The Mythcreant Podcast

One episode simply wasn’t enough to say everything on our minds about the mechanics for D&D’s new quasi-edition, so we’re back for part two. This time, we’re focusing on the honestly baffling ways that WotC has chosen to increase or decrease different classes’ power levels, including a huge boost for the wizard, which was already D&D’s strongest class. Guess that’s why it’s not called Fighters of the Coast.Show Notes Champion Fighter Damage Spell Modifying   New Druid  Legend of the Five Rings  Avernus  Twilight Cleric Transcript Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Oren: Hey everyone, Oren from the future here for a final time. This is the conclusion of our D&D discussion that we had to pause in the middle because it went for an entire hour. Enjoy!  It has been hard to take seeing with each new class release a whole bunch of nerfs, just tons of nerfs on various classes, many of which were not that strong to begin with. The Rogue is the most obvious example. And the classes that did get buffs were very small, like someone did the math, and sure, Champion Fighter does a little more damage now than they did before, even with the nerfs to all the important Martial feats, but it’s not much. And then here comes the Wizard – Ari, Oren: [Laugh] Oren: – and the Wizard, who was already the most powerful class, gets this amazing spell modification ability, which is just, my god. Like I love it, but it is so busted.  Ari: I want to talk about that a little bit, actually. The buffs and nerfs, specifically with that Champion Fighter, that series of videos that came out about this from some of the D&D content creators that I follow, there’s a couple of thoughts on this. So they were correct that at some levels, with some assumptions, the new Champion Fighter does more damage than an old 5e Champion Fighter doing the same build. But there’s a couple problems with that.  One, it has certain assumptions, specifically what your accuracy is, and that matters a lot because the 5e version is using the minus 5 to hit plus 10 damage. So the more accurate you are, the stronger those abilities get. And they’re also assuming that the old Fighter would be doing the same build as the new one, when, if you were really optimizing a Champion Fighter, you would be doing a ranged crossbow build, which you cannot do with the current 5.5 version. So there’s a couple of things wrong with that. But let’s just assume that those problems, whatever, we’ll put those to the side.  But one of the ways that it’s doing more average damage now is the weapon mastery that says when you miss, you do your stat modifier and damage, even if you miss. And that obviously brings up your damage floor from 0, to 3 to 5. That’s going to increase your average a lot because 0 is gone. You can’t do 0 damage anymore. That increases the floor and the average, but it actually decreases the ceiling because you’re no longer getting that plus 10 to damage. And, that’s fun.  Most players that I see and the way I hear it talked about, doing 50 damage in one hit is more fun than doing 50 damage across a bunch of other hits. Even if your damage is the same in the round, I’m doing 50 damage either way, but I hit five times for 10 damage each is less fun. Increasing your damage floor and average with a consolation prize mechanic of “you missed, but you still do a little damage” isn’t fun. It’s good. And I’m glad it’s in there. I think it should be. But they removed the big numbers. We know players love big numbers because they keep loving crits, even though crits are statistically very small damage boost. Crit fishing builds are popular. People enjoy them even though their damage is bad because people like seeing big numbers.  Oren: Numbers big, okay. Big numbers make big brain chemicals.  Ari: I like big number too. And so I want more big numbers. And so when they removed all the ways to do big number, that’s not, even if it’s not a nerf, there are still arguments to be made that the new version is worse. Even if you consider it a buff, it’s a buff in a way that’s less fun for the players. And that’s not good. That’s for the Martial side of things. We still haven’t seen the Monk, so we have no idea what that’s doing.  But talking about what you were mentioning with the casters, it’s so weird because I mentioned earlier in our discussion, why do you release something when you know the answer? The wizard spell crafting system. I cannot imagine the designers of the game looked at that and thought it was balanced, because anyone who understands how D&D works looks at that and says, “This is broken”. Even if you don’t try to exploit it, which some people are coming up with ways you could break it, just using it as intended. It is way too powerful. What response do you think you’re going to get when you ask players about it? So there’s that.  And then there is the Sorcerer can wish and break your campaign once they hit 18th level. Those were the two mechanics that stood out to me as “Why do this? Why are we doing this?” It’s making casters stronger, which isn’t in itself a bad thing. But when you look at what they’ve done in the rest of the game, generally keeping power pretty similar or lower than what it was before, why are casters the only one getting this treatment when they were the ones who needed it the least?  My tinfoil theory for at least the wizard spell crafting is that they made that system and couldn’t come up with a good way to balance it, so they released it as-is to see what people came up with, to see if there was a better idea than what they had. And there are a lot of good designers out there in the third-party scene. So maybe one of them can come up with a good thing and we’ll put it in their feedback, or release a video about it or something.  Oren: It’s a pretty comfortable looking tinfoil hat you got there.  Wes: [Laughs] Ari: It is! But I’m trying to imagine why I would release something like that. And that’s the reason I can think of. What am I gaining from releasing something that I know is overpowered and I know all the feedback is going to tell me it’s overpowered? And the answer is: Get some free feedback and testing on a possible fix. I’m not asking for feedback about the mechanic. I already know the answer about the mechanic. That’s my tinfoil hat theory on that one anyway.  Oren: So, coming to Mythcreant soon, how to balance the wizard’s spell modification ability? [Laughs] Ari: The boring way is just to increase the spell slot level of whatever spell you modify. Someone’s probably come up with something more interesting, but looking at it off the top of my head, that’s what I would do with it. It’s very confusing what they’ve chosen to buff. But on the bright side, the spell casting is exciting. I think that’s cool. I want the spell crafting system to exist in the new edition. I hope it does. I hope they figure out a way to make it fair. And I hope they remove that new Sorcerer ability because it’s awful and I hate it. I hope they keep one of the cool things that I actually got excited about.  Oren: I would be very sad if the new Wizard came out and it was just the old Wizard and they were like, “You said the thing was overpowered, so we took it out”.  Ari, Oren, Wes: [Laughing] Ari: I’m hoping that’s what happens with the Druid because boy howdy, did they not understand how to make the Druid properly.  Oren: What exactly happened with the Druid? Can you remind me?  Ari: So the Druid has the newest in a long line of mechanics that are moving towards, instead of a bespoke series of stat blocks you choose from, you instead get a stat block template that you then layer flavor over it. So instead of turning into a brown bear, I turn into a “Beast of the Land” or whatever they called it. But I can say it’s a brown bear, but I’m not a brown bear anymore. Doesn’t matter what I am. I’m an elephant. I’m a brown bear. I’m a saber-tooth tiger. I’m the same stat block. I personally find this a very bad approach to design. I think at best you have something decently powerful and flavorless, because now it is completely on the player to come up with flavor for their mechanic. At worst, you have something weak and flavorless, which is the worst of both worlds. And that’s what happened with the Druid. Its new forms had zero inherent flavor to them and they were also bad. Like bad enough that the Moon Druid was better off not using its shape shifting, which is really not where you want your Moon Druid to be.  Oren: The Moon Druid is literally a subclass for using shape shifting. That’s what the Moon Druid is for.  Ari: If your Moon Druid doesn’t want to shape shift, something happened, because they took away, one of the big things about Wild Shape was it gave you more health, especially as a Moon Druid. And that’s very useful when you have a really low AC because you’re having a 13 AC because you’re a bear. So they took that away. Now it’s just the Druid’s health. I think it gave some temp HP maybe if I remember correctly. If it gave HP, it was a pittance. Not only did you not gain a lot of bonus XP, but you actually got easier to hurt and you had to be in melee. And so now all of a sudden your caster who is squishy because Druids only have a D8 and your AC is bad and you didn’t get enough bonus HP from your class feature. So you are easier to hurt while you are shape shifted. And when they knock you out, you literally are knocked out. And also its damage was bad. Its damage was arguably worse than just a Druid using a quarterstaff and Shillelagh.  So it’s another one of those things is, what are we testing here? Everyone agreed this was bad. So I imagine the folks at Wizards also knew it was bad. So I don’t know what feedback they were looking for there. And I don’t have tinfoil for this one because the balance for this one is way easier. You just make the numbers better. So I don’t know what they were looking for in the Druid.  But I hope they walk it back because the advantage of templates, which they’ve said, is that it’s easier on new players, especially because you don’t have to look through a bunch of monsters to figure out which one you like. Which, I sympathize with, but I think it’s worth that because it keeps the flavor and the fantasy of your character alive without you having to do all the work yourself. ‘Cause I know a popular saying in the D&D community is “flavor is free”, but that has its limits because otherwise you could make a game that had no descriptive text. It just told you “This ability does X damage to a target”. I won’t tell you how. It doesn’t have a name. It is “damage spell one”. Oren, Wes: [Laughing] Ari: If I designed that, people would be like, “That system sounds boring.” And then I said, “You can flavor it whatever you want. Flavor is free”. And they would rightfully call bullshit on that because that is a bad answer and you should have inherent flavor in your system and then you should let players modify it as they wish to fit their personal fantasy. That’s what you could do with shapeshifting.  It also is true with the Rangers’ companion when they change that to a template with familiars for Wizards and the like when they change that to a template, but especially for Druids because shapeshifting is such a core part of that class that you are now putting everything on the player. Whereas before, if I wanted to be like a Forest Druid, turning into a brown bear, totally fits with my character. But if I wanted to, and say I was from some other biome, I could be like “my brown bear is a little baby elephant”, instead. And I could reflavor it if I wanted to, but I didn’t have to because the game was giving me flavor to start with.  Oren: And it also just feels different. It feels like you have choices. In a perfect world, what it would be is you would turn into different animals for different situations. Now, of course, in reality, it doesn’t super work that way because D&D is not really a game where other things other than being the best in combat have huge value, but at least it gives you the feeling of that. Maybe I’m not always going to turn into a bear. Maybe sometimes I’ll be a wolf. Ari: Honestly, I think there is a middle ground to be had here. So in my redesign for the Ranger, I made pets a central mechanic. One of the ways I controlled that a little bit was I offered several choices from an expanded pet table, a roster of options for the Ranger. And I tried to cover a wide variety of flavors. I tried to make sure all of them were roughly equal to each other in terms of damage output or tankiness or whatever. And you could do that too, because I understand when you have something like Wild Shape in the game, it makes producing new content difficult because anytime you make a new beast, you have to think about “is this broken if Druids turn into it”?  Oren: A player is going to be this thing, so be careful.  Ari: Same with Polymorph and stuff like that, those open-ended spells. I do think limiting them to some extent is good because it allows you to design other cool things that you don’t want players to turn into. But just turning it all into one template is just not the way to do it. I would understand if a solo designer did that because it’s hard to design a lot of options like that. But Wizards of the Coast is the best situated to have enough time and resources to actually come up with a reasonably good list of options.  If nothing else, you could just look at the popular picks people take, and then balance those beasts, rebalance them to make them more balanced against each other. Make the direwolf as good as the bear in some situations, or something like that. That’s totally a reasonable thing and offer just a selection of, I don’t know, five beasts or whatever. That doesn’t sound super hard. I could do that in a day of work maybe or even less, because I did it with the Ranger. I literally did that already. I know it’s possible. I hope they at least come up with a couple options for templates and I know they did come up with some options, real options, better options and make them good.  Oren: Weren’t the options originally just your actual beast and then the one that has a swim speed and the one with a flying speed?  Ari: Yeah, and you did a little bit less damage if you picked either of the other speeds. I don’t know why swim speed did less damage because swim speed is not generally very strong, but that was how they approached it. So, I hope they do more of a middle ground or they just walk it back. If we have to choose, I’ll take just the old Druid with no changes because Wild Shape is cool and I like having a ability that rewards you looking at the breadth of the game and looking in parts of the game you might not look at otherwise. Or you can just google good wild shapes and follow whatever the internet tells you.  Oren: Do we know much about what’s going on with the new Artificer? I missed out on that entirely.  Ari: We don’t talk about Artificers here.  Wes: [Laughing] Ari: The playtests have, to my knowledge, made no real mention of them. I assume it’s not going to be in the new player’s handbook and maybe we’ll get it in an expansion book or something.  Oren: Oh really? Okay. I thought that was a joke. I thought there was an Artificer somewhere that I missed.  Ari: I don’t think so. I think the only class they’ve said they haven’t shown us yet is the Monks. I don’t think the Artificer is going to be there.  Oren: That would be hilarious. I thought, I was wondering about that because the Artificer was such a weird add-on to Fifth Edition. It was, for one thing, it was the only new class they ever released and it lacked a core identity. It has an identity flavor-wise but mechanically it lacks one. I was really hoping, I don’t know why I hoped this because I had no reason to think Wizards would do it, but I was really hoping that 5.5 would take what makes the Paladin work really well, which is a core mechanical identity with its smites and give that to the other half-caster classes. They did not do that. [Laughs] Ari: There’s another major point I’d like to touch on.  Oren: Yes, please.  Ari: So another thing that I’ve seen in the new 5.5 design is “multi-classing is too good and we gotta fix that”.  Wes: [Laughs] Ari: And I could not agree less. I enjoy optimization. I enjoy seeing what characters can do and it is true, at this moment, pretty much every optimized build uses multi-classing in some form. It is stronger than mono-classing. However, I don’t think the answer to that is to make multi-classing a lot worse, which seems to be what they’re doing. It should instead be to make mono-classing better, and this also solves a problem that D&D has where a lot of classes feel bad at higher levels, especially Martial ones.  If you make Martial stronger at high levels, not only does that make, “Hey, the Martial is more fun to play, that’s cool, we like that”, but it also means, “Hey, I am no longer being so heavily incentivized to drop this Martial character post-level 5” because now all of a sudden if playing a 14th level mono-classed Fighter feels really good, I might just do that instead of playing a Fighter–Ranger–Barbarian multi-class or some garbage.  Oren: Legend of the Five Rings actually did that between editions because back in the very first edition of Legend of the Five Rings, all of the various samurai schools, their first rank techniques were really powerful and everyone wanted to go around taking the first rank technique of each school, and I don’t even remember if that was officially allowed in the rules at that point – Ari, Wes: [Chuckling] Oren: – But it was a thing everyone did, both because it was cool in character, this idea of, “Yes, I have studied at every school in the land and I have learned their secrets”. That sounded like something that was perfect in a samurai story, but it was also just mechanically so tempting. So, in the later editions, and not every change in the later editions was good, but one of the things they changed that they were consistent about and that was great was that they made the later ranks of each school significantly better than the lower ranks and you could still make some pretty sick multi-school builds, especially in third edition, which got weird. You could do it and it was fun, but you also felt rewarded if you stuck with a single school up into the high ranks.  Ari: I would 100% agree, but instead for 5.5, they’ve made it better a little bit, like high-level Barbarian from what I’ve seen, mono, just the base class because we don’t have a lot of the subclasses, but both Fighter and Barbarians feel a little better at high levels than they did before, but they’re still not good enough and even with all the nerfs to multi-class, I’m still multi-classing a lot of the time from what I’ve seen of 5.5. One of their other solutions to this was to un-frontload some classes and to me, that is just not the way to go because low level is already boring in D&D and they’re making it more boring.  Wes: [Chuckles] Ari: One of the things they did is standardize when all the classes get subclass features in an attempt to A, kind of standardize things, make it a little easier, but B, to nerf one level dips into Warlock or Sorcerer or Cleric. And I get the reasoning, but the end result is now every class is boring at level one, instead of most of the classes are boring at level one.  Oren: I think they did walk that back.  Ari: No, they’re keeping that.  Oren: Are they really?  Wes: Oh. [Laughs] Ari: That’s one of the things, they’re walking back the “every class gets their class features at the same level”, but every class is still getting their subclass at the same level. So they’re walking some of it back. Some people are philosophically against it, the flavor of the character. I honestly don’t care that much about that. I can believe my Sorcerer doesn’t unlock the heart of their power until third level. That’s fine. It’s just for me, it’s a fun thing. I don’t want to wait till third level for every character before I get the cool stuff. I think every character should get the cool stuff at first level and just make your higher levels more appealing. And that’s how you get people to stick to your class.  Oren: Ari’s hot take is that first level shouldn’t suck to play.  Wes: [Laughs] Ari: It shouldn’t. I did that, just recently in my Avernus game. For the first time in Fifth Edition, I started a campaign at level one because we had so many new players. I’m like, “Okay, this is the campaign. If it’s going to be useful, it’ll be useful in this one”. And, even the new players were bored. It wasn’t just my two veteran players who were bored at first level. 5.5 does not seem poised to fix that problem. If anything, they are making it worse by trying to un-frontload the class. You just got to backload the classes too. And then people will stick with them because people already want to stick with them. And if your goal is to fix complaints with nerfs to multi-classing, that’s never going to happen. Because if mono-classing is the best, people are going to complain about that. If multi-classing is the best, people will complain about that. Let’s say level 20 Champion Fighter was the best build in the game.  Oren, Wes: [Laughing] Ari: Outperformed everyone else. It just did the most damage. It somehow could lock down entire fights. Whatever. It’s the best thing. People would complain so much. They would say, “This build is so simple. All you do is take 20 levels of Champion Fighter. It sucks. There’s no creativity. There’s no skill expression” or whatever. People would complain about it. Because I’ve seen those complaints about mono-class builds that are actually good. That’s what people level at them is that they’re not fun because you don’t think that much about them. You just take 20 levels of the class.  That is one of the complaints people had about Twilight Cleric. That you just take Twilight Cleric and you’re OP. If mono-classes are better, that’s the complaints you’re going to hear. No amount of balancing will fix complaining. People are just going to complain about whatever is good. Whether it’s mono or multi-classing. And I think it is very misguided to try and nerf them to fix them. You should just make mono-classing feel better to play. And the way you do that is by making it powerful.  Oren: I have actually recently encountered, that there is a philosophical argument against multi-classing because people don’t like the idea that a Warlock could make a deal with a patron and then also worship a god or something.  Ari: Oh yeah. I’ve seen people be like, “Yeah I don’t like it when my players multi-class when they’re just trying to be powerful”. I’m like, “Why? Why don’t you want your players to feel powerful?” That’s cool.  Wes: [Chuckles] Ari: I want my players to feel powerful. If they think that the best way to do that is some cool multi-class, great. In my game, I’ve seen some GMs say, “I only allow multi-classing if they come up with an in-character reason that I accept”. And I find that so silly. To me, if they come up with a reason, cool. That’s great. I like it when my players come up with cool reasons for why their character does stuff. I’m never going to require it. If my player just says, “I want to multi-class into Warlock because Warlocks will make me OP”, I’ll be like, “Great”.  Wes: [Laughs] Ari: Awesome. I want you to feel OP. Everyone should feel OP in my game if I can help it. It’s just so weird to me when I hear GMs be like, “My players are having too much fun and I had to put a stop to that”.  Oren: [Laughs] Wes: Wizards was clearly listening to those GMs.  Ari: I’ve heard that. When a lot of these nerfs were announced, there were people like, “Yeah, this was a problem and it was too good and whatever”. But it was fun. We want that. We want things to be powerful. Being powerful is fun. There’s a limit to that idea. You don’t want things to be so powerful they’re not fun for other people. But a lot of this stuff people complained, weren’t too powerful. It wasn’t ruining other people’s fun at the table. People see powerful stuff and they want it to be nerfed and they don’t think too much about the consequences and what that might mean overall. They’re just like, “Yeah, this is gone. This is going to replace it. And is it going to be more fun than what came before?” And so far, the answer I’ve seen is no.  Oren: Yeah, I get it. I get that you’ve had your game ruined by an optimizer and the GM didn’t take steps to balance things out for everyone else. I get that the urge is to be like, “I wish Wizards would come down from the heavens and nerf that optimizer’s build”. But I don’t think that’s the productive way to look at this. Now, we are coming to the end of our two-part discussion on the rules. But before we go, I just want to ask both of you, since you guys play D&D more than me, and Wes, we’ll start with you, are you imagining that you’re actually going to use 5.5 or are you just going to stick with the existing 5.0?  Wes: [Laughs] Am I going to use 5e 2024?  Ari, Oren: [Laughing] Wes: Can I get it for free? Yes. Am I not going to get it for free? No. Is someone else going to buy it and then I can take the time to learn the ins and outs and run a campaign that I can just play in? Sure. Am I going to make that effort? No. Pretty cut and dry.  Oren: Ari?  Ari: I will probably, in my own games, play some horrendous Frankenstein’s monster of 5 and 5.5. I will probably end up cherry-picking the rules that I like and I will put them as available to my group and then I will just leave the rest because a lot of the rules-tightening is stuff I do already and I’m just going to leave all the stuff I don’t care about. And I’ll be fine playing in one, whatever, if that’s what’s on the table. But for my own game, I’ll just continue making modifications and trying to amalgamate them into something fun.  Oren: Ari’s going to be running 5.25 over there.  Wes: [Laughs] Ari: Yep, exactly.  Oren: All right, Ari, thanks so much for coming to complain about D&D with us.  Wes: Yeah, thanks Ari.  Ari: Of course. I love complaining about D&D. This was so much easier than writing articles.  Oren, Wes: [Laughing] Oren: Next week, Chris will return and we will be back to our storytelling roots, but we just had to complain about D&D for a few weeks, so now you’ve all heard it. So, if you would like us to keep releasing one podcast at a time instead of all at once, the way that Wizards does its playtesting, you can join us on Patreon where we complain about D&D full-time. Just go to Patreon.com slash Mythcreants. And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie MacLeod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you all next week.  [Outro Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

Our deep dive into the latest quasi edition of Dungeons & Dragons continues, this time with the new mechanics. At least, what we know of the new mechanics. It seems like everything we’ve been told could be reversed at any time, which is part of the problem. But hey, weapon masteries are cool!Show Notes Guidance Bless 2014-2024 Nomenclature Ancestry PDF  Weapon Masteries  Battlemaster  Bounded Accuracy Transcript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening theme] Oren: And welcome everyone to part two of our D&D complaining podcast. I’m Oren. Wes: And I’m Wes. Oren: And Ari returns once again to bless us with his D&D wisdom. I think that gives us a +1d4 to knowledge D&D checks. Ari: Yeah, I snuck back in for a second podcast. Oren: And it’s a cantrip so we can keep casting it. Ari: You wish Bless was a cantrip. Oren: Is it? Which one is it? Because there’s a cantrip that gives +d4. Wes: Guidance. Ari: You’re thinking guidance, my friends. You’re gonna get roasted in the comments. They’ll be like, no, Bless is a first level spell. [laughter] You can’t just cast that forever. Oren: See here, the +1d4 is already paying off. All right, so today we’re going to talk about the new mechanics of One D&D, or 5.5, or D&D 2024. Ari: I’m calling it 5.5. They can’t stop me. Oren: Yeah, they literally cannot pick a name. We know in their design documents from some interviews that they’re calling it 5E 2024. And the original one is 5E 2014. And it’s like, all right, guys, the fact that you had to make a different name for it in your design documents suggests we should have something else to call it. But anyway, we’ll talk about the new mechanics. And I know we have a lot of things that we didn’t love, but I thought it might be nice to talk about some of the things that are not bad, that are perhaps even good that we’ve seen so far. Ari: Impossible. Oren: Before we go into the complaints. For one, I’m glad that we’re finally and officially decoupling the specific stat bonuses from Ancestries. Ari: Yep, I totally agree. I was doing that for years, and I’m glad that it’s official now. Oren: Yeah, and I think also we’re decoupling alignments and all of that. That’s all good. There are still some unforced errors, like the Gladiator just happened to be an orc in their example document. And it’s like, all right, OK, come on. Trying to break stereotypes here, guys. But that’s good. I like that each Ancestry now gets a single ability that makes them feel unique without pigeonholing them into a specific role. Mostly. Gnomes are OP. Ari: Yeah, they’re pretty good. Their save bonuses are quite strong. Oren: We don’t know what all the feats are yet, so humans could still be the most powerful because humans still get just a bonus feat. But if the feats aren’t as strong, then Gnome will have its day. Ari: Yeah, this is the thing that I like. And actually, what was initially I was excited about 5.5 was I think that a lot of this addition seems to be rules cleanup, which is really important in a game like D&D. And we’ve had 10 years to figure out a bunch of rules that don’t make a whole lot of sense and are hard to track and use as a GM. A lot of these rules are often just ignored at a lot of tables. So I’m a big fan of that, especially for inexperienced GMs. A lot of these fixes were things I was already doing at my table, but I’ve been playing this game for a long time and I have no problem making modifications to the rules on the fly as I need to make sure that the game runs smooth. But a lot of GMs don’t do that. And so you should make your rules clean as you possibly can for those people. Oren: I’m also a fan of the weapon masteries, at least in theory. I admit I haven’t done all the math to know which ones are good, but I watched a couple videos and people seem to like them. Ari: And any cool thing that martials get, I’m a fan of. Martials need more love, and we’ll get to that and the things I don’t like. But yes, the weapon masteries are a cool idea and I hope they do more with it than they are currently. Wes: I am a big fan of them because it was tough in just 2014 5e or whatever [scoffs]. In 5e, it’s like if you want to do cool things with weapons, you had to be a battle master, pretty much. I always thought it was very weird that in the character design that they had subclasses and then I guess just like warlocks with lots of customization options. It’s like battle masters have all these maneuvers and then warlocks have all these invocations, but then the rest of the classes just don’t have as many customization options. I guess the hunter had some choices. And then seeing masteries in this document, I was like, cool, thank you. Let’s spread some love. Let’s do some cool stuff with weapons. Ari: It’s interesting you bring up the battle master because I believe early in the testing for D&D for 5e back in the day, the battle master wasn’t the subclass. That was just a thing fighters did. They had maneuvers. Oh, and lots of people, and I agree with these people, have pointed out that maneuvers being baseline for fighters or martials in general would be very cool and a cool thing to help give them something unique to them. But these weapon masters, as I said, are also cool. I think that they’re a good idea and I want to see more of it. Oren: And for anyone who hasn’t been following along super closely, the weapon masters are specific abilities that you get with different kinds of weapons, but you need specific class features or a feat, I think, to unlock them. And it makes the weapons behave a little differently, which is a neat idea. It would be cool if we had a D&D where you actually switched weapons based on the task at hand. I don’t think we’ve gotten quite there. Ari: It won’t be. Anyone who says that is a dirty liar. Oren: But it’s a neat idea, right? And some weapons have a slowing effect when you hit your opponent. Others do a little bit of extra damage even if you miss. Some let you cleave into the next opponent, etc. I don’t know why getting shot with a crossbow is supposed to slow someone down, but there you go. Ari: It would slow me down to be fair. [Wes laughs] If you shot me with a crossbow, I’d be like, yeah, I think I’m gonna move 10 feet slower this time. Oren: Yeah, maybe use that extra time to consider how I got here. Also, they boosted the damage of my favorite weapon, the trident. Wes: Yes. Ari: Good things. We all us trident users unite. Oren: Kindness to the trident fan base. And muskets are officially in the game now. All hail the musket. Ari: The gunk, the gun monk writhe as official content. Oren: Yeah, I used to think guns in D&D were a bad idea because they break theme and whatever, and they still do, but I don’t care anymore. [Wes laughs]  Ari: Guns are just cool, and they’re so easy to take out if you don’t want them. I just like seeing them. It was weird that they were in the book, but as this weird optional thing that just made it more complex than- and they weren’t broken. Obviously the future ones were, but the ones that would be allowed in a fantasy setting weren’t broken.  Wes: Not the frag grenades. Ari: Not the anti-material rifle that did 5d10 necrotic damage or something like that. Yeah, that one’s probably shouldn’t let your characters use that, but yes, big fan. Oren: All right, so that’s some good stuff, and maybe we’ll find more good stuff along the way, but then the next thing that just makes this whole play test very difficult and awkward, and has resulted in at least one beef between D&D YouTubers that I follow, is the way in which material is being released to people to test, supposedly. Ari: This is actually one of the reasons I stopped. I was initially going to cover all these test packets that came out, and I just stopped because of this partially. They have been releasing the test content for 5.5 in this piecemeal fashion, generally focusing on like a group of classes or sometimes like feats and backgrounds, and then they ask for our feedback. And D&D isn’t the type of game where you can give good feedback like that, because let’s say they release the wizard, and the wizard is very powerful. However, they didn’t release the wizard’s spell list. I can’t tell you how good the new wizard is, because if you make all the good spells from 5e bad, then the wizard will be bad. It doesn’t matter how good their class features are. As they have told us, if it’s not in the play test packet, assume it hasn’t changed. Okay, cool, so the wizard is still busted because its spell list has the- I don’t see enough changes to the spell list here to justify any other reaction, but is that correct? Like, some people are like, obviously they’re gonna nerf a spell like Hypnotic Pattern or Fear or Slow or Wall of Force or Force Cage, but we haven’t seen that. I mean, it would make sense to nerf those spells. I probably would if I was designing a new edition of the game, but I can’t assume. The general vibe I get from people who talk like that are, trust the designers and they will have a plan, and I just don’t. I don’t trust them. Their current output just does not garner trust from me. I don’t feel like they have a plan. I have questions about some competency or thought process that we can get into later that make me wary of that strategy of, don’t worry, they’ll figure it out in the end. Oren: It’s also just weird to say that because the whole point of them releasing this stuff is that they want our feedback, but how are we supposed to give it when we don’t know what the actual context is? I also noticed this line from when I looked at the most recent Player’s Handbook quote-unquote “playtest release” that they gave. There was a note on power level. “The character options you read here might be more or less powerful than options in the 2014 Player’s Handbook. If a design survives playtesting, we adjust its power to the desirable level before publication. This means an option could be more or less powerful in its final form.” So what am I judging exactly? Ari: It could be anything. Don’t worry about it. Oren: What is my feedback? What am I supposed to tell you? Am I just supposed to tell you that I kind of like the idea of this? Because if that’s what you want, okay, but you didn’t say that anywhere. You just said you wanted feedback. Ari: Also, the way they’ve done this, their timeline is so short, the way they’re requesting feedback. Like, sure, they have till, what, 2024 when this thing comes out? Because I don’t think they’re bumping that date back because it’s for the anniversary. But the turnaround time on their feedback is so long, I can’t imagine they have enough time to really incorporate much more feedback. I work in a field that does lots of user testing, and you gotta use what user testing you have very frugally, and it feels like they have wasted their window with this piecemeal approach. It would have been, I know it would have been a lot to read through, but also, they should have released everything and said, what do you think of this? Because that is the only way to give you a good review of an RPG system as complex and intertwined as D&D. Oren: And I get that if they had released the whole thing, fewer people would have looked at it. I tried to read all of the player’s handbook PDF before this podcast, and I admit I could not do it. I skimmed many sections, and that would have been significantly shorter than a full rules release. But at the same time, the people who actually did it would have given you some actual useful feedback, as opposed to this weird piecemeal approach where no one can tell if their reactions are legitimate or not.  