Transcript:Exandria Unlimited: Calamity Wrap Up

MARISHA: Well hello, and welcome to the official Wrap-Up of Exandria Unlimited: Calamity.

SAM: Hey.

AABRIA: Brrah!

MARISHA: That's right, we'll be exploring all of the luscious lore surrounding the Ring of Brass, the fall of Avalir, and even everyone's favorite Aeorian reporter, Bolo.

AABRIA: Don't like her!

TRAVIS: NPC.

AABRIA: Don't like her.

MARISHA: So many opinions. This will be a roundish table, there's a rectangle one here, discussion with fan questions peppered throughout. So sit back, relax, and enjoy our reflections on the apocalypse we brought about, but also maybe made just a little less worse, maybe. So with that in mind, I think first we should maybe just do a little quick round of introductions.

SAM: There's no intro song that plays now or something?

AABRIA: Make one now.

MARISHA: Go.

SAM: Is there a title sequence?

MARISHA: And title sequence, go.

SAM: ♪ Ah, we're all going to die ♪ (laughter)

TRAVIS: Ring of ass.

AABRIA: That was so fast.

TRAVIS: On the teleprompter, I saw, "The luscious Ring of Ass."

SAM: Oh, that would be good.

TRAVIS: I got real confused.

AABRIA: Ah man, sequel.

MARISHA: That should've been our name.

LOU and AABRIA: Yeah.

MARISHA: The Ring of Ass.

LUIS: The Ring of Ass.

MARISHA: Well, now that we're back from that amazing title sequence. (laughter)

MARISHA: Yeah, I'm assuming most people know who we are if they watched 20 hours of us, but I guess, Luis, maybe let's just go around and introduce everybody. I'm Marisha Ray, I played Patia.

TRAVIS: Hi, Marisha.

MARISHA: Patia Por'co.

MARISHA: Hi. Hi everybody, hello. Luis?

LUIS: I'm Luis Carazo. I played Zerxus Ilerez. (cheering)

MARISHA: First Knight.

AABRIA: First Knight. First Knight, first merch.

SAM: I'm not sure which camera to look into. Hi, I'm Sam Riegel. I was the Voice of the Herald's Tome, Loquatius Seelie. I'm also a talented actor. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Wow.

LOU: And a fun fact now, oh, we're adding fun facts?

BRENNAN: On the third instance, we added a new category of thing to say.

MARISHA: Complimenting yourself.

BRENNAN: Yes, yes, yes.

MARISHA: Sure, okay.

BRENNAN: Hey gang, I'm Brennan Lee Mulligan, I was everybody else. (laughter)

SAM: And fun fact.

BRENNAN: Fun fact, put the camera back. And a fun fact about me is that I am drinking a nice cup of joe right now.

LUIS: Fun fact.

AABRIA: Was that a fun fact?

SAM: I don't know that it was fun.

AABRIA: Yeah.

SAM: It was a fact.

BRENNAN: It was a fact, yeah. It was a fact.

MARISHA: It's also kind of a constant for you, I feel like.

BRENNAN: Yeah, it's true.

AABRIA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Turn it around for a creative fun fact.

LOU: Are we all fucking done talking? (laughter)

SAM: Get focused, get focused.

LOU: Can we get focused?

AABRIA: Oh, okay.

BRENNAN: Ooh.

SAM: There's a dance?

LOU: Yeah.

SAM: What's happening?

AABRIA: Oh my god. Yes!

BRENNAN: Yeah!

LOU: Hi, I'm Lou Wilson. (laughter)

LOU: And for the past 20 plus hours, I played Nydas Okiro, Guildmaster of the Golden Scythe.

LUIS: Oh my goodness.

LOU: And a fun fact about me. I've never had a pizza sashimi. (laughter)

SAM: You've never had a pizza sashimi?

LOU: I've never had a pizza sashimi. (laughter)

SAM: A pizza sashimi?

LOU: Yes, and I'm assuming you all have eating pizza sashimi.

TRAVIS: No!

LOU: I personally have never had pizza sashimi.

BRENNAN: So pizza sashimi is--

LOU: Thank you, Brennan.

BRENNAN: -- is raw dough--

MARISHA: Raw pizza.

BRENNAN: -- with slices of tomato, uncooked cheese, and uncured ham.

LOU: It's a classic, they serve it a lot in Barcelona.

MARISHA: Shitty bruschetta.

LOU: Yeah.

BRENNAN: It's real. Hey, it's real.

TRAVIS: Nope, it's not real.

AABRIA: That's real.

LOU: Hey, Google it.

AABRIA: You guys, that's absolutely real, what are you talking about?

SAM: Back row.

TRAVIS: Are we going to me? Hi, hello, hi. That's not a real food, right? Okay. I'm Travis Willingham. I played Cerrit Agrupnin, I survived.

AABRIA: Cerritos Groupon.

MARISHA: Final girl.

TRAVIS: Cerritos Groupon. Better known as.

LUIS: That was good.

MARISHA: I died.

TRAVIS: If you Google Cerrit, you'll find my real name. Fun fact, I wore a black t-shirt tonight in an effort not to get food on myself when I ate dinner. (cheering)

TRAVIS: Challenged the Fates and won.

MARISHA: Yep, nailed it.

AABRIA: I'm proud of you. Sweet, hi.

SAM: Wrap it up.

AABRIA: I'm here, hey, I'm Aabria Iyengar. I played Laerryn Coramar-Seelie, Heirophant Abjura, Architect Arcane. Fun fact about me, I don't think I've ever won a game of rock-paper-scissors ever in my life.

MARISHA: Wait, really?

AABRIA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Go hard, ready, go.

AABRIA: Fuck, okay.

LUIS: Yeah.

AABRIA: I'm nervous. On shoot?

TRAVIS: Throw on three.

AABRIA: No, no one throws on three.

SAM: On three?

TRAVIS: Yeah.

AABRIA: That's crazy.

SAM: It's on four.

TRAVIS: Throw on four.

BRENNAN: It's rock, paper, scissors, shoot.

AABRIA: Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. I won! (cheering)

AABRIA: (yells)

SAM: What a show, guys.

MARISHA: Yeah, you know what? I think we should call it there.

AABRIA: I love you.

MARISHA: We won't get any better. That's the highlight of tonight.

AABRIA: I love you.

BRENNAN: Kids, if you can dream it, you can do it.

MARISHA and TRAVIS: (laugh)

AABRIA: I'm actually sweating.

TRAVIS: ♪ ("The More You Know") ♪

AABRIA: Oh my god.

TRAVIS: Nobody knows [inaudible].

MARISHA: Well, you guys, let's just jump into some of this hot goss.

SAM: We're just asking questions. There's no format, right?

MARISHA: Yeah. Not really.

SAM: Okay.

MARISHA: But I also am the one with the IFB in my ear and I have a drive to move it forward because I have margaritas waiting for me at the end of this.

SAM: All right, then kick us off.

MARISHA: So (laughs). Everybody, knowing that this was the Calamity, did it change how you normally build your characters?

SAM: Hell yeah, go for it.

AABRIA: Oh yeah, oh man. I normally don't care about optimized play, but Brennan said we were probably going to die. So I decided fuck you, absolutely not, and I worked the hardest I've ever worked to build a very cool character that could survive as long as possible.

MARISHA: Yeah, you min-maxed the fuck--

AABRIA: Oh yeah.

MARISHA: -- out of Laerryn.

AABRIA: It was very fun when I finally saw everyone's characters in the campaign and I saw the HP differential between our two wizards and I went, "I've done a good job here. Yes, that's good."

MARISHA: That Tough feat, man.

AABRIA: Yeah. Tough is dope.

BRENNAN: With the Arcane Ward, you more than doubled Patia, right?

AABRIA: Yes.

BRENNAN: Yeah, for sure.

AABRIA: I had 175 functional HP.

LUIS: That's insane.

LOU: Functional.

AABRIA: Yeah, if I ever used the Arcane Ward on myself.

SAM: Wow.

LOU: Got it.

AABRIA: Yeah, plus that little workaround to rebuild the Arcane Ward with an Eldritch Adept feat. Anyway, it's the nerdiest I've ever gotten about a build and it was very fun and good.

MARISHA: Did you research that?

AABRIA: Yeah.

MARISHA: Did you Google "How to break wizards?"

AABRIA: Yes, lots of people talk about it all the time, and then I sat down with my friend Trevor who also is very good at D&D and I was like, "Okay, here's what I'm working with so far. Help me optimize this," and we worked for four hours and built a little monster.

TRAVIS: Damn.

MARISHA: That's sick.

SAM: When we were building out the characters, you said, Brennan, Brennan Lee Mulligan, GM of EXU: Calamity.

AABRIA: The guy who loves coffee.

SAM: You said we could just have, was there a limit to how many items we could have? Now I know why you said this, but you were like "Yeah, just pick a bunch of magical items." And that scared me, that frightened me. It made me feel like I was cheating. So I only picked two very, very weak items. I think I picked a Wand of Smiles.

MARISHA: You picked a Wand of Smiles?

SAM: Uh-huh, and a plus one Ring of Protection and I felt guilty doing that. But then I looked around at y'all. You had--

AABRIA: You!

SAM: Everybody had all this shit. You had a strength of 56.

LUIS: Uh-huh, yeah.

SAM: You were all stacking shit. I didn't have anything, I felt guilty doing it. But now I know why, you were going to taketh away everything that you gaveth us.

AABRIA: Don't trust Brennan gifts. Don't do it.

MARISHA: The moment that Luis dropped in our Slack, though, and was like, "Can I take a Holy Avenger?" I was like, "Well, he asked first." So now I feel like it's paved the way, free reign.

LUIS: Yes.

BRENNAN: There's an element of verisimilitude to that, right? Imagine being like "Yes, the secret movers and shakers of Avalir. Can I borrow $20? Because I am--" No, these people would be fucking loaded. They're at the height of a magical fucking civilization. They would be strapped with gear. So it was actually not only a clever ploy. It was not just me pulling the parenting trick of someone's like, "I'm running away," and you're like, "Good, run away." (laughter)

BRENNAN: You're like, "Run away," and you're like (nervous hum). That was not a reverse psychology thing to get you guys to not pick magical items. It was truly from a place of like-- When I saw Luis go ham on the magic items, I was like, "Yes!" because it's just realistic. This is a civilization that's like, "We don't need an army. We just need one guy with a Belt of Storm Giant Strength."

LUIS: Storm Giant Strength, that's why 29 Strength.

BRENNAN: Storm Giant Strength. And when you see Zerxus fighting, you're like, "Yeah, believable."

SAM: Yeah.

BRENNAN: That would cover it, for sure.

MARISHA: Yeah, absolutely.

AABRIA: It's dope.

LUIS: So anybody else want to talk about how they built their characters?

LOU: What, me?

AABRIA: Yeah.

LOU: I think the build I went with wasn't so Calamity-infused. I think I did really want to show out. I think just being on Critical Role, I was like, "Well, I can't show up and be like, 'I'm a bard!'" (laughter)

AABRIA: Sam does that every day.

SAM: I was a bard!

LOU: I just couldn't--

MARISHA: Bard shame.

LOU: Hack it and just show up as a bard. But I want to do, you know? Because are you just going to show up and just be a bard and just be like, "What, Bardic Inspiration for you?" I mean, come on, are you kidding?

BRENNAN: I love it because you were both bards and both multiclass.

SAM: That's true. I multiclassed as warlock because, Brennan, you said that would be a good idea. (laughter)

SAM: No, I think I came into it. I was like, I've done a bard. I got to do something other than a bard, but it's also level 14. I don't want to learn a brand new thing. I don't want to learn sorcerer or wizard. That's complicated, so I'll do what I know, I'll be bard. And you were like, you could flavor it a little with something else. I think you gave me a couple options, and warlock sounded okay.

BRENNAN: And gave us a really awesome connection--

SAM: It did.

BRENNAN: -- story-wise, not only for the game contained within itself but also very timely with Ashley's character in C3, the connection to the Seelie Court.

SAM: Yeah.

MARISHA: The Seelie Court.

BRENNAN: Yeah, absolutely.

SAM: Yeah, that was a well-researched connection that I definitely spent a lot of time researching--

MARISHA: Oh, really?

SAM: -- and talking to Ashley about.

AABRIA: Incredible.

SAM: Or maybe it was Brennan saying, "Hey, who's your warlock patron?" And me going to the Critical Role Wiki and just-- (laughter)

SAM: -- looking up fey creature, fey characters in Critical Role lore, and seeing the word Seelie and being like, "Great, done."

AABRIA: Perfect.

TRAVIS: (laughs)

MARISHA: So you were a bard-warlock and you were a bard--

LOU: I was a bard-sorcerer.

MARISHA: Bard-sorcerer, that's right.

LOU: Four levels of sorcerer, 10 levels of bard. Because I really wanted-- Splitting spellcasting classes meant that I couldn't cast above a 5th-level, but I had those-- Or I didn't have any spells above 5th-level, but I had those spell slots. So I used Magical Secrets to get some sicker shit.

AABRIA: Yes.

SAM: What did you get?

