Frequently Asked Questions

What is that music?

The intro music to the podcast is “Achilles” by Kevin MacLeod

The rest of the music that plays during the actual episode is a mixture from several sources. We almost exclusively use video game soundtracks, because they tend to have a very even “energy” across the entire song and loop well. Movie soundtracks tend to be specifically written for the scenes they are for and as such can have a drastically different mood throughout one song.

Most of the music we use is from The Witcher, Guild Wars, Oblivion, and Fallout 3.

How long have you been playing?

Four members of our group have been playing these characters since June 2008. Lincoln and Sam joined the group in August 2009.

What edition are you playing?

We play Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons.

What hardware and software do you use?

We use quite a few different tools! The music runs off of an Xbox connected to a home theater running XBMC. The DM controls the music using a remote.

The DM uses Masterplan to keep track of the overall campaign. He also uses IniTracker to manage combat.

We use a player-facing monitor to show monster attack and damage rolls. This started as an experiment, and has turned out to be a big hit. It allows the DM to spend less time with the math of the monster attacks, and allows the players to still experience the thrill of seeing that random number generated. The software that powers this system is called Avandra, and is the DM’s own creation. In the live broadcast, this is sometimes shown as one of the picture-in-picture windows.

Two of the players use iPlay4e running on small computers as their character sheets. Lincoln (Wrenn) uses a Dell Mini 9 netbook and Dan (Brandis) uses a Motion Computing Tablet PC (not an iPad!)

The live broadcast uses two Microsoft LifeCams to show both the players and a close up of the battle map. The HD camera is a LifeCam Cinema. To accomplish the picture-in-picture using both cameras at once, we use a program called VH Multi Cam Studio. The video is then encoded and uploaded using Flash Media Encoder to justin.tv.

The audio of the podcast as well as the live broadcast is recorded using a Blue Snowball.

Where are you located?

We are located in Novato, CA. It’s just north of San Francisco.

What campaign are you playing?

For the first year and a half we played the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. When that story concluded (episode 2) we began a new story using the same characters. This new story is an original story written by the DM.