Transcript
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Have you ever discovered something about yourself by playing TTRPGs?
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What do you do when using a character voice challenges your identity? And Wouldn't we all rather stay home drink tea and read a steamy romance novel than go out and kill monsters?
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Hello, friends welcome to characters without stories, a TTRPG podcast about the roads not yet traveled. I'm star. This episode I'm joined by Caroline Vahrenkamp, a suburban parent of two who does silly d&d character voices on TikTok from time to time. Caroline's podcast wonders of the world is about all of the amazing places on earth, and the cultures that created them.
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Caroline, I'll give you a chance to plug your projects at the end. For right now, do you want to tell listeners a little bit about yourself?
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I started playing TTRPG is in the summer of 87 when I was 11 years old, and I was first introduced on a little vacation weekend with some friends to basic d&d. Basic d&d was so basic, that elf was a class. So I played that, and I was like, it was kind of fun.
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And then I met another kid that was going to be in middle school with and he introduced me to advanced d&d, where lo and behold, races and classes were different. And that got me in.
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And so then I started playing Middle Earth role playing, where I learned how to DM and Torg which is still one of my absolute favorites because basically the earth like today's Earth, is invaded by alternate realities. And when you go into those alternate realities, like magic might go up or spiritual power might go up or technology might go down or might go up.
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And so you had these like crazy alternate worlds combining with Earth, like France was now the cyber papacy. It was like the Avignon papacy had stayed and gone to the future and become cybernetic, so it's like the Terminator meets the Spanish Inquisition. It was cool. And then the Nile empire, like the Nile Valley was the pharaohs back so it was still very, it was like Egyptian mythology. But it was set in like the 1930s film noir. So it's superheroes.
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Early comic books kind of thing meets the mummy.
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It was awesome. That sounds amazing.
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Yeah, so I played that. And I love DMing. And I love playing characters. I love doing voice things. And then when I went to college, I had to do something cool. I had to be cool. I had to change my image, not be so nerdy. And so I put TTRPG away, and didn't play again, until the pandemic. So I really, really, really long time.
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What got you back into it?
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My kids. I have two kids bored at home, right?
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Because the school was closed.
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And we were all on lockdown. And I'm like, You know what, maybe fun to do d&d. It's still around. Let's try it out. We got the Essentials Kit, and they have a good time. And I've just remember, like, suddenly, like, reconnected with the oh my god, I love DMing. I love telling the story. I love playing all these characters, cheering them on when they do well, and then having vicious laughter when they don't. You know, it's so much fun. So it turns out, they were up to like level 11. But they were so worried that their characters were going to die, that they just stopped playing.
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Oh, no, I didn't tell me. They didn't explain that was the problem. They just said, Oh, well, we're all done. Other things to do, are not really interested. And I only learned that like two years later.
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Oh, oh, okay. So Caroline, who are you bringing to the table today?
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I seldom get to play as a player. Really seldom. And most of my character ideas that I have come from NPCs that I play in a campaign. They end up really liking. I'm like, I want to know more about this person.
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I want to like flesh them out more and make them so that they transfer into basically a PC fully loaded care cheat big background full stories for personalities, but I don't use them is already done in the campaign. But then I'm like, Well, I can always bring them to the next one. They're never isn't that the one I try. So this character I'm bringing.
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It's actually it's kind of meaningful for me. I was taking a group of friends in person, like adults through lost mines of Phandelver right The beginning Starter Set adventure.
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And the very beginning of that adventure. If you're familiar with d&d 5e, a starter set, you start with the goblin ambush.
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Goblins ambush the characters and often can kill them. So in this case, it was a really dicey thing. And they ended up winning and killing all the goblins except one, we're going to keep him alive to ask questions. So on the spur of the moment, I had to like, Oh, crap, I hadn't really thought about like, who these goblins are and what they sound like and what their deal is, and like anything at all.
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And so I just defaulted into a Liverpudlian accent. So Jurdgel's a goblin, as a customs official on this simply stops passengers as they go through all the road charts to tell them not to do it doesn't really want to go to war is not really a fighter who likes to sit in his cave by the fire and read romance novels, it's more comfortable thing to do. He's more of a homebody than anything else. But you know, when you work for the goblin kingdom, you have to do your chores and have to serve in the armies. And so off, he goes, well as a customs official, so we make sure that you know, all the deliveries are taken care of. And only if they happen to be taken care of away from the people who had them before and somewhere else was fine. That's a bit of all right.
