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[0:30] R. Alex Murray: Welcome back, adventurers, to Ale and Well Met! The Twenty Sided Tavern Podcast.

[0:36] R. Alex Murray: It is I, R. Alex Murray, your resident universal swing and taverner of things.

[0:44] R. Alex Murray: It has been so long. Thank you so much. We're so glad to be back.

[0:49] R. Alex Murray: This show has traditionally been a sort of one-shot and like improv meet character work sort of place. And we're going to switch that up a little bit. I think we're going to come back and make this more of a tavern, more of a table at a tavern where you can sit with your favorite adventurers and we can hang out and we can chat and we can get to know each other a little better. Because isn't that the point of all of this? So today we're joined by the two newest adventurers to Dungeons & Dragons. The Twenty Sided Tavern, Will Champion and Jasmin Malave. What's up, friends? Hey, everybody. What's up? I'm so glad to have you all here, first of all. Thanks for jumping back into this part of it. We've pretty much been just like hurling things at y'all constantly for the last couple of weeks.

[1:40] Jasmin Malave: Yeah.

[1:41] Will Champion: Yeah.

[1:42] R. Alex Murray: Yeah. But I'm just thrilled to be here.

[1:46] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. I mean, thrilled to have you. So I mean, let's start off there. So we're sort of in the cast 2.0 of the New York run, I guess.

[1:52] R. Alex Murray: Yeah.

[1:53] Jasmin Malave: And y'all are the newest folks in Jasmin, our mage, resident mage currently, and Will, one of our character swings. How's it been? How's it been like coming into the tavern?

[2:08] Will Champion: I feel like there's so many words to say, right? I'm just like, unreal is a big one. It still doesn't feel super real in a lot of ways that I'm gonna go in a few hours and play silly games with my friends. And that's my job. So good, right? And it doesn't feel like I'm four years in with this company. It's never it's just always everybody comes in pumped. Have you noticed that?

[2:35] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. Like every single person that walks in and walks out, just losing their minds. I mean, I had my first show just like a few days ago, right? This past Monday. And that is when it really struck home. This sounds silly to say, because we've been it's just simply what it says on the tin. But that is when it fully hit home for me that this is I am playing Dungeons and Dragons just like blown up in big for my job. That's like what? I don't know what more I could want out of my professional or personal life, right? Like, that's it. Literally. That's the end of it.

[3:13] Will Champion: Yeah. It's so ridiculous. I like I still I think I've mentioned it before, but there was a there was a point like I started playing at AD&D. I had the like, when I was like seven or eight, and I remember my parents being like, are you sure you want to? I don't this is kind of weird. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I like it a lot. This is the long game. I never I never thought that it would be like, oh, let me go play with a couple hundred people every night and party. When did y'all start playing D&D?

[3:41] Jasmin Malave: D&D specifically, only in quarantine, actually, but I was playing tabletop and other stuff before that. I played my very first game ever was Mouse Guard. And that was in like 2010.

[3:54] Will Champion: I don't know Mouse Guard, but it sounds fun.

[3:58] Jasmin Malave: It's adorable. You're all little like mice and you're doing your best.

[4:01] Will Champion: I know Mouse Ridder is that it's not the same. It's just another like, I love that we keep finding ways to be like, just be somebody cute and fluffy and tiny. And yeah, here's a sword.

[4:12] Jasmin Malave: I think we all miss Red Ball one way or another, right? Like that's, that's right. So yeah, I my first ever D&D session, I think it was third edition in my seventh grade, I we only played one session. I remember I was a drow looking for magic sunscreen and my party member was a centaur who desperately wanted to find a horse that he could also ride. So that's, that was that.

[4:40] Will Champion: Oh God, that's so good. The joke of like, centaurs, you can like, it's so hard to have a centaur in your party because ladders, right? Like, what if you need to?

[4:51] Jasmin Malave: Yeah.

[4:52] Will Champion: The whole shtick of it was we were given our DM again, she must have been in, I think a year below me. So she was in sixth grade, but she was crushing it. She gave us all this starting equipment and she was giving us all horses and was looked at the centaur guy and was like, yeah, you don't get one. And he like stood up and said, I'm, I'm sorry. And that was, that was his whole motive. But I didn't play D&D after that, just for sort of lack of ability to until freshman year of college. And that sort of started a downhill spiral that has led me to the tavern.

[5:24] Jasmin Malave: Amazing.

[5:25] Will Champion: Yeah. It's, I mean, the joke, right. Is that like, you can never get everybody together, right? That's just the meme of like, Oh hell yeah. I think that's, I'm going to start trying to like, that's I walk out when I'm DMing at the tavern now, which to be fair, I've done like three times now, but I want to get a thing like, Oh my God, we all met. Hey, everybody. I'm so glad everybody's schedules finally got together so that we could all get here. Especially you, Doug. You right, Doug, you were a pain, man. Thanks for rescheduling. But we're so glad that you guys are here. Cause it's just so hard. And like, I would play at summer camp when I was growing up. I played, that was it. Like the nerd counselors.

