you put magic in the hands of the protagonist, you are automatically if not elevating them to the level of the more powerful foe, giving them a step ladder that allows them to start climbing to the level of the more powerful foe and I think it's a more rewarding story if like the more they have to struggle to achieve victory and I think magic sometimes levels the playing field too much. That's fair.
I was when we talk about like low fantasy, low magic, no fantasy, no magic I think for me because of the way I define fantasy um I picture definitely like no healing spells, no resurrection spells. If you get wounded you have to you know rest, you have to rest for some time before that wound goes away or you know if it's like a if you got like a gash in your shoulder then just like don't work that shoulder like that sort of thing.
I do enjoy that setting because you know lots of, lots of books are set in kind of this like yes they have swords and yes there are things that are kind of on the edge of fantastic like creatures that are beyond our own scope and understanding.
Mhm but there's no like nobody's throwing fireballs at each other um anything like that seems like magic briefly and then turns out like oh what they're doing is they're wadding up these old towels and filling them with a burnable liquid, lighting them on fire and using a tribute Shay to launch them at you like their their court wizard is actually just a really good engineer and you know I get why it's appealing to have systems in your game that allow for stuff like faster recovery,
greater offense, stuff like that because like I've played um some like Osr stuff like you know um I think I I can't remember if it was like Osric specifically that I played but one of the like one of the first edition clones that I played in a game of and it was, you know, it was like playing Diablo basically because you go into the dungeon, you fight in the dungeon for as long as you can until you're probably going to die, then you have to leave the dungeon,
go back to town resupply um rest and then go back and clear out more and that can get really tedious. So having greater like having more power to heal more power to attack and also just like different ways of doing it. So not everybody is like wielding a sword or something like that or shooting a bow. That's definitely appealing.
But I guess the broader point that I was trying to get to is like it like there's nothing wrong with that, I just kind of like things being a little bit more hardscrabble from a storytelling perspective because like I guess I guess one thing I kind of think about about the abuse of magic and how it can be really stupid is like once you get up to like level 10 or something like that, they're like oh well I'm casting this on you know?
But I'm going to cast counter spell and then you're like oh but I'm going to counter spell your counter spell. I'm like well guess what? I've got another spell slot and I'm gonna counter spell the counter spell. The counter spell. It's like the it's like the radar detector whole like I've got my radar detector detector so the police won't be able to detect my radar detector unless they've got a radar detector detector detector. Yeah. I get how to say this.
I think for me when it comes to running a more hardscrabble campaign, what I like is having a lower magic campaign where magic is still there. Uh you can still do things like resurrect people and cure them of poisons and things like that but your ability to use that magic is significantly reduced and so you're more reliant on things like medicine and like binding of wounds and people not getting hurt in the first place.
Um You know you can use magic to heal like to set a bone but that doesn't make it completely healed all at once because it's too much. Like the bone still has to have time to MIT and things like that.
You said something that really like that really caught my attention because it sort of crystallized um Some of my thinking you're like yeah I mean one of the strategies you can have is just try not to get hurt and like if you always have the safety net of some sort of like supernatural way of like making up for your bad decisions, then you're going to continue to make bad decisions, you know?
And it if you're, I know some people get frustrated with cautious players, it's like well I take 10 steps, I'm gonna search for traps, I take 10 steps, I'm gonna search for traps, like that's how you stay alive, like you don't have to you don't have to push it to the insta gree like that, but if you are an actual real person underground in a dungeon or in a dark forest or something,
you would probably be a little more cautious than your player is and I'm not calling that good or bad role playing, I'm just saying it adds another dimension to it that forces you to sort of stop step outside yourself and think about what the consequences of those actions to your character are, because like really like you're already outside yourself because you're looking from an objective perspective at the character you're playing.
So you should be thinking like I've never been in a place like this before, you know, I don't have a lot of experience with this kind of thing, I should probably be careful and not act like I've got a guy back here who can put hands on me and heal up any gashes or wounds that I've got, I mean I would make the argument that uh if you're worried about your player character is getting a little too confident and just walking directly into the mouth of danger because they know they can get healed.