Ari: It also doesn’t help that some of these quote-unquote “playtest materials” are either so bad or so overpowered, I cannot imagine the designers did not know what response they would receive, right? We’ll get into some specifics in a little bit later, but if you’re doing user testing, don’t ask questions you know the answer to already. That’s valuable time and valuable responses that you are burning on something you have an answer to. Why are you showing me something in this stage of the design? This is something that should never have gotten out of internal testing. Wes: All of this kind of just makes me think that it’s all just a PR stunt. They’re not actually incorporating feedback, but they can say, [commercial voiceover voice] we asked and you answered and we listened.  Ari: It’s the hype train. Wes: It’s the hype train. That’s exactly what it is. I do not believe they’re actually considering this feedback. Ari: There was that leak that, according to D&D Shorts, who his leaks were pretty good so far regarding the OGL, that some employees were saying that they don’t look at this feedback. Now, a lot of the D&D design team have come out pretty strongly against that, saying, no, we read it, we look at your scores, and Jeremy Crawford in his interviews obviously has read something or has been told something about it, but the amount of responses they get is too many for me to believe they are looking at a large number of custom responses, because you gave your scores and you can aggregate those, so you can look at however many you want, you just look at them and average out the scores, but all the type in your response things, there’s just too many. You can’t do it.You do not have the time to look at all of those and actually process, and so you’ll cherry pick ones and you’ll talk about them because that’s easy and it makes it look like you’re listening. And that’s just from my experience with user testing.As often as you can, you want to avoid open-ended answers like that because they’re so hard to review as a team. Like, 10 people with open-ended answers is a lot. 10,000? I don’t care if that’s your 40-hour work week. That is still too much. Oren: Yeah, when I send out like a story for beta reading, I send it to six people, not sixty. Ari: It’s just too much. I worked in a field that does this. I’ve seen it time and time again. It looks good when you let people type their feelings out, and then you ignore a lot of it because you just don’t have the resources. Oren: We do know that they are paying at least some attention because they withdrew the druid and were like, we’re sorry guys, we messed this one up. We’ll do a better druid next time. Ari: What I’m guessing is happening… So they get all this feedback and they look at the aggregate scores and they probably look at really high-performing questions and then really low-performing ones. And then they hunt through those. They probably use keyword searches to try and find specific things to test against what they’re thinking, would be my guess. This is what we think the problem might be, and we want to look for words that would talk about that to see what people’s thoughts are in that area. Because that’s what I would do. And this team just doesn’t have the resources to look at all of them. This is not a thing. Oren: Or maybe they train a large language learning model on all of the answers- Wes: [quietly] No. Oren: -and create a chat bot that can talk to them in the voice of their playtesters. Ari: ChatGPT, did the playtesters like the druid? [laughter] We’ll get there one day, I’m sure. But I do think it’s just somewhere in the middle. I don’t think they’re ignoring everything, but they can’t be reading all of it. They just don’t have the time for it. It doesn’t matter if they want to or not. That’s not the equation here. Oren: All right, all right. So you’re the one with the expertise here. What aspect do you think is the most important to talk about next? We got game balance, we got scope of the changes. How are you feeling? Ari: I think the most important thing that underpins almost all of my complaints about this newest edition of the game is the philosophy behind how they approach this new edition of D&D and how much I disagree with the things they have done. Wes: Yeah, please. Ari: So I already mentioned what I think the first thing they did. I think the first thing was, here are all these weird interactions that confuse the hell out of people. We’re gonna try and clean that up and make the rules make more sense. And that’s great. 100%. If this was a digital game, I would have expected this in some of the first patches, but it’s not. So they obviously can’t do like a weekly or monthly patch cycle. So that part is good. 100%, you should always do this. Now the other part of this that I don’t like, and I think has completely drained my excitement for this new edition, is here are some things we think are problems from 5e or exploits from 5e. We need to fix those because those players shouldn’t have been doing those things, and we don’t like that. And that, I think, is the root of a lot of the problems with this edition. Oren: Are we talking about things like making it so the rogue can’t get an extra sneak attack in by triggering an attack on someone else’s turn? Ari: Yeah, I think that’s probably my best example. Wizards did not intend for that, and it was a thing that rogues were often doing, especially optimized rogues were doing this, and they don’t like that, and so they fixed it. But the problem with that is that the reason rogues were doing that is if you wanted to be competitive as a rogue with other well-built characters- that’s important here because you can build any character badly- but assuming your party has made good characters, your rogue is going to feel very sad until they can sneak attack twice. And then they are competitive. They aren’t ahead, they aren’t like hugely overpowered, they are competitive with the other martials in your party. But what they did in fixing this loophole is they reduced the rogue’s damage output by 50%, and that’s bad. And there’s no amount of weapon masteries that are going to fix that. Oren: Yeah, it really felt like they were thinking, okay, this rule where you can get an extra sneak attack if you can provoke an attack on someone else’s turn, that is weird and wonky and players find it frustrating, which they absolutely do. But instead of the obvious solution of let’s just let rogues do this and make it easier and simpler, they’re like, nope, we’re taking that out. But rogues needed that, and now it’s gone.  Ari: Yeah, their general strategy seems to be nerf-oriented rather than buff-oriented, which I just think is the weirdest thing to do when you are making a new addition and you’re trying to get people excited. Like, calls of power creep are rampant in D&D, lots of other games too, but the reason power creep exists is because we’ve seen in card games if you release new content and it sucks and it’s weak, no one uses it and people don’t have fun. Because, generally, weak content isn’t fun. Sometimes it is, but generally not. The weaker something is, the more likely it will be unfun to play. And so they went with this nerf strategy instead of increasing the power, and this is a dual problem because that type of approach can work if you’re creating a game different enough from the old one that you cannot compare it apples to apples. Like, fourth edition to fifth edition. If you could have reduced the damage by 50% from fourth to fifth, and I don’t think people would complain or really notice it because the games are so different. Oren: That is literally what they did from 3.5 to fifth edition. One of the big changes that made the game better was they hunted down and cancelled a lot of the miscellaneous 3.5 bonuses that everything was adding to everything. They even came up with a fancy name for it, they called it bounded accuracy, which at the time I thought was pretty pretentious, but it was a good choice. Ari: When you make a game different enough that you can do that, that’s a great time to reset power because players aren’t going to complain, they can’t compare it. But when you do this 5e to 5.5, you can compare this because they keep touting this is not a new edition, this is just a change and evolution of 5th edition. And if your new edition, if I get to start playing 5.5 and I’m playing the same character I was playing in 5e but I do 20% less damage, I’m gonna notice that and I’ll just be like, why? This is less fun, I like doing powerful things. Powerful things are fun, fun should trump balance every time in D&D. It’s a cooperative game. And the extra funny part about 5.5 is even assuming balance is your number one goal, it’s still horrendously imbalanced. So they did not even accomplish that I presume to be their goal, like I can’t imagine what else it would be with a lot of these changes. Oren: But it still feels bad if party member Bobbo, your friend, is doing twice as much damage as you, unless you’re not a damage dealing build.  Ari: There is of course a limit to that, right? There is a point where someone else’s fun is taking away fun from other people at the table and you probably should look into that. But that point is pretty high. It is way more likely that if you just take away the fun stuff from a class because it was good, people are just gonna have less fun in general. And especially some of the things they took away were support builds as well. I feel like a lot of builds might be weaker now that never even took the spotlight no matter how strong they were. Oren: One of the things was that they nerfed Twin Spell basically out of existence. And the main use of Twin Spell was to buff your party; to make your party cooler. Why would you nerf that? That is the thing you want everyone to be doing. Everyone has a good time when the sorcerer runs out and dual casts holy weapon. Ari: 100%. So I don’t think nerfing is the way to do this. Things should have been buffed to go up to par. Martials are weaker than casters, let’s say. Like barbarians are bad past level five. Let’s buff barbarians. Let’s not nerf everyone else to try to bring them down to barbarian’s level. And so they went with this seemingly nerf oriented strategy and it didn’t balance the game. At least not – maybe they’ll fix it all before the game releases. Maybe this is just completely making a mountain out of a molehill here. Maybe they’ll trust the plan and it’ll all work out. But nothing I’ve seen from these design documents so far makes me think 5.5 will be any more balanced. If anything, it looks less balanced, assuming some of the things we’ve seen coming out of caster-land stick in the book in any form resembling what they are now. Oren: Wes, have you looked at much of the new mechanics? I’m curious if you have any thoughts on it. Not a ton of the new mechanics but I was trying to pay attention to just like the changes, and I think going along with what Ari’s talking about with this nerf focus, this might just be my copy editor talking. The weird fixation on how they’re just deciding what to capitalize or what not to capitalize, and like clarifying certain types of terms and conditions and stuff, struck me as completely unnecessary. [Wes laughs] Did anybody think that was a problem? Ari, were there some instances where like an ability did not specify that it created a condition and therefore a loophole? Ari: Most of the time, conditions weren’t the problem. The problem that 5e had was that they would mix flavor text with rules text and they’re not fixing that. So that’s the real problem from a copy perspective. Like 5e should take a page out of Magic’s book and put all the rule text in one place and italicize all the flavor text and put it under that or above it. Whatever. I don’t care where it goes. But I’m fine with them capitalizing conditions if they think that’ll help. They’re trying to make conditions a bigger part of 5e so that’ll probably be helpful. But I agree. It’s fine, but it’s not what I would be focusing on at the moment. And this kind of moves a little bit neatly into a recent thing where they said they’re done with the big ideas phase of 5.5. And I look at them and I say, what big ideas? How is this what we ended up with? Wes: One of my favorite big idea changes was in 5e 2014 they really made it very clear that feats were optional. Ari: The biggest ideas I’ve seen in 5.5 is the wizard but there was another one- oh yes, the warlock. They basically completely redesigned the warlock. It’s like a different class now and that is a big idea. I don’t know if it’s a good idea but it’s big and so that’s one. And then the other one was the wizard spell creation mechanics which is the most exciting thing they put out, and it is a big idea, and it’s horrendously imbalanced. So those are the two big ideas and they said that if people don’t respond favorably to this they’re just going to revert to what 5e did and it’s been what was the point of all this? Wes: Sell new books. Oren: I did notice that is it really felt like a lot of this was actually we didn’t have enough time to test any of this so we’re just going to go back to what 5e was for the most part, with some nerfs here and there. Ari: It boggles my mind that they had 10 years to work on this. I’m not saying they started working on immediately after 5e released but as someone who dabbles in design as a hobby, I’m always thinking about neat possible ideas to explore. I can’t imagine the team didn’t have some of those that came up after 10 years of the game existing. And even if you had no ideas of your own you can just look at what third party content creators are coming up with. And honestly, not to put too fine a point, on it you can just steal that stuff if you have nothing original to bring to the table. Just look at what popular third party creators are doing and say, what if we did that but our own spin. We changed the serial numbers or whatever. And I’m not saying you should do that that is not a good thing to do but I’m trying to imagine the designer who is so unoriginal as to have very few new ideas themselves but also morally upright enough to not look at other people’s ideas and try to borrow those. Oren: Yeah. I don’t want to cast aspersions on the creativity of a bunch of designers who I don’t know and I’ve never met them. My experience in the gaming industry was that very often designers have ideas but they are not given the time or the resources to pursue them. And it’s weird. I don’t know what the design team in 5e was doing. I don’t know what the work structure of Wizards of the Coast is like. Ari: It’s just the time to develop a good idea versus a bad idea are pretty similar in a game like D&D. It’s not like a video game where you have to spend a bunch of dev time coming up with things. And you’re right, I don’t want to bash on specific designers but I just don’t understand how this is it. Like there’s been so much cool movement coming out of third party and it’s like a self-selecting thing. You don’t even have to pour through all the bad homebrew out there because you can just look at the popular people, and heck, you could even hire the popular people to help work on your game and things like that. It’s just, it’s so weird to me. They played it so safe and I understand you don’t want to just put all this over complicated stuff that third party people came up with in your game because that might confuse new players but you could make simple versions. There’s understandable stuff out there. So it’s very confusing and very frustrating for me to watch this. Wes: Ari, do you think that there’s this kind of lingering fear of them putting out a fourth edition, and have it flop if they stray too far with something new and it fails? Ari: I think it’s possible, but there’s just so much room between making cool and interesting stuff in 5e and having 4e. There’s a lot of design space between those two points and I just have a hard time understanding how this came to pass in this form. Oren: Hey everyone, Oren from the future here. This conversation actually went on for an entire hour, which is way too long for a single episode, so we’ve split it into two. The second part will be up next week. In the meantime, if this podcast was a good use of half your short rest, you can help us make more via Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie MacLeod, next there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.  [closing theme] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

Dungeons and Dragons continues to lurch toward a new edition, sort of, maybe, depending on how you define “edition.” One thing’s for sure, Wizards of the Coast would like us to buy a bunch of new books soon, which is a pretty big ask from a company with this kind of recent history. What recent history is that, you ask? Today’s episode happily explains!Show Notes Dungeons and Dragons Editions  Satanic Panic  Cthulhu RPGs OGL Disaster Overview  WotC Could Steal Your Work  D&D Is Under-Monetized  WotC Sends In the Pinkertons  Kobold Press Game Matthew Colville Game  Pathfinder  Mage: The Awakening  D&D Beyond Virtual Tabletop Talespire  Foundry  Roll20  WotC’s Apology  Ginny D’s Interview  DnD Shorts Linda Codega D&D Beyond Cancelation  AvernusTranscript Generously transcribed by Viviana. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Orun Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.  [Opening Music] Oren: Hey everyone, Oren from the future needing to chime in and give you a heads up. We had more recording difficulties than normal this episode, one of which is that Wes’ audio for the first couple minutes is entirely gone despite multiple backups. I’ve done my best to edit around it, but that’s why the opening sounds a bit weird and why Wes suddenly appears from nowhere once his audio starts recording properly. Now on with the episode.  Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast, I’m Oren, and Chris couldn’t be here today, but that’s okay because I want to complain about Dungeons and Dragons, and for that, I have invited Mythcreants’ D&D expert, Ari, onto the podcast.  Ari: Hello! Oren: And this is going to be great because the audio editors and the transcribers are going to love this episode because they already have trouble telling me and Wes apart sometimes and Ari and I famously sound almost exactly the same.  Ari: Yeah, they don’t normally let me on here. Oren: So, this is going to be a great time. I’m sure they will love us and everything will go fine. So Ari, just to remind everyone, because it might’ve been a little bit, what is your experience with D&D, both on and off of Mythcreants?  Ari: So I’ve been playing D&D on and off since second edition, but I really got into the hobby with fifth edition, so I’ve been playing in and GMing my games for, I guess, about 10 years now, because that’s how long 5e’s been out. And I can’t even remember the first article I wrote for Mythcreants, but, at some point I started being an on and off contributor to Mythcreants, as you kindly offered to give me a platform to complain about D&D. And ever since I’ve enjoyed writing for Mythcreants, I don’t do it as often as I would like to, but we’ll get to that. We’ll get to the reasons I don’t write as often as I would like to. Oren: And Wes, what is your history with role playing games and D&D specifically?  Wes: Let’s see. I started role playing games in my early teen years with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons on a church trip.  Oren: Oh! Ha ha ha! That’s delicious.  Wes: It was thrilling. Ari: Famously supportive of D&D.  Wes: The youth group leader told us how to play, so I was well pleased by that.  Ari: That’s cool.  Wes: Yeah, it was cool.  Oren: This is the most disappointing satanic panic I’ve ever been to. Wes: Yeah, and started then, and then I think got way more into it in college with 3.5. That’s definitely the system that I learned a lot in a few campaigns, a lot of homebrew. And then we started playing 5th edition when that came out, and I dabbled in Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu, and that’s kind of it. Mostly my role playing game experience has definitely just been Dungeons and Dragons.  Oren: All right, now that we’ve established our backstories. So first, I think we should talk a little bit about not even the game itself, but what Wizards has been doing outside of the game.  Ari: Oh boy.  Oren: Wizards of the Coast, that is, the company that owns Dungeons and Dragons, which is in turn owned by Hasbro, because not everyone is plugged into that news, people who are listening, they might have missed some of this. So I’ll give a brief recap of the main event, which is of course the OGL disaster. Wes: To put it lightly.  Oren: Yeah, and I’ll put some sources in the show notes that will give you a more detailed coverage. But the basic version is that the Open Gaming License slash OGL is this license that Wizards made back in 2000 or so that said anyone can use anything from most of the D&D rules. There were a few exceptions that they carved out for named monsters and what have you, but most stuff was free, anyone can use it. And that lasted until this year, or maybe it was going to, and there was a leak that Wizards of the Coast was trying to release a “new” quote unquote OGL that they were calling 1.1 that had a whole bunch of restrictions. And there were a bunch of ones about how if you made a certain amount of money, you suddenly had to give that to Wizards. And there was text in the legal agreement that made it sound like Wizards could, at any time, take something that you were making and then just say you couldn’t make it anymore, but they still could. Ari: We made this.  Oren: It was just very bad. The hilarious part was that everyone protested. Like, it was frankly amazing to see the entire community of D&D that normally can’t agree on anything suddenly come together and be like, “No, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened and we hate it.” Wes: There was some prelude to that release as well. I remember in the fall being, I want to say some Hasbro exec, but don’t quote me on that, about it coming out about how under monetized the D&D brand is. Do you guys remember that? Oren:  Yes, there was, I believe, an investors meeting.  Wes: Exactly. And all of us who heard that were like, “uh oh.” Ari: I think it was even the president or the top person of Wizards who mentioned that D&D was under monetized because books are hard to sell and you only need one of them.  Oren: And like in a complete vacuum, I’m actually not unsympathetic to that view because role playing game books are both too expensive and too cheap. They’re too expensive in that, if you sell them at anything close to an adequate price point, people don’t want to buy them because they’re really expensive. But also each group only needs one, so it’s really hard to make money selling them.  Wes: Yeah, that’s true.  Oren: So, I don’t disagree with the notion in a complete vacuum, but wow, did they manage to mess it up.  Ari: The biggest of unforced errors too. I was clued into this a lot. And from what I can tell, I just don’t think the people who made the decision considered this as a possible outcome. They just didn’t think it would be a big deal.  Wes: That checks out.  Ari: And like people just wouldn’t notice or no one would care enough to actually do anything about it. And then that was, as it turns out, not correct.  Oren: And they did reverse course after a few weeks of just the worst publicity this company has gotten. This is a company that has literally sent Pinkerton agents after people.  Ari: And I’m still surprised that they reversed course at all. It was very unexpected. The YouTubers I was watching were just as surprised. The journalists I saw covering it also seemed surprised. Like, we’ve seen companies do things like this and just wait it out because they can and it was very surprising to see Wizards not only walk it back, but actually take more steps to make it harder to do this in the future. Oren:  Because what they were counting on to make this work was that the OGL was a perpetual license but not an irrevocable license. So that was the thing that was really getting everyone’s goat. It wasn’t just that the new game wasn’t going to be released under the OGL, it was that they were retroactively canceling everything else that the OGL had applied to, and  so now what they did instead was all the new stuff is going to be released under a Creative Commons license, which is irrevocable. Again, aside from the exceptions. Like you can’t actually call your game “D&D” and you can’t use certain monster names and what have you. But the rest of it is now under Creative Commons, which, if they tried this again, it would be harder. For now, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief because no one has to test this in court.  Ari: Because we think we know what would happen. But no one’s actually tried this in court yet, and I don’t think anyone wants to do it.  Oren: That’s the thing that kept coming up in this analysis was this question of “Does this matter?” because it doesn’t seem like you can actually copyright game mechanics. That was an opinion that most legal experts looking at this seem to share and that’s something that’s been known in the games industry for a long time. Basically every serious game designer that I’ve ever talked to is aware of that, but at the same time it’s never been tested. No one has ever gone to court over game mechanics. So, we can’t be sure how the court would rule on that. An interesting thing that came out of this was a ton of people and companies all announced they were making their own game to try to replace 5e. Do you guys think any of those are going to go anywhere now?  Wes: No.  Ari: So the ones I’m aware of, there’s the Kobald Press one, which will probably do fine. Their kickstarters have always done really well. So they’ll probably sell it to their existing audience and it’ll be okay. And it looks to be very similar to D&D but D&D the way they wanted to make it. I think that’ll do okay but no big reach. The one coming out of MCDM and Matthew Kovil who’s like a pretty big D&D YouTuber, it’s the most interesting of the bunch because it’s one that they’re like we don’t want this shackled to all these things that D&D has had to do because old D&D did it, which is a complaint I have about 5e. And so that’s cool and they once again have a built-in audience. So I think these games, none of them are going to become Pathfinder, right? That’s the question. Will we have another Pathfinder? And that’s just not going to happen because they reversed course. It wasn’t like 4e where they didn’t do that. And then there’s all the little homebrew ones which, they will be tiny and small and if they succeed they will hopefully produce enough money to keep their creators fed and have the lights on but I don’t think any of them will have much reach beyond that.  Oren: Yeah that was pretty much my thought. I’m interested to see what Kovil comes up with though. He’s had some very interesting mechanics.  Ari: He also just always seemed like he didn’t really want to be designing D&D. And he has said as much in some of his videos that I’ve watched of his. So yeah that’s the one I’m most interested in. Because I can make D&D but different myself. In fact I have already done that. But this seems to be not D&D which is interesting.  Wes: I think that is an interesting point as part of this fallout is that a lot of the influencers I think because of the OGL fiasco have realized that there is an avenue for them to branch out into other content. Keep the D&D stuff in their mix but then really start looking and exploring and that just widens the discussion. In terms of that kind of content we’re all definitely benefiting from it because I felt like before that it was like D&D all the time. A lot of these people made their names, on YouTube for example, for that. And now I’m seeing them show me new systems and talk about other alternative things and just big praise. I’m really happy.  Oren: That would be pretty cool if that stuck. Wes: Yeah it would be.  Ari: Although there is unfortunately that at least some of the YouTube channels I’ve been watching they’ve talked about how their Pathfinder videos were doing well for a little bit but now they’re just not doing very well because the interest didn’t stick and Pathfinder’s complicated so no one wants to learn a new system.  Oren: Yeah especially not one as complicated as Pathfinder. That’s been my experience is that players will learn new systems. Most of us learned our big tome RPGs when we were in high school or college and, if you’re older than that, learning a new giant tome is a big ask. Whereas like I can bring them my like little homebrew dice pool game where the rules mostly fit on five pages and they’re like “Yesh I’ll play that, whatever.” But if I try to bring them like here’s a Shadowrun 5th edition and they’re like why? Why would you make me do that?  Wes: It was hard enough getting us all to play in the first place and you want to do this, Oren? Ari:  I started reading the Pathfinder 2 PDF and I stopped when I got to where the dwarves could weaponize racism to do more damage and I have not returned since.  Wes: Classic dwarf move.  Oren: A friend of mine invited me to play in a Mage the Awakening 2nd edition game a while back and I was like I used to love Mage and I mostly played Ascension. Awakening’s fun too. I’ll play Awakening. And I looked at the spell casting rules and my eyes just slid off the page. I just could not figure it out. I have no idea how to cast a spell. I sat there for an hour trying to figure out how you cast a spell and it would not enter the brain. I couldn’t figure it out so I was eventually like “Hey, could we play like, Base Hunter instead? That one’s a lot simpler.” Ari: A little easier. I’ve just spent a decade learning the ins and outs of 5th edition. I don’t want to start from scratch in a more complex game with Pathfinder. If I played in a group, I would learn the rules but it’s really hard to motivate myself to learn them when I have no plans to play in it. Oren:  And I get why most content creators switched back to D&D. You only have to look at Mythcreants and our traffic numbers and see the traffic on our old non-D&D RPG articles that I wrote and then compare that to the traffic on Ari’s D&D articles and let me tell you it’s not even close.  Ari: It is the biggest game in town.  Oren: It’s the biggest game in town and if you depend on that to make your living it’s a huge risk to try something else. Ari:  I do not envy the content creators. I couldn’t even come up with one article a week. You got D&D content creators coming out with two videos every week and it’s just oh boy I couldn’t do that. That’s too much.  Oren: Although in fairness I think your articles probably take longer because you spend a lot of time checking and double checking and some of the YouTube D&D creators do that too but a lot of them are just “I’m going to talk into a microphone about whatever I happen to be thinking about right now.” Ari: Like what I’m doing right now. It’s so much easier. Oren:  It is. There’s a reason why we have a podcast every week instead of a third article because if Chris and I tried to write a third article every week we would die.  Ari: Also some of the content creators nowadays have discords that they crowdsource their math to which makes it I’m sure a lot easier.  Wes: Oh yeah, good point.  Ari: Get your math wizards on this in your discord channel and then just report on the findings.  Oren: Just get a gut check from the two of you. Why do you think wizards did this? What was their main motivation if they had one beyond a vague desire to make more money, somehow? Ari: My best guess is that the new D&D is trying to, as I said, monetize the game and one of the ways they’re doing that is by making it more of a video game with their new digital tabletop program that they’re making in the Unreal Engine for some reason. And so, things like microtransactions and whatnot, and I think this OGL thing was just aimed at locking things down. As they moved into this new space, they wanted to make sure that they had the tools to set the tone and the ground rules against all these established digital tabletop spaces like Roll20 is probably the biggest one. But then you have things like Foundry. You have Tailspire, which is one that I use personally. There are system-agnostic ones. There are ones that are made specifically for D&D. So I think it was just them trying to cover their bases and make sure that as they moved into this like new vision for D&D, because the guy in charge of this his background was in mobile gaming.  Oren: Oh really? Ari:  I think it was mobile gaming. I’m probably gonna get some of these details wrong. It was a while ago but his background was not in RPGs. It was in video games and so that’s how they’re approaching this because microtransactions make a lot of money and, if you can bring microtransactions successfully to D&D, that’s probably gonna fix your monetization problem.  Oren: Wes, what do you think? Wes: I echo all of that and when Ari was talking I remembered when D&D Beyond officially got bought. That was what months before the OGL? That was last fall. And I remember the second that happened I was like “Yep, they’re gonna do their own tabletop and they’re gonna do their own VTT. Like, absolutely going to happen.” And yeah, Ari,  I didn’t even think about that broader connection because if they lock that down and then all the physical gaming assets become microtransactions and all of that stuff around the subscription, all of it, and then yeah that’s it you’ve solved it.  Ari: I just think they didn’t think about it or they didn’t care because from what I understand the creative team behind D&D knew this was an awful idea and they said as much this isn’t their decision and I just think the business folks in charge didn’t look at this as like a possible powder keg. They’re just like “Yeah we’ll just do this it’ll be fine. No one cares about legal licensing. What fandom pays attention to that?” Oren: Have either of you actually looked at the document? Because I did and I was surprised at how petty it sounded because it had a bunch of “You’re freeloading, you’ve been freeloading off us long enough,  time to pay up!” type language. Where was this quote here? “Moving forward hugely successful businesses that generate more than $750,000 of annual revenue will need to share some of that success with us.” Whoa calm down there, Lenin.  Ari: We are D&D. Communism intensifies.  Oren: That was so weird it didn’t feel like a legal document it felt like a gossip post. Ari: No, 100%. You combine that with the first apology document they put out if you remember that famous line “You won, and so did we.” And it was like the tone of this was real bad and it is bonkers. My recent jobs have put me in some very large orgs so I actually can see this kind of thing happening but it’s still such a botched job it’s impressive how bad it was handled.  