GMBC ep23 - From Goblins to Game Masters: Navigating Political Intrigue with Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor
Katherine Addison
The Goblin Emperor
Speaker A
00:00:00.240 - 00:00:00.560
Foreign.
Speaker B
00:00:07.360 - 00:00:35.100
Welcome to the Game Masters Book Club where great fiction becomes your next great tabletop role playing experience.
This episode, George Krubsky, Marshall Schmidt and Eric Drix are back to talk about one of my favorite books of all time, the Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. We talk about the gorgeous world building, how rulers affect gameplay, fantasy name syndrome, do we even need humans in our fantasy worlds?
And that one time that Eric doomed a character with a single word. All right, let's get into the conversation.
Speaker C
00:00:36.860 - 00:01:13.150
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Game Masters Book Club. And I have three returning game masters here.
All of us are very excited to talk to you today about the book by Katherine Addison, the Goblin Emperor. So today our game masters are going to come and talk to us about this fantastic book and they're going to talk to us about rulers.
Have they played them? How do they run them? How do having rulers in their game affect their tabletop role playing games? And today we're going to start with Eric.
Eric, please tell the folks a little bit about your gaming journey and about rulers in your game.
Speaker A
00:01:13.230 - 00:02:16.690
Great topic. So my name is Eric Drix. I'm a longtime game master from the Pennsylvania Philadelphia area and I've delved into this one a number of times.
I've played personally as a prince, which was a real fun time. Got very jealous of the adventuring group in my kingdom because they had all this freedom and I didn't.
I also ran a campaign, it was the Dark Bane campaign where Dark Bane was the royal family. And I had one person that played the essentially one of the princes of that campaign world.
And the rest of the players sort of played his support cast and were manipulating everything behind the scenes and around him, which led to some very funny moments because he had no clue what was going on half the time. But it's very similar to our previous conversation with sentence to war.
If you're putting any PC or any PCs above others, you have to make sure that person is a good steward. The campaign set up so that they're still every person has their agency.
Speaker C
00:02:16.850 - 00:02:21.010
Absolutely agree. George, do you want to continue on with our ruler question?
Speaker D
00:02:21.620 - 00:02:21.860
Sure.
Speaker E
00:02:21.860 - 00:03:09.310
So, okay. So I'm George Krupsky. I've been role playing for many decades. Most recently I ran some long term Star wars and Firefly campaigns.
I have some experience playing a ruler, although it is nowhere near as relevant to today's discussion as Eric's is. I was in a high level Dungeons and Dragons campaign where I played a king, but we were not in my kingdom. I was out adventuring with my old friends.
It was third edition. It was three, I think 3.5. So we were like, I don't know, 14th level. So the spellcasters just solved everything.
So my king's main objective was we had dragons as our partners, shape shifting dragons. And my goal was to bed my dragon. So that's my royal experience.
Speaker C
00:03:09.870 - 00:03:15.150
There we go. A truly kingly duty. Marshall.
Speaker D
00:03:15.150 - 00:03:46.590
So my name is Marshall Smith and longtime player in DM and sometime writer. One of the things that I did write on was 7th Sea and I've run several games of 7th Sea. I have played as a noble and run nobles in that.
I've never had a campaign where actually running the kingdom or duchy or whatever was part of the play. It was always very much relegated to the background. But it's something I've always kind of been curious about.
Speaker C
00:03:46.950 - 00:06:33.100
You've been kingdom curious is what you're saying? Yes. I'm the other Eric on this podcast. My name is Eric Jackson.
I've been playing since the Pleistocene and I will play any game anyone puts in front of me. But as far as kings go, I personally have never played a member of the royal family.
In my current campaign, my characters are guarding one of the heirs of the kingdom. That's part of their whole purpose is to be there to guard a prince who, who is touched with a special ability to fix the thing.
In this case Elemental Rifts. And it's their job to keep him safe so that he can do the one magical thing that fixed the Elemental Rifts.
And these Elemental Rifts pop up all over the place. So they're sort of his like bodyguard group.
And a lot of times he gets left behind in like a really safe place and they go off and do the thing and then they bring him in. So he doesn't play a huge role, but he is to, to a certain extent like his safety is this constant issue that they're always trying to deal with.
So he also technically is in charge of a small part of the kingdom.
But again, much like Marshall, we've never really gotten to the really fun aspects of taxation and in courts and determining, you know, what is the true law of the land. So doesn't sound like any of us have really run something specifically like the Goblin Emperor.
So why don't I tell the folks at home what this whole book is about.
The Goblin Emperor focuses on Maya, the ill used and discarded half goblin heir to the Elvish throne, who is suddenly thrust into ruling when a skyship carrying the emperor and his two other heirs explodes Thus begins a fish out of water story and a fantasy steampunk world.
