"4-Sided Dive: Fly Into The Danger Zone" (4SDx03) is the third episode of 4-Sided Dive, discussing episodes of the third campaign up through "The Hellcatch Valley" (3x24) with guests Taliesin Jaffe, Matthew Mercer, Liam O'Brien, and Travis Willingham.
Synopsis[]
Provided with permission by Eponymous Rose.[1]
Tonight’s guests: Matt, Liam, Travis, and Taliesin! Dani immediately declares an end to the faux-conversation we start on, which is probably for the best. Matt is tonight’s Tavern Keeper! Matt, dying slowly on the inside during the opening: “I have bones in me, I guess.”
What the Fuck is Up With That?
Matt: “We got topics, motherfuckers.” Travis thought they were just going to see a repeat of the paper layout for the skyship from campaign 1 and was blown away by the new piece. Matt had it commissioned a while ago in the expectation that they’d wind up doing skyships at some point relatively early in this campaign. There’s a long digression about Teddy Ruxpin. Liam: “I have no idea why, Orym is in love with airship.” There’s another digression about Top Gun, and Liam points out that Travis’s shirt looks like it has a little propeller beanie made of jets. Taliesin: (sing-song) “Someone’s going to the danger zone!” Taliesin points out that since he ruined the last attempt they did at ship-to-ship combat, he’s been craving it on the airship. Travis: “You can totally DM that, right?” Matt: “Just make enemies with people who have skyships now.”
Matt asks about the cast’s lasting impressions of Jrusar. Taliesin teases that they didn’t get to see a lot of the cool stuff while they were there. Everyone wants to know more about the tunnels under the city, to the point where leaving that behind feels like the Happy Fun Ball. (Matt mentions they only saw about 20% of the HFB.) “It reminds Orym of home in that you’ve got all these amazing structures, but there’s so much nature woven in and around it.” There’s a digression about salmon fishing in Alaska. Yes, truly. First impressions of Dusk? Taliesin: “She’s not broken enough to be a local.” Lots and lots of questions, early days yet!
Favorite form of fictional travel? Skyship is popular. Travis: “I love a good teleport and apparating/disapparating.” Taliesin: “I’m a Nemo kid, I love a submarine. Deep underwater freaks me out.” Liam: Blaine the Monorail in the Dark Tower series and the landstriders from The Dark Crystal. Matt: “Fanboats. I grew up in Florida, I know they’re real but they shouldn’t be.”
Tower of Inquiry!
Liam pulls a (still-sticky) block. “It’s a good thing this is glued together.” We’re talking modern AUs - which occupation would the characters have in the modern world? “Orym would either be in the New York Ballet in Swan Lake, or he might be a coach for track-and-field. Or an athlete himself in the Olympics. I think I’d go ballet.” “I think Chetney would be a woodworker… or a dentist. Would really enjoy it, really.” What about Ashton? “That’s pretty easy. He would work in an ice cream parlor. Hate it and have no customer service whatsoever. That’s the best shit job for a punker I can think of.” “Eshteross would be a mysterious venture capitalist.” How about the Shade Mother? “She’d be in season four of Stranger Things. Character actor.”
Tower of Inquiry, round two!
Travis pulls a block! The whole thing nearly comes down. What would the characters’ Twitter bios look like? Dead silence contemplating that for a few seconds. Travis: “It would be CPock Industries. he/him, no instant gratification, 18+.” Matt: “Little link to your Etsy page.” Taliesin: “Anime character, nothing but obnoxious political retweets. Might actually say that in the bio.” Taliesin, to Liam: “I’d have a Soundcloud, you’d have a Tumblr.” Liam: “It would say pie is better than cake.[2] Might have a link to a YouTube channel of different workouts, probably.” Taliesin: “Halfling your way to health.” There’s some discussion of Robbie Daymond’s hiking. Travis: “This is for you, Robbie. Stop summiting stuff.” How about the ship captain? “All pronouns, all caps. Free spirit. Seeing the world. Will do it all. Again. Link to my OF, but it’s mostly just them making food.”
Tower of Inquiry, round three!
Taliesin knocks a block straight onto the floor, but the tower remains intact. “If your character was a candle, what scent would they be?” Travis: “The scent of rusted pennies. The scent of pine, birch, oak, …” We have a digression about Nag Champa incense. Liam: “How would you mix sweat and cherry blossoms?” Eshteross? “I will say a ginger spice. Beyond that, I would say a musky cedar.”
Deep Dive time!
Liam gets asked about seeing Clasp connections in Marquet. He’s blown away by how much has propagated from the first campaign and the home game. Travis remembers very little about the Spireling structure. Matt: “Each major city that has Clasp involvement, the Spirelings are essentially the collection of leaders that organize that sect of the Clasp wherever they are. Shenn has been one of the power players in Emon.” Matt mentions that he always dreamed of running a game that would let him connect threads between campaigns.