Oren: Was that before or after they did the We Rolled a One?  Ari: That was the same one the same document and then they brought forward that poor schmuck they put in front of the camera who had to pay the dues with all these interviews, that guy, Kyle Brink I think was his name or something like that.  Oren: Was that the one Ginny Di talked to?  Ari: Yeah he did a bunch of interviews with prominent youtubers and I feel for the guy because this wasn’t his decision either and he had to put his name on all this stuff and he had to like try and tell the truth and they really didn’t want to be caught lying right then but he was in such an unwinnable position and credit to the youtubers like Ginny Di their livelihood is so intrinsically tied to Wizards of the Coast that there is a powerful motivation to not hold their feet to the fire for this and she did, she did a really good job. Great integrity from some of these creators. I think D&D shorts and Ginny Di were the ones that really stood out to me as folks who set aside the possible financial benefits of just not talking about this or softballing it. Oren:  It felt like Ginny Di definitely felt she’d been betrayed almost because wasn’t she one of the early advocates for One D&D as it’s being called?  Ari: It’s possible. I wasn’t following her until super recently but not in the beginning of all of this I was only tangentially aware of her and D&D shorts, they weren’t channels that I watched.  Oren: That was just a vibe I got but good on them I appreciate their journalism in this.  Ari: And Linda Codega was also super pivotal in this. They were the one that was actually giving this a lot of legitimate outside-the-gaming-sphere spotlight that these things really need some of the time. Sometimes things blow up in a small corner of the internet and it just doesn’t leave that area, and, when that happens, companies can just ignore it because the general public isn’t seeing it but then you had some more widespread reporting. Like you said the community came together and lots of folks stuck their neck out in various ways.  Oren: I would just really love to know what the actual subscription losses on D&D Beyond were because all we know for sure is that there was a call on Twitter I think is where it started, and it spread to other places to cancel your D&D Beyond subscription as a form of protest, and then there was a report that the subscription management page had crashed. And that’s a pretty convenient thing to crash when people are trying to cancel their subscription.  Wes: Yep! Oren: That’s real lucky on that one but we don’t know how many people actually canceled there’s no way to know and I would just love to know what that number was. Was it actually a bunch of people or was it a small number who were very loud about it? Ari:  I think it had to be large because if it hadn’t been they wouldn’t have done anything. As far as we can tell, all the information, these people don’t care about D&D. The folks making these decisions they’re business folks, they don’t play the game they don’t really know much about the game, and so they didn’t do this for the love of the game. They did this because there was an obvious financial backlash that they were suffering and that’s the only thing I can imagine motivating them was that there was a substantial drop in revenue from this giant purchase they just made. And if you are trying to turn D&D Beyond into the centerpiece of your new digital platform for D&D that’s really not the direction you want that going in. Oren: All right so speaking of D&D Beyond, it really looks like they’re trying to move into the direction of D&D as a service more than D&D as a product, though I don’t think D&D as a product is going away. I think they’re still going to sell books. I just think that they are trying to emphasize it as a service that you continually pay for, and I have to admit that doesn’t sound great to me but I’m also not really plugged into D&D Beyond, Ari, and I think you are, certainly more than me.  Ari: Yeah I think this is generally going to be neutral to bad for most D&D consumers. I personally don’t use D&D Beyond because I actually think it’s one of the worst resources out there and it’s one I have to pay for. There are better free resources out there for folks. But, yeah, they’re going to more heavily monetize it. It’s going to be, I think more confusing for users because that often accompanies monetization because they are trying to confuse you into losing your money. But when the new VT comes out it’s going to, I would imagine, just some simple things that come to mind is like miniature customization will cost you money. A spell customization will cost you money. You’ll have a lot of base effects and then if you want cool stuff you have to give them a lot of money. So, it’ll be all the problems that games as a service have in the video games industry but in D&D, and so I think it’ll look cool. That’s one good thing coming out of this, their VTT looks cool. So for the folks who aren’t bugged by big microtransaction-laden services it’ll probably be neutral to maybe good if you like the VTT’s base offerings. But there are going to be a lot of people out there who are going to feel pressured to spend a lot of money that they weren’t spending before on D&D. Oren:  Wes have you used D&D Beyond much?  Wes: We use it regularly because one of our players is a teacher and he started a D&D club at his secondary school and apparently Beyond, this happened before they were bought, comped the books as part of a school program so we have access to basically everything which is great. Out of the bounds of what any reasonable person would spend. We’re talking basically a grand. I’m just like “Yikes, the books are so expensive.” But having access to all that is great. It’s well set up. I make pretty good use of the encounter builder for like tracking initiative and it pulls up the stat blocks right there for me for rolling and things like that. Would I have bought all that myself? Absolutely not. I was doing fine before I found it convenient because it’s all just there and I didn’t have to pay for it. It has probably one of the worst search functions I’ve experienced on any website.  Ari: It is a shame.  Wes: It is a shame. My experience with the digital books and stuff is nice. It’s fun to just filter those bookmark pages keep things handy for like prep and tabs and things like that for running a campaign, but nothing that I couldn’t do elsewhere. It’s just what we ended up doing because it ended up being free and accessible so I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody, especially with the other alternatives out there, but it’s fun and like I already said I mean it is nice because it’s pretty it’s well-formatted there’s good styling and the books are cool and you can have all the images and things like that ready to go. So, yeah, there are some pros for sure.  Ari: The biggest sticking point for me besides the price because Wes is right it’s so expensive for a digital product that costs them nothing to make but the biggest problem for me is the D&D Beyond is awful at supporting custom rules and specifically custom classes. You can make a subclass if you want to, but you can’t make your own classes so a lot of the custom content in homebrew that I’ve made just doesn’t work in D&D Beyond. Anyone who does stuff like that is just out of luck for D&D Beyond at the moment and I hope that changes. There was some leaks about the tiers of D&D Beyond subscriptions and like which ones would allow you to make certain homebrew stuff and I don’t know how much of that was true, there was a lot of contention about how true those things were, but it definitely worries me about what the environment looks like for GMs like me who want to create their own content. How friendly will this new D&D be to that?  Oren: The thing that gets me about D&D Beyond, and regular D&D has this problem too, but with D&D Beyond it feels like it’s getting more intense where the reason why I seek out free sources of D&D rules isn’t because I don’t want to buy the books it’s because, to make a basic character now, I would need to buy an absurd number of books.  Ari: All the books.  Wes: Yeah good point.  Oren: It’s weird because these books are not sectioned off it’s not like a video game where we’re all playing the same version. I only have the player’s handbook but my good friend Bobbo he has the player’s handbook, and Tasha’s, and the Sword Coast expansion, and so I either have to be able to use those rules too or his character’s just better than mine and mine will be sad. There’s just a huge pressure to be able to make a character from whatever is available and yet it’s way too expensive to do that, and I’m worried that with the increased reliance on D&D Beyond that Wizards will take harder stances trying to get rid of other options that currently let me do that without dropping a fortune.  Wes: Yeah Ari’s covered a lot of that with his class and subclass posts like, as new books come online and offer either new subclass or like new rules, it’s just fundamentally changing how characters operate and, if you don’t have access to that, you’re just playing an eldritch knight.  Ari: The player who isn’t bringing Xanathar’s Guide and Tasha’s to the table is just going to feel very sad a lot of the time compared to the players who are. Another thing about D&D Beyond is once you do own all that, from what I’ve seen, it’s really hard to actually parse all the information you have across a million books. I’ve seen creators try to like live search for specific monsters that have certain features and the search function has just failed them time and time again. There are free resources out there with significantly better and more granular search capabilities than D&D Beyond and finding very specific things is important when you’re a GM. I want to find every monster that can cast Hold Persin. That was a real search that I did recently and I’ve seen D&D Beyond’s, tools they aren’t good for stuff like that.  Oren: Why are you trying to cast so many hold persons, Ari? Is this something your party should be aware of? Ari: I was watching like a gauntlet video and I was trying to examine the kind of unreasonableness of a single character attempting to beat everything and so I was just looking at all the monsters that demand different saves and Hold Person was the wisdom save I was looking for because like that’s one of the worst spells to fail a wisdom save on that is pretty early level.  Oren: All right now that we know Ari’s evil plans I’m sorry to the players in Ari’s current game you’re gonna get held. Your person is gonna get held a lot.  Ari: That’s definitely what I’m doing. No, they just showed up in Avernus, I’m gonna give them their Mad Max dune buggy soon. It’s gonna be great. Wes: Yeah. Oren: I think we are gonna take a pause because we’ve covered the out of game stuff that Wizards has been up to but we got a whole list of things to talk about with the actual new mechanics so we’re gonna pause the episode here and we’ll do this as a little two-parter, so we’ll come back next week with the rest of it, but in the meantime, if this episode was better than Wizards’ weird “We rolled a one” apology you can support us for just a dollar on Patreon which we would consider a critical success. Wes: Nice Oren: Keeping us in the D&D mode. So, you just go to patreon.com slash Mythcreants, and, before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie McLeod. Next there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And, finally, we have Kathy Ferguson who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will be back next week with more D&D.  [Closing Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening-closing theme “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.

Every good hero deserves a moment where they ride into the sunset, but ride on what? From horses to bears to weird space dragons, mounts quite literally carry our main characters through the plot, and today we’re talking about our very favorites. That turns out to be more challenging than we thought, since a disappointing number of stories do little to develop their steeds other than having them add +1 to speed and stamina. With luck, we can find those that do better.Show Notes Bat Flight Speed  Animal Companion  Temeraire  Shadowfax  Narsil  Bill the Pony  Torrent  GoT Dragons  Appa Naga Llyan Catbus  Moya  Sisters of the Vast Black  Yakul Fuunsaiki Chocobo  MaximusTranscript Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is… Wes: Wes Oren: …and… Chris: Chris. Oren: Now, saddle up, partner, cuz it’s time to ride into the sunset! But on what you might ask. What is your personal steed, the best mount for you in all of speculative fiction? Mine, the most gentle, most mild-mannered horse you can find, because I can’t tell horses what to do and they know it. So, if I get up in the saddle and the horse has any opinions of its own, we’re just going wherever the horse wants to go. So, I need you to get me a horse who is just the chillest. The most chill horse you can possibly imagine, and then I might be able to get it to go somewhere. Wes, what’s your preferred mount? Wes: This is assuming I can just ride it: I just want to ride a bear. They’re fuzzy and adorable and they’re also terrifying monsters. And I want to ride one. Oren: Bear Cavalry. Yeah, I’ve played War Hammer. I know all about Bear Cavalry. Wes: Exactly. They’re super handy. Oren: Chris, what do you got for us? Chris: I would like to ride a giant bat. Wes: Awesome. Oren: Yeah. That’s great. Wes: Is part of your deal with using a giant bat as a mount that you have to also sleep upside down, strapped to it? Chris: Look, it’s just easy to find a stable cuz you don’t need it on the ground. You just find a place for them to hang. Wes: Yeah, that’s smart. Chris: They can fly, they’re very manoeuvrable, and they should be fuzzy too. Oren: Depending on the kind of bat, they also might just be very fast. Apparently, bats are some of the fastest flyers in level flight. Falcons get all the attention because they can dive really fast. But if you just want to go like cross country, bats are often your best bet. Chris: Yeah, they thought that bats were really slow and then they put some trackers on them and found out that some bats go much faster sometimes than they thought. Oren: There’s apparently some contention around the current bat speed record, which is very fast, but also there’s questions about how it was measured. I’ll let the bat scientists figure that one out. Chris: If we’re talking about mounts, does the Mount need to be an animal companion or can it also be a character? Oren: Well, I’m not a mount prescriptivist, so I think that it’s flexible enough that often the mount is a character. Not always, but that’s pretty common. Temeraire is probably the example that comes to my mind the easiest. Cuz Temeraire is a big old dragon and he talks and he’s his own character. But Laurence also rides on him, as do a bunch of other characters, cuz he’s very large. He’s still a mount, even though he’s also another character. Chris: Admittedly, when I tried to think of mounts that were cool, I came up a little disappointed. It’s not as many as I thought. And a lot of them are dragons. People just really wanna ride dragons, the mount of choice. Oren: The reason why I think it’s harder to come up with examples is that in a lot of cases the story will be like, and this is Billinar and he’s the greatest horse cause he’s real big and real fast at running. That’s the weapon problem, they’re trying to make your character’s signature weapon neat because it has +5 to attack and damage. Chris: Rude of you to call out Shadowfax that way. Oren: Shadowfax is a little more memorable than your average Lord of the Rings horse because he is established to be the Lord of all Horses. Chris: Yeah, but he just does everything that other horses do. Oren: He does. I’m not saying he’s great. I’m just saying that the fact that he has a title makes him a little more memorable because that gets people thinking like, what does the Lord of Horses do exactly? Chris: That is the only reason I can remember him at all. Oren: Because of the memes, because the memes. Wes: But it’s kinda the exact same thing with Narsil, the sword, right? Is there anything special about this sword? No, but it’s a sword-y sword. It might be the sword-iest of swords. Oren: I can remember Bill the Pony much better than I can remember any other horse in the Lord of the Rings books, with the exception of Shadowfax. And the only reason I remember Shadowfax is because of the memes asking what it is to be Lord of all Horses. But no, you know what the best fantasy horse is? This one’s not a character. It’s Torrent from Elden Ring. I love my horse from Eldon Ring. First, he has like a pair of antelope horns for no reason. I don’t know why he has those, but it just makes him stand out. Chris: And the other horses don’t. Oren: Apparently not, you don’t see a whole lot of other horses, but I don’t think they do. So, I don’t know why he has those, but that’s a thing. But you can see him from the side. He’s clearly all horse. He just has antelope horns for some reason. He’s also very mechanically useful. He’s got the double jump feature. Without that exploration in Elden Ring would be basically impossible. And he opens up all new kinds of combat. So mechanically, he just makes a big difference once you get him. Story wise, he picks you because he believes in you. Wes: Aw. Oren: And you know how rare that is in Eldon Ring? Nobody believes in you in Eldon Ring. Even your maiden, Melina, she doesn’t really believe in you. She picked you because there was nobody else. But Torrent, he thinks you’re cool. He thinks you have what it takes. And it’s just, yeah, Torrent, I don’t think you’re a great judge here. You’re a horse, but I really appreciate the gesture. Chris: So should we talk more then, about what a cool mount should have? You’ve listed the things that I was gonna say. For instance, distinctive features. If it’s another horse, how do you tell it apart from all the other horses? In this case, Torrent has some horns. We don’t have an explanation for the horns, but they do make the horse distinctive. Obviously, an unusual species is good, making the mount distinctive. The next thing is personality. Does it do anything other than exactly what the rider wants? Does it have any things it’s scared of or any strengths or inclinations or other behavior that kind of sets it apart from just a vehicle you are driving? Oren: The personality really is what makes your mount different from a motorcycle. If you look at stories that wanna make the vehicles more prominent, they give the vehicles personalities to make them more like mounts. Chris: It feels like the mount still exists when the protagonist is not riding them. Oren: Torrent doesn’t have that. He literally vanishes when you get off his back. Wes: But he still believes in you. Oren: He lives inside this little whistle I have. Chris: Animals need care. Wes: That’s a good point, Chris. Don’t forget that your mount is a living creature and you can’t just put it in the shed like a sword. You can just put the sword down and not treat it. Good mounts are not treated as inanimate objects. Oren: If you build up the attachment in a mount, you can’t just trade it in for a better one the way that you would a weapon, because you’ve built attachment to it. Supposedly, the character really is supposed to care about this creature, at least they probably should if you’re trying for that kind of relationship. And so if you’re just like, no, I’m trading it in for a better model. No. Looking at you Avatar! Not the last Airbender, blue people avatar. He has that whole thing about bonding with his one special dragon and then he’s, actually, I need a bigger dragon, and we never see what happened to his original one. It’s just gone. Chris: But the Game of Thrones dragons, because it is important to the plot where Daenerys actually has to manage their food supply. They’re more than just political tools. Oren: And it takes a long time in reading terms before they become adults that she can ride. In universe, that’s a ridiculously fast growth rate. That’s the thing that’s pretty common in fantasy, is that giant creatures that you’re gonna ride also grow super-fast. Chris: Anything that’s young grows at an astounding rate. Oren: But the Game of Thrones books are so long that even if you read them back-to-back instead of having to wait a million years between when they were published, it still feels like it takes quite a while for Daenerys’ dragons to mature to the point where she can actually ride them. Of course, she has them for four or five books. So that helps a lot too, right? That builds more attachment with them. I also think that when you are writing a mount of some kind, you should also give some thought to what it actually allows your protagonist to do. And even a horse has a lot more functionality than just going fast. Being on a horse means you’re higher up and you have more momentum, so you can see farther and you have an advantage in fighting. And your horse, if it’s properly trained, can even fight with you. If you get a more exotic mount, like a fantasy creature or even something like an elephant, that’s gonna change, right? What your mount can and can’t do will be very different. So that’s just something I’d recommend keeping in mind when you’re thinking of effects this will have. Wes: That’s kind of part of the novelty factor with cool items that let you do things that you can’t otherwise. And a mount compliments you by providing options for you to do things that you can’t otherwise do. My bear mount can climb really well, and all I gotta do is hold on. Chris: I think Appa, who is a standout mount in general, is really good for that because he facilitates the plot by just allowing them to go from one end of the world to the next much faster. They can even sleep on him, but he does eventually need to sleep himself, and he’s big, but he does not fight. He’s too scared. Oren: Except for sometimes when he does fight, mostly he doesn’t cause he’s OP. Appa is an interesting example because generally the writers of Avatar are very good at remembering that Appa exists even when he’s not being used for transport. So, it doesn’t feel like he just disappears in a pokéball whenever they get off of his back. Although it is also notable that he can fly. So, when they do need him to not be around, he can just lift off into the sky. And that’s a little more convenient than a standard, very large mount would be. Chris: It’s notable that in other stories, Appa might make traveling too easy, but Avatar the Airbender relies on a lot of traveling to make the plot work. We wanna zip around and tour the whole world and see all the temples, etc. And so that’s really valuable. But in another story, they had an issue in Dark Crystal just because some of the female characters can fly and they needed to travel for distance and they needed it to be hard, so it would’ve been very bad if Appa had been there. Oren: You do really wanna calibrate the kinds of transportation that you have to the sorts of things your character needs to be able to do, and you don’t want to give them a big old flying mount if they can just fly over all of their problems. Temeraire has the same issue and they generally handle it pretty well. But there are a few instances where there’s a bit of a contrived, we’d better sit down over here so we can get ambushed, get supplies. Wes: This is, we don’t really ever know what to do with flight. We want things that fly cuz they’re cool, but then we’re like incompetent. Oren: But same thing can happen in reverse and that’s why Pabu [Naga], I think is his name, the polar bear dog that Korra has, is basically a non-entity and it’s because he’s just not capable enough. So, he can carry Korra faster than a person can walk and he can swim. But Korra’s a water bender; she can already cover ground much faster than that just by herself if she wants to. Chris: And she does spend much of the time more stationary than Aang does. Oren: And if she does need to go somewhere, she has access to all of these advanced vehicles. We literally don’t need this dog for anything. It’s not like they couldn’t have found a way to make him important, but it would’ve been much harder and they were clearly not really interested. So, he seems like he’s gonna be important and then he just fades away as the story progresses. Except for one time when he shows up and knocks down a big set of iron bars. And is he strong enough to do that? That feels like more of an Appa thing, but I don’t know. Chris: My personal opinion is that the very best mount is Llyan from the Prydain Chronicles. Oren: The big cat? Chris: Yeah, the bard rides a cat. Oren: Yeah. I love the big cat. Yeah, no, giant cats are great. Chris: He’s about to get eaten when he realizes that he can play the harp. And the cat likes the harp. Wes: That’s right. Oh, it’s so good. Chris: So, the rest of the books, he’s just riding a cat that has a will of its own. Oren: Cat’s distinctive, it’s got its own personality, it’s not overpowered because he can’t really fly. They’re often so overmatched by their enemies that having a cat mount who will help them fight is pretty handy sometimes. Wes: Cat-type mounts don’t show up a lot. Does anybody even ride lions and tigers? Oren: In real life? No. Wes: Oh yeah. Chris: The believability of getting a cat to go where you want it to go. Wes: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But that’s why it works well in the Prydain because the cat enjoys the music and is, okay, I am choosing this. I’m allowing this to happen. Oren: It’s not fully sapient, but it’s smart enough to make a kind of deal: Sure, I’ll carry you around as long as I feel like it and as long as you play me music that I like, but I might eat your friends. Wes: I guess the other kind of cat mount, I love it, but it also freaks me out, is in My Friend Totoro: the cat bus. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Oh yeah. Wes: Oh man, that thing is so weird. Chris: Do we really wanna step in here? Oren: What’s important is that the inside of the cat bus is also furry. The fur extends inside. Don’t think about the alternative. I think it was Children of Blood and Bone that also had cat mount. Yeah. I think the protagonist had a big old kinda lion-type creature that they rode around and that was fine. It wasn’t super memorable just because other than being a cat, it basically functioned largely like a horse would. This isn’t its fault, but it was unintentionally funny: They’re all surrounded by the guards and the guards are about to kill them, and then the brother shows up on his big cat mount. The action scene just pauses as it describes him riding up, and then them getting on, and then them riding away. What were all the guards doing? Chris: Look, it would’ve been very rude of the guards to attack them while they were escaping, okay? Oren: It wasn’t their turn. That happens a lot in the later Animorphs books. Not really related to mounts, but the bad guys pausing while the heroes gradually leave. That’s a hard thing to do when you want your protagonists to run away from a fight is you realize that, oh yeah, the bad guys could just chase them. I also like how you can occasionally get cool mounts in sci-fi with living ships. Chris: Yeah, you gotta ride in those space whales. Oren: And the most obvious example that people are probably familiar with is the one from Farscape, which is certainly notable. Moya is the name of that one. I remember not really liking that one cuz it’s been a while since I’ve watched Stargate [Farscape]. But I remember feeling like Moya, oddly, her personality came off as really inconsistent because sometimes it felt like she cared about the people on board and then sometimes she was just doing stuff that would kill them and they’d be like, oh, that’s just Moya. Sometimes she just tries to kill us. And I don’t know, that felt a little weird to me. A book that I’ve read recently that I really liked is called Sisters of the Vast Black. And they’re a bunch of nuns and they hang out on a living ship, which is also their convent called Our Lady of Impossible Constellations. Which is just a fun little ship and you get to know its personality and its quirks. And the mechanic is also a vet, which is just neat. It decides it wants to mate with another ship and they keep it safe while that’s happening and that’s just a fun little sequence. Story does get much darker later for warning for anyone who reads it, but that part was fun. I liked it. Wes, do you have any favorite mounts you wanna bring up? Wes: So what about like underwater mounts? Those I don’t think get a lot of attention because swimming and if our protagonists actually take any action in the water, they’re probably capable anyway and/or part fish. Oren: I think the reason you don’t have a ton of underwater mounts is just that by the time you’re giving a human the ability to act underwater to the level that they need to do most adventures, it’s also assumed that they have a swim speed. The Aquaman movie recently has whales that the characters ride around in. In the most recent Black Panther movie, the Namorians, I forget their name, but Namor is their leader. They have whale troop transports, which very politely just drop the troops off and then swim away so that we don’t put the Wakandans in a position of having to kill whales. Chris: Avatar Way of Water, of course we gotta upgrade to the new water animal just to help them go faster and they ride along and they have whales that they talk to. But those don’t really feel like mount so much as they’re friends, but they have like smaller underwater animals that pull them along. Wes: The lack of underwater mount, like in our stories. It’s just that, I guess, water’s just not accessible no matter how we really spin it. I know we have talked about it’d be cool to have more like ocean-based stories. It’s harder maybe to conceptualize. It’s easier to think giant eagles are cool mount. They can get you where you need on land, but it’s okay, I’m underwater now. I need to go into the abyss and am I gonna ride in a giant angler fish? Oren: Yeah, I’m into that. Wes: Actually, yeah, that sounds cool. Chris: If we change people enough, if we have a story where we want people to fly or a story, we want people to swim, we stopped using mounts as much because now we’ve given the people transport capabilities they need themselves. So there’s just less reason to have mounts. Oren: To have underwater mounts, you basically need a situation where your characters can live and do stuff underwater, but not super fast. Basically, the same dynamic that we have on land. We can walk around and do stuff. We don’t need mounts to move, but if you wanna move fast, a horse is pretty handy. So you would need to do that. And there’s no reason you can’t. I just noticed that most authors tend not to, most authors by the time they create mermaids, they’re like, but also the mermaids should just be able to swim fast enough that there’s not really any reason for them to have mounts. Wes: Mounts also transport heavy things and water makes that easier. Oren: Although again, it’s just a question of how much. It’s easier to move stuff underwater, but how much easier? So, you could do it. It would require a little more extra effort. I have some fun, honorable mentions that aren’t super great but are fun. My favorite is Fuunsaiki, I believe is how you pronounce it, is the horse from the anime G Gundam. And he pilots a Gundam, which is a horse and is human, is on a human shaped Gundam and gets onto the horse Gundam, which is piloted by a horse. That’s the kind of show this is. Chris: And so, does the human Gundam ride the horse Gundam? Oren: Yeah, absolutely. And it has to use the reigns, the giant, like Gundam reigns. Chris: No wireless technology. Oren: Can’t just tell the horse where to go on your cell phone. That’s not gonna work. Chris: At what point are we just replicating the entire world and giant-mech-form? Why don’t we just put everybody in robot suits? Oren: There are some Gundam shows where the giant robots actually feel like giant robots as opposed to people with smaller people inside them. G Gundam is not one of those. There’s also Yakul, the red elk, which looks like an antelope. I tried to find out if the red elk was like a real animal. If it was, I couldn’t find it. But I was always confused when they called it a red elk. Cause it doesn’t look anything like an elk that doesn’t have antlers. It’s got horns that is taxonomically inaccurate. I thought it was pretty cool. Wes: One that comes to mind, might rival my bear choice, are chocobo. I like birds that you can ride who are also cute. Chris: What is that from? Wes: Final Fantasy introduced the chocobo mounts, which are like ostriches, but way better. Oren: What if an ostrich was big enough to ride? Wes: What if an ostrich is big enough to ride and super cute and came in a variety of colors? Oren: In Final Fantasy VII, you spend a lot of time grinding chocobo races. Wes: You really do. Oren: Assuming that you wanna do the extras, right? If you just wanna beat the game, whatever, you don’t ever need to. But if you wanna beat the big optional bosses, you’re gonna need to do a chocobo grinding. Wes: There’s something fun about flightless birds that function as mounts. I think that’s a cool concept. And I know that chocobo is a bigger, more popular version of that for anybody who’s played Final Fantasy games. But I’ve yet to see another one. Oren: There’s a cutscene in Final Fantasy X. That really shook me for a second because it shows a bunch of armored chocobo knights riding into battle, and I was not expecting to see the Chocobo. It’s like a badass animal. It’s Final Fantasy X, but as far as I’m concerned, the modern new Final Fantasy game. Wes: That’s right. Can’t quite keep up. Oren: That’s when I stopped playing. Chris: We also have Maximus from Tangled. Oren: Do they ever actually ride Maximus? Chris: I don’t think the other protagonists do. So Maximus is the steed for the captain of the guard. So Maximus starts as an antagonist. It’s more like Maximus is the rider and the guard is like decoration because Maximus is the one who’s actually doing all of the clue finding to follow the protagonist around trying to catch them. But then I think when Maximus goes on their side, if they ride him, it’s not for very long guard. Oren: The guard captain is basically a hood ornament that Maximus has to make it easier for him to get places. Chris: Doesn’t have to explain himself, as long as he just has a human on his back. Everybody will attribute everything he does to the human. Oren: All right, I got one more from the very first Animorphs book. This felt like the players doing a clever idea that the GM was just not ready for, and so arbitrarily said didn’t work. So what they do is they’re like, okay, we know where the Yeerk pool is, that’s where the yeerks keep all their hostages when the yeerks are not in their heads. So we’re gonna raid there and free a bunch of people. So, Cassie says, I know, I will morph into a horse and then I can carry some of the people out. That’s a good idea, Cassie. Good plan. Applegate’s like, actually, I can’t let you do that because if you free anyone, then my masquerade wouldn’t make sense. For a number of reasons, That doesn’t work. All the people you try to free either fall off or die. Chris: Oh, that’s terrible. Oren: Except for one woman who they managed to get out with and then that woman is never mentioned again. No idea what happened to her. But I did think that was a creative bit of thinking on Cassie’s part. I appreciated that. Chris: Since this series is about the horrors of war. Oren: Ooh. Chris: Do you maybe think that this is supposed to be an analogy for the terrors that prisoners of war go through and in a middle-grade story about kids transforming into animals? Oren: Yeah. It’s very dark and serious, let me tell you. I think that’ll about do it. Now that we’ve gotten the horrors of war into our fun horse podcast, I think we’re gonna have to call this one to a close. Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons: First we have Callie Macleod. Next, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson who’s a Professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.

