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The Mighty Nein are so funny because Matt’s just there like, “Lorenzo was supposed to get away. You were not supposed to keep the Happy Fun Ball. You were NOT meat to go to Xhorhas. Trent was supposed to escape—” Mighty Nein just steamrolling their way through their own campaign. They do what they want. The DM’s long-term plans have no authority over this party

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new icon cause i love jester

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Essek just wants some friends who don’t go to his church and don’t know his mom!!!

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I was thinking about how you'd go about adapting for the Nein show with regard to the alluded-to D-plot following whatever Essek was up to with his Assembly contacts prior to the Nein showing up given that the general sense I get is that the cast does hope to adapt campaign 3 as well, and Ludinus was his main point of contact. If he is not the eventual villain, it isn't tight enough for that format (which is super limited in comparison!) if you don't alter that, since that just ends up feeling like a loose end.

Personally, if I was doing the adapting, I'd probably switch Essek's contact to one of the other collaborators that he listed. Trent seems like the obvious first choice, since it does later tie him to Caleb, but I think you run into trouble there, because it becomes too personal in a way that's harder to reconcile, especially in the time the show allots. It's certainly doable, but I'd personally think it causes more problems than it solves. It would also require threading a needle in terms of his willingness to collaborate with Trent; you could go the A:TLA season 1 route and set him up to be an obviously much worse person, but I think that makes it too clean cut. That's very sensible for a kid's show where you do have an antagonistic teenager who you want the audience to sympathize with, but you can make the dynamic more complex than that in adult media.

Which brings us to the final candidate: Vess Derogna. It took me a minute to think this one through, but this is actually brilliant. You sprinkle her in from the get-go, rather than only vaguely alluding to her through Cree up until Felderwin, and you don't run into nearly as much complication in eventually settling Caleb's distrust of Essek as you would if he had mainly been working with Trent, nor do you risk defanging Essek by juxtaposing him against a blatantly horrific guy. You also ratchet up the horror of Lucien killing her, because she will have been such an uneasily menacing contact for so long, so the audience if not the Nein fully understand how powerful she is and how much influence she has, and he just waltzes in and offs her. That is already pretty powerful in the campaign just by knowing that she's a member of the Assembly, but it hits harder when this person has been an imposition for four seasons straight.

And most importantly, it takes the "What happened to Vess Derogna?" exchange up from funny to fucking hysterical.

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God, Liam's acting during the scene where he explains his past to Nott and Beau was so good. It's so clear with the way he pauses and glosses over details and occasionally talks in a flat monotone that this is really difficult for him to say and he's forcing himself to say it for the sake of getting into the Archive. The only time he really emotes is when he's yelling at Nott that he's a disgusting person. Just, so SO good

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caleb, nervously on impulse, in ep 1: yeah my friend wears a mask because she's a goblin. oh i guess i shouldn't have said that

nott, nervous and experiencing withdrawals, in ep 68: our group is pretty shifty, yasha. you know, caleb killed his whole family. oh i guess i shouldn't have said that

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The Pre-Timeline of Dimension 20

Just because I've seen a lot of confusion about this following the release of The Roll of a Lifetime: How Dimension 20 Sold Out Madison Square Garden, in which the story of how Dimension 20 got started is edited in such a way that viewers come away with an odd impression about the timeline, I thought I'd put together as clear and annotated a timeline as I can of how and when the Intrepid Heroes met, got into D&D, and got cast in Dimension 20, plus some of the greater context they were operating in. All of this is publicly available information, gleaned mostly from years of interviews, Adventuring Parties, NADDPod Short Rests, and social media posts.

1998: Noted science-fiction author Elaine Lee signs her ten-year-old son Brennan up for a Dungeons & Dragons game at October Country, a local comics and gaming shop, in order to provide him with a social and creative outlet after having to start homeschooling him due to pervasive bullying at school. Within weeks, he begins running his own games for fellow children.

December 1999: CollegeHumor.com launches, posting user-submitted funny and/or titillating content from around the web. Within a few years, banner ad revenue and merch sales have made its founders young tech millionaires. By 2004 they are hiring writers to produce original content.

August 2006: CollegeHumor is acquired by InterActive Corp. Shortly thereafter, Sam Reich is hired to produce video content on the strength of videos he'd posted online of his improv team Dutch West.

April 2007: CollegeHumor staff writers Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld begin posting videos of themselves performing absurdist sketches in their downtime at work; this inspires the long-running Hardly Working series, in which CollegeHumor staff appear as heightened versions of themselves in the office.