Uh it sounds like you need more trapdoor traps in your dungeon that just opened two shoots that dropped them in pits full of snakes and things like that, you know? Yeah, I guess over the course of this conversation, I'm realizing that sort of my play philosophy is struggle.
Um like I like writing and running low level games, like levels 1 to 4, like a lot of people are like, oh it doesn't really get interesting till you get to level five because then you get all your feet and you know, you got more spell slots and all this stuff. I'm like well yeah, but like I think it's more interesting if like joe farmer has to pick up a sword and go try, like he's trying to learn how to be an adventurer while he's on the job.
Um you know, he's got like, he's got some experience, he knows how to do some things, but not a whole lot and he still has to, he still can't afford to not be cautious because you know, at some point he's got to go back home to his wife, his kid and you know, their cattle farm or whatever.
I mean I can dig that, there's there's a lot to be said for having a game world that is more challenging than the typical and I think there's a lot of people that would agree with you that like five E for instance is so hard to kill your players part well player characters I should say especially once they get past Level five probably is about the point where it starts to get like you can throw lots of stuff at them but even if they get tagged by something that is too big for them to fight,
odds are good, they can get away. Yeah.
Yeah exactly and I I have made the argument before that like that's great because you know the circumstances under which Five came about is it was a rebirth of the franchise after a couple of very divisive editions and you know it was trying to bring new people into the game and you know from a wizard perspective trying to bring new people into the product so they wanted I think the cookie of being able to get out of those kind of hairy situations a little bit easier than maybe you could have in 1979,
you know if you were playing d. and D. But on the flip side of that it takes out a lot of the tension of the game if you're like Uh you know what like yeah there's 16 goblins there and yeah I'm only level three but like the worst case scenario is we just gotta cast resurrection on me back in town, like we got all this stuff for that, that's fine. Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, cautious play, like I was saying, yeah, it's not what Muhammad ali's name used to be cautious play.
Um No, I think, I think that's perfectly reasonable and I think I will agree that five E definitely takes it far enough in that direction. I mean, I've had players that are literally like, they're a wizard and they're like, yeah, I'm going to run into the middle of the group and I was like, okay, this is a terrible idea and they go, yeah, and then I'm going to cast fireball on myself and I'm like, You're you're gonna run in and self immolate as your strategy.
Like that's your top strategy really. These wizards today with their D6 hit, die back in my day, you had a D4 and you felt lucky if you had three hit points at first level. I mean, yes, but that was also those were also the days where the memes come from where it's like fighter runs in, takes two hits and goes, I need to fall back, wizard on the back line, someone sneezes and goes, I have to fall back.
Yeah, I never I never played any kind of magic user back then, just because like the rules were explained to me and how you barely had any hit points, I was like, no, thank you, I'll pass thanks. You know, as with all dumb arguments about tabletop role playing games, there's no right or wrong answer about how you want to play.
I just, you know, I like to look at a lot of things from like the lens of like storytelling and things like that and I just think the more you have to struggle or your characters have to struggle and not be able to fall back on. Well I got this knapsack full of like one D six plus two healing potions that I can chug.
Um you know, the more you have to think about those kind of things, husbanding your resources, you know because the people at that, you know there was this would not be like a world of excess. It would very much be a pre like it would not be a post scarcity world, so you wouldn't be able to just run into a shop and buy a bunch of potions or spell scrolls or anything like that.
Well I've got, I've got actually kind of a fun idea since you started mentioning a couple of things that you know, help create that element of tension where it's like there are limits to how much healing you can get and things like that.
Um let's let's give our audience a couple of ideas of how they could take a standard setting and dial back the magic or the availability of things so that they can ramp up the tension in their game world a little bit and I will start, you mentioned knapsack full of healing potions and one of my favorite game mechanic fixes for the classic like oh well the palette and we'll just heal me with lay on hands.
