Epic Adventure

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“As the four of you move into the open cavern you see a large Goblin on the far side. He turns and raises a club banging his crusty and broken shield. Three more goblins step from the shadows, their bows raised.”
Bob who was playing a first level fighter smiled. “This is perfect. Four Goblins against our Four 1st level characters. Let’s Do This! I charge forward with a war cry.”
20 minutes later as the players all sit in disbelief, their characters dead or dying with no possibility of survival. “What the hell just happened” they mumble as they start working on new characters.
What happened is that no matter what the book says about Challenge Ratings, there is no such thing as a balanced encounter.
On this episode Mike, Christina and I are going to talk about Balancing Encounters in your games. Why there is no such thing as a balanced encounter and the difference between a Roleplaying and Gaming at the table.
Mike, this is your favorite thing to say, so why don’t you kick us off.
[Kick to Mike]
Christina, you are heavy on the story telling side or what I like to call Roleplaying. I know you believe that the only way to balance encounters is between your ears.

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Welcome to you heard it here last, where we talk about news, you’ve already heard.
First up we are looking at EN Worlds results from their fan vote Most Anticipated Games of 2026. Malcolm and I talked about our favorites a few weeks ago, but now we have the official results from EN World.
https://www.enworld.org/threads/here-are-2026s-most-anticipated-ttrpgs-as-voted-by-you.717141/
The top 10 fan voted games are interesting for a number or reasons. We have some new players to the game world, some old favorites getting a face lift and at least one that left me scratching my head.
But let’s get the Doctor’s thought’s first. Christina, what stood out to you on EN World’s Top 10 List of Most Anticipated Games for 2026.
[Kick to Christina]
Mike, I know you have opinions, what did you pull from this?
[Kick to Mike]
In business news Drive Thru RPG announced an increase in it’s print on demand prices.
https://www.enworld.org/threads/drivethrurpg-print-on-demand-prices-increasing-again.717604/
This comes on the heels of last March’s almost 50% increase in printing costs. Drive Thru’s announcement indicates that there will be a 3 – 5 percent increase in costs for their print on demand service. This increase went into effect on February 1st, 2026. The announcement places the reason for the increase squarely on the shoulders of rising costs of materials, from paper to ink to labor.
Mike, I know the printing world is something you keep an eye on, so what observations do you have for the laymen out there wanting to get books printed?
[Kick to Mike]
Christina, is the future of TTRPG’s digital and what does that ultimately mean for the hobby?
[Kick to Christina]
And there you have it, all the news, you’ve already heard.

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I homebrew all my games. Well, not all of them. Over the years I have tried my hand at running modules to mixed results. As I have talked about before on this podcast, I like the freedom of homebrew, the ability to change things up at a moments notice and the freedom to let the players take me on a ride. As a matter of fact, I am putting together a Twilight 2000 game and while I am stealing the name and location setting of the classic first adventure, I am homebrewing everything else.
Recently I have been making these homebrew adventures a little more formal in there set up and construction and I have even written a series of adventures for Oddfish Games, How To Roleplay With Your Cat, that hopefully will be available at GenCon this year. I wrote a one-shot Call of Cthulhu game that came out beautifully last month and I have gone down the path of formalizing my upcoming adventures, for posterity’s sake of nothing else.
I decided that since I had a smattering of experience now, I should probably sit down with the experts and chat about how to write an adventure for roleplaying games and since I have a podcast designed for just such a topic, here you go.
On this episode Mike, Christina and I are going to talk about writing an adventure for roleplaying games. The basics, structure, format, and of course the does and don’ts.
Christina, Do you remember the first time you sat down and officially created a new adventure? And was it a formal process or more informal?
[Kick to Christina]
Mike, what about you? First Adventure?
[Kick to Mike]

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Welcome to You Heard it Here Last, where we talk about news, you’ve already heard.
We start this week off with an article from EN World about Daggerheart and Darrington Press.
https://www.enworld.org/threads/daggerheart-sold-out-in-two-weeks-has-three-year-plan-in-place.716975/
The article reports that the first printing of Daggerheart was planned to last a year. Instead, it sold out in 2 weeks. But don’t fear, the article goes on to say that Darrington Press has a 3-year plan in place for Daggerheart, Yipee!
The article is based on another article by Business Insider that highlights Ed Lopez and Ben Van Der Fluit the COO and Senior Vice President of Business and Content Development respectively. Now I am an avowed capitalist, unlike my co-hosts, but even I get annoyed with the little games designed to separate a fool and his money. I mean you can’t even read the original article at Business Insider unless you pay them money. If any of you are buying this crap, then shame on you. Darrington Press is simply a WOTC and Hasbro wannabe that are adapting the same bullshit that we have seen from those companies, I mean they even hired the people that come up with the bullshit to begin with. You mean to tell me that professionals in a business behind the most successful actual play show in the history of actual play shows screwed up their product ordering by 96%. I mean not even weathermen and the airlines are that bad. On top of it, if you tried to pick up the game at GenCon then you saw their business idea first hand. Small windows where the product was available everyday to create artificial scarcity and only provide the most expensive version of the game. I mean you couldn’t even buy just the basic rulebook. You had to get the entire starter set, which was of course…more expensive. 
But anyway, that’s my opinion. 
For our next bit of information, we are diving into a specific release.
https://www.enworld.org/threads/rpg-print-news-%E2%80%93-traveller-d-d-mothership-and-more.717021/
https://www.nobleknight.com/P/2148379689/Omendrome?awid=1086
Omendrome by Alewood Games is a brand-new softcover adventure for Mothership using the ARKYVR supplement. Now I have heard a ton about Mothership, but I haven’t read any of it. Lots of word of mouth and lots of love, but it just hasn’t crossed my path and this is the first time I have heard anything about the ARKYVR supplement. Mothership is a Sci-Fi Horror Game that lets you play out all your Aliens and Space Hulk adventures. ARKYVR is a system that builds on that putting the characters behind the lens so to speak and letting them “Film” the action and choose the direction of the stories. All of that sounds amazing. The Omendrome adventure set puts the player character in the driver’s seat of a pirate TV station that films and shows all of the horrors of space. Are those horrors real or just made up for the TV, well the players and characters get to decide that. I love the TV aspect of horror. My favorite Call of Cthulhu games are set in the modern era with the players taking on rolls of TV employees. And one of my favorite cult horror films is Videodrome which clearly Omendrome drew heavily from when they wrote the adventure. So Mothership, ARKYVR and Omendrome just hit my buy list for 2026.

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In February of 2019 Ron Burgandy started his podcast. You know, Ron Burgandy, “Stay Classy San Diego”, the fictional 70s character from the movie Anchorman played by Will Ferrall. 
When Will Farrall started the Ron Burgandy Podcast was when the AV Club announced that “Everybody has a podcast.” And that’s not far from the mark. But while the sentiment might feel like it’s a bad thing I completely disagree. The ability for everyday people to broadcast their thoughts, hobbies, ideas, and passions to the world for like minded people is truly one of the great marvels of our world and we should embrace it instead of making fun of it.
I started my first podcast in 2020 when the world was shut down and in 2023 I started this one to showcase my love of roleplaying. Since then, I have listened to hundreds, hell thousands of podcasts, many have come and gone but the ones that endure and become successful do so for a variety of reasons. That’s what we are going to talk about today on this Behind-the-Scenes episode of Epic Adventure.
Joining me today will be my friend Malcolm from the Finding Atoria Podcast and we are going to talk about whey we started our podcasts in the first place, the challenges of getting them off the ground and how we keep them rolling from week to week.
Malcolm, who’s idea was it to start the Finding Atoria Podcast and how hard was it to put together that first episode?
[Kick to Malcolm]