As much as you love your hero, maybe they shouldn’t succeed at absolutely everything they try. A little failure once in a while can add variety, not to mention tension and believability. But what should actually happen when your protagonist fails? How do you keep the story moving and prevent the audience from getting frustrated? We’ve got answers in this week’s episode – plus more description of time loops than you might expect. Show Notes How to Use Failure In Your Story Snyder’s Weird DNA Rule The 100  Fail Forward Mechanics  How to Pace Your Story Downward Turning Points  Shang-Chi  No Way Home  Lockwood and CoTranscript Generously transcribed by Ace. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Oren: Oren Chris: …and… Wes: Wes. Chris: Unfortunately, we’ve already failed to record this podcast several times, but it didn’t move anything forward. It didn’t really make a difference. We just had to try again. You know, you’ll never know or hear about it. Oren: It was very frustrating, though, let me tell you that. Wes: The emotional cues made it seem like we were accomplishing something though. Chris: Just didn’t feel like anything we did made a difference. Oren: But yet it seems like it should have, though. Cause we spent a lot of time on it. Wes: A lot of time on it. Oren: Maybe we could say we personally grew as people. Wes: Because something has to happen if we waste that much time. Chris: Maybe we got clues as to why we kept failing. Oren: It was cause we kept forgetting to hit the record button and eventually we noticed. Chris: Or maybe we were just on a time loop. When we had to do something very specific in our podcast before we were able to move on. Wes: Like Sisyphus, we are bound to podcasting. Chris: So this time we’re gonna talk about protagonist failures. Basically what happens when the protagonist fails something they try to do during the story. And there’s several storytelling concerns that generally pop up during failures. So we figured we’d give you some tips so you could avoid failing at failing. Cause if you can’t succeed at failing, what can you succeed at? Oren: All right. I, for one thing, I’ve read Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder, and I know that protagonists should never fail because that’s not a Chad thing to do, and apparently that’s what protagonists are supposed to be according to Save the Cat!. Chris: Does he really say they’re never supposed to fail? Wes: Wait, does he also call them Chads? Oren: He does not, no. Those were some creative licenses. What he actually talks about… Chris: I would believe it if you said it, because some of the things in there… Oren: No, but the section he actually has that gives me the impression he doesn’t think protagonists should ever fail is that he has this whole thing about how the protagonist always needs to be in charge. And he means that literally, like the protagonist needs to be the highest ranking person around. Like he can’t be lower on the org chart than anybody else. And it just feels very like, my character must be the ultimate Gigachad at all times or I won’t feel good about it. Which is weird cause that’s definitely not a lot of the movies he’s describing. If I started naming the inconsistencies between the things he says you should do and the movies he says do them, we would be here literally all day. Chris: Sounds like the other thing Snyder says, as far as “I have a vague idea of some storytelling concept, but I actually haven’t thought through how to give people advice on it. So I’m gonna do something that is, like, roughly correlated, but really just is missed.” Oren: Yep. No, that there’s a lot of that in Snyder’s book. He occasionally can see that there is something going on, but he doesn’t really understand why, and so he ends up giving at best overly restrictive advice. The other thing that made me think of the Chad analogy is that he has this weird thing about primal motivations, which are basically all about sex, but he doesn’t say that most of the time. He phrases it as “continuing your DNA.” Chris: Everything has to be primal. Oren: Yeah, which is like the creepiest way to say that. So anyway, moving on from Save the Cat!, I have failed to not talk about Save the Cat! again. I keep trying to not do that and I have failed. Chris: Every time in the time loop Oren does this, it’s, you know how every time loop has like specific events that you see repeated over and over again, so you know where you are in the time loop? Yeah. It’s Oren complaining about Save the Cat!, it’s one of our first events. Okay, so why have failure? First question, why do we do this? Why can’t the protagonist just succeed at everything? And it’s not impossible to make a plot where the protagonist does succeed at what they try. It’s just harder in some ways. Oren: Right, usually the reason just comes down to if your protagonist always succeeds at everything they try to do, it will seem too easy, and tension and satisfaction will suffer. And characters who always succeed usually have too much candy, which will also reduce attachment, at which point you’re basically just running on novelty and that’s only gonna work for so long. Assuming you had any to start with. Wes: Yeah, I was, I’ve been thinking about when you said protagonists should never fail, and I was thinking about action movies and like certain actors who put it into their contracts that their characters cannot really fail. Like they can’t get beat up too hard, right? Cause it could ruin their status as actors and then they go and ruin their status themselves by things they say and do. But I’m thinking about those kinds of movies and it’s like, they don’t fail, but they’re just succeeding at things that don’t quite matter. And I wonder if that’s the same kind of thing. Oren: Yeah. Usually when actors do stuff like that or when writers have a character that they just can’t bear to see actually fail, what they will usually do is those characters will still fail in some capacity, but it will be… any responsibility they had for the failure will be erased or heavily hidden. It’ll be like, okay, I was trying to rescue this guy from the prison, but I couldn’t because there were 5 million guys in the way and I could only fight 1 million of them. Wes: Yeah. Oren: That sort of thing. Chris: Yeah, there are ways. We can talk more. But yeah, there’s ways to have the protagonist fail, but still make them look tough. Or make them not just, there’s a difference between failure and the ability to just snap your fingers and have everything be the way you want it to be, right? Which is partly where agency comes into play. But as far as successes, you can, every time your protagonist has a success, it generally means you have to do something to restore the tension. Because them succeeding usually means they’re a step closer to victory, or things have gotten easier because they succeeded and it makes it look like they’re more likely to succeed in the future just because they have a good track record. So you have to put in something in the plot to make them head into danger or have something else go wrong or do something to restore the tension. And I think in a movie length, you could probably continually have the protagonist succeed maybe, and get away with that. But the longer the story is, the harder that might be, especially, and again, there’s a difference between “do they succeed” and “do they succeed easily.” That’s definitely gonna make a difference. So if they fail, that can be easier because you don’t have to do as much to keep the tension up. You don’t have to put in a plot device right there usually, and if they don’t have a constant track record of success, it just can make it feel more likely that they’re gonna fail in the future. Oren: So this brings to mind an interesting contradiction that I’ve run into where if your character never fails, they often, audiences don’t tend to like that because it feels like the character is invincible or can’t fail and everything’s too easy or what have you. And this is especially true in longer stories like novels or TV shows. But at the same time, I have found that audiences get very easily frustrated with your character making mistakes. Wes: Yeah. Oren: I have a scene in the novel that I’ve been working on for a million years, and maybe I’ll be done with that soon. Who knows? I have a scene, probably the one that I’ve revised more than any other scene, is the scene where the protagonist makes a serious mistake. And plays into her enemy’s hand and things go really wrong. And I’ve had to revise that scene so many times because people keep reading it and getting frustrated and they’re like, no, “why isn’t she doing this? And that’s the wrong thing. I hate it so much!” And if they like the character, they don’t like it because they feel, they identify with her and now they feel like they’re making a mistake and if they didn’t like the character, they also don’t like it because now it feels like I’ve validated all the things they said about this character not being, like, deserving of protagonist status. I think I finally got it to a place where it’s working, but that, wow, that was a surprising amount of work. Chris: [sarcastic] Oren, this is just what you deserve for getting your readers emotionally invested in your story. Wes: How dare you? Oren: Yeah. I guess it was my own fault really. Chris: They want the protagonist to win. Geez. Oren: Yeah. So that is, in my experience, the most difficult kind of failure is your protagonist making a bad choice. Chris: I will say though, and we’ll talk about, I have some tips for that. But in your case, it was actually interesting because one of the things that you did is you made it, instead of her just losing control, you basically turned it into a moral dilemma. Where she had to make a strategic choice about what was most important to her, and that definitely made the reception better because she was, it was less frustrating if she had a reason to choose that. And decided that she could not in good conscience do what she had been planning to do. Oren: To a certain extent I cheated, is that I made it not an issue like a poor choice or an issue of bad judgment. I made it a moral dilemma with no good answer. And you know, she picked the one that was most important to her. And that still frustrated a couple of people, but it was certainly easier to get them to accept it than when I was trying to write it as she just made a genuine mistake and did something that she shouldn’t have done. So that was just, that was much harder, and I still think that you should be able to do that. It’s just very challenging. Chris: Right. And you could consider that a failure if you want. On one hand she did what she intended to do, so we might not call that a failure. At the same time, she still had an objective she did not succeed at because she was not willing to do what it took. Eh, we could call that a failure, even though through a different lens it’s a moral dilemma. Oren: Yeah. I would call it a failure because she didn’t get the thing she was after, but it’s not a poor judgment failure, right? I made it into another kind of problem. I made it into a less extreme version of the “I could only fight 1 million guys, but there were 5 million guys” scenario. Chris: Going back to what failures are for, besides tension, which is usually what you’re concerned with most of the time, cause we always have to manage tension, keep tension up during the story. But as you mentioned, teaching the protagonist lessons, right? If they’re on a character arc, a lot of times failure is very instructive. And can help them do better next time. You can set up for a nice payoff later where they fail to do something and that thing is, “oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I could just do this thing, but I’m always failing.” And then when they finally succeed later in the story, right, we get a good payoff for that. In addition to the lessons, if you wanna send your audience a message, we’ve talked about tragedies before. The idea that at the climax, the hero just fails and we’ve got like a cautionary tale. And those stories are generally not as popular, but they can send really strong messages. And then also if you’re an edgelord. Wes: Most importantly.  Chris: Or if you have any other dark themes, right? There could be other things like you want to send a message about dealing with regret or guilt, for instance. That would be a reason to use failures. Oren: Shall we talk about the potential problems that your protagonist failing can cause in the story? The most obvious one is that if your character fails a lot, the story can just get too dismal. And I’m not just talking about The 100. Chris: The 100 does surprisingly good with its failures, though. Oren: It does. The 100 avoids the other problem with failures, which is that if by default, often when the character fails, it just means they didn’t get the thing they needed for the plot to move forward. And so now you’re just stuck and all right, now what? There’s no, you don’t have movement, and so it just feels like the story is paused for a while. You try to find a way around whatever the roadblock is, whereas The 100 is very good at using failures to also advance the story, just not in a way the protagonists wanted. Chris: The 100 uses the Plan B trick a lot. There’s different ways to keep the plot moving, but that’s one. Cause you need to have the failure make a difference, right? It should never just put the characters back where they started. So you have to figure out a way that this failure changes the trajectory of the plot while still keeping it moving. And one way is, okay, the heroes have a plan B. They try their safe option, that’s been eliminated. Now they have to get desperate, and then it’s nice to add something in addition to that. Because of their failure, the villain is onto them. So basically, they have to face a consequence every time they try and fail. That’s important for tension because if you have heroes that can just keep trying over and over again and it costs them nothing, tension will drop. This is why in a time loop story, usually pretty quickly after we get past the novelty stage, some kind of urgency is gonna be established. There’s gonna be some limit for how many times the loop can happen, so that tension stays up. Because having a situation where we can just trial and error, just brute force this and do it over and over again, will kill your tension. Oren: Yeah. If it feels like they have infinite time to solve a problem, then they’ll solve it eventually. Chris: So every time your protagonists try and fail, they do need to face some kind of consequence for that. Oren: And this has been a problem in old school RPG design for a long time now. And fortunately, the state of the field outside of the really big games like D&D has mostly figured this out. But for a long time RPGs had this real problem where you failed a roll and then what? You just, okay, you just didn’t get the thing you wanted, so you’re just standing there. Do you try again? What do you do at that point? And it’s really frustrating. Basically, nobody enjoys that experience. I did have one person try to tell me that, no, it’s actually fun because then you try to come up with a different plan. But that’s not my experience of that. Chris: No, players give you their first plan. That’s the plan they thought of. They really struggle if you take that away and make them think of another one. Wes: Yeah, whoever would say that it should go that way clearly just hasn’t played a game where you can roll low, roll a failure, but accomplish something and then have the game master introduce a complication, right? And it’s suddenly, oh, something new to play, like a new puzzle piece to work out. That’s infinitely better. Oren: Yeah. That’s basically the fail forward, is the catch-all term for that philosophy. And that’s basically the default now in any indie game. It’s very rare to find a new game outside of one of the established lines that doesn’t have some form of fail forward. At this point, it’s weird if you don’t have it. Chris: So we talked about having a plan B for avoiding that. Going back to where we started and just doing it, trying again. Having the villain do something that the protagonist has to respond to that ultimately moves things forward. You can move the plot forward just by escalating the situation and leading to a final confrontation. For instance, the protagonist fails. As a result, the villain captures somebody. Now the protagonist has to rescue that person. Or something else. The villain moves a step forward. Now the protagonist has to act to prevent the worst from happening. That’s another way to keep things moving forward. And finally, you can also do the silver lining, right? Okay. So we failed at our main objective, but a new opportunity appeared while we were doing that. We met a new person. We got a new clue, right? We got some new ideas. And now we have a different pathway to pursue. Oren: That’s part of the jagged, ascending line of tension that we’ve talked about in other places where as the story moves forward, it should simultaneously feel like a conclusion is drawing nearer, but also that it will, it is less likely that conclusion will be favorable. And that’s tricky. That’s hard to do. And so when you have a failure, one of your things you have to figure out is, how does this failure move the story closer to a conclusion? Not necessarily the conclusion we, the protagonist and the reader wanted to have, but a conclusion. And with success, it’s a little easier to move it forward, but then you have to figure out how to keep tension going up. So either way, you have to maintain the feeling that the end is getting closer, but also the end is harder than before. Chris: It’s the weird magician’s trick where the protagonist has to be closer to success, assuming you’re gonna have a happy ending, but it has to seem more dire and desperate than before, despite the fact that they’re getting closer to success. So we could go back to, you were talking about the story getting too dismal. I think it’s good again to remind people that first of all, tension, which is what makes your story exciting, is created by the anticipation of something bad that could happen. And if lots of bad things do happen, that’s not exciting. Just the fact that after something bad happens, tension often goes down, right? Because we’re no longer worried about whether or not it will happen. And also tension requires uncertainty. So if you ever get to the point where it doesn’t feel like the protagonist has any path to succeed or any chance of success, your tension won’t go away. It’s all a part of that preserving hope that Oren has talked about in the blog, Oren: And to a certain extent, there is a level of taste involved here. Like we try to talk about things that are more broadly applicable. There’s very rarely anyone who’s gonna enjoy your story less because it has a more satisfying ending. That’s not common, but when it comes to how dismal the story is, that is, to a certain extent, a taste question. Because like I said, like Chris mentioned, if you do all the things The 100 does, of making it so that failures still move the story forward and still have turning points, that’s downward turning points. It’s a specific kind of turning point you have at a failure, which I’ll add in the show notes, we have an article on that. You can do all those things and the story will still move and it will have all those things and yet it will still get too dark for some people, but for other people, they will love it because there are people who like really dark stuff. And so, that’s a taste question. There’s not an objective right answer to that. That’s just a question of how dark do you want this and what kind of audience are you looking for? There are probably fewer people who like really dark stuff, but they’re also likely to be pretty devoted because more stories are written for the wider group that doesn’t like super dark stuff. Chris: So let’s talk about agency and turning points. Since that’s another tricky thing, right? Besides moving the story forward. Another thing that storytellers can have trouble with is, how do they give the protagonist agency. And to review, agency is the character’s ability to affect the outcome of the story. So your protagonists need it, your antagonists should have it too. It’s really unsatisfying if a protagonist is just escorted through the story and they are helpless and can’t do anything. People do not like that. They often blame the protagonist and stop liking the protagonist when that happens. So you don’t want that. And I think that some storytellers, they want things to go wrong, and they imagine that if their protagonist has any power over the outcome, then they would just fix it. So their reflexive way of having bad things happening is making it so the protagonists just can’t do anything. This can work for one-off incidents, right? If you have something suddenly bad happen, and we would call this calamity, like, oh, suddenly a big meteor strikes. You can have those things happen in the story. They’re useful when they create problems that then the protagonist can work on taking care of. And those problems raise tension, but you also don’t wanna do that a lot. So if you have a sequence in your story where everything is supposed to go downhill for a while, the situation is gonna get worse and worse for a significant period of time. You can’t just rely on stuff happening without giving the protagonist any agency. Oren: So usually when it comes to downward turning points, they’re the opposite of a normal turning point, right? Because by default we’re assuming the protagonist is gonna succeed, and a traditional turning point typically works by the protagonist showing some kind of cleverness or persistence or selflessness. Those are usually the ones that’ll get you through. There are some others, but those are sort of your workhorses. So for downward points, and I’m just reading off of Chris’ article here, you want to do the opposite. You usually show selfishness, poor decision making or taking the easy path instead of doing what’s difficult. And those are kind of your workhorses for a downward turning point. And you will usually want some element of that, even if you’re doing the thing where “I could only fight 1 million guys.” Because if the only thing, if the only reason your protagonist ever fails is that the bad guy has overwhelming force that’s gonna make it feel like, well, I guess the protagonist is gonna lose cause no matter how badass they are, the villain always has overpowering force. So whatever. Chris: But I do wanna point out that the most prominent downward turning points happen for villains. Because we don’t have to worry about villain likability. So those ones get really obvious. You have a villain who kills a bunch of people and then, the hero defeats them, but of course your hero can’t dirty their hands killing your villain. Like the people that the villain hurt, they suddenly come back from the dead and drag the villain into the grave or something. That’s an example of a downward turning point because the villain did something bad and then that bad thing came to bite the villain. So they’re pretty obvious when applied to a villain, but when we apply them to a protagonist, they’re usually much milder. And the goal is to create something that we can say, okay, that was the wrong choice, but it’s an understandable choice. And the punishment for that wrong point, wrong choice is disproportionate, right? So they did a thing that’s only a little bad and then just a huge tragedy occurred as a result. And so even though they have a mistake that they should correct, right, and they have some responsibility for the bad things that happen, it also builds a little sympathy for them cause they didn’t really deserve that much. Oren: Yeah. A fun example from a recent movie is actually from Shang-Chi. Chris has an example in her downward turning points article using the villain. But there’s also an interesting example in this movie of the hero having a downward turning point. And this is when Shang-Chi, our protagonist, is fighting Wenwu, the bad guy. And they’re, this is the early part of their fight before Wenwu has really started using his magic. So like logically, there are some questions there. It’s like, why isn’t Wenwu just using his magic to win the fight? But he hasn’t started doing that yet, so we’re not gonna ask those questions. Shang-Chi is actually getting the upper hand. And it manages to knock Wenwu down and has a chance to end the fight, but instead takes a moment to gloat a bit because he’s got it. He’s been, this is his father who’s been a jerk to him for a while, and so he has a second to be like, “hey, I’m gonna give you a piece of mind dad,” and it’s sure we can totally understand why you would wanna do that. But it was a bad choice. He should have finished the fight when he had the opportunity. Cause then he gets sucker punched and tossed into a lake, at which point the climax gets noticeably worse. So my point is, Shang-Chi, you shouldn’t have let yourself get tossed in that lake. Chris: One of my favorites, because clearly a lot of effort was put into balancing this one, was Spider-Man: No Way Home. So Peter has a situation where his secret identity has been revealed. And somebody’s also blaming him for things that happened. So people are wondering if he’s a villain and as a result, his friends don’t get into the college that they applied for. He feels bad about that, so he wants Doctor Strange to cast a spell to make people forget his secret identity again, so that his two friends can get into college, because he’s the reason they didn’t. So he has a selfless reason to start, which would normally make it just fine. But then when Doctor Strange starts to cast this spell, we first see that Peter didn’t actually do his due diligence by appealing the decision before asking for magic. Which means that he’s taking the easy route a little bit, even though his motivation is selfless. And then while the spell’s being cast, he starts to get a little greedy and make more and more demands of Doctor Strange, which kind of strains the spell and makes it harder. And as a result, the spell does not have the intended effect, and then he has to make a sacrifice later in the movie to make up for that because he is responsible for the bad things that happen as a result of the spell. So is Doctor Strange, honestly. You don’t have to just say yes to the high school kid who comes up and asks for a huge world changing spell, but as you can see, okay, that’s understandable, right? It’s understandable that that happened. At the same time, he could have done better. But yeah, this is a good place to, if you have a character arc, and you want your hero to learn a lesson, right? That’s often a really good level. Of course, depending on what character arc you have, your hero, again, could potentially do really frustrating things if they just lose control and cause a lot of damage. But if they’re just a little impatient, for instance, or you could have a situation where you show what the right tactic or wrong tactic is in a situation by having your hero first try the wrong tactic. For instance, maybe they tried to persuade a villain to stand down by pretending to buy into what the villain believes, and that’s actually a bad choice because they’re only reinforcing those bad beliefs. And that encourages the villain and then it comes back to bite them, for instance. You can show, okay, no, we need to not pretend those things are good. And that could be a little lesson that you have in your story. Oren: You can also use some, you can also use a bit of narrative trickery to create some distance between the outcome of the mistake and the actual mistake, which tends to reduce reader frustration. So there’s a scene from the beginning of the second Lockwood & Co book, which does this in, I think, an interesting way where they’re on a job, and this is one of the jobs that got cut for the show just cause it wasn’t super important and they were condensing things down. But they’re on a job and they are digging up what they think is a body, and they’re trying to find the body and they can’t find it. And then a bunch of ghosts show up and attack them and it’s, oh no, it’s bad. And we messed up. We don’t, where’s the body? And then they have to get saved by the rival team who they hate. And then we discover that the mistake they made was when they were digging, they discarded the marker stone, which was the actual haunted object. Now if during the scene if they had been like, oh, and here’s a suspicious stone that is marking the grave. And they had then just tossed aside and ignored it. The reader would’ve been like, “no, it’s the stone, you guys! It’s the stone! Why are you not doing the stone?” But since we didn’t know about the stone, because the scene starts after they’ve already made that mistake, there’s a little bit more narrative distance and so there’s less of an opportunity for the reader to get frustrated with them. Chris: Yeah, that’s really good. Oren: So you can do tricks like that, right? You can also do it in reverse where the protagonist makes a mistake, but the effects of that mistake are not obvious until later. The protagonist is like, “no, we’re gonna, we’re gonna go out and fight the bad guys, and we’re not gonna stay in our city and hide.” And it turns out that the bad guys are too strong because of something that the protagonist maybe didn’t know about at the time, or at least the readers don’t know. And so that creates some distance between the initial mistake and the outcome of the mistake. Chris: And again, the more understandable you make it, the better. Like, for instance, maybe your hero makes a bad choice because they are rushing through something when they should take more care. But you can also give them a reason to rush. So they had to make a difficult decision and they made the wrong choice. Oren: Okay. I think we have successfully managed to break the time loop. I guess it was talking about creating narrative distance and making it understandable. We just never thought of doing that until now, which would’ve been very frustrating if you’d had to listen to that. But fortunately that happened in backstory, so you don’t have to worry about it. So I think we’re gonna call this episode to a close. Chris: If this episode was not a failure for you, consider joining our Patreon and keeping Mythcreants going. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

