The Adventure Zone: Ethersea — Episode 1

July 8, 2021 11:08 AM

The Gallery Job: Part One A Finner, an Orator, and a Brinarr walk into a bar. Well, first they walk into a job interview, and it doesn't go so great, so THEN they walk into a bar. Join us for the start of a new adventure in the undersea metropolis of Founders' Wake! For more info on this new setting, give a listen to our Prologue mini-series (or our special, abridged recap!) to hear how the Ethersea first took form.

In which we meet:

Devo (Deveau? Deeveaux?) LeMain (sp?), an uncloistered, and very pretty, former parishioner and now bard of the spoken word,

Zoox, a Brinarr ranger who's as handy with a crossbow as he is pretty in his own eyes, and

Amber Gris (sp?), A monk who realized Ol' Uncle Joshy's vision of psychic victory over the Blink Sharks, and might be feeling a wee bit restless ever sense.

posted by Navelgazer (13 comments total)

I have high hopes for this season! Although I worry that having two soft-spoken characters will put a damper on the goofs-quotient.
posted by zeptoweasel at 2:47 PM on July 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

We'll see. It's fun to see Griffin feel so free to rock these NPCs again. Just his reaction as Brother Seldom to Devo's "He is a coral person" introduction had me wheezing.
posted by Navelgazer at 2:57 PM on July 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

I enjoyed this and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes! I appreciate that Travis had toned down the voice by the end of the episode because at the beginning I was pretty sure I was not going to be able to understand 1/3 of the trio.

Amber Gris is definitely a reference to the substance but whether Justin has done something funky with the spelling remains to be seen.
posted by Anonymous at 5:53 AM on July 9, 2021

I like where it's going for sure. It's a good sign that the episode ended a little abruptly, like a play session that went long and got divided up in editing.

Amber, like most of Justin's characters, is an early standout. I really hope they've read the monk rules and play her correctly. Monks are extremely cool played right, extremely boring when played like fighters. At least Griffin seems unlikely to, I don't know, incorrectly tell Justin he's using chi points wrong or something when Justin has actually read the PHB...

The "French" is rough. I came to dread long stretches where Devo wasn't talking because it was a fresh assault when it came back. I shouldn't be surprised that it smacks of local community theatre Poirot when... that's probably what it is.

The one thing I got zero sense of is how their race and class traits shook out. I imagine Devo is charisma-heavy but the rest of his balance, and the other two PCs, are a mystery.
posted by supercres at 12:31 PM on July 9, 2021

I didn't like Devo's accent at first, but by the end of the episode I was cracking up. I love horrible French accents in general, I admit.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:50 PM on July 9, 2021

Yeah, I'm also enjoying Devo's "French," in part because it's not playing off of any particular trope or French stereotype. Devo's just a curious, likable guy with almost zero life experience, and by the end, particularly, I just found the voice very endearing. But also in part because the part when they met Mona and Travis tried to speak actual French for a bit felt very, very familiar to me, a person who studies French daily and absolutely blanks when trying to speak it aloud.

But yeah, Amber is the early standout (I'm excited to get more of Zoox to really know what their deal is) and Justin seems to love tossing random things in there for listeners to find (or for Griffin to google, horrified) and Amber's speech is peppered with little easter eggs.
posted by Navelgazer at 1:11 PM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

A ranger, a monk, and a bard. That... that is a choice. Not a choice I would have made, but a choice.

If nothing else, the group will probably be uniformly good at Stealth checks. Which is good, because that is not a class spread for whom combat bodes well.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 11:57 PM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Eh, it's still a DPS/Tank/Healer spread, though they're all second-choice examples of each category. That said, despite D&D still being a combat-focused tabletop game I'm hoping their spread of alternative classes gives us some alternative problem-solving.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:01 PM on July 11, 2021

They all seemed to be having a good time, and I enjoyed listening. I know as a player/DM I'd be frustrated if so "little" was done in an hour and a half (plus whatever got edited out), but it's great as a listener because I've got no stake in the game flow -- happy to just hear 'em riff, find out who's soft and/or fancy, and make sure everyone's ready for the Return of the Blink Sharks.
posted by curious nu at 3:23 PM on July 11, 2021

>Amber's speech is peppered with little easter eggs.

When she called someone a clasper, I all but clapped my hands in delight. I love when someone has done homework.

The ten year old’s review is that he thinks this will be the funniest season. I agree that there is a looseness that feels good so far.
posted by tchemgrrl at 3:07 PM on July 13, 2021 [3 favorites]

Will this make sense if I didn’t listen to the setup episodes? I got 20 min into the first one and just wasn’t absorbing anything. But I do miss the boys.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:06 PM on July 14, 2021

Yeah, it'll be fine. There's a 15 minute setup recap episode in the feed, but I don't think it would matter if you didn't even listen to that.

They're in a recently established undersea colony after a surface world magical apocalypse. The sea is very dangerous. There is a naughty man called Old/Uncle Joshie. That's you caught up on the essentials.
posted by howfar at 1:08 AM on July 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

Seconding that. The prelude episodes were interesting but not essential, and time jumps forward many years between them and now, anyway.
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:26 AM on July 15, 2021