Session 0

The Gang’s All Here!

It’s session zero time friends. An important part of any RPG is making sure that the table is safe. This one is no different. Listen in as we set our ground rules and talk about the game to come.

The Game

This Game was played using the Mavericks system. An RPG utilizing a deck of cards to tell the story and put fate in the hands of the players. It’s a story-forward roleplaying experience that encourages the players and dealer to work together to create the story. Check out the System Reference Document on Itch.io

https://the-indecisionist.itch.io/mavericks

The Cast

Stella Cheeks is @stellacheeks on Instagram and Bluesky. Check out her other podcasts, Not Your Demographic, X-Treks, and Spooky Thirties.

Sara Moore is @pixiesandpins on all social media channels and at Pixies and Pins.com. You can also check out her Sarah’s Table livestreams on twitch @pixiesandpins.  

Omar Burgos is @Taleweaver Check out his work on the Tale of D20s TTRPG channel. More information at https://ataleofd20s.com/

Ben Banks is @Dj_blindian on Instagram and Soundcloud

I’m Ansel Burch and you can find me @TheIndecisionist on all of the meta properties and on Bluesky.

———

Special thanks to Cameron Evesque Davis for the song you’re hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast. Find her work on Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/cameronevesquedavis

This show is an Indecisionist Production. Go to Indecisionist.com to find more of my work including my monthly gaming event, TTRPG Pickup Con, and my other time travel podcast, Time 2 Party. 

As you travel at one second per second, take some time out for these intrepid adventurers. They may be in trouble, but only for the time being.

Transcript

Ansel Burch 0:06

I welcome adventurers from across time and space. Five creators have been brought together from across the internet for one purpose and one purpose alone, to travel through time and have a good time doing it. When big changes happen to the timeline, the change attracts other time travelers like gravity, they won't be able to move past it until they fix whatever was messed up. So our heroes are stuck together, but only For the time being. You

It's easy enough. What do you think? Man,

Stella Cheeks 1:03

I like it. I like, how many times you

Unknown Speaker 1:07

say the word time? Yeah, so many times self conscious

Ansel Burch 1:13

too. And I'm like,

Stella Cheeks 1:16

No. Man would have been weird. But like, it's the bit like honestly, you could probably add one more.

Ansel Burch 1:24

Yeah, count it up. Make sure it's divisible by three. Hello. Welcome everyone to our session zero. Our friends have already built our characters, and I'm so excited for you all to introduce your characters to each other and talk a little bit about that. But first, the most important thing for any role playing game is to lay down the ground rules about like what we are comfortable doing together in the course of our stories. And so I would love to start our conversation by talking a little bit about the setting that we're going to go with and and then from there, we'll talk about our lines and veils, and I will talk a little bit about the x card, which is my personal favorite gaming safety mechanism. To give you some context for the adventures that we're going to have as a part of the show. Here we are going to be playing time travelers, as you well know. And I hope that the audience has figured it out by this point in the episode already, and that means basically we have carte blanche and excuse to go just about anywhere in time and space, and that includes fantasy realms, places that never existed, places that don't exist yet, places that we hope it will exist, and places that we hope never will exist. So as a result, we have sort of broad scope of situations and worlds that we might end up in. We talked a little bit before during our initial meeting, about what we were comfortable with confronting in our adventures. And one of the big things that I would like to go ahead and say is not going to happen during our game unless it is explicitly the reason that you are going to the place to fix it is any isms. Your adventurers are coming from all sorts of times and places to all sorts of times and places. And I don't think that it's particularly interesting to try to role play out dealing with the prejudices that come with those locations, unless we're giving you the levers to fight it. So like, if there's a really cool thing that that we will explicitly call out as, like, the point of the episode, then maybe I won't rule that out, but that'll have to be something that everybody agrees upon and wants to do. I'm not going to surprise you with like, hey, looks like you're going to have trouble walking around in the open here, because that that just, I don't know, that doesn't sound like a good time for anybody. So yes, so just as a ground rule, we're not gonna, we're not gonna deal with that. Other than that, friends, are there any things in the course of our role play that you would like to make sure we just, you know, don't do if there's something that that you find unpleasant, distasteful, frightening, what have you.

Sarah Moore 4:34

My lines are sexual violence, violence against children and withholding food as punishment or starvation. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you.