How do you make magic spooky? You just add blood! At least, that’s how fiction seems to view it. If a story has magic, it’s almost guaranteed that someone will try a blood ritual at some point, and who can blame them? Blood magic is visceral and externalizes the idea of magic sapping a person’s life force. Naturally, this pleasant idea is our topic for this week!Show Notes A Darker Shade of Magic  Legend of the Five Rings  Winter Tide  Ten Thousand Doors of January The Dark Crystal  Half Bad: The Bastard Son of the Devil Himself Dragon Age  7th SeaTranscript Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Wes: You’re listening to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is… Chris: Chris Wes: …and… Oren: Oren Wes: And before we do vampire voices and things like that, let’s just put a content notice up that we’re talking about blood magic, and we’re gonna be talking about a lot of blood, which is gonna probably mean discussions of, like, gory subject material, violence. Blood magic sometimes involves self-harm and – like body horror stuff in general. So just, it might get gross, but we also get grossed out, so we’re gonna probably not gross ourselves out. Oren: Probably a little gross, but not as gross as you might want it to be if you’re into that sort of thing. Wes: [laughing] Yeah, thank you. That’s a good way of putting it. But that said, as gross as it can be, I feel like there’s no shortage of storytellers willing to let their characters and villains use this power. I don’t know. Once I started thinking about blood magic, I was like, okay, this is actually cropping up everywhere, and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m listening to A Darker Shade of Magic right now by V. E. Schwab, but…I’m just like, okay, now that I started prepping for this I’m thinking blood magic is all over the place, so let’s get into it. What is blood magic, Chris and Oren? Chris: I think it’s magic that the storyteller wants to feel menacing. Wes: [laughter] I love that answer. Chris: Any magic that the storyteller wants to feel menacing becomes blood magic. Wes: Yeah, it’s like a checklist of like, how much angst do I want in my story, right? [laughing] And also how menacing do I want to be? Okay. Oren: Yeah. Most fantasy stories, if they have an extensive use of magic or even a limited use of magic in some cases will involve some kind of spooky blood addition of some sort. Now, I, personally, am a veteran of Legend of the Five Rings, which has a whole blood magic system. This isn’t “add some blood to some other magic.” No, we take it very seriously around here. Everything’s blood magic all the time, or at least it used to be. Apparently in the new edition, they changed a bunch of stuff to try to make it, like, less Orientalist, which is good. But I don’t know what that did to blood magic. I haven’t read the new edition. Wes: Perhaps maybe on just a more maybe, I don’t know, literal level for, I think the video game enthusiasts out there. Blood magic also could be magic that is powered by blood, with blood serving as a component or like a catalyst for other magical effects. Or, blood magic could mean magic that affects blood. Which we get in Avatar, right? With blood bending. Oren: Yeah, it can go either way, but it’s still always portrayed as like spooky and weird and gross. Except for the one counter example I can think of off the top of my head is Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys. Wes: That’s right. Yeah. There was blood magic in that. Oren: They do have some blood magic, but it’s not especially creepy. Now granted, this is at least somewhat a cosmic horror story, and so all magic is weird and creepy. And so the blood magic is not especially creepy, right? Like, they do some blood magic and whatever, and they also do some other magic. And some of that’s way worse. Chris: When you have Cthulhu in the story, blood starts to sound less intimidating. Oren: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Wes: Yeah, but I do remember the main character in that story. The blood components of that magic were tidy in comparison to other stories. Certainly not a huge deal, but still present. Oren: Because that story was also very much, “Hey, what if we reimagined some cosmic horror tropes as like actual beliefs that these beings have?” And so in that sort of situation, they’re probably not gonna be doing like the really big dramatic slashes across the palm or whatever, because that’s not sustainable. There’s important stuff in your palm! You can’t just keep slashing it, unless you want nerve damage. Especially now we have hypodermic needles. You can just do a little blood draw, and now you’ve got some blood. It’s just…calm down everybody! Chris: I still cannot forget Ten Thousand Doors of January, where the protagonist, she just has writing magic. Wes: Just gotta write on stuff. Chris: She just writes. And she’s been basically kidnapped, and she has a sharp object, and instead of scratching into anything else that she could scratch, or even piercing herself and then using the blood as ink, she decides she has to cut herself, and it’s like, why are we doing this? So it’s not actually a blood magic system. I’m sure it was very symbolic. Oren: It was very symbolic, I’m sure. That scene also bothered me because until now we’ve been told over and over again that the protagonist can’t do things because she’s just so conditioned to be meek and passive, which was a weird thing to say because I didn’t actually feel like she was overly meek and passive? But that’s what the narrative kept telling us. And then suddenly she’s in a situation cause she’s been kidnapped and taken to an asylum, where all she needs to do is be meek and passive, because they don’t know about her magic there. So she just needs to be meek and passive until she can get her hands on a pen, which they would probably give her just to write her dad a letter or something. But instead, she immediately goes berserk [laughter] and tries to force a pen away from one of the orderlies. And so then they lock her up. Okay, I thought she was supposed to be meek and passive. What? Wes: Now is as good time as any need to talk about my theory, the why of blood magic that is not just, I don’t know, for edge or whatever. Doors of January is not a good book, but a good example, maybe. There’s a sense that because it’s blood, that casting blood magic is, like, there’s a sacrifice involved, right? And I think that’s just drawing on literal sacrificial history in this realm. And yeah, making January do that to herself is like a self-sacrifice, right? What is she willing to give up to make this magic work? That kind of thing. And it was completely unnecessary, [laughter] but I feel since blood spilled for teaching power, or whatever, I feel like that is the subliminal connotation to a lot of blood magic and yeah, maybe that’s why. Yeah, it’s hard. It’s difficult. You must suffer in order to do this, and I think a lot of people do like magic that has costs. They don’t wanna just be casting spells willy-nilly, gotta be limited somehow, and blood is like a super kind of cost. Whether you’re sacrificing parts of yourself, or you are sacrificing voluntary or involuntary subjects, depends on maybe what part of the good and evil spectrum you lie on, but yeah, that’s kinda my theory. It all comes down to sacrifice and blood being the power for it. Oren: I don’t think you’re wrong. I think that makes sense. I think a lot of the time blood magic is an externalization of the concept of sacrificing some part of yourself to do magic. And you can always describe it as, “I’ve drained their essence” or “their soul” or whatever, but that’s less real than blood. Chris: Dark Crystal does that, but it’s really creepy. But, yeah, I think it takes a little bit more setup, right? It’s much easier to just be like, blood. Knife. Here you go. We can see it dripping, all red and stuff. Than it is to be, “Hey, we’ve got this dark crystal, and now we’ve got this, like, setup, and if you stare at the dark crystal, and then this machine does the thing.” Oren: Also, if I remember correctly, in Dark Crystal, the machine just scrunches you up, right? Like you just rot and collapse, or something. It was bad, right? Chris: It turns the Podlings into basically subservient zombies. Oren: Yeah. So, in that situation, you don’t necessarily need the blood component, but often you want magic where you want the protagonist to have done that, to have given some part of themselves. And in that situation, having it be literal blood makes it, I think, hit harder than it would if you were just like, all right, I gave some of my spirit points away and now I’m very tired. And, but trust me, like on the inside, my spirit has been drained, right? It’s just less real. Chris: I should point out that The Dark Crystal takes place in a second world fantasy with no humans. And that might make it easier to, “Hey, there’s this strange essence liquid we get from people’s bodies.” [laughing] Wes: Yeah, good point. Chris: I do wonder if it was the real word of humans, you’d be like, wait, but what is that? There’s liquid there. What liquid is that? Oren: That’s some stuff. Don’t worry about it. It’s that bile we’ve been hearing so much about. [laughter] Wes: That’s a good example. Yeah. And then that provides the answer of just what is magical ichor [eye-kor] or ichor [ih-kor] and however, depending on your pronunciations. I don’t know. It’s just some juice that comes out of things and it’s useful. [laughter] It is funny, though, or like we were talking about, it’s just, “No, I assure you I am fatigued.” But then we have plenty of people that use blood magic who should be feeling faint, at the least, but are not? At all? Oren: That’s just power creep for you. Okay? Once you start introducing blood magic and more stories start using it, you’re gonna have characters who you want to keep casting spells even after they’ve spilled several pints of blood, and it’s, I don’t know, do you have that much to spare? I feel like you might need a transfusion at this point. Chris: I think you would know, Oren, because of your vampires. I remember one game – it was actually a really good ability. It just, it did stretch imagination for how much blood these vampires could hold. So what they did is they shaped things out of their blood, and sometimes it was just like, “Hey, I have a blood knife.” Oren: No, excuse me. I was way more confusing than that. The blood knife was a separate artifact that one of them had. That was different from the other vampire who made a knife out of blood. [laughter] Chris: [funny voice] Oh, I’m sor-ree. Excuse me, sir. Oren: See, I want people to understand how much I did not think this through. [laughter] Chris: But they get in fights and the vampires just cut their veins open and make things from their blood. And in particular, there was this villain that would make blood clones, and it actually worked out really well for the campaign, because we needed a way to encounter the villain, and we were all like OP in the system, where rolls were all really high. So it was really difficult for us to fail anything. But we still needed to encounter the villain, but the villain couldn’t just be defeated, or else she would lose her threat factor. So instead, she would appear to us, it would look like her, and then we would get in a physical fight with her, and she would be a difficult opponent to beat, but then it would just, the final knockout blow would turn out she was just a bunch of blood. [laughter] So she was an image of the villain made from blood. Oren did not specify how much blood that required. [laughter] Oren: So just, let’s just imagine that it was blood spread very thinly. Wes: Uhhuh Oren: It was just like a one micron thick sheet of blood in a person’s shape. Let’s just go with that. Okay. Let’s stop asking questions. Chris: Some very durable blood here with a lot of resistance to it. Oren: Yeah, well, Chris, a wizard did it. [laughter] And since a wizard did it, it technically makes sense, and no one can critique it anymore. [laughing] This is what I’ve been told. Wes: What kind of spells, like effects, do we associate with blood magic? Oren: Gross ones. Wes: Gross ones? Oren: Or usually, it depends, there’s a lot of different versions. The most common are harmful things. You don’t usually spill blood if your spell is to help the crops grow, but sometimes you do. Everything’s…there’s a lot of different types of blood magic. Chris: There’s also a lot of associations with stealing a life from one person to another. The whole like, [vampire accent] “bathe in blood to become young” [end vampire accent] or something like that. So, I would also think of it, anything that has to do with the body, right? Drink somebody’s blood to take something from them, for instance. Wes: I think that’s the whole point of vampires, right? Is that they prey on young people for sustenance to stay immortal, right? It’s like literally that act of blood magic just preserves their life. Chris: I do think an interesting example is Half Bad. Oren: …The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself? We have to say the full title every time, Chris, we can’t shorten it. It’s a betrayal of everything that show stood for.  Chris: Somebody just loved that title. Somebody was just very attached to that title. But this is definitely a case of using the sinisterness of blood magic to make it look like a specific group of mages are bad, so that you can then be like, no, they’re not bad, they’re the good guys! Gotcha. [laughing] But in this case, they heal faster, which to me does make sense. It fits the body theme. It’s a little eclectic. They have one very strange difference, which just feels a little arbitrary, where there’s a coming of age ritual in this setting where the mages get their special ability, and the blood mages need a drop of relative’s blood for this coming of age, or they just die. And I think it’s used, it’s an important plot point in the show, because then the main character who is a blood mage doesn’t have any relatives, and so he has to travel to try to find their blood. So it’s used to good effect, but it is a little bit arbitrary, I feel like. Oren: I need people to understand just how arbitrary this is because the blood mages, right, that’s one group of them, or Blood Witches I think they’re called, and they do the thing where for their coming of age ceremony, you have to drink a couple drops of your relative’s blood, and then you have the Fairborn Witches, and for their coming of age ceremony, you have to drink a couple drops of your relative’s blood. Chris: [laughing] Oh, I forgot about that. Oren: It’s the same, except that for some reason the Blood Witches will die because of it if they don’t get it. And the Fairborn, I think just won’t get their powers. So it’s as if you had a setting where everybody ate salt. But like one group of people had a salt deficiency and so if they didn’t eat salt, they would die. Everyone eats about the same amount, and so those group of people are the salt eaters. And it’s not impossible that could happen. It was just a really confusing thing to call them. Chris: The other thing, I think one reason why it seems arbitrary actually is because it’s only a couple drops, right? It just stretches belief more than if they were a little bit more vampiric about it and needed a pint of blood. [laughing] The thing that’s really supposed to make them creepy is that they can eat somebody’s heart to get their powers, right, which they make a point of, oh, this means they’re bad, and super creepy and monstrous. But then, they’re like, oh, actually, in our families, somebody does this at the end of their life, they give their powers to the next person, and then those powers are inherited with each generation, which makes it look better. The problem is that they want these blood mages to be the underdogs. Oren: So somehow you have, one side has basically the same powers as the other side, except they also have a certain number of people, it’s not clear exactly how many, but apparently most families have at least one, who can just snowball powers through the centuries. Chris: It has like hundreds probably. Oren: And has, and most of those powers are useless, because most of them are just not very well thought out, but a few of them are incredibly good and combined would be basically unstoppable. And so how are the blood mages the underdogs, no one knows the answer. [laughter] Chris: And they heal faster too, on top of that. Oren: Right. Also, for some reason, they heal faster. That show is weird because it’s also one of those shows where every witch has a specific power like the X-Men, but then they also all have all the spells, which can do whatever the writers feel like at any given time. So, like, it’s – the magic system of that story is not well thought out is what I’m saying. But this actually segues into an interesting point that I found with blood magic, which is there’s this whole thing of maybe blood magic’s not that bad. A lot of stories do that. Or they are like, oh, blood magic’s bad. But maybe, if you want to win, you have to embrace the grimdarkness of using blood magic. And, I’m not gonna say that can’t work. I’m gonna say be careful, because you can very easily find yourself in a situation where you’ve created a scenario where being willing to murder someone directly translates into more power. And of course, in real life, there are plenty of opportunities where killing someone could get you power, but it doesn’t literally make you physically more powerful in most cases, whereas in this blood magic situation you have, and – I would just think if that’s the kind of dynamic you want in your setting. Because you might find that it’s hard to justify why the setting isn’t a horrible dystopia at that point. It’s especially bad for role playing games because role playing games tend to pull darker already, and once you start telling players, “yeah, this is a really hard boss fight, or, you could go murder a villager and then it would be an easy boss fight.” If they ever get at all frustrated, that villager murder is gonna start looking real tempting. Wes: But do you think it works well for, I don’t know, like for a villain, right? When we were talking about this topic, Dragon Age: Absolution came up, right, with, what was his name? Rasalan? Or, yeah, Rezaren, the Tevinter mage that ends up going hardcore blood magic by the end of it. [laughing] And it’s just an escalating thread of, I just want it for this. But what he wants it for becomes an obsession. And then like that descent into realizing that if you just have enough, you can do almost anything. Which for a villain, I think it worked well in that story. Oren: It works out okay. You just wanna be careful how much you emphasize it, right? Like in that story, we just assumed that the protagonists would never think of doing that. Or that they aren’t really in a situation where it would be practical or necessary for some imagined greater good or what have you. But, and of course they’re not players, right? So you can make them think whatever you want them to think. But if you make it more widespread, it can be an issue. Chris: I will point out that that particular story is about an artifact. Wes: Yes, that’s a good point Chris: …that he wants to use. So, you could use something like that. Okay, it’s not just that we have to kill somebody, but we also have to kill somebody and have this special artifact and there’s only one of them. Or do other things to just reduce the total number of people who would be doing this, right? Wes: Yeah, that’s a good point. Oren: Dragon Age is very funny with its blood magic, because most of the time the game is like, “blood magic is corrupting, and if you use it, you’re on the path to evil, and it’s basically magical hard drugs and you’re, once you use it, you’re doomed” or whatever. But then Dragon Age II, which is ironically the one that focuses the most on how evil blood magic is, just lets you take a blood magic prestige class and it’s the most powerful build in the game. Chris: Oh, my goodness. [laughter] Oren: And, nothing happens when you do it. Like, it’s just very weird, if you side with the Templars in the little oppressed mages story they have going on, and you break into the mage sanctum, and all the mages are doing blood magic, and it’s all horrible and evil, and the Templars are like, [dramatic voice] “We must cleanse this place with fire.” And then they look over to you and are, like, “Do you have our backs?” And you’re standing there with, like, huge ribbons of blood circling you, [laughter] and big glowing red orbs, and you’re like, “Yeah, let’s get these blood mages!” Wes: That’s hilarious. I haven’t played two, but I remember in one the mages’, like, quest line where you saved them or whatever. And if I think if you had unlocked blood magic and done that, that you’ll rescue everybody, but then the headmaster Dumbledore figure will be like, “Thank you! But by the way, you were using some magic back there that I’m a little worried about.” And you can just be like, “It’s Grey Warden magic. Don’t worry about it.” [laughter] Oren: “It’s fine.” [more laughter] Oren: Yeah, see Dragon Age II was also annoying because most of the time in Dragon Age, if you wanna be a blood mage, you’ve gotta devote significant resources to it. It’s like a prestige class. But then all these random newbie mages are just, like, “Blah! Knife stab self, now blood magic happens.” And it’s like, “Hey, I had to work hard for that, and you all just get it for free?” [laughter] That’s some nonsense. Wes: Bringing up Dragon Age is a good segue to this, that I’m curious if you two think there’s a strong association or not between this, cause, one of the ways to unlock blood magic in that game is that one of the, oh, forget what they’re called, but, like, the demons, can teach it to you, right. To what extent is there like some kind of devilish aspect to blood magic in stories? Oren: In stories? Basically all the time. I don’t know if you know what the historical connection there is. I see historical dramas all the time. The witch hunter will come to town and be like, [witch hunter voice] “The evil witch is doing a blood sacrifice for Satan.” And I’m like, maybe that’s a thing witch hunters said in that time period. I don’t know. I haven’t checked, but I do know that’s very common in fantasy fiction all over the place. Wes: To the point where you feel like if I was writing a story and I want to include like magic that I am certainly running the risk of maybe inviting that kind of, like, premise into the story? Oren: I don’t know if I would say inviting. I don’t think it’s so common that if you have blood magic, people are gonna be like, [complaining voice] “Where’s the demon to go with the blood magic? Continuity error.” It’s not quite that common. If you had blood magic and then there was like a demon or devil, some kind of supernatural, evil creature that was giving the knowledge of it, or that was what people thought it was, I mean, readers are gonna take that in stride, right? That’s a pretty well established trope. Chris: I would say that it would be a little odd if you had blood magic and nothing about it seemed – like it was perfectly nonchalant. “Oh yeah. The blood, it’s just like any other element, and there’s just nothing menacing about it.” Then that would be a little strange, not like impossible, depending on context. If you have the right magic system, you might be able to do that, but in many cases they, people would look for some kind of commentary on whether it’s good or bad. Wes: Interesting. I mentioned earlier that I’m not, that I’m maybe only a third of the way through A Darker Shade of Magic. And one of the early things that happens in that story is that he trades basically a, uh, it’s almost like a little like trinket type game with the four elements and then a little piece of bone to a collector in Grey London, which is a place that doesn’t have much magic. Kell, the main character, describes it as a toy that lets you assess your affinity for magic in, like, Red London. And so it’s like the four elements and then bone, which essentially is blood magic. And I’m just like, I don’t know where the story goes, so maybe demons are gonna show up or something, but it’s just, okay, so we’re having an elemental system and then, blood…as like something else, there. And I know that elemental systems will go beyond the traditional four, but that doesn’t make me necessarily think that there’s gonna be like a demon component because of the way magic was presented through that frame. Chris: Perhaps? It’s normal to have the four elements and then some kind of life-related fifth element. I will say that the choice of blood or bone for that is a little more sinister than I would expect for a normal, traditional elemental system. Oren: If I remember correctly, the bad guy in Darker Shade of Magic uses blood magic, but it’s been a while. Chris: Oren, did you just spoil the story for Wes? Wes: Yeah, thanks a lot, Oren. [laughs] The main character Kell does use blood magic. Oren: Oh, does he? Wes: Because that’s how he goes between the Londons, angsty fashion. He has to cut on himself, and… Oren: Oh, is that how he opens portals? Wes: That’s how he portals because, and this is another thing I wanna talk about with blood magic, because he’s an Antari, which is some kind of just human that is just, like, naturally more magical. And so he heals better, because he’s naturally more magical. His blood is actually just a little bit more magical. Chris: Ah, yes, the convenient, “I heal better because the storyteller wants me to get injured a lot.” Oren:  Exactly. Not only do I have blood magic power at my disposal, but my blood itself has more, like, magical capabilities than some rube over there. [laughter] Chris: That reminds me of the Kushiel books. We wanna have sexy times blood. So…heal fast! Wes: Heal fast! I guess some stories can do it right. Certainly, I don’t love insinuating that just the blood in some people’s bodies is just better than others. [laughs] I’m not a big fan of that. Oren: Yeeah, I can imagine why you might not love that idea. [laughs] Wes: Oh, really? Oren: [laughing] But the important thing is that I didn’t actually spoil anything for you cause I was apparently wrong. Wes: Oh, okay, good. Thanks. Oren: Cause I don’t remember Kell using blood magic. Chris: Yeah, I don’t remember that either. [laughing] Oren: That’s actually very reminiscent of 7th Sea, where the portal magic in 7th Sea was, like, blood themed, but not the person’s blood. For some reason, the portals you made just bled. To be extra weird and gross, I guess. Wes: That is gross. [laughs] Oren: Yeah, it was odd, and it was like, it’s cause you’re cutting into the universe. Chris: [noise of disgust] Oren: Does the universe have blood? I don’t think that’s how universes work, man. Uh, now if it started bleeding out some dark matter, now that I could appreciate. Wes: Yeah. So, Interesting. Oren, how does blood magic relate to the Necro Industrial Complex? Are necromancers blood mages? Oren: Depends on the story, but usually the difference between death magic and blood magic is the difference between light gray and dark gray. It depends on how much the storyteller feels like separating it. Now, like in traditional D&D, which is where the Necro Industrial Complex comes from, there isn’t any blood related to necromancy. It’s, for some reason, opals are the material component. You need to raise skeletons in 3.5 D&D. So opals, it’s the Necro Opal Complex is actually what it is, but in a lot of stories, blood is very connected to necromancy. In L Five R [Legend of the Five Rings] I was mentioning earlier, that’s a big one. Blood mages do a lot of raising the dead. Which is weird, because it’s part of the plot of L five R if you read deep enough into the lore, is that blood magic used to not be evil. It was just like a thing people could do, but then the Dark God fell down from heaven and he made it evil somehow on his way down. And so I’m like, okay, so before the Dark God showed up, did blood Magic still have all this gross resurrection type? Did you still raise zombies with it, or is that a new thing that it has only now? I don’t know, but yeah, L five R is one of those scenes where necromancy  and blood magic are basically synonyms, and there are a number of other settings that do something similar. The whole, because again, the blood here is the externalized idea of you sacrificing life to bring something back from the dead. So you can see why they go hand in hand. Wes: Yeah. But definitely if your necromancy required blood to, like, power it, then maybe you’re running into some inefficiencies with the industrial complex part of that, right? Oren: Because yeah, cause skeletons don’t have their own blood, okay. So you’re gonna need to get that blood from somewhere. And that’s gonna raise your operating costs, and it’s just not. It’s not. I wouldn’t recommend it. Now that we’ve learned that the Necro Industrial Complex is made less efficient with blood magic, I think we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close. Chris: If you made it through this episode without getting grossed out, consider joining our Patreon. And if you didn’t make it through this episode without getting grossed out, consider joining our Patreon. Wes: And thanks for skipping to the end. [laughter] Oren: That’s very important to skip to the end, to hear the Patreon read. Wes: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

Saving the world, epic stakes, exciting battles, all of them are great. But sometimes you want a more personal story that still has plenty of magic to keep things interesting. You want a supernatural drama. This week, we’re talking about how to use speculative elements to bring out the characters’ emotions, what kinds of speculative elements you need in the first place, and how to integrate all that with your main plot. Plus, someone’s out to overthrow Chris as leader of the podcast, oh no!Show Notes Macbeth  School Spirits  Paper Girls  Interview With The Vampire Lockwood and Co Fruits Basket  The Good Place  Sabrina  Grimm Paramount’s Posted Loss  What Is “Character Driven?”  2001: A Space OdysseyTranscript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [intro music] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris and with me is… Wes: Wes. Chris: …and… Oren: Oren. Chris: Now the two of you have been great co-hosts so far, but a witch just gave me a prophecy that one of you is going to overthrow me. Now I don’t know if I can trust you anymore. Oren: I’m prepared to sell Wes out to any degree I must. Wes: I’m prepared to do it. Chris: The question is, which one of you is not of woman born? Which apparently just means a Caesarian section or something like that, which I don’t understand. Oren: Don’t worry about it. Wes: It was just how they got around the prophecy for Macbeth, where Macduff could be like, “I was not born of a woman; they cut me out of my ma!” And Macbeth’s, “Oh crap, I’m gonna die.” Chris: Maybe one of you was born from a trans man. I think that’s a much more logical reading of the statement. Wes: Agree. Oren: If I was Macbeth, I would be like, I would contest that wording. Blah. That’s what would happen if I was Macbeth. Chris: So this time we’re talking about supernatural drama. This is a neat topic for me because, when we think of speculative fiction, we’re always or not always, but often automatically, assume high stakes. Yes, we have a lot of really popular speculative fiction stories [that] are life or death scenarios, action, that kind of thing. We can have any plot that we want. They don’t necessarily have to have stakes that high. And we can also use fantastical things for other effects and for other types of plots. You just want to use them in your plot somehow. Otherwise you end up with what we might call a Mars Western. All the fantastical things can be removed and it wouldn’t matter. Unfortunately, Grimm, the show Grimm has this problem. Oren: Yeah, that’s such a weird show. It’s just a regular cop show. And then every once in a while it’s, oh yeah, also there are monsters. Chris: And I think the problem that particular show had is it wanted to keep the supernatural hidden and have a regular way to close cases without explaining the supernatural. But you could just take it out and it wouldn’t make any difference. Wes: It had such an immediate snowball effect because they kept wanting to introduce newer monstrous creatures and stuff. “We cannot keep the lid on this forever.” And that’s why I forget which season, they just had a full pivot to like, “Okay, he’s not really detective anymore.” Or, “We’re going to bring all of his detective friends in on it and also make sure that the police chief, who is also like a half something, is also on his team.” Yeah, pull the veil back way hard. Chris: Yeah, I heard they fixed it later. Wes: The premise was never sustainable for that. Chris: I thought it was worth talking about examples of how fantastical things can be used to create drama and not just to threaten people’s lives. And I think this would be especially beneficial for high school drama, because we had a whole episode where we talked about supernatural teen drama, and the fact that it always comes apart at the seams, because what happens is all the supernatural elements are focused on really high-stakes plot arcs which makes all of the teen drama feel petty in comparison. Oren: You don’t have to call out Sabrina and October Faction like that. Chris: Pretty soon it’s just like the drama part doesn’t feel like it matters. Teen Wolf just drops it, becomes a high-stakes show where the drama is not really there anymore to a large degree. Oren: That happened in the magical girl roleplaying game campaign that I finished running a few months ago. Like at the start of the campaign I did some high school drama stuff and by about the midpoint it was like, yeah, alright, we’re all dealing with way too much magic nonsense for that. So high school is just a place you hang out occasionally for exposition scenes. Chris: After a while, it just doesn’t feel like the drama matters when everybody’s about to die. Let’s talk about shows, movies, books where the supernatural kind of made a difference to the character relationships that were in the show. Oren: Chris, is this just an excuse to talk about School Spirits? Chris: Yes. Oren: Be honest. Chris: So we watched School Spirits recently and, oh geez, what network is this on? What streaming service? Oren: It is on Paramount Plus, one of the worst streaming services. Chris: When you’re done watching Star Trek, you can watch School Spirits. Oren: Please watch it; we don’t know if they’re gonna get a season two. Chris: We need it to get a second season, therefore we need you to watch it, okay? Oren: Stop whatever you’re doing and go watch School Spirits. Paramount apparently just posted a huge loss for their earnings. This is not good. Chris: Not good at all. Oren: Before your company implodes, I’m gonna need season two, okay? On my desk. Chris: In the plus category is that it’s clearly a budget show. It has no special effects. Which is interesting; they do well with it. It’s a ghost premise. That’s one of the types of supernatural things that you can pretty easily do without any special effects. They have this odd thing where, when they want ghosts to interact with objects in the living world, they just make a copy of them. So that we can show our ghosts do all of the normal things they would do by moving things around and then nobody in the living world actually sees it because the ghost has their own copy of this popcorn that they’re eating. Oren: Yeah, it’s ghost popcorn now. It also means they don’t have to do like a scene from the living person’s perspective where we see a bunch of stuff levitating because that would cost an amount of money. Probably not a lot, but some money. And we’re not here to spend money. The ghosts don’t have any flashy powers or abilities. Very focused on the characters. I might even call it character-driven. Chris: Oh no. Wes: Oh Oren, don’t do it. Don’t do it. Chris: No, Oren, don’t. We can’t. No. In School Spirits, it’s about a ghost who wants to solve her own murder. So she dies. Most ghosts remember how they died, but she doesn’t remember how she died and she really wants to know. In most murder mysteries, you would need to do something else to raise the stakes and the urgency because, if it’s just one murder, there’s nothing to anticipate as far as somebody else getting murdered. That’s why we still have so many serial killers running around in our shows, so that we can believe that something else will happen that’s bad if we don’t find who murdered the person who’s already dead. But in this case we don’t have that, but it still works, you know, very well by focusing on the drama aspect. The main character, Maddie, who’s dead, she has very strong feelings and that’s why it’s beneficial to have her around because she could be gone and other characters could be solving her murder, but because she wants to know who killed her, it’s much more personal. If my boyfriend killed me, ugh. If my mother killed me, ugh. That’s a big deal. And we do have some stakes related to “Maybe she’ll be able to pass on” or “Maybe she’ll get stuck.” For her, it’s really about her personal happiness. And then we have a variety of other characters that we care about. All of them have just enough flaws that allow us to imagine it’s possible they might have killed her, but are overall still interesting, sympathetic people. The show really focuses on that attachment aspect so we just care who did it. Oren: Although, interestingly, this is one of the things that would make the show, I think, very difficult to write as a novel. And I’m going to try to avoid any real spoilers here, because everything we’ve told you so far is like in the first two minutes of the first episode. It’s just part of the premise. It follows characters around who are still active suspects so that we can get to know them and build attachment to them. That would be really challenging in a book. The book would have to follow the character but not tell us what they were thinking, because if it told us what they were thinking, it would be too obvious whether or not they were the killer. And that’s just very challenging. Not impossible, but challenging. Chris: Generally, showing what’s in a character’s head is how you get that strong attachment in a narrated work. In a visual work, you have actors. In this case, like Christian Flores, who plays Simon. Just amazing acting on his part that really gets you to like the characters. He plays like the one character that you never suspect of murdering her, because that’s not his role in the show. But we still have some great actors who are bringing these characters to life, and if we were in a narrated book and we just saw them from the outside and we didn’t get to watch their nuanced facial expressions, it would be really hard to build that level of attachment. The show also does well with creating episode arcs so that each episode has a smaller problem that gives us some tension. Simon is going to confront somebody who he thinks could be the killer, and we’re worried about his safety. Or we have tense social situations, that kind of thing. And