LOU: That was the dragon spell, the Summon Dragon Spirit that turned into Shak and the--

BRENNAN: Cone of Cold, right?

LOU: The Cone of Cold I used one time at the very end because we never took a rest of any kind.

AABRIA: Yeah.

MARISHA: Nope.

AABRIA: It was fucked up.

TRAVIS: Should've seen that coming.

BRENNAN: All the GMs out there, fuck a rest, all right?

MARISHA: (laughs)

BRENNAN: They don't need them. They don't need them.

AABRIA: There's too many GMs in this room. Go fuck yourself. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Wait, I have a question for the multiclasses.

SAM: This was the first time I've ever multiclassed. It was really fun.

AABRIA: Really?

SAM: Yeah, I got access to all sorts of other cool stuff. I also used Magical Secrets to get some cool things. It was great. It was fun.

BRENNAN: This is something interesting when I think about multiclass characters. What class do you think your characters started at at 1st-level?

LOU: Ooh. I picked sorcerer for that. I was like, "Oh, Nydas is a magical person who didn't really tap into that side and so didn't grow much more, didn't just think about himself as being magical and work with that. He instead used what little magic he had and navigated it through the lifestyle he lived." So I went starting four levels of sorcerer, finishing 10 levels of bard.

SAM: I think similarly, Loquatius started as a warlock for, I think it was only three levels of warlock and then 11 levels of bard when he found his calling, found his true path and what could bring him fame and the adoration of many.

AABRIA: Aww. Not me, bitch was busy.

SAM: Nope. (laughter)

AABRIA: Hey quick, Marisha.

MARISHA: Yeah?

AABRIA: Before I forget. What was Patia's--

LUIS: Oh yeah. School?

AABRIA: School of magic?

MARISHA: Enchantment.

AABRIA: There we go. Yeah.

MARISHA: It was enchantment. Yeah, she was a full on--

LUIS: Wiping memories.

MARISHA: -- pure, all the way enchantment wizard. Because the enchantment wizard's perks and abilities is that you can split your enchantment spells and do multiple targets on single enchantment spells. But it just didn't really become super relevant with what we were doing.

AABRIA: Yeah.

MARISHA: By the time we were fighting, I wasn't going to be like well, "Hang on, let's talk." (laughter) So it just didn't really become super relevant. But my thing with Brennan, the way that I just broke the class and just made her powerful because I wanted to have her be super knowledge-based and have this orb that she had where she just stored everything and being the leader of the library, I was basically like, "Can I just take, like, all the spells? I know there's a limit. Can I just add, like, 10 more spells, though, so I just have a lot?" And you were like "Yeah, theoretically, you could just pull from--"

TRAVIS: You're like, "It won't fucking matter."

MARISHA: You could just Google it in the middle, yeah.

AABRIA: You're not going to take a nap. Go ahead.

MARISHA: Yeah, fine, exactly.

TRAVIS: Sure.

MARISHA: Pretty much.

LUIS: Wow.

BRENNAN: This is a bizarre tangent, but literally to what Travis is saying about like, "Yeah sure, go for it," there was that attitude of-- Because I think GMs and DMs can be stingy with stuff that they don't actually need to be stingy with. You know what I mean? Your character is the Keeper of Scrolls for an entire city. You would have an infinite spellbook. You would have all the spells, every spell that's ever been. It would be bizarre for you not to, and I think that you need to be generous with that stuff. There was a kid at my old summer camp who was a young adventurer who was obsessed with elves. He was an eight year old boy. He was like, "In the game, can I be an elf? I want to be an elf wawwior."

MARISHA: Elf wawwior.

BRENNAN: So cute. He came up to me and he kept asking, "Can I have a wazer gun that only elves can use?" I had to be like, "Well, that might not--" Then he came up to me and was like, "Can I have the power to walk on snow like Wegolas?" There's that instinct you get, there's an instinct you get where you want to say no to requests. But then I looked around and I was like, it's the middle of July and I was like, "You can walk on all the snow you want. Any snow you find, walk all over it. You're a snow walking master." (laughter)

BRENNAN: Finding those things that it's like, yeah, that's not game-breaking to give someone access to all those spells in that way.

MARISHA: Yeah. Yeah. It was cool stuff.

AABRIA: We need to talk about this bird, though. How did you walk into the Age of Arcanum and be like, "Absolutely no magic"? (laughter)

MARISHA: I know.

TRAVIS: Well, the character creation part informed all of it because they were like, "Come with some ideas, come with some partial builds." I didn't do any of that shit. I just showed up my lazy ass to the table and then everybody was spitting fire and had great ideas. All of a sudden, the shape of what this could look like started to take shape, but I was the last one to go. I just happened to be on the end of the table as we were going counterclockwise, and everybody else had killer magic. You all were super powerful with magic. I was like, "Well, you got to have the one guy that's like, 'Sharp pointy things only,' right?" Then I asked Brennan, I was like, "What's a really good investigator? What would be really good at finding out details and trying to keep a check on all this magic run amok?" He was like, "Inquisitor rogue." So the more you build that out, the more you realize you're really good at being slippery and not getting hit but if you do get a hit, it's one really good stank one. Which was nice.

AABRIA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Which was nice. So one thing I do when I build characters is I start with an item. I don't know why.

AABRIA: Ooh, okay.

TRAVIS: When I built Fjord... What's the store on Magnolia here that has the old wardrobe departments, like drop off?

SAM: Oh, Take Two.

MARISHA: It's a Wrap.

SAM and TRAVIS: It's a Wrap.

SAM: That's right.

TRAVIS: We went there for Halloween one year and they had Dracula Untold had put all these clothes there and I found these dope greaves that were these silver, folded greaves, bought them on sale or whatever, and that was how I built Fjord, was he started with these forearm bracer greaves and then everything came off of that. So when it was inquisitor rogue time, I was like, "Okay, it's got to be an awesome weapon. It can't just be some normal shit. What is there?" There's this Navy Seal named Jack Carr that has these hawks, these Winkler RnD hawks that look like the craziest things you've ever seen. I looked them up and they're part of this Sayoc Kali fighting system in the Philippines which led to the Philippine Eagle. And so it just like rolled and rolled and rolled and that's just how that started. But the Eyes of Avalir and being the Sightwarden, all that stuff just came together so beautifully and it was just nice to have one non-magic person that's just trying to make it work.

MARISHA: Yeah, absolutely.

SAM: Good balance.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

AABRIA: Yay!

MARISHA: It definitely felt like a little of this "Who watches the Watchmen?" type of element of let's have this one person who's a little bit more grounded.

TRAVIS: I felt so out of it, which was probably perfect because, we were talking about this before we actually started. We probably should've saved it. But when the first episode started, you guys were just in it. You were talking about your magic shit. You were in the city, and I felt like there was a rapport amongst some of you, and I felt like I had missed a meeting or something because you guys were just comfy and talking about the city and how it works and I was just taking notes furiously and trying not to get lost. Turns out, some of you bitches--

MARISHA: We did.

AABRIA: I have no idea what you're talking about, and I wasn't scared of you the entire time.

TRAVIS: Oh my god.

AABRIA: I had a completely normal relationship with Cerrit.

SAM: For those who missed our Twitter Spaces thing.

MARISHA: Yes.

AABRIA: Oh yeah.

SAM: Which is everybody. (laughter)

SAM: There was a secret meeting. There was a secret meeting. And who was at this secret meeting?

AABRIA: Woop.

MARISHA: We had a few secret meetings, right? But I think.

AABRIA: Let's go.

SAM: And what did you guys discuss?

AABRIA: Why we were better than you.

LOU: Just how awful we were. (laughter)

AABRIA: Truly.

LOU: Honestly--

MARISHA: That one's true.

LOU: -- that was mostly the topic of discussion, which was like, "How nasty are you?" It was fun to be-- I had gone and been like, "All right, I'm going to be a little nasty." Then when we were talking and immediately, Aabria and Marisha were like, "We're nasty." And I was like, "Oh, okay. Oh, okay, we're nasty." Then we turned out to be really nasty, nastier than even I planned, so much nastier, but yeah, most of the meeting was agreeing how we were nasty and how long we'd been nasty for, and the many ways we had been nasty together.

AABRIA: That's very good.

BRENNAN: I'm trying to think of the nastiest stuff that came up in that meeting, because basically I was like, "Hey, the Replenishment, this is what's supposed to happen. 25% of the city's ether is supposed to go to the Gau Drashari, the other 75% supposed to go into the ground, and replenish, the Replenishment, all of Domunas. Is that really happening, or what's happening to that other, what's happening to that city's energy?"

MARISHA: We were all like, "Yes."

AABRIA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: (trills) Just this flurry of the stuff, I think there was one point where it was like, I was like, "Okay, you tell me when I go too far. People extending their lives, maybe there's a Magister who hasn't shown up in a little while, maybe he's maybe a lich and not telling anybody," and that didn't even raise an eyebrow.

AABRIA: Yeah!

BRENNAN: You were all like, "That's fine."

AABRIA: A good beginning. Keep thinking, Brennan.

BRENNAN: That's fine, yeah, all good. So it was very, but it was very-- the whole network of someone intercepting with the Septarion and the whole idea of behind Patia of someone who had found a job, like a Senate parliamentarian, and found this job and been like, "Oh, people think this is not important. It's about to be incredibly important, and I'm going to flip this on its head." Interfacing with the entire wealth of the city and someone who saw the vision for what Avalir could be and was like, yeah, no amount of-- if you have a cause, no amount of backroom dealing is ever going to make you question what that cause is. Then the entire technological-- the leywright, the whole point of the secret project. Of we're going to take the city-- This is how we beat Aeor. This is how we win the Arcanum space race of like, okay, you guys hate the gods, other people, we look down on them, Ascension, we are going to become an interplanar city. We're going to become a city that trades with every other realm outside of Exandria.

TRAVIS: Ambition.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

AABRIA: There's nothing wrong with that. I think it was great, and it worked out super well.

LOU: It was going to. It was super going to.

AABRIA: It was super good.

MARISHA: Yeah, theoretically, it worked.

AABRIA: Yeah!

BRENNAN: But it's very funny to hear everyone talk about how the secrets were-- Because you guys-- Because this meeting, of course, was very fun and scheme-y and great, and I was also like-- Because also, I didn't want to have that-- I said it in the Twitter Spaces thing, but I didn't want it to be like Christmas where it's like, "Everyone gets the same amount of presents." You know what I mean, where it's sort of like: No! There's some people in this Brass Ring that are up to an asymmetrical amount of shady shit and that's realistic and that's going to create fun dynamics--

MARISHA: Tension.

BRENNAN: -- which, lo and behold, it fucking did. But it's very good to hear about the meeting because while the meeting was happening, I also was aware of the other secrets that were coming up. So it's like, you guys are having a meeting and you're like, "We're nasty." Then I'm emailing with Luis every day and he's like, "Yeah, my character's not doing good." (laughter)

BRENNAN: "He really thinks about Betrayer Gods every day."

LUIS: All the time. (laughter)

BRENNAN: So you guys are like, "We're corrupt city officials." This guy's like, "It could all burn. Maybe it burns today? Tomorrow? Who knows when it burns." (laughter)

AABRIA: Delightful.

LUIS: Yeah, yeah.

MARISHA: But that's just-- That feels like you were just on such another level of-- you saw through it all, which made sense. It's a different level of bullshit. (laughter)

LUIS: I mean I, so jeez... It's weird to try to have an objective take on the character that you had been sitting in for so long, for four sessions. But I know that I wanted to play a redemption paladin right away. I thought maybe a cleric, but then I was like, "Nah, man, I want to play a redemption paladin to the extreme." I wanted to just challenge myself in a way, too, to just really commit to that. Our exchanges were just getting to what makes-- what runs-- just offering and getting some sounding board stuff on what runs Zerxus, and I tried to-- I wanted to make a parallel between what he was experiencing as the First Knight and what maybe his idea of the Betrayer Gods were, the First Knight being in this tower in a really lonely experience that he never really asked for, but was put on him. So in a way, he was in his own sort of isolation, and so I wanted to create something that would make him connect to the experiences of the Betrayer Gods and then really crazy extreme redemption paladin. I don't know. I mean, I guess he had secrets, for sure, but he didn't have longstanding secrets. The dream really happened the day of--

AABRIA: Really? Did you ever tell us?

LUIS: No, but it--

AABRIA: About? Yeah.

LUIS: Two, there were two-- there were two moments.

AABRIA: Oath of Deflection paladin.

LUIS: Two-- (laughs)

MARISHA: Oath of Deflection!

AABRIA: Never answered a question, dropped the whole Zone of Truth and was like, "And let me not tell you about that."

LUIS: So let me tell you--

MARISHA: 100% true.

AABRIA: That motherfucker.

LUIS: The two moments that I was like, "I think I'm going to lay it all out on the table," was in the second session, why I was looking for Nydas is because I wanted-- that was my oldest friend and I was, I would've if I had found you, I would've-- I would've told you.

LOU: Where was I?

LUIS: You were chasing your thing deal.

BRENNAN: No, when you walked out in the second session you had been in the bathroom with the cracked mirror.

LOU: Yeah.