The cleric can just spend a spell slaughter too, I can just drink a couple of these potions, have it limited how much healing they can receive magically. Mhm. And that's it like you you have to heal naturally some of the way you like you can only heal up to like one D. Six or something like that and then after that you best take a nap. Is that what you're saying? I mean basically like it's it's you can only heal I think in the system I played it was up to half of your hit points magically.
Mhm. Over a I believe it was a two week period, so if you needed magical healing then you better save that for when things are really dire. I think another way to handle that too is to treat magic more like wild magic just like like magic is plucking at the strings of reality to manipulate it like it shouldn't always work like and stuff should bad stuff should happen more often like paladin or the cleric, you know appeal to their appeal to their god for healing.
Um You know maybe they did something like maybe they slighted somebody and didn't know it like earlier in the day uh and they do not have the favor of their deity at that moment. So it's just their prayers are just gonna go unanswered until they atone. I've definitely seen that play out really well and it makes a really interesting story as well. Mhm. Yeah, like they're not like cast out or anything like that, they just need to be humbled a little bit.
Yeah, like it's a it's a situation where you're taking their resources from them but temporarily and to improve the story overall, right? Yeah. But then oftentimes you'll have players complaining that like well that's the whole point of my character or telling a story, Be quiet, I use this as an opportunity to reflect and develop I think uh if you're if you're a really solid gm then doing stuff like that, your players should trust you to not leave them in the lurch permanently.
Like I've talked to people who, you know, they're like, oh well the whole point of my character is X. And it's like, you know, you build a character that's an acrobat and then as part of like the developing story and some bad rolls, maybe your character loses their leg and you're like, well a kid to macro bad stuff anymore, It's like it's a it's a world of magic Homey, you can get that functionality of your character back if you really want it, but there's also like explore that space,
like that's for your character, that's kind of a tragedy and then additionally, like there's all kinds of things you can learn as a person and your character can learn as a person about dealing with that situation and how much stronger you'll be coming out the other side of it regardless of whether or not you continue to be a really talented acrobat character. Yeah. You know, creativity thrives with restriction. 100% if you if you really throw yourself into it.
Well, yes, you can't yeah, I don't I don't think anyone's expecting creativity to thrive during restriction if you get restricted and then you fold your arms and sit down and go, well this isn't fun, screw you guys. I'm going home. Have we veered a little bit from topic maybe? Well, anyway, this has been The Gods, the collars podcast. Uh No. Do you have any closing thoughts on that? I think I think my closing thoughts are that overall.
I like magic in my games, but I do sometimes feel like magic, especially lots and lots and lots of magic can make it feel like there's not a lot of tension there. And so sometimes it's nice to dial that magic pack a little bit, put in some anti magic zones perhaps. Yeah, I'm very much about the struggle, person versus nature. Um person versus person, not person and magic versus nature or person and magic versus person.
I just think it forces you to think, think a little bit more plan a little bit more and sort of, give yourself over to more role play. Hell yeah. Which I never think is a bad thing. Never. Yeah, well anyways everybody, you know, you tell us tweet us at way of Brandel or or at black cloak DM about how you feel about high magic, Low magic, no magic, magical realism, high fantasy, low fantasy, literary fantasy. Um and we'll be back next time with another topic to be determined.
I'm Brandon at way of Brandel or on twitter and I'm josh at Black Look DM on twitter. Uh thanks everybody for listening to goblins growlers podcast and we'll catch you next time. Bye y'all! Hey, goblins, Brandon here, uh this is our last release before christmas, so I just wanted to take a minute and thank everybody for listening and supporting us over the last few months as we've gotten this new podcast up and rolling josh and I really appreciate it.
Uh and we got a lot planned for 2022 so we hope you stay tuned in for that and also, you know, shoot us suggestions for stuff you want us to talk about our people, you want us to try and get for an interview, Just email us at contact at goblins and growlers dot com or you can send us a message on our twitters. Uh again, really excited to be doing this. Really glad you're listening. And we hope to keep providing some cool stuff for you going into next year. Thanks.