Ansel Burch 4:44

You've done this before. Are there any other things that we want to include on our list of lines and veils? Yeah, still, maternal

Stella Cheeks 4:52

mortality, specifically, women dying from childbirth. Like, it's okay if you're like, I'm an orphan, my mom passed away. That's. No, not what I mean by it.

Ben Banks 5:01

I was gonna say, I guess we all have to take a trip to your desk to see the paper. Yeah, right, yeah,

Ansel Burch 5:08

privileged details here on the scrap of paper.

Omar Burgos 5:13

I definitely would not like to have any form of rape or torture in a sexual manner, that those are very hard lines for me that I would like to have crossed.

Ansel Burch 5:27

Those are noted.

Speaker 1 5:30

I was gonna say sexual violence, but that's been covered, so I think we're good. Yeah,

Ansel Burch 5:34

sexual violence is one of the big ones for me as well, and I'm glad that it's

Sarah Moore 5:39

already made it on the list. Something that comes up a lot at tables is violence toward animals. Like, what, what level is everybody comfortable with at my table, I usually say, like, you can attack an animal that's attacking you, but don't kick the neighbor's dog. So, like, I don't know, like, if a random animal comes up if there's, like, a protocol that we should be as a table dealing with before we I don't, I don't know what shenanigans we will get into, but like, yeah,

Ansel Burch 6:10

no, I think that's a that's a great one. And violence against animals is honestly something I don't usually use as a lever. So thank you for bringing it up, because I would have completely forgotten about it. For me personally, I I would love it if we didn't do violence to animals who weren't threatening. But I'm happy if the line is drawn elsewhere as well. That works for me. Yeah?

Omar Burgos 6:34

Me as well. Yeah, I'm good with that, honestly, a little bit that plays into my characters bit, not more

Ansel Burch 6:43

foreshadowing, foreshadowing, excellent. All right, and now that we've done that, let's go ahead and talk a little bit about the x card. So the x card is a tool that I really enjoy using at my tables for things that we didn't think of during this part of the session. You know, sometimes you're having a different day, or there's a situation that you didn't think about or hadn't anticipated, and it's starting to go into a place that feels icky or not fun. And ultimately, this space, this table, is meant to be here to be fun. We're telling a story together, and it's so much better when everybody is able to participate safely and happily. So I encourage in those moments for all of us to take the opportunity to steer things away. And if there's not something happening in the moment that you feel comfortable steering or that you have control over, you can just stop the direction by pulling out the x card. Now, that can be done in a few ways. In this context, we do have a chat in the service here in Riverside where we're recording. You can type an X in the chat that will alert everybody who's here and allow you to do that. So I'm going to go ahead and click that here, and you should see that notification pop up. You can also, because we're all on video here in our in our recording studio, you can also put your hands up in an X in front of your cameras. We can all see it. That's a good way to do it. You can also just say, Hey, I'd like to use the x card, or x card, or, you know, some iteration of that. And I would like to make it clear that you're never gonna have to explain your use of the x card to me. We're just gonna move away. I'm just gonna change the scene. We're gonna change the direction. If it's interrupting something that has more legs to it, or that is foundational to what I'm planning to do. We may take a minute to, you know, sort of redirect and figure out what needs to happen to make everybody safe, but I'm never going to ask you to explain beyond what you want to say, that the x card is is safe and is not a negotiable tool. So that being said, are there any questions about the x card or clarifications? Since I know we've got a few, uh, fellow expert Game Masters on board today, is there anything you'd like to add about the x card. In your experience,

Sarah Moore 9:44

I think it might be nice to have an option where we could privately message you Ansel, if it's something that is,

Ansel Burch 9:51

oh, yeah, sorry, yes, you're welcome to send it to me privately as well.

Sarah Moore 9:55

I don't anticipate that being a problem, but just in case, yeah. Yeah.