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So the idea of Jurdgel the customs official Goblin and I ended up bringing him back over and over again, because it's just so challenging to have this character who's so divided in his attempts and what he's gonna do, it's becomes more of a challenge to figure it out. How does he adjust to actually having to kill you know, how's he adjust life in adventuring circles, we'd much rather be comfortable, you know, the plush carpet. He's really more of a hobbit than a goblin. Yellow.
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All right. So that's Jurdgel.
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Jurdgel Sharptooth, spur of the moment thing, and my players were just like, Oh, my God, we love Jurdgel. We got to keep him around, and then nearly got him killed twice. And they dragged him along everywhere. And it was hilarious. But I think he'd be a really, really fun character to play in a campaign, right?
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Someone who is legitimately skilled, right? I mean, he's a rogue, he's a scout, he's got pretty good abilities for being nimble and quick and sneaky, right? But he just much rather sit with a cup of tea, you know, to sit.
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You know, if it came down to whether I'd want to go out and kill some dragons, or sit at home with a cup of tea, I think I'm gonna choose the tea.
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It's just more comfortable it's an easier place to be.
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Was he then required to learn all of these rogue skills?
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Some of it comes out kind of naturally, right?
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Goblin, nimble escape or whatever is one of those classic things. So awesome. leads naturally into brokenness. I know, we're trying to like, you know, with, with monsters in the multiverse, or whatever, they're trying to separate out the idea that every one of our racist particularly stereotypically acts, but a lot of the physical traits they keep in and so you know, dark vision and being nimble and quick and fury of the small or whatever, the goblin things are now all lead to a life of rogueing. And so yeah, I mean, from his standpoint, would he rather be on the front lines where things could get bloody messy and deady? Or would you rather, you know, work in that in the customs department. And by customs, I mean, rating, right, stealing things and running away.
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I was gonna ask, I'm like, What is a goblin customs department look like?
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Well, they're very official, they have badges you know, require people to show their papers, and then they, you know, kill or incapacitate them and take all their stuff. Taxes, right customs duty. Yeah, of course. It's just part of, you know, civilization. So in the campaign that I had built, the goblins and the goblinoids because they were all kind of together, right. We're craving the trappings of being included in civilization. Right and I got a lot of this from reading Volos and I guess I say no more bolos but hobgoblins in Volos are incredibly well organized. They are incredibly lawful and focused and they have libraries in every encampment and barracks right every hobgoblin fort's gonna have a library now yeah, it's mostly nonfiction stuff like it's dude books right like geography right military tactics. What's a world war two stuff right you know, a dude library. By I have had love this idea is like wow, you know, they're really, when you compare actually they're as quote unquote, civilized as anybody, right hobgoblins when they conquer a place, they don't kill and maim, destroy enslaved, they just simply say, Okay, fine, you work for us, you send us taxes, and we're fine. And it's like, okay, yeah, that's actually a pretty remarkably good thing to do. Do I allow dissent? No, they do not allow dissent. Or they pro free speech? No, no, they are not. But they are also not like needlessly cruel. And I found this kind of concept.
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Fascinating. I was thinking, what if you had hobgoblins, who weren't necessarily even evil, but just, we want to be accepted as equals in a society that has favored humans, elves, dwarves, halflings. Right. We want to be part of that. And so they have these trappings. Even though they are a very small group, this like little tribe I had were very small, but they had a king and a castle and ranks and all the trappings of civilization that they saw, right, the books that they had read, said, You have to have barons, and you have to have jesters and you have to have, like all these things, they read in these feudal romance novels, they felt to have all of those things, so they could finally be recognized among the kingdoms of the earth. And among those were customs duties, taxation officials have to have them, even though they are still doing what they had always done, which is raiding taking things, you know, because they don't live in an area where they don't have like access to agriculture. Like they can't grow enough for themselves. So they have to take to survive. But I just thought it like a fascinating concept, and sort of played up with that.