[6:04] Jasmin Malave: Yeah.

[6:05] Will Champion: I learned how to do outdoor stuff, like, and Dungeons and Dragons at the same time. At the same time. Like I would, I would like, I played Magic the Gathering on top of mountains in Maine, which is pretty great at like nine. Like we would all, we would be like hiking and then we'd like make dinner and pitch our tents and stuff and be like sitting, like picking fresh blueberries and like watching the sunset.

[6:24] Jasmin Malave: And so I'm going to be like, that's so lovely.

[6:29] Will Champion: Like carts and be like, Oh yeah, absolutely. And everybody busts out their decks that they've gotten their fourth edition deck, baby. Oh my God. Dear listeners. I'm the old one. If you haven't picked that up, that's, I think one of my main jobs is it's old.

[6:45] Jasmin Malave: Hey man, you gotta have it. You wizards are important. The deep floor is important. You gotta, you gotta know things.

[6:52] Will Champion: Oh man. Yeah. My whole like nerdiness was very, very, very indoors cause I was doing a bunch of community theater. And then when we were done with the show, correct. And we would have big giant co-ed sleepovers because there was always at least one family who had a brother and a sister. And so we would be at different houses and we would all just be hanging out together and we would fall asleep in like the living room areas, but we would just stay up late watching anime and then ordering pizzas and eating entire medium Domino's pizzas by ourselves.

[7:36] Jasmin Malave: 40 years old. And you have just described my ideal Friday night.

[7:41] Will Champion: Yeah. Let's let's do it. Let's go for it. I know. Right. Especially all the wife's out of town.

[7:46] R. Alex Murray: Oh no.

[7:47] Will Champion: Oh no. Oh gosh. I'm going to, oh, Papa John's. What's up? It's Papa Alex. You know what I need? You, you've got what I want. Get over here, man. I'm still kind of getting over it. Like I, at least the tail end of me being in school was still the last sort of chunk of nerds not being cool yet. Right. Like anime was like, you didn't really talk about it. I like didn't even really tell anybody in high school that I was playing video games, right? Like it wasn't even that kind of environment where I felt comfortable sharing it. So the fact that in the last, what is that? 10 years it's the sort of atmosphere around nerd culture has flipped and switched. And now we have a hundred plus people every night coming into the tavern screaming when we roll above a 15.

[8:32] Jasmin Malave: Oh yeah.

[8:33] Will Champion: Right. Losing their minds. I will say there, there was a, a, like Tyler Felix was one of our warriors rolled with a packed house, full, full house rolled. Um, it for a, like re-roll with advantage had rolled a one and then, and everybody went nuts and then rolled a 20 on the second roll. And it was like being in a sports arena. Like the room exploded. I saw people trying to rip their chairs out of the floor. Like it was people just losing their minds.

[9:07] Jasmin Malave: Um, I mean, Jasmine, didn't you roll it? Didn't you chuck two twenties at the same time the other day?

[9:14] Jasmin Malave: No, I, I chucked a one in a 20 at disadvantage. Um, but still, it's just like everybody goes, it's still got a big reaction.

[9:27] Will Champion: Group nerd gambling is what it is. And we're all just looking at a dive going, Oh, please. And we're all looking for that next hit.

[9:33] Jasmin Malave: Yeah.

[9:34] Will Champion: Yeah. It's just one more sweet crit, please. Please. I want to do exactly what I want to do as well as I can put it in my veins.

[9:43] Jasmin Malave: But you, I mean, you're not wrong. Well, it's like, I, again, old, like, I can't tell you the difference in the world before the Peter Jackson, Lord of the Rings movies came out and after that was my senior year of high school was the fellowship of the ranks. And in middle school, I got, uh, someone took a copy of the Hobbit out of my hand, yelled nerd at me and threw it right now. I was a 180 pounds nerd in the seventh grade and played football. So I did attack them physically, but, but like that just didn't happen four years later.

[10:27] Jasmin Malave: Yeah.

[10:28] Will Champion: Yeah. People are just, it's like, this is normal, which is awesome. Like welcome everybody. Hooray. Tiny nerds, every walk around, wave, wave. You're like, let your dork flag fly, man.

[10:39] Jasmin Malave: And there was like a whole period. So it's definitely evening out. It's still very, um, masculine heavy, let's say inside of the community. But when I was in middle school, um, as long as I've been a nerd for so forever, but for the entire time of it, it would always just be like me to maybe really close girlfriends who also were giant nerds and played games and other stuff. But it was like us playing DDR in secret and like having soft pads at home and like doing all these other little things.

[11:12] Will Champion: That's not being a nerd. That's exercise.

[11:18] Jasmin Malave: That too. Well, we, we literally did a Euro trip together, me and a friend, and we printed out sheets of the steps and put our headphones in and practiced on the plane in our seats.