Unlike most of these stories, the magic, mayhem and murder are in the background, whereas the character relationships and outstanding world building are brought to the front.
We experience a barrage of strange sounding names and titles so intense that there is an actual glossary that's there and a number of sites online which talk about how to understand this book.
Which allows us to experience in part Maya's own overwhelming panic of his situation of being in an unknown place under an ugly imperial bureaucracy that does not want him to be emperor. Fortunately, the story focuses on decency in adversity as Maya finds allies and eventually his feet to become that rarest of things, a good emperor.
Throughout his journey, we see intricate world building in a world with tall white elves, dark eyed goblins, magic and clockwork culture and religion, and enough linguistic exploration to make even Tolkien fans happy. I get it.
Speaker A
00:06:34.230 - 00:06:35.190
I think you nailed it.
Speaker D
00:06:35.510 - 00:06:35.990
Perfect.
Speaker C
00:06:35.990 - 00:06:43.750
But did I miss anything? Is really what it is. What to you folks were the themes that you really took away from this particular book? Marshall, do you want to start?
Speaker A
00:06:43.750 - 00:06:44.150
Sure.
Speaker D
00:06:44.390 - 00:07:27.540
I will admit that the first time I started book, I did not finish it because Byzantine political thing not my jam. I was enjoying the writing, but the story, just around the time of the coronation, I just lost it.
Eric put this out as us to do for this episode and so I picked it up again and I'm very grateful to Eric because by the time I finished the book I had started to enjoy it again and I really loved it by the ending.
There is a lot of great character work in this book and a lot of really nice touches just all throughout the book of little bits of world building that make it all come alive.
Speaker F
00:07:27.980 - 00:07:28.460
Excellent.
Speaker C
00:07:28.460 - 00:07:31.100
Eric, did you have anything to add to the themes?
Speaker A
00:07:31.260 - 00:08:16.810
Yeah, it was the idea of the character really being Maya, being thrust into everything and seeing how they not only find their own confidence in an unfamiliar territory.
I think a lot of people can sort of relate to that, you know, whether it's not you're coming into a new job, a new type of supervisory position or anything like that, where you have new responsibilities and being unsure of yourself and sort of finding your footing and finding ways to work with subordinates and create a loyalty work with people to really support others and create loyalty and build these, I'll quite say literally build these bridges, I think is a great takeaway from the book.
Speaker C
00:08:17.210 - 00:08:18.010
Good one there.
Speaker A
00:08:19.450 - 00:08:20.890
I do try.
Speaker C
00:08:21.850 - 00:08:23.370
George, anything you want to add?
Speaker E
00:08:23.940 - 00:08:57.040
Sure. I think that it is, as Eric alluded to a little bit already, it's somewhat similar to Sentence to War that we read last.
You know, it's sort of about a hero put in a.
A protagonist put in a situation where nothing is under their control and they're surrounded by a bunch of rituals and characters in very specific roles. So I, you know, it's a very different type of book than what I usually read.
I would describe it, and I'm probably gonna say a couple things during this discussion that makes it sound like I didn't like the book, but I did. I would call it Jane Aust, Game of Thrones.
Speaker A
00:08:57.040 - 00:08:57.400
Nice.
Speaker C
00:08:57.400 - 00:08:58.240
It's a good summary.
Speaker F
00:08:58.240 - 00:08:58.800
Absolutely.
Speaker C
00:08:58.880 - 00:09:23.000
Now that we've dived into the literary merits of this particular book, why don't we actually talk about how we might want to use this in. If we wanted to run a game just like the Goblin Emperor, what sort of RPG would we run it in? I'm going to ask that Eric take the lead on this one.
Eric, if you were going to emulate and evoke the Goblin Emperor, what game system might you use and why?
Speaker A
00:09:23.000 - 00:09:57.150
Well, the first one that comes to mind is Court of Blades.
It's really a TTRPG that really emphasizes court, politics, intrigue, and even reputation as you go about dealing with different royal houses and things of that nature.
The second, I would change how I'm running it between Court of Blades, but the other one would be D and D. I would run it more as a behind the scenes thing where the players might have more options for action or running around and subterfuge and things of that nature.
Speaker C
00:09:58.190 - 00:10:10.550
I agree. Being the emperor, as is illustrated in the book, is quite limiting, surprisingly. George, I understand you had an interesting take on this one.
From an RPG standpoint, I don't necessarily.
Speaker E
00:10:10.550 - 00:10:52.230
Have the range of modern RPGs at my hands that you guys do. Obviously, it's a very different game, would be a very different game than a lot of what we're used to playing.
I don't have a system to pitch per se, but my friend Ed passed away last year.
Before he did, he had been working on a game that was based not around things like strength and dexterity and intelligence, around personality traits. So I would probably look for something like that. This is not.
Would not be a campaign that's about how well you can fight or, you know, whether you can climb the wall or not, but how credible your empathy is, how strong your focus truly is, things like that. So that's probably what I would look for.
