0. Welcome to the Hereafter

Transcript by Raina Harper

[Music plays, ‘Quest Friends! Hereafter Theme’ by Miles Morkri.]

Kyle

Hello, guests and ghouls, and welcome to Quest Friends! Hereafter, an improvised fiction podcast using the Under the Neighborhood roleplaying system. I am Kyle, he/him, and today my four best friends and I are gonna tell you a story about… what the hell you’re listening to, what this podcast even is.

Before we get started on introducing all of ourselves, if you are an existing fan of Quest Friends or you just wanna jump on to our brand new story, you can move straight onto—assuming it’s released already—Episode 1, An Oasis of Ghosts. However, if you’re new either to us or to actual play podcasts in general, or you just want a little more information about what’s going on before actually getting into the story, you wanna dip your toes in a little bit, this is a great episode to listen to.

What we’ll be going over specifically: 1. Who are you people?! 2. What’s a podcast? 3. Okay, so what’s a roleplaying podcast, though? 4. What’s the roleplaying system that we use and how does it work? 5. What is the world of Quest Friends! Hereafter like? 6. Who are we playing? And then finally, 7. How can I listen to the first episode?

Ari

[Giggling.] To listen to these options again, press 0.

Emily

[Laughs.]

Hallie

I saw you waiting for that. I was like “what is Ari doing? Is she typing something?”

Ari

I was waiting for that!

Tom

[Silly.] “I’ve been waiting for this!”

Kyle

I got about halfway through the list and I thought “oh no, oh no… numbering this list was a bad idea.”

Emily

That’s a lot of numbers.

Kyle

It’s a lot of numbers.

Hallie

That’s seven whole numbers.

Kyle

Because when I first wrote it down I was like “numbers are nice, they’re comfortable, they’re simple. The audience knows exactly what they’re in for.”

In addition, we’ll have in the description timestamps for when each of these things start, so if you wanna just jump straight into what our system is or what our world is you can do that.

{Transcriber’s Note: You can search for ## to jump between each of these sections.}

{## Who are you people?}

Anyways. Now that everyone’s spoken, let’s introduce ourselves so that the next time we speak people know who we are. I’ve already introduced myself, I am Kyle, he/him. I am your host and I have other roles that we will get to when they are relevant.

Ari

The one that compared this to a phone number is me! Hello, I am Ari, pronouns she/her. Is that all? Is that all I say?

Kyle

That’s all you say. That’s all you say. We’ll get more into it later. They just want to know you’re Ari, that’s who you are. Unless we wanna do a fun fact about ourselves. We’ve done that—

Ari

The fun fact is that I made the phone number joke.

Hallie

[Laughs.]

Kyle

Well that’s it, everyone’s gotta tell a fun fact now. I hope you’re ready to be back at college.

Hallie

[Groaning.] No~

Ari

A phone fact!

Kyle

A phone fact about yourself! A fact about you and phones.

Hallie

Please, no…

Emily

I’m Emily, and my pronouns are they/she. My phone fact is that I sound like Hallie but I’m not her.

Tom

Hi, I’m Tom. My pronouns are he/him. A fun and/or phone fact about me is I’m dead inside.

Kyle

[Laughs.]

Tom

And I work on phones in my real life. Alternatively, I have a podcast. This is not new information for you, but I like using it as a fun fact in terrible work icebreakers and then not explain to them what the podcast is.

Kyle

You’re probably talking about like crimes or something. That’s what I hear, all podcasts discuss crimes.

Tom

Yeah. They ask “what do you talk about” and I’m like uh… it’s more like a story.

Hallie

My own family doesn’t understand it.

Tom

You ever heard of D&D?

Ari

It’s really hard to explain it. That’s why we’re doing it in this episode!

Emily

So Hallie, who are you?

Hallie

Oh, I didn’t go. Hi, I’m Hallie, my pronouns are she/her, and a phone fact about me is that every single time I leave my house to go drive somewhere that I’ve never been to before, instead of opening Google Maps I open Google Drive, every single time. I have moved the apps far apart from each other. This has not helped. I always think “I’m driving, I need to open Drive. That’s what the map will take me. That’s what the Google wants.” It’s not what the Google wants. It upsets me more and more each time.

{## 2. What’s a podcast?}

Kyle

Alright. You’ve gotten an idea of who we are. What’s a podcast?

[00:05:00]

If you are listening to us, you might have an idea of what a podcast is or you may have just had a friend send this to you. You may have heard the trailer and went “I’m gonna go onto QuestFriendsPodcast.com, that’s what the trailer told me to do.”

What a podcast is essentially a group of people, or one person… any amount of people equal to or more than one, sitting or standing or laying, and speaking into a microphone.

[Snickering.]

Tom

Brilliant.

Ari

To me, it’s like modern radio but you get to pick what programs you want to listen to and you don’t have to go through all of those weird ads, usually, at least not for us.

Kyle

I actually really like that way of thinking. It’s a lot like how with standard television you turn on the TV at some time and whatever is on that station at that time is what you’re listening to, whereas if you go onto YouTube or Netflix or Hulu or something like that, you get to watch the episodes whenever you want.

Podcasts are the same idea but with radios where the radio, you turn it on and it does whatever, but with a podcast you open up a specific app on your phone, or our website, so if you have an iPhone, you have Apple Podcasts. You type in the name of the thing you want to listen to, you click an episode, and the episode plays.

A lot of podcasts actually are a lot like talk radio. Many of them just feature people discussing things. Earlier I made a joke, for example, about how every podcast is people talking about crimes, and that’s because one of the most popular genres of podcasts is people just sitting around talking about crimes. We don’t do that here, though, we commit crimes here.

Hallie

I was also going to say that.

{## 3. Okay, so what’s a roleplaying podcast, though?}

Kyle

[Laughs.] What we are is we are an actual play or roleplaying or fiction podcast. You know those old fashioned radio plays? That’s what this is. It is a story being told in a podcast form. Essentially, everyone else here is playing a character, one of our protagonists, one of our heroes, and then I am playing everyone else.

An example for this could be, say, let’s say you’re listening to a version of Star Wars, and you have one person playing Luke, one person playing Leia, one person playing Han, and then one person playing… Chewie, sure. Then, the other person plays everything else. They describe what the Empire is doing. They play Darth Vader. They play Luke’s aunt and uncle. They play the Jawas. They play C-3PO. That’s why I didn’t give anyone else C-3PO, I like C-3PO, I get to keep him. He is mine.

Ari

I already sort of played C-3PO before.

Kyle

He’s mine!

Ari

Okay.

Kyle

[Laughing.] I claim him.

Hallie

I wanted R2-D2.

Kyle

[Laughs.]

Tom

I wanna be an Ithorian.

Ari

You also already sort of played R2.

Hallie

Oh! I did already kind of play R2-D2. Never mind, I’m satisfied.

Kyle

So, that’s essentially how it works. Everyone else is called a player, because they play a specific part of the role, a player or a PC, player character, and I play the game master, or GM. Anyone I control is a non-player character because they’re not played by a player.

For example, in the scenario we talked about, if Ari is C-3PO, that’s a PC. If Hallie is R2-D2, R2-D2 is a PC. If I play Darth Vader, because I usually play the villains, that is an NPC.

The way it works is we both speak in and out of character to describe a story. For example, I’m actually gonna put a clip in right here from our first season where Hallie’s character, a PC, is trying to describe herself getting an NPC off of a sinking ship.

[Whooshing sound signaling a scene change. Silly music begins.]

Kyle

And you hear a…

Kyle (as Vespari)

Wah!

Tom

[Delighted.] I fucking knew it.

Kyle

…and you turn over and you hear that the sound came from the room you shared with Vespari.

Tom

I fucking knew he could have just gone—

Hallie

Is he in there?! Why is he in his room?! What?!

Alright, with as much emotion as I just had, Hop goes:

Hallie (as Hopper)

Vespari?!

Kyle

A  head pokes out.

Kyle (as Vespari)

Oh, hello friend.

Hallie (as Hopper)

What are you doing down here?!

Kyle (as Vespari)

Well, I heard the ship was collapsing, so I was just gathering my things before we headed out.

Hallie (as Hopper)

[Stressed.] Oh my god, Vespari, forget about your things. Listen, we all have to get out. Come with me and Sera, okay?

Kyle (as Vespari)

But I paid a lot of money on these things…

Hallie (as Hopper)

What are your things?

Kyle (as Vespari)

Well, there’s my card deck from Qi.

Hallie (as Hopper)

Put them in your pocket.

Kyle (as Vespari)

And my card deck from Charmonde.

Hallie (as Hopper)

Put that in your pocket.

Kyle (as Vespari)

And my card deck from Ig.

Hallie (as Hopper)

Put that in your pocket!

Kyle (as Vespari)

And my card