Liam: “Everybody in this building is really randy about Calamity right now.” Matt: “I’ve wanted something to happen in that era for a long time, and it wasn’t until we were talking with Brennan, we were talking about different things, mentioned the Age of Arcanum, and he just went like, we’ll talk about that one.”
Taliesin is asked about the return to Bassuras and the prospect of finding the Nobodies. “I don’t think they’re there, first of all. Not really a person who likes to look back or ever deal with things that were in the past.” Taliesin just assumes the Nobodies scattered to the four winds. “It is like going to your hometown with your friends, really. This town is shit. This bar is great. I like writing characters who don’t want to deal with their shit.”
Matt is asked about collaborating on the Hellcatch Valley. “The wonderful Bashir Gaus has been helping write with this. I’ve outlined the continent’s main regions, and certain ones are primarily my creations, and then go through consulting and things like that.” But other regions, he offered to the collaborators for whatever caught their interest. “What inspires you? Go.”
Travis is asked about his Calamity character, Cerrit “Pinch” Agrupnin. “I felt like I had to rep a little bit of just that straight melee class.” As soon as he started getting how detailed things were going to be, he wanted to be the one trying to connect the dots that others were missing. I based him off of John Cusack in ‘Con Air’.” Travis thought it was a great excuse to try an eisfuura and an inquisitor rogue. “Holy shit, the stuff you get as a rogue is crazy!”
Liam is asked about bonding with Chetney. “I mean, I think he was rightly super skeptical of Chetney but oddly finds himself really getting along with him. Chetney kind of fills a casual grandpa slot for him, and that’s fun to be around. We gotta work through some things, you might have some anger issues, but Pop-pop’s got a good heart in there.”
Taliesin is asked about inspiration behind Ashton. He hadn’t done punk yet. “What the fuck does punk look like in a fantasy realm? I watched a bunch of Henry Rollins talking about his life.” He also watched documentaries about the punk scene in the 80s and 90s in LA: “The Decline of Western Civilization III”. For Fundamental Chaos, that was just wanting to create something difficult and complicated.
Matt is asked about the fey influence in this campaign. It wasn’t something he wanted to pull into the campaign initially, but between Fearne and some of the other players having a fey-touched influence, he realized there wasn’t all that much of it they’d explored in earlier campaigns.
Travis is asked about the toy-making process. “Now there have been multiple nights where I’ll just search ‘wooden’ and a bunch of different words.” What would Chetney make for the illustrious DM? An orrery.
The Tower of Inquiry Continues!
Travis is chosen again. It’s Very Dramatic. If gold didn’t matter, what would the characters’ first purchases be? Liam: “Buy the group a skyship outright.” “Chetney would make a hostile takeover bid for all the toy stores in half the continents so there’s still some left to be conquered.” “Ash would just buy that whole chunk of property that they’ve been living in in the Spires.”
Post-Break Shenanigans!
Exploding Kittens! If you get knocked out, you can ask other people questions from their tankards. Liam is eliminated extremely early, so it’s his turn to ask questions. How does Ash feel about being debt-free? Is the other shoe going to drop? “Oh, it’s going to drop any minute. Good things don’t happen to people.” How about Chetney’s revenge? Is this new for him? “Chetney is experienced with death. He definitely has a moral system, a way of judging people. The slate has been wiped clean for now.” The inspiration for Eshteross? “I wanted to introduce a unique possible patron to the group that– I didn’t mean to create a ‘Batman Beyond’ Bruce Wayne figure, but when people started pointing it out…” Travis is eliminated! He asks Liam about going to Bassuras on a bit of a side-jaunt from his plot right now. “He’s much more powerful and in a better place with this group, these are his friends now, and it’s gotta be a give and take.” Matt is victorious! Last question for Travis: what was it like to lose control of the wolf during the heist? “I had forgotten about it up until that point. I like it because then you have to RP out of it or around it.”
Round 2! Taliesin asks if there’s anyone in the party Chetney doesn’t trust. “There’s more than one!” Travis is out first this time! What does Orym think about the Grim Verity? “He’s really happy to have some more learned people with him. Feels over his head, so he’s just glad there are a couple of brains in this group, intelligence scores aside.” Matt is out and asks about what Chetney thinks about the Gorgynei. “Wants to learn from them, because it’s been so long. If it’s real attractive, he might run away.” Liam is victorious this time!
External Links[]
References[]
- ↑ Originally posted at https://eponymous-rose.tumblr.com/post/686460413732388864/4-sided-dive-highlights-critical-role-c3e22-e24.
- ↑ See "By the Road" (E1x04) at 3:07:21.
Art: