One of the best feelings in the world, perhaps second only to falling in love, is falling in a new fandom.
Sometime last year or two, I discovered Dungeons and Dragons actual play podcasts. This type of media has been around for many years, but only crossed my radar recently. There is a lot to be written about why Dungeons and Dragons is such a delightfully human and frankly adorable pursuit, and I have written about some of that on my blog before.
Today, I’m going to bring you into the world of one of these actual play podcasts that I find especially captivating. It’s 4 episodes in length, and totals around 20 hours of audio content. I’ve listened to it about 7 or 8 times. I hope I can peer pressure you to go and enjoy it too.
Matt Mercer is one of the most well-known names in D&D actual play podcasts. He is the main Dungeon Master (DM) on the acclaimed web series Critical Role. For the uninitiated, Mercer’s role as DM means he provides narration, guidance, and game facilitation for a table of around 6 players. His players are discovering and completing quests in his fictional world of Exandria.
In D&D parlance, a “campaign” is a long-term (often years long) story arc. Characters will navigate quests and co-create a longform story planned by the DM. Characters will also make choices and fight battles in the campaign. They can, and do, affect the story’s outcome, and DMs must plan for the inherent chaos and unpredictability this can cause.
“Campaigns” are the long term story arcs. “Sessions” are pieces of the campaign. For many D&D players, sessions are played once a week and can range anywhere from 2-5 hours in length. Mirroring real life D&D players, then, Critical Role airs their sessions live once a week on Twitch, and are currently midway through their third campaign. “The table” refers to the game’s players.
Critical Role is generally played according to the ruleset in Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. This means that it has more or less the same universe, and the same potential for characters to travel to other planes. D&D campaigns can and do have characters travel from the material plane (aka, some version of earth) to other planes, such as the Nine Hells or the Celestial Plane. D&D is similar to Greek mythology in that “Heaven” and “Hell” play a part in the world. They are real, physical places that characters can travel to, much to their own peril.
The world Mercer has created with his table of seasoned voice actors throughout 3 campaigns and over 5 years of programming is immense and very complicated. There have been spin-offs created from the Critical Role universe with guest DMs, called Exandria Unlimited, or ExU for short.
I have listened to a handful of Critical Role episodes from the main campaign, but it’s ExU that really drew me in. Specifically, I listened to ExU: Calamity, a prequel mini-campaign clocking in at just 4 episodes in length and around 20 hours of content. This campaign was DM’d by Brennan Lee Mulligan, who is the main DM for Dropout’s Dimension 20 campaigns.
(artist credit) The player character lineup of ExU: Calamity.
Exandria Unlimited: Calamity takes place in the flying city of Avalir. The city can be more or less thought of as a giant cruise ship in the sky. It flies all around the continent of Domunas, trading with different cities and collecting magical energy. This magical energy then gets brought back to Avalir’s sister city, Cathmoira, after completing a 7-year circuit of the continent.
This delivery of magical energy (ether) that Cathmoira receives every 7 years is crucial to its economy. It causes crops to flourish, magical production to thrive, and magical children to be born.
If this collectible magical energy is so powerful and brings so many good things, you might ask yourself, why aren’t the residents of the city of Avalir just keeping it for themselves? Couldn’t it do things like extend their lives (unnaturally…), perhaps fuel spells more powerful than they themselves can accomplish alone, or maybe even unlock passage to new planes?
The answer to this question is yes, they absolutely could use it for those purposes and so much more. Doing so would be bad for many reasons. It would violate centuries-old tradition and agreements with people who live on the continent and not in the flying city. It would anger a group of ancient druids who first allowed the city to be taken to the sky in the first place. But if you were an unimaginably powerful wizard presented with the opportunity to use the city’s stored power for your own ends, wouldn’t you be tempted?
The residents of Avalir are many such powerful wizards. They can achieve incredible feats of magic, even ascending to godlike levels of power. Unchecked magical dynamism runs rampant throughout the city, and with it soars the hubris of the city’s denizens.
There are schemes afoot in Avalir.
One wizard is attempting to free an evil god from his underground prison to wreak havoc on the city.
Another wizard is stealing magical energy to try to enable the city to travel to an entirely different plane. This would be an incredible feat of magic, to be sure, but would also cause mass panic and hysteria as residents are ripped from the plane they know. The wizard who wants to achieve this inter-planar travel has no idea what will happen when she achieves this goal, whether it’s physical side effects on residents or exposing the city to unknown dangers. She is simply consumed with the possibility of achieving such a feat of magic.
Avalir faces two terrible threats in this story. One is the city’s potential destruction from an angry god newly free from prison. The other is the potential involuntary displacement of thousands of citizens from their home plane to realms unknown and almost certainly unfriendly and inhospitable.
Exandria Unlimited: Calamity follows a group of powerful city dignitaries as these threats unfold. Some city dignitaries are the cause of the threats, while others uncover what is to come. As the story unfolds, friendships are tested, boundaries are crossed, and the fate of an entire magical city and the continent below it hangs in the balance.
ExU: Calamity is a triumph of fantasy storytelling. DM Brennan Lee Mulligan takes Matt Mercer’s world and tells a thrilling prequel story of magical achievement and hubris, of scientific curiosity both imperiling and saving a city, and of both belief in and abuse of divine power. It takes us through the chaos that unfolds when the dichotomous sides of human nature interact. When our love of discovery and achievement threatens our love of and the safety of our fellow man, what chaos will befall us?
I love stories of characters who have to make impossible choices with their backs up against a wall. I love stories of characters who are self-interested and driven and must face the consequences of their drive and self-interest. I love stories of characters who think they are doing everything right, and yet they still are not exempt from chaos and calamity.
I often feel that the world is a fundamentally chaotic, cruel, and unfair place. I love stories that highlight this, but also highlight the incredible human ability to love one another anyways, and to push back against entropy with all our might, even when it will take us in the end. It gives me hope for my own chaotic little life.
If you like apocalypse stories too, please, for the love of god, listen to or watch ExU: Calamity. This probably won’t be the last time I write about it. I anticipate continuing to write about some data related things but this blog is now just about “things I am interested in” because that’s what feels right this year.
Thanks for reading. See you next week. Tell your friends, don’t forget to subscribe, and all that. I’ll leave you with a quote from the finale of this amazing story.
Why do we tell stories? To try to make sense of a world that can be terrifying and enormous. In Exandria, I don’t know that your story will long be known. I don’t know who will remain to tell it, but it did happen — and it did matter. And though the Calamity is here, because of you, it will not be here forever.
-Brennan Lee Mulligan, ExU: Calamity Finale
Alternate name for blog: death, d&d, and dbt 😁