1 D10: The Show

1 D10: The Show is an actual-play Dungeons & Dragons podcast that runs its campaign like a serial. Episodes carry arc names and chapter numbers, with titles such as 'The Ballad of the Lone King: Chapter Ten' and 'One Fae More - Chapter Three'. Several open the way a TV drama would, with a 'Previously on' recap. Many sign off by pointing to the next episode. The show works in two distinct modes. The chapter episodes are the table itself: someone calls for a dexterity save, a climber passes an athletics check, a player rolls a twenty and is asked what the shot looks like. The episodes titled as a prologue and an epilogue drop the dice and are read aloud as prose. One describes a fairy city called Belastia, split into six sections and four tiers, each tier cut off from the next by a hundred-foot cliff. Another shows the Lone King's castle falling in the rain while an invisible creature nearly thirty feet tall shows its outline through the downpour. The fiction is eerie. These fairies are not small or impish; they stand six feet tall, with black bat-like wings, six eyes and limbs bent the wrong way. A council of yellow fairies meets in a pitch-dark hut lit by one small fire and rows of glowing orange eyes. Deals come up again and again, struck for a hound's freedom, for passage toward a hidden kingdom of dwarves, and even for a bar tab. The table keeps cutting through the dread, and happily. A critical failure on an investigation check leaves one character clueless about four dead florists, and searching the bodies turns up twelve gold against a debt of roughly four hundred and seventy. A player wears a weasel like a scarf. Someone poses the old riddle about a raven and a writing desk, and one closing line hopes the heroes are wearing masks and social distancing as they step into the city. Two characters, Locke and Kate, appear in both arcs, and the story is willing to jump back two months to put them in front of the fairy council. Other names turn up along the way: Snirk, a tiefling bargaining with a six-inch creature in battle armour; Smyther, who throws an axe at a queen on a castle roof; and a crime boss known as the Crane. In one aside, the real people behind characters like Jim the Farmer and the Crane get named. For dice and banter, any chapter works, and for story alone, a prologue or epilogue is the better first listen.