Ansel Burch 10:00

And I also welcome you to, you know, if, if you don't want a full x card, but you're like, hey, it sounds like we're headed towards rivers, and I don't like rivers today. You could, you can send me a chat ahead as well. Just be like, Hey, I don't know if this is what's going on, but let's try and not have that happen. That's totally cool, too. I encourage, encourage you all to message me privately if there's anything you want to change about the way game is going, even if it's not safety related. Good clarification. Thank you. Anything else that we want to talk about safety wise? Are there any tools that you use that help you feel safe at the table? I

Omar Burgos 10:43

do have one that I like to use myself and in my games is the Rewind. Sometimes we flub or we say something and I'm like that. That's not what I meant. That's not how I might like, how I wanted to come out. Can we wind I really meant to do this way? And because sometimes people have words or my mind loses itself, that's a safety tool that I definitely would like. Well, I would ask that we add to this as well, absolutely,

Ansel Burch 11:10

actually, that's a really good reminder to me. I heard recently about a game that used, Oh God, what did they call it, I think they called it the remote. And you could, you could rewind. You'd be like, oh, let's, can we bump that back a little bit? I, you know, that's not what I meant to say, or I use the wrong power, or whatever they also had fast forward for, like, all right, well, we're gonna do a sex scene now. So they go to bed, and then tomorrow they wake up, and you just like, fast forward beyond whatever thing is coming up, and they also had pause, of course, just to like, take a second to like, talk something out. So I love that language as a way of like, describing those controls. And I will say that for us as you know, a piece of content this show is getting edited. So in the event that we as players around the table would like to remove anything that happens in the game, that is absolutely an option, and I want that to be on the table. You know, we are. We are all people who exist on the internet, and the internet is forever. So, you know, Hey, I didn't, I didn't mean to say that, or that's not really what I feel about that thing. We can edit that out. That's totally fine.

Sarah Moore 12:37

Are we tonally, because I have run a bunch of different kinds of games, like, I run thirsty sword lesbians frequently and so like, how flirty slash descriptive is this particular game? Is this a fade to black when it comes to any kind of flirting or sexual nature, or is it like, where's what's happening with that?

Ansel Burch 13:09

Yeah, no, that's that's a great question. I am comfortable with getting us all the way up to, like, a fade to black for I don't want to do any explicit sex scenes. But like, you know, we can, we can have characters flirt. We can have characters go do whatever grown up activities our characters want to do, for me, but how is everybody else's comfort level on that that works for me? Me as well?

Sarah Moore 13:38

Yeah, I'm good with that. I've made a note that it's going to be nothing but dick jokes all the way down. Awesome. Yeah.

Ansel Burch 13:47

What's your podcast like? Mostly dick

Stella Cheeks 13:52

jokes, time travel and dick jokes. You know, isn't

Speaker 1 13:56

that like most of them? We describe podcasts like we didn't change

Sarah Moore 14:03

title of this particular one. When you release, it should be mostly time travel and dick jokes, and then everybody knows what you're getting into that on the on the header. Think we've hooked him.

Omar Burgos 14:18

Yeah, you can definitely judge this book by his cover. Yep,

Ansel Burch 14:25

fantastic. And I know that we all know each other at least a little bit through the course of our pre work, but as we are about to embark on this adventure, now that we've covered a little bit of our safety tools, I would love for each of you to introduce yourselves briefly to our audience, we'll also do some brief plugs, so you can tell us a little bit about the projects that you're working on, and if there's anything that they should look for on the internet. So let's start with Omar. Omar, tell us a little bit about yourself. Okay, awesome.

Omar Burgos 14:56

Hello, everyone. My name is Omar Burgos, but. You may find me on Discord. Still work fixing the Insta and other social media as the tail Weaver. I run and own a company called a tale of D 20s. We are a TT RPG company, and you can find us anywhere, at WWW dot tilde twenties.com, or insert social media, slash the tale of the 20s,

Ansel Burch 15:23

platform of choice, slash, exactly like

Omar Burgos 15:26

everywhere and anywhere. We're also on Spotify and all the podcasts as well. With our shows such as descent to the void, tale of the radiant Citadel, we play games such as Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Star finder and as well is, do we do work with Magpie games? So you'll see a lot of thing called Magpie madness. You have to say it that way. I didn't know like that. We play all Magpie games. And coming soon to a streaming near you, possibly working on something called Taro, which is, if you just imagine, Magical Girl, guy, non binary realness, anime transformations, full on Sailor Moon in the world of like mask play in it's pretty awesome. Still a work in progress and being play tested now, but that should be coming soon.

Ansel Burch 16:21

That's very good. Ben, tell us about yourself.

Speaker 1 16:29

Hey, what's up? I am Ben. I am a DJ and a photographer. I've got a couple podcasts that I've done floating out in the ether, but I have, don't have anything current right now, but I'm working on it, but I am on this show. So there, yeah, now you do. Now I do. But yeah, I've been playing, really in TT RPGs and, like, Dungeons and Dragons, 5e Since 2020, when the world shut down. That was kind of my gateway. I started listening to a bunch, and I was like, hey, I want to do this and start playing. So I played in a bunch of discord games and stuff like that, but I'm excited to be here.

Ansel Burch 17:08

Amazing. How about Sarah? Tell us a little bit

Sarah Moore 17:12

about Hey everybody. My name is Sarah Moore. My pronouns are she her. And you can find me all over the internet at pixies and pins, or my web, my website, which is pixies and pins.com and you can find me every Friday night on twitch in a show called Sarah's table at 5pm Pacific, where I highlight indie and small publisher games. You can also go to formerly feral games.com and check out my first RPG that was just released, called the crowned where you get to play a God, a very small sliver of reality, and see how much you mess up the world with that. Because usually, yeah, and I, I'm sort of, I'm everywhere, and if you just say my name three times into a mirror. I will show up and run an RPG for you.

Ansel Burch 18:11

And if I, if I recall correctly, there's usually

Sarah Moore 18:13

pastry. Yeah, something sweet pastry, and it's and it's generally also pretty gay. Just as a heads up to everybody, just super queer all the way down. So

Ansel Burch 18:28

little extra value tied in there, rainbows and cookies. Who doesn't want this? All right? And Stella, tell

Stella Cheeks 18:34

us a little bit about yourself. Hi, I'm Stella cheeks. You may known me in Chicago as being the producer of plan nine burlesque. Or you might know me from the internet, from my various podcasts at nYd productions, like spooky 30s or extracts or nominally not your demographic, it still technically exists. Yeah, you can find me anywhere, except for on Twitter, because I deleted that at solid cheeks. I have been a longtime player of ttrpgs, just never for hashtag content. So I'm actually really excited to do a podcast with everybody, kind of combining my love of podcasts and make believe work in these mini theater degrees for zero money. That's what theater degrees are for, right? I'm pretty sure that

Ansel Burch 19:29

was what I was led to understand the

Sarah Moore 19:30

bank account just now I was like, woof,

Ansel Burch 19:37

writing the loans. Yikes.

Stella Cheeks 19:38

Do you need more than one theater degree? No, do I have more than one theater degree? Yeah,

Speaker 2 19:44

need is such a strong word. Listen, I like to think it really is.

Omar Burgos 19:50

I like to think about like TTR bees helps us weapons on liberal arts degree, yeah,

Ansel Burch 19:55

yeah. I'm,

Stella Cheeks 19:56

well, I am. I will credit you on that, but I'm. Definitely saying that many times out loud in the future.

Ansel Burch 20:08

And finally, I am Ansel. I am the indecisionist, and I am the creator of the game that we are playing in this podcast. So I'm very excited about that as an opportunity to sort of put it out in the world. If you are interested in playing this game. Versions of it are available on itch.io, and you can find me at the indecisionist there. You can also find me on all of the meta properties at the indecisionist. And, yeah, I'm also on blue sky and what's the other one? Threads,

Stella Cheeks 20:43

Bumble. Threads, yes, I'm on thread. You say, bumble,

Ansel Burch 20:48

yeah, bumble, I'm on farmers ONLY. You may also find us. Find me on the podcast, time to party, which is also produced by this company, which is a time travel, movie podcast, and yeah, you would think I have a fixation, and you might be right about

Speaker 2 21:08

very loose theme for a lot of your content, just at the smallest, the smallest

Ansel Burch 21:17

All together, uh huh, it's every genre, but mostly time travel.

Omar Burgos 21:23

But what a subject. I love time travel because there's so much minor free in there and stuff, and you can make your own rules. So I'm about it.

Ansel Burch 21:34

This is actually a great thing for us to sort of tie off with. I love time travel, because it's such a broad metaphor. Time Travel lets us explore so many parts of humanity and like, what would you do if you could travel through time? What would you do if you were stuck in time? What would you do if time looped back on itself and the the myriad ways that holds a mirror up to our psyche is just incredible. And if we can, if we can play even a little bit with that during the course of this silly, silly game, I will consider this to have been an enormous success. So what is your favorite piece of time travel media is, does everybody have one? Yes, it can be Superman too.

Stella Cheeks 22:30

It's definitely Star Trek four, the one with the whales. Hell yeah, which is the official title?

Ansel Burch 22:36

Yes,

Sarah Moore 22:40

the one Bill and Ted's Excellent

Omar Burgos 22:43

Adventure, very good. Mine would have to be, and it's, and it's not, kind of because of the movies, because I'm a big comic book nerd fan, but it's the entire Marvel universe, how they did time travel, and it made multiverses and all that. I was in love with that growing up reading the comic books. And that started my Yeah, but if you do change between the past, but then is that the same future anymore? Yada yada yada. So definitely comic comic books, but yes, the Marvel

Ansel Burch 23:11

universe. All right. All right,

Speaker 1 23:15

yeah, I was gonna say probably Avengers in game, uh, because nothing has made me jump out of my seat in a theater and, like, scream, like some of the things that happened in that movie did, but for the hardcore fans, the nerds out there, primer is also great the movie. It's like the very logistical time travel. But I don't know, I had a great time watching that movie.

Stella Cheeks 23:39

I also we have to shout out, at least I do. I love quantum leap. Like, oh, gee, quantum leap. Oh

Speaker 2 23:44

yes, oh, my god. I love quantum leap. Love quantum life.

Ansel Burch 23:48

You hold on to that thought.

Stella Cheeks 23:51

I will. I think about it every day.

Omar Burgos 23:53

And we also have to mention my second favorite thing, which is Doctor Who, because the whole thing is based on time when I love it. Yeah, there's, there's

Ansel Burch 24:03

a lot of Doctor Who vibes in this, in this show. So definitely worth bringing up. I would actually love to shout out another podcast that I super fell in love with. It's called Ars paradoxica, and it is such a nuanced and carefully crafted piece of time travel media, I cannot enough recommend it. It is so so good. The whole concept is based around the Philadelphia Experiment, and the idea being that, like when the ship, like cloaked itself, or whatever, it fractured time. It like fell out of time, and it created this barrier where people can you can travel through time now, yay, but you can't go further forward than the Philadelphia Experiment. And you can't go further backward than the Philadelphia Experiment. So people get stuck on like, one side or the other of this barrier. And see you, you get to follow these agents who are, like, trying to figure out how to get home and what happened. And it's, it's very just

Sarah Moore 25:20

like, spawned a whole new thing in my brain where I was just like, oh, but also Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow, and and like tomorrow, the seven and a half deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. If anybody here has read that, that's

Stella Cheeks 25:37

definitely so good.

Sarah Moore 25:39

The loop, part of the of the time travel, where you can't travel forward in time. It's very interesting.

Ansel Burch 25:47

Have you guys seen Palm Springs, similar habits? Concept, great time loop movie, much better than I thought it was going to be.

Sarah Moore 25:55

So I'll bump it up maybe.

Ben Banks 25:58

Yeah, it's also on my list because Ansel said

Ansel Burch 26:03

that stamp now I will accept that authority. Fantastic. Yep, it's It's homework. Now, amazing. Well, thank you all so much for joining me here. This is going to be such a good time, and I am so excited for our first adventure, which for those of you listening at home, is probably in your feed. As we speak time you don't even have to wait time that's that's time travel, that right there. Time travel. We've broken we're coming to you from the past.

You so as you travel forward one second per second, please come on back and join us next time. Stella cheeks is at Stella cheeks on Instagram and blue sky, Sarah Moore is at pixies and pins on all of the social media channels, and at pixies and pins.com you can also check out her Sarah's table live streams on Twitch at pixies and pins. Omar Burgos is at tail Weaver. Check out his work on the tale of D 20s. TTRPG channel. More information at a tale of D twenties.com Ben banks is at DJ underscore. Blendian on Instagram and SoundCloud. I'm Ansel Burch, and you can find me at the indecisionist on all of the meta properties and on blue sky special. Thanks to Cameron evesque Davis for the song you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast, this has been an indecisionist production. Go to indecisionist.com to find more of our work, including my monthly gaming event, TTRPG pickup con, and my other time travel podcast, time to party as you travel at one second per second. Take some time out for these intrepid adventurers, they may be in trouble, but only for the time being. You