Speaker D
00:10:52.390 - 00:11:35.720
All right, Marshall, as I mentioned earlier, this kind of politicking is not really my jam. So I've never played anything like this. But the game I would go to to do it would be Greg Stoltz's Reign.
I am a big fan of Greg Stoltz in general, have been for years. I do own Reign and I've read through it at one point but never played it. But it is an RPG that is all about doing this kind of politicking.
The PCs belong to a company.
The company has stats and dice and whatnot and can take actions and gain and lose abilities as a company in order to track your effectiveness as a faction. That's what I would pick.
Speaker C
00:11:35.800 - 00:14:23.950
I am in the opposite place where you are Marshall in that I would desperately like to run and or play this, but I have never found the players who are willing to play it. So I'm on the other end. It's other end of that. I've never found anybody who's like, you know what I want to do?
I want to run a deeply bureaucratic, interesting, courtly intrigue kind of game. Not yet. I'm going to find them though. It's going to happen.
And when I do, the game that I want to use is very similar to kind of what you were proposing, George, which is the game called the Burning Wheel. The author of this game, the primary author of this game, Luke Crane, said that this is the game where you fight for what you believe.
It involves dice pools and tests against those dice pools. But really what the game is about is about fulfilling your destiny and working to be the kind of person who you are supposed to be.
All of the abilities that are listed, part of the character creation is your beliefs. And you get traits based off of those beliefs. And as you act on those beliefs, that's how you earn experience points.
In the game the experience point is called Artha, which is named after something to do with karma and really cool stuff like that. But the Arthur comes in three types. Fate, which is like manifesting your character's destiny.
Persona, manifesting who the best person you are or who you can be and deeds, which is fulfilling various heroic deeds or deeds that that are part of your character. And you can spend Arthur to basically level up your character either temporarily or permanently.
So that on top of the fact that you start the game very much with a traveler esque sort of beginning where you you don't roll, but you do pick. And that allows you to gain points to build your skills and you can pick different life paths.
And the game actually suggests that unless you're a really experienced player, you should not start with one life path, but you should start with like three. Three life paths, because that's more of a seasoned adventure.
And if you wanted to start with sort of a high level campaign, you can pick up to six to eight life paths. And each one of these life paths would improve your abilities or give you some background or do this sort of thing.
In this regard, it's similar to Traveller, except you can't die in character creation as you can famously in Traveller. You can, however, give your character permanent wounds, disabilities, trauma. All that great stuff is built into the game.
So if you wanted to run the Goblin Emperor that you should use Burning Wheel. I currently have the Gold revised edition and it looks great.
Anybody else have RPG stuff they want to talk about before we get into the portables that we can steal for our own campaigns?
Speaker E
00:14:23.950 - 00:14:26.470
I'll just say, Eric, good luck. Good luck finding the group.
Speaker C
00:14:26.550 - 00:14:27.630
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker E
00:14:27.630 - 00:15:22.830
Doubt that it can happen. When I was in high school, I ran a long term superhero game, very X Many. At one point we lost some of our players to I believe, SAT study.
We're down to just two players and the other player wound up running at that point a sequel campaign to my game that was set like three, four years in the future where the team had fallen apart and so I was the only player. But it was about me trying to put the team back together.
And I swear there were like whole sessions where I would just be like, okay, I'm going to break into our old headquarters and paint the rooms so they look nice.
So it was not as, you know, it was not as rigid as Goblin Emperor, but it was definitely much more of a. I think it was like five sessions before there was a fight is what I'm getting at. So it's out there. You just need the right people at the right time.
Speaker C
00:15:23.230 - 00:15:35.750
If you got some people who are really into say White Wolf's Vampire, because Vampire is very much like an interseen court intrigue. It's just they're bad guys. You just have to find some people who want to play good vampires is.
Speaker E
00:15:35.750 - 00:15:45.990
Pretty much what I. I will point out that my friend Ed, who I referenced, the first game that he ran that I played was White Wolf Vampire. So. Yep, that'll. That'll bring it right back around.
Speaker A
00:15:46.070 - 00:16:30.800
Yeah, I was thinking of how I would run this and you know, I was thinking of having, well, you have that one person in charge and everyone else beneath them. But then you'd have these long scenes where the other players are sort of waiting do anything for agency and things of that nature.
And then I was thinking about Web. You just played the support people. That's where I was going with D and D, where they are playing everyone around, but not the emperor themselves.
But what do you guys think about, let's say emperors dead, royal family's dead, and there are four to five vassals that have been chosen or that are now going to run the kingdom without an emperor. So all five players are essentially part of a ruling council where they can all have agency.
Speaker E
00:16:30.800 - 00:16:31.640
Could be interesting.
Speaker D
00:16:31.990 - 00:17:42.200
I was just thinking one thing you could do to avoid the. You know, everything focuses on the emperor and everybody else is just sitting and watching the emperor do things is abstract.
A lot of the general play away into moves.
So as the court mage, I spend a move which lasts a week, something like that, in order to make the mage academy better, in order to attract more students to the academy or a better caliber students or whatever. Or in turn, I as court mage, partner with the other player who is playing the general. And we come together to make magically enhanced troops.
And you don't have to play through all the details, but you just. You're making moves on a high level. In order to try and make that sort of thing happen, you would need a system that's balanced out to support that.
But it doesn't have to be a walking through every single day and playing through all the conversations to keep everything interesting.
Speaker A
00:17:42.200 - 00:17:42.640
Yep.
Speaker C
00:17:42.640 - 00:17:52.800
No, I agree.
If you were going to go with a group of people, as soon as you said a group of people who were doing things and the king wasn't there, I was like, well, what about Pendragon?
Speaker A
00:17:53.080 - 00:17:53.240
Right?
Speaker C
00:17:53.240 - 00:19:18.850
You could. You could run an Arthurian game where the Knights of the Round Table are the ones who are running things. And Pendragon's been around for ever.
But I don't know how high level that is to match with what you're saying, Marshall. But I was like, yes, there we go. We could just get a bunch of knights who run the kingdom. And that could be really interesting.
The other way to handle it, of course, is to do the troop play in like that's in Ars Magica. Ars Magica has this thing where everybody has a bunch of characters and there's. It's a bunch of wizards who live in a tower and.
And everybody has a wizard. But the wizards don't actually go on adventures with each other. They just all occupy the same space or they rarely do.
And when like say Eric's wizard goes on a thing George has is the knight who protects him. And I play his servant slash thief character who goes into town and does stuff.
And Marshall plays the team of like five ogres who go around and beat people up for the wizard. Right. And everybody has their own. When we switch wizards, everybody switches characters.
So you could do a troop play like that if you wanted to get different people having different amounts of power at different time.
You could play a session where you're the Lord Chancellor and we're all your minions and we do stuff and we do things and then George is the counselor of the exchequer and maybe you could do it. That's a method, but I don't know. Again, we got to find these people who want to do this game. Like that's really what I think it comes down to.
Speaker E
00:19:19.330 - 00:19:20.810
Yeah, I mean, let's, let's be honest.
Speaker C
00:19:20.810 - 00:19:24.210
Somebody besides me needs to, needs to be interested in this.
Speaker E
00:19:25.570 - 00:19:27.810
Most role playing is about hitting things.
Speaker C
00:19:28.370 - 00:19:52.280
Yes, it definitely can be. So it's it. That is definitely on the list of things that happen during role playing games. We cannot argue that they started as war games.
And so it's sort of buried in their DNA, no matter what we do. But speaking of being buried and things that we wanted to take out, like we would if we were going to be grave robbing.
God, that was a terrible segue, but we're going to keep that one in. Let's just grave robbing.
Speaker A
00:19:53.240 - 00:19:53.680
All right.
Speaker C
00:19:53.680 - 00:20:08.160
So speaking of grave robbing, Eric, do you want to start us up and tell us if you're going to take something from this book particularly and drop it directly into your own campaign? What would you take from the Goblin Emperor?
Speaker A
00:20:08.160 - 00:21:58.530
Absolutely. I'd love to be the first necromancer of our group today. So the. There are actually two things given a lot of thought.
So first is humans tend to be the species in most gaming systems that bind everything else together. By extension, they tend to be the most adaptable.
And sometimes, depending on the gm, they sometimes don't have as much flavor in their own culture as compared to what an elven city looks like or Dwarves city looks like or, or their own culture. So no humans remove them from the equation.
Let the players play these really polarized and focused cultures and species that there's a ton of material out for on dwarves and elves and goblins and things of that nature. So you take away that sort of tie that binds and really focus it on different species in their culture.
And the other is how often have you guys ran campaigns where players defeat the villain and turned out they had children or a wife and you get this sort of like, secondary villain that comes up, you know, the. You killed my father or mother or you defeat, you know, defeated them. I must avenge them.
But the Goblin Emperor really introduced that sort of theme of, well, the sins of the parent and that there are some people that are just going to be innocent collateral damage that are going to be felt and letting the players deal with that collateral damage in a.
However they think they should, you know, give them that chance to be, you know, the villain's children that were innocently dragged along into this, are they going to forgive them? Are they going to take them underneath their wing? Are they just going to kill them, you know, and give them that sort of.
That sins of the parent and how they want to deal with it. Those are the two things I would probably take away.
Speaker C
00:21:58.530 - 00:22:09.330
Yeah, that second one is pretty cool. I. I really like to see how some players would handle, like, if you show up and they're like, oh, I'm a big fan of yours, you know.