so that’s how the show manages to do very well with much lower stakes than we would usually need for our kind of murder mysteries, because it really focuses on that drama aspect. Oren: And on Maddie’s side, very often her investigations and trying to figure out what’s going on require her to get to know the other ghosts. And you know what that means? Drama! And that’s perfect and it’s just suited to what it’s trying to do. It doesn’t have a big flashy exterior plot that the drama is distracting us from, because the exterior plot is, first of all, much lower in stakes, but also it’s part of the drama, and it just works really well and you should go watch it if for no other reason so that you can come back and give us our own cup of holistic depression by telling us you didn’t like it. Wouldn’t that be sweet? The important part is that Paramount Plus would still get your viewership numbers. Chris: Another one I think is really worth mentioning that made me think about this for the first time is Paper Girls, which is on Netflix. Oren: No, it’s on Amazon, I think. Chris: This one is based on a comic book as opposed to School Spirits, which weirdly is going to be a graphic novel but is not one yet. Wes: Based on the forthcoming? Is that possible? Oren: It’s based on a graphic novel that doesn’t exist yet, which is the weirdest idea I have ever heard. Wes: I feel like that happened with 2001 Space Odyssey. It’s like he did the movie and wrote the book like at the exact same time. Oren: I’m pretty sure the only reason it says that is to boost sales of the graphic novel so that, when the graphic novel comes out, people who watch the show will be more likely to know about it. But anyway, that’s School Spirits. Now: Paper Girls. Chris: Which is based on a comic book. Oren: Actually based on a comic book. Chris: And it’s got time travel in it and it’s about four girls that hop around in time and they meet their future selves. And it does technically have a high-stakes arc in it, but it’s bad. We don’t really care about that. Mostly the problem with the external arc is that these teenage girls, they just don’t have any way to affect it. They don’t have any agency in it and so it just doesn’t feel like it really matters, because they can’t do anything and it’s just annoying when it comes in. But the time travel is just used so they can encounter their future selves and be disillusioned or disappointed in some way. And so they travel around and then argue with their future selves. Oftentimes about, “You didn’t accomplish the things I expected you to accomplish.” “You didn’t keep in touch with family members.” Oren: The show is definitely at its strongest when it’s just about these four girls being stuck in a time period they’re not familiar with and trying to navigate that. When the evil time cops show up, protagonists can’t do anything against that, so they’re just going to hang out, I guess, for a while. And that’s boring. I would have liked this so much more if there just weren’t evil time cops and this was just a natural phenomenon that had accidentally sent the girls hopping through time. Chris: One of the girls jumps to the future and discovers that she’s a lesbian. It’s something she did not previously know about herself. Fairly dramatic for her. And that’s something she has to think about. Oren: You have one character who meets her future self and is, “On the one hand, you’re everything I wanted to be; on the other hand, you didn’t do any of the things I wanted.” And that’s complicated and it’s neat and the characters are always like stressed out and being crappy to each other, but like also trying to help each other, which is very sweet. They do a really good job of making that seem compelling and not just like characters being rude for no reason. Chris: The drama that happens between the teenage girls definitely feels like it’s done well. Where they can be mean to each other; at the same time they are also going through a very stressful experience. You don’t really hold it against them in the same way, and they’re trying in many cases to get along, even if they don’t always get along. We also have a really neat scene where one of the girls has her period for the first time and doesn’t know what to do, and the other girls like go and steal some tampons for her. That’s not really a great place to start. So then they go steal some pads for her. I think it’s how that sequence works out. Frankly, we need more things like that. Oren: Because Mac’s the best and has your back, no matter what’s going on. Chris: So that one was really good because it really felt that the time loops were uniquely set up to do these personal journeys. Honestly, the kind of time war plot was just window dressing. Oren: It just feels unnecessary. You don’t need that to keep the girls together, because they’re gonna stick together, because they’re the only ones who know about each other. They don’t want to leave and then be stuck in a time they don’t understand without, like, anyone who knows what’s going on. So even if they argue, you have a pretty good reason for them to stick together. Except for when one of them like dramatically leaves and the other three are like, “We were mean to her; we need to go find her.” That’s also a thing you can do. So you don’t like need the threat of the time cops to keep them together. Would you consider Interview with the Vampire to be a supernatural drama? Chris: I think I would. Especially the first season, that we have on AMC, or like the first half. Because later there’s a little bit more life or death stakes with enemy vampires. But certainly in the beginning, definitely does a really good job. You could still have it be a story about abuse if they weren’t vampires. But I do think that the fact that they’re vampires matters, because it changes the nature of the story and the dynamics of the abuse and the kind of control dynamic. They also have some interesting things that they do with it. They can read each other’s minds. except for Lestat can’t read the minds of the vampires he’s created. But they can read each other’s minds. Which is interesting; it allows them to have private conversations where they scheme. But there’s also a way that he spies on them by getting another vampire that he created to do it. It builds up to life or death stakes, but those stakes come naturally out of the drama as the situation between the characters escalates. Of course, Lestat in the beginning has to deal with things like, his family is now very suspicious of him and he’s trying to maintain his relationship with his family. But he can’t show up to family events during the day. Oren: We’re talking about Louis, right? Not Lestat? Chris: Yeah. That just creates a lot of very personal conflict for him. What about The Good Place? Wes: What’s the supernatural element? They’re dead. Spoiler. Chris: Being in heaven slash hell probably qualifies. Wes: I guess. Sure. Chris: The Good Place is interesting because, every time they want to reset the drama, they erase the characters’ memories. Wes: Yeah, that’s true. Chris: Or move them somewhere else. Obviously, it’s a comedy and it has some higher stakes in that they could end up in hell and that would be a problem. But at the same time, it uses that as a premise for why the characters get together and they’re supposed that, “Hey, this is your soulmate,” pushes them together in a way that gets the drama going. Wes: Probably should just toss a spoiler warning on here. As things progress in the seasons and they do get wiped, but then get brought back and recharged. But the relationships between them, despite what’s going on around, still resurface in meaningful moments. And in meaningful moments that do affect the plot and the other characters. Like in the episode when they all become Janets, Eleanor starts losing herself. That moment with Chidi bringing her back to herself, acknowledging their relationship, I thought it was actually quite well done. Plus they all got to be Janets for a while. That was hilarious. Chris: They have good relationships in The Good Place, but I think the character arcs is really where it stands out. Wes: Yes. Chris: Because the whole premise is that they need to somehow become better people to avoid going to hell. And so that really puts the focus on their personal progress and adds stakes to their personal progress, which would otherwise be more difficult to do. Wes: And that also is important, just how the show even concludes that you have to better yourself to not end up going somewhere bad. The comedy aspect has conflated a little bit. Still works. Chris: It’s interesting because The Good Place is reinvented so often to keep everything going. When they finally, for instance, spend a while on Earth, that’s a new way for us to explore the characters and their backstories and why they ended up the way they were. And see what would have happened if their lives had played out differently. Each time we change things around, we get to see a different aspect of the characters. Oren: Beyond just talking about different examples, which admittedly is very fun, what exactly do you need for a supernatural drama? We talked a little bit about how you don’t want a super high-stakes overriding plot, because then, if you stop to take time away from that to do some drama, it’s going to feel like a distraction. So what other requirements do we need? Wes: Vampires. Oren: Yeah, obviously. Chris: Most of the ones that we see that have good drama, one of the keys is making sure that you have strong characters that have significant flaws that can help drive the drama. At the same time, still being people that you can care about. Which is the real trick. A lot of times, people have trouble writing characters that have reasons to fight with each other without going too far and making their fights seem forced and petty. Any kind of drama needs that kind of character work so you have a reason for them to fight in the first place and differences between them without making it feel overdone or comical. In Paper Girls, where we have these teenage girls and we have issues where one of the girls has been living in poverty and she has issues, and she says a few anti-Semitic comments, which are not great, but at least we call her out. That’s probably not an issue I would recommend most people cover. Oren: Yeah, it takes a little bit of care, that one. Chris: But we have another girl who’s just a little bit overly enthusiastic. She’s super academic, needs everything to be done. You can take that a little too far. You know, the girl who feels like she’s forgotten. People call her the new girl, don’t know her name. They all have their personal issues for us to bring out and work on. Similarly, School Spirits. For that one to work, we have to, again, have all these reasons that we create to think that somebody might kill Maddie. And for instance, her boyfriend, which we bring up, is a bad boy. You could understand what’s attractive about him, but then you can easily twist that around and be like, “Okay, how bad is he?” And was he messed up enough that he might have hurt her? Oren: We’re not gonna say, because you’ll have to watch it to find out. Chris: Definitely, the characters that have big enough problems that you can actually do a drama with them and have that be meaty is also another requirement. Most of these works have some level of, “What are the stakes of the drama?” Oftentimes, it is an important relationship. Why does their happiness depend on this happening? For Paper Girls, you can understand why it’s a really big deal for them if they become entirely disillusioned by their future selves and who they are and how that reflects upon their feelings about themselves. In School Spirits, of course, we have this murder and Hattie’s happiness is really at stake with who murdered her. Interview with the Vampire has some pretty high stakes. Good Place again attaches “Do they go to hell?” to its drama as stakes. So that’s definitely an opportunity that you can use with supernatural drama that you would not get otherwise, is to attach some kind of supernatural stakes to your character interactions. Oren: You also just want to make sure that your supernatural setup is actually designed to promote drama. You can easily end up with –I’ve seen this in client manuscripts even– a setting that’s supposed to be full of social drama, but like the supernatural elements are kind of scattershot or are like a magic school where you’ve got vampires and werewolves and harpies and they’re all hanging out. And so that in itself doesn’t really use the magic to drive the drama. That’s just having people with different power sets. On its own, that’s not really enough and you’re likely to end up caught in the issue that other shows have had, where it just seems like the external plot is bigger and more important. And then the other thing of the device that I would suggest is: you’re probably still going to have an external plot and you’re still going to want to resolve that at some point. I’m not just talking about Fruits Basket here, but I am talking about Fruits Basket. Fruits Basket had this external plot of the curse and how that’s going to cause a lot of problems, and Toru at one point is like, “I’m going to break the curse,” and then she does not do that or take any steps towards doing that, and we just forget she ever said that. Chris: The odd thing about Fruits Basket is that the characters all end up bringing their own curse by just like getting over their personal issues and Toru goes around helping people get over their personal issues, but Toru never helps them break their curse. Why didn’t we just fit those two things together? Why didn’t we more explicitly say, “Okay, they manage to get free of the curse once they get over their personal issues; Toru’s going to go around and just assist them in some way”? And therefore we have stakes to her helping them and stakes to those character interactions. But no. Oren: It does sound obvious when you say it that way. Chris: It does sound really obvious, but that’s just not how it works. Wes: That’s Chris’s supernatural power. Oren: We’re nearly at the end of the podcast, so which of us was going to overthrow you again? Chris: If you would like a chance to overthrow me, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: We’re going to have to add so many patron tiers at this point. Just creating work for ourselves, I tell you. Chris: Look, I have to work that promo into the end of each podcast, so there you go. Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons who we are very grateful have not tried to overthrow us. First, there’s the popular writing software Plotter, which you can learn about at plotter.com. Then there’s Callie McLeod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [outro music] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

We talked about The Mandalorian back when there was just one season, but now there’s a whole lot more of it. Also, all the characters have names now, so that’s neat. Join us as we discuss the highs of season two, the mids of season three, and whatever the heck was happening in The Book of Boba Fett. This is the way.Show Notes The Mandalorian  First Season Podcast  Daft Punk Cara Dune Controversy  The Book of Boba Fett  Razor Crest  The First Order  L3-37Transcript Generously transcribed by James. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Wes: Welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m your host, Wes. With me today is… Oren: Oren. Wes: And… Chris: Chris. Wes: And we do an audio podcast, but not like it would matter even if we did a video one. You would never see our faces because we never take our helmets off. Because we are true Mandalorians! Chris: This is the way. Wes: This is the way. [laughter] Wes: Or we are French house funk music artists, Daft Punk, who are also Mandalorians. The key thing here is – it’s complicated. Look, if you just like having stuff over your face, you’re probably a Mandalorian according to some. This is the way. Oren: The important thing is that if we do have to take our helmets off, we can go and have a little swim in a neat lake and then it’ll be cool. We’ll all be fine. Wes: This is true. It’s really just encouraging hygiene in an otherwise increasingly gritty Star Wars universe. Oren: Everything’s real. There’s a lot of dirt now. A lot of dust everywhere. Wes: Chris and Oren talked about the first season of The Mandalorian many moons ago, and there’s been two seasons since. So, we thought we would catch up, with probably more complaints than anything else, because quite a bit has happened with the show. And there are more shows and spinoff shows of all kinds of things in this ever-expanding, questionable content realm of Star Wars. Oren: I went back. I don’t usually do this for podcasts that we’ve done in the past, but I felt like I should this time. I went back and looked at what we said, and I noticed we had a few predictions. And it’s interesting to look at which ones came true. Wes: All right, share them. Chris: Let’s hear it. Oren: So first, we predicted that The Mandalorian would become the flagship of the franchise, which it did. It’s not only huge, but it has so far spawned one show, which we don’t like talking about, and another show that will hopefully be better. That one starts this year. That’s the Ahsoka story, which is going to also be like Rebels season five and also the film reboot of the Thrawn series. It’s a lot. Chris: They’re making it sound doomed, Oren. Oren: It’ll be great. Chris: Just back off a little bit. Oren: What could go wrong? [laughter] Chris: It doesn’t sound good. Oren: We predicted that Grogu was going to have problems once his arc of trying to find a teacher or trying to learn to use his powers finished, and boy were we right. Chris: Absolutely correct. Oren: For this last one, hey, we’re not infallible. We predicted that Cara Dune would be a cool character with a long history in the franchise. Chris: Oh, man. Oren: Oh, no. Oh, no. Chris: Sweet summer children that we were. Oren: And I will point out that from a storytelling standpoint, we were definitely correct. They were planning to have her be the star of her own show, but then things happened, which I’ll put in the show notes if you don’t know, and that didn’t occur. Fortunately, I don’t think there was any way we could have predicted that. Those were our Mandalorian season one predictions. Wes: On the whole, pretty good, you guys. Chris: I think it also might be worth mentioning the fact that Boba got his own show since then. Oren: Yeah, he did. Chris: Since we spent a fair amount of time on our Mandalorian podcast just talking about the fact that Mando was not quite Boba Fett, and how weird that was, and all of our theories for why they just didn’t use Boba Fett, and possibly some of the story constraints that they had for Boba Fett were reasoned, because when we actually got Boba Fett, it was just the worst. Oren: Actually, one reason that I did not think about at the time, but that may have been a contributing factor, is that they felt like if they were going to use Boba Fett, they had to use the same actor who played Jango Fett in the prequels. Because they did that! It’s the same guy. And I would not have expected that. I assumed they would just have recast him, but it’s possible that they just didn’t think that actor was right, and they wanted Pedro Pascal, because Pedro Pascal has never met a special orphan he could not escort somewhere. [laughter] Chris: It’s true. Yeah, that could be it. So, the Mandalorian is not as good as it was. It’s not terrible like the Book of Boba Fett, but also, I have to say, wasn’t a good sign that the same team who did the Mandalorian also did Book of Boba Fett. Wes: Right. And we have to talk about Book of Boba Fett, because it has two full episodes dedicated to the Mandalorian story. Oren: Or here’s an idea. We could just not include the parts where we talk about those episodes, and then just keep going, assuming that everyone already knows what we’re talking about. Chris: We’ll talk about them in a different podcast. I’ll be like a guest on somebody else’s podcast, and then I’ll talk about that part. Wes: Way to stay true to canon. There we go. Oren: I do think that we should mention that, and I know Season 3 is fresh in our minds, but I don’t want to neglect Season 2, because that wasn’t even out when we first talked about the Mandalorian. Wes: Right, yeah. Oren: And I think Season 2 is generally probably the strongest. Wes: It’s good. Especially like, the finale of that is great. I really enjoyed that one. Chris: Yeah, I loved the Season 2 finale, even though it’s CG. It made me feel like the Force was mystical again. Wes: Yeah. Chris: Watching the end of Season 2. Oren: Yeah, I had some trouble with the premise of, we need to find Baby Yoda a Jedi to train them, and apparently no one in this setting knows who Luke Skywalker is. [laughter] Oren: That was a little weird to me, but whatever. Once I accepted that, I enjoyed that quite a bit. I thought having Luke show up to murder a bunch of Sith battle droids was fun. I don’t like CGI Luke. He’s like a perfect replication of Mark Hamill. If Mark Hamill couldn’t act, is what that looks like to me. But he was fine. He was very minimal. He didn’t talk much. It’s not like in the Book of Boba Fett, where he’s starting his own cult. That was also where we met Ahsoka. Wes: Yeah, she was in Season 2, the first half of the season. Because she got to drop that good line during that pretty awesome duel with the person that had the beskar spear, and the whole like, where is Admiral Thrawn? I thought that was kind of a cool nod to her forthcoming show. Chris: And Mando got the beskar spear for a while, and I thought that was neat. Oren: We had a funny little Boba Fett fake out, where it was like, there’s a guy with Mandalorian armor, but he’s not a Mandalorian. It’s like, okay, is that Boba Fett? And it’s like, look, he’s got Boba Fett’s helmet. And it’s like, is that Boba Fett? No, it’s not Boba Fett. He got the armor from some Jawas. Oh, okay. Chris: Although I do have to remind you that was also the season when Grogu ate some poor woman’s eggs. Wes: Oh my gosh, yeah. Oren: Don’t do that, Grogu. Wes: It’s like, we know that Star Wars likes their cute, weird aliens and their ha-ha funny bits, but this is like, the whole point of that episode was, hey, escort this woman and her offspring to this planet to reunite with her partner. They’re just getting consumed by Baby Yoda. Oren: Don’t do that. That was not funny. Chris: That was humor that relied on the audience not empathizing with this woman who was in a kind of bad place and was trying to travel across the galaxy to get back together with her mate so that they could have kids, and it was a real struggle. We had to not empathize with her to find Grogu eating her eggs funny. Oren: That just seems like a bad concept. Wes: Yeah, not a great premise. Oren: I did love how they said M-Count because even Filoni is not ready to use the word Midi-Chlorians. Wes: Nor should he. Oren: Yeah. I mean, he clearly loves all aspects of Star Wars canon. He wants all of it, but even he knows that if he says Midi-Chlorians, people will be upset. So now it’s M-Count. What is an M-Count? Who knows, it’s something. Wes: Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Oren: The Razor Crest exploded, which I was honestly surprised by. You don’t normally see main character ships explode. Wes: No, that was cool, and then they really dropped the ball replacing that one. Oren: Yeah, I was like, what ship is he going to get to replace it with? And it’s like, he’s going to get a single-seat fighter? That’s a weird ship for a bounty hunter to have. Chris: Yeah, it’s cool looking, but it’s not very practical. Oren: Somehow, he knew he wasn’t going to do any bounty hunting in season three. He foresaw that. Wes: Kind of funny too, because they blow up his ship, and then he gets another ship that is mostly just, hey, remember the prequel trilogy, I guess? It’s such a downgrade, and granted, I think we all really love his, what’s it called, Oren? The rifle that he has in season one? Oren: Oh, his disintegration gun. Wes: Yes, that is amazing. And yes, he loses that, but he gets the beskar spear, and then he gets the Darksaber. So it’s, oh, okay, cool weapon upgrade, despite losing the rifle that could destroy anything. The ship was like, no, you get this tiny thing that I guess goes really fast. Oren: Yeah, it’s super OP, apparently. This is always a problem that Star Wars has. Star Wars has an issue where it has its characters fight way too many enemy soldiers. This is the first time I think we’ve seen it really happen in space to this degree, because we haven’t had that many space battles where the protagonist is by themself. But in season three, suddenly, the Mando was fighting like six other ships, and it’s like, that seems like too many. It doesn’t seem like he should be able to beat that many other ships. He’s a bounty hunter. He’s not the Red Baron. [laughter] Oren: For the record, the Red Baron couldn’t have beat six other planes either. He would have run away, is what he would have done in that situation. Wes: But at least he never took his goggles off. This is the way. Oren: Oh, the important thing is that at the end of season two, Moff Gideon was defeated really thoroughly and so we never saw him again. Chris: Oh yeah, that guy’s never coming back. Oren: He’s gone. It would be a really bad decision to bring him back as a villain for season three. Chris: Wah-wah[sad noise]. Wes: And then to not only bring him back but do a bunch of mysterious buildup and then like right towards the finale, have him and his shadow council and he’s making demands of them and it’s like, he’s a loser. There’s no way he’s going to win. Chris: Literally he lost. Wes: And then pulling in the Praetorian guards as well. They’re like, they dress in red and they’re badasses. Except this child Yoda can evade them forever, apparently. Chris: And now it’s canon that he’s a Sith wannabe. Wes: There it is. Chris: He’s literally a Sith wannabe. He acts like it, he looks like it, and it’s canonical. Oren: It also just dramatically feels like some scenes happened in the wrong order. Because first we have Gideon tracking where Mando is. So normally you would have that scene as a prelude to the bad guy being like, aha, I shepherded you into a trap or something to fight you on my terms. But no, that doesn’t happen. Instead, Din and Grogu end up in a room full of Moff Gideon clones who they immediately destroy because for some reason Gideon has a button for that. Then they go and fight Gideon and Gideon’s like, no, I had this whole clone plan. I was going to do clones. Chris: How could you destroy all my clones? Wes: My poor clones. They had the one thing that I never had. The Force. It’s like, this is not a Jedi story. We don’t care. Oren: Why are we explaining this plan after it’s already failed? What is even happening here? It feels like a D&D dungeon where the players went into the rooms in the wrong order and the GM just couldn’t react quickly enough. [laughter] Oren: And so players, like, diffuse the boss’s big plan to rule the world before they even meet the boss. I could buy that in a D&D game. Things happen. It’s really weird that it happened in a scripted television show. Chris: Maybe one of those clones will survive and then next season we’ve got Moff Gideon clone. Wes: Oh my God. Don’t. No. Chris. Chris: But he’ll be an actual Sith. Won’t that make him great? Wes: There it is. He’s probably just coming back anyway. Something about his stupid beskar Sith suit is going to somehow keep him alive. Chris: I’m trying to think of why do that with the clones. Why bring in all of those clones only to destroy him? The only thing I can think of is that somehow we’re going to save one. Wes: And so are we to assume that his cloning projects with Dr. Pershing in the earlier seasons, was that self-serving for him the whole time? Or were those meant to be Palpatine clones? Oren: I honestly don’t know. Chris: Why not both? Wes: I guess why not both. And I guess, yeah, I did bring up Pershing. Chris: Oh yeah, we’ve got the Andor episode in Mandalorian. Not only are there Mandalorian episodes in Book of Boba Fett, but there is an episode- it’s not actually Andor because it doesn’t have any of the Andor characters, but it’s a very Andor episode where we just hang out with other characters to maybe establish a minor villain for next season, I guess? Wes: Not only that, but the runtime on that was twice as long as the preceding episode. Chris: Why are we doing this? Why are we doing it? Just like the clones, why are they here? What do we want with them? Oren: It was so weird because it was like, hey, I bet you all want to know what happened to Dr. Pershing. I’m like, who? Chris: Oh yeah, that guy. The glasses guy who liked Baby Yoda but was also not willing to stand up for him. I remember him, I guess. Oren: Doesn’t help that this episode is part of the current trend in shitty-ifying the Republic. Not only is it super ineffective, and it can send some bored X-Wing cops to harass Din once in a while, but it can’t do anything. And also, it has an amnesty program. Chris: They don’t let people use their names, they go by numbers. It’s like, what? Oren: They don’t even establish if the people in this program committed actual crimes. Chris: Or they just happened to work for the Empire. Oren: Yeah, it’s like most people were probably in the Imperial military at some point, guys. That’s how giant militaries work. Ugh, that was so weird and I hated it. I like the bad guy in that episode. She’s cool. I hope we see her again. That actor was having fun. She can be the villain of season four for all I care. Chris: I’m wondering if that’s the minor villain that entire episode was meant to set up. I think we probably could have set her up in less time. There had to be a better way. There had to be a better way. Wes: The whole Pershing story, too, in that sets up even more questions like about their saying, hey, the Republic is actually not that great. But also showing him give this heartfelt speech about why he does what he does to try to like clone organs and save lives and stuff. And to think that no one wants to use any of that technology. Oren: No, they hate it. Wes: What? He’s literally talking about saving lives by cloning hearts and other kinds of organs and practicing medicine and everybody’s like, haha, go enjoy your amnesty program, you Imperial loser. Oren: You absolute weirdo. Yeah, no, that was so weird. Also, if you step out of line – because I guess your counseling session with the question repeater droid wasn’t enough – if you step out of line, they put you in the brain frying machine. Wes: Oren, it’s not a mind flayer. It’s not a mind flayer. Don’t worry about it. Oren: Like best case scenario, it rewrites your brain against your will. Worst case scenario, it kills you. Wes: I didn’t like that episode, but I did really like that they had a Mon Calamari telling him that thing was OK. [laughter] Wes: That was a hilarious decision. I mean, that joke was just peak. I lost it. I saw this nod to Admiral Ackbar. It’s a trap. And this Calamari saying, I actually find it quite soothing. Oren: That was pretty funny. That was the best part of the whole episode. It’s still a terrible episode. Wes: The whole thing with the Republic being like, we don’t have the resources to protect the outer systems. And it’s like, here, we have an entire planet full of star destroyers that we’re sending to the scrapyard. Maybe use some of those just a thought. I don’t know. I’m just spit-balling here. Wes: Maybe that’s where the First Order got all their ships. They’re like, oh my God, can you guys believe they’re not using these things? Oren: Part of this does seem like it’s a weird attempt to retroactively set up the First Order. And I just wish they wouldn’t do that. I just wish they wouldn’t bother. Chris: Can we just forget that? Can we just forget that happened, please? That’s all we want. Oren: Nothing about the First Order makes any sense and attempts to explain it are just going to make less sense. Chris: I just want a Star Wars story that lets me forget about all the bad parts of Star Wars. Wes: Is that so much to ask? Chris: Just leave it alone. Let’s just go to a new planet and just not interact with the rest of it for a while. Make it a distant memory first, please. But speaking of bad things, I think we have to talk about droid oppression. Oren: Oh boy. Chris: Sorry to rain on your parade here. Wes: I like how they were like, hey, you’re going to love this episode because Jack Black and Lizzo. I’m sorry, are we excusing all this racism because these celebrities are guest starring? Chris: I did like Jack Black and Lizzo, that specific part, but woo, uncomfortable episode. Oren: I love how back in the day they gave us Solo, where it was like, there’s a droid who wants to be free. Isn’t that hilarious? And I’m like, all right, this is surely the worst Star Wars is ever going to get with its droids. And then they got this episode, and it was like, Din Djarin, you shouldn’t be racist against droids because they love being servants. They love it so much. Wes: They feel so bad for our frail little meat bodies. They just want to help us. Oren: If we could have given them, like, a sense of superiority about it, that would actually have made it a little better. Instead, it was just like, yes, we love having your boot on us, humans. Please press harder. The worst. Chris: Having Mando hate droids was just always a bad idea for this show because in this context, droids are slaves. They’re definitely an oppressed group. I mean, just to be clear, at Mythcreants we do talk about how you can use mindless machines if you want enemies to mow down or what have you. But in the Star Wars setting, droids are definitely meant to come off as people. We’re supposed to get attached to them, care about them. And so that’s why it’s really unacceptable in this setting that they’re property. And having Mando hate on them just, oof, in season three, even before we get to the Lizzo Jack Black episode, we have this whole scene where he buys this droid who doesn’t really want to endanger its life doing what he wants it to do. And so then he has to order it to here. It’s too dangerous for me to go in those caverns. So I want you to do it as my canary in the coal mine. Ugh, this is deeply uncomfortable. Oren: So out of character for Din too. Since when has Din ever been like, I don’t know guys, that might be dangerous. I think I’m going to stay in the ship. Wes: Yeah, exactly. Oren: Are we talking about the same Din Djarin? If anything has been established about him until this point, I would have expected his droid racism to manifest as, no, I’m not putting an astromech in my ship, I don’t trust it. As opposed to, I’m going to buy an astromech and then bully it into taking some atmospheric readings for me. Do you trust that those readings are accurate, Mando? Because you don’t seem to trust droids any other time. Chris: And then there’s also the fact that Baby Yoda is walking around in the corpse of IG-11. Oren: Yeah, but that did generate a lot of memes. So can we really say it was bad? Chris: Don’t get me wrong, I think giving Baby Yoda a robot suit was a great idea. It makes Grogu a little more useful. And also, then we can give him the yes-no without getting him on the speaking path. Because we don’t really want him to speak still, because he’s supposed to be a cute little baby. Wes: The yes-no was, that was brilliant. Chris: It was priceless. Yeah, it was really very toddlerish. It was perfect. But why did we choose a character that died for that? And so much time was spent in season 3 with, no, I want to rebuild this droid who’s my friend. And they make it very clear to Mando that, okay, but the memory chip is completely fried, so it just would not be the same person. It’s, no, still want to rebuild it. It’s like, feels like desecrating some poor robot corpse at this point. Oren: Real weird if you realize that IG-88 was basically a person who saved Din’s life several times. Speaking of droids and going to Mandalore, let’s talk about Bo-Katan, shall we? Wes: Ah, yes. Oren: How do we feel about Bo-Katan? What are our thoughts on Bo-Katan? Wes: We knew she would show up after season 2’s entry and failing to get apparently the thing that she had to have to unite the Mandalorian people. Oren: Yeah, but they’re real big on proper blade custody transfers. Wes: Exactly. Oren: Which I always thought was weird, because those Mandalorians are always making fun of the Death Watch for being too committed to their traditions. Wes: Gosh, I’m so glad you said that. Oren: Don’t get me wrong, they could be hypocrites. I’m open to the possibility that they actually have this tradition that they really care about and not others, but I just would have liked someone to point it out, someone on the Death Watch to be like, okay, if we’re the ones who care about tradition so much, why does it matter how she got the Darksaber? And then they’d get all defensive, and, well, because that’s different. Shut up. Wes: I was here for Bo-Katan being the Mandalorian of that season. I’m fine with that. I think Katie Sackhoff does a great job in that role, and I would have rather just followed her from the start. Din and Grogu didn’t do anything really that interesting. Chris: I like her as a character. I would have preferred if she had been useful to the plot in that she, okay, she’s in charge, and then what we do is have Mando go on missions for her, and the show focuses on the missions that he’s doing for her. She’s a leader that we can believe in so that we want him to succeed on his missions, which are helping her, but the focus is still on Mando. I liked her, but I would have preferred to keep her main character, and if we wanted to do her as a main character of a show, to just give her her own show. Oren: We are missing one very important fact that makes Bo-Katan important for this season, which is that Katie Sackhoff could actually be in the studio to film, and Pedro Pascal could not. Wes: Yeah, that probably explains a lot. Oren: There’s a reason he doesn’t take off his helmet this season, or at least not in a way that we can see his face. Wes: I remember somebody speculating too, as episodes were being released, that Dave Filoni voiced Paz—wait, what’s his name?