The Adventure Zone: Ethersea — Prologue II: The Cost of Opportunity

May 16, 2021 12:31 PM

Forgotten relics from the past are unearthed and put to use as the shoreside community continues plotting their undersea departure. Join us as we build our next campaign while playing The Quiet Year, a brilliant mapmaking game designed and written by Avery Alder. Learn more about The Quiet Year and purchase it for yourself here: https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year See the maps here: http://bit.ly/EtherseaMaps
posted by curious nu (7 comments total)

Haven’t listened to the prologues yet, so maybe they address this, but isn’t the name extremely similar to the Earthsea books?
posted by lazugod at 1:17 PM on May 16, 2021

They have not addressed it in the podcast, tho maybe that's been floating around on twitter somewhere. I'm not sure that's the inspiration, either. I was listening to an old Wonderful episode and they were talking about a book about oceans/ocean exploration that Rachael had gotten for Griffin and how it's something he was using for a secret project, so I'm guessing this was more about "what about D&D... underwater?!" than anything else.
posted by curious nu at 2:43 PM on May 16, 2021

Finding it hard to get into these, especially compared to Friends at the Table's TQY game for Marielda. I feel like they had more characters and interesting shit going on, which even if the game discourages that it makes for better radio and storytelling.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:28 PM on May 16, 2021

I think the problem here versus Marielda's TQY is entirely down to differences in the non-GM players. Not that it's their fault, they're just in a different mode. The F@TT players are totally willing to get as into worldbuilding as Austin, invent gods and philosophies and cultures and The Weavers, but the TAZ players just want to play in [Griffin's] space for lack of a better way of putting it. They want to invent player characters with backstories, but don't want to worldbuild as much. I'm having real trouble seeing how magic springs and a shipyard are going to feed into the coming season. The "world clocks" are by far the most interesting events.

TQY sounds like a really fun game but it's really hard to podcast with the lack of individual characters and being so tied to the visual system of the map.

As a meta-comment on the upcoming season-- Be sure to check out Griffin's conversation with Brendan Lee Mulligan on his homebrew "this is how submarines will work" system. It sounds like a good system but I'm a little worried that any sort of increase in rules complexity is going to make it harder to keep his players engaged when Justin just wants to be "Taako's good out here" (which don't get me wrong makes for some hilarious listening) and Travis just wants to "win" (🤞 for Roll20 so he actually fails occasionally). Clint, bless him, despite having a reputation of being oblivious, is the most down to clown in any new campaign or system.
posted by supercres at 7:33 PM on May 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

Honestly, I really loved this episode. I'm really getting into this world, and I love seeing how all the details of it progress and change over time.
posted by meese at 4:59 PM on May 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'm enjoying watching the world building. I think they're leaving a lot of weird, fun stuff in the space to play with. My only wish is that they'd actually recorded the Zoom call and posted it as a donor bonus or even just on their Youtube, so I could see the drawings as they go.
posted by tchemgrrl at 6:00 AM on May 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

There's an animation of the map being built which you can step through as you listen. I found this more useful than the unlabelled finished product.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:21 AM on May 25, 2021