Some Changes Coming

Dear Readers & Premium Subscribers (yeah, this concerns you as well), I know it’s been a minute, but we need to talk. Nothing bad, but I’ve got some things that are going to be changing.

Firstly, to rest your mind at ease, the blog is NOT going away, but will be taking a hiatus after May 2 with one exception (we’re getting to that). I’m in the middle of moving to a new place (an in-town move, but it’s a lot of work), and May is going to be insanely busy for me. Regular blog posts will resume in June.

The Ingrates will be premiering to the public, with no pay wall, the moment that my editor can get a new laptop. Those updates will likely be monthly, due to the aforementioned exception (I promise, we’re getting to it). We have concluded recording some 90+ episodes of the Ingrates, and you all have only gotten to episode 36. That’s a lot of footage for our editor to listen through, remove parts where we yell “PAUSE” when someone comes into our game space, and instances where we accidentally doxx ourselves, which happens more than we like, but few enough times that My Favorite & Only Editor has to catch it. According to them, it’s a process. That said, they are going to be working rather feverishly once they get a laptop up and running.

Which leads me to the exception I talked about earlier…

Due to several players having to drop the Ingrates (I know, very sad, especially considering who is dropping), I have a lot of campaign to rewrite. A lot. Especially since one of the players dropping is rather…central to the story. The Ingrates that are dropping include: Mewsie, Aramil, and Avery. When Mewsie dropped, Avery picked up playing Mewsie as an NPC. Then we picked up Clara to replace Mewsie’s player. Aramil and Avery, a married couple (actually my son and daughter in-law; they got married this past year), and had too many things going on and had to unfortunately choose the Ingrates as what they had to drop. The remaining Ingrates then had to have a conversation: what to do next?

We talked about a lot of options:

Continuing the Ingrates with me doing re-writes along the way. Not the best solution for me, the DM, due to the sheer amount of work that would entail, but I could make it work.
Play something different: This one led down a serious rabbit hole; we discussed playing Call of Cthulhu, d20 Modern (Shadow Chasers or something similar), or any number of things.
Have Arkon’s player run something for us

So, with the options, we decided to go with both option 2 and 3, and here’s how.

First, we settled on me running Dungeons of Drakkenheim for the now reduced group, which includes the following players (I’m going to refer to them by their Ingrates names): Arkon, Talon (he appears later in the series), Clara (again, appears later in the series), Winter, Dacyria, Kana’l (appears somewhat later in the series), and Oliver. That leaves us with a total of 7 players. We are keeping the group at that size, and will not be adding anyone else.

Second, when it comes out, Arkon’s player will be running “Vecna: Eyes of Ruin” for the group once per month, to give me a break and time to campaign plan for both Drakkenheim and the Ingrates.

Which leads to a change, or rather, return to something that was dropped: we will be recording our Drakkenheim campaign, with the following cast: Lotor (Half-orc Barbarian), Abra (Tabaxi Rogue), Sylas (Custom Lineage [humanish] Fighter), Bitsy (Halfling Rogue), Sylvia (human[ish] Alchemist [new class from a Drakkenheim sourcebook], Arashi (Harrengon Sorcerer), and Orien (aasimar monk).

This campaign will be recorded and made available on Wednesdays for the Premium Subscribers only (at least until the Ingrates catches up). I’ll probably release the Drakkenheim podcast (they haven’t come up with a name yet) at a fairly fast pace (maybe multiple episodes a week or something as my editor can crank them out) until we catch up to where we are, likely a week behind when it was actually played. Of course, we wish we could do an actual live play, but for the sake of anonymity, we try to avoid using player names (at least until/if we become “famous,” lol), and we have to invariably edit those out. Also, I expect the quality of those episodes to be much greater, since I’ll be trying a new sound set up so we don’t all sound so far away. I’m actually saving up for a new laptop that can handle a piece of hardware allowing us to each wear individual mics that would record us all simultaneously with higher fidelity. That’s about 8 months out or so, but it will be worth it when it happens. We’ll work with what we have in the meantime.

Welp, that’s it for today. Here’s a few memes to brighten your day!