The Adventure Zone: Ethersea — Prologue III: The Comfort of Guilt

May 28, 2021 6:28 AM

The shoreside community stands divided over their priorities as the storm looms ever closer. 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 and see the maps and their alt-text here: http://bit.ly/EtherseaMaps
posted by curious nu (5 comments total)

Gooshiewolves!

Once they started talking about spirits in armor I figured we’d see a golem-type people in the main game, cool to see it get coral-ized.

Listening to a world-building podcast is an interesting experience.
posted by curious nu at 8:06 AM on May 28, 2021

I love the very strong dadvibes of, "Are gooshie wolves real? You have to tell us, we need to know if you're not just making this up."

Also, so glad to get the coral knights! Such a powerful, fascinating image, that

AND THEN! While we're still trying to recover from the gooshie wolves and the coral knights, what does Justin hit us with? None other than Ol' Joshy, who is INSPIRED.
posted by meese at 12:19 PM on May 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

I’m really confused about the timing of production. When the trailer came out and there was the coral knight, Justin was adamant that they hadn’t made characters yet. But like. One of them is definitely playing coral knight right? Was this episode recorded before the trailer hit or after?
posted by supercres at 6:27 PM on May 28, 2021

I believe that the timeline ran that they made all these before Griffin's new baby to have some stuff in the can for paternity leave. There's also the recent live chat Griffin had with Brennan Lee Mulligan, which I haven't watched all the way through, but Griffin mentions that they haven't started recording the "real game" yet and did the world building a while back. I get the sense that they did the world building months ago, and in the meantime Griffin did some writing and homebrewing of ships while the artist got to either listen to these episodes or the highlights.

I mean, I personally would love to play a coral knight, or a gooshywolf kid with a horseshoe crab terrier, or a chill bathysphere pilot, but those are already plausibly real people in the world without necessarily being Their Characters.

My family has already been making up wild Ol' Joshy ideas. Ol' Joshy is a RICH comedy vein. And gooshywolves is just... I DM a D&D game for 10-12 year olds and gooshywolves is so precisely the thing that they would create in their little hive mind and present to me as self-evident truth, just like the guard that is secretly made of Jello for no reason, the lost chicken that is clearly evil, and the pocket dimension that is required to train rapacious monsters and sell them as beasts of burden. If anything, gooshywolves is too tame.
posted by tchemgrrl at 8:38 PM on May 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

It's taken me a few episodes of cautious optimism, but I'm really loving the Quiet Year eps. They're just... soothing, in a way I don't normally associate with the McElboys, and occasionally you get something like Trash Geysers or Gooshiewolves or fucking Joshy. I'm really glad they're taking their time with it, which is not a reaction I expected.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:34 PM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]