Speaker A
00:22:09.570 - 00:22:09.970
Right.
Speaker C
00:22:12.210 - 00:22:37.800
That actually happens in for the Throne of the Crescent Moon, where the evil sultan, his son, actually is a big fan of the roguish guy who wants to come in and overthrow the king. And he's like, oh, that's awesome. My. My father is terrible. I'll show you where he. I'll show you how to get to his room so you can kill him.
And I'm like, whoa, George, anything that you would want to lift out of this and drop into one of your campaigns?
Speaker E
00:22:37.800 - 00:23:07.540
So I like the cast of characters and the subtlety of development, you know, how smoothly some of the change in evolution was. In fact, I mean, if, you know, if I were going to run a game based on this, I would probably consider something like a direct sequel.
Sideline the Emperor in some way and have the players be like his bodyguards and the betrothed and some of the other characters, and they're trying to figure out what happened while also keeping the kingdom in working order, maybe without damaging the Emperor's reputation.
Speaker C
00:23:07.540 - 00:24:28.360
You're not far off. The other three books that are in this series, the Witness for the Dead, the Grief of Stones and the Tome of Dragons.
Yes, they do get to have dragons later on in this series. This follows the side character who's doing. Conducting the investigation about the skyship being blown up. Farrah Kelleher.
He's the Witness for the Dead, hence the second book in this series.
And it really just follows that character within this really well developed world that we get as the Goblin Emperor almost becomes a sort of a prequel novel for this series. Of mystery novels where. Where he is solving mysteries that are occurring. I think all of them involve at least one murder.
But there are all these mysteries that are taking place in the kingdom, and there's also government corruption, and there's also. Within the religious orders, things are going wrong. And this character, this very.
This very emotionally reserved yet deeply caring character is the focus of this. And he gathers allies much like. Much like Maya does as the books go on. And they're all a bit more on the same plane as opposed to like, you're.
I'm the emperor and you are all my servants. Is this more like, hi, I have a friend in the cartographer's guild and I have a friend over here and wanted to run it.
George, it sounds like you'd have way more fun in the following books than you would in, say, the Goblin Emperor.
Speaker D
00:24:28.360 - 00:24:28.920
Gotcha.
Speaker E
00:24:29.000 - 00:24:35.640
I mostly just want the fiance and the bodyguards to team up. That's the book I want.
Speaker A
00:24:35.720 - 00:24:36.200
Nice.
Speaker C
00:24:36.200 - 00:24:39.880
You need some swords, man. There were just not enough swords in this book for you?
Speaker E
00:24:40.520 - 00:24:45.880
Well, but they don't really stab anyone. They just talk about swords. But they were my favorite characters.
Speaker C
00:24:46.360 - 00:24:51.010
Yes, like. Like you want the sun sword, but you want people stabbing people with the sun sword.
Speaker E
00:24:51.490 - 00:24:54.690
There doesn't need to be stabbing, but maybe we see the sword.
Speaker A
00:24:54.770 - 00:24:56.530
Point taken. Point taken. Literally.
Speaker C
00:24:57.490 - 00:25:02.370
Marshall, do you want to add to our. Add to our pile of stolen goodies?
Speaker D
00:25:02.610 - 00:25:44.490
So there was nothing that jumped out at me that I really wanted to steal in a large sense. There were a lot of really great little world building moments. I loved the title of Witness, which is used as more than just a type of investigator.
Witnesses have a very important general role, and you can be witnesses for a river, so that there is somebody there to be the spokesperson for the river's interests. I thought that was fascinating.
There was a little bit where he received a note that had a special knot on it that I felt was like Celtic knot work more than a physical knot. It was a great. It was a great little scene.
Speaker E
00:25:44.580 - 00:25:44.700
Yeah.
Speaker C
00:25:44.700 - 00:25:52.820
I was gonna say we. I looked this up when you mentioned this the other.
It's called a Nesho and it had like the little gold bead that you had to pull on in order to get it to pop off.
Speaker D
00:25:52.820 - 00:26:07.020
Yes. And I was like, that was. That's just such a cool little thing. And there were a lot of great little things.
None that I think I would pick necessarily to put into my game, but that I love just in general, to.
Speaker C
00:26:07.020 - 00:26:12.780
See the idea that these are the small touches that should go into every campaign. Like to really bring it out.
Speaker D
00:26:12.780 - 00:26:13.460
Exactly.
Speaker C
00:26:13.700 - 00:26:14.180
Yeah.
Speaker A
00:26:14.500 - 00:26:15.740
Yep. Okay.
Speaker C
00:26:15.740 - 00:27:27.030
Fantasy Name syndrome. I'm going to talk about it. We all know we want to talk about it.
I was going to talk about the Bridge, which I absolutely love, but I just couldn't help myself.
