[Aram]: Hey people, this is Aram.

[Aram]: Dylan has been mulling over some thoughts on worldbuilding, so we sat down in front of our mics and hash them out over an hour.

[Aram]: We talk about the tropes that annoy us and came up with suggestions on how we think our fantasy playgrounds can be made just a little bit better.

[Aram]: We will occasionally revisit this topic and come up with an actual title for it in the future.

[Aram]: But for now, welcome to Dylan Is Mad About A Thing.

[Aram]: Episode one.

[Dylan]: I got two door cast world building things that I don't see talked about often enough.

[Dylan]: All right.

[Dylan]: We're going to talk about the easy one first, which is simply stop making elf countries.

[Dylan]: Okay.

[Dylan]: I just, I was listening to another podcast.

[Dylan]: I won't mention, but like, [Dylan]: It's just the standard formula of like, oh, this is the dwarf nation.

[Dylan]: This is the halfling nation.

[Dylan]: This is the...

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: And talking about like equipment in the way that was built.

[Dylan]: And then I was like, we had just put out the.

[Dylan]: the triant episode where we had like an entire thing where it was like an orc-nome collaboration to invent cannons.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: If you're going to sit down and do world building, you start off with sort of who built this city.

[Dylan]: What's the dominant sort of cultural idea?

[Dylan]: And we have this big idea of like [Dylan]: every species in Dungeons and Dragons in fantasy in general, super unique.

[Dylan]: So that's how we stop though.

[Aram]: Right.

[Dylan]: Like maybe the underlying architecture of this thing is no mesh, whatever.

[Aram]: Right.

[Dylan]: But at some point, if we're not in, like, which is gonna, this is gonna be the tangent that brings us into topic too.

[Dylan]: If we're not in the region of history, where like, the God of elves went bippity, boppity elves, and then like, three hundred years later, the first humans started wandering around.

[Dylan]: They've probably intermingled at some point, like the culture, like they were around each other.

[Dylan]: In the case of Elves, there's a weird situation with the longevity.

[Dylan]: It makes a lot of sense to have sort of Elf nation when you're getting out to seven hundred, eight hundred years old.

[Aram]: Sure, or at least they can see a project through.

[Dylan]: Yeah, you have a very different perspective on the world, you know, even just like the idea of like, you know, having all of the shorter lived races refer to them as the retirement homes, fucking great shit.

[Dylan]: But [Dylan]: for the most part even a two hundred fifty-year-old dwarf right if they're dying at like a quarter century but they're still like eighty five years old like that mother fucker is still hanging out with humans like that's not world's different you've seen you know middle-aged people hang out at a coffee shop like [Dylan]: gonna show my Canadian here.

[Dylan]: Everybody is seeing a four year old guy hanging out with the old farmer at a Thames, like sitting there having a call.

[Aram]: It also else aren't there again.

[Aram]: While they're not willing to pick it up the granted, they're not the ones laying the foundation.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Here's the thing.

[Dylan]: They fucking are because they build shit.

[Dylan]: Right?

[Dylan]: Like if you got lumberjacks, like the dwarves aren't gonna build everything out of stone.

[Dylan]: Unless you're in such an absurdly high magic setting that the dwarves are like stone singers who are molding this rocks and the elves are building everything out of wood because whatever a fuck.

[Dylan]: If you're living in a world where dwarves and humans are roughly equivalent and sometimes you can make a wizard if you want a real heart.

[Dylan]: They also need what, which means they're going to go out and do lumberjack shit.

[Dylan]: You're going to get dwarven lumberjacks.

[Dylan]: You're going to have fling lumberjacks.

[Dylan]: You're going to get fucking elven lumberjacks.

[Aram]: You're also going to get a lot of cheap and all the way for doing these drop people who aren't necessarily from this city.

[Dylan]: Yep, you're going to have your standard economies if you're working in that sort of world.

[Dylan]: You're going to have like [Dylan]: like even more so in like Elven cities where again, like you've got a whole aristocracy established because these motherfuckers never die.

[Dylan]: But then like you get your new money old money fights, right?

[Dylan]: Some human is going to come up with a clever ass way of doing something and have to go to the other council despite only being ninety five.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Yeah, they'd be miserable about it.

[Dylan]: But they would hold enough power in the city that like you can't not let it happen.

[Aram]: Especially because human kingdoms are usually so vast.

[Aram]: They're going to have a lot of resources.

[Aram]: You're going to have to get something from them.

[Dylan]: No.

[Dylan]: There are human kingdoms.

[Dylan]: That's the point.

[Dylan]: because those humans have made treaties with dwarfs.

[Dylan]: And some of the dwarf clans have been like, no, we won't get on board with that.

[Dylan]: And some of the other dwarfs have.

[Dylan]: And now there's this weird little province that's like, fifty-fifty.

[Dylan]: And these dwarfs have other deals with some orchish.

[Dylan]: Let your starting point.

[Dylan]: in this mythology is likely that sort of isolationism of just like we drop these, it's siff, right?

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: You hit go and the elves are in this corner and the dwarves are in this, but if we're not, again, in like half-ling city, stay it over here.

[Dylan]: Yeah, if we're not within the first ten or so elven generations, so we're looking at like a millennium.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Those motherfuckers have interacted.

[Dylan]: Maybe there's like distributions of the population, of course.

[Dylan]: Like, they're going to be primarily dwarven things.

[Dylan]: But if you've got something where a war happened, like, oh, yeah, the ancient arched lich is going to come back after being sealed for ten thousand years.

[Dylan]: And now the cage is finally opening.

[Dylan]: You're telling me in ten thousand mother fucking years, the halflings are still just not building doors enough so that the humans [Dylan]: who are like coming through pretty regularly for trade can enter their houses.

[Aram]: Yeah, maybe not their personal homes, but certainly the in and the market would have adaptations.

[Dylan]: And again, keep in mind, I'm saying like after ten thousand years, I think you would still be a bit of a dickhead or like it would be like [Dylan]: It's like the halfway equivalent of trailer trash where it's like, yeah, I just like built the short house, you know?

[Dylan]: I could, oh, you're like, you just won't let humans into your house.

[Dylan]: You're not gonna account for that.

[Dylan]: It's like, I had to do it cheap, okay?

[Dylan]: I couldn't fucking, I'm sorry, I could have the vaulted ceilings.

[Aram]: Yeah, we'll make the door a little bigger, but the handle's still going in the middle.

[Aram]: That's the halfway way.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: All of the stuff that you're still thinking of in terms of materials and the way things are done, like those are cultural, just let them be cultural.

[Dylan]: It's not that elves build things that are whispering thin and delicate.

[Dylan]: It's that there's a culture over here that values things that are very precise and get things done with like finesse and dexterity and precision.

[Dylan]: Versus a culture over here that's a little bit more rugged.

[Dylan]: It's just like, hey, [Dylan]: It's got to be able to do it over and over again.

[Dylan]: Like this is not bourbon.

[Dylan]: This is workmen.

[Aram]: Yes.

[Aram]: If you live to a thousand years, you perhaps have a penchant for craftsmanship.

[Aram]: You can spend fifty years on a filigree.

[Aram]: You can make these long sculpted columns because you have time.

[Dylan]: But that's the other bit is like [Dylan]: in cities, sure, but like, Elvin weaponry, like we have people that make beautiful, engraved, like precious swords.

[Dylan]: Those aren't for stabbing people.

[Dylan]: Those are ceremonial.

[Aram]: Those are, yeah.

[Aram]: And they can also be first stabbing people, but there aren't.

[Aram]: Everyone designs art.

[Aram]: Everyone puts extra effort into beautiful things.

[Aram]: These like fifty-year swords.

[Dylan]: Because, again, let's fucking get the proportionalities, right?

[Dylan]: If your elves live to be a thousand, I'm doing rounding error here, right?

[Dylan]: Humans live to be a hundred.

[Dylan]: Fifty years of work to an elf is five years of work to human.

[Dylan]: Yep.

[Dylan]: I would not spend five years on something I was sending into battle.

[Dylan]: You have to turn those out.

[Dylan]: Those have to be things you can get done on the order of like hours, days maybe.

[Aram]: I could maybe see the elves spending extra time on the weapons as a reminder to themselves how costly war is to elves.

[Aram]: Sure.

[Dylan]: And that is, but that's also something that would then leak into culture, right?

[Dylan]: The idea of having a fifty-year blade, even for humans would be something like, no, no, no, we, yeah, these lands were originally held by elves.

[Dylan]: And you know, we just have some of their cultures been passed along.

[Dylan]: We've worked with elves.

[Dylan]: I studied for a couple of years under a couple of journeyments.

[Dylan]: They viewed it as like, you know, quick internships popped in for a week and left.

[Dylan]: For me it was foundational and now I worked on this that my grandfather worked on and my father worked on and now I'm going to finish the blade.

[Dylan]: I'm going to hand it down to my son so that he can remember the same thing that elves always talked about.

[Dylan]: You can't just rebuild a life.

[Dylan]: A sword has to take as much effort to build as the life it could take.

[Dylan]: which frankly would hit harder for the humans because now it's three generations of work being right down to this kid and this kid is being told like this this played could kill a person.

[Dylan]: But I want you to remember that that guy over there dying in a rocking chair started that sword.

[Dylan]: Yeah, like if any one of us died in that path, you don't hold that blade that blade carries the weight of those.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: And then you get those evolutions, right?

[Dylan]: That's part of why so many heartbreakers are so boring.

[Dylan]: Because the thing that's going to let you build an interesting world is the fact that I spun that out of some horse shit.

[Dylan]: You just said some words and we just bounced on it.

[Dylan]: But like [Dylan]: The idea of a human's interpretation of an elf work ethic makes that interesting, whereas just elves being like, well, I can take fifty years because it's not that big deal to me.

[Dylan]: Fuck it.

[Aram]: Yeah, humans have to toil quickly.

[Aram]: We have to be as industrious as we can, because there's so short of period.

[Aram]: You spend, you mean, you start, let's say, in the yield and days, interning or apprenticeshiping at like, twelve to fourteen years old.

[Aram]: You get good around eighteen to twenty.

[Aram]: You may be master a craft by thirty.

[Aram]: And then you got twenty years before your body breaks down or the plague takes you.

[Aram]: to actually get something done.

[Dylan]: Yeah, but even then, like, think about how a human is going to internalize being in that, like, infucking lawflory and or some shit like that.

[Dylan]: You're surrounded by beauty.

[Dylan]: You appreciate that, yeah, in this case, like one person could oversee the entire construction.

[Dylan]: But it was still five hundred years it took to put this building the way it was meant to be.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Aram]: I was going to work on the cathedral that took like a thousand years.

[Aram]: It looks like a sand castle.

[Dylan]: Milan.

[Aram]: I think so.

[Aram]: You'll do almost something like that.

[Aram]: Yeah, it took like a thousand years to finish at elf could have just a bunch potentially seen that through.

[Dylan]: Yeah, but at the same time, like if you were a human who was raised around the idea of like, no, we do things properly and sometimes properly means a century.

[Dylan]: And like for you, that means putting the work in, but [Dylan]: same thing with the generational efforts right like you reap the rewards of your grandfather's efforts did you not yep so you put in your efforts so that your grandchildren can see it done will you maybe maybe not maybe you got to see the beauty and now you know [Dylan]: versus like I said, the dwarven ethic of like, yeah, but that's gonna fall.

[Dylan]: That's delicate.

[Dylan]: And now that, and that's something that I think a lot of the fantasy race is like picture the way orks are generally depicted.

[Dylan]: Picture the way humans actually are like all of that sort of brutalist we're just gonna build the shit hearty.

[Dylan]: He's going to fit.

[Aram]: Yeah, look how we build now.

[Aram]: We're like, we're going to build a box.

[Aram]: It's going to be for over one under stores there, living above nothing decorative or expansive because we have to.

[Aram]: Also, it's because building techniques have improved.

[Aram]: We don't layer things like we used to.

[Aram]: We don't add those details like we used to because we don't have to account for errors in production.

[Aram]: They built those windows back [Aram]: And they built the edging around them so that the people doing the construction could make changes as they go because the materials don't line up with what the plans are.

[Aram]: We don't have to worry about that anymore.

[Aram]: Everything's flush because it just fits in like Legos.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: And like for everything that holds up better in the old days because we used better materials, there's something else where it's like, yeah, but somebody didn't know how this worked in Cotta Corner.

[Dylan]: Yeah, my grandpa built his house hell.

[Dylan]: He built our house growing up and like structurally they were incredibly sound my cousin inherited my grandpa's house opened up the wall to fix a light [Dylan]: And I mean, there's like, oh, this should have been on fire.

[Dylan]: This should have been on fire.

[Dylan]: It hasn't been over.

[Dylan]: Oh my god.

[Dylan]: Why is this like this grandpa?

[Dylan]: You were so, you were so clever.

[Dylan]: Why did you not know you couldn't do this?

[Aram]: He was clever with the basics, but maybe he didn't know electrical that well.

[Aram]: And this just more invented electrical during his lifetime.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: Love not happened.

[Dylan]: For the first time, and he and his father went, oh my god, what was that?

[Aram]: Yeah, he was just adapting to what he could at the time standards have changed.

[Dylan]: Yeah, and that's sort of the mentality of like, okay, yeah, that's beautiful and you call it timeless because [Dylan]: your culture is really sort of dictated by this aristocracy that basically never dies.

[Aram]: Therefore, it's so slow to shift at a dad new things.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: And like I said, that's the thing that lets me go like, I really do think elves are the single case where I'm like, they would get isolationists in some cases.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: But everybody else is going to start mixing and incorporating.

[Dylan]: And like, again, there will be pockets, but like, [Dylan]: You're building in the center of the fucking mountain.

[Dylan]: Okay, you've got a bunch of stone.

[Dylan]: But like, you don't mind bricks.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: You can't start a fire in a tiny little hole.

[Dylan]: You need good ventilation for that shit.

[Dylan]: You need people to be bringing things in and out, which means you've got fucking orcs.

[Dylan]: You've got noms who are crafty little bricks.

[Dylan]: The idea of like, [Dylan]: Dwarf and gnome collaborations should be constant because that engineering and that like rigidity of thought like you can build something intricate and complex, but I can build something that's actually going to work.

[Dylan]: Okay, and now take that a thousand years on, and now we've got a college teaching engineering in the middle of a mountain.

[Dylan]: It's being taught by orcs and humans and dwarves.

[Aram]: Yeah, and just and certainly elves and noms have some crossover with like jewelry and stone work as far as gems.

[Aram]: But yeah, you know, of course, going to want to go to the [Aram]: not times that it then bother with the elf and the one year of haggling, it's gonna take to get that order filled.

[Dylan]: One year of haggling and then having to wait like twenty years to get the first draft like fucking hell, which is the other bit, right?

[Dylan]: Like even when we talk about elves, where do they forge an assort out of?

[Aram]: What do the elves usually do?

[Aram]: Maddle?

[Dylan]: Right, absolutely.

[Aram]: They're not going to line it.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: No, but this, this is my point, especially early on.

[Dylan]: Yeah, they will.

[Aram]: Right.

[Dylan]: They're going to have to be L than minors.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: If L's existed before all the others, which is generally how fantasy has to do it.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Aram]: They were doing all of it.

[Aram]: They were doing the mining.

[Aram]: They were doing the clear cutting.

[Aram]: They were doing the farming.

[Aram]: But you never see it now.

[Aram]: Even cities are just these perfect cities that exist with no industry whatsoever.

[Dylan]: I think the odds of Elven miners go up if Elves aren't the first ones there.

[Dylan]: because you have to wait a hundred years, let's say humans are there first.

[Dylan]: Sure.

[Dylan]: It's not until a generation of humans has fully died that the elves really start going like, it's weird we didn't do that, isn't it?

[Dylan]: We're all wrong the same page that was fucking odd.

[Dylan]: I guess if all you have are elves you just think of a thousand years as they're just how long it takes to die which again like if all you have is humans and then elves show up You're suddenly like like is that four generations deep you've watched someone reach old age and die and we're still thirty years into the next generation after that before you're really gone like [Dylan]: I'm feeling quite surprised still.

[Dylan]: I don't know why your joints are so bad.

[Dylan]: At stuff.

[Dylan]: But then that entire time, those elves got jobs as lumberjacks.

[Dylan]: God, jobs as miners.

[Dylan]: Yep.

[Dylan]: Maybe they got so haste out of fucking town because it was like holy shit.

[Dylan]: All elves are vampires.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: Let's go learn a new trade somewhere.

[Dylan]: Now he's a minor and a lumberjack.

[Aram]: It would be weird to be a human and have, like, your friend who's in their twenties throughout your entire life.

[Dylan]: And without a reference point, all of the shit you've gotten your fantasy world, the myth role, the fucking adamantide, and all of the thought processes you've got for, like, oh, this is Elvin, this is work.

[Dylan]: You don't actually have to change that.

[Dylan]: You just have to stop saying that it's Elvin.

[Dylan]: Give the cultural and give the cultural name.

[Dylan]: See, it's from a place.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: Make trade happen.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: You can have, you know, random.

[Dylan]: It's a region.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Metro comes from these mountains.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: And whoever shows up there, it's attracted to the metro.

[Aram]: There's a reason why there are towns and cities here because the resource.

[Dylan]: Yeah, and now myth rule is also a common thing in the elves because it's so hard to work with that it was one of those things where we had to make the negotiation of like This takes time like you have to delicately heat it or it oxidizes or some shit and it turns brittle so the only blacksmith that could reasonably work it were the elves [Aram]: Maybe the doors found it in the mountain, but the elves had the ironwood that burned hot enough in order to work it.

[Aram]: Possibly.

[Aram]: Like I said, maybe it's a time thing.

[Dylan]: Maybe it's a temperature thing.

[Dylan]: Maybe it's a wisdom thing.

[Dylan]: Maybe it's a fucking magic thing.

[Dylan]: Edict or a combination of all.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: But the point is, like, all of it becomes more interesting when it's not hello Oliver.

[Dylan]: Hi, buddy.

[Dylan]: Here is a cat.

[Dylan]: Oh, the most perfect cat.

[Dylan]: I love you, dearly.

[Dylan]: I need you to want attention.

[Dylan]: What I'm not doing stuff.

[Dylan]: Um, it's no fun.

[Dylan]: Yeah, he's a little prick.

[Dylan]: Anyway, like, all that becomes more interesting when it's that results of collaboration when it's just a culture.

[Dylan]: So again, don't make, like, hell, keep the fucking elven names.

[Dylan]: Just have weird shit.

[Dylan]: We're like, there's a human running around in his name is fucking, the only elf name I could think of was a lengthy elrin.

[Dylan]: It's just because that's the town grew up and that's how the language works, but I grew up speaking this language.

[Dylan]: I fully realize that that wound up being more of a tirade than I intended, but also like, guys, how are we still doing this?

[Aram]: Let's just take D&D and let's take the forgotten rounds because that is their default setting now.

[Aram]: If it says old as they say it is, there have been civilizations for forty thousand years.

[Dylan]: we have stories of civilizations rising and falling.

[Dylan]: Empires being created and destroyed and yet no halflings moved in.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Aram]: They're just still so sacred.

[Aram]: They still think that have integration as human cities and even then not that much.

[Aram]: No.

[Dylan]: I think they fucking gave numbers in three point five and it's always like, seventy, eighty percent human still.

[Dylan]: Yeah, necessarily to revolve them, but like, [Aram]: The majority.

[Aram]: Yeah, and those are the most integrated.

[Aram]: You go to the Elven cities and it's like ninety nine percent.

[Aram]: Oh, yeah, we we have an arc.

[Aram]: We don't want to those.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: It doesn't make a sense and it implies that they're all horribly racist because why else would the city be that way?

[Dylan]: The thing is they are like [Dylan]: there is like shit like sentals keep where they worship bane and are explicitly racist in human supremacists yeah like sure there is a lot of racism in the forgotten realms and like yeah sure you want to play something real verse and millitude like there is gonna but one of the things that's gonna fuel that is having them next to each other to fight [Aram]: Yeah, sure, but also like, if you take the Star Trek view on things, right?

[Aram]: Okay, there's elves and dwarves and halflings and humans and orcs and maybe they all kind of looked at each other and was like, that's not like me, but that falls apart as soon as there's a talking dragon.

[Dylan]: And they're like, wait, I'm a player showed up and you were still pissed about one guy with pointy ears.

[Aram]: No, no, you're all on the same team.

[Aram]: That guy's just short, but he doesn't want to eat my brain.

[Aram]: Yeah, he doesn't want to bake me with fire and steal all my gold and take it back to his mountain kingdom.

[Aram]: What's your fucking problem guys?

[Aram]: Yeah, exactly.

[Aram]: No, we all have a commonality now.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: We're the two-legged mortals compared to the others.

[Aram]: We all eat food.

[Aram]: Yeah, not gold.

[Aram]: No, it just doesn't make sense.

[Aram]: There's so many others to other.

[Aram]: Why would it be the rest of the mortals?

[Dylan]: As it may be, maybe you could come up with some like logic around like how common those things are and then the fact of like [Dylan]: people not moving around, right?

[Dylan]: The usual county problem of like, oh, well, I've lived in one place my whole life.

[Dylan]: I've never seen a dragon because I've never seen like different kinds of birds, you know, sure.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Sure.

[Dylan]: Okay.

[Dylan]: You're going to have pockets like that in major cities.

[Dylan]: People are gonna have a different view on things.

[Dylan]: Even then like non-major cities, smaller places, little trading towns, right?

[Dylan]: Until you are getting to fully, this is a farm.

[Dylan]: There's a farm and five hundred miles down the road.

[Dylan]: There's another farm and that's what we call town.

[Dylan]: Yeah, until you get that deep, you're gonna get a bit of everybody everywhere, right?

[Dylan]: Like, this is something where for some reason we've all agreed that there's a single continent we all live on.

[Dylan]: It's not like fucking, oh, well, I've never seen a black person because they all lived in Africa.

[Dylan]: No, you dump fuck there.

[Aram]: They're there.

[Aram]: They're there.

[Aram]: They're just there.

[Aram]: in the past, in our own like human past, in the real world, right?

[Aram]: The forest, we're scary for a reason.

[Aram]: Now imagine if there's actual monsters in them, right?

[Aram]: That will unify a people.

[Aram]: You have to.

[Aram]: And the first time you watch an elf just stride out of one with no problem whatsoever, living in it, knowing there are monsters in there, you're going to have a certain respect for them, coming in, not a fear, [Dylan]: But alternately, you know, we do have pretty common assumptions of like, oh, that person was safe.

[Dylan]: Therefore, they have a deal with the thing that is dangerous.

[Dylan]: I could be that is a common for xenophobia.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: But again, that's like when we're first seeing elves.

[Dylan]: This is also all ignoring the fact that a lot of these worlds have like, gods talking to you.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: Like, right.

[Dylan]: Lethander coming down and being like, also leave Legolas alone.

[Dylan]: He's kind of cool.

[Dylan]: He worships a different pantheon, but I do like go to cook out at Coral on sometimes.

[Aram]: He does solid, solid work.

[Aram]: The first guy to put a couple lenses together in a tube and see his chariot racing across the sky, bringing the dawn.

[Aram]: They're going to be like, oh, the world's a bit bigger than I've anticipated.

[Dylan]: But that does bring me to my other thing, which is if [Dylan]: I'm still surprised I haven't seen anybody write an adventure or a fantasy story, legitimately starting in the first thousand years of the world.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: Or at least one history is hard to write.

[Dylan]: Like it is, why are you sitting there and telling me there had to be ten thousand years of like, right?

[Dylan]: Four hundred years of history.

[Dylan]: We still haven't seen the first generation of elves die.

[Dylan]: Yeah, like we don't we don't know their mortal yet.

[Dylan]: We we know they can killed but like we don't know their mortal.

[Aram]: I guess we got a bit of that in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in the similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in similarium in sim [Dylan]: You know, you do what you gotta do when you're a lunatic.

[Aram]: And I guess there's a certain idea of like, okay, so the gods existed first, because they had to exist to bring everything into reality.

[Aram]: And then there was always this ancient primal serial force, like the Titans or something else that came out of the god stuff.

[Aram]: We've talked about this in D&D.

[Dylan]: I like the lore of like the blood war of, you know, we started.

[Dylan]: There were angels and demons and they were fighting and then there were devils brought about by angels who were fighting.

[Dylan]: The demons, and essentially just like, took on some level of corruption.

[Dylan]: Uh, sure.

[Dylan]: That could be billions of beers.

[Dylan]: I don't give a shit.

[Dylan]: There, there are mortal.

[Dylan]: But at some point, the earth was created, the material plane at some point there was this continent.

[Dylan]: And somebody looked at it and was like, let there be elves.

[Dylan]: And somebody was like, that's cool idea.

[Dylan]: What if those were shorter and died faster?

[Aram]: Yes, that's what it's like.

[Dylan]: A taller died even faster.

[Dylan]: They were very short, like very short, more living though, back to the short guy living.

[Aram]: Side note, everyone ignores that.

[Aram]: In every D&D book, elves are slightly shorter than men, everyone ignores that.

[Aram]: Just like Marvel ignores the height of Wolverine, everyone ignores the idea that elves are shorter than humans.

[Aram]: So here's where I approve of it.

[Dylan]: There's a little voice in my head that goes, when you make elves like thin and delicate and wispy and all that shit.

[Dylan]: And then you also make them five foot six.

[Dylan]: There's something inherently like you've just made the elves into what like Tolkien thought women were.

[Dylan]: Right, they'll wander around and dresses.

[Dylan]: They all have their long flowing hair.

[Dylan]: They're all five foot six and pretty.

[Aram]: Like, right, we're just, they can never look older than thirty.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: For the wood elves, I usually make them shorter.

[Aram]: Because to me, that makes sense.

[Aram]: They're in the trees.

[Aram]: They're doing acrobatics stuff.

[Aram]: They're running through the forest, ducking under the branches.

[Dylan]: The little do associate with acrobatics is short.

[Aram]: Right, like gymnasts, but the high elves are quite literally high, six foot two, splendid.

[Aram]: The dresses get them just right, you know?

[Dylan]: I think, again, coming back to the initial thing, drop the high elf, uh, what elf distinction?

[Dylan]: Because that's just gonna be different cultures, right?

[Dylan]: Like those are, it's just where they live.

[Dylan]: Yeah, it's just where they live.

[Dylan]: And the moment you stop making this weird isolationist thing, [Dylan]: Like, like, why do you have a traditional set of elves?

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: That says, no, we live by the old rules.

[Aram]: We stay in the woods.

[Aram]: We take what we need.

[Aram]: We exist.

[Aram]: We coexist with the land.

[Aram]: And then there's the high elves who are like, no, we shape this world for what it is.

[Aram]: The high elves believe the forest is a garden while the wild elves or the forest elves believe the forest is a forest.

[Aram]: That's my distinction for them.

[Dylan]: I absolutely, I'm on board with that.

[Dylan]: Don't get me wrong.

[Dylan]: I'm just like, they don't need to be biologically different.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: That's the silly.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: So like having, oh, the hiles are all tall in the, the wood elves are all short.

[Dylan]: Like, [Dylan]: That's unnecessary.

[Dylan]: These guys are druids.

[Dylan]: That's why they're out there because they like the trees.

[Dylan]: Those guys are over there in the cities and they've made friends with the, you know, a weird, no, no-mish tinker occult and a bunch of orcs who are also like, yeah, I do buildings are pretty nifty.

[Dylan]: There are certain things that are going to be biologically different in the sense of like dark vision.

[Dylan]: If your eyes literally work different, if you die faster, right?

[Dylan]: But ninety percent of the rest of it is going to be cultural, right?

[Dylan]: Is just going to be in societies that are raised around strength.

[Dylan]: You're probably going to be subjected to a lot of hard work, a lot of athletics, a lot of like fucking weight training, and you're gonna be strong.

[Dylan]: We're gonna have beefy health sometimes.

[Dylan]: We're gonna have beefy gnomes, we're gonna have beefy half lengths, and all of them we're gonna be hotter for it.

[Dylan]: Yeah, yes.

[Aram]: If you tend to live high in the mountains, that tends to change you, too.

[Aram]: And also, it is funny how often D&D races or species, as they're called now, are just separated by how their eyes work.

[Aram]: Like that seems to be the deletiation of how you could tell one from the other.

[Dylan]: It also gets us away from one of my biggest pet peeves, which is D&D going, look, we've invented a new species.

[Dylan]: It's people.

[Dylan]: It's just personal.

[Dylan]: Aren't a fucking stat block we need it.

[Aram]: Fuck off.

[Aram]: Just people.

[Aram]: I mean, the other one is what inherent magic can you cast, right?

[Dylan]: I think that one's important, right?

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Same sort of thing, right?

[Dylan]: Like if you've just got magic, but again, if we're doing God stuff, like that's.

[Dylan]: that's religion that's localized, right?

[Dylan]: Having parts of the Pantheon better represented and so like there are certain people who are blessed by the goddess of fucking starting fires or whatever, I don't give a shit.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: If you really wanted to separate people out, you could do it by which gods blessed this kingdom.

[Aram]: Maybe you gain a little bit of their power because you are from a blessed land of the gods and that makes you different from other people.

[Dylan]: Yeah, that would be a good way.

[Dylan]: I don't mind that.

[Dylan]: Like if everybody basically comes out of character creation with magic initiate and you just get like a first level spell in a can trip and it's just like these are the things I know how to do because I came from a farming village in the farming area.

[Dylan]: Therefore, I can cast.

[Aram]: fucking spike growth not a very slow spell whatever I don't care fight whatever it is like every every everyone from these lands of the south where it's sand and heat can all bring the light with them because that's where the sun does the strongest and is most blessed by Apollo or whatever not Apollo what does the sun got again [Aram]: I'm in your form.

[Aram]: Lefander, Lefander, or Lefander, technically the same God, but different sometimes depending on you ask.

[Aram]: No, it matters by region, just like every, everything else.

[Aram]: Everything is about what resources are there and magic is just another resource.

[Dylan]: I think legitimately, if you're people that are living in the desert and you're blessed by someone, you're probably not carrying light with you, because that's the biggest problem in your survival.

[Dylan]: Is it too hot?

[Dylan]: It's too bright.

[Aram]: The water keeps going away.

[Aram]: You'd hope it'd be water.

[Aram]: But God's our dick.

[Aram]: So it's going to be light.

[Aram]: But yeah, it's very dark in the desert.

[Dylan]: No, I just find it odd when they're like, yeah, we've got these people and like sure.

[Dylan]: Yeah, if you want to give them like like the raw concept of an ASMR is not necessarily stupid.

[Dylan]: Same thing with tea flings, right?

[Dylan]: But it's just like these [Dylan]: are anomalies and our magical abilities, right?

[Dylan]: They're blessings or curses or whatever the case may be.

[Dylan]: Like, right, we don't need a town of tea flings.

[Dylan]: We don't need to raise that particular problem.

[Dylan]: Like, because fun forgotten realms lore, tea flings were like that.

[Dylan]: We're just a weird thing that cropped up every now and then.

[Dylan]: Like, you might have someone in your bloodline made a pact and now three generations down.

[Dylan]: You got a tea fling coming out.

[Dylan]: and then it was something like when the gods rose up again somehow as medias managed to seize some bit of divine power got elevated from being an archfiend to a true god and then everyone who had some little bit of teafling blood basically got a little power pulse and then turned into a teafling.

[Dylan]: So you suddenly had entire cities that were teaflings and like family lines that were all teaflings all the way down.

[Dylan]: Like why?

[Dylan]: You could give those abilities to, like you said, if you want to make it a fucking, uh, these people live in the fucking tropics and are blessed by the gods of fire and heat.

[Dylan]: Alright, cool.

[Dylan]: Done, handled.

[Dylan]: Maybe there's an elf with that spell.

[Aram]: Maybe there's a fucking...

Yeah, others can do it.

[Aram]: Just the people from this divine province, perhaps, are more accustomed or more naturally able.

[Aram]: They have more aptitude for it because of divinity, not because of racial differences.

[Dylan]: We talked about this a little bit way back when on like Dispel Magic, but I think...

[Dylan]: Making it almost a selection thing of like, oh, you can do that.

[Dylan]: You're meant for great things.

[Dylan]: It's part of a character creation thing because adventurers can do this.

[Dylan]: Yes, people who are going to go and accomplish things are touched by the gods.

[Dylan]: Yes, maybe there's like a couple people in town who are like, [Dylan]: You know, don't talk to fucking that guy.

[Dylan]: He's sixty-five.

[Dylan]: The gods touched him and he never left town.

[Dylan]: He's just been sitting here casting magic missile when he wants to get the crow's out of his yard.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Or yeah, you used it for something practical.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: It's like, oh, great.

[Aram]: Now I can craft past heat metal.

[Aram]: God.

[Aram]: I'm going to be such a great blacksmith.

[Aram]: I don't even need the fuck.

[Aram]: Don't even need a forge.

[Aram]: I just go think and then hammer that shit out.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: It's a guy just grip the fucking blade with my bare hand and stays hot as long as I want it to.

[Dylan]: Yeah, I can knock out twenty sorts a day, man.

[Aram]: I'm cranking these guys.

[Aram]: She is great.

[Aram]: I love that.

[Aram]: It's so much more sensible because that's what we would use.

[Aram]: We would use these things for industry or magical when you do that shit.

[Aram]: Yep.

[Aram]: Also, it with a world this magical.

[Aram]: And again, with spells, especially because it like let's take wizards where anyone with enough study can learn it and can trips aren't that hard.

[Aram]: Maybe you go to a vocational school and now you can knock out mending.

[Aram]: You've just eliminated cobblers and a ton of other jobs because you can just touch a thing and fix it.

[Dylan]: I think every first level of ability is probably actually exceptionally difficult.

[Aram]: First level, Chad, what happened?

[Aram]: No, no, no, no.

[Dylan]: I mean, first level, you're a character and you have abilities.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: Those are all spectacular.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: You can look at it that way.

[Aram]: But that's not what the book says.

[Aram]: The book says you have to have a thirteen intelligence, and you can knock it out.

[Dylan]: Okay, but again, thirteen one.

[Dylan]: Let me, let me, let me, I'm repulsing fucking probability.

[Dylan]: All right.

[Dylan]: All right.

[Dylan]: Two D six.

[Aram]: Hit me a physicist.

[Aram]: Sorry.

[Aram]: Give me the numbers.

[Dylan]: Let's do, we're going to do straight, three, three, six, because the three, six drop lowest is specifically four heroes.

[Dylan]: Okay.

[Aram]: It's because you're going to be factoring in that humans get a plus one in every category.

[Dylan]: I mean, we can, if you want, I really care about that.

[Dylan]: All right.

[Dylan]: I'm going to send you this link so that you can see what I'm talking about.

[Dylan]: All right.

[Dylan]: So there's like one plot right up the top of this article.

[Dylan]: They're all probably the probabilities are listed at the bottom.

[Dylan]: Okay.

[Dylan]: You have probability of being at least in eleven.

[Dylan]: Sorry, yeah, at least an eleven is fifty fifty, right?

[Dylan]: Fifty percent chance that you're a tenor lower fifty percent chance that you're eleven or higher.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: So a thirteen or higher is I'm gonna rough this math out.

[Dylan]: You got a point five percent chance of rolling in eighteen plus about one point five on seventeen.

[Dylan]: So it's two percent plus three percent for sixteen.

[Dylan]: We're at five plus four and a half that's nine and a half at fifteen.

[Dylan]: Plus, sevens were at sixteen percent chance for a fourteen plus round that off to ten.

[Dylan]: You're like one in four people has the raw potential to learn a cantrip.

[Aram]: Well, one and four people has the raw potential of multi-class to learn, I can't trip because in D&D, anyone can do it at first level.

[Dylan]: You're right, but I think that's one of those rules over sites by dent of why would you do it otherwise, right?

[Dylan]: If you don't have at least a plus one in your main ability, [Dylan]: becoming a wizard, then you're one of those smart asses who's like, I like to make myself a role playing challenge.

[Dylan]: Now everyone's gonna beat everyone of my saves and I'll never hit with an attack in the entire game that's about fighting.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Aram]: So we're talking now, twelve or higher.

[Aram]: If you have a twelve or higher intelligence as a book wizard, which is the easiest way to learn easiest quote unquote way to learn magic.

[Dylan]: There are numbers of, I'm saying, there are numbers of thirteen, so we'll work with that.

[Dylan]: One in four people has the raw potential to do it.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: Now you need access to a school non-trivial, right?

[Dylan]: Right.

[Aram]: So you're not getting- Isn't this roughly equivalent with people go on to college?

[Aram]: One and four plus access.

[Dylan]: I think that's pretty fair, but I think that's what I'm getting at, right?

[Dylan]: When you get to those real small towns, how many people are kicking around with a bachelor's degree?

[Dylan]: Because we're also talking about trade school, like with right stuff, is full on weird occult universities.

[Aram]: If you're going for the whole nine yards, if you're just going to learn mending, there would be trade schools to teach you just mending.

[Dylan]: There might be a weird wanderer guy who does that, but like again, it's the question of how long does it take, how much does it cost, how accessible is that going to be, right?

[Aram]: Four years to learn mending, let's say, just maybe just that, four years to learn mending and now you can repair anything, right?

[Aram]: Anything.

[Dylan]: No, I'm not saying that it's not a big deal and people wouldn't go for it.

[Dylan]: I'm saying like we're looking at a maximum of one and four people.

[Dylan]: And then you're tuning down based on how how accessible you want magic to be to the general populace.

[Dylan]: Sure, right?

[Dylan]: So I'm saying like this isn't going to be [Dylan]: On the blacksmith it would be real convenient if I just took a four year break from my career to learn how to do like say up to first level spells Yeah, right?

[Aram]: That's all that I'm trying to get out here Yeah, and you're not making anything you're just repairing things, but it would still have some in it would it would be significant it would be huge [Dylan]: But like, you know, me learning to speak another language could potentially be huge.

[Dylan]: I haven't done that.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: It's hard.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: It's hard.

[Dylan]: It's just like learning.

[Dylan]: Mending would be hard.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Sure.

[Dylan]: You have to have the opportunity.

[Dylan]: Like I before they did the AI shit did a whole bunch of dual lingo.

[Dylan]: I am menu fluent in a couple languages.

[Dylan]: Can I have a conversation in any of them?

[Dylan]: Like barely even fucking English bud.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: And largely, that comes down to accessibility, right?

[Dylan]: Like, I don't hang out with a bunch of French people.

[Dylan]: I don't have anyone I can speak French to.

[Dylan]: My French has never improved past, you know, a half way decent vocabulary for someone who is explicitly an Anglophone.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: Meanwhile, if you go, if you went and lived in Paris for two years, we went off there two for snippets.

[Dylan]: That's sort of what I'm getting.

[Dylan]: I think it'd be cool.

[Dylan]: My point simply being like, that's sort of where I look at wizards, right?

[Dylan]: Those are huge opportunities.

[Dylan]: And when you get them, are you coming home?

[Dylan]: Right.

[Aram]: Are you going to return to the town?

[Dylan]: That's the biggest way back to your little hick town to be, you know, the god of mung.

[Dylan]: You know, the small folk, or are you going to find an opportunity proportional to the ability you now have?

[Aram]: There'd be all these medium sized towns who would sponsor your four years at vocational school as long as you were willing to give eight years back to the community.

[Aram]: Yeah, you go off and we will send you [Dylan]: to a mage college to just do your bachelor's to get up like once a day you can cast a first level spell and also you can mend all of our horse shit.

[Dylan]: Yeah, and you return to service agreements.

[Dylan]: Yeah, I think that again, great world building really fun stuff.

[Dylan]: And even for those, do you think they're handing out those scholarships to one in four children?

[Dylan]: No, no.

[Aram]: The town's got enough gold.

[Aram]: Maybe send one person a year.

[Aram]: Rax.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: That's what I'm getting at here.

[Dylan]: It's like, yes, in theory.

[Dylan]: And if you want to build a world where magic is like hugely available, you know, maybe it's called.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Aram]: It's already there.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Let's pick up the book.

[Aram]: They're still great.

[Dylan]: They're really solid.

[Dylan]: But, you know, you can do a lot of stuff.

[Dylan]: just making magic a little bit more available and having that be relevant.

[Dylan]: And of course, you know, all of my math didn't account for like sorcerers, but I got to think a sorcerer, you're talking like, incredible.

[Dylan]: Yeah, we're talking about direct bloodline from a dragon.

[Dylan]: Even half a percent, like one in two hundred people.

[Dylan]: I don't know, like, roughly speaking, how big was your high school?

[Dylan]: It was total population.

[Dylan]: Oh, huge, four thousand kids.

[Dylan]: So that's like, what, like, twenty sorcerers?

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: That's so significantly less than half a percent.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: Yeah, significantly, because we're talking like, okay, dragons are rare.

[Aram]: First of all, they have to be, or there'd be no civilization.

[Aram]: So dragons are rare, and then a dragon has to shape change into a guy, or girls, and then have sex with a person, and then somehow make a child.

[Dylan]: Maybe it's not a bloodline thing.

[Dylan]: Maybe it's like an ancient dragon blessed your bloodline at some point.

[Dylan]: It just manifests as it works.

[Aram]: Even work.

[Dylan]: Yeah, exactly.

[Dylan]: I got to say that a dragon being one sufficiently magical to pull off that blessing and then to wanting to probably less frequent that a dragon just being like, I don't know, that thing doesn't have any scales, but I'd fuck it.

[Aram]: We're stuck in silver and bronze dragons and maybe black dragons to fuck with people, but pretty much the rest are going to be like not interested.

[Dylan]: Yeah, absolutely.

[Dylan]: So like, sorcerers are vanishingly uncommon.

[Dylan]: Warlocks are even worse because you have to get in contact with something.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Aram]: Something very big has to happen.

[Aram]: And then that big thing has to be willing to do it.

[Dylan]: This conversation is getting progressively more meandering.

[Dylan]: But I think it's interesting.

[Dylan]: These are interesting things to like actively think about instead of just what D&D presents in their books, which is stupid.

[Dylan]: Warlocks feel like they should be a prestige class.

[Aram]: I would agree.

[Aram]: He's like, the base should play that in game.

[Aram]: You're coming into the game.

[Aram]: Like, oh, yeah, I have this whole backstory where I found a guy and he liked me.

[Dylan]: I'm starting the game.

[Dylan]: Having met a, like, twenty-a-level threat that was like, no, no, no.

[Aram]: make me a deal.

[Aram]: I'll tell you what, kid.

[Aram]: It should be like the Wheel of Time books, whether I'll just kids who are farmers and all of their unique abilities were either found out about or gifted later.

[Aram]: They were just people and you got to see how they became.

[Aram]: Now those books run for a while.

[Aram]: But the origins were solid.

[Dylan]: when you do a warlock assuming that it isn't like because I mean fair play if you're doing something where it's like no no no my town was burning down and I was just reaching out for whatever and an angel came down and was like You need this like you're not religious you don't worship my god you cannot be a cleric I cannot make you a paladin but I can give you my power and now you're a celestial pack warlock okay [Dylan]: That's, that's fine.

[Dylan]: On a panel that I like to sort of standard, like concepts are like the fade.

[Dylan]: You have to get in contact with the fade.

[Dylan]: That's hugely, regionally locked and then it's very much on the whims of those things.

[Dylan]: Like you're probably not getting out of that situation alive.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Or you actively contacted a devil and survived.

[Dylan]: Okay.

[Dylan]: So at minimum, you're already probably a wizard.

[Dylan]: Like to get in contact with another plane.

[Dylan]: We're talking like fifth, sixth level wizard.

[Dylan]: Yeah, just to me, I'm not going to concern myself with Warlocks in this sort of how likely is it that you can cast magic calculation, because by being a Warlock, you imply that you're already probably some sort of spellcaster.

[Aram]: You're already a weird hero level special.

[Aram]: Or at least has some innate ability or something special about you, because why bother other words?

[Dylan]: The three major types of Warlock, the three primary ones, because I honestly like, [Dylan]: on top of, you know, being the second thoughts for Warlocks, everything outside of the three primary subclasses.

[Dylan]: They're also increasingly weird when you think about the premise of a Warlock, like the concept that you're a Warlock and your power comes from undef.

[Dylan]: What do you fucking mean?

[Dylan]: What is that sentence?

[Dylan]: Yeah, where does that power actually lay and why do you have it?

[Dylan]: Like I mentioned, the idea of like, oh, I'm a celestial warlock.

[Dylan]: Okay, but if you made a deal with Jesus, isn't that being a cleric?

[Dylan]: I'm pretty sure that's being a cleric.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: And also, like, like, okay, maybe the town's burning and you reach out for power and some angel takes pity on you.

[Aram]: That feels an awful lot like the people who are like, oh, this town killed a hundred people.

[Aram]: But what guys survive the flood?

[Aram]: Thank God.

[Aram]: What do you mean, thank God?

[Aram]: Who sent the flood?

[Aram]: Like, that's an angel going, oh, man, we're guilty here.

[Aram]: I guess I'll bring this guy as a little bit of payback.

[Dylan]: Like when you think about the three primary types of warlock, you're looking at your arch-fei, your grade-old one, and your devils.

[Dylan]: The devils makes the most sense.

[Dylan]: Devils make the most sense, you probably had to reach out to get that one.

[Dylan]: Grade-old ones also sort of makes sense in terms of it was on my whim sort of thing, but also...

[Dylan]: exposure to grade old ones, right?

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: Probably also had to reach out to get that one.

[Dylan]: Yep.

[Dylan]: The archfays, the only one that makes any sense to me to be like semi-frequent.

[Aram]: I just got grabbed.

[Aram]: Oh, because I like to fuck with mortals.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Absolutely.

[Aram]: You stepped into the wrong mushroom circle.

[Aram]: And now you got a deal to make.

[Dylan]: You stepped into the wrong mushroom patch.

[Dylan]: And that particular faith out the funniest thing to do is to gift you with power and send you back out into your world.

[Dylan]: I didn't think that's for you to make your dance until you die.

[Aram]: Yeah, absolutely.

[Aram]: And then one in ten of them dances well enough that they're like, you know what?

[Aram]: Why not?

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: So we're sticking with like an absolute max of about a quarter of the population get magic powers.

[Dylan]: And then you get into the divine stuff.

[Dylan]: your druids, your clerics.

[Dylan]: Paladins are just clerics with swords, fuck off.

[Dylan]: It's all the same shit.

[Dylan]: Which becomes the same sort of thing, right?

[Dylan]: per town how many clerics are you getting because yet doesn't matter how long you study it matters if that god goes okay and like same sort of thing right like if you're meeting out that kind of power it's probably on a needs basis which means like you're actually probably more limited than like a wizard [Dylan]: Wizard, it's how many people are smart enough.

[Dylan]: Yeah, I got to take a measure of your whole soul.

[Dylan]: But the clerics is like looking down at the town and be like, well, they got a holy man there.

[Dylan]: He's one of mine.

[Dylan]: He's doing the good Bippity Poppity Booze.

[Dylan]: He's got like fifty years left in him.

[Dylan]: They don't even know.

[Dylan]: I'm not gonna like, unless I have a specific need for vengeance in this area, I'm not gonna do another one.

[Aram]: Being a god in D&D is all about resource management.

[Aram]: It's a big game of civilization.

[Aram]: It's a bunch of meples that keep moving places on their own.

[Aram]: I got a church here.

[Aram]: I'm good.

[Aram]: It's cranking out workshippers.

[Aram]: No problem.

[Aram]: I don't need to put another one in.

[Aram]: No.

[Dylan]: Like, I mean, that's the thing, right?

[Dylan]: Like, it'd be an entire campaign.

[Dylan]: If a god any of the gods was just like, no, no, no, no.

[Dylan]: You know what?

[Dylan]: That talent over there?

[Dylan]: All of them.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: See, that's seven year old.

[Dylan]: That's a paladin.

[Aram]: That's kind of smite shit.

[Aram]: That'd be amazing.

[Aram]: I want to play that game.

[Aram]: The town that just became holy.

[Dylan]: The town that became holy, and then the immediate reaction of all of the gods being like, what?

[Dylan]: I'm sorry, fucking.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: What do you mean you have five thousand paladins?

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: How did that happen?

[Aram]: Why?

[Aram]: What are you doing?

[Aram]: Fuck how?

[Aram]: Why?

[Dylan]: Why did you need five thousand people to be able to smite?

[Aram]: And if they don't get the answer, they want that.

[Dylan]: They're going to destroy it.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Like.

[Dylan]: And the other bit being depending on the God, depending on the level of Holy, right?

[Dylan]: Like.

[Dylan]: If you send me a talent and you're like, oh, I've created this talent.

[Dylan]: It's got five thousand paladins in it.

[Dylan]: I decided to bless everyone because it was funny that day.

[Dylan]: Get the angels.

[Dylan]: All of them.

[Dylan]: How many we got?

[Dylan]: Get more.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Aram]: This is a category one problem.

[Aram]: We're just going to smite that town.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: I even know why you did it.

[Aram]: But we're going to erase this thing off the map.

[Aram]: You've got an R.

You've got five thousand Paladins.

[Aram]: All right.

[Dylan]: Cool.

[Dylan]: So they're all still level one, right?

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: which could still do a lot of damage.

[Aram]: You get a lot of level one smites, but yeah.

[Aram]: No, because I don't think it gets smites until like level three.

[Aram]: Maybe, oh, that's probably, that's probably true.

[Aram]: I'm, I'm so used to starting out games as piled-ins up like fourth level.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Well, that's good.

[Dylan]: That's when they're interesting.

[Aram]: Exactly.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: More than a story like here, on average, looking at a maximum of a quarter of the population, even remotely capable of being magical.

[Dylan]: We then have to factor in access.

[Dylan]: You then have to factor in like, are they coming back to town?

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: Yeah, you get smite its second level.

[Aram]: So that first group of paledins has to survive the initial wave and then maybe.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Which again, like for a character, right?

[Dylan]: It's like, what's your deal?

[Dylan]: Well, I'm a paladin of Sierra.

[Dylan]: No, I know.

[Dylan]: I know not by choice.

[Dylan]: God of Chaos decided my entire town should be Paladins.

[Dylan]: And then the town was leveled by angels.

[Dylan]: And they were like, good enough, right?

[Dylan]: Everybody's got Paladins.

[Dylan]: So like, two of us that got out of their alive, that's a rounding error to the celestial plane.

[Aram]: Right, the actual fighters in town that got the power.

[Aram]: They actually pulled it off.

[Dylan]: The six year olds, not so much.

[Dylan]: There's a couple of us that were like actual worshipers and those guys got wrecked.

[Dylan]: There's a whole youngling situation.

[Dylan]: When the first angel landed, I got thrown across town by the shockwave and that's the only, I had a tree and that's the only reason I'm still alive.

[Aram]: Yep.

[Aram]: Angels not going to walk up and smite you when you're already unconscious.

[Aram]: We covered that in the devil.

[Aram]: Yes.

[Aram]: In the deep episode.

[Aram]: We'll not cover that they will not murder.

[Aram]: Right.

[Dylan]: This actually brings us back to the conversation like very concretely if an angel was sent and told smite the party.

[Dylan]: Yeah, they would.

[Dylan]: Yeah, they would murder in a heartbeat.

[Aram]: Yeah, that's their pages are robots.

[Aram]: Yeah, but, but they don't do it because they want.

[Aram]: Yeah, so it's not murder.

[Aram]: It's programming.

[Aram]: Yeah, fair.

[Aram]: Anywho, like.

[Dylan]: You can do some really cool world building when you start like just forsaking the idea of Elf Town.

[Dylan]: You know, oh, even just the stuff like, oh, this town exclusively worships this one God.

[Dylan]: That's silly.

[Aram]: That's not how anything has ever worked.

[Aram]: That's not how Pantheon's works.

[Aram]: It's not a pantheon.

[Aram]: It just isn't.

[Aram]: If you have to do your farm, you worship the farm God.

[Aram]: If you're going out to see on your boat, you worship the seat God.

[Aram]: If a family member is ill, you worship the God of healing.

[Aram]: Or it's not worshipable.

[Aram]: Or it's not worshipable.

[Aram]: It's not worshipable.

[Dylan]: It's with like patron deities or like primary deities.

[Dylan]: That's the one they worship the most.

[Aram]: Right.

[Dylan]: Because that's the most police that was like fucking Aphrodite all day early.

[Aram]: No, absolutely not.

[Aram]: If you're on the coast and like your entire industry is around fishing, sure, you probably should pass out big temples to the god of the sea, right?

[Aram]: But there's other god to go light a candle and a temple once in a while.

[Dylan]: Yeah, you'll go worship that one and then also stop off at Poseidon and be like, hey, if you could put in a good word with your brother, that would be dope.

[Aram]: No human is gonna go.

[Aram]: Well, all these gods exist, but I'm just laser focused here.

[Aram]: No, you're gonna head your fucking bets when my dad's an atheist.

[Aram]: Hard core atheist.

[Aram]: I was dating this one guy who grew up in a pretty religious household and he came over to our house one day during Christmas and we had a Christmas atry up.

[Aram]: And he looked at him and he's like, why?

[Aram]: And he's like, well, you know, and then he asked like, why do you ever rom a baptize?

[Aram]: And my dad thought about it for a second.

[Aram]: He was like, you know, you gotta head your bets.

[Aram]: He's right.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: It's Pascal's wager.

[Dylan]: Let's talk about it.

[Dylan]: Let's talk about one last thing before we call that enough random world building rambles.

[Dylan]: Sure.

[Dylan]: Just because we've got none to it.

[Dylan]: I think.

[Dylan]: that there should be like thirty gods of all the different things, right?

[Dylan]: Like the idea that the elves have their pantheon and they have their own god of agriculture and the nomes have a god of agriculture.

[Dylan]: That makes sense to me because that is how people work.

[Dylan]: Sure.

[Dylan]: I think the reason for that should be that the gods don't show up.

[Dylan]: Or like when they do it's very uncommon and they show up in a form that is most palatable to the people they show up to whatever that, whatever reasoning you want.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: I think there should just be one God of agriculture.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Aram]: It's the same God.

[Aram]: It's just showing itself to it.

[Aram]: It's just in the form that you would expect.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Like you are a desert wandering nomadic people.

[Dylan]: It shows up in like the standard like very thin, flowy robes that are going to be good for desert heat and keeping sand at all your holes.

[Dylan]: Yeah, you get the Jesus God.

[Dylan]: Yeah, you worship that same guy, but you're in a mountain, you're showing up in first because that's what you expect people to look like.

[Aram]: Yeah, if you're an orc, you expect an orc to show up if you're a half, like you expect a halfling to show up.

[Aram]: It'd be weird if they did it.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: And then that still lets you do all of your like holy shenanigans and wars and all that stuff because the thing that is the problem is almost always the priest.

[Dylan]: Yes.

[Dylan]: And also it's your relationship to that thing, right?

[Dylan]: Like we said, if you're, you know, in a fishing town, yeah, of course, the god of the sea is fickle, but also a thing of abundance, you know, sometimes we lose people in the ocean, but like mostly they come back with, you know, the thing that's going to sustain us.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: That's the reason why the town exists in the first place.

[Aram]: It usually works out.

[Aram]: If you live in the flood plains, [Dylan]: The God of the Sea is sometimes is a cruel mother fucker.

[Aram]: But the reason why you settled in the flood plains is because once the waters received, that's the richest source.

[Dylan]: Yes, because the God of agriculture supports us, even though the God of the Sea, for whatever reason has decided he hates this town.

[Dylan]: And now if you have a weird cult crop up worshiping the ocean in town, they're probably like the sort of psychos who are like, no, no, no.

[Dylan]: You've seen that.

[Dylan]: Every few years, the town is underwater.

[Dylan]: We are meant to die.

[Dylan]: And in the name of the God of the Sea, I will make sure we all die.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Well, also, though, it could just be as a reminder, like when those flash floods hit West Virginia that were so devastating, there were people who were saying, like, the river is no longer where it's supposed to be.

[Aram]: I don't know.

[Aram]: Unfortunately, that river is exactly where it's supposed to be.

[Aram]: If you listen to the native people back when you first settled this down, who told you not to do it, you wouldn't be in this situation.

[Dylan]: In that specific case, yes, but also those things can happen because you're engineering like when you build roads and shit.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: If the plane's floating down the path of, yeah, the the damn one of the most obvious like you did that like yep, you redirected the river so the river's sort of resetting itself.

[Dylan]: But if you built like a road where you wore the train now and say it's fresh like it's a gravel road.

[Dylan]: Maybe that's actually just the more convenient path for the water to flow on now.

[Dylan]: So it's it isn't supposed to be there, but we didn't built up a lot [Aram]: landing strip and it just came to you.

[Dylan]: But like that sort of thing, if that's your mentality of like, oh, it floods and you believe it to be in response to things, maybe you worship the sea god is a god of justice.

[Dylan]: Sure.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: It's like we did like the god of punishment specifically, like a lawful evil type of god of justice.

[Dylan]: We deserve this, or you deserve this one.

[Dylan]: Exactly.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: I do like the idea of like the God of punishment being a lawful evil God.

[Dylan]: It's not even like, no, no, no.

[Dylan]: We hurt people who do wrong.

[Dylan]: And if, you know, it means burning the entire town to do it.

[Aram]: And that even just wrong, we hurt people who strayed from some path that I believe in.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Therefore, you're punished.

[Dylan]: And as long as your core worship still hits the buttons of the God, like are the gods paying enough attention to you that they're going to say no.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Dylan]: Like how capricious are they?

[Dylan]: How distant are they, right?

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Just, you know, take a, how big would you say is a big cult?

[Dylan]: And I mean like enough to cause a problem in the world today.

[Aram]: I don't think I was okay.

[Aram]: Worldwide enough to cause a problem.

[Aram]: I guess we're talking about locally.

[Aram]: Like we're talking about something that's going to require adventures, adventures to put down.

[Aram]: Well, if it's a town, twenty, if it's a country five thousand.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Okay.

[Aram]: So there's, [Dylan]: eight billion people on the planet.

[Dylan]: How many voices is five thousand?

[Dylan]: Not much.

[Dylan]: Are you going to fucking clue in?

[Dylan]: Are you going to like, no, it's got to get drowned out by all that you don't even notice.

[Dylan]: And as long as those voices are like tapped into the thing that pulls your magic, that the worship that connects them to you is valid.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Like I can actually be Scientology levels before it starts to register.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Like if you're not talking like a couple hundred thousand like [Dylan]: Or again, like, in the way I think about it, right, is like they're going to be modes of worship or certain things that you sort of have to do to connect to that God, unless they break that connection.

[Dylan]: And even then, like, that's not you cutting them off.

[Dylan]: That's the connection being weak and not linking up anymore.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: You need a problem to be big enough that your priests are on their knees going, hey, God, we can really use your help with this.

[Dylan]: You need enough signals coming back from your own people for that to be an issue, which, again, really cool thing to be able to do in a campaign would be to like pull enough focus from the cult that when you're fighting the bad guy, they just straight up stop getting spells.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Meet the god later on in the campaign after you've, you know, defeated that particular tier and be like, hey, thanks for intervening on our behalf and cutting it.

[Dylan]: Huh?

[Dylan]: Who?

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: What do you mean?

[Dylan]: A cult.

[Dylan]: I wouldn't let that doesn't sound like me.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Aram]: All right.

[Aram]: Thanks for drawing us.

[Aram]: Psychic divine energy.

[Dylan]: Just do fish.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: We were just having a festival.

[Dylan]: That was just turtle fest.

[Dylan]: What are you talking about?

[Dylan]: You're being crazy.

[Dylan]: Don't fucking bring that up to me again or I swear to God, I will put you in the bottom of the ocean.

[Dylan]: Exactly.

[Aram]: They see things on a different scale.

[Aram]: It's a totally different chessboard to them.

[Aram]: And it's, again, it's like playing civilization.

[Aram]: You don't see the individual people's needs.

[Aram]: You see the needs of at least a town.

[Aram]: You see one happy face symbolizing how many thousands of people.

[Dylan]: Exactly.

[Dylan]: Yep.

[Dylan]: Do you know for a fact that in any of your towns and siv there is a serial killer?

[Aram]: No, none whatsoever.

[Aram]: You have, I mean, there is a little bar.

[Dylan]: It came works, but you know, but there are.

[Aram]: If it's a civilization, of course, there are.

[Aram]: Maybe that's why some people are unhappy, but there's no slider for the serial killer.

[Aram]: You don't know.

[Aram]: I'll tell you there.

[Dylan]: Click on Jack and be like, stop ripin'.

[Dylan]: Yeah, exactly.

[Dylan]: Damn it.

[Dylan]: I was just listening to a bunch of stuff recently and it got me on a world-building sort of thought-trained.

[Dylan]: How can we sum this up?

[Dylan]: Be creative in the way you do world-building.

[Dylan]: Ask questions about why things work the way they do, like investigate it a little bit.

[Dylan]: Understand, resource management.

[Dylan]: Understand, resource management.

[Dylan]: Look into probabilities a little bit more.

[Dylan]: No, it's going to learn math.

[Dylan]: You kidding me?

[Aram]: No, but you can think about them abstractly at the very least.

[Aram]: Like, how many of these people are actually there?

[Aram]: What impact would that have on your world?

[Dylan]: And, you know, that thought process of, okay, hypothetically, one in four people is capable in the first place, but how many of them are getting the actual ability?

[Dylan]: What do they have to accomplish to do to think?

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: Yep.

[Aram]: And a lot of people have trouble with writing.

[Aram]: They find it super intimidating.

[Aram]: If you're just thinking of groups of numbers, it can help you break that down and make it make a lot more sense than just staring at a blank page.

[Dylan]: Which also leads into like when you're thinking about it in course or grain, you're eventually going to get into a thing where you go, why is this the case?

[Dylan]: And that's how you rank fine details is by explaining.

[Aram]: Yep.

[Aram]: I'll tell you what, I tell this to everyone.

[Aram]: Whatever I world build, I make the map first.

[Aram]: I make the map, I play with the map, I play some cities, I play some resources, I sit back and look at it and just having that, let's be looking and say, okay, well, these people would have this and they wouldn't have this.

[Aram]: So they'd probably trade or maybe have some conflict here and the world kind of evolves out from that for me because I have something to look at.

[Dylan]: And think about doing what's funny about that is we've talked about this a little bit When it comes to building a campaign and anything I don't world build I know just it'll happen eventually mostly accidentally and then I'll have enough context to be like oh, well, I should draw a line around this I guess that's a country now [Aram]: That works too.

[Aram]: That's how your whole arcane college came into being because we played enough games where it would make sense to necessitate one.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: And your own trauma with higher education.

[Aram]: The other fun bit is, pull on what you know.

[Aram]: Yeah, what you know, yeah, school sucks sometimes.

[Aram]: Put it into your world.

[Aram]: Absolutely.

[Aram]: That is a universal truth.

[Aram]: You could bank on.

[Dylan]: No, I, I said, just, you find, you find a lever to pull.

[Dylan]: Pull it until it stops being interesting.

[Dylan]: And then start asking why those things are there.

[Dylan]: Yeah, like, [Dylan]: I mean, frankly, that's actually the underlying theme here, right?

[Dylan]: Is that idea of like, [Dylan]: isolationism doesn't make sense.

[Dylan]: If there are no elven miners, how the fuck are they making jewelry?

[Dylan]: Okay, so while they must be mangling, well, then do the elves change their mentality or they're still doing fifty-year crafts or the humans that are living with the elves doing fifty-year crafts?

[Dylan]: Like, yeah.

[Dylan]: And you start asking yourself these questions and you just chase to the logical conclusion until you feel satisfied with it and then you go like, okay, that makes sense.

[Dylan]: That's days.

[Dylan]: What about over here?

[Dylan]: And then eventually you'll chase down enough threads that you have something that feels complete.

[Dylan]: I would say in any of those above like thing, any of the discussions we just had, the only thing missing is an action item for a fucking party to deal with, right?

[Dylan]: With the exception of the city of Paladins.

[Dylan]: Right.

[Aram]: No, you think action.

[Dylan]: I'm not sure that that motivates a campaign because the people we're going to be pissed about that are the other gods.

[Dylan]: Yeah, you still have to figure out what your bad guy is there.

[Dylan]: I guess your bad guy, the god that made too many paladans is your bad guy.

[Dylan]: The other god that's like, well, if you have that many paladans.

[Dylan]: I'm gonna raise that town.

[Dylan]: Is that just the source of a couple of paladins, right?

[Aram]: Like, I'm just a way of not explaining.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Just saying go do.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: Maybe you go do and then you get there and you're like, but why?

[Dylan]: Yeah, or maybe that's just the source of your bad guy, right?

[Dylan]: Like I just as a random fucking statement mentioned like, oh yeah, no, I got knocked out like two of us got out of town.

[Dylan]: Okay, well now you've got one NPC that's just like a pallet and who's like, I didn't want this, but I got out of town and then there's the other guy that he knows and has not thought about in a while who was made a pallet in on the whims of the god of chaos and now has a grudge against a different god.

[Aram]: Yeah, that's a form that you got to wait and happen.

[Aram]: Maybe the same God, because I tell you what, if I was in a town and some God rose everyone up with divine power and then we got rocked for it and I was the survivor.

[Aram]: Not only am I gonna have strange feelings towards that God who gifted us in the first place, but I'm gonna have survivor skill built on top of that.

[Aram]: So maybe I hate that God.

[Aram]: That's what we're talking about.

[Aram]: That makes me feel powerful.

[Dylan]: You have the two modes of thought, right?

[Dylan]: It's like, [Dylan]: If it's the God of Chaos, then maybe that's actually, not even the whole reason.

[Dylan]: Maybe the idea of I'm going to upset the order.

[Dylan]: I'm going to destroy the God of Chaos is actually a form of worship for the God of Chaos, so you maintain your powers.

[Dylan]: Or maybe you take the D&D school of thought of like, no, no, no, you connected me to the idea of these holy powers.

[Dylan]: Now I'm an oath breaker.

[Dylan]: Like I still have this line of power and I believe in something strong enough to hold it.

[Dylan]: That thing is not you and I'm coming.

[Dylan]: Yep.

[Dylan]: level breaker pile and it's good.

[Dylan]: Yeah, I don't mind that at all.

[Dylan]: I still kind of like the idea that if you broke your oath, you have to like find something to fill the gap.

[Aram]: But, you know, the idea depends how it's broken.

[Aram]: The oath breaker pile and I'm playing in the curse of straw.

[Aram]: I got taken in by-strod, captured for a year, was tormented by this one jailer, and then chose to forgive them, and helm walked away from me, because I forgave them, because helm thinks that person should be punished, but my heart said I need to forgive.

[Aram]: So there's ways to get there in really interesting ways.

[Aram]: There are.

[Aram]: I'm not saying there aren't.

[Dylan]: It's another one of those things where, like, Sam is putting the tea flings in the core book, right?

[Dylan]: where I think the oathbreakers hit the same space for me of just because their an option doesn't mean they should be likely.

[Aram]: Right.

[Aram]: They're not comment.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Like if you have a city the size of fucking Toronto, and you've got three tea flings.

[Dylan]: That's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: That's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: That's a lot of tea flings.

[Aram]: I agree.

[Aram]: Absolutely.

[Aram]: They would.

[Aram]: Oh, it's great.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Aram]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Aram]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Aram]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Aram]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Dylan]: It's a lot of tea flings.

[Aram]: No, they may be people who fell from grace, but they just lost their power.

[Aram]: Yeah.

[Aram]: The guy who still has his power, but it's different, that's going to be where I can weird.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: I said chase your fucking bad ideas down, and maybe it turns out they're not bad.

[Dylan]: Yeah, make shit weird.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: Make it weird.

[Dylan]: Make it unique.

[Dylan]: Ask a dumb question.

[Dylan]: Answer it, and it will be good.

[Dylan]: What happens in the first thousand years of fantasy civilization when we still don't know that elves are I might have actually pitched this on one of our like conversations, but I still want to run a game where the world is on the edge of war because it's the year nine hundred and the first elf dies of old age.

[Dylan]: Yeah.

[Dylan]: like they have a full on like uh...

gentocracy functionally except it takes on a completely different meaning in the case of elves where they just age for thousand years but now the oldest elf who has been in charge since the beginning [Dylan]: dies of old age.

[Dylan]: They didn't know that was even possible.

[Dylan]: So everyone is still sitting there going like, no, no, no, no, that has to be a weird fucking poison or a spell.

[Dylan]: If it was a spell, it was those fucking humans.

[Dylan]: I guarantee it.

[Dylan]: They've been fucking around with magic.

[Dylan]: We taught them a little bit and then they started experimenting.

[Dylan]: We should have never fucking taught them anything.

[Aram]: Yep, you get to thirty, you're thirty forever than all of a sudden you just die?

[Aram]: Yeah, that's different than how humans age.

[Aram]: Ask a bad question, and there will be a good answer somewhere.

[Aram]: Absolutely.

[Aram]: And frankly, most things that are bad are created because of our own fears.

[Aram]: They're not external.

[Aram]: They're things we invoked.

[Aram]: Start the first cataclysm because elves didn't know they could die.

[Dylan]: Baldur's Gate talks a little bit about carcasses as folly.

[Dylan]: Where there was one guy who like invented a thirteen third something level spell to make himself a god.

[Dylan]: And it was so powerful that it killed the god of magic in trying to just hold the weave together.

[Dylan]: And that's why there can't be ten level anything higher than ninth level spells anymore.

[Dylan]: Mr.

That was just like [Dylan]: Nope, I died trying to stop that.

[Dylan]: We're not doing any more of that shit.

[Aram]: Yeah, you can only run so much power through these circuits guys than everything below.

[Dylan]: The idea that the elves are like, no, no, no, no.

[Dylan]: We need to get all of the magic because we just figured out we could die and that cannot be allowed.

[Aram]: That's basically why the rings were made.

[Aram]: Because the elf society was collapsing and they were perishing so they made the fucking rings.

[Aram]: That's basically the story right there.

[Dylan]: You get a new generation of humans every twenty-five years give or take.

[Dylan]: So we're talking like forty generations of humans that you've seen come and go and suddenly you're like that might happen to you too.

[Dylan]: Terrified.

[Dylan]: Absolutely ring rakes you're getting fuck yeah, yeah, it's gonna happen.

[Dylan]: It's gonna happen every time humanity has accepted that they die sometimes the first neck romansers were elves who realized they had to fear death Hmm exactly true feel that world right that campaign your mother fuckers go do it go do it and we'll have you on the show [Dylan]: If you do it, it's good.

[Aram]: If it's good, if you did it well, we'll have you on the show.

[Aram]: No promises.

[Dylan]: If you do it in its socks, then I'm gonna have to tell you that it sucks, and that's gonna be a really uncomfortable conversation.

[Aram]: We'll tell you.

[Aram]: We're not confrontation, and we'll deal with more than I have.

[Aram]: But I'm not.

[Aram]: Thanks for joining us for the first supporter exclusive episode of Dylan is mad about a thing.

[Aram]: This show will not have a regular release schedule, despite the fact that Dylan is frequently mad about many things.

[Aram]: We'll post new episodes to Patreon and Apple Podcasts when Dylan can no longer contain his anger about a specific thing.

[Aram]: Our host for this episode, we're Dylan Mellon-Font and Iran-Vargin.

[Aram]: I also did the editing.

[Aram]: To listen to more supporter exclusive content, audio and video DMs notes from Kill Every Monster, and add free episodes of All Our Shows, check us out at patreon.com slash dead ghost pro, or subscribe to Dead Ghost Productions right in your Apple Podcast app.

[Aram]: Thank you for listening to and supporting the Dead Ghost Podcasting Network.

[Aram]: We'll see you next time, Dylan is mad about a thing.