2008: Brian Murphy is hired to answer phones at the CollegeHumor offices. He soon begins writing for the website and appearing in videos, striking up a nerdy friendship with staff artist Caldwell Tanner.

2011: Emily Axford is hired by CollegeHumor as part of a wave of new talent as the original CollegeHumor cast moves on to bigger opportunities. She and Murph are memorably cast as romantic interests in Jake & Amir videos; some time later, they begin dating.

summer 2014: CollegeHumor's video team relocates to Los Angeles in order to establish themselves as a traditional TV production house, including shows like Adam Ruins Everything and the Jake and Amir series Lonely and Horny. Murph and Emily are among the cast who make the move. They marry in September and begin developing the TV sketch show Hot Date.

Early 2015: Siobhan Thompson, Zac Oyama, and Grant O'Brien are hired to write and act in sketches for CollegeHumor as cast turnover continues. Emily and Siobhan become close friends, and Zac bonds with Murph and Emily over anime.

August 2015: Jake and Amir, having quit CollegeHumor earlier that year, start the podcast network Headgum, whose initial slate of podcasts is shows by other CollegeHumor alums.

November 2015: Brennan Lee Mulligan wins $50,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, pays back a loan for medical expenses, and begins the process of relocating to Los Angeles to pursue more opportunities in production and development.

July 2016: Siobhan throws herself a birthday party, inviting people she knows from doing comedy in New York and Los Angeles. At the party, Emily overhears Brennan talking about D&D and corners him to ask him to run a game for her and her friends. During the conversation, Zac turns around, asking what they're talking about, and gets invited too. Siobhan, Zac, Emily, Murph, and Adam Ruins Everything producers Jon Wolf and Travis Helwig start playing in a home game with Brennan DMing. Murph plays a paladin, Emily a druid, Siobhan a ranger, and Zac a monk.

around the same time: Lou Wilson meets Brennan through Upright Citizens Brigade (where Brennan coaches improv) and begins playing in a different home game as a barbarian. Both of these games are played in 3.5, Brennan's preferred edition of Dungeons & Dragons at the time.

September 2016: Murph, Emily and Caldwell start 8 Bit Book Club, a podcast about video game adaptations, on the Headgum network.

April 2017: Ally Beardsley is hired (along with Raphael Chestang and Rekha Shankar) to join the CollegeHumor sketch-video cast, as Siobhan has left to pursue other opportunities and Murph and Emily are busy with Adam Ruins Everything and Hot Date. During this round of hiring, Brennan is considered but doesn't make the cut, although a few months later he is hired part-time to write questions for Um, Actually. Ally and Zac become close friends and perform improv together.

summer 2017: Zac leaves CollegeHumor to write on a new season of Adam Ruins Everything. Rather than go through another round of auditions and hires, Sam bumps Brennan up to main cast.

fall 2017: Wanting more of a return out of their investment, IAC insists on CollegeHumor starting its own streaming service. Existing staff are required to pitch original shows. Brennan is halfway through writing a pitch document for a TTRPG actual play, citing the success of The Adventure Zone and Critical Role, when he is called into a meeting and asked how he would feel about DMing an actual play.

October 2017: Brian Murphy guests on If I Were You, Jake and Amir's flagship podcast, and explains Dungeons & Dragons. Jake is intrigued, Amir not so much.

November 2017: Dimension 20 begins the planning stages. For the next three months, Brennan works with producer David Kerns, coordinator Ebony Hardin, director Michael Schaubach and designer Rick Perry to develop a unique set, feel, and pace for the show. After some chemistry test games, the initial cast is set as Brian Murphy, Emily Axford, Siobhan Thompson, Zac Oyama, Lou Wilson, and Rekha Shankar, who has never played before.

December 2017: At a Headgum Christmas party, Jake Hurwitz corners Murph and suggests that they start a D&D podcast so that Jake can play.

January 18, 2018: Murph, Emily, Caldwell and Jake announce Not Another D&D Podcast on an episode of 8 Bit Book Club.

February 7, 2018: The first shooting day of Fantasy High, which will be the first season of Dimension 20. Only a few weeks before shooting, Rekha has a scheduling conflict and can't fit Dimension 20 in between her duties as head writer of CollegeHumor's sketches and developing other shows for Dropout; Ally Beardsley becomes her replacement at the Dimension 20 table. It is Ally's first time playing D&D at all; it is Brennan, Zac, Siobhan, and Lou's first time playing 5th edition. Earlier that day, Brennan shoots the first CEO video, which will net him viral notoriety and a vocal fanbase within the CollegeHumor audience, with an undercurrent of "finally, a straight white man" to the praise.

February 8, 2018: The first campaign episode of Not Another D&D Podcast is released. It releases weekly thereafter, and they are 32 episodes in and have done their first live show before Dimension 20 premieres.

September 26, 2018: The first two episodes of Fantasy High are available when Dropout goes live. It is the immediate breakout hit of the platform, so much so that the second season, The Unsleeping City, goes into production while Fantasy High is airing; but because it will take so long to edit before it's ready to air, a short "sidequest" is filmed in a weekend with Matt Mercer, Erika Ishii, Amy Vorphal and Ify Nwadiwe from the online gaming world and Mike Trapp and Rekha from CollegeHumor to tide the audience over, establishing D20's production rhythms for the next several years.

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Another post reminded me about the lead-lined box the Nein put the beacon in, and it's a little thing but honestly it's one of my favorite things they did because it felt so grounded in the reality of the world.

Liam as Caleb was the first one to suggest doing it, and he did so unprompted. Matt didn't have him roll an Arcana check to know that lead blocks magical detection. He already knew that, probably from seeing written in the Detect Magic spell.

Some might consider this metagaming, but even if it is (I don't consider it so) it made Caleb seem more real. He used his knowledge of magic that he learned from the Academy to figure out the best way to hide this magic artifact, in a way that felt perfectly natural and not gamified by hiding the knowledge hidden by a check.

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It’s so interesting to me that Kingsley Tealeaf, unlike any of the previous people in charge of that body, does actually take interest in the past and those who came before him.

Molly used to run away from any mention of the person who had his body before hand. Nothing good ever came out of it, and every interaction with that past was intimidating and unpleasant to him. A reminder of the shaky foundation and loneliness his life started in. The only thing he knows, and needs to know, about that person, is that they died, and got buried in a lonely shallow grave from which he had to crawl, empty and alone.

Lucien, when he came back, didn’t want anything to do with Molly either. He didn’t care for “the speck”, he wanted nothing to do with the full life he lived, with the person he was. That person was nothing. There is only Lucien. Even as he yearned for the things Molly left behind, the warmth and love that the Nein had for this thing he saw as insignificant (yearning enough to consume, to try and pull them into himself and devour them to maybe feel their warmth), he never bothered trying to understand why. He didn’t have to crawl out of the grave probably, he had Cree to help him out, but he was still the man buried once before, not too far from this grave.

But Kingsley? Kingsley Tealeaf was born in the open, surrounded by people he barely recognised, but immediately showed him care and love. He was covered, warmed, held. Even when he found words again (with help and meddling from these people, who had been there for his entire life), even when he tells them “I am not the person you wanted”, they love him anyway. They don’t leave him. They tell him about the past, and he listens. This isn’t him, this person they’re describing with so much love, but… it’s not a stranger. Not an adversary. A brother. Someone he shares some things with, someone he can pay homage to, who came before him and paved some of the way. Who, in death, gave him the gift of a stable foundation, of people he can come back home to, who can tell him about what the world used to be for this body he’s in, and who the person who came before him was, when he’s ready.

And maybe sometimes they get sad. Maybe sometimes they look at him weird, like they are grieving. They are! They are grieving a friend they lost, but they’re not trying to force him to be that person. They help him find out who he is instead. And with that security, the knowledge that he can forge a future without expectation to repeat the past, he can look back and find out who these people who came before him were. Because when he’s confident he’s his own full person, these other people aren’t a risk to his identity, just a facet of the past he gets to explore.

He called his ship the Mollymauk. The vessel that carries him into the future named after the brother who in death left him the foundation of one.

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Nott steals a gun

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caleb widogast. the volstrucker don't exist on paper. how do u document a man that's fallen thru the cracks? u don't u lock him up and assume he'll never have the mental capacity to ever get out again. he gets out and takes a veiler with him. the organization of ghosts is now haunted and this motherfucker's got some unfinished business

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i think what made the cr2 top table dynamic so great is that fjord beau and caleb are fundamentally Normal^™️ people who all had to react to the oddities of the world and bottom table was always a collection of weirdos even in their native environments

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Essek's home was so barren when the nein first came around... but I think it's different now.

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security rituals

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Quiet moments

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Do you think he ever sat under the Xhorhaus tree while the Nein were away? I do.