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Yeah, you said feudal romance novels. Do you mean like actual romance novels or or novels that make feudalism romantic?
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Oh, in their case, gosh. So I would say both, both those that are like, oh, you know, courtly love and the things that we have like, but also, yes, steamy sex scenes.
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Nice. Yes. George particularly enjoys that.
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Is it something where, you know, they rated and they had a library and they were like, we want the romance novels, or they're like, we got the library. Let's look at what we have. Oh, look at these.
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These are what we're interested in.
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More, the latter are more what really more they would raid. The places that reading don't have libraries, they don't have books. The goblins are far better read than any of the human rural towns that are in their area, like those places are just struggling mining towns and little farm Hamlet's they're mostly all illiterate, they don't have anything. So the goblins are actually far more better read, far more literate, far more capable. But they're like all we have our military history books. So we need more.
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So they would raid they would take the money. And then they would send people to the cities to buy books. And they go to the cities and go to booksellers and things and just like what do you have? Whatever they didn't need for like survival purposes or investment in the community, they would go buy books to build up the library. And that's where the romance novels came from.
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Because you're buying books.
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Beggars can't be choosers, right? You're just saying, what do you got in the, you know, the one copper pile outside Barnes and Noble
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fantasy Barnes and Noble, of course, I love that they chose military strategy and geography and romance. Those are the things they gravitated towards.
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It's just you know, what else is there when you get right down to it?
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Are you personally a fan of romance novels?
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Now, that gets into a lot of personal psycho analysis?
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Yeah, we don't have to go there. If you don't want to. I was just curious.
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I mean, ultimately, and where this is all gonna go.
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You've obviously made a choice to make this character And then we're using one of the reasons that characters are kind male. Is that a difficult choice for you?
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It's hard. It's is hard. And a lot of it is because of hard and in a way, playing TTRPGs is hard is I'm trans. And the voice is, it's the hardest part. Right? Undoing the damage, I can't do accents and voices and modulations and things. In the untold damage of testosterone is it's almost impossible. Very few people can pull it off. I've only been able to do it with like this nasally pseudo California Midwestern accent, I have somehow given myself because I can like, click it. But if you notice, when I go Liverpudlian, it drops, right, right? You'll just hold it like this. And it's a much more natural baritone when my normal horse has been as weird for me to talk about like now if I try to go back to that, to my old voice, it's almost impossible.
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the new voice. I had to go back to the old ways to pull it off.
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A lot of like my orcs almost always from West Texas. They got kind of a attitude about them will get militaristic, community minded, full hearts can't lose that kind of thing.
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Oh my god, I love that.
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And nightwatchman always are cockney. Now they can be like what's always then, but I can't tell you how to do a noble get into English. And I can't really do a straight ahead, it ends up not being good. First of all, for some reason I can do Liverpudlian, better than any other English accent. But it's just really hard for me to do it in the feminine. And it becomes really hard. Because even in characters that I'm not creating, right, even in NPCs, as a general rule, I was having a really hard time because I can only gender swap the characters so much like I can't expect the characters to think they're on a world without males interacting. But if I'm in a male voice too long from an NPC, I start getting misgendered by players, which is hard.
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Yeah, I can imagine.
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And that goes to romance novels, which is that there are almost no romance novels written would make me feel really uncomfortable.
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Because there's not they're not written with a trans woman audience.
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So then it sounds like you made a couple of personally difficult choices when building this character.
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Yeah, yeah. And that's part of the challenge, too. It's funny, because the joke is, you know that everyone who plays d&d and D is queer in some way sort of happens. And being able to experiment so I had I'll tell a quick little story of the campaign I ran with the kids the Essentials Kit, Dragon of ice spire peak because the module, the follow ups of that have two primary big bad evil guys. One is like a high priest of a god of death, who controls undead and raises an undead dragon like a Draco Lich to do evil things.
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And then the other one is a female, half orc barbarian slash cleric of a storm god. So she's trying to take over everything with this army of lightning fueled kind of barbarians. In a way I just don't get the idea.
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So as I was fleshing out these characters, and this is before I transitioned, I still thought I was a guy, I found that the cleric of death I made really boring, like just really boring, middle aged, punchy, balding, sort of the the kind of person that you feel obligated to invite to family gatherings, but you don't really want to talk to us in the background of all the family photo, but you don't really like him. And that's what drove him to hang out with the undead because they don't judge just incredibly boring. Kind of like talks like this. Did you hear about the incident in the swamp? It was very exciting. Oh, you just really terrible.
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Meanwhile, the half orc, I just went crazy with her ferroli red hair that was always wind swept, even if the air was still exciting, adventurous, always on the move driven, constantly matching wits against the player characters able to switch to like genteel and urbane if she needed to, and then able to, like, rough it with the guys if she needed to. And she was just so tempestuous and so just vibrant, right? storm god cleric, right. Yeah, Tempest domain, she's gonna be not. And I found that as I was like doing this, like, Wow, she's so cool.
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And this dude's such a boring rag, like, what's going on here?
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And I was like, it was like, a month later, I'm like, oh, shit.
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Oh, I have learned something about myself. So I'm really grateful to have had the opportunity right to be able to play those different characters perspectives, and that's one of the things that TTRPG is particularly do really well and really open up to people. But it becomes an after the fact situation where like you're revisiting and reopening old wounds, that can be challenging.
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Yeah, I think it's interesting. The act of inhabiting a character that's different from yourself can often give you the ability to kind of test the waters when exploring aspects of your personality and your identity.
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With Jurdgel you obviously gave them a very interesting quirk and that they love romance novels. And I think for me, sometimes the quirk is what really draws you into the character. What makes them the NPC that you bring along with you on the journey? Yeah. Is that something that you do when you're building a player character as well? Like, kind of where do you start?
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Yeah, absolutely. I honestly, with player characters, I start with the quirk with a few, very few that I've been able to build, or I've been in a campaign, I start with the was an interesting thing I wanted to inhabit, I want to play. So I was in a campaign that I love the idea of somebody who was who like went to school because their parents said, you have to go to school. This is your the expectation, you're gonna go to university, you're going to be educated, you're going to get the degree, but somebody who just they're not meant for that, really not, like intellectually gifted. And so in D&D terms, it means like a low intelligence score, basically, but super charismatic, and ended up gravitating into library science, because they could pretend to be smart to please their parents, but they always had books so they could rely on for the information. They'd have to do the thinking for themselves. They could just research so they weren't great at putting two and two together.
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They're good at knowing this book says What's up, then the backstory, basically, they found a genie ring and became a warlock. And suddenly, they're like, Oh, check it out. I'm a super powerful wizard, because I'm so smart. And they're faking the whole thing. And I love the idea that they carry the books around. They know about books, right? But they're dumb as a brand. You know, she was she was a half Drow her parents are both adventurers. I love half elves, because I love giving them the worst names. Because I love the idea of like they have this beautiful elven first name, and their last names like Smith.
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It's like Galadriel Jones.
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That's totally how it works, right? I mean, they like the ones that live up in human societies generally have these beautiful elven first names. And the ones that grow up in elven societies generally have these like human first names. That's canon. And Smith is totally legitimate name in any fantasy setting, because just means your father was math. Your family of blacksmith, totally legitimate name. surname was Volantis Smith. She's beautiful half Drow that everyone thinks is like a super powerful wizard. But now she's a warlock with a genie in her ring.
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I love that. Sorry, I keep going back to the romance novels. But again, it's that quirk that really like pulled me in. I think it's interesting because romance novels are something we usually associate with femininity. And obviously, that's not really the case. But we think of romance novels as something that women read that men don't read.
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And that's fair.
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Was that part of that choice for you that kind of going against a stereotype?
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Not consciously. It was just I was trying to think of again, that the quirk that make Jurdgel unique, not just that he was really trying to legally justify the crimes he was committing but also just like they did like okay, you know, he he'd much rather not be here in them cold and rain. He'd rather be someplace cozy with a fire going to meet grilling, roasting in the oven and, and reading a book, I thought, what would he read in somehow the idea of a romance novel which a doomed love between an elf man and a dwarf woman sounded really appealing again, it was in the library because somebody got it at the bargain bin, because he's just trash. There's a literary value. But for him, it's just it's this world that he can't get to, and sort of an opening into understanding this world around that he was limited in reaching. I mean, I guess it could have been, it could be any number of things he was reading, but I just love the idea of doom bromance trashy, you know, bodice Ripper on the cover.