BRENNAN: Then you came out, but that's when Akami Rowe got murdered, because I could see in your eyes that you wanted to spill the beans. I was like--

SAM: You stopped it?!

AABRIA: Yes. (shouting)

LUIS: That was the second time. The first time was right after we spoke to Purvan. To Purvan.

SAM: Purvan.

LUIS: Yes, that was-- and then I wanted to-- instead of going back to meeting everybody, I wanted to go find you and then I couldn't find you, and then the second time was the Zone of Truth. But then you, you said no, and I was like, okay.

LOU: Don't put this on me. (laughter)

LOU: Don't you dare act like I said no.

TRAVIS: (laughs)

LUIS: You said no. And I was like, okay.

LOU: But it's because, I only turned on you because--

LUIS: This feels like therapy now, for some reason.

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughter)

LOU: (shouts) I wouldn't have turned on you! (laughter)

LOU: (shouts) I never would've turned on you! No! No! I'm tired of this! No, I'm tired of this.

SAM: Are you hearing what he's saying to you?

LUIS: I'm trying my best.

LOU: All right, you know what? Fine.

TRAVIS: This is how it makes me feel.

LOU: (deep breathing) Okay.

LUIS: You've always done this!

LOU: I am receiving this information. I am receiving the idea that because I scolded you, which I felt terrible about, in the Zone of Truth moment that you did not reveal, but to be fair, that was seconds after you-- other people had been like, I don't want to do the Zone of Truth. You had been like, (shouts) "What are you hiding?"

LUIS: Yes!

LOU: I had to be like, "Okay, bro."

LUIS: Yeah, it was so cool.

TRAVIS: Don't come at me like this!

LUIS: I loved it so much because it was-- I love it when there's a scene, an exchange between you and another person at the table where they completely set you off course and into another direction because they've done a thing that changes you and I was going to dig my heels in, but then I was-- but I don't know, it really affected me to have the guy that's known me the longest call me out. I was like, "Okay." It was fucking cool.

TRAVIS: (menacing laughter)

BRENNAN: It was so good. Well, for people to know, too, in the emails that I had with Luis, it was just, and this is my first time playing with you. We had coffee before the game and it was just-- I was like, "Oh, this guy feels about storytelling all the ways I feel about storytelling." Because you at the table got totally lost in the character. People watching you could be like, "Is Luis gone? It's only Zerxus now." But people need to know in the emails, Luis was fully sending me. I was getting emails like, "Here's what my guy thinks. He could be totally fucking wrong." Everything from Luis was as a collaborator like, "Hey man, I am making a man who is strongly convicted. These are his convictions. This is what a paladin is." One of the smartest things I feel like 5e as a system did, when it moved paladins from being wisdom casters to charisma casters, you know what I mean?

MARISHA and AABRIA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: Because it made me realize why you don't want to base morality in charisma.

MARISHA: Charisma.

BRENNAN: Right, because you're like, "The only thing the world needs is redemption, and I'm going to do it every day! No matter how many people get hurt, or how badly it goes, or how many times the world tries to tell me it's not working."

MARISHA: Wouldn't call that wisdom.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

SAM: Yeah.

BRENNAN: Having that insight skill ratcheted up can be helpful. Everyone is redeemable. You, are you the right guy for the job, right? Are you this person who can do this thing in this moment? It felt like there was such a thing with Zerxus where he took this universal truth about everyone can be saved, and didn't see the bridge to, "I can save anybody."

LUIS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

MARISHA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: That never occurred to him of like, "Am I the guy for the job?" I thought that was so beautifully done.

LUIS: I-- thanks. I had a conversation with, and I don't think every redemption paladin needs to be played this way, but again, I wanted to play one to the extreme and that was part of the flaw that I had embedded in it. I was like, "This is an incredibly toxic trait." It's the-- I mean, it is that I am going to change you, but from such a well-meaning heartfelt place. That wasn't the only layer to him because I also wanted to play someone whose flame of hope will never extinguish. That those two can be synthesized together, but they don't have to coexist. So, yeah, I guess from the get go, I wasn't really plotting the nastiness, but I was like, "Let me embed it in to this blind spot and have this person who is the most well meaning, the goodest person in his own heart, and let's give him this flaw and this blind spot."

MARISHA: Yeah, and you talking about the flaws, because even us sitting around the table, me, Lou, and Aabria and being like, "Mm, we're going to get nasty." In the same way of you being very cognizant of Zerxus' flaws, we were in the same mindset with like, "We know we are being shady and shifty but our characters, at the end of the day, are like, 'This is justified 'and we are doing it for the good of the city 'and the greater good.'" That was-- I mean, speaking of incredibly poignant, incredible life lessons, something that Brennan talked about on that day which was not to tell your story, but ending in the lesson being: Never trust a motherfucker with a cause. It felt like so much was really rooted in that about how you-- really so much of the the flaws of-- For Patia especially, and Laerryn and Nydas was that being blinded by their ambition. And it's not to say that they weren't evil, and I honestly think trying to play a evil on the spectrum character is boring and dumb because there is no black and white spectrum and to try and play that calculated, manipulative, but you're doing it because you know in the end, you're going to win and you're going to be right, and everyone will fucking love you for it. Trying to be on that level of awareness, I mean, that was some damn mental gymnastics.

LUIS: Yeah.

AABRIA: (laughs)

MARISHA: These were some pretty deep and complicated characters, considering.

SAM: Yeah, because, as a player, you know what you're doing is wrong, but you also know, my person--

MARISHA: Speak for yourself.

SAM: -- thinks that it would be right.

MARISHA: Yeah.

SAM: There's a reason why I'm being, I'm doing bad things to get good results.

MARISHA: Yes.

SAM: Yeah, it was fun to watch you all do that. I think for-- (laughter)

SAM: I think for my character, my guy was--

AABRIA: Had secrets.

SAM: -- was almost the-- Yeah, was almost the opposite. My character--

TRAVIS: Was perfect in every way?

SAM: Well, no. He was a liar all the time.

TRAVIS: Mm-hmm.

AABRIA: Yeah.

SAM: That was his surface level was like, "Yeah, I always lie, I'm always stretching and bending the truth to do what I want." So that's not really a surprise. But the weird secret was that he that, or the flaw, I guess, to Loquatius, which I sort of figured out as we were playing was not that he was an easy liar, or a good liar, but was that he was lying to himself more than anything, more than anyone else. Because he put on this outward appearance of knowing everything, being super confident, being beloved by all, but all he wanted was very simple things and he couldn't admit that to himself. He just wanted a lady and to and to be happy and to be truthful. He didn't like what he was doing as the the Herald of Avalir either, because it meant bending and stretching the truth. What he wanted to do was just be a gritty indie reporter--

MARISHA: Aw.

SAM: -- for the LA Weekly--

AABRIA and LUIS: (laugh)

MARISHA: Oh my god. Go gonzo!

SAM: -- covering rock shows or whatever.

MARISHA: Yeah.

SAM: He needed to admit that to himself. You know, he doesn't really want all of this pizazz and stuff, he just wants to be a good guy. I think that was his weird opposite flaw from the rest of you.

MARISHA: Mm. Yeah.

SAM: Meanwhile, Cerritos Groupon over here had no flaws. (laughter)

LOU: He was a bad dad.

SAM: Well, was he, though?

AABRIA: No!

SAM: He was so sweet.

AABRIA: No.

TRAVIS: In the end, right? But that's just catching him on that day. So that day he had a good day as a dad. I think the years prior to that were severely less.

SAM: What happened to the wife? Do we know what happened to the wife?

TRAVIS: Yeah, so--

LOU: Didn't you guys have a weird thing?

LUIS: What'd you do to her?

LOU: Were you guys divorced?

TRAVIS: I just didn't pay any attention to her.

LOU: Oh.

BRENNAN: The implication that was there was that Wrayne and Cerrit were not doing great.

LOU: Got it.

SAM: And were split up?

TRAVIS: We were split.

LOU: Yeah, was she at her sister's or what?

TRAVIS: Yeah, she was. It was one of those things where he was obsessed with his work, he had a high station in the city, but while he had his eyes on everything else literally everything outside of their house, it wasn't on her and it wasn't on the children.

AABRIA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: She was like, I need-- This is my idea of her. She was like, "I need more. I need more purpose. I'm going to go find that elsewhere. And until there's something for me here, I won't be here." I'm sure he was like, "Okay," and just went back to work.

AABRIA: Oof.

TRAVIS: Right? Just totally blind--

LOU: Yes, Wrayne. Yes, Wrayne.

TRAVIS: -- in all that stuff, So I feel like there's always-- I think it's always interesting to try and put a little part of yourself into characters. So as a new dad, one of the things I'm always fearful of is just working so much that you'll miss parts of your life, and I definitely pay attention to my wife, but you worry about--

AABRIA: Way to get that in there on tape.

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Love you, babe. I see you.

SAM: I love my wife.

TRAVIS: Heart emoji. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Oh shit. (laughter)

SAM: I take care of my kid!

TRAVIS: Uh-huh, just being like-- You don't want to miss any of that stuff. So I think in that last day, it wasn't about who he'd been. It was like, "Who can you be if you get one last chance," right? The old question if you had one day left, what would you do?

BRENNAN: I think also with Cerrit, there's a part of me that really loved his presence in the group, because there were shady people, and if Travis-- And when you said, you pitched your character as I want to be Jor-El, I want to be the guy that gets his kids out of there. And I want be tapped into Vespin Chloras. There were a couple of different-- Everyone made a choice that helped lift the story up. Being like, "I'm into the Betrayer Gods." I was like, "Well, they're pretty important in this time period, that's very helpful." For you being like, "I'm on Vespin Chloras' trail."

TRAVIS: I was. Yeah.

BRENNAN: Where it was, I was like, "Thank god." I was like, "Great. That's how we tie Vespin into this thing." But what I loved in terms of, if you had also been a shady motherfucker, right, then we'd have a group of people that are doing shady things. Even Loquatius, his very first scene, he's influencing an election. He's not involved with the ether scheme, but this guy is shady as hell. He's incredibly corrupt, Having one person who-- If you had also been corrupt, people watching at home would get to go like, "Oh, that's what happens when everyone's bad. Not like me, who's good."

TRAVIS and LUIS: Yeah.

BRENNAN: And you were good, and also didn't stop Calamity.

TRAVIS: Right.

BRENNAN: It was really important for me to have one character who's like, "Yeah, he's not back dealing ether, he's not influencing an election, but his attention's not in the right place, and at the end of days, that matters just as much."

TRAVIS: It was interesting because I wasn't privy to the Council of Three. (laughter)

AABRIA: Trouble troika, fuck you.

MARISHA: Trifecta.

SAM: The Nasty Triplets.

TRAVIS: I was experiencing everyone's secrets as they were happening, but whether we were in the Herald's Tome you were being deceitful and deceptive and other things were happening. I found in that moment, not wanting to press my friend on the thing that you were clearly lying about.

SAM: Uh-huh.

TRAVIS: Which was just so fucking telling also about if your job is to do the right thing in the end of days, and even though you know all that extra shit, I still wasn't pushing you on it.

SAM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BRENNAN: (laughs)

TRAVIS: So it was just interesting.

MARISHA: Yeah. That's fascinating.

TRAVIS: It was interesting like that.

AABRIA: I will say my favorite part was learning that your wife was also a scientist, because again, I was like, "Cerrit's going to come for Laerryn at some point." That was my one emotional needle. "Oh, you couldn't figure out shit with your wife, so you're coming after me now?"

TRAVIS: (laughs)

AABRIA: I was just waiting for that and it never came up, which was great. But god, what an interesting character. You know that there's something big here.

TRAVIS: Uh-huh.

AABRIA: And you have to go, "I'm going to pay attention to this other thing and hope that that somehow allows me to sidestep what I know is bad in my own front yard."

TRAVIS: That's so interesting.

AABRIA: Oh, that's heartbreaking.

TRAVIS: I think he also has a crazy respect for the arcane wielders. So I think also it was-- I think on the inside he knew it wasn't something he could mess with unless he was able to get right up close to you.

AABRIA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: And then maybe turn or push the button.

AABRIA: Yeah. Oh, it's so good.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

MARISHA: Jumping off of what we were talking about the dads, we have a question from @The_Katie_M on Twitter. "Travis and Luis, what inspired your decisions to make characters who had children despite knowing that you were telling an apocalyptic story? Did you think the fact that your characters were both dads affected your gameplay and caused you to make different decisions to the other characters?" Because yeah, I agree with Katie here. Fucking bold move.

AABRIA: It hurt our feelings.

MARISHA: Holy fuck.

LOU: When the kids were cute, it was incredibly fucked up.

AABRIA: Oh, yeah.

LOU: When they were fun and delightful and not even just blank--

TRAVIS: Brennan is brutal.

LOU: -- slate kids.

TRAVIS: Brutal. With the little Talon 2. I melted in my fucking chair.

LUIS: I know.