I think that normally when we find a speculative fiction novel that leans hard into names, I can think of dozens of these books where the naming conventions and titles and all that stuff feels like it distracts from the good stuff.
But I think in the Goblin Emperor, it really serves as a way for us to experience Maya's sense of overwhelm, being overwhelmed by his elevation to emperor. And I think as a gm, I would like to try something like this. If we were going to introducing characters to brand new cultures.
I think the idea that there's just all of these different things sounds cool.
I don't know how I do it without being frustrating to my characters, or at least I basically have to get them to buy in and be like, this is going to be frustrating because you guys don't know anything about this stuff. And I know from experience that players do not like to not know.
Speaker D
00:27:27.430 - 00:27:27.830
Right.
Speaker C
00:27:28.150 - 00:27:32.230
So what do you guys think? I mean, am I. Am I just wishcasting here?
Speaker D
00:27:32.550 - 00:28:01.110
So I will say that one thing that might help is look at Pern as an example, more than this, in that she had that same kind of special naming convention, but they were all one or two syllables instead of like six syllables per name. And so they were more pronounceable, more easily remembered. Also, suffixes. Sticking to suffixes might really help.
Speaker C
00:28:01.190 - 00:28:02.630
Fair choice. Anybody else?
Speaker E
00:28:02.810 - 00:29:20.520
I'm going to say that when I started the book and it opens with like a linguistics lesson, my first thought was, anger at you, Eric, for picking this book. That's fair. So to project that onto a campaign, you got again, I'm sure the group of players is out there for it.
But like, I mean, Eric, in our current game, like, we spent five sessions referring to one guy as the fish guy. I still don't know his name.
I mean, I can say my approach to gaming when I'm running a campaign is that the world exists independent of what the heroes do. So there's a lot of stuff going on and there's a lot of characters with their own agendas. And my players are.
I mean, I've been playing with the same group of people with essentially the same core of people for almost 30 years at this point. So they know my style and they know what they're in for, but they're still like, I'll Mention the name.
And they're like, okay, who plays that character? Because I cast everyone as well. And I'm like, that's Christopher Walken. They're like, oh, that guy. Okay.
As someone who is playing with a conscientious and focused group of players, they don't know the names of half the regular characters, much less if I started doing linguistics stuff.
Speaker C
00:29:20.600 - 00:29:53.600
I still remember it was my game. I was. But it was. A character had named her to name her horse Tide Runner because she was a Pat. Was like her paladin's mount.
And I don't know how it happened, but that. That horse became Toilet Duck really fast and. And they never got rid of that.
So, yeah, I suppose maybe resting games on names might not be the kind of thing that you can do in a tabletop situation, just given the general juvenile behavior of most gamers.
Speaker E
00:29:53.760 - 00:29:56.800
My group's not juvenile, and they just don't care.
Speaker C
00:29:56.960 - 00:29:57.680
Yeah, okay.
Speaker E
00:29:57.680 - 00:30:08.240
I mean, I'll be honest if you asked me to name the characters in our game right now, Eric. Yeah, I. I don't know that I can name them all. And I mean, the players.
Speaker C
00:30:12.400 - 00:30:15.920
We are playing online, so you're not looking at them, so.
Speaker E
00:30:16.160 - 00:30:21.200
Oh, well, I am looking at them. I'm looking at the initiative order. Every day we play.
Speaker A
00:30:21.360 - 00:32:16.670
I've seen the good, good and bad with names and campaign settings. So when I was saying that, I was like, all right, how would I want to approach as a player?
And I take a lot of notes, and a lot of my players take notes, which is great. Some just say, hey, can you pass me a glossary of all the information and titles and everything? So a lot of times I like.
If I'm going into a new campaign setting, I'm like, I don't want knowledge history. I don't want anything knowledge, politics or survival for that would indicate I know the world.
I'm like, I'm going to be a newbie to this world, and this way my character will get to know it at the same time. So I think if you started introducing these things slowly to. Into like the same campaign world.
So, like, they visit the Royal Court, they pick up a couple titles and names, and next time they visit, they might pick up some different titles and names that they have to interact with.
Almost like learn teaching people a new language, but let them get to the new language in the campaign setting slowly instead of throwing them in might help the player adoption of these new titles and names. That's my thought on it. But I like it just on a name standpoint I had one of my players had taken a more of a Greek name, Aeneas.
And I was phonetically wrote things out and I messed that up. Oh, boy. Yeah, you guessed it.
And it was like, I'm just reading through the initiative block and real quickly, and I'm like, okay, Anus, you're up next. And I just quickly moved on. And I. I looked at him and yeah, it really was. I was like. I was like, I mean, Aeneas, what do you do for your initiative?
Like, I tried to play it off. Like, I didn't do it, but everyone else heard it. So the person after the session was like, yeah, I need to switch the character. I was like, oh, God.
