The Beginning of the Scornful Swords
Welcome to A Dungeon Master Exposed. If you’ve never heard of Dungeons and Dragons or don’t know what a TTRPG is, I may not be the kind of dungeon master you seek. But since you’re here, you may as well stick around—I will occasionally talk about leather armour and whips.
The first episode of the Scornful Swords playing Dungeons and Dragons was created on April 6, 2022. We were still fresh in the pandemic with social distancing and just getting used to being back out in the World. My friends and I decided to join the many streamers out there with our game of Dungeons and Dragons.
I was streaming a game with another group that wasn’t going so well. Our schedules rarely matched up, so I decided to try another group and see how it worked. We’d all played D&D together before, so we knew each other well.
The eight episodes we did were an excellent time playing. This Dungeons and Dragons campaign was based on Icewind Dale, and many of my ideas and original storylines and characters. The players’ choices altered the storyline, and it was pretty fun to see where our imagination took us.
In the first episode, I still had many technical troubles. I had given up on my 2012 MacBook Pro and would have been working on my Mac M1 with a 13-inch screen at that point. I was trying to run two instances of roll 20, the Zoom chat room, OBS, and all my notes.
OBS didn’t always broadcast the audio from the desktop (which meant the Zoom conversation didn’t always get recorded). Often, it would take me twenty minutes to figure out how to get it to record the audio correctly.
My friends were patient with me as I did that. Unfortunately, as I was trying to get the program to work, I was getting increasingly frustrated. I couldn’t understand why it worked sometimes but not other times.
I’d learn many months later that it was a problem with the Mac OS. When OBS 26, I think, was released, that was the same time that a new Mac OS came out. Then all the audio problems were fixed. But during the months when the issue existed, I’d spend so much brain power trying to figure out a fix that, because of my undiagnosed ADHD, my working memory was exhausted by the time we started playing.
I had to try to manage the story with an exhausted working memory. I had to try to remember the rules and sometimes improvise situations; I made up a lot of rules, just on the fly. I tried to be as fair as possible, and many times, I was not correct in making up the rules.
I was very new to being a Dungeon Master as well. I was learning all the rules myself, and sometimes, in your games, you’ll get a rules lawyer who will know the rulebook backwards and forwards. They can tell you what the rules are, and you can adjust. But this time around, I did not have that.
It’s different when you know the rule and decide to do something different instead of just making something up. But because we were streaming, there was a time crunch. I made decisions right then and there, some good and some bad, but my players kept coming back–so they must have enjoyed my game style.
Between the first and last games, I had ten players join the game (not all at once). Episode One, Kars, For Sale, Ravenfriend and Vesovir began the journey. Episode two, For Sale left the game, and Azariah joined. In episode three, Azariah left and in episode four, Vesovir and Ravenfriend travelled solo.
In episode five, I had a player I met on the Foundry VTT discord join as a wizard (no idea what his name was). He journeyed with Ravenfriend for that session.
In Episode Six, a woman joined but only wanted to know if she could play a Pathfinder class that didn’t exist in D&D. I spent hours every night for a week creating the class in my online virtual tabletop. She only played one session and then disappeared.
At that point, I should have given up and accepted that this was too much work. But…ADHD hyperfocus was activated…I persisted. Episode seven was when Cass and Twig joined the adventure. They changed the group dynamic, and suddenly, the game and the streaming…well, the game…became fun.
The streaming was still a nightmare at that point. I’ll talk about that later on. Cass brought in a paladin in episode nine or ten, and Blythe joined in episode eleven.
That was when the game hit its peak. We had six consistent players, MAC OS had finally fixed its issue with not recording audio from the desktop, I had a good handle on how Foundry VTT worked…and then the pressure from the pandemic and life itself hit me so hard that I couldn’t function properly. And I stopped around Episode 13 or 14 to care for my brain that wouldn’t stop racing.
On my Scornful Swords page, I’ll have links to all the remastered versions of the recorded episodes.
In the original version, the players’ voices didn’t match up, and it looked like it’s been dubbed over. The video was choppy because I was trying to run too many programs, and my computer could not handle it. As I was running the game, I realized that this was happening.
I had struggled with OBS for 30 minutes to get the audio working to get to that point of recording. And at that point, I was frustrated and not emotionally regulated (a fancy way of saying I was angry).
This resulted in me forgetting words and stuttering–and I don’t stutter usually. But I kept going.
To improve the stream, I cut out the player’s version of the map (which was the one I was streaming so anyone viewing would see what the players saw.) I streamed my version of the map, but that now included a lot of extra pop-ups that took away from the immersive storytelling. Eventually, I also had to cut off my video because it was choppy. It almost looked like an old episode of Max Headroom.
When I remastered the video, I tried to remove the choppy video. I think I did a pretty good job. I matched up all the voice tracks with the players and added title cards for the players’ names. One of the biggest things I took out of this was my stutter. The stutter was because my working memory was so full and tired from the 20 to 30 minutes of trying to figure out how to get the audio working and from running all the programs and the game itself.
By the time I got to the game, I was exhausted. Here I was, super, super tired. I was hardly able to think, and I felt frustrated about it. Sometimes, the stutter would go on for a long time. The other thing I noticed is that because we were all in our homes with different microphones and computers, some of us had good audio, and some of us sounded like we were whispering.
Using Audacity, I levelled all the audio and removed some background noise so you could hear everybody. I redid the video using DaVinci Resolve, and because I didn’t have many visuals, I redid many of the taverns’ maps, the shopkeepers, and the snowy journey. I made the map of the Five Taverns in part 1 using a program called Dungeon Alchemist on Steam.
I remastered the maps with Foundry VTT with effects from patrons I follow to add in lights, weather and sound. It looks more like what I had envisioned when I had set out to do this in 2021.
The story: the players are meeting a dwarf bounty hunter, Hlin Trollbane. Hlin Trollbane tells them a tale of Sephek, who’s murdering people. She wants them to hunt Sephek down, and at that point, the players should be enraged and be like, oh yeah, sure. We got this.
At first, Hlin tells them that she wants them to capture Sephek and bring him back to her for justice because he’s murdering people. Then, just to kill him. She doesn’t even to see him.
Kars didn’t believe Sephek was an issue because she couldn’t offer proof. Most of the conversation became Hlin (which was me) trying to convince them to take the quest. (They could take two other options, I wasn’t railroading them.) The funny thing is, Hlin seemed wishy-washy to them because my brain was so tired and concentrating on too many things that I kept forgetting what I had told them. Smack my head.
We spent 20 minutes in this conversation with Hlin Trollbane, and then in every episode that followed, for about eight months, Hlin Trollbane was never mentioned again.
I’m happy to be able to present the remastered version of episode one to you. My players did an excellent storytelling job through their characters’ personas, and I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you for listening to A Dungeon Master Exposed, and hopefully, I am the kind of Dungeon Master you’re looking for.