TRAVIS: I was dying. I want to hear what Luis' take was, but for me, usually it seems like in adventure campaigns, a group of adventurers go to the threat, battle it, and maybe if they're lucky, somebody will hear that they either succeeded or failed, but it's like collateral damage is minimized and it's out there. This took place in the city. It's in your home and everybody else's home, and of course that means there are families and women and children and everything else, hopes and dreams and everything. So I felt like we had to do that-- because it makes it far more fucking complicated.

LOU: Yeah.

LUIS: I want to ask because you were already talking about it. Between the two of us, you have your own kid and did that ever, giving your character a child in the Calamity didn't make you go, oh? You were saying how you related to that--

TRAVIS: Very much so.

LUIS: -- aspect of it.

TRAVIS: So I brought up before that-- So I'll back up. My favorite superhero, it's not very interesting, is Superman since I was a kid just because he's a guy that could do anything and chooses to do good and so I loved that growing up. But I've always been fascinated by Jor-El who was also very influential in Krypton and did the right thing and got his kid off the exploding planet. But if I had to critique it, I'd be like, "If you were so smart, motherfucker, why didn't you make a rocket for the three of you? Then you could all go up instead of just your kid!" So part of that was also you can be the baddest, most focused warrior, mage, whatever, and when shit hits the fan, there has to be a priority. If one is shutting down the threat, then number two, inherently, is your family.

AABRIA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: So you've put something above your family. As a new dad, I don't know how to do that. You might hear it, but when people say becoming a parent is literally someone taking your heart out of your chest, taking it out of your body, giving it legs and it starts walking around for the rest of your life and all you can do is stare at it and the things that are around it and try and protect it and hope that nothing bad happens to it. That's the craziest notion. So when I knew that a Calamity was coming, I thought it would be interesting as a player, depending on where it went down and what was going to be happening, if he was torn between the thing that he's been trained to do his entire life, and knowing that maybe there is something more important than that in this moment, even though he holds this high position. So that pull was what I wanted. I just didn't know I wanted it like that. (laughter)

LUIS: Yeah, yeah.

TRAVIS: It was real dirty.

LUIS: You said something that I'm fascinated by new parents because I don't have kids and I don't know if I want kids, but I don't think they're gross or anything. (laughter)

TRAVIS: They are.

LUIS: They do gross things.

MARISHA: No one assumed that until you started justifying it. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Sam, when we just had Ronin, he was like "You're going to get poop on yourself." I was like, "Oh, okay, cool."

LUIS: I have nieces and nephews and they don't live far away. But that's not the same as having your own kid, but I am fascinated by what you described, which is that your heart is now outside of you and now out in the world and whenever friends of mine have their first kid, I interview them and I'm like "So, is all this stuff true that people say?" Then just to get them to talk about-- it's just endlessly fascinating to me and that's one of the reasons why I like to play a parent because it's me playing pretend.

SAM: Yeah.

LUIS: And trying to access something that I feel like I get a sense of through my imagination, but I can only imagine in real life. There's nothing to compare it to in real life. But I'm endlessly fascinated by that, and so it just made sense for me to have-- and I wanted to have a kid that wasn't mine. I wanted to have, again, to parallel the relationship between the gods. I think I had told Brennan, I said, "I see the story as a story of fathers and sons in a sense." So seeing the Betrayers as our fathers and mothers in a way and then I have a kid who's not mine, but is mine and I've never explored that, so it was cool and I'm glad that you said what you said because next time I play a dad, I'm going to literally imagine my heart leaping out of my body and then taking form as a kid and that's going to be fucking cool. It's very powerful and to hear you say that, you can feel it.

MARISHA: Even the dichotomy, too, that you had a complicated relationship with your son and playing that estranged father role.

LUIS: Yeah.

MARISHA: Because your kid was staying with--

LUIS: Yes.

AABRIA: Yeah, your family.

MARISHA: Your family.

LUIS: With my family.

MARISHA: Right?

TRAVIS: It was so good.

MARISHA: And we only really got a little bit of that.

LOU: Just a kiss, you know?

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughs)

LOU: Yeah, that was something we talked about. That was something I threw out I think because I knew Nydas wouldn't have an actual family. But I liked the idea-- I liked it as a representation of how close we were at one point in our lives. That it's the three of us, we're some kind of triumvirate to the point where you were like, "Yeah, he's part of our extended family."

LUIS: Yeah, it cemented, I think, my relationship to you and I think that's why it was, in the moment, so easy to give in to you and if this were a longer campaign with more of those moments, I can imagine always doing that because I don't know how you stop feeling indebted to someone who's taking your kid.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

LUIS: Like how you and your family did, so yeah.

SAM: Aabria and I briefly discussed--

AABRIA: Yeah.

SAM: -- whether we had kids, and we quickly said "Nah."

MARISHA: (laughs)

SAM: Because there's something slightly hilarious about exes who fucking hate each other, and there's something that's not hilarious at all about exes with a kid who hate each other.

MARISHA: Oh yeah.

AABRIA: Oh no, that's terrible.

SAM: True.

AABRIA: Speaking of that.

LUIS: Yes?

AABRIA: We also when we got coffee-- yeah.

LUIS: Yes, I was going to say!

AABRIA: There was early talks about--

TRAVIS: You did with? him!?

AABRIA: Yeah.

SAM: Jesus. What were you doing, Travis?

TRAVIS: Sitting with our thumbs up our ass. I guess next time, find Aabria as fast as you can.

AABRIA: That's the game, baby.

MARISHA: (laughs)

AABRIA: We never talked about who Elias' mom was.

LUIS: Nope, never.

AABRIA: And there were early talks about like--

SAM: Wait, like you?

AABRIA: Yeah.

LUIS: Maybe.

AABRIA: Laerryn being Elias' mom.

LUIS: I think I said you decide that because I don't think I would've known.

AABRIA: I didn't want to take away from--

LUIS: I think it would've been pretty cool. It would've been something interesting.

AABRIA: I was excited about it. It stepped in on a very powerful thing about the family that you choose that aren't necessarily born to you and I think it would've been this weird step away because then there's that sense of claiming of-- yeah. But I remember us talking about it and I was very excited about like oh man, I always think about fighting everyone in the group, I guess. I'm just PVP-minded. (laughter)

LUIS: Aabria almost killed me in something else we did.

AABRIA: Yeah, that's right! Oh my god. Well, I'm just an asshole, so I'm going to stop telling that story, that's fine. Never mind.

TRAVIS: Aabria's just coming to collect heads.

AABRIA: I am, I'm here to just ring bells. Yeah, the idea that if we ever got into it and talked about Elias potentially being orphaned, it'd be like: No, he still has his mother. And make that the big reveal.

TRAVIS: Whoa.

AABRIA: But it never came to that.

SAM: No.

TRAVIS: Oh boy.

BRENNAN: Just thinking about-- I love the gestalt space that was rendered even by the stuff you guys didn't talk about in your characters' backstory. Thinking about Zerxus and it's like: Okay, so this is a guy who came aboard the city while his husband, an eldritch knight, was First Knight, so he could study his weird paladin-oracle stuff that seemed to be unique. His husband died, and then the backstory that didn't come out on camera, but the city put a lot of pressure on Zerxus to become First Knight because there wasn't a great candidate after Evandrin was gone. So him leaving Elias in Cathmoíra was something that there was a lot of political pressure on him to do, of people being like, "If it's not you, it's going to be fucking Kevin." (laughter)

TRAVIS: "Fucking Kevin."

BRENNAN: You know? So we can't--

MARISHA: "Do you want to doom Avalir to Kevin?"

LUIS: Nope. Give it to this guy.

BRENNAN: "Hey, you know this grief-stricken, completely alone knight up in the tower who keeps talking about dreams of Betrayer Gods? Should anyone check in on him?" "Nah, he's probably fine. His kid's a continent away."

LUIS: "He's so strong." (laughter)

AABRIA: He'll work it out.

TRAVIS: (laughs) "So strong!"

LUIS: I want to ask what it was like for you to play our kids? I don't know, I'm just curious.

BRENNAN: Love it because there's a convenience-- There's a convenience to orphans, which is why from fairy tales and fantasy immemorial, just convenient, right? I have no attachments, so an adventure makes more sense.

MARISHA: Makes sense.

BRENNAN: When does Luke leave Tatooine? When his aunt and uncle are dead, right?

AABRIA: Spoilers!

BRENNAN: Spoilers for-- Sorry! But you know what I mean? I think there's something to the idea of in a thing that's all about stakes and loss, I think it's really necessary and I love doing any familial relationships, siblings, parents, children because I think that there are people-- People are like gems, right? They have facets to them and some of them only get exposed within certain relationships.

TRAVIS: Totally.

BRENNAN: So you need certain things to see certain sides of people. Again, I feel like even in just the blush of everything around that, even people that did try to avoid those or not try to avoid, but people that were distant with like Patia and her grandfather and Nydas and his brother and things that never get said. But by the fourth episode, I'm like Eaedalus is Nydas' older brother and he never did make it to Avalir, and how does Nydas feel about that? The fact that his older brother got married and became the Mayor of Cathmoíra and you, unmarried, are like, "No, I did become the Dragon," and all that stuff just becomes implication in the background. I just loved it, I think all that family stuff makes it so rich. Actually, I feel like we've been away from questions for a second.

AABRIA: They keep scrolling.

BRENNAN: Lou.

LOU: Yeah?

BRENNAN: Nydas was a pirate who became the key to--

SAM and LUIS: So natural.

SAM: Yeah, it's very natural.

BRENNAN: I'm so good at intros and outros and segues.

SAM: You're the best.

BRENNAN: Nydas was a pirate who became the key to Avalir's resources. Does he feel as though his dreams were realized even though the city fell?

LOU: Great question, Brennan. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Thank you.

LOU: Really good. I don't think so. I based the character a lot in terms of his thought process on a mix of John Hammond from Jurassic Park in the book and in the movie.

AABRIA: Ooh. Yes!

LOU: In the book, he's a real monster, and in the movie, he's a real sweetie. I do think in the Jurassic Park sense, the goal is not just to make the city great. The goal and the dangerous part is that the goal is to make the city great and then show it to the world and prove it every day for the rest of our lives and have everyone come up and kneel before me and say "Great job, you really made something amazing." Like just bringing dinosaurs back, I could give a shit. Or just making Avalir great and making it this hub of commerce where everyone can live, and where there is no strife, and hodmedods do everything you want, and you only experience weather once a week. Nah, that's-- Fuck that. We need to go to the Celestial Plane. That is when things will matter and that's when people will care. So I don't think his dream is realized, but I think in the moment where you killed us. (laughter)

BRENNAN: I just want to say something.

AABRIA: No.

BRENNAN: Matt Mercer made up the Calamity, okay? Matt Mercer made it up--

MARISHA: You're trying to pass this off?!

BRENNAN: -- and I'm over here bad-copping it, okay?

SAM: So you gave birth to us, and Matt killed us, is what you're saying.

BRENNAN: In a way. I'm in the delivery room.

LOU: I specifically mean when you killed us with the tree.

BRENNAN: Oh yeah.

LOU: Which is you. (laughter)

AABRIA: Yeah!

LOU: The tree didn't have to be that wild. The tree could have just split open, you know? Like, it seemed like it was going to, and then in the fourth episode, for the first second, AKA two hours, you murdered us ruthlessly. That was you.

AABRIA: We didn't all die.

LOU: That's you.

BRENNAN: All I'm saying is everyone loves it when Matt says two-thirds of Exandria is gone, but when it actually starts to happen and we're making saving throws for an hour of game time-- (laughter)

BRENNAN: -- all of a sudden, people got some shit to say. That's all I'm saying. (laughter)

LOU: But in that moment, I do think that's Nydas' moment of being like, "Okay, the ambition is too much, and right now there is something to lose, which is just what Avalir is, which is a community of people doing great things and that must be preserved."

LUIS: I actually earlier wanted to ask, because what you're talking about is the change, the realization that you had and the arc that you went on. When we're talking about the secrets and all the nasty stuff, but the moment-- I think a lot of the characters realize and have had a moment of really looking at themselves in a mirror and that's where it started for you?

LOU: Yeah, I think-- It's not until Laerryn is trying to blow up the tree that this fucked up prophecy I got told me might be important. That's the first time it's like, "Wait, wait, wait."

TRAVIS: So good.

MARISHA: So good.

LOU: "If this is it, if this is us enacting this thing that this person has told me is the inevitable end of Avalir, then actually we need to stop. Now, I know I've been shoveling coal into this engine, but can we please hit the brakes? Can we please, in this moment, hit the brakes?" And the answer is: We can't. (laughter)

AABRIA: Tell the prodigy that you had enabled for decades "no" for the first time, and thought that was going to go a different way.

LOU: What's up, dude?

AABRIA: (laughs)

LOU: I can dream.

BRENNAN: I know--

LOU: I can dream.

BRENNAN: I know that you have the commitment to take a character that's supposed to be bad and make them bad. Which is why Nydas' sudden third act shift into the moral core of--

AABRIA: That was amazing.

BRENNAN: It felt so earned. What was that like? Because I feel like you must have surprised yourself following that.

LOU: I think I got caught off guard when you were like, "I'm going to cast Blight on it." I was like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait." It was that moment where you were like, and you were very kind in that you did it very slowly. You were like, "I raise my hand to cast Blight." You don't go, "I cast Blight." So in that moment, I was like, "Oh shit."

TRAVIS and AABRIA: (laugh)

TRAVIS: Yes.

LOU: Wait.

TRAVIS: Yes.

LOU: "Wait, wait, wait. Okay, guys, I have to explain something to you that I've kind of been sitting on."

AABRIA: No one explained anything.

LOU: "I don't know. I think we might be fucking up real bad." (laughter)

LOU: I know people were rolling insight checks to figure out if I was telling the truth or not and you could tell I was lying and you didn't ask about it.

TRAVIS: The rolling realization.

LOU: But now I want to talk about it. (laughter)

LOU: It was a weird thing of being like all right, but then also quietly knowing in my head that even just me saying it is not enough and then it came to blows and it was like: Oh, okay. But it was the first hitch of you being like, "I'm going to kill it," was me going, "Wait, wait, I have to tell everybody this thing and what this means." Then when everyone else didn't back down, when that didn't work.

LUIS: Yeah.

LOU: I was like, "Oh. Oh okay, well, I have to try and stop this and this is now on me. You gave me this prophecy and now I'm the only one who can do anything about it."

BRENNAN: Without a saving throw, to watch a prophecy actually drive someone to panic, you know what I mean? It happened in real time of like the proph-- the thing. I don't know, I just love these characters. I love all of your characters so fucking much and I love that of the shady, of the Trouble Troika.

MARISHA and SAM: The Trouble Troika!

BRENNAN: Of the Trouble Troika, what I love about it is--

AABRIA: I said that!

BRENNAN: Nydas' story--

AABRIA: What?!

BRENNAN: -- all of the three of you in your present time--

AABRIA: Wild.

BRENNAN: -- are so well- matched with each other. But there's a fucking difference because you're both elves and you're from the sky, and this dude, I feel like there was just something in Nydas of, "Yes, I'm supporting it. The Leywright, the Ether. Let's do shady deals. Let's do stuff," and then there's a sudden moment where you hear this prophecy, and a kid who had to fight on blood-soaked docks.

TRAVIS: Yes, sir.

BRENNAN: Goes, "Wait, guys, it can actually get bad."

TRAVIS: Yeah, yeah.

AABRIA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: The real world is coming through.

BRENNAN: The real world is coming. I'm telling you things can get bad. It felt so-- It was just such a cool transformation.

MARISHA: Yeah, we're coming from privilege. We're like "Bad?"

AABRIA: Yeah, 100%.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

AABRIA: What is bad?

MARISHA: Bad is when the water heater broke.

AABRIA: We'll talk about this when I'm done with this tree real quick.

TRAVIS: That Blight casting, I felt like I was four seconds behind everything everybody was doing in terms of all of that stuff. When you said, "Blight," I was like, "Wait, no, that'll-- I'm not here." (laughter)

MARISHA: Oh my god! You were gone for all of that!

TRAVIS: Well, I was out. I was out.

AABRIA: Having Blight was the luckiest guess. I was like, "I kind of like this spell. Maybe I'll get to use it." (gasps) Oh, a bad tree?

TRAVIS: Oh.

AABRIA: Cool. (laughter)

AABRIA: Christmas.

BRENNAN: I will say, in the pantheon of pulling the heart through and Blighting the tree, one of those very nice things that was very sweet about the show, puts Cerrit's decision to leave up there in that.

AABRIA: If you would've been there, it wouldn't have happened.

SAM: That would have been a totally different fight if you were there. You could've stopped a lot of shit from happening.

LOU: You leaving was-- I remember you leaving, and I was kind of like, "We'll get him later." (laughter) It was actually like, "It's fine."

LUIS: It was. It was bad.

LOU: "Hey, what's up? If something really bad's going to happen, he'll come back. All right, come on, guys."

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughs)

LOU: Then to have it be that we're fighting, it's like, "Oh shit, he should be here." Why am I the only person?

SAM: Travis, if you had walked in at that moment--

TRAVIS: Yeah.

SAM: With your pizza box and the fire going.

AABRIA: Full Donald Glover, yeah.

SAM: Well, knowing what you knew at the moment, and your suspicions of everyone, but especially missus over here.

MARISHA: (laughs)

SAM: Who would you have stopped? What side would you have taken? Who would've those hot hawks have gone straight into?

TRAVIS: I mean, it would've depended on what he walked into, but Patia and Laerryn were one and two, because I just assumed that Zerxus--

AABRIA: That's you, bae!

MARISHA: I'm number one!

AABRIA: Yay!

SAM: One and two meaning the people you love and trust the most?

TRAVIS: No, that I would try and take down the fastest.

SAM: Oh, okay.

AABRIA: Oh, amazing! (laughter)

TRAVIS: Yeah, and Zerxus would be three, but I would assume that he wasn't trying to fucking befriend a Betrayer God! But I also knew that Nydas, with all that bard shit that I haven't seen yet, because we hadn't really, we hadn't rolled, I didn't know what was capable of coming out. There was a chance that it was just going to go bad. What was so interesting was that I made the choice, just on an RP thing, to go after the kids, and stretch the story that way that as soon as I left, I was like, "Oh, I'm going to let them fuck each other up first--"

AABRIA and MARISHA: Yeah!

TRAVIS: "-- and come in when they're tired!"

AABRIA: That's very good, actually.

TRAVIS: That's way better!

LOU: Yep. (laughter)

LUIS: Oh my god.

SAM: We have a fan question, you guys.

MARISHA: Ooh!

SAM: Yes, yes.

MARISHA: We do!

SAM: Hot off the presses from Ándrea or Andrėa.

AABRIA: A fan.

SAM: It's to Aabria.

AABRIA: Oh, hey.

SAM: Or Áh-bria. (laughter)

AABRIA: Technically both correct.

SAM: "Was Laerryn's urgency to get the Astral Leywright done before the next a Apogee Solstice only so that she could fix or focus on her relationship with Loquatius before he was gone?" Question mark?

AABRIA: Buh?

SAM: "Or was there something she was hoping to do on other planes she was working towards that involved him," slash me, "as well?"

AABRIA: It's you, aw, babe.

SAM: So, what were you up to?

AABRIA: Sweet. I think the drive to get it done in this one was suddenly realizing, her introduction was, hey, this is not only going to be your best shot, but it's even better than you were hoping for to pull this off. So, everyone has over-indexed for how focused she was in that moment, but if you get the best news that you have your best chance of success at pulling off something that you've worked for more than a decade on, of course that's the thing you care about the most. She wanted it done and taken care of because, yeah, in that sort of type-A personality, on the flow chart, she was, get the Leywright done, fix your marriage, or at least repair that relationship so that it can be as good as it can be again, because she knew that she still had feelings for him.

SAM: But the Leywright came up.

AABRIA: But the Leywright came first because it needed to--

SAM: Came due.

AABRIA: It needed to get done. It was a time bounded thing.

SAM: Yeah.

AABRIA: I think everything past the planes-- There was no, "I want to send him home to the Feywild." That was just the little dream in the back of her mind was once this is done, we can go visit your home plane together.

SAM: Yeah, yeah.

AABRIA: Won't it be a lovely--

SAM: There was a lot of that with a lot of our characters. Once we get this, we can focus on the real stuff.

LUIS: We can begin.

MARISHA: Yeah.

AABRIA: Exactly.

TRAVIS: Just the one last thing.

AABRIA: This one last thing. Yeah.

SAM and AABRIA: Yeah.

MARISHA: I can rest after this.

SAM: Then went, "Huh?"

AABRIA: There's nothing more fun--

SAM: That's how it is in real life, too.

MARISHA: Uh-huh.

AABRIA: Knowing you're playing a game that's going to stop at the Calamity, there's nothing more tragic than telegraphing future plans of all the things you'll get to.

SAM: Speaking of plans, another question was, "How much of the Laerryn-Loquatius relationship was planned before the game?"

AABRIA: Ooh, okay.

MARISHA: Yeah, let's talk about this--

AABRIA: Yeah, okay.

MARISHA: -- because holy shit.

SAM: I got our text thread.

AABRIA: Oh god, it's--

LUIS: You do?

AABRIA: -- shorter than it should be.

SAM: I got the text thread up where Aabria says--

TRAVIS: There's some scrolling.

AABRIA: There's some scrolling.

SAM: It's a long thread.

AABRIA: Okay.

SAM: It says, "Lorwyn is her first name."

AABRIA: Oh, I changed it. That's right.

SAM: "Haven't decided on a surname. Thoughts on yours?"

AABRIA: (laughs) Are you just going to read it?

SAM: Uh-huh, uh-huh. (laughter)

AABRIA: This is bad.

BRENNAN: "Thoughts on yours," has a funny double meaning there. I haven't thought of a surname, could I have yours? (laughter)

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughter)

SAM: "I said, my current name is Loquatius Hambrick-Zucker." (laughter)

MARISHA: Hambrick-Zucker.

TRAVIS: Hambrick-Zucker?

BRENNAN: You robbed us! You absolutely robbed us. We could've had Loquatius Hambrick-Zucker.

SAM: Hambrick-Zucker.

LOU: Like a ham brick?

BRENNAN: And now we'll never have it. (laughter)

AABRIA: Yeah.

LOU: Wow, that's a different character.

TRAVIS: What? (laughter)

LOU: Hambrick-Zucker?

TRAVIS: What?

MARISHA: Yeah. I hate him.

AABRIA: Yeah!

MARISHA: Whoever he is.

AABRIA: I was like, I don't want to be married to that, thank you. Thank you.

MARISHA: Yes!

SAM: We made some better choices.

AABRIA: That's a no out the gate from your girl, Laerryn, who was Lorwyn.

BRENNAN: That's just two words, ham, brick.

LOU: Just Hambrick-Zucker is a name with a charisma of six, and a constitution of 22.

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughter)

MARISHA: Hambrick-Zucker is definitely--

AABRIA: He's taken a lot of of hits in his youth.

MARISHA: -- creating his own cryptocurrency.

BRENNAN: Think of a brick shaped into a ham, and how durable that would be.

SAM: My very next text on the thread is, "Maybe I should simplify my stupid-ass last name to something much more fey, since that's where I'm from. How about Loquatius Seelie, implying that I'm from the Seelie Court, like Elmenore? Wasn't that something you did with Fearne on ExU?"

AABRIA: That's very kind. I was like, "Oh, he watched!"

TRAVIS: Hey!

AABRIA: Okay, okay! (laughter)

SAM: But to answer the original question is, how much of the relationship was planned? We figured out a timeline.

AABRIA: Yeah.

SAM: How many years we were married, how many years we were not married. We figured out loosely why we had split.

AABRIA: Yes.

SAM: This one here was like, "Hey, is it okay if I was the reason?"

AABRIA: Yeah. Look, we had already met in our little nasty gal meeting, and I was like, "I want to be the bad one."

TRAVIS: Yeah.

SAM: Yeah.

AABRIA: Yeah, I'll do it. I did it. What'd I do? (laughter)

SAM: I was like, "Well, no. Can't we both be at fault?"

AABRIA: Yeah.

SAM: Yeah, so we were.

LOU: Aw.

MARISHA: That's good.

AABRIA: Look, I'm just mad because I came away from our text conversation going, "What a fun bit this will be." Then you proceeded to fucking knock me out with an emotion every 20 minutes. Whenever I covered my full face with my hands, it was because I was fully actually crying. "What is he doing? These are feelings."

SAM: That was a discovery.

AABRIA: Ugh!

SAM: Honestly, It was planned as a bit. We were just going to be sniping at each other. I think we talked, I talked to Brennan at least about how, hey, it would be really great if over the course of these four episodes, he could discover things about himself that are... He could be more honest with himself about what he's become, and maybe he doesn't like what he's become. Maybe that would affect us in some way, and maybe by the end of it, we could reconcile or something. But that's not up to you to decide, obviously.

BRENNAN: No, and that was honestly, the parts of the story that I probably had my hands off the most for were your guys' scenes. There was a whole scene in, I think, at the beginning of episode three or something like that, where it's just you guys in the Meridian Labyrinth while the fight is raging, and it's just you guys having a heart to heart. The scene in episode one, when we're doing all the intro vignettes where you guys and you alone had a vignette where you met. But I remembered, because we had talked about it, and you had said this vision of Loquatius that his life changed in a bad way with the Elena Tuvaris, with the covering up of that secret. Because before then, you had actually been an honest reporter.

SAM: Mm-hmm.

BRENNAN: That was the beginning of you being, "Okay, I'm going to acquiesce, and the Herald's Tome is going to become propaganda, and it is gong to be power pushing." But it was also clearly bad for Loquatius.

SAM: Yeah.

BRENNAN: Right? In that first scene where you were talking to Laerryn, where you go, you have the fun sniping, it's super fun, the jokes are flying. Then you're like, "Let's try to not hate each other for a month." It was so real, and I was like, "They're locked in." I was like, "I don't know where we end up by the end of episode four." The fucking speech. The speech in episode four.

MARISHA: The speech!

AABRIA: Can we talk about that ding dang speech.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Bro.

BRENNAN: First of all, I don't know if I even want to know, but whether that quaver in your voice when you say, "And to Laerryn, the Architect Arcane, the most beautiful woman in the world," it makes me almost cry every time I've watched it, of the hundred times I've watched it. It makes me almost want to cry. It's so profoundly beautiful. Whether that was honest emotion or performance, it's equally magical either way.

SAM: It was definitely honest.

AABRIA: (gasps) Stop.

SAM: I am not a very good actor, as opposed to what I said earlier.

AABRIA: I love you.

SAM: But yeah, I fell in love with her during the game, it was amazing.

AABRIA: Same.

BRENNAN: That's beautiful.

MARISHA: Okay, let me brag on Sam for a minute, because we had a conversation a really long time ago. I don't know, five to six years, and we were still in Campaign 1.

SAM: Oh.

MARISHA: We were talking about how we role play. I was kind of-- I don't even remember how it came about in conversation, but was asking how are you access your things, and you call back to things, and where you were influenced from your character's decisions. You said, "I just always try to remember what came before, everything in these formative rungs of a ladder. So I just always try to think about what has already happened, and that's what--" Which sounds really basic when you say it out there, but I think it is something that people-- It's easy to forget, especially when you're in the moment. That's always stuck with me, and I think that speech that you wrote was like a master class--

LUIS: Yeah.

MARISHA: -- in just being 100% informed from everything that had already happened.

AABRIA: Yeah.

MARISHA: Because it's easy to make shit up, and you could've made something up about Avalir, or where it's going, and whatever. But everything was referenced from something that had previously happened. It was just incredible.

TRAVIS: Chicken scratch--

AABRIA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: -- on a legal pad.

LOU: Yeah.

TRAVIS: That only you really could read.

SAM: I have shit handwriting.

TRAVIS: Done in the shadows in a matter of minutes while you were standing next to all of us being dumbasses on a break.

MARISHA: Yeah, yeah.

TRAVIS: And you came back with that.

BRENNAN: Yeah, I don't say this lightly. From that beautiful moment of Laerryn where you're like, "Oh my god, this is someone who's literally grappling in the moment with the fact that moments ago he made the decision to die. Made the decision to go down with the ship."

MARISHA: Yes.

BRENNAN: And is speaking about the reason that he chose to do that. Then the moment after that, "And remember the Market of Wonders." (laughter)

AABRIA: Yes!

BRENNAN: I just need to say, that is-- I've been lucky enough to see a couple of them in my life, that is a perfect joke.

AABRIA: Yes. (laughter)

BRENNAN: It is a perfect joke, because to do something that funny, that comes at a moment-- Do you know what I'm saying? This is a Campbell quote, but he literally says something about comedy. Campbell says something about comedy, where he says: Comedy completes the realization that drama begins.

ALL: Mm.

BRENNAN: Right? Where there's something where it's like, oh, I have not contradicted the depth of my sorrow, I have not contradicted the meaningfulness of my sadness, but I have introduced something profoundly absurd, and wonderfully silly, and I am not uncommitted in the moment of doing it. In the moment of doing it, this is exactly what I would do, and it's hysterical, and it also makes it even more sad! It makes the sad even worse. You're just like, "And remember the Market of Wonders." (laughter)

LUIS: So amazing.

BRENNAN: It's so fucking good! Oh, fuck.

AABRIA: I want to say one bragging thing. As I was talking to a bunch of friends, and we were, they're also RPG people, and they were like, "What's your favorite decision you ever made in a game?" My answer, and it remains to this day, was when we were in our character gen, and you came in, you're like, "I kind of want to be divorced, who wants to do it?" Best decision I ever made was being like, "Me, me, me, pick me!"

SAM and LUIS: Yeah.

AABRIA: Because this was the most fun.

SAM: It was fast and loud.

AABRIA: Yeah, I had--

SAM: You were like, "Me!"

AABRIA: -- no chill about that. I was like, "I will lunge for Laura. Don't. Stop, let me have this."

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughs)

AABRIA: I don't want to fight you, but I will.

SAM: It was great--

AABRIA: Thank you for--

SAM: -- great pair up, a great combo.

MARISHA: Well, it really was so incredible to watch, because I think you guys really hit on what any type of a couple goes through, where, and especially when you're a third party watching a couple bicker, where you're like, "Mm."

SAM: Mm.

MARISHA: "Mm, they're both right, and they're both wrong." (laughter)

MARISHA: Uh-oh, and this is where.

TRAVIS: But that was-- He got her back.

MARISHA: Yeah, yeah, and then you're just like, wow, you can see just these sediment layers of damage, and trauma--

SAM: Yeah.

MARISHA: -- enacted on both sides. That was incredible to watch.

LOU: Hey Marisha, I've always had a question for you.

AABRIA: Ooh. That was great!

LOU: How does Patia feel about the deal her grandfather struck with the Gau Drashari?

MARISHA: I can tell you've been sitting on that one for a long time.

LOU: Yeah, you know what's funny?

MARISHA: Yeah.

LOU: Me and the boys, we've been talking, and we've been wondering.

SAM: Me and the boys.

LOU: What are Patia's opinions about her grandfather and her family name? (laughter)

MARISHA: Wow, yeah, you know, excellent question, Lou.

LOU: Thank you.

AABRIA: (laughs)

MARISHA: Man, I don't even know where to begin with this. Ultimately, super high level, when I started thinking about Patia, and I went to Brennan, and I was like, "I think I want to make her like a Kennedy." I want her to be--

TRAVIS: Oh.

SAM: That's a great pull.

MARISHA: Yeah. Just someone who is so deeply entrenched in the history of Avalir, and the political structure of Avalir. I've talked a little bit about this as well that Laura was originally supposed to play. So, she built the very bare structure of what this character was going to be, and she was like, "Politics!" And I was like, "Fuck!" (laughter)

MARISHA: Oh man, fucking, I got to do politics? Okay. Especially because a lot of times in D&D, or role playing, like what you were talking about, like the orphan trope. It's easy to go for the scrappy, work your way up from nothing, especially when you're going from low level to high level. But since we were starting at such a high level, and entrenched in everything to do with Avalir, it was just this perfect opportunity to build someone from the start who was super high society, incredible lineage in the city. We talked so much. It was why it was so wild when you were like, "What about her parents?" in the game. And I was like.

BRENNAN: It was one of those things--

MARISHA: I don't know.

BRENNAN: Because you're never quite done world building, right?

MARISHA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: There's lots of family relationships that we didn't explore. I don't necessarily know who Laerryn's parents are, right?

AABRIA: Yeah. In the city, they died. (laughter)

SAM: Flow charted!

AABRIA: Flow charted! (laughter)

BRENNAN: Yeah, flow charted. Incredible. But with Patia, it was just this thing where in the middle of that episode, you so beautifully book ended it with "Happy Replenishment, Grandfather." It was so beautiful. Really, there was something so heartbreaking about Patia.

LUIS: Yes.

BRENNAN: Oh, I got hit with emotion just saying it.

AABRIA: Ooh, a feeling!

BRENNAN: I got hit a little bit. You are all so fucking good at this, and it's not an accident that in the middle of the fight, Patia looks at Laerryn and says, "You're my best friend."

AABRIA: Ah.

BRENNAN: Because Patia's alone, and it's really fucking sad.

MARISHA: Yeah, yeah.

BRENNAN: It just became clear in how you were playing Patia, that we got to the middle of episode four, and I was like, "This person was not treated well by this." Yes, incredible wealth, all of this power, but looking at who Imyr was. By the way, everything I said in the beginning, Imyr was an asshole from the jump. From the first scene, what does he say to do? Avalir goes from here to here, it's going to be beneath my eyes, right? I want the city to be underneath me. I am looking down so that the people down there can see my face, right? Immediately, I was like, this is not a good guy, right?

MARISHA: Yeah, yeah.

BRENNAN: When we got to that point in that final episode, I just realized how alone Patia was, how much of herself she had given up to the service of this vision. Now that it was also being away from her. And especially as everyone was-- Zerxus had gone to Cathmoíra, Cerrit had gone to get his kids out. Loquatius and Laerryn were finding each other. Even Nydas fucking had Alessander.

LUIS: Yeah.

BRENNAN: There was this thing with Patia where it was just, who does she have?

LUIS: The statue.

TRAVIS: Standing in front of the fucking statue.

MARISHA: That's it, yeah.

TRAVIS: Alone.

BRENNAN: I just looked at it, and I was like, the fact that we've never talked about your character's parents' contribution, it sort of just came to me in the moment, and we had to communicate it while the cameras were rolling.

MARISHA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: But I was like, your parents are gone.

MARISHA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: And gone from your memory, because the most horrifying thing of someone-- It's the hammer and nail, right? If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The idea of you're memory erasing everybody, you've done it to yourself, or it's happened to you.

MARISHA: It's happened.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

MARISHA: What's the likelihood? Pretty fucking high.

BRENNAN: So that moment of just your parents failed and in so failing, in some way or another, your grandfather was like, "You're going to succeed where they failed."

MARISHA: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

TRAVIS: So I have a question. So your grandfather was up to some shit.

AABRIA: But very hot.

TRAVIS: Brennan, the Gau Drashari.

BRENNAN: Yes.

AABRIA and MARISHA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: What was it like (laughs) unraveling that for the first time to all of us and the audience and everything else?

SAM: Did you consult with Matt?

TRAVIS: Yeah.

BRENNAN: Nah, I fucking winged it, dude. I said, "This is where the Ashari come from." Of course I consulted with Matt!

LOU: This is where they come.

BRENNAN: Honestly, Matt can attest to it. I was blowing up his phone nonstop. I was like, "Could this be true about some Druids?" Just truly trying to check in as much as possible and obviously the guy's doing the entirety of planning for C3. So I was trying to make it as short and concise as possible. But essentially, I was like: Okay, for this-- I think it started with the Primordials. I was like the Primordials are sealed because I was trying to be like I want there to be apocalyptic stakes here, but we know our Betrayer Gods are focused on Vasselheim. So they're not rocking up to Avalir. Avalir's not their priority. So how do we make there be some stakes here in this moment? I was like: Oh, there's some Primordials sealed under the mountain and there's another prophecy about da, da, da, da, da, and so there was just a sesh where I was talking to Matt and I was like something with these old Druids that used to be there in the mountain and Matt was like, and I think Matt fully pitched all of the stuff surrounding-- First of all, the name Gau Drashari is a Matt Mercer original.

MARISHA: Ooh, cool.

TRAVIS: When you said it, I was like, Gau Drashari? Like Ashari?

BRENNAN: He pulled it off the dome so fast. It was fucked up. I was like, "What about the Druids?" He was like, "The Gau Drashari." I went, "Fuck, that was just right there." (laughter)

BRENNAN: We watched it happen.

TRAVIS: Matt Mercer.

BRENNAN: There it is.

TRAVIS and AABRIA: Matt Mercer.

BRENNAN: Matt Mercer, what the fuck? Then I had been talking about like-- it was a perfect marriage I feel like of-- because I was coming in with these story beat things, right? Because for me, especially doing short run seasons, it's like, "Okay, here's the beats we have to hit," and then going to the fucking creator of Exandria, this master world builder and being like, "It would be great if Vespin had released the Betrayer Gods from their prison, but there was some other stumbling block that we can focus on in this story. If there's something from these Druids that they put in the city that the wizards don't give a shit about anymore, right?" So you can even hear it in how I'm saying it of like, "Here's a fucking fuzzy little thing I need for a story thing to happen," and Matt goes like, "Okay," and just immediately on the call spins this whole thing about the Gau Drashari and the fact that the Primordials, there's an analogy to the Elemental Gates of the Ashari and the Elemental Rifts. The idea of there's always been this connection to elementalism through the Primordials and other stuff like that and then the Tree of Names being this thing that was itself crafting a druidic protection over the world was also a Matt Mercer original.

SAM: I mean, you guys.

MARISHA: So sick.

SAM: Obviously, we know that both of you are super talented, but the way that you guys did this together is just, it's astounding.

MARISHA: I know.

SAM: It's astounding.

BRENNAN: I'm doing this to camera, but also Matt's literally right there.

MARISHA: Hi, babe.

LUIS: Hi, Matt.

BRENNAN: Hi, Matt.

SAM: No, it was so cool. It was also so cool for me as a player because I've only ever really played in one-shots or three-year-long epic campaigns.

MARISHA: Yeah.

SAM: So it was cool to come into a shortish, I guess short-medium story and just to see how you approached it and how you approached gently pushing and prodding us into character creation that would serve a shorter form of story and keeping us always on task with: Okay, you don't have a short term and medium term and a long term goal. You really just have this one. This is the one that we get. We got to keep you focused on it and it was just so cool to watch you balance the needs of this short form story with the demands of Matt's gigantically huge world and that in and of itself is a feat and you should be congratulated for it.

BRENNAN: Thanks, man.

TRAVIS: You suck, Brennan. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Oh, I should've brought--

AABRIA: I can't tell if it helps if it's to clap.

LOU: Well done, Brennan.

BRENNAN: Oh shit!

AABRIA: You did a good job!

