Horus-scopes

The crew psychoanalyze each other at least twice during episode 19 of the Rascal Radio Hour, which features everyone but Rowan (she brought home an illness souvenir from Gen Con) wading through a dense thicket of tabletop news from the last two weeks. They discuss two new RPGs adapted from book licenses and what exactly is gained when making that jump. Later, they break down White Wolf's new creative director and an unfortunate (but ultimately insubstantive) brush with AI.

Oh, also, Gen Con happened! The back half of the podcast breaks down some of the more interesting bits that happened at, and around, the biggest US convention of the year. Gen Con is staying in Indianapolis through at least 2030, Shadowrun goes solo, and Brennan Lee Mulligan takes the reins of Critical Role's fourth season. Somewhere amongst it all, the crew manage to spelunk through The Question Dungeon and finally answer a really important questions: are y'all burned out?

Also, it's History Week at Rascal! We've published some incredible articles to celebrate our August Subscriber Drive. You can get 25% off the first six months of a subscription by using code DJNAY.

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Here's an excerpt:

Thomas: It's interesting because these shows are completely different. Critical Role's seasons are not 100 hours of TV, right? They're 500 hours. They are so big. And Brennan Lee Mulligan has never done that. So, I don't know whether this means Critical Role 4 will be different, or if it means Brennan will do something different. For everyone who was like, things are things are getting a little stale over at Critical Role, this is going to be huge.

Chase: I think it will probably come alongside some changes because — if you're interested in actual play from the highest level, looking at the largest players, you can read Em Friedman talking about this on Polygon's tabletop section, which Polygon is not what it used to be. But she wrote an incredible story looking back at Critical Role at the end of its third season.

What do the actual players, the cast, want? And what do the people who watch it want for whatever Critical Role looks like next? It's a really complicated question to pick through. And ultimately I think she does come down more on the side of it having to evolve after 10 years — actual play has changed, but Critical Role has really kind of stuck to its guns for a lot of it.

You can tell that there is some real fatigue building in Mercer and company and how they run that show. I think they are looking for a change up. And if you want to sign that they are dedicated to like changing up the format of the show, putting Brennan Lee Mulligan in the hot seat and moving Mercer off to the player side of the table is a really good indicator.

Lin: I just looked this up. There is a site called CritRollStats, and it shows how long the campaigns were. Apparently, campaign one was just under 450 hours. Campaign two was just over 550. And apparently, campaign three is just under 400 hours, which is just like a crazy amount of storytelling and GMing. Matt Mercer, if you need to retire, I get it. I understand. It's just a huge amount.

Chase: I have empathetic pains of a feeling that's very similar to whenever I used to play World of Warcraft. You could type "/played", and it would give you your time, first in hours and then days. And I imagine that there must be a similar feeling if Matt Mercer ever went to critrollstats dot com and looked at the hours on these campaigns.

Lin: God, any of them. It's such a huge storytelling commitment, and that only includes the stuff that's on camera. Who knows how much this doesn't include? The prep and the other talk back shows that they're doing. They have really done so much work over the last 10 years that it's kind of hard to even comprehend, even with critrollstats dot com helping me out. Brennan Lee Mulligan going is certainly news. I don't know what else we can say about something like this.

Caelyn: I'm interested in seeing what Matt is going to be like as a player on a full, long-term campaign. Is he going to be unleashing 10 years of pent-up forever DM energy in the most chaotic way possible? Because that would be highly entertaining.

Thomas: Forever GM Energy is actually being the most helpful player possible, you know what I mean? I want to be the nicest guy at the table so it's very probable that he's gonna be the opposite of Chaos.

Caelyn: I don't know. In my experience, it's a 50-50 thing. Sometimes, you say I'm gonna be helpful, I'm gonna help with the heavy lifting on the rules side without interjecting too much. And sometimes — especially if you've been playing with the same people — it's like, right, you fuckers. It's my turn.

Thomas: First scene of the game: "I drop my pants."