[11:32] Jasmin Malave: And if I wasn't hanging out with her being a nerd, Krista shout out love you, if I wasn't with her being a nerd, then I was just really hanging out with a lot of the guys. I just had to hang out with the dudes doing LAN parties or like reading too much anime and nerd textbooks, like hiding her books in the back row. That's so funny. Fully seeing if Scott Pilgrim was in fact going to conquer the whole world in the back of social studies class. Literally that. Oh man, I just, there is, there is, I do miss all of that like just a little bit. But I mean, it's still, it's this weird. Have you all been immersed in it with like this is work long enough yet where like, I just forget that people don't know now.

Like I'll just be hanging out with my like normal friends and I'll be like, you know, blah, blah, blah, con check. Yeah, do natural magic items. Plus seven. A little bit. Yeah. And they're like, what are you talking about? Yeah, I mean, I had to like sit down and try and explain like what the rolling means, because she like understood in theory, the concept of like storytelling as a group exercise. I've been trying to like nail that one home for like 10 years. But the just the mechanics, the gameplay of D&D was something so foreign to her that just like giving her a little session like, okay, you're in the woods. You have your bow drawn, you hear a sound, what would you like to do? She tells me I want to maybe get low so I don't get seen.

I said that is where you would roll. That's the whole bottom. That's the game. That's it. But I think I love that. That's so good. Did you see what's her name from Punisher on a podcast doing literally exactly that?

[13:20] Will Champion: I know. Which is great. And I have done it since seeing that doing the thing you were just talking about it. I've done it like four times. And I'll say to people all the time. I'm like, they asked me what I do for work or whatever. And I'm like, do you speak Dungeons and Dragons? And they're like, no, a little. I know what a dungeon is. And so you know, you have to like translate things for people. Yeah. But that's such a good way. It's easier a little bit if anybody has played any kind of basic roleplay video game, right? Even something like, I don't know, Assassin's Creed, for example, which isn't exactly the same, but you want to be good at specific things. So you get items and train skills.

It's all Dungeons and Dragons just made digital, right? That's just what all of it is. Here's my reskin taking me all the way back. Let me just hop up my favorite soapbox. It's also what sports are. You practice the same thing over and over and over again so that every time you make a shoot a three pointer check, you've got a good chance of it going in. And like the NBA season is just the fellowship of the championship trophy. Like it's just let's get 13 people together who all have different powers and they need to learn how to work together well. And there's an old wizard man is their coach who's like, ah, yes, I hold the deep play like Isaiah Thomas did in the championship. And like and they have to work together to see if their magical team could. It's more like, I guess maybe more like Warhammer because you're trying to kill the other team.

[15:03] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. Yeah. But you know, that's like, it kills me that I don't understand why like, oh God, football. It's like a, that's a, they all literally have different powers and stats and like in different roles. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I just don't understand whether it's just rolling a disadvantage. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. This is awful. Yeah, absolutely. If you get injured. Yeah. Yeah. Penalty penalty minutes in hockey and stuff. It's all rolling at disadvantage. The trouble with this conversation, it's making me understand sports more. Like, yeah, you're welcome. This is my whole, this is, this is my quest is to unite, to unite the factions. Oh no. Um, we lost Will Fowler. He's back. Um, yeah. Right.

I mean, and that's it. Right. Bringing people together to my mom came and saw the show not long ago and she was like, I don't think I'm going to understand it. And I was like, it almost doesn't matter that mom. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to, we've got your back. We're going to teach you how, right? I know everyone keeps coming up to me, my friends who want to come see it. Don't know much about Dungeons and Dragons. If anything, I keep telling them the show runs in a lot of ways, like a tutorial. So the first 10 minutes of the show is us literally explaining what the next two hours are going to be. So yeah, we've got you. And then you learn about combat in a really like bite-sized way. Like it's really, uh, it's a really accommodating, it's really accessible. Yeah.

[16:12] Will Champion: I feel like, yeah, absolutely. But so by that, so that by the time you get to the end of the show and stakes are really high, everybody understands what's happening. Right. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's how like, again, to make the sports analogy every, every two to four years, everybody gets obsessed with the Olympics. None of us know what curling is, but like we decide I'm here for dressage. Yes. See, there's, there's a wacky one goal ball. I got into on, in this summer Olympics. It's insane. I mean, did you see any goal ball? Well, let me tell you, I didn't know what the hell it was. And I saw a clip of these three guys lying on the ground with like, with like masks on with a, the goal is the length of the whole tiny court about the size of a pickleball court.

And they're sort of all three goalies and they're all three like strikers. And they, they have to like pitch it underhand. And I don't, and, and then you, but you have to stay with like X amount of like, your body has to be on the ground. If you're not throwing the ball and you're just, you have to bowl it in past people. It's insane. But it's one of those things where I was like, I watched it once and I was like, I want to know everything.

[17:20] Jasmin Malave: If you can be. Sounds like something, somebody made to play on the great lawn.

[17:24] Will Champion: Yes. Sure. They just made it up with their friends while they were drunk.

[17:28] Jasmin Malave: Hey, Jasmine, Jasmine, that's, that's all, that's all games.

[17:32] Will Champion: Oh, all games are made up because the hunting gathering was done for the day. And so we decided if we needed, we were bored, we were bored and then it got dark and we hadn't invented electricity yet. So we had to be like, let's throw sticks at each other. Yeah. Yeah. That should be an Olympic game. Whatever that trampoline thing is that they're doing now. Trampoline thing. Have you seen it where people bounce like a ball off of this trampoline and another person catches a spike ball girl? Absolutely. I've played so much. There's a, Hey friend, there's a leak. There's a spike ball league. It's on, it's on some fricking ESPN 47 or whatever. There was a time there's professional cornhole. This is my pitch right now for it.

This is my pitch for the 20 sided tavern cornhole team. Uh, it's sponsored by us. Listen, all you need is I looked into it. It's sponsored by Johnsonville bratwursts. What? Oh, there's a league and there's a tour, man. Like all you need is like, I think it's a couple thousand dollars to register your team. And then the grand prize is like 15 grand if you win the league. I just won. I won bronze bratty. The bratwurst comes out with a bratwurst cannon and just starts closing you down with meat. Oh, that's a sentence. I wish hadn't been said. It turns out everybody wants a sausage shower. Don't lie.

[19:06] Jasmin Malave: Yeah, man. It would be all, it's all so goofy, but then you get into it and you get, and you learn and nobody has any problem getting, just deciding they're going to learn all about like this sport with like sliding rocks across the ice with brooms, which is again, an insane thing to decide you're going to do with your time.

[19:25] Will Champion: You're not even wearing skates. What are you doing?

[19:26] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. Why? I don't know if it's more or less insane than like get ball, throw in peach basket, hit, hit on ground a couple of times past your friend. Oh man. If you break down any sport that way, it falls apart though. It's all ridiculous. So thinking that the thing that you do is not ridiculous, the thing that somebody else is doing is ridiculous, is stupid and a waste of time. So anyway, everybody come hang out sports, sports people. Welcome. We'll explain nerd culture to you. Come hang out.

[20:02] R. Alex Murray: Oh man. What else? I do have some actual questions just for y'all. Do you have, I know you've got a lot of them, Will, but do either of the two of you have any like favorite characters yet? Is anybody like any of your characters like really latched onto you? I mean, I think I know Will's answer.

[20:17] Will Champion: You do. You do. I, again, I have a lot of them. I have explored very few of them. Only one of them in front of a crowd, but a few of them sort of behind closed doors. But I have such a soft spot for big lizard Layton. Like I just, I remember getting the, we have a cast Google drive where we get all the like the fun info on the characters and sort of look at their character sheets and whatnot. I remember looking at his character sheet and his character art for the first time, like a week after I joined, not even, and just immediately thought that if I was playing D&D with these 10 characters, that's my guy. That's the one I would, I would play with. And then getting to play him for my first night at the tavern, just like confirmed that just, just penciled that box in. I love him to death. Would die for Layton.

[21:09] Jasmin Malave: I'm so glad. I'm so glad that Layton has a, like a true installer pilot on stage. Cause I, I've played him a couple of times that I, he's fun. I love him. And he's also a nuke.

[21:21] Will Champion: Yeah. He can just really hurt people and also help you. I think he can just do three D 10 healing at will. Right? Like that was wild. He's got another one that like, I, I'm intrigued to see when it shows up on stage for the first time, but he can drain his own life into something else. He can, I've never made that work on stage before. And I really want to, I was going to do it on night one, but then my health got too low. I had two hits. So no, but yeah, he's the first time I got him out on stage. I, I spirit guardians to the combat tutorial and killed them all before anybody had a chance to turn the Holy Beyblade on and just rip through the hallway.

[22:04] Jasmin Malave: Oh my God. I just love that. I like that might be my favorite spell in Dungeons and Dragons. I just love that. I have this aura of like machine gunning little buddies that are just around me.

[22:17] Will Champion: Yeah. My Holy murder aura. Stand back. Holy murder aura. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

[22:23] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. I'm so happy. I got to see Layton the other day cause I'd never gotten to see it before. Um, but yeah, I, I don't know that I have a favorite. I came in thinking I did and I'm still kind of working out different things with the characters. I do have, I think in my heart, a favorite that hasn't made an appearance yet for the show. And I'm really excited for when I can bring her in. I don't want to like spoil anything for people. We can tease stuff. I think I teased it on discord earlier.

[22:54] Will Champion: I think you did tease it on discord. I think they're debuting with Bria Iyengar is when, when they're going to come in is what's happening. Um, so yeah.

[23:05] Jasmin Malave: We do have, oh man, I can't wait to see you play that person on stage because you did them in a character workshop like a couple months ago. Brilliant. Unbelievably funny. It's actually just a lot of the things I already like anyway, so I'm not actually making anything up. It's just like me being weird about mystic tarot woosh.

[23:27] Will Champion: Yeah, but I mean, like, that's it, right? Like you bring it into every single one of my characters is kind of a frat bro, no matter what. Anytime people ask me this question, I'm like, it's Chester. It's Chester Van Yardley. It's just me. It's just the drawing of me with a hammer. And yeah, it was great. And so I don't have to reach, you know, it's nice not being able to like have to go like, well, let me do research on crystals for this character. Like, no, I already, I have, I personally, Jasmine, I have my like chaos magic altar set up just behind me in the room. Like I'm right there with you, man. I don't have to, I do not have to pretend to be a mystical dude, bro. It's just what I do.

[24:14] Jasmin Malave: There are at least three tarot decks in this room with me right now.

[24:19] Will Champion: I don't, speaking of things that have become normalized in the last decade.

[24:24] Jasmin Malave: That one. Yeah.

[24:25] Will Champion: That's the one. Alternative spiritual rituals.

[24:28] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. Yeah. I was like, I think the first night you were DMing Alex, I think, yeah, I'm pretty sure. And Diego ended up as Chester and you had the conversation between the two of you and it was with the Chester art up in the back. It was like watching father and son speak, like passing the, passing the torch. It was lovely. I've also, I've done a thing before where like, if I'm Chester, I like the, you know, the bartender famously has a great big, bushy red beard. So it's easy for me to be like, Hey, what's up?

[25:02] Will Champion: I did see you do something like that the other day. It's very funny. Or I've done a thing where I like disguise self as one of the like barrier or whoever is one of the tricksters. And I'm like, and yes, and then poof, a big red, bushy beard appears on my face because it wasn't there before.

[25:19] Jasmin Malave: This is, you have to imagine this isn't how I look.

[25:26] Will Champion: Yeah. The Willick suspension of disbelief is you guys, it's powerful. When I'm on stage, you really have to be like, ah, yes, that man who looks as much like Gimli as a person could look is in fact a tall, lanky, elven bard. Fabulous.

[25:41] Jasmin Malave: Oh, on the subject of characters that haven't shown up yet, there's a fighter that I hope one day will come to the, uh, not a fighter, uh, a warrior rather.

[25:50] Will Champion: The warrior.

[25:50] Jasmin Malave: Um, I can't remember what their actual class is, but I.

[25:57] Will Champion: Who you can say.

[26:00] Jasmin Malave: I can say.

[26:01] Will Champion: Yeah. I mean, I can edit it out if you're not allowed.

[26:03] Jasmin Malave: My, my King Gordo, Gordo Ramekin.

[26:06] Will Champion: I am Gordo. Gordo Ramekin is, is in canon big time. Like he's been on the podcast. He's been in one shots. So he's, he's on this speed and also Gordo was Gordo's who I played in Pittsburgh.

[26:19] Jasmin Malave: And so he's been on the roster before.

[26:25] Will Champion: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Lots of Gordo. So he was, I couldn't get away from him. The first, like six shows in Pittsburgh were all Gordo Ramekin.

[26:29] Jasmin Malave: How can he's a martial? He's a, he's a martial fighter. He's a, he's a commander. He's real pure. He's a warrior and actually a fighter. Yes, he is a fighter.

[26:40] Will Champion: Yeah. Yeah. He's a, he's a real pure, uh, battle master, like Marshall. Yeah. He does. Yep. He does a lot of commanding, which is really, really fun too, because you, exactly. You can do shit in combat on stage where like, you can have the mage go again. You know what I mean? Like you hit him again, like fireball him again. That's I, the day he arrives at the New York tavern is, will be a good day.

[27:04] Jasmin Malave: Oh my God. I, I excited to see you do him. I'm excited to see Diego did a workshop.

[27:13] Will Champion: Feral. Yeah. So insane. And he's real fun too. Uh, he's yeah, he's great. He's got a big old, uh, uh, uh, cauldron flail. He just whales on people with this giant, like cauldron.

[27:29] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. That's so good. Ideal.

[27:35] Will Champion: Yeah. So we have, there's like 30 more, there's a bunch of people and I think we're just going to keep rolling them out as we can. So, you know, that's the, the beautiful thing about this too, is like watch this space, right? All the time.

[27:41] Jasmin Malave: Like it's just, has that been a thing to adjust to for y'all? The fact that we're truly are in like an improv show.

[27:51] Will Champion: Yeah. That's been a big, uh, that's been a new thing in my life for sure. I don't consider myself an improviser despite doing a lot of kind of audience based work. Cause I've so used to having a very set script, like doing murder mysteries. Here's all the canned things I need to get to. I'm finding ends with the audience just to like hit my bullet points so that they can solve this thing. And this is wildly different from that, but it's been so much fun.

[28:20] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. We've pretty much taken most of the canned text and like thrown it away.

[28:26] Will Champion: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's gone except for there's a couple like monologues now that are like monologues, which is fun.

[28:31] Jasmin Malave: Um, yeah. Yeah. I don't know. How about you?

[28:37] Will Champion: Well, I'm pretty much in the same boat. I, I would not have considered myself an improv performer before this. And it was the D and D flavoring of it all that drew me to the project. And that's again, why I say, oh my God, it's just doing D and D for work because that's what helped me not freak out working with these, or, you know, if I'm on stage with powerhouses like Maddie and Diego, like I was the other night who are, you know, veterans at this sort of thing. For me, it helps. It helped me to think of it as, oh yeah, you're just, this is just the role play part of a D and D game, right? You can just bounce around like that.

[29:08] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. And sticking around with my friends, man.

[29:14] Will Champion: Yep. So yeah, it's been an act of like trying to take the pressure off myself. Like you, this is don't think of it as like some crazy high level improv show. It's just D and D with your friends and a lot of your new friends.

[29:23] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. I've said that to myself so much.

[29:29] Will Champion: You know, what's funny you say that that's, I have a problem getting people to the D and D table because yeah, sure. That's why I have friends that are like, I don't know, I'm not good at improv. I couldn't do the character stuff. I couldn't do any of that. And I'm like, you don't have to. You can just, yeah. You can just come into whichever, whichever part of it you want.

[29:46] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. And if you're already, you guys already had that role play.

[29:50] Will Champion: Yeah. But that, I think that that was again, a couple of years ago, somebody defined D and D as like fantasy flavored improv with math involved. And that like shook me to my core when I thought of it that way. But it also helps when you have a group of people like those of you who've been there for a while, being as welcoming as you are, not just interpersonally, but professionally as well. You're so good at opening up spaces for everybody on stage that it never feels like no wrong answers.

[30:27] Jasmin Malave: Exactly. Everybody is. The level of support in this show. And like, we've, it really goes out to, to like, I mean, props to Michael Fell, who's our resident director for like casting so well. And like the fact that, you know, we, we all knew each other a little bit before you guys even came in. Right. Cause we've got this resident company and we're doing workshops every month. It's just, it's so cool to like, you said it too, Maddie and Diego are unreal. Like I feel every time I'm on stage with those two, it's just like, all right. Let's try to keep up.

[31:02] Will Champion: Yeah. It's crazy. We were, we were all hanging out. We went out for drinks after the show the other night and like, he just doesn't stop at one in the morning on a subway platform. He's doing portmanteau jokes.

[31:13] Jasmin Malave: We have a game, we have a game that we play backstage called portmanteau, where you just have to make, you just have to get somebody to say like, uh, see now I can't do it. Put on the spot.

[31:27] Will Champion: Uh, okay. I got one. Uh, okay. Um, gruff parks and rec manager is a seventies serial killer.

[31:40] Jasmin Malave: Right. Once one son of Sam.

[31:50] Will Champion: Yep. Unbelievable. Oh my goodness. And that's the game. That's the game, dear listeners. And like, we just will sit around, this will go on for a long time. And it's just the, like, it's just the, like the we just don't stop playing. Right. It's the, you want to play games.

[32:02] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. All the time. Damn. It's great. Everything off all the time. Walking down the street, he found something and turned it into a skateboard, like a lancer goofing all the time.

[32:16] Will Champion: Well, and also everybody immediately went to it, right? It's like, instead of your one dumb friend going like on a, uh, something that I think looks like you put chairs on, moves it around Dolly of some sort. Everybody's just like, Oh, yep. Got your back. Got your sport. Okay. Somebody's on the filming. Let's go. That's all right.

[32:31] Jasmin Malave: And, and we've done a stupid bit together.

[32:36] Will Champion: It's a company of goblins is what I'm learning.

[32:41] Jasmin Malave: Hold on. Well, you had one.

[32:44] Will Champion: Oh, uh, I think we've done this backstage before, but this is divine Greek patriarch stars in a musical set in Whoville.

[32:55] Jasmin Malave: So ready for that one. I had not heard that one yet. That's so funny.

[33:00] Will Champion: So dumb, but it's just like, I don't know, man, we like the, that's making space for people and like playing is it's, it's awesome. And like everybody that keeps coming in, it's really fun. Like, it's just an absolute dream.

[33:10] Jasmin Malave: Um, well, so that's backstage. I think my last like question for you guys is that like, do you, have you had anything happen? And I know, well, you're working with like one actual show under your belt, but like they'll trust they cause I started coming fast and loose.

[33:29] Will Champion: Uh, um, has anything happened to you like on stage that surprised you or they, you had any realizations like on stage that you like weren't expecting? You sort of covered it a little bit.

[33:44] Jasmin Malave: Well, with like going like, Oh, it's actually just actually really D and D.

[33:50] Will Champion: Yeah, that was a big one. Um, I think for me with my, my nerves around improvising have been calmed quite a bit by just kind of acknowledging my type of humor and sitting in my own strengths, which is being comfortable in silence. So I'm, uh, I let them be crazy and find a moment to jump in. And that's been working way better than my first few shows where I was trying to keep up.

[34:37] Jasmin Malave: There's one moment that I am not ever going to forget. It was actually with, I think it was you DMing, Alex. There was a moment where it was Quinton, not Quinton, whoever the apprentice, right? The apprentice of the night came down near the end of act two, was just laying into Ethel and Ethel just claps back, "You need to fix your wig." And that just took me out. Locked in. Oh my God. My favorite part about that moment is that it's because you forgot to bring the wig up and Stomp had brought it to you and dropped it on your head. So it was totally messed up. So I saw it and was like, "That's going to be my clap back." And as soon as I said that, Stomp stopped, turned around dramatically and gave such face acting that I was like, I felt bad for saying it.

That's like one of the sleeper sort of like, almost an Easter egg of the show is Alex Stompoli's face the entire time. Like you can absolutely come. We got to watch Stomp's face. We have these, we have patrons that come constantly, which is incredible. Shout out to all of y'all. I mean, I'll shout out Mikey in particular, like he's come to the show at least 40 times and he just comes and hangs out and he's like, I talked to him after a show and I'd be like, "What were you watching tonight?" And he's like, "Oh my God, I was just watching Stomp. I was just watching Stomp do his thing, watching the tavern keeper back there being like, 'What are you doing now, idiots?'" It's great. Always like a, always sort of Stomp seems like a babysitter who just wishes we'd go to bed.

[36:30] Will Champion: Oh my God. Don't feed the gremlins after midnight. Yeah, guys, the pizzas are eaten. We ate all the medium-sized pizzas. We've watched all the anime. Could you fucking go to bed? Time to sleep. Please shut up.

[36:41] Jasmin Malave: See, and the Zvezda part of my brain is like, there's the Virgo. Thank you, Virgo, for keeping us on track.

[36:48] Will Champion: Absolutely. Are there, does Faerun have Zodiac signs? Somebody has to know. Get on Reddit.

[36:54] Jasmin Malave: It runs under a different timing. I don't know.

[36:59] Will Champion: Sure. Because the stars are different, I guess, in the Forgotten Realms.

[37:03] Jasmin Malave: The weeks, it's like a 10-day, not a week.

[37:06] Will Champion: Oh, that's right. It is a 10-day, not a week, but there have to be, there's gotta be. That's the thing for us to research. Also, hey, reach out. A whole, there are at least two or three different forums I'm looking at right now that all are talking about the various astrology of Faerun. So nuts. God, I love this community. People, we are not the only ones thinking about this.

[37:24] Jasmin Malave: No, no, absolutely not. No, we could get into it. Well, I guess divining is different in the Forgotten Realms, right? Because you can actually talk to like—

[37:30] Will Champion: It's an actual skill.

[37:33] Jasmin Malave: Yeah. Well, and you can actually, yes, it's truly, you can scry and you can, yeah. And then also, you can really get in touch with a god and be like, "Hey, Tyr." And Tyr's like, "Sup, dog?" Like, he's there to there.

[37:47] Will Champion: Isn't there a whole part of the Strahd adventure where you'd have to deal with a Turokka deck, the definitely not Faerun tarot that's foretelling what's going to happen in the cast? There's something about that.

[38:00] Jasmin Malave: That sounds awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds rad. I've tried to incorporate sort of hard fortune telling into my adventures before. And it's tough because your players are, everyone who's ever DM'd a D&D session knows that you just can't. I quit writing long ago. Like, I quit. It's just bullet points. And then I usually have a text document that says, "These things are true now." And it's just like things and facts in the world that have come up because they just, they just take off. Like, they just take off in a different direction.

[38:41] Will Champion: I'm in media res in one that I'm DMing right now. Like, just got the party together. Just got them together to, like, get them in the same place. And they were, like, going and they were trying to, some bullywugs had stolen a cash box from a market. And they were, like, going, you know, for some money to get it because they were all broke. And they won because it was an easy fight. And I had them all in the same place. And then one of the guys just executed the sergeant there to watch them. Just killed him. Just fire bolted him in the back of the head. And I was like, "Oh, no. What? Why?" And I just took my, because, I don't know, chaos. He was on the run and he was an angry young man magician.

And he just, like, he's pissed at his dad, I guess. And just, like, shot this dude. And it was one of those things where I was like, I just, like, took 20 pages of adventure and just threw it out a window and was like, "Okay. Well, you have new problems now." And they solved it. And the things that they did with that are incredible. But, like, yeah, you know, I just, you can't, you cannot predict.

[39:55] Jasmin Malave: The tavern is a great example of it. There was a show a couple nights ago where the audience gave the party an item that was like, the all-seeing eye.

[40:05] Will Champion: The eye.

[40:06] Jasmin Malave: Right? And, like, that item wasn't planned because it's the one that's different every time. And, or the one that's created fresh every time. And that then inspired an entire arc for the rest of the story. No one can plan for it, right? And you just never, or also, like, I don't know, my first night DMing, I ran down for a name for a character and they named him Barb. And I started doing a Midwest accent. And I just went with it. And that just sort of informs the character for the whole night. And so everything, again, years. And it blows me away how different every adventure is because of stuff like that. Like, you know, just, it's the audience. It's the sixth player in the room that's also just going, like, "Do this. I want this. I want to do this." It's rad. And yeah, how's that? How's that going? I mean, you've done it once with an audience, Will, but, like, it's just a whole other thing, right?

[41:05] Will Champion: I mean, there was another night, I think, a little more recently, the item that showed up was like, a golden heart forged in sorrow or sadness.

[41:16] Jasmin Malave: That was me. That was me DMing.

[41:19] Will Champion: You were playing Dustin, Jazz.

[41:22] Jasmin Malave: Yeah, we shoved it in Dustin's chest cavity to hold on to it. I'm such a harlot for that level of flavor. Like, it just works well in my head. Just little things like that. Like, my show on Monday, Maddie, like, as Tamblyn, dove through a portal in one of the shops that then had lasting fun story effects later because it just, you guys as DMs and as the bar are so generous giving little story gifts and then rolling with whatever nightmare fuel we use those gifts for.

[41:55] Will Champion: Well, and the audience, too, gives those gifts.

[41:57] Jasmin Malave: Oh my God.

[41:58] Will Champion: That's the, like—

[41:58] Jasmin Malave: We had this adorable little kid who, in the audience during that little part where you make up the item, give us the option of, what did he call it? A sword that kills anything.

[42:10] Will Champion: Crazy. Crazy.

[42:12] Jasmin Malave: And so we were like, "What?" It's the flaming, raging, poisoning sword of doom for any Adventure Zone fans out there. Yeah.

[42:19] Will Champion: Yeah. And so we were like, "Okay, so now we have a sword that can kill anything." And so we had to talk backstage during intermission, like, "Can we reincorporate this? Can we bring it back for the BBEG combat?" We're like, having a conversation with Connor. Connor and Stomper having a conversation about how that's going to actually play out, what the role will be, whether or not it's going to be a magical item, if it hits or not, because if it misses and it can't kill things, then it's not actually magical.

[42:44] Jasmin Malave: Oh, right.

[42:44] Will Champion: And so, yeah, so we discussed all this very, very quickly, and then we're able to bring it out for final combat. And we all agreed that whoever got the lowest initiative would be the one to incorporate it. And so we were all at a million miles an hour thinking about all these things while trying to do combat, and then making sure the final blow was actually the sword that the kid had offered us. And then you've got to get it.

[43:05] Jasmin Malave: And he lost his mind.

[43:05] Will Champion: The dice have to let you do the thing that you want to do. That's the big thing is that like, we do do a fair amount of like, you can't call it planning, right? It's a huddle. And it's like, it's like calling a play at a football game.

[43:18] Jasmin Malave: No! No!

[43:23] Will Champion: And everyone's just trying to go rapid fire. And then you meet the, you know, no plan survives contact with the enemy, right? It's like no plan survives contact with a chaos chart ever. We had these such fun thoughts about like, "Okay, how are we going to cleanse Tamburlaine of the strange shard of the havoc from the portal?" And we had an idea set up. And not 10 minutes later, Tamburlaine was a potted plant. And then like, well, half of that's gone out the window.

[43:50] Jasmin Malave: Yep.

[43:50] Will Champion: And that's just hearing you talk about—

[43:52] Jasmin Malave: Dice gonna dice.

[43:53] Will Champion: Dice gonna dice. It's, again, striking me particularly hard sitting here in my living room. You're talking about like, planning about the sword that kills everything. And it's just making me so hyped to go into work later today. Like this, we are, this is in theory, a professional conversation. The wildest professional conversation.

[44:12] Jasmin Malave: Yes, this is work. We're at work right now.

[44:14] Will Champion: Yeah. Yeah.

[44:15] Jasmin Malave: What a joy. What an actual treat.

[44:19] Will Champion: Audience engagement.

[44:20] Jasmin Malave: Yeah.

[44:20] Will Champion: And, you know, honestly, I think that's as good a place as any to wrap up our first chat. This is, this is a treat. This has been a treat. Thanks both of y'all for being here.

[44:29] Will Champion: Always.

[44:30] Jasmin Malave: I'm sure we'll do lots more. Again, listeners. Hi, I'm R. Alex Murray with Jasmin Malave and Will Champion. I think Jazzy's on stage. Oh, well, this will drop next Wednesday. But, so yeah, we're going to drop these on Wednesdays. And if you have questions for people, the best way for you to interact with this show is to get on Discord. There is a link in the episode description. There are tickets to our show. There's a ticket link in the episode description. Come hang out. We've already announced this, so I can say it again here. As we, as we're, as this drops, Felicia Day will be on stage with us in a week, for about a week, which is going to be nuts. And then we've got Aabria Iyengar coming in at the end of the month and Eric Ishii coming in, in a couple months.

And then there's going to be more guest stars. We're going to have more fun. Come hang out with us at the Tavern. We're there. We're kicking it. And watch, watch this space for more fun, too. I'm sure there will be one-shots and games and joy and nerdery. We're just happy to be back. Thank you for listening. And until next time. Ale and well met.