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It's interesting that you bring that up as a way of exploring other cultures as well. Yeah, you know, maybe there probably aren't a lot of goblinoid romances.
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I mean, there could be depending on your setting. But yeah, yeah,
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but kind of in the way that you were talking about your world is that goblins were kind of set apart. Being able to read about a culture that you're not a part of, is an interesting way to approach it even though it's not history of the world. It's sounds like they were also reading those kinds of histories too.
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That's also my own experience. So I was a French cultural studies major my duties in French cultural studies. So I read all these classics of French literature in the original francais. And I learned more about we'll culture just reading trashy Belgian graphic novels, because he's got a more real world view of what people are liking what they do. who and how they think and how they act.
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When you get if you read L'étranger, you know, I mean that sounds right. It's amazing, the stranger to amazing.
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Oh yeah, I love that book, being able to inhabit kind of an everyday person, you know, almost like we inhabit characters, but being able to hear from a character's interior, their what they're feeling and thinking as well.
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Yeah, in a couple of ways L'étranger is kind of going against stereotypes. And when you're talking about your other characters, while you're you're halfway out character is they're kind of at odds with an aspect of their personality. You have an elf who is expected to be a wizard, who is instead of Warlock and kind of pretending to be something else. Is that kind of an approach that you tend to take?
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Now we're getting into therapy?
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Yes. The whole the whole idea of like, pretending to be something that you're not, and not being able to really be who you are.
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Yeah, no, that's, that's a theme consistently. In my entire life.
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Yeah. It took just 44 years to figure it out. But yeah, yeah.
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Is it something that's, that's conscious or subconscious for you?
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It was subconscious for ever. Now it's more conscious. I was in a band, right. I wrote songs. And I'm from Nashville, Tennessee, originally, they give you the guitar, when you come out of the womb. We on the radio, we played gigs, it was cool. And looking back at lyrics, things that I wrote, when I was 20, 23, 18, 16, that range when you're, you're miserable, and grungy and angst ridden, and you write a bunch of song lyrics. And honestly, half of them were about wanting to be a girl. And I did not even think about it did not click in my head at all.
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Because it's all veiled. And it's all metaphor. And it's all just, oh, it's written from somebody else's perspective. It habits pretty much everything I do now, too, is that there's always something underneath the surface. And there's always the sort of playing against type.
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I'm about the same age as you, I think, maybe only a couple years younger. And I think for people around our age, growing up, gender identity was a lot less fluid. It wasn't something that we had as much access to in terms of having role models to look at or people who were not transitioning.
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Yeah, none. I mean, I knew I was six by I didn't have the vocabulary. I didn't really understand that was even something somebody could do. I didn't have there were no, there were no role models. My best friend growing up, we were in Boy Scouts together. We're altar boys together. He's gay. I went to his gay wedding over the summer, year over to their St.
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Philip's. He always talked about how real in grace didn't exist.
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When we were young, there was just no visibility, and that was sexuality. From a gender identity perspective, it was punchlines and jokes. My daughter has been watching The Simpsons, and every episode for like a 10 year 15 year period has a joke about trans people every single episode, and it is your punch line. And so Lord knows you don't want to admit that you wouldn't dare. I didn't dare. And then eventually, I'm like, Well, I guess I was stuck as this. So I'll accept that.
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It's never too late to discover who you are. And to live that. And I love that.
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100% true.
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So going back to Jurdgel, their adventuring story starts when they meet the party and get kind of dragged along.
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In that case, yeah, but I would love to bring Jurdgel back for a campaign where he's like meeting a bunch of people in the tavern. Jurdgel could fit anywhere, as long as there's a cozy place he can yearn for. Otherwise, he's sort of like he feels duty bound to like Shuffle Along. We're gonna go find the dragons like whoa, rolls. I'll get so good. I thought the Dragon will totally want to fight the dragon.
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Ultimate just have a cup of tea.
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Ah, I mean, he feels this obligation. Okay, I'll come along. He's gonna grumble a lot about it.
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The reluctant adventure trope?
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Yeah, it's probably overplayed. But
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no, I, to me, I think what's interesting about that approach is then you have to find a way to justify why they keep adventuring, and what they kind of discover about themselves or about that life that they enjoy. Whether that's getting the power to do something to accomplish a task, or whether it's just finding yourself or finding an affinity for it.
00:29:29.660 --> 00:30:02.150
In George's case, it was it loyalty to the new friend friends, you know, just a key felt loyalty to his country, and loyalty to the king and loyalty to like, do his job. He's fiercely loyal to people, especially if they show that back. If there's kindness and friendship and all these things he reads in these books. Does he ever think he'll find Baba himself? Well, maybe. But in the meantime, he'll settle for friendship and he's fiercely loyal to his friends.
00:30:03.289 --> 00:30:08.359
If Jurdgel was going to have a motto to live by, what do you think that might be?
00:30:09.140 --> 00:30:10.789
Do we have to go in there?
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I love that.
00:30:14.599 --> 00:30:17.630
Wouldn't it be easier just to wait for them to come out?
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Well, that's good, then the monsters won't get their lair actions.
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You can wait an ambush. You shoot your arrows you you hide, shoot again. I mean, Super Lethal. He's super lethal. Because again, he was obligated to do that. But yeah, you'd rather just not get messy.
00:30:38.240 --> 00:30:45.650
He sees the monster killing or the death, he has to deal as an obligation then to the other party members.
00:30:46.490 --> 00:31:17.240
Yeah, he's a really simple like, he's not driven by a desire for wealth or power. He really likes a simple life and can be very comfortable. This living suddenly, as long as books and a fire and tea, he's fine. But if he's loyal to a group of friends and group of friends are like, Hey, this is important to us, then it will be important to him. And so it's that that fierce loyalty that kind of drives him more than anything else. Like he's not driven by a sense to do good.
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He's not driven by a feeling that he owes it to the world to help the disadvantaged or anything like that. It sounds nice, but it doesn't really move him. But it's the loyalty of the friends that does, which is both good and bad, right? Because it means that if he's in a party of good people, Paladins and doers of good then he'll jump right in and do good. But if it's a party that is of murder hobos, he'll, he'll murder hobo along with it just out of loyalty.
00:31:44.089 --> 00:32:00.829
You know, for me, I really struggle with playing a character that doesn't do good, that is comfortable doing the morally wrong thing. How is that for you? You're a DM first and foremost, and so you're gonna have to play evil characters.
00:32:01.490 --> 00:32:18.289
I mean, the thing is, there are very few very, very few rational thinking creatures or characters do evil just to do evil, right, there's almost always a rationale. There's almost always something that they're working towards, right?
00:32:18.500 --> 00:32:28.099
Whether it's riches, power, praise from others, they truly want people to bow down before them just they get off on that.
00:32:28.519 --> 00:33:01.609
Awesome, right. And those can be evil goals. But I mean, there's a goal, there's a reason something driving them to make the decisions they make. And then they're just willing to accept that the ends justify the means. So even if it means things happening, that perhaps they would not do in a vacuum, they will do it because it helps them achieve that goal of whatever that goal might be. And in some cases, you know, like, my kids watch this French cartoon show called Miraculous Ladybug and Cat Noir superheroes in France. That's pretty good.
00:33:01.849 --> 00:33:18.799
So the bad guy there is super, super, super, super evil. But he's evil, because he's trying to get the power to bring his wife back to life, because his wife died far too young. And he's trying to bring her back.
00:33:15.079 --> 00:33:39.079
And to do that he needs these things that the heroes have. So he's trying to get them from the heroes, but it ends up driving him insane because he keeps failing. Because it's kids cartoon show, right? It just gets more and more megalomaniacal, more and more driven to evil for evil sake.
00:33:33.769 --> 00:33:42.140
Even though he had this goal in mind, the goal starts becoming less and less meaningful to him.
00:33:42.140 --> 00:34:51.139
So it's those sorts of things happen when playing characters like that. So in Jurdgel's case, I mean, he's just a really true neutral guy. And I find neutral alignments to be easily the hardest alignments to play. I know we're not supposed to be into alignment anymore alignment supposed to be out. But I do think it's helpful to kind of serve as a guidepost for behavior. And your traditionally, there's this notion of neutrality as separating from the world, right? Being Switzerland, we're not going to pass judgment on anybody. We're not going to get involved. And then the old d&d druids had to be true neutral, and they couldn't be associated with doing good or doing evil, following the rules or being chaotic. But I think someone like Jurdgel has a much better example of traditional, like someone who really could go any way depending upon the people around him. And I know that sounds like it's always so it's succumbing to peer pressure, but it's not that simple. It is, you are meaningful to me. And so your goals are meaningful to me.
00:34:45.769 --> 00:35:06.440
And those goals and how you choose to achieve them. Maybe good, maybe evil, maybe lawful, maybe chaotic. I'm gonna follow along. Just that understand that when push comes to shove, I'll be there. But I'll be wishing I were at home.
00:35:08.420 --> 00:35:11.119
Jurdgel. Can you tell when someone is flirting with you?
00:35:12.900 --> 00:35:21.228
No, not even a little bit mainly because I don't think anyone does. And I'm three and a half feet tall comma bad teeth.
00:35:21.297 --> 00:36:02.730
Nobody wants to talk to me but it'd be nice if they did. I don't know. I guess it's possible somebody was flirting with me I'm trying to think back. Those that know what to think he just really wanted to like, you know, saw me decorative gourds. Because, you know, he was a decorative gourd salesman. I said that I didn't want any because you know, I don't really have room and I wasn't really hosting any events but he was like, No, you've got to have the decorative gourds. I don't know, sort of hacky tacky Git. Yeah, I dunno I hadn't really thought about it doesn't really seldom come up.
00:36:02.730 --> 00:36:09.608
That was a whole journey that answer from I don't know to somebody's trying to sell me decorative gourds. I love that.
00:36:09.666 --> 00:36:13.980
That's a very DM answer, I think to me is letting that take you somewhere.
00:36:14.940 --> 00:36:17.628
Sort of happens.
00:36:14.940 --> 00:36:19.110
Stream of consciousness. Jurdgel just a little keeps going.
00:36:19.860 --> 00:36:26.940
Caroline, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing Jurdgel with us. I had so much fun.
00:36:27.630 --> 00:36:29.010
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
00:36:29.820 --> 00:36:33.059
So how can people find you? What kind of projects do you want to share?
00:36:33.059 --> 00:37:11.137
In this world? The easiest thing is finding tick tock. I'm on tick tock all the time. I did a Jurdgel voice and then when that was like my one big viral moment, most people followed me and they're like disappointed that I'm not constantly doing voices. If you do like history, travel and food, wonders of the world, I've been doing it for six years. I am currently on an unofficial hiatus, mainly because I just cannot get the energy together to edit three hours of interviews that I had for my next episode. It's so daunting.
00:37:11.208 --> 00:37:27.570
That's a lot. Machu Picchu is the next episode. So basically wonders of the world. I'm looking at world history through the lens of the great places on earth. It is yes. 60% history 30% Travel 10% food. Because you got to eat.
00:37:27.570 --> 00:37:30.150
It's hard to talk about food on a podcast.
00:37:30.980 --> 00:37:33.539
I know! I give recipes?
00:37:33.719 --> 00:37:38.699
I know I listened to the one about I think it was Mansa Musa.
00:37:39.210 --> 00:37:42.809
That had been the Timbuktu episode. It's like a peanut stew.
00:37:42.900 --> 00:37:45.269
Yes, yes. Yes. That's it.
00:37:42.900 --> 00:37:45.269
Yeah.
00:37:45.809 --> 00:37:52.469
You would not think that fish sauce would fit but it is. Ah mazing.
00:37:53.099 --> 00:38:11.398
So, so good. You can find me on Tik Tok as well at St AR M A M A C that star mama see. You can also listen on YouTube just search for characters without stories. Please like subscribe, rate, review, share with your friends share with your mom.
00:38:11.789 --> 00:38:26.728
Every little bit helps. I'm currently accepting submissions, particularly for non d&d characters. So if you'd like to share your character, you can go to the submission form at characters without stories.com.
00:38:22.619 --> 00:38:28.978
Thanks for listening, and may all of your characters find their stories.
