This week’s guest is Matthew Grau of WildFire Games and we talked about his upcoming CthulhuTech: The Shadow War Quick-Start Rules (V2), working with the scumdogs of the universe to create his deck-building game Gwar vs. Time, his stint at Riot Games building the world of League of Legends, and growing up in the Twin Cities with D&D’s Dave Arneson in his life.
This pleasant cafe’s walls are lined with tables and cat-condos covered in a menagerie of delicious tacos, hot sauce and churros. The proprietors are Keeper, a kindly middle-aged woman who’ll train you to see a TacocaT, and Sage, an old, bearded, zen dude with long hair who’ll teach you to symbiotically bond with a TacocaT. They’re both wearing deer antlers covered in hanging crystals.
To see a TacoCaT, you must clear your mind and think only taco thoughts. When you do, there’s a ton of them. They’re everywhere and it’s cat chaos. They’re pouring out of an interdimensional TacocaT waterfall into a cuddle puddle pool in the center of the room. Keeper & Sage have more than they can handle, and want to make sure that they go to a good home.
A TacocaT is an adorable, squamous, symbiotic dream cat from the elemental plane of tacos. They have hard-taco-shell armor with fur tufts poking out between their plates, a hot-sauce hiss, and excrete delicious churros. When you bond with a TacocaT, they can regurgitate an infinite amount of tacos of whatever variety you can imagine, and they can attach to you to create a full body TacocaT armor. A TacocaT chooses its symbiotic host and bonds for life.
Art: Tiger Wizard Words: Steve Albertson
Story by: Andrew Bellury, Steve Albertson, Matthew Grau
Appendix N: Lovecraft’s The Cats of Ulthar, Black Panther afterlife, Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat, Lofi hip hop meme girl with cat, Spiderman villains (Venom, Carnage, Black Cat, Lizard), Captain Marvel’s flerken cat, “The Lovecats” by The Cure, X-O Manowar (comic), WildStar (comic), Tacocat (band), Peter Pan, Kiki’s Delivery Service (Studio Ghibli).
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This episode is sponsored by Exalted Funeral, and we talk about ARC: Doom Tabletop RPG by momatoes aka Bianca Canoza. It’s a rules-lite, tension-heavy, adventurous race against the clock to slay the apocalypse. Capture your imagination with near-inescapable dooms that threaten limitless worlds…for a heart-racing story to remember. A high-quality, lushly designed and illustrated game.
It has its own fantasy d6 RPG system with rules for building engaging, tightly-paced stories through the Doomsday Clock and a trinity of Omens. You pair Skills with problem-solving Approaches. Player-driven combat with intent-based initiative. Esoteric ways to recover magic like eating an entire door, and 40 Spells & Techniques.
Check out the character Steve made:
Professor Ion Silver: Bureaucratic engineer who feuded with all four corners of the wind and has an innocuous fourth eye.
Blood: 2d6+1 (9) / Guts: 2d6+2 (10)
Approaches: Creative: +1 / Careful: +2 / Concerted: +0
Skills: Tinker +2, Academic +2, Insight +1, Arcana +1, Focus +1
Items: Well-rounded education [+1 Guts Damage]
Spells: Trinket (Minor magical effects certain to delight anyone.) “From dust to dust” (Craft anything you’ve seen from a handful of dust.),
Technique: “Uncanny Alarm” (Ask the fates about an action’s consequences.)
3 Questions: Prof. Silver differs from other people because he has four eyeballs: two normal, one on his forehead & one on the back of his bald head. People whisper that Prof. Silver can see how things are constructed on an atomic level, that he carries around the ashes of a murdered lover, and that he has built a device that can raise the dead. His most painful lesson is to not treat people like machines or he may never be loved.
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ANNOUNCEMENTS
Check out Steve and Andrew on the Neon Lords of the Toxic Wastes Stream this Thursday night at 8pm EST. It’s Ravioli for Randy!
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All Dwarf drawings are in, submissions have closed, and our amazing panel of judges are reviewing all of the entries. We’ll be announcing the winners very soon!
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Dungeon Cats is a rules-light, casual TTRPG by our own Tiger Wizard. The pre-launch page is now live on the Epic Level’s Kickstarter! Click the “notify me on launch” button to make sure you don’t miss out!
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We’ll be podcasting live at Gamehole Con in Madison on Oct. 19th- 24th. Dragon Warrior will be running games. Sign ups are now available. Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 10:00 AM CST – Old School Essentials: Mad Dungeon Rooms
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Monsters! Mazes! Martinis & Minotaurs! The Epic Levels – Armor Classy CDungeon is now available for purchase at Exalted Funeral. This amazing artifact is both a compact disc of the fantasy RPG hip hop album, and a full-color compact dungeon adventure that’s based on the album’s songs and Wisconsin oddity attraction, The House on the Rock. The included system-agnostic mini-adventure features a fully illustrated 10 room dungeon crawl.
Art & layout: Tiger Wizard
Written by: Steve Albertson
Additional artwork by: Ambrose H. Hoilman & Michael Mauldin
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Thanks for listening to Season Two of the Epic Levels Mad Dungeon podcast, where D&D hip hop group Epic Levels and a guest create a system-neutral, playable dungeon room using improv, comedy, and lifetimes wasted on roleplaying games.
You can support us via Patreon for early episode releases, bonus map content, extra art, access to our discord server, and lots of other exclusive goodies.
Get nerd merch and stay up to date with socials: HERE
Mad Dungeon is hosted by Andrew Bellury, Steve Albertson, and produced by Zach Cowan.
Theme song by Epic Levels and beat by Mason Grant.
© 2023 Epic Levels. All characters in this adventure–even those based on real people–are entirely fictional.