#I made this post because I saw to much Luke slander lately

[jokey05]

Luke Castellan is still the best tragic villain/ fallen hero of all fiction. And I don't like how the show is doing him, he is too nice, he should be angrier. The Book character is perfect. I don't even think Uncle Rick knows what a masterpiece of a character he created. The only thing that should be changed is his last line to Annabeth, and even that I always read it in a platonic way. But the thing with Luke is that it hits you later. You are so angry with him after the betrayal, after that he is the main villain and does terrible things, and you want him gone, until he is bleeding on the floor still asking for others. Until he dies and you think of May Castellan alone in her kitchen waiting for a kid that is already gone. Until Percy asks for the drape.Until you read the secret diaries and realised how much he cared. Until you read the sequels and see that despite everything Zeus still acts the same. That when it gets you. That where I think the pjo show failed, too much explaining, we need to SEE this character arch. He should be scary right know, I still think the betrayal scene in the books is PERFECT. Percy is 12, Luke is 19 there is no way they are on the same level, that was a major point in the books. Also another major plot point I don't see enough is how Luke and Percy weren't friends. Maybe Luke had a sorta of mentor role for Percy in the first book, but the fact that they weren't superclose and Percy only got to know him through others is really important for the phrofechy and also what allows Percy to make the choice at the end of the last olympian. They have a much more complex connection that simply hero Vs villain and I wish more people could see that.

[loquaciousquark]

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E63 (May 21, 2019)

Sorry it’s late, guys. @eponymous-rose has narrowly avoided being blown away by tornadoes and I’ve narrowly avoided drowning in equally dangerous paperwork, so here we are at the end of all things. Preroll is post-its of donors for Red Nose Day.

Tonight’s guests: Sam Riegel & Liam O’Brien.

Tonight’s announcements: We’re opened by Mark Hulmes instead of BWF. He dabs. No one blinks an eye. After the music open, we find out BWF’s neighbor’s kid stole his keys and then he lost his wallet. It hasn’t mattered, because he’s about to be Mr. Ashley Johnson & people just keep giving him what he needs. They’re still raising money for RedNoseDay. Thursday morning, the Colbert one-shot airs on the Critical Role Youtube. You can donate at critrole.com/rednoseday. Mark Hulmes joined Taliesin & BWF today for an episode available on the CR Twitch.

Episode 63: Intervention

CR Stats: Caleb cast his 700th spell, Gift of Alacrity, on Caduceus. Nott rolled her 40th natural 1 this episode to understand the local sewer system. This was Caduceus’s first HDYWTDT. Everyone mourns that someone stole the Golden Snitch from Matt’s bag.

It’s more stressful not knowing everyone’s motivations, both within the party and the game world. Sam talks about Yasha’s mysterious past and Beau’s dangerous ties to the Empire, especially given how much they understood in the first campaign about (at least) who the bad guys were. Sam feels like once they have a shred of information, he wants to jump on it ASAP and make big, bold decisions on them. He’s dealing with the discovery that this might be not as great an idea. He’s not experienced this kind of “trepidation, failure, uncertainty...I don’t like this game. I don’t like it at all!”

Caleb likes using the little bit of dunamantic magic as a taste of a drug--each little hit makes him want more and more and more.

Danimancy? Make a Carrcana check. Sigh, Sam.

Sam made two big mistakes in the last fight: he missed the gender of the dragonborn, so he thought that one of the other voices Matt was doing was actually the dragonborn giving orders (and therefore the one in charge, while the drow was the one taking orders). He also saw the dragonborn leaving and was worried that he was waiting on the party to give him (Nott) the go-ahead to kick things off. He recognizes he put Caleb in a terrible position both in a meta yes-and sense and in the Nott-Caleb team sense.

The world devolves into campaign slander and propaganda. Everyone’s in it, including BWF and Dani. #samforpresident

Caleb told the Brightqueen about his past because he feels like they’re on a very tight timeline, looking for very slight drips of information like gold. He thought it was worth the shot.

Sam desperately wants to know what the missing years in Yasha’s memory hold. BWF tells him to get what he can out of her while she’s here; her show’s been renewed for another season. He sounds genuinely bitter as he says it, but he notes at least it’s the last one. :(

They ask Mark Hulmes about what Charm does for people. He helpfully tells us it doesn’t say if they remember or not. Sam also points out Nott has blown up Caduceus before, so doing a few more points to Yasha is *wigglehands*.

Caleb did not mean to kill the horse on purpose. Sam tries to get him to confess that on camera, but instead Liam needles him about not cuddling Henry.

Cosplay of the Week: @andy_srivastava’s cosplay of Beau. Gorgeous!

Both Sam and Nott feel the fight’s outcome was his/her fault. He expects her to feel very guilty next week. Sam genuinely felt and still feels bad about it. He also prefers hashing out reactions the night things happen instead of having to wait a week for the next Thursday. He feels it’s more genuine.

Caleb is very worried about Jester’s mom and Astrid’s crew finding ways to use her mom as leverage. He’s also worried about the kid, but is glad Shakaste is going to get him. Liam also always imagined running into his old crew against the backdrop of the Empire, and is now very worried that if he runs into them soon he’ll have the added perception of being a traitor since they’re in the Dynasty.

Liam and Caleb both were surprised he was given hints of dunamancy so freely. He looks forward to learning more.

Liam totally understands how easy it is to miss things now. He’s constantly looking things up and reading in an attempt to understand his spells, and therefore missing parts of the battle. He greatly sympathizes with Marisha. Sam, on the other hand, is finding it hard to adapt to rogue life; he doesn’t like the necessary “out there, bold choice” nature of rogues in D&D and having the pressure of making big decisions very fast. He prefers Scanlan’s nature of sitting in the back, casting spells, and being more reactionary than instigatory. Liam always is afraid of picking the wrong spells, and finds it much harder than Vax. BWF: “Dagger dagger dagger...dagger dagger dagger dagger?” Liam: “I kept track of that fine, it’s everyone else that was wrong.”

Sam is shocked the D&D Beyond campaign bit has dragged on. BWF calls his rebuttal “bogusly weak,” and Sam looks genuinely aghast. It’s hilarious. “I don’t know how he got to you, Brian, but this feels like coming on Fox News! You’re a partisan hack! I won’t take it anymore, but I love attention, so I will stay.”

Nott is super interested in the dodeca’s ability to give people different bodies, but Caleb is still the clearest path to getting her body back. It’s complicated because the Dynasty souls are “chosen” and Nott’s not likely to be so.

Liam is very excited to see this magic system Matt has created in dunamancy. Did he create it in response to Liam or had he already thought about it? Sam tells us he’s always been thoughtful about fate and the subverting of it. Liam is so pumped because in campaign one, fate strings existed and were uncontrollable, but in campaign two we’ve “developed physicists, tinkering.”

In re: Essik, Nott’s just happy Caleb has found a friend. She wishes he’d bring him home more often.

Sam finally busses Henry’s cheek and affirms to us that he actually loves dogs. Everyone in his family is voting for a new dog except for his daughter, who wants a cat.

Liam doesn’t want everything to be cat-themed, but likes retouching a few spells here and there for flavor. He also wanted to differentiate it from Scanlan’s Bigby’s Hand. Sam thinks he should reskin more spells.

SPOILERS FOR C1 IN THIS QUESTION. Sam talks about rogue high-stakes moments as genuinely, surprisingly stressful. Liam says Vax was stressful but exhilarating, especially when it came to moments that conflated poor meta decisions vs roleplay decisions. He specifically mentions Raishan’s chase as a terrible in-game decision but one that was right for the character. He and Sam will always do what’s right for the character, even if it’s bad narratively in the moment. Sam says he got a lot of support from the group thread this past week, though. END SPOILERS FOR C1.

Fanart of the Week: a gorgeous Caduceus portrait by @larndraws.

Nott trusts Shakaste to get Luke traveling safely. Sam also drops a bombshell on the world by telling us Luc is spelled Luc. It’s just that no one’s ever asked. Heavens!

Caleb’s made an effort to tell people he cares for them, but he fears it at the same time. He’s afraid he’s going to be put in a position where he needs it too much. Brian asks if he believes he’s truly irredeemable: Liam says there’s a certain road where he could feel he atoned, and there’s a road that might lead to balance, but there’s never a brass ring that he could reach that could let him relax entirely. I don’t entirely understand the metaphor, but I get what he means.

Sam likes that the theme of this campaign seems to be “atonement and reconciliation” compared to the first campaign’s “finding family.” There’s a bit of that in this campaign too, but he likes how everyone has something in their past that they’re clinging to, and he’s interested to see who will be able to resolve it, who will be able to handle it, and who won’t be able to let it go.

Mark Hulmes come on to talk about the Stream of Descent, which happened last weekend. He’s the DM for High Rollers, which airs at 9am Pacific on Sundays.

BWF talks about how C1 had a lot of the Hero’s Journey in various forms, and C2 feels a lot like “what it means to be good.” He doesn’t feel they fit the “antihero” archetype very well.

Liam thinks that if Caleb were going to leave the campaign, he’d have done it already.

Part of Caleb’s generation was to create a character the world would shun, and seeing if he could find a way to find compassion for them. He mentions the poem written for the Boston marathon bomber a while ago. BWF talks about how it’s a really interesting character choice because it depends on the rest of the table being willing to stick around and seek out that redeemable quality in your character, even when you’re making decisions that are true to the character but bad for the table/the rest of the group. You can’t always expect that to work with every group you play with.

Mark talks about Calliana being the other end of the spectrum from Caleb, because she also has a history of having done very terrible things, but she was taken in by a family who helped her understand she’d been manipulated and it was not her fault. He’s desperate for his recently mentioned package to be picked up because she has some messages for Caleb in it. Now she tries to see the best in everyone she meets as a result of her history. He has a whole folder of fanart of Calliana on his wall. Awwww.

It’s still never gotten old for Liam or Sam either.

Mark endorses Sam for President. Good job, foreign fellow. Is it Thursday yet?