Roll For Your Lives

The Dragon Souls reach the surface and begin their search for Tiamat's corpse in a town known as Orchid Row. A treasure is found, a monster is slain, friendships are strained, and sacrifices are made. Do you still cling to your shells, mortals? Time has grander things in store for you than the dirt and rock and darkness.

In his book "The Prismatic Age," the dwarven historian Gron Shalecliff argues that it's important to remember the Five Dragonsouls came together not because of a mutual goal, but out of convenience and necessity and partially against their own will. It is therefore unsurprising, he argues, that as more and more unexpected difficulties bombarded them, cracks began to form in their relationships both among themselves and with their guild leaders. That Miriel still sent them to the surface to recover Tiamat shows how desperate she was to finally bring the dragons together.

As the party comes to grips with their new employment situation--some better than others--trouble strikes once again. A man studying the five dragons has gone missing, and the players are tasked with finding him. And to make things more complicated, the dragon spirits taking up residence inside them have begun to stir and exert their will.

The party splits. Mortimer, Rick, Run and Cordelia are trapped between many rocks, a hard place, and a golem made of rocks and hard places. Rick makes a desperate gambit that nearly gets someone killed. Nol, all alone, discovers a power long thought dead and gone. And when all is said and done, the guilds of Prism are forced to intervene.

Welcome to a new campaign using a new system and featuring some new faces. Stilts returns as the host and GM of a Dungeon World game where civilization has all moved underground after a catastrophe rendered the surface too dangerous. A post-post-apocalypse, if you will. Neo and Blue are back as players, and they're joined by newcomers Tal and Theodore. On this episode, we run down the campaign's basic background, meet our cast of characters, and fail a whole lot of rolls.

Oh my gosh, what year is it? 2016? Really? Man, I should not have taken that extended rest. On this fourth and final (for now) episode of John's Dark Sun adventure, our kinda-sorta-heroes avoid acid traps, teleport people into acid pools, and attempt to bend the rules to make other acid-related actions happen. Some of these things work out for us. Others do not.

On this much-delayed episode of Roll For Your Lives, the "team" investigates some ancient ruins that have been taken over by...a cult or something? Shane gets ambushed in the bathroom, the party takes down a mecha-chef that tries to burn them to death, Tyberius has strange ideas about what constitutes a post-battle snack, and I valiantly resist defiling a sacred fountain with my drug-blood. Also: Luke's pacifist whining finally works out for once.

As the caravan arrives in the massive city of Tyr, the team splits up to explore the city and prepare for their next adventure. Once Dustin literally sews the seeds for a secret drug cult and Shane successfully weirds out everyone in the market, The team get together and discuss whether they should take up mercenary work or open up a pizzeria. Unsurprisingly, they go for the mercenary work. Also, Luke is now editing these episodes, so you have to put up with his musical taste now instead of Dustin's. May God have mercy on your soul.

We return to Dungeons and Dragons for this arc, this time by way of the Dark Sun campaign for 4th Edition. John GMs for the first time in his life, while the rest of us try to make his job as hard as possible. And by "the rest of us" I mean "mostly Luke." The cast of characters for this arc is a hamadryad sun cultist cleric (played by Dustin); a naive psion who holds a grudge (played by Luke); a werewolf barbarian who super loves fighting (played by Tyberius); and an aloof thri-kreen ranger who's a bit too into skinning his enemies.

Look, I'm gonna be honest here. There was some alcohol involved in the recording of this session. Some bad decisions were made, both in-character and out. That's okay, though, because we had a whole lot of fun laughing and doing terrible, terrible things to a nightmarish horse monster. And when you get right down to it, isn't brutalizing nightmarish horse monsters why we play these games in the first place? No? Just us? Huh.

It's once again time for a new adventure, and it's Shane's turn to take the wheel. The setting? A monster-filled wilderness where small pockets of civilization try to stay alive and push back against the aberrant creatures. The players? A chipper young woman trying to prove herself, a boisterous blacksmith who loves hitting things with blunt objects, a wild woman who trusts sheep more than people, and a brawler who turns out to have a special talent for mounting. Audio credits for this episode go to Woody Allen and "Blut Im Auge" by Equilibrium.

In this episode, we conclude our trip into the abandoned mine of Dardun and come face to face with a dragon who has definitely seen better days. Luke gets brave, Shane gets creeped out, and John gets really, really messy. And while they all manage to live through the encounter, they soon discover that their job is about to get a lot more complicated. Intro music for this episode is "No Light, No Light" by Florence + The Machine. Additional audio credits go to Neil deGrasse Tyson and StarTalk Radio.

On this episode of Roll For Your Lives, the Pathfinder gang (I really need to find a better name for these guys) gets wet. Like, really wet. They have to fight in a giant lake, is what I'm saying. If you've ever wanted to hear what it's like when I force everyone to do something they would really rather not do, this is the episode for you. Also, one of them almost dies. That was pretty fun.

In this arc of RFYL, we return to Pathfinder and the mostly-competent group of adventurers comprised of Henson (the gunslinger frogman), Hildegard (the dual-shield warrior princess), Mokugyo (the monk who loves hugging maybe a bit too much), and Inara (the kitsune summoner with a body-horror spirit companion). Rather than pretending to be investigators, their next job sees them doing some actual adventuring in the remote mining village of Dardun. Dardun has recently gone completely silent, it's up to our players to figure out what happened and stop any threats before they get too big to handle. Seems simple, right? Surely there won't be anything strange going on. Nothing strange at all.

Our "heroes" have been captured will soon be thrown out an airlock. Will they survive? Well, yes, obviously they will. But how they escape may surprise you. And possibly disgust you. Look, I'm gonna be honest, Luke throws dark in this episode. I give you a warning in the episode itself before it happens, but I'll go ahead and mention here that if you aren't keen on hearing somewhat graphic descriptions of a foot being almost completely torn off, you might want to be ready to skip ahead a bit somewhere around the 25-minute mark. I also apologize for my terrible attempt at singing along with Italian opera. In my defense, I had less than a minute to learn the damn thing.

Everything's going according to Luke's plan. Our characters have found the alien and are on their way home. Now it's time for the GM to spring his trap. The only problem is that he forgot to account for Ty's preternatural luck. This is gonna get messy.

With the village they were sent to retrieve gas from destroyed, Wolfgang and Didi have little choice but to infiltrate a pirate base hidden in an asteroid. They drag Chuck and the Prince with them, of course. There, they discover a mysterious ship, an exploding hallway, hookah lounges, and...Frisbee golf? Seriously? Is that what this game is now?

The time: far in the future. The place: a gas giant in deep space. The role-playing system: [%]. The GM: Luke. On this arc of Roll For Your Lives, Dustin and John play two former militia members--Wolfgang R. Willibald and Didi LaCroix--who are now living on nice paychecks provided by a less-than-scrupulous mining company for their services as private security. Shane plays Chuck Mutton, a pilot and scavenger for a small gas-mining village that's about to have an unfortunate encounter with Prince--the charismatic and somewhat bumbling pirate played by Tyberius--and a gang of pirates that happens to hate Prince's guts. Did I mention that Wolfgang and Didi just got told by a corporate big-wig to go collect gas from Chuck's village by any means necessary? Yeah, things are gonna get messy.

In this hella long finale of the third arc of Roll For Your Lives, the gang fights off some stinky gargoyles and just barely avoids death at the hands of a succubus and the help she summoned from an outer realm. We also learn that Inara's spider is the MVP of the group, and that there's no problem that can't be solved by hugging.

For this next mini-campaign, we go back to the familiar territory of Dungeons & Dragons, this time filtered through the Pathfinder system. Our "heroes" this time are a frogman gunslinger named Henson (played by Shane); a warrior princess who's built like a tank--and has the armor to match--named Hildegard (played by Luke); a summoner named Inara who loves to party, has a giant spider for a buddy, and harbors a shocking secret (played by Tyberius); and a monk named Mogukyo who's true joy in life is tying every living thing up with rope (played by John). In this session, they team up with the city guard of Magnimar to track down a serial killer who seems to be targeting priests of Sarenrae and stealing their hearts.

In this concluding episode to the first campaign of the new and (hopefully) improved version of Roll For Your Lives, the team tries to figure out where and when they are, how they're supposed to kill the robots that soon attack them, and what the deal is with all the ancient aliens-esque hints their DM has been giving them (the answer is not actually ancient aliens).

The second session of the Resonance campaign begins with reproducing the hunting calls of alien pterodactyls and only gets more ridiculous from there. Will Enten, Mondai and DANNY KLINE safely infiltrate the base that's hiding the alien ship? Will they figure out what Kai'lak was so interested in? Or will they eventually find a way to derail the campaign and make my preparation completely irrelevant? The answer to that last one is "yes," by the way.

After a long hiatus, Roll For Your Lives is back, and we have a new mission: to play all the pen and paper RPGs. ALL OF THEM. From now on, GMs will rotate out, and each one will choose a different gaming system to run a mini-adventure. It's all about variety in this new (and hopefully improved) version of RFYL. To start off, Dustin GMs a sci-fi magic kung-fu adventure called "Resonance." The game system for this adventure is [%], a narrative-focused system created by our mutual friend Malachi Sharlow. You can find [%]--along with his other game systems--at www.mtwinterstar.com. On this week's episode, we meet our "elite" team of monks: Danny Kline, Enten Etadu and Mondai Nagare. They get their mission details from a lizard-man before heading out into the unknown and bravely...tunneling through dirt, hiding beneath cargo ships, and using time-altering abilities to make soup.

OUR HEROES EMBARK ON THEIR ADVENTURE! Mike Blais the Goat sleeps away inside the....stomach (?) of Pitt the Crab Man, Akyok fights off accusations of being a killer, and Crud Hutchins + a mysterious rogue propel the investigation of a gruesome murder forwards.