BRENNAN: Shit. What an incredible joy and I feel like so much of the fun of stepping in here for the story was that thing of almost like an operator of a switchboard, right? Is you have all this beautiful material, and you're like, "Okay, Vespin Chloras--" All of it, I was going back over it like-- It's like why was Asmodeus the Betrayer God? You're like in the lore of Exandria pre-established by Matt, the rumor is that Vespin Chloras is at the right hand of Asmodeus. And you read that and you go, "Well, if this motherfucker released every Betrayer God, why is he at the right hand of just this one guy?"

MARISHA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: All of a sudden, just the ideas start coming and it's very like, "Okay," and you plug that in there and you go, "Okay, so Vespin does that, but the Age of Arcanum also was just shitty wizards everywhere." So I don't want it to be like, "These guys were fucking just like, 'We never did anything wrong and just 'Vespin Chloras ruined fucking everything for all of us!'" It's like, "No, you're all fucking culpable, baby." Vespin is symptomatic of the larger age, right? You all share some blame in this, right? Then establishing, but why does Vespin Chloras have the unique station that he does in the consciousness of Exandria? Well, number one, Avalir was so destroyed that what fucking stories came out of it, right? As opposed to Vasselheim, which we know does get successfully defended by the Prime Deities and Vespin Chloras' crimes were known in the city. So his story has a way better chance of surviving, historically. In addition to the deal he made with the fucking Lord of the Hells to never be forgotten.

TRAVIS: Can we also just like-- I'm going to barf compliments on Luis for a second.

AABRIA: Yeah!

TRAVIS: Because--

SAM: Wow.

TRAVIS: -- my first time playing with you. It's at our table. Surely Brennan will pick on someone else to start the story.

LUIS: That's what I thought.

TRAVIS: He threw you into the labyrinthian trench. It was churning waters and madness and I was like, "Well, that's one way to have someone never come back and play with us again." (laughter)

SAM: 100%.

TRAVIS: You just smashed it.

AABRIA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: How did it feel to start with the Lord of the Hells kicking off the whole thing?

LUIS: Oh my god.

AABRIA: What was that like?

TRAVIS: How'd that go?

LUIS: I don't even know how--

SAM: You could have fucked up so bad.

MARISHA: Yeah! (laughter)

SAM: It was such high stakes.

TRAVIS: For sure.

SAM: It was the beginning of a four-part thing.

AABRIA: That's insane.

SAM: You could have fucked up the whole thing.

LUIS: I could have?

AABRIA: Like this.

LUIS: I didn't?

TRAVIS: Yeah, that's like the old movie line where you're like, "Well, that's one way to go." (laughter)

SAM: But you didn't, you rose to the challenge immensely. It was amazing.

TRAVIS: I didn't want to be in his position.

AABRIA: That's crazy.

TRAVIS: Crazy.

LUIS: Before we started, I think I just went to Lou and I was like, "So we're about to start, right?" Then you had said, "Oh, Brennan usually starts off with vignettes, a spotlight on each character" and I was like, "Ah, okay. Well, he's not going to start with me." (laughter)

LUIS: I had no idea until partway through and I think you see my face go (surprised noise), do something, and I was like, "Oh okay, we're here." But I think I had said this in the Twitter thing, too, that one of the things that I had asked Brennan for was I wanted to have an encounter with a Betrayer God. Because I didn't know where in the Calamity this was going to take place.

SAM: What a weird request.

LUIS: I know. But I wanted to see what would happen.

BRENNAN: Wish granted, baby.

LUIS: Redemption paladin to the extreme with confronting a Betrayer God, but I thought it was going to happen-- I didn't know it was going to happen like this at all, in a more intimate way. I just thought I would see a Betrayer God in the distance eventually approaching and I would have to go and confront them and then that would be how my character probably dies and then it was here's this dream, and this really intimate-- I didn't know I was going to care for them. I didn't know what Betrayer God we were going to meet, and I didn't know I was going to care for them the way that that unfolded and one of the things, to talk a little bit more about Zerxus for a moment. There's one hidden thing that I had incorporated into the way he sees the world in that he establishes attachments fast, which I was surprised that it wasn't a red flag to people because he falls in love with Evandrin immediately and then he meets this kid and he's like, "You're my son," immediately. So he creates intense attachments fast and then here we are having a meeting with the Betrayer God in this really intimate way and I was like, "Okay, attachment created."

AABRIA: That's really good.

TRAVIS: But also we couldn't see him. We didn't see any of that happening. We were at the table watching it when you were like, "I'm going to redeem him." We were like that's definitely not what I thought we would do.

LUIS: Why would you do that?

TRAVIS: But I'm so glad you're doing it.

AABRIA: Shout out to the reaction corner just being like "What?!"

TRAVIS: We were losing our shit.

LOU: When you came out of the thing and we were leaving and it was just huh, I guess we got to all meet up to go fight Lacrytia. (laughter)

LOU: That was that like PC versus--

AABRIA: That's right, you said it.

LOU: -- actual meme moment of being like, "Hey dog, are you going to tell me that crazy thing that just happened in there?" Then time just kept going on and it was like, "I guess he's not." He's not going to tell me that he was cuddling a Betrayer God. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Cuddling!

LOU: While I was just standing outside the door being like "Shit, man, we got to go." (laughter)

LUIS: I would still say the instinct behind it predominantly was paternal. But I can see how it can become all kinds. I mean Elias and Evandrin-- Elias grown up looks like Evandrin and so it was super fucking confusing to be like you're so tender and caring and also receptive of any intimacy that comes from me.

MARISHA: Oh, dude.

LUIS: Whether it's paternal or somewhat confused romantic.

SAM: It was so cool.

MARISHA: It was wild.

SAM: It was wild to watch because those choices are unexpected, unusual. At one point, I feel like in the first game, at one point I was like, "Wait, maybe Luis didn't hear him. Maybe he didn't hear Brennan that this is--"

MARISHA: That this is the Lord of Hells.

SAM: Yeah, it's a red guy with big horns.

TRAVIS: Big horns. Big horns!

SAM: I don't know, maybe he's hard of hearing or something, maybe he missed it.

BRENNAN: Hey, listen. I just need to say, for real, in terms of everyone, everyone's character was so truthful to the thing they had said at the outset. In terms of plot, Blighting that fucking tree and pulling that devil through the fucking portal.

TRAVIS: Oh my god.

BRENNAN: As all the bad guys, thank you because, truly, from a storytelling perspective, I needed it.

TRAVIS: Yeah, you almost licked your lips when he did it. He was like, "I'm going to pull him through," and I saw you go--

LUIS: Yeah. (laughter)

TRAVIS: "That's all I needed."

LOU: I had trouble with that as a person of being like, "Luis, what the fuck are you doing?"

BRENNAN: Y'all are dead.

LOU: Do whatever fucking mental loopholes you need to jump through to get on fucking Team Save the World. Like, what is this shit?

AABRIA: I would say my favorite part was watching, because that second the portal, when you were being an oracle meeting with the Lord of Hells, watching Brennan start that super neutrally and the moment you fed him compassion, there's nothing more fun than watching a DM dial in, like, "Got it." Then you watch the entire encounter change to feed you the thing that Zerxus was already-- There's something so beautiful about the way you stated everything, which was never asking anything of him or insighting or doubting it. You were feeding him what he wanted him to tell you.

LUIS: Yeah.

AABRIA: All he had to do was bounce it back at you, and it was just the most heart-breaking thing I've ever seen because I was like, "Oh, I understand exactly why a person like Zerxus, in this moment, would do that and get that back," and it's just this horrifying feedback loop.

MARISHA: 100%.

LUIS: Why it would never occur to him to try to challenge that by doing, mechanically, an insight check or didn't do a Zone of Truth there. Not that it would've worked on the Lord of Hells.

AABRIA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LUIS: But he tried to do a bunch of things, Remove Curse, a bunch of stuff that I knew would fail, but he was going to try to do.

AABRIA: Yeah.

SAM: I love that commitment.

BRENNAN: But I think it's also-- I mean, the Lord of the Hells, (shudders) it's like the most evil, the evilest, right? And what is more evil? In terms of being a liar, the God of Lies, trickery is one of his domains is like: No, I don't flimflam a person with a steel resolve. I do what real evil is, which is I find somebody who already wants to believe.

LUIS: There it is.

BRENNAN: You find somebody who already wants it.

LUIS: Yep.

BRENNAN: You go, "Is there something that you'd really like to be true?" How much does the devil even lie in those couple scenes? Mostly you say stuff, you're like, "The Prime Deities, they did this to you." And homeboy's like, "Yeah, sure, man."

LUIS: Yep.

BRENNAN: You know? "Yeah, that works for me."

TRAVIS: It was so--

AABRIA: So good.

BRENNAN: It's so much him just letting you walk to where he wants you to walk.

TRAVIS: It was such a chilling take to hear you do the devil, going like, "I never know what I'm going to look like to people." Just nonchalant, chills up my back.

SAM: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Doesn't want to do this, doesn't want to be here. Is over it.

SAM: I'm sorry.

TRAVIS: Not conniving, not arch.

AABRIA: Yeah.

SAM: Sorry about my bad breath, guys.

TRAVIS: Oh god.

MARISHA: You did a lot of terrifying things this entire campaign, but that was the most terrifying, and I'd be lying if I didn't say there was a part of me that was like: I just saw something that Brennan is capable of.

AABRIA: Yeah!

TRAVIS: Yes.

AABRIA: That's a red flag, baby!

LUIS: About the person?

TRAVIS: Respect earned.

MARISHA: I'm glad that Brennan is--

TRAVIS: Threat level: Elevated.

MARISHA: -- an incredibly good and moral person to his core.

AABRIA: Yes.

MARISHA: Because you're very intelligent and I'm like: Oh, he can tap into this weird manipulation aspect that is horrifying.

AABRIA: Horrifying!

BRENNAN: Of course.

LUIS: It's the Lord of lies.

BRENNAN: That's the thing is that that type of-- What's so scary about manipulators is that they actually have-- there's a whole article that talked about the neurology of it. But they literally said for that manipulative behavior, it's like high cognitive empathy, low emotion-- emotion's not the right word, but in other words, you don't feel it when you hurt people, but you know what will hurt people.

TRAVIS: Right.

MARISHA: Yes.

BRENNAN: Those type of people have profound understanding, The idea of, "No, no, I really get you and I know what I need to say to." There was so much stuff we didn't have time to get to, even in all the hours of that long finale. But I spent a lot of time thinking about the Lord of the Hells and what he thought about stuff.

SAM: Oh yeah.

BRENNAN: There was a thing of if it ever had been a longer conversation after his turning on you of you being like, "What was a lie and what was the truth?" Very little that he said was a lie. There were some lies in there, but when he showed up to you wounded, that's the manipulation, of him showing up injured because-- and I remember the line I had for him was going to be, "Yeah, I've appeared to you injured because you guys love it when people are hurting."

LUIS: Well, a savior needs somebody to save.

BRENNAN: You know, "You love it when people hurt, and if I had shown up to you in my full power, you would've hated me because you hate when things stand tall."

SAM and AABRIA: Ooh!

BRENNAN: And just really having that thing of him being like, "No, you guys are the ones who are fucked up." He's wrong and evil, but it was like finding what he hates about mortals was very fun, and if I scared anyone--

LUIS and BRENNAN: Good.

AABRIA: Dude, the fact that you did that with like-- you dropped affectation. Your voices and mannerisms are great for NPCs. The fact that you played the Lord of the Hells and dropped all of that, I was like, "That's just Brennan talking."

MARISHA: Brennan, I know, it fucks with your head.

AABRIA: Yeah.

LUIS: I love it, I loved it. It was so fun.

MARISHA: We've been talking for a little bit and as everyone can see, our mic packs are starting to all, the batteries are starting to eat it.

LUIS: Did mine die?

MARISHA: A few more questions before we wrap it up. But I do desperately want to know. Brennan, did you have any contingency plans, should the end of the world not come about as expected.

BRENNAN: I had so many contingency plans! There was a whole plot about the Septarion coming after you guys. (surprised noises)

TRAVIS: The wizards--

AABRIA: You could've had so many guys to kill!

BRENNAN: We only had four episodes so there was a ton of planning. I had all-- People talk about, in terms of rails, there were a bunch of railroads you guys could've gone on. Those rails just we won't ever get to. But in a world where you guys see shit starting to go wrong, and not even all of you, but just one of you, goes to the Septarion or someone goes and says, "Hey, we should alert da, da, da, da, other thing." Or especially in a case where you all go to the Septarion and say something wrong is happening here, and try to get the city on your side. They were going to declare you guys fugitives. There was going to be a whole thing of them coming after you.

TRAVIS: I thought about it for a second because there was someone that the Senior Sightwarden reports to, and I was like, "Nah, if I don't trust these people, I certainly don't trust that list of people."

AABRIA: You didn't trust us?

TRAVIS: Somebody the Wise, Somebody the Beard, somebody the--

AABRIA: "Somebody the Beard."

BRENNAN: In terms of the various contingencies, yeah, there were a ton. In terms of you guys averting the Calamity, those contingencies are the most boring ones. In the ones where you don't blight the tree, or you don't pull the Lord of the Hells in. Then it's like-- Yeah, Vespin rolls up and the Taxmen go evil, and then it's a fight at the tree. Or if you don't pull the Lord of the Hells through, then only Vespin can come through, but he pulls in some devils and they kill Zerxus. Most of the contingencies for "You guys are less responsible for the Calamity," is brute force, something comes in, they use the artifacts from Orwyn's office. They use the blood they got from you, da, da, da. Some other thing happens. You guys manage to somehow jury-rig the Helm and stop the city, but then the sun rises and you turn. So there's all this stuff, right. Weirdly, the contingencies for that were some of the most simple ones. Other contingencies-- So there were a bunch of contingencies also for that final combat, right, that was very interesting. For example, there were a bunch of-- You guys holding the Taxmen in that first round at the door changed a lot, that was huge. That last battle, everyone was so fucking good. The inspiration going to Cerrit. We got to talk about that. Wait a minute, yeah, the last thing I'll say is. Actually, the contingency I had for Laerryn. There was that moment at the end with Vespin and the insane Nat 20 that got him down. I actually had contingencies for what happened if Laerryn died.

ALL: Ooh!

BRENNAN: Yeah, I was totally prepared for Laerryn to go down in that last final flight. Which was essentially that someone was going to have to make a unreal, impossible DC arcana check with disadvantage.

SAM: To figure out her work.

BRENNAN: To try to complete the last couple. That probably would've been Loquatius, which would've been very cinematic.

AABRIA: Oh, that would've been so good! I should've died, I'm sorry.

SAM: You should have died.

AABRIA: My bad. (laughter)

SAM: Give me my moment.

BRENNAN: Yeah, 100%.

TRAVIS: (rewinding noises)

AABRIA: Yeah, take it back!

BRENNAN: Wait, that final was-- wait, hold on. That final roll, that final roll.

TRAVIS: The 31.

BRENNAN: The 31.

TRAVIS: They wouldn't have been done without the inspiration, without the buff. I mean.

MARISHA: That's right. We were all just throwing everything we had to just get Cerrit it out.

AABRIA: Oh my goodness.

TRAVIS: I mean, it was just so good. At least just from my chair, because he had done all the things he needed to do for his kids. He had atoned in that way, let all that stuff go, focused on the thing, killed the thing, but it wasn't done. Like, could he get out and leave? It only would've happened. It only could've happened because of the Ring of Brass. He couldn't do it by himself. So that was just so fucking perfect.

SAM: Yeah, one little spark of hope.

TRAVIS: One of those things where it takes the whole table.

AABRIA: It mattered that we were friends.

LUIS: That's that wasn't in the--

BRENNAN: Without that eight?

TRAVIS: Yep.

SAM: For sure.

BRENNAN: Yeah, without that eight, there's no world where that.

TRAVIS: Nope.

SAM: Impossible.

TRAVIS: He goes down with everybody else.

MARISHA: I mean, realistically, too, we still don't really have any idea. Like, did Cerrit make it back to his kids? Where are kids?

BRENNAN: Gwessar. That's all he knows.

MARISHA: Gwessar, yeah.

BRENNAN: I mean, he is the world's greatest detective. But--

MARISHA: Sure.

TRAVIS: You sent the library to his daughter who's at the university of arcade wizard-- Like, you know--

MARISHA: Travis, when you texted me, you texted me and you were like, "What did you just do to my daughter?"

TRAVIS: Just for a moment there, you were like, "And I send it to--" because I hadn't picked up on what you had done. I didn't know that the little miniature was the culmination of knowledge of Avalir that you sent it to her. I was like, "This is bitch is fucking with my daughter! There's no limit to her evil!" Wait, it's way, way better than that.

MARISHA: But I mean, to be fair, like, I don't know, because in part of my inspiration for Patia was like what if we hadn't lost the library of Alexandria? What if we had a record of all of that and all of this knowledge that hadn't been lost? I've asked Matt since then as well. I'm like, "Where's my orb? Is the orb still around, where is it?"

BRENNAN: There is something that me and Aabria are the only-- at the time of this moment, the only people in the world who have the experience of which is that camera stops rolling, and suddenly canon leaves you.

AABRIA: Yeah!

BRENNAN: I immediately wanted to run and find Matt and be like, "Is the orb okay?" (laughter)

BRENNAN: I am not-- I don't have any say anymore. It goes back to you now. Is it fine? The little library, where is it at?

AABRIA: You'll get the moment, Brennan, at some point, something will pop up in C3, and you'll just be there and be like, "(tearily) It happened and it mattered."

LUIS: It happened and it mattered!

AABRIA: (tearfully) Why do we tell stories?

MARISHA: I saw this fan theory, that is 100% just a fan theory, but I kind of like it. Did you see those one? That like-- Once again: all fan, not canon. But that the library going to the daughter of a master detective, and then getting all of this library information was the origin of the Cobalt Reserve. This was like--

TRAVIS: That harbors knowledge.

MARISHA: Yes, that harbors knowledge.

SAM: It's too perfect!

MARISHA: I know!

TRAVIS: Keeps an eye on other powerful content--

MARISHA: Structures and--

TRAVIS: Neutral, but--

SAM: If that ends up being true, we came up with that idea. (laughter)

SAM: Fans did not do it.

AABRIA: That was the plan. Always.

BRENNAN: No, I love that. If ever there was a world where I would jump-- There was someone else running something later in the Calamity, be coming back and playing either Kir or Maya as an adult, would be so fucking--

AABRIA: Someone write that down.

BRENNAN: Adult Kir, in my mind, is jacked. Just fucking huge, dude, fucking huge, man.

TRAVIS: Kir, is that you? (deeply) "Yeah, I found protein shakes." (laughter)

LOU: Talon 2, now I'm Talon fucking 6.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

SAM: A lot of acne.

AABRIA: Yeah, just like that.

BRENNAN: There was something we were talking about in terms of how everyone here bookended everything, everything got bookended so well. The 31 investigation for Vespin, the 31 investigation to get back to your family.

LUIS: That's crazy.

BRENNAN: So fucking good. Also, I wanted to talk about two things really quick that were just important to me to do as a DM, and also as a storyteller for the kinds of stories we tell. In a short story, it's always-- There are certain things that come through that feel like, "Because the story said this, the story is saying this is always true." Right? And the story is making a claim about how the world works. So it was something in the terms of the bookending of it all, it was really significant to me that Laerryn used her Leywright to save Exandria.

MARISHA: Yeah!

BRENNAN: And that Zerxus used his cleansing redemption power to get Vespin back for a moment. Because I didn't want the story to say, "Science is bad and innovation is bad."

MARISHA and BRENNAN: And compassion is bad.

BRENNAN: It was like, I wanted the story to be say something more nuanced of like, it was bad in, or "bad." It didn't work in this instance for these reasons. Rather than making this big thing. The fact that both of you guys after blighting the tree, after pulling the Lord of the Hells through, got to say, "Here is a chance to show what I mean by this," was very cool. Just like, ah, I loved it.

SAM: Yeah, that was great.

MARISHA: So much poetry.

SAM: Speaking of poetry, should we end on the burning question that was submitted by--

LOU: You know, why people have been watching?

SAM: Literally.

AABRIA: The entire time.

MARISHA: 100%.

TRAVIS: The thing we've texted about ourselves.

MARISHA: Yeah. Fan favorite, standout NPC, stole the show. Brennan, is Bolo okay? What happened to Bolo from Aeor?

AABRIA: I don't like her. I don't like her.

BRENNAN: You know, sometimes a PC will gift you with an NPC. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Sometimes a PC will gift another PC with an NPC. Sometimes Aabria will say, "Did you have a plus one?" And Sam will go, "That absolutely makes sense."

SAM: Sure.

BRENNAN: Then what happens is--

TRAVIS: I said that'd be no problem. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Then what happens is that PC will name that NPC. Sometimes, they'll just reach down into the top hat and see if a rabbit comes out, and a rabbit doesn't come out. What comes out is Bolo. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Named Bolo. Then what you get to do is conscript Matt Mercer into doing Slavic accents for any Aeorians.

AABRIA: Yes! (laughter)

SAM: From now on.

BRENNAN: I don't know why in that moment, but we were improvising it and there you go. And that's Bolo. Bolo's dead.

AABRIA: Yes! Yes, I love you, thank you!

TRAVIS: No!

ALL: No!

AABRIA: Yes! Cut the feed! Yes!

BRENNAN: Or! Or!

SAM: But not the way you think.

BRENNAN: Or not the way you think. She dies 12 hours later because she gets hit by a wagon.

LUIS: Wow.

AABRIA: Yeah!

BRENNAN: No, no, no, no, no.

TRAVIS: She literally made it out and then--

BRENNAN: She teleports--

LOU: Which one is it?

BRENNAN: Which one is it? No. Or Bolo is an incredibly dangerous Aeorian spy who goes into Avalir during the chaos and finds a necessary piece of arcanotech for Aeor's later work with all the shady things that we know that they were working on.

AABRIA: Absolutely, the threshold crests.

BRENNAN: Threshold crest, Godhammer. You know, anything, right? Or there's also a world where maybe Bolo was a polymorphed dragon and she just flew away. (laughter)

MARISHA: What!

TRAVIS: What?!

MARISHA: Who was this bitch?

BRENNAN: (as Bolo) She is Bolo and she want to be a reporter. Eventually.

AABRIA: "This your house?" Is the most important sentence.

BRENNAN: This your house?

AABRIA: Not a question, not a statement, just words.

LOU: She can't be a polymorphed dragon.

BRENNAN: Why not?

LOU: She couldn't be.

BRENNAN: Why not?

LOU: She doesn't know how to-- She doesn't know how to get a beer from a hodmedod.

BRENNAN: How many beers are dragons out here grabbing?!

LOU: I don't know. Hundreds?

BRENNAN: Dragons just roll up to the bar. "Excuse me, might I have a pint of ale?" No! Everything, if you actually think about it, the dragon theory makes a lot of sense. There's a part of it that makes a lot of sense, if you really start to think about it. You know what I'm saying? Because she doesn't know how to get drinks. She wants to be a reporter eventually. Those are all the things we know about Bolo.

SAM: That's pretty much it.

AABRIA: Cerritos Groupon!

SAM: She has an accent...

AABRIA: Was she a dragon?!

LOU: Yeah, didn't Cerritos Groupon make an insight check on Bolo? Didn't you follow her to the drinks?

TRAVIS: I think I was so stunned by Bolo's inherent beauty and strange personality that I didn't use my one feat that would've seen any illusions present. (laughter)

AABRIA: Was a dragon.

MARISHA: Sam, you were fucking a dragon. That's what this means.

AABRIA: I will happily allow that. You're fucking a dragon? We can put that on the wall.

BRENNAN: These draconic sorcerers have to come from somewhere, you know what I mean? At the end of the day.

SAM: That's how the dragonborn race was born.

BRENNAN: Yeah, there you go.

AABRIA: Oh god! Bleh!

BRENNAN: We remember back our progenitor, Bolo. (laughter)

LOU: Jesus.

AABRIA: Oh my god.

LUIS: Oh my god. (laughter)

MARISHA: Well-- (laughter)

BRENNAN: Dragon fucking! Thanks, folks.

MARISHA: Yeah, long live Bolo.

AABRIA: No.

MARISHA: Long may she reign. Thank you guys so much for doing this. This was truly the most special. I also want to give a quick shout out to our production crew: Producer Kyle, who spear-headed this one.

TRAVIS: Kyle Shire! (cheering)

MARISHA: There were so many amazing little points of genius that I hope people have pointed out on from everything from the graphics.

AABRIA: The overlay, oh my god.

MARISHA: The overlay. Yeah, I saw a few people notice it.

LOU: Wild detail.

MARISHA: Yeah, over time, the overlay was slowly degrading and cracking and little easter eggs, all the incredible art that we had done across the board, wanted to shout out from everyone from top to bottom, it really felt like everyone was on their A-game, you know? Not just the people who are sitting here in front of the camera, but all the people behind the camera as well. So it was absolutely incredible. Yeah, we could say this is the end, but is it?

AABRIA: Yeah, we died.

TRAVIS: It doesn't really feel--

BRENNAN: It's not--

TRAVIS: -- like we're done.

BRENNAN: It's not, I don't think it's the end because again, hope returns, right?

TRAVIS: Did Patia's parents know the Matron of Ravens? I have so many other questions.

BRENNAN: The Calamity is here.

TRAVIS: There's so much more to explore.

BRENNAN: The Calamity is not here forever.

MARISHA: No.

AABRIA: So we all live through it? We're fine?

LOU: Yeah, is that--

BRENNAN: Okay, so five of you are fucking dead. And that's what the dice said. (laughter)

LOU: Bolo is alive.

BRENNAN: Bolo is 100% alive, unless... She was dead the whole time. She's undead!

MARISHA: Fucking necromancers, always so dramatic.

AABRIA: So dramatic.

MARISHA: Thank you guys so much. Thank you to everyone watching at home. We love you, and is it Thursday yet? (cheering)