—the bulky Mandalorian with the massive gun. Oren: Oh, I just called him the Heavy. Wes: The Heavy, I like that. So as the episodes for this season were coming out, there was speculation that the character Paz Vizsla, who, aka the Heavy, the Mandalorian that never gets tired carrying around the biggest gun on the planet. But I guess Jon Favreau had voiced him in the previous seasons, but then that changed to a different actor, so it was like, oh, he’ll probably take his helmet off. They have a different actor, because Favreau’s not going to be behind the mask, probably. That and a few other things, like knowing that Pedro Pascal was not available, really, it felt like they were just messing with us the whole time. I think Filoni and Favreau both came out and were like, maybe isn’t the Mandalorian anymore? Maybe there’s others that are Mandalorian. No, we don’t care about that. Be quiet. And then the penultimate episode, The Spies, they really wanted us to believe that the Armorer was a spy for Moff Gideon. And I’m glad she wasn’t. Oren: I have to admit, I completely missed that part. I do remember now that there’s, oh no, we found a shard of beskar in Moff Gideon’s shuttle that he escaped from. I guess I completely blanked on the possibility they might be making us think that there was a spy among the Mandalorians. Fascinating. Wes: I think this is where they are being too clever and drawing surprise, drawing on things that are not in the show, but that would be familiar to people that have watched all the other shows. And there’s another Mandalorian character that was team Death Watch, team Darth Maul, who wore a similar colored outfit and was not on team Satine and Bo-Katan. Those creepy long shots of the Armorer suddenly saying, oh, these wounded can’t carry on. Oh, I will take them back to the main ships. Oh, you’re going to go get a secret ambush, but here I go taking these wounded back to the ship. They want to set it up for betrayal. Oh, and she has horns on her helmet, just like Moff Gideon. So, I don’t like the idea that they were just messing with us because they could. But also, I’m glad that the Armorer was not a spy because I like the Armorer as a really weird character, but a good character. I liked it. Aside from – we have problems with Mandalorian strength and ineptitude. I like her consistent presence throughout the season. And I like how that moment when she asked Bo-Katan if she went in the water and has taken her helmet off since and Bo-Katan’s yes and no. And she’s like, great, you’re Mandalorian, hang out with us. We are friends now. And I was like, oh, okay. Fun moment. Chris: I don’t know what you’re talking about. The Mandalorians are just very competent. Anybody hang out on a planet where large birds come to eat your children regularly. Wes: And they have no ships. They have no ships. Where are their ships? Oren: Where did all these Mandalorians even come from? Because they were all dead last season. Wes: That’s true. Oren: That was one of the problems with season two is it killed all the Mandalorians except for the Armorer who somehow survived. Or maybe that happened in season one. I forget. But they were all dead. And now suddenly there are a bunch more and they live on pterodactyl planet and Pterodactyls just come by and grab their kids sometimes. And they don’t even have a guy on lookout. Wes: It just happens and it always gets away, Oren. Oren: They also are really confident about how long it will take this pterodactyl to eat the kid. They are really sure they know how long that’ll take. Chris: Oh, drat. It took one of our kids. I suppose we should do something about it sometime. Oh, Bo-Katan! That’s nice of you to volunteer. We were gonna get around to it eventually. This is what happens when we really need Bo-Katan to show that she’s useful and the only way we know how to do that is by making everybody else complete incomps. Oren: They suddenly just forgot how to do anything. Wes: Which is terrible because the episode where the pirates attack Nevarro, the ground action… Chris: Oh, that was fantastic. Wes: Where they’re being like SWAT team Boba Fett. Oren: Yeah! Wes: Heck yes! I’m here for this! This is great! Oren: That was so well choreographed. That whole ground battle was great. Chris: Definitely an improvement because, again, listen to our podcast episode on season one and we were talking about how bad all the gun battles were. They really cleaned up and improved that since then. Oren: I’ve even talked about this before is that if you want to make gun battles fun, you have to emphasize movement. People standing behind something and popping up to shoot and then popping back down. That’s not exciting. It will never be exciting. So if you want an advanced technology fight to be exciting, you have to show the characters moving around and flanking each other and using different kinds of weapons. And they did that and it was real fun. Chris: Best part of season three in my opinion. Oren: And then at the end, Mando got a nice little house as a reward for all of his work. Because I guess he’s playing a Bethesda video game now. Wes: He’s got his homestead. Oren: All right. That is, I think, as much as we have time for. We’re gonna have to end this season of the Mandalorian podcast episodes. We don’t know if there will be more, but if there are, we’ll come back and revisit this in two years. Chris: If you would like us to remove our helmets, you can support us on patreon.com. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. That definitely makes sense. Oren: Yeah, that’s a very good patron level. We’ll add that in there. And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie MacLeod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [closing song] Chris: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

One story is good, so wouldn’t two stories be better? And what if you put one story inside the story you already have? That way, your fans don’t have to put down the book if they want to read something else for a while. That’s right, we’re talking about stories within stories: how they work, what their problems are, and when you should use one. Surprising no one, we spend a lot of time talking about authors who’ve gone overboard.Show Notes How to Tell a Story Within a Story The Fisherman  Ten Thousand Doors of January  The Problem With Multiple Viewpoints The Once & Future Witches The Neverending Story Interview With the Vampire  Balin’s Journal  The Name of the Wind  Middlegame  The MagiciansTranscript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.  [opening theme] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is…  Chris: Chris.  Oren: And?  Wes: Wes.  Oren: Okay, so for this episode, we’re actually going to record this one for a little while, and then talk about a different podcast that we recorded a while back. Maybe just record that one for a bit. We’ll just do my old Star Trek podcast, as if this was an old Star Trek episode. And then we’ll just come back to the Mythcreant episode and finish it out. Does that sound good? That sounds fun, right?  Chris: Yeah, absolutely.  Wes: We gotta fill up this time slot somehow.  Chris: Look, it’s important that everybody know the backstory of your podcasting career. So we gotta start talking about your previous podcast and then play some of it for a while. It’s just very important information.  Oren: I think we’re gonna have to go like full immersion and do the original two hour live broadcast setup that we had… for some reason. I still don’t know why. [laughter] Wes: For the challenge, no doubt.  Chris: And let’s face it, this podcast would be so much deeper with a framing device.  Oren: [deep breath] Oh boy. Yeah, I wanted to talk about stories within stories, or nested stories as they’re sometimes called. And the reason is that I read a book that had one recently and it was bad and I’m upset. [laughter] So now I’m gonna make it everyone else’s problem.  Wes: Oh, and so what book was it?  Oren: Okay, the book was The Fisherman. It’s a novel that’s supposedly cosmic horror. I have some issues with that label. It’s got weird water stuff, but I don’t think that’s enough to call something cosmic horror. The problem with this one is, so it starts off with this very, very long backstory explanation that explains how these two guys lost their families. That takes a while. And then they go fishing together for a while. And then finally, one of them is, hey, we should go fish in this real weird, mysterious creek that I won’t tell you how I learned where it was. All right, I’m getting into it.  Chris: I like how this sequence, every time you’re like, okay, once we just get this part done, then I’m sure the story will begin. [laughter] Sure, okay, we need their dramatic backstory. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, maybe the story will start. Okay, well, they’re going fishing, but now they’re going to the creepy fishing hole. So I’m sure the story will start there.  Oren: Yeah, you would think the story was about to start, but then they stop at a diner and the cook there tells them the backstory of this creek for half of the book. Like, half of the book is just the backstory of why this creek is spooky.  Wes: Was it actually spooky?  Oren: No. [laughter] Wes: Did it ever have a chance, Oren?  Oren: The parts in the present, when we’re not spending way too much time on backstory, are actually spooky. Most of the time. I’d give it about a 90% spookiness rating.  Chris: That’s pretty good.  Oren: Yeah, that’s pretty good. There was one really weird sequence where I think it’s supposed to be spooky, but it’s just gross. But other than that one part, it’s very spooky and weird. The interior backstory is the opposite.  It’s incredibly dry, and it tells the story of how a Hungarian wizard came to this area of New York and set up shop. And then a while later, a German wizard came and also was there, and they didn’t like each other, and they had a beef, and the German wizard won. And then the Hungarian wizard got banished to another dimension for a while, and he’s still around, and that’s why the stream’s creepy. If it sounds weird and dry, it is. This takes up half of the book, and it just does all of these things that I’m like, why is it doing this?  First of all, it has too many degrees of separation. So the protagonist is hearing this from a cook who heard it from a minister who heard it from an old lady who heard it from her husband who heard part of the story from the father.  Chris: Oren, every time you add an additional person, it just gets deeper.  Oren: Yes, and so I got really confused who the ‘I’ is, because this is all first-person narration, and I’m just like, who is ‘I’? Someone is ‘I.’ Who is talking?  Chris: One of those people in the chain is ‘I,’ but it’s like a shell game, or passing it back and forth.  Oren: And it’s barely related to the main story. It does technically explain why this creak is spooky. Other than that, it does foreshadow that this Hungarian guy likes to offer men their dead wives if he’ll help them. That’s a thing he does as an eldritch bargain, which he’s gonna do once we finally get back to the main story, but I don’t think we needed that spelled out for us. It was actually pretty creepy and well-established already. Like, I don’t think I needed that to be spoon-fed to me. That’s a term that people sometimes like to use for stories that over-explain things.  So this thing has several problems. One, it’s just not very good. If you tried to read this as its own story, you’d be like, what is this? It’s super dry. There’s no suspense. There’s no investment in any real character because we keep hopping around and we get very little characterization from anybody. So it’s just bad.  Chris: That reminds me, I just have to say, of Ten Thousand Doors of January, where we have this interior story that the protagonist continually reads, and we have to continually read it with her, but it’s one big exposition dump. It does feel, many times when this storyteller changes up the story, they just don’t try the second time around, including stories within stories, right? You didn’t try to make that inner story as engaging as your outer story. Oren: And it’s also just weird because it’s just, as far as backstory goes, it is so unnecessary. I don’t need to know that a while back, the spooky Hungarian wizard had a beef with a different wizard. I don’t need to know that. All I need to know is that he’s spooky and weird, and that he’s trying to hook the great leviathan who lives in the deep beyond the world. I would really like to know what’s supposed to happen when he does that. The book never establishes that. But regardless, that’s all I need to know. And I need to know that he is offering these two grieving men their wives back if they will help him. That’s the actual premise of the story. I don’t need to know about this German wizard.  Wes: So the German wizard is the titular fisherman. Oren: The Hungarian is actually the fisherman. Chris: Because he’s trying to catch this little leviathan. Oren: Yeah, because he’s trying to catch the leviathan. That part I actually like. The fishing motif is very cool, which explains why the backstory is so bad, because there’s no fishing motifs in it. It’s just a German wizard. [laughter] And the Hungarian wizard is doing some vaguely bad stuff, and he like turns one of the dead wives in the work camp nearby into a zombie. And the German wizard is like, I guess he should probably not do that. I’ll go mess him up. And then they have a little wizard fight. This is so counter to cosmic horror. Everything is all out in the open. Everything is very dry and matter of fact. That part is not, I don’t think, inherently the fault of it being a story within the story. I think that was just bad writing choices. But you’re not wrong that authors sometimes completely change their style when telling their inner story, and that can be a problem. Chris: Honestly, it’s similar to POVs, which is one of my grievances against multiple POVs, is that usually the first POV in the book, the storyteller tries really hard to optimize that and make that engaging. And then they just take you for granted when they introduce the second POV. And it’s like, why would I care about this? Which is one of the things that – there’s other problems with multiple POVs. Obviously, we’ve talked about that a lot, but that’s one of the things that makes it worse. Oren: The other thing that’s hilarious about this is these people, the two guys who are being told this inner story, they don’t know anything about magic at this point. All we know is that there’s a creek that has some kind of mysterious deaths associated with it, and the protagonist knows that his friend is being shady about why he wants to go there. That’s all we know at this point. And so they just go, and this cook just tells them a five-hour story about a German wizard. It’s supposed to be serious and scary, but it is hilarious. Try to imagine how that scene would possibly go. Wes: Do they just lap it up too? Oren: Later, they’re like, eh, that can’t have been real. But then they’re all real creeped out by it, because. And the story, the book even implies that they’re supernaturally creeped out by it, because I think later the author realized that he said it took an hour to tell the story, but the actual story takes about four hours to read. That doesn’t make any sense. So he has a little afterwards where the protagonist is like, later on, after all this happened, I was possessed by the spirit of exposition dumps, and I learned all this other stuff, which I have since added to the original story. Wes: Of course. Oren: What does that have to do with anything? What even was that? Wes: It’s like the author got side-railed, went that way, wrote through all of that, then realized what he wanted to actually write about, returned to that, and was like, there’s no way I’m cutting this. Oren: It does feel like backstory that got out of hand. Chris: The other thing is that, and I think this is just an impulse to make your story compelling, that when writers put in these stories within the stories, then they’ll have their characters react to the story, right? Because they just heard it. But they always have them be so impressed, and it just comes off like bragging. It’s oh, wow, that dry story about a wizard, little wizard duel, is so creepy, and I’m so in awe. It’s changed me. Wes: And you’re like, I just read that, and it’s terrible. [laughter] Oren: I had to read that, man. Don’t tell me that was good. [laughter] Chris: Which is one of the problems with stories within the stories, is that I think one of the reasons they’re attractive is we want to talk about storytelling because we’re storytellers. And so if we put in stories, then we can talk about stories. But in the majority of cases, this kind of meta-commentary is just very obnoxious. We don’t really want to listen to storytellers wax poetic about storytelling. It’s not very fun. Ten Thousand Doors of January did something similar. Oh, this book, it’s so riveting. It’s just an exposition dump. Or Middlegame. Wes: But it’s about her father. Oren: And if you don’t believe in the love story of Ten Thousand Doors, you’re a dirty imperialist. Wes: I read her, I don’t know if it was immediately her next book, but The Once and Future Witches, as far as I’m aware, it’s what she published after Ten Thousand Doors of January, and still includes stories in stories, but in an effort to draw her main story’s connection, which is basically three sisters who are witches, spoilers – [laughter] if you didn’t get that from the title – to the larger folklore of witches. So periodically throughout this book, there’s just literally a fairy tale. I skipped most of them. I turned the page, oh, this is a fairy tale. Okay, back to the story. I get what you’re doing, but it’s exactly what Chris said. It comes off as pretentious. And sure, there might be enjoyment there, but I want to see what’s going on with these sister witches. I don’t need to read a rehashing of Hansel and Gretel to explain what’s going on with this person. Oren: Please tell me about the sister witches. That actually sounds interesting. Wes: Yeah, I did like that a bit. So it opens up with, it’s set in New Salem, and it’s meant to be a suffragette and witches story. So set in New Salem, the youngest sister basically arrives there. She’s got her gnarled staff and she’s 17 and just left home under some odd circumstances because she was the last one there with her dad. And basically finds her sisters and their meeting has this weird magical energy about it. And they accidentally summon the Tower of Avalon for a moment. But then, they get involved in some local politics with a suffragette group, but they’re not willing to take steps. And the young witch is, we have power. Why would we not use it? It follows that trajectory of them forming their own group and then trying to collect more knowledge because the oldest sister is the town librarian and they piece things together.  Anyway, long story short, big spoilers. The bad guy was one of the first witches with the original three. And so it’s modeled after the Crone, the Mother, and the Maiden. So the three, the once witches and the future witches. He is Hansel from the stories who also acquired witch power, but he didn’t stay in the woods with the witch. He learned from somebody that she was bad. And so he killed her, but his sister fled into the woods, becoming the first Maiden. And he just basically used dark magic to keep his body alive and periodically burn witches. I liked actually quite a bit of it. I really liked how they explained why did they burn witches? And she explained it as originally they burned the witches’ books because that’s where they kept their knowledge. And then they figured if we’re going to kill them anyway, we might as well throw them on there too. But it was more like we’re destroying your knowledge so you can stop this. Stop spreading this kind of stuff, these dangerous thoughts and things like that. In sum, it’s a good book. You could cut out two thirds of it. And that would be great. Because it’s 550 pages, something silly like that. And the whole story could be told in easily 250. That’s my experience. Chris: It’s a good book, except for two thirds of it. Wes: Yes. It’s like when you retell it and you’re like, okay, the core of this is good, but I did just skip a bunch of it. I’m liking these parts, skip, skip, and just chugging along because I don’t care about these parts. Oren: I can see why the author felt the need to put in fairy tales if her bad guy is going to be Hansel, but I promise there was a better way to get that reveal. Chris: Or just put in one fairy tale. Just put in the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. You don’t need any of the other ones. The trick to doing a story within a story is that you have to make it matter or else it’s just skippable. And that means that it coming into play somehow changes the outcome of the story. And there’s multiple ways we could do that. Obviously, it can reveal information about the history, and usually if you’re doing that, the character again is also reading, telling the story, listening to it, what have you. They learn something important that’s based on history. They use that information somehow. Method one. Another method is just to have it impact the character in a way that makes sense. So this one is a little harder. I think it could risk once again getting into the kind of cheesy pretentiousness of having your character be like, oh my gosh, that story is amazing. But I think what you want to do is look at it at a personal level instead of just being like, this is the most incredible story that has ever been written. Just be like, hey, this, I empathize with this character, right? Because it feels similar to my own life. And it got me thinking, and I realized because of this character’s journey that maybe this is what I want to do for myself. So keep it personal instead of just talking about how amazing the story is. Wes: I like that advice because it seems like sometimes these stories and stories aren’t written for the story or the characters, but the readers. And that’s the wrong approach for sure. Chris: And then the other one is a little bit more unusual, which is breaking the fourth wall, which you have in The Neverending Story, which I might have to just read that book sometime since I’ve only seen the movie. But that one is just very unusual in that Sebastian, the main character, starts reading a story and then we dive into the story. But then as it goes on, it starts to link him and the story together. So the world starts to, he starts coming into the story world slowly. Oren: You have a number of stories that use the framing device as a way to insert commentary onto the inner story or the main story, depending on how big your framing device is. The Neverending Story is hard to judge because it’s just silly in a lot of ways and not very well put together. So it’s hard for me to tell how well that strategy would work if it was better presented. The recent AMC Interview with the Vampire adaptation does something that’s not exactly the same because it’s not a person being literally pulled into a book, but it’s similar in that the reporter is hearing the story from Louis. Louis is clearly lying at some parts and the reporter either calls him on his bullshit or investigates to be like, what’s Louis hiding here? These parts of the story don’t make sense. And that’s really cool. It’s one of the only times I’ve ever seen that work. Chris: Yeah, it’s probably the only time I’ve ever seen using this for commentary on the inner story seems like it has paid off, especially since that allows the show to clarify that what people are seeing is domestic abuse, which people are bad at recognizing normally. Oren: It’s helpful that they’re basically doing what you said, Chris, is that they are using this to reveal things about the character and rather than having the reporter be like, wow, Louis, that was the best story I’ve ever heard, or the scariest story I’ve ever heard. Chris: Which is what the original Interview with the Vampire does. The boy. Oren: My favorite thing about the new Interview with the Vampire is that the reporter guy is like, yeah, and so when I was like a young kid and heard your story for the first time, I was all like googly eyed and over impressed, but I’m not like that now. I’m snarky and jaded, so you’re gonna have a tougher audience. And it was so great. I loved it so much.  Chris: Looked at his old work, because this is a different interview. It’s like, thank you. No, it is not an interview. I really appreciate that. [laughter] Oren: That adaptation is so good. Hey, what if we took everything great about the book and made it better, and either cut or subverted all of the bad stuff? The only way it could be better is if they included Lestat’s dad. Chris: No, we don’t need Lestat’s dad [she laughs].  Oren: Chris, no adaptation has been brave enough to include Lestat’s dad. I won’t stand for it. Chris: No, that was a good move on their part. But similarly, just going back to The Neverending Story for a second. I do think that the breaking the fourth wall makes sense to me, because it sounds a little cheesy, but they still make it clear, at least in the movie, that the message they’re going for is that imagination is good, and resist calls to give up your wild imagination to be more grounded. And it feels a little fanciful. It’s just like, hey, kids, the message of this story is you should go play with toys and have fun. Or maybe the kids need to read more books, right? Which is the other end is, hey, children, brush your teeth. [laughter] But nonetheless, it has a message that is about the importance of the imagination or of story worlds and books. And so then having a story where Sebastian has to participate in the story he is reading in order to save the story world just fits with that, and I think makes it so that it adds something as opposed to it just having commentary that isn’t useful or doesn’t… You want all parts of a story to be stronger together. And I feel like it fits that criteria. Even if that if you watch the movie, yes, it is a very silly movie. [she laughs] Oren: One thing that I will advise, and I talk about this in my post from a few years ago on stories within stories, is that if you are planning to put like an entire or at least most of a story inside your book or whatever it is, practice your microfiction. Because that’s what you’re doing, right? Because what you should be doing is it should be short and sweet. I’m just gonna say, don’t do what The Fisherman did. It’s not a good idea. That’s too long. So you’re gonna want it to be much shorter.  And unfortunately, the example I use in that article is from a franchise I don’t want to give any more airtime to. So instead, I’ll use Bolin’s journals, the one that they find in the minds of Moria. And they don’t read us the whole journal, but they read us a section of it. And it’s real creepy. And it ends with we cannot get out, which is [shudders]. Wes: Very good. Oren: Gives me shivers constantly. And so that inner story is used for a few things. One, it is used to fill in what happened, which is actually really important. And in the movie, one of the things that’s very confusing is that Moria apparently is super ancient, has been abandoned for a long time. But also there have been dwarves here recently. And it’s hard to tell what’s going on. But in the book, it’s clear that the dwarves are a recent expedition to Moria, which is an ancient, long-abandoned dwarf kingdom. So it gives us some exposition on that. And then it also sets the mood and builds tension as it describes what happened to them and how they all died and how they didn’t make it out and all of that. Chris: And it’s very relevant for the characters, because if this prior party that came in here died, that means very bad things for them. Oren: Yeah. So it both gives information that the reader needs, and it is really good at establishing the mood and building the tension of the threat the protagonists are about to face. And it does all that in a very short amount of time. Because if it had been much longer, any tension it had would have worn off because it would have been like, wow, we apparently have time to read this entire thing.  As opposed to something like the start at The Name of the Wind, which has a framing device. Before we even get to the framing device, we have some randos in a pub telling a story. And it’s short. I’ll give it that. I’ll say that much for it. But it’s otherwise just useless, because it’s just a story about this invincible superhero who nothing bad can happen to. Chris: And he’s Kvothe, right? Oren: I don’t know if he’s Kvothe or not, honestly. Kvothe is also like that. Chris: I don’t know that he’s Kvothe, but that is the thing that struck me about it. Because Kvothe is supposedly really famous elsewhere, hence why he’s changed his name. Slightly. Changed his name slightly. Not enough that would actually disguise him. Just enough to pretend he’s disguised.  Oren: Especially since his hair is true red. Not like…  Chris: Red red! Oren: Yeah, not like fake red people’s hair. No, like real red. You’d think that would make him pretty easy to find. But I think – it’s been a little while since I’ve read this – but I’m pretty sure that story they tell at the beginning predates Kvothe. I think he hears part of it when he’s in his childhood flashback. But I could be wrong. But even if that is Kvothe, it’s just… All it would do… It would be even worse, right? If that was actually Kvothe, and those were things he’s actually supposed to be able to do. The only way that would work is if we told the story about how great Kvothe was, and then the real Kvothe narrated to us about how I actually can’t do any of those things. People just expect that from me. And that might have had some value. But as it is, it’s just worthless. All it does is foreshadow the Chandrians, which is just not worth that much time and energy spent on this. Chris: Yeah, it’s not an exciting story. It’s not tense. Really. I felt like it did more to establish the magic system, which is maybe what it was for, but I don’t think it had any particular purpose.  Oren: Right, especially since the magic… The part of the magic system that it establishes is the boring part. There’s two halves of the magic system in Name of the Wind. And there’s the actual, if not rational, at least robust sympathetic magic system that you have to think about, and it has trade-offs, and you have to figure out how to use it. And then there’s the true name system, which is if you know something’s name, you can make it do whatever you want.  Chris: I understand why people like the true name system, because they seem mystical, then it’s, oh, how do I get something’s name? But they don’t work out very well. Because then you just go around collecting names, and it just becomes uninteresting after that. Oren: And look, maybe you can do something interesting with actually finding the name, but once you have it, it’s like, all right, now I got this name, and I can basically do whatever I want. I would advise maybe have something a little more interesting happen once you get the name. Chris: Probably be one part of a bigger system that has other interesting things in it, perhaps. Oren: Yeah. And then the other method that I talked about in that article is referencing sections of a longer story. And here, you’re not going to put the whole thing. Chris: This is the Middlegame strategy, just to curse it.  Oren: Yeah, it’s Middlegame, but also The Magicians, which is not a book I love, but did use this aspect of it fairly well. Because in The Magicians, the inner story is basically Narnia. It’s called Fillory, but it’s Narnia. And The Magicians, although it is pretending to be grimdark wizard school, it’s actually grimdark Narnia. So having the protagonists already be familiar with the fake Narnia story is helpful, because it creates some beautiful dreams they have that the story can then rip to shreds, because that’s what the story is about. And I’m not saying that’s what you should write your story about. I’m just saying that if you want to, this is an effective way to do it. And they talk about the story, and it becomes clear how it’s important. At first, it’s just like an offhand reference, right? They don’t belabor the point early. They just mention that it’s one of many fantasy books that the protagonist likes. And it comes up more later, once they realize that Fillory is a real place they can go to. And then it sets up the expectations of, oh, it’ll be great, and there will be fauns there, and we’ll be kings. Then they actually go there, [grimdark voice] and everything’s horrible, and the Aslan equivalent ate Lucy’s head. [normal voice] I see what you did there.  Chris: I feel like one of the issues with Middlegame is that it felt like all of the pieces of the bigger story were meant to be symbolic in some way. And it just came off as too much, right? Like, we’re trying to create a story that is supposed to be from a best-selling series that one of the characters writes. So we’re already putting it on a pedestal by talking about how amazingly popular it is. And then we take little pieces, and they’re supposed to be both from a really compelling story, and supposed to have some deeper encoded symbolism in them. And it only works to the extent that it does, because it’s like when you make up a fantasy chess game, and it’s not really chess. But you’re like, oh, this is a game where all the moves perfectly correspond to the political intrigue in the story. That’s never going to work. You can’t really do that. But you can pretend if you just don’t say what the rules of the game are.  Wes: Yup. Chris: Then we can pretend it’s totally analogous. Same with Middlegame’s excerpts. We have these weird excerpts with weird language in them. And no, this is totally evocative of such and such, we swear. Oren: Yeah, I guess maybe. The weirdest thing about Middlegame is that technically the characters in the book have all read the inner story because it’s a novel that exists in the setting, but they almost never talk about it. So it’s hard for me to tell how it’s supposed to apply to different situations. I just know that each chapter starts with a quote from this book, which took me forever to figure out it was an in-universe book. I thought these were just a completely different set of characters off somewhere else for a while. Which – that book exists. Maguire just went and wrote that as its own story. So I guess at some point it might be funny to go and see if the snippets from Middlegame actually match what’s in the full version that Maguire wrote. Chris:  I would be surprised if somebody’s reading these books that were written after Middlegame and just be like, okay, that’s cool. Nice text here… huh, we have this weird section where everything just doesn’t fit right and feels really forced. I wonder what that’s about. Oren: Yeah, it’s like dialogue that was written for the trailer. [laughter]  Chris: Yeah, dialogue written for the trailer. Huh, that’s weird.  Oren: It’s like, why did they say that? I don’t know, but it seems like it would sound cool separated from the rest of the story and just set on its own. You’ll be watching an episode of Star Trek and they’ll be doing normal Star Trek dialogue and then suddenly one of the characters will turn to the camera and be like, and that is why we must continue our exploration at all costs. What? What are you talking about, Captain? But that was a line he had to say because it was in the trailer and it looked cool in the trailer. [laughter] All right, now I think our story within a story has come to an end, as is our story outside of a story, because the podcast is over. Chris: If you enjoy this podcast episode within a podcast episode, please support us on Patreon. You can go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie MacLeod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.  [closing theme] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

It’s time to divide your magic into categories, but what should those categories be? What should they be based on, what powers should they grant, and, most importantly, how well will they fit on an online personality test? Those are all questions to ask of an elemental magic system, and that’s what we’re talking about today. We discuss how many elements a system should have, how to choose them, and why everyone expects four element systems to have a secret fifth element. Plus, what is “beast keeping” anyway?Show Notes The Four Fundamental Forces  The Standard Model of Physics  Bending  Legend of the Five Rings  The Infinity Stones Owl House Covens Fate: The Winx Saga Mistborn Magic  Frozen Two MagicTranscript Generously transcribed by Viviana. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.  [Opening Music] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I am Chris, the mage of plot arcs, and with me is… Wes: Wes, the mage of red pens.  Chris: And… Oren: I am Oren. I have the four elements of gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism. By their powers combined, I am the standard model of physics.  Chris: No! You can’t get multiple elements! Wes: Yeah, boooo! Oren: Look, I’m going into the standard model state, okay? I could do anything in this state. Chris: Look, if you’re the avatar or the chosen one, you have to have all of the elements. You can’t just have a separate set of them. Oren: Look, these are the four fundamental forces, okay? They’re fundamental. You can’t have forces more fundamental than these ones. Yes, I know the standard model doesn’t actually include gravity. I looked this up, but I wasn’t going to let that fact ruin my joke. Chris: So yeah, this time we’re talking about elemental magic. Wes: And so right off the bat, we have to answer the question of what is an element, don’t we? Chris: Yeah, what is elemental magic, and are sandwiches involved? Oren: The element of sandwich. It’s definitely- See, I think people are always being like, ‘We could use the actual elements of the periodic table.’ You could, if you’re a coward. What you should do is the elemental groupings of the periodic table, because then you can be an alkaline metal bender and an alkaline earth metal bender, and those will be different, and it’ll take five hours to explain. Then you can be a lanthanides bender. I don’t know what a lanthanide is, I just know it’s one of the categorizations on the periodic table. Chris: Can I be a noble gas bender? Oren: Yeah, get that helium. Chris: I can make people’s voices really high, but I do have trouble exploding anything. Anyway, a magic system could be considered elemental whenever magic is sorted into categories that determine what the magic does- loose definition. So anytime you see a magic system that is sorted into those types of categories, you could call it elemental. Obviously it’s elemental if we have the traditional magical elements like fire and water and there are some trends like elemental systems are more likely to be a little more rational. Not always. They can definitely be very arbitrary, but because there’s such a big tradition of people just controlling their element, we can sometimes be more likely to logically see what a mage is capable of doing and not capable of doing and extrapolating a little bit better. I think partly because an element just narrows it down enough. If you have your mages and they can do absolutely anything, it’s almost impossible to make it rational because there’s no way you can sort all of that out into, ‘Okay, this is exactly how I got this effect.’ If you have all the effects under the sun included in your magic system. Whereas giving it elements oftentimes does narrow down what mages can do. It doesn’t mean they’re not overpowered, but sometimes it narrows it down. Oren: Yeah, and if you have a story where it’s established that characters can control fire, air, earth, water, whatever, it’s less likely that you’re going to be tempted to suddenly have one of them cast a scrying spell because which element is that? It’s not like you couldn’t figure out a way to do it, but the temptation will be reduced. Chris: But Oren, I want healing, so I was thinking my water mages would heal people.  Oren: Ugh… Wes: The human body is mostly water anyway, Oren.  Oren: Gosh, man, I’ll never stop being annoyed that Avatar has all of these very substance-based magic effects that are all based on controlling the thing, and then healing, which just does a bunch of unrelated things and they all fall under water for some reason. You should need earthbending to fix bones. Hot take. Chris: It would have been cool if only the Avatar could heal, because you’ve got to use all the elements together or something. Oren: I like that, yeah. What I honestly would have done is I would have had different benders specialize in different kinds of healing. That’s what I would have done, and granted, it would have been a little harder in a cartoon. In a book, I think it would have been a lot easier, because you have more time to explain how they’re doing it. Chris: I would say that’s if you decide you really want magical healing, and that’s the only way you’re going to get it, because I will advise against the, ‘Oh, and people with this element have this power, and then this power, and this power, and they’re not really related to each other, and now we have to give everybody with the other elements the same goodies to make it feel even,’ and so every element is just like a random collection of powers that is really hard to remember, and often feels arbitrary itself. So I would say resist adding too many additional related powers that aren’t really intuitive onto your element, if you can help it.  Oren: You can also start getting thematic elements if you want. Fire magic is out of hand pretty fast, like Legend of the Five Rings does that with its magic system, where fire magic, yeah, it’s got the obvious stuff of actual fire, but it also makes you smart. Chris: Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Oren: Fire magic to get smarter, and air magic makes you better at bows. And I don’t mean because you’re using wind to guide the arrows, that would actually make sense, that air is associated with bows, so if you’re an air shigenja, you can become good at bows. Chris: Don’t want to make it seem miscellaneous like that. Don’t get me wrong, if you normally have martial artists that control air, earth, fire, water, and you really want healing, and you give them each one healing power, it’s not going to kill you, but pretty soon it’s easy to start adding more and more miscellaneous stuff like that. And also, even the healing powers by themselves just feel a little bit contrived. They don’t quite fit in naturally. So anyway, some advantages of elemental systems are that everyone loves magical categories that you can put people in. Wes: It’s so true.  Oren: Yeah, that makes a good personality test. Chris: That makes a good online personality test, everybody will love it. You can get diverse magical effects while also keeping magic manageable. Doesn’t mean it will be manageable, but it’ll be a little easier, a little more possible to make it manageable. Oren: It’s easier to balance because if you have one element that flies and another one that shoots long-range deadly attacks, you can more easily make those not the same kind of magic so that you don’t have to deal with ‘Why does he just fly up and shoot lightning bolts down forever?’ Chris: And then you can also use it to create interesting theming and world-building, depending on what kind of elements you choose. Because we’re not just talking about air, earth, fire, and water here. You can basically make anything into your elements. Oren: Yeah, although I had an interesting observation that as I was thinking about what can be elements, I noticed that, so first you want whatever your elements are to feel equivalent. Chris: So you’re talking about a set of elements as opposed to what qualifies as an element? Oren: Yeah, that’s what I was… Should we talk about what qualifies as an element first? Chris: I don’t have notes on that, but that’s what I thought you were going to say. It would be a little strange if you’re like, ‘I’m the element of mugs.’ I guess they’re supposed to feel at least a little bit magical and mysterious. Or not a noun that’s not a specific object. An abstract noun, whatever it’s called. Oren: If it’s going to be an element, you want it to feel fundamental in some way. Because an actual element in real life is a substance that is the same atomically. You don’t get it by mashing different kinds of atoms together. It’s all one kind of atom. So that’s the general vibe you’re going for. It shouldn’t feel like a very specific part of the world and if it does, you’re usually going to have a lot of elements. Like I was thinking, earth and sky, those feel like elements. Chris: Yeah, I will say though that if it has a magical connotation, for instance, you would have ruby and sapphire mages. We associate gems with magic and it’s easy to make them feel mystical.  Oren: But like, salt and sand, for example. Those could potentially be elements, but they wouldn’t be your only elements. That would feel really weird. That would feel like you’re leaving a bunch of stuff out.  Chris: So before we get into talking about a set of elements, I just want to mention that there’s more than one way to do this. And when we’re thinking about elements, we’re usually thinking about a specific kind of elements. But there’s actually other methods. So I call this ‘ordered elements.’ The idea of ordered elements is that you have a specific set that kind of represent the metaphysics in the universe in some way. They feel fundamental to how the universe works. Which is why they have to be chosen very carefully, which is what Orin has started to talk about. So that they feel natural. Because if they’re asymmetric, or the set doesn’t feel right, then it’s going to be really contrived and the magic’s not going to be that believable. So, they’re finicky. But there’s other ways to do it, for instance, you can have what I might call ‘sourced elements’, where you pick things in your world that are a source of magic and then you use the explanation that those things are just naturally different, and so the magic that comes from it is naturally different. So, for instance, if you had a set of islands of different sizes and different traits, and then each island had an island spirit, or had an island magical essence, and then the people of that island could channel it, the big island might not be the same as the little island. Maybe one is more powerful than the other, and the number of elements that you have would feel random because that’s how it’s just naturally occurring in your world, right? So it doesn’t have to feel neat and orderly that way.  Chris: Another way you can do it is what I call ‘chaotic elements’, which feels a little bit more like a superpower system, and more like scientific phenomenon, and a little bit less mystical, which is why I don’t think it’s used very often. But you can just say, you know what, this is all really random, we don’t really understand it, but this one person can channel water and the other person can channel mayonnaise and there’s some repetition, but we have no idea how many of them there are, and they just seem to occur at random. It can be used for a little bit more jokiness, but also just without that, without having a mayonnaise mage, it also just feels a little bit more scientific. But the point is that you’re setting the expectation that it’s really random and eclectic, and that, for instance, a more powerful person might be able to do water and all that entails, and a less powerful person might just have ice, for instance, so they can only deal with water when it’s in its frozen state. But the most popular choice seems to be, again, going with kind of like universal metaphysics that are supposed to vent something mystical about the universe. Oren: Yeah, that’s where your classic fire and water, night and day kind of elemental systems come from. Those feel like somehow part of the existence in some capacity.  Wes: Less element and more fundament.  Oren: Mmm, fundament, that’s good, I like that.  Chris: So as Oren was saying, you wouldn’t have a system that’s just salt and sand, because that doesn’t feel complete. Which is one of the requirements, is that it feels like it’s a complete set and it’s not missing obvious things. Because if you have salt and sand, then you’d have to ask why you don’t have dust or something else like that in there, because it doesn’t feel like a complete set of all the things that are like that.  Oren: Or dirt, right? Why isn’t dirt one of them? Or any of the other things that can dissolve in water. Why isn’t sugar an element? A common one that I see in client manuscripts is elements that are mismatched, that don’t feel as broad. Instead of fire and water, you’d have something specific like fire and rain.  Wes: Yeah.  Oren: Rain is just a little too specific, right? Fire is very broad, whereas rain is a specific instance of water. And that just seems overly limiting if you’re only doing a two element system.  Chris: And, in most cases, you’re looking for elements that are also equally powerful. And oftentimes broadening the element makes for a more powerful magic worker, depending on how your system works. Usually if you’re going for more of a mystical set, you’re not looking to make one randomly more powerful than the next one.  Oren: Right, because remember, people need to be able to identify whichever element they think is best and they’re not going to be able to do that if one of them is just the loser element.  Chris: Yeah, you don’t want somebody to take your internet quiz and then be sad about the results they get, okay?  Wes: That’s right.  Oren: I’m only a rainbender. I hate it. I’m just going to look up the answers next time. I wanted to have fire! Chris: And they should be equally distant or related to each other. So if you have plants, and then you have lava and steam or something, it’s just one of those things is not like the other. I like to think about it like a color wheel, where it would be very strange if you had blue and teal and green and then yellow. And that was your set.  Wes: That would be weird.  Chris: That would be weird.  Wes: Are there expectations with these, if you have an elemental system, that they have their opposites? Like if you say ‘elemental magic’, that carries a connotation that, like, fire and water are opposites. And then if you talk about light magic, then there must be dark magic. If there’s order magic, then there must be chaos magic. Chris: I think if you have an element that suggests an opposite, maybe. But in some systems, light mages would also control darkness. Because they would just take the light away, for instance. And some elemental systems do not have opposites that are inherent to the elements they chose. Like for instance, if you have a sapphire and ruby mage, what’s the opposite of sapphire?  Oren: It depends on how many elements you have. If you only have two, the expectation that they will be opposites goes up. That’s why you could have a fire and water system, but you probably wouldn’t have a fire and earth system. That would feel weird.  Wes: That would feel weird, yeah.  Oren: The two elements are fire and air. Really? Those are the two? Something about that seems wrong. Whereas fire and water, that’s more okay. You’re less likely to get people wondering, ‘Where are the other two?’ Chris: Yeah, or fire and ice.  Oren: Yeah, fire and ice, that’s another one. Chris: So basically what you don’t want is what they have in Frozen 2. Oren: Oh gosh, that was hilarious.  Chris: Where they have earth, air, fire, water, and ice. What?  Oren: It was really weird! She’s not water, because she’s only ice, so she can’t be the water one, but she’s also clearly too close to water to be the bridge between that they wanted her to be in the movie. It’s amazing how you picked a thing that wouldn’t work either way.  Chris: Yup, that does not work. That does not work at all. Oren: So how many elements should you have? That’s a question. What’s the number? What’s the perfect number of elements, Chris?  Chris: Okay, I will say that part of this is, do you expect the audience to remember all of them? Because I do think that in some cases, I’m going to go over some examples, including Owl House. Owl House has more than you can remember, but that’s not really important, because you’re not expected to remember all of them. If you want people to remember, I think six is even pushing it a little bit, but you might be able to do six if they’re really intuitive. Otherwise, I think the more you have, the harder it might be to just make your set feel natural. You might get to 12. You can have subcategories, right? So if you wanted, you could take air, earth, fire, water, and then subdivide them into three forms each.  Oren: Because then I don’t have to remember all the subforms, but I can probably remember the base four.  Wes: If each has clear opposites, you only really need to remember half.  Chris: And that would probably help you make a larger set that feels more natural and help it feel a little bit more intuitive. But yeah, I mean, if you had, of course, a chaotic element that’s naturally occurring, then you could have an infinite number if you wanted to. But the point is that you could have potentially lots, and then just don’t expect your audience to remember what they are. Don’t require them to and as long as you have it set up so they feel natural, you’ll be fine.  Oren: That just means that if you have a whole bunch, and you want to introduce a mage who has sound magic, then you’re going to have to remind your audience what sound magic is first. You can’t just have the mage show up and start doing sound magic and expect us to know what that is.  Chris: So I want to talk about some out there. And again, this is one of those things where I’ve had people submit questions asking me, ‘Hey, are my elements even?’ and the answer is no and then they don’t want to change it. Because usually when people have a really random set of elements that isn’t quite working, they’re just attached to having certain characters have certain powers, and they don’t really want to change it and that’s how they ended up in that situation in the first place. We originally conceived one character having fire and another having lava, and then we didn’t really want to add all the others in. And that’s how it becomes a problem. But one example that’s interesting is that they do surprisingly well with the Infinity Stones, I think, except for one. So let’s see if you can tell me which one I think needs to be at least renamed.  Oren: Is it Reality?  Chris: Oren, you were supposed to wait for me to list them first!  Oren: Oh, I’m sorry.  Chris: Especially since our listeners may not have them memorized.  Oren: That’s a good point.  Chris: Okay, so the Infinity Stones are Space, Time, Power, Reality, Mind, and Soul. These are surprisingly good. They’re very cosmic-feeling. And they’re called Infinity Stones, so that really fits the theme. But the problem is that Reality would normally encompass lots of those other things. Oren: Yeah, probably all of them. It’s like having a system where your elements are eggs, flour, sugar, chocolate, and cake. One of those is just the other four put together. They’re not equal.  Chris: And it’s so weird! Because all you have to do is relabel Reality so that it’s Matter. Were they worried that’s too scientific for their audience? I think most people know what matter is.  Oren: Yeah, I feel like you might still have a problem if matter lets you turn people into slinkies but better naming for sure.  Chris: I’m not talking about how OP the Infinity Stones are. I’m just talking about whether or not those elements are balanced. But otherwise, I think they do surprisingly well. And it’s a set of six. And again, with things like Mind and Soul, just accept the fact that Mind is different even though technically it would be part of Reality. Or Matter, right? It would be part of Matter. There’s a cultural precedent there of thinking of Mind as being separate. Oren: Although I would start to be unclear what the difference between Mind and Soul is. I’m not saying you couldn’t show that to me. If you told me those were the categories, I would not intuitively know the difference.  Chris: And I also think that you could take Mind out of here and change Reality and Matter and the set would work. So that it would be Space, Time, Power, Matter, Soul. Or just Matter, Mind, and take Soul out. And I think it’s okay to have both. It’s not bad. The set would also feel complete with just one. The Owl House magic system has about nine in here. It’s not the worst. The show gets away with it, but it’s a little rougher. So their elements are Abomination, Bard, which is like their music magic, Beast-keeping, Construction, Healing, Illusion, Oracle, Plant, and Potions. And I think the issue here is that we have two different types of elements. We have elements that are representing Plant and Abomination. They’re almost like different types of lifeforms and then Beastkeeping is… It’s not Beast, it’s Beastkeeping.  Oren: Do we ever see any Beastkeeping magic? I remember the Beastkeeping Master is just like a cat person and I think he scratches people. But I don’t remember if he ever does any magic.  Chris: So maybe it’s just Beast, in reality, not Beastkeeping. But see, the others are all like… Feel a little bit more task-oriented about activities that you do or crafts. So Bard is making music and constructing things and healing people. And Illusion even could be casting illusions. And then Potions, you’re making Potions. Even Oracle, I mean we can start to stretch this a little bit, is okay, we’re doing fortune-telling.  Oren: Potions is also weird thematically because in The Owl House, magic is like an inborn thing that you have and you do it out of you. Like it comes from you, specifically from your bilesack. And it’s potions work with that. Because potions are like things that you make. Is this one of those settings where someone else can follow the same instructions but if they don’t have the magical energy, the potion won’t work? Because that one just feels a little odd. Like by default, Potions feel like a thing anyone can do if they have the right ingredients.  Chris: Yeah, the other problem that happens with potions in many cases is can the potions do everything?  Oren: Yeah. Chris: So all of the other elements are limited in the tasks they can perform, but potions are just like the magic way anything can happen. Pretty soon, potions become really OP.  Oren: Anytime the author needs like a magical effect that doesn’t fit into one of their other elements, ‘I guess there’s a potion that does that!’ and it’s like, alright, just keeping a long list of all the things potions can do.  Chris: So yeah, if I were to look at the Owl House magic system, I would probably think about either the task-oriented things like construction or the kind of nature or life oriented things like plants and abominations and do one or the other. Oren:  I guess if we wanted to explain why they don’t really make sense, we could say that Belos invented them and Belos isn’t very smart.  Chris: Yeah, don’t get me going about how it does not make sense that anybody would ever choose to get the mark and restrict themself because there’s no advantage to doing that. I don’t care how convincing Belos is, he would not convince people to put on a mark that permanently takes away most of their magical ability. It’s just not a thing that would happen.  Oren: Look, he’s a very good public speaker, okay?  Chris: That’s not a thing! No one is that good at public speaking.  Oren: He can sell you timeshares. Chris:  Yeah, he locks you in a room, doesn’t let you go anywhere.  Oren: Until you agree. Chris:  He lures you in with a free gift and then gives you a sales pitch and then just doesn’t let you leave.  Oren: There’s like a pile of snacks but you’re not allowed to have any until you sign.  Chris: Oh no. So there’s Winx, which does pretty well, the new Winx show. Fire, water, earth, air, and then it has light and mind.  Oren: Light is the odd one out in that exchange. Mind feels like the secret fifth element that everyone expects a four-element system to have now, but light is like fire but less. They did eventually establish that light can do illusions and stuff, which fire can’t do, but, by default, light just seems like weaker fire.  Chris: In the show, it feels better than it looks on paper because it’s like light and fire, aren’t those kind of closely related? Fire can create light, so what’s the advantage of light? In the show, yeah, they can create entire illusions, make things invisible, and it feels very distinct from fire, which is just you can start fires. So it works a little better in the show.  Oren: Plus, with fire, you get to be the main character. I was curious what either of you thought of the Mistborn elements, the eight, I think it’s eight basic metals, the metal powers.  ’ Wes: There’s lots to come from, right?  Chris: Yeah, I think that’s a tricky one, because first of all, choosing metals, there’s lots and lots of metals, and it doesn’t work because he uses it to, ‘Hey, we’ve discovered more’, right, as the books go on. So it’s incomplete because we don’t actually know about all of them. So it’s useful that way, but even trying to pick which metals to use is a liability when creating a system like that. And I think he did the best he could, but also the set of powers, I think that’s the biggest problem, is just the set of powers that they convey are too eclectic and don’t feel what they match. In a system like this, where you have, okay, like a sapphire or ruby mage, for instance, that’s probably not elements where you’re just going to give people direct control over their elements. This is not bling mages, necessarily. Usually what you’re going to do is match it symbolically to whatever power it gives. And so if you do that, you also have to be careful that those powers feel as natural as the elements that you choose, and that the symbolism is very intuitive. Keep it simple, easy. So after he chose a specific set of metals, he also had to figure out what powers those metals represent. It was honestly just a very tricky thing, and so it’s not really surprising that it came out feeling a little arbitrary.  Oren: To be honest, metals often have very similar properties. And so it’s, okay, why is tin the superior eyesight metal? What makes tin related to eyesight? And it’s like, iron, that’s the one that pulls things towards you. It’s like, alright, iron’s magnetic. That sort of makes sense. Pewter is the super strength one. And it’s like, pewter is not a very strong metal. That doesn’t feel strength related.  Chris: It works a lot better if you choose elements that have symbolism, right? Because for at least rubies and sapphires, we associate them with colors. In actuality, sapphires can be a whole range of colors. They’re not necessarily blue, but we associate them with the color blue. So then you can use color blue symbolism to choose what a sapphire mage could do. Or if you have a mage that’s like sun, moon, stars, sky, or something like that, you can think about, okay, what is the symbolism I’m going for with my celestial theme? And choose appropriate powers based on that. But to just choose metals that all feel similar. That’s a big ask.  Wes: The more specific you’re naming it, the more arbitrary it feels for sure. And it gets away from, I think, everything Chris has told us about the point of an elemental magic. If we’re choosing, like, You’re a potassium mage!’ Okay, great. It doesn’t, I don’t know. The more associations you can have with your elemental term, the better. That’s why, like, fire, life, death, order, chaos, all that stuff, I think you can just fit. Things will make more sense under those broader umbrellas.  Oren: Yeah, although I admittedly do love the idea of sapphire and ruby mages. Instead of having thematic powers, just having to pelt each other with different kinds of gemstones. Chris:  No, they have a bling contest! It’s like a beauty contest for whoever makes the best bling.  Oren: Whose jewelry is coolest? Chris:  Obviously the sapphire mage, because they can make so many different colors.  Oren: But I like rubies. Rubies are my favorite. The rubies always win in my heart, Chris.  Chris: One last thing that I thought would be good to talk about before we go is, again, you don’t necessarily have to make it about having direct control over the element, even if you’re doing earth, air, fire, water. It’s very popular. It gets really powerful, though. It’s especially easy to kill people. Too easy to kill people. Which means that you can put limits on it. Like distance, and do you have to touch it, and do you have it to start with whatever that will help. But other ways, besides the symbolic way, is you can have it, like, some other type of affinity. Can you survive an element, like a fire mage being able to walk into fire? Can you sense things inside the element, or through the element, like a scryer dipping their hand in a puddle, and then seeing things that are close to a nearby lake? You could navigate or travel through it, flying or breathing underwater. That kind of thing.  Oren: In that case, I want to be a microplastics bender.  Wes: You can go everywhere! Oren: I am all-knowing and all-consuming. Or all-permeating, really. Chris:  So I would just, again, think a little bit about what kind of relationship people have to their element, and you can do control. Sample your options a little bit first before just going for one.  Oren: I think it is time to end the podcast on that note, now that we’ve covered all the elements. There aren’t any we didn’t cover. Don’t write us. Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreats.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plotter, which you can learn more about at plotter.com. Then there’s Kelly Macleod. Next there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. Talk to you next week.  [Closing Music] Chris: This has been The Mythcreant podcast. Opening-closing theme “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Johnathan Coulton