Tales from the Table

Tales from the Table is an actual-play Dungeons & Dragons campaign, played around a virtual table and run by Cloud, the dungeon master who also created the adventure. Cloud introduces the rest of the table by their characters' names: Athanasius, Flower and Kaden. Episode titles carry an arc name alongside the number, such as The Ruins of Kazadhros and The Great Awakening, which makes a storyline easy to trace. The Great Awakening material features an outbreak. A fungus the lizardfolk have never seen before is releasing spores, and the disease it spreads kills, then raises its victims as sleepwalkers: blind, without memory or speech, and bent on infecting others. Asked whether anyone has been cured, the character describing it can only answer that they have not seen it happen. It does not stay abstract for long. In one fight, two fallen serpent folk named Feather and Current sprout fungus and rise mid-combat, and Feather goes straight for Keeve, who had been hurling handfuls of fire at her. Kaden, already infected, takes poison damage with no saving throw to resist it. Other scenes run quieter. At a camp where a strange creature called Rumble curls up nearby and the scouts start to relax, Flower drifts off and dreams of floating in a dim green expanse that feels like being underwater. The Ruins of Kazadhros episodes have their own hazards, as one recap lays out: a campfire that swells and lunges at Athanasius, a room of lifelike stone carvings of trees and ferns, and water that begins turning Vertinia's feet to stone until Kaden reverses it with a salve. The dice stay audible throughout. Initiative order and saving throws are read out as they happen, and one rescue hinges on Athanasius making a dexterity check to catch Flower when the footing gives way. Rules get worked out aloud, from how much weight a catapult spell can fling at a higher level to whether a dragonborn's tail can grab anything at all. Cloud also admits to fudging a call during a Shambling Mound fight, because a player tried exactly the kind of move Cloud had been hoping for. Then there is the table itself. Before the welcome, the players trade jabs about recordings that may or may not have started, the wrong microphone, knuckles cracked into the mic and someone talking with bread in their mouth. In one episode a 'die of destiny' is rolled to pick who gives the recap, and the question of whether to count by player or by character stalls it immediately. The players are also refused permission to edit their own inventories, and the jokes that follow show why. Cloud and Dre edit and produce the show together, over a theme called 8-Bit Adventure by Adhesive Wombat. What a listener gets is a straight-faced plague story with the scaffolding left visible: the rolls, the rulings and a table that keeps interrupting it.