Speaker D
00:32:16.750 - 00:32:17.190
Yep.
Speaker C
00:32:17.190 - 00:32:21.230
And that's it. That's the end of that character. You can never play that character again.
Speaker A
00:32:21.390 - 00:32:22.670
Not my proudest moment.
Speaker C
00:32:22.990 - 00:32:24.510
George, what did you want to add?
Speaker E
00:32:24.510 - 00:33:24.120
I was just going to say, you know, I don't want to come off as fully cynical about it. I just, you know, I'm just trying to be realistic and a little funny.
But I do think if you wanted to go heavy into the linguistics, there's many good articles from screenwriters about naming conventions and keeping characters distinct and concepts. There's one. And this piece of advice is maybe relevant, not just naming, but for a lot of gaming stuff.
One of the writers, I think it was on ER said that if you're dealing with, like, linguistic mumbo jumbo, whether it's sci fi, whether it's medical, whatever, you can do two or three sentences of that, but then you need to give the significance to the audience. So talk all you want about the details of what's going on with the patient, but then punctuated with, or the patient will die.
Yeah, and it's very easy, I think, for us to get seduced by the quality and intricacies of our worlds, but if we don't make sure that the players know what that means to them, then it gets lost.
Speaker C
00:33:25.800 - 00:34:00.990
There we go. That's a great place to wrap that up. I'm going to throw in not a promotion, but a suggestion.
I've started using gmassistant Apple for my game because no matter how good of a note taker I am, I never do it well. And since we play online, it generates a transcript and actually also the AI does a summary.
So this is one of the few things that I think AI is good for, is like summarizing all the things that we talked about over the course of four hours of a game. That's great. That's what I want. AI to do so if you need to take notes and remember all of those names, the gmassistant app is really good at that.
Speaker E
00:34:00.990 - 00:34:04.150
So again, just pronounce Aeneas correctly.
Speaker A
00:34:04.150 - 00:34:06.030
Oh, all right.
Speaker C
00:34:06.030 - 00:34:20.710
So speaking of pronouncing things correctly, now that we've talked about how we would play the game and what we would take if we weren't running the game, let's talk about things that feel that have the same vibe. So, Jord, you want to take us on with media recommendations? Sure.
Speaker E
00:34:21.190 - 00:35:23.980
So, you know, as. As I alluded to earlier, I do feel like there's some thematic similarity between Goblin Emperor and Sentenced to War.
It's, you know, both are a protagonist whose life is not going the way they thought it to be in a highly ritualized world, and we'll leave it at that. If you like the linguistics. Of course, there's Tolkien to lean into. A little bit of a wild card. Something that I just read recently.
My daughter had to read it for school, so my wife and I decided to read it as well. The Devil in the White City. I think it is about the 1893 World's Fair.
There's a whole subplot about a serial killer, which is where the action is, but most of it is sort of just about the creation of the World's Fair and the various personalities that had to interact together.
It's not as ritualized and as stylized as Goblin Emperor, but the idea of this sort of individual using his will to create something new and having to deal with a lot of people who maybe are not as on board with the new version of things was definitely strong in that book as well.
Speaker A
00:35:23.980 - 00:35:24.540
Awesome.
Speaker C
00:35:24.780 - 00:35:27.980
Marshall, any other good vibes media?
Speaker D
00:35:28.060 - 00:36:10.060
There are all kinds of epic fantasy that come back mind for me, especially from the 90s era. The one that I really want to call out is the Dragon Prince series by Melanie Ron. That's the one that kept coming to mind.
It is very similarly about the Dragon Prince as a character attempting to bring together a bunch of principalities that are around him into one unified kingdom and his political struggles in doing that. It's got much more of a Dragonriders of Pern vibe to it than this very baroque, intricate, stylized atmosphere.
But that's the one that I most identified with it.
Speaker A
00:36:10.060 - 00:37:17.370
Eric. Right. So this was really my first exposure to this type of fantasy book.
I've read plenty of other fantasy, so initially came to mind was sort of that Game of Thrones just for the political, not for the combat and nudity and sex and all that that's in Game of Thrones, but more the political behind the scenes in other media. I was thinking about it and actually came to mind. Last night was my favorite Korean drama called Lee San Wind of the Palace.
It focuses on the Joseon Dynasty period of Korea.
And it's a really historical fantasy that focuses on a young king that's really thrust into navigating this political intrigue, deception, betrayal, and some of the side characters and how they're involved.
There was even a story arc in that series where they had to meet with construction people and they were building a huge pontoon bridge over the major river, which was historically accurate to the time period. So that really is the big focus. I mean, in the first part of the book, of course there's King Ralph, but I'm not going to go into that.
Speaker C
00:37:18.090 - 00:37:20.810
Nothing wrong with King Ralph, man. Nothing wrong with King Ralph.
Speaker A
00:37:20.810 - 00:37:22.090
Nothing wrong with King Ralph.
Speaker C
00:37:22.490 - 00:39:37.790
I have a couple of books. The one that I think is the closest possible is the Tainted cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, just came out this year.
It's a fantasy mystery, so you've got a lot of that. And it does focus more on the mystery and less on the court stuff.
But it is good people in an imperial bureaucracy that are trying to rid it of corruption and make it better. So it's great. It's very similar to the Goblin Emperor in that way. It also has more magic and giant Kaiju that are trying to destroy the empire.
So I, you know, again, I think that's a plus. So the Tainted cup by Robert Jackson Bennett on the good people solve problems spectrum.
But having a princess who escapes her life as a princess and goes out and solves problems, I would recommend the Tea Princess Chronicles by Casey Blair. We recently did another one of Casey Blair's book, the Sundered Realms, as one of our episodes. So.
But this was the series, actually, I read first, and this is. This has a princess who goes into hiding and starts running a tea shop.
And that puts her into a place of diplomatic neutrality, which allows her to solve a whole bunch of really interesting problems. So in that regard, still fantasy, more diplomacy, but not 100% in the court.
But finally, if you're talking about the heart of the film, if you're talking about the idea that under adversity, goodness arises, I can't recommend anything more than the 1993 movie Dave with Kevin Klein. Great movie about a good man.
For those of you who are too young to know this movie, a good man who is a presidential impersonator takes over for a comatose president and brings innate goodness to a cynical and corrupt government. That's why I've read this book six times.
I've read it in the last couple years because I just want someone to go in and be good and make the government better, which is why I picked this book in the first place. Anyway, that's getting a little off topic. Well, okay.
Speaking of our civic duty, as would be the main point of Dave is fulfilling our civic duty, does anyone have any promotions that they want to put out that they want to tell people about good things that are happening that we should tell folks?
Speaker D
00:39:38.030 - 00:39:57.670
So one I want to bring up. I don't know if it's still going to be relevant by the time this actually airs, but I just found out about this this morning.
Amazon is making a number of interesting changes to how Audible pays out royalties that are well, evil corporation being evil.
Speaker C
00:39:57.670 - 00:39:59.150
Evil corporation being evil.
Speaker D
00:39:59.550 - 00:40:24.030
Robin Sullivan, who is the wife and business manager of author Michael J. Sullivan, put together a petition on Change.org and apparently has enough connections in the industry that she can actually get this petition in front of Amazon executives. And so I would like to just bring it up and you can go check it out.
I put a couple of links on the discord so that you can check out some of the details about it.
Speaker C
00:40:24.030 - 00:40:26.470
We will definitely attach it to the show. Anybody else?
Speaker A
00:40:26.630 - 00:40:48.890
So just from a very personal standpoint, I had recent family member that is now battling with cancer so I will just do a shameless plug for the American Cancer Society. So I know things are tough all around but that one struck at me personally. So people have things they want to donate or help there always recommend.
Speaker C
00:40:48.970 - 00:41:26.370
I was fishing around for something else entirely and I ran into diversity saves.org which is grants for creators of TTRPG stuff that include and focus on bipoc, LGBTQ neurodiversity and disabled gamers. If you are working on a project that in that and you have you put emphasis on this, you can get grants.
So you should go to their website@diversitysaves.org so I know all the people who listen here are creative people who make stuff. So if you're making cool stuff for those communities, go check that out.
Speaker D
00:41:26.450 - 00:41:26.930
Nice.
Speaker B
00:41:28.050 - 00:41:44.410
And that was the Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, brought to you by the emperors of gaming themselves, Eric Drix, George Krubsky and Marshall Smith. Thank you gentlemen for another fantastic discussion. Come back to listen to them when we discuss Spellslinger by Sebastian D. Castell.
Speaker F
00:41:44.410 - 00:42:29.510
You can find a complete transcript of today's discussion as well as links to all of our podcasts@k-square productions.com GMBC you can learn about upcoming episodes on our social media on bluesky@gmbookclub, bluesky social, on Facebook @ gamemasters book club, on Mastodon Amasters Book Club, and on Instagram @GamemastersBookClub. If you've enjoyed the show, please like subscribe and comment on our episodes in your chosen podcasting space.
And be sure to share those episodes with your gaming community you've been listening to The Game Masters Book Club brought to you by me, Eric Jackson and K Square Productions. Continued praise and thanks to John Corbett for the podcast artwork and Otis Galloway for our.
Speaker B
00:42:29.510 - 00:42:35.870
Music. Join us in two weeks when Rick Steck, Michael Sainir, and Mauricio Cordero discuss Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue.
Speaker F
00:42:35.870 - 00:42:42.680
Deconnick. Later, gamers and to to paraphrase the great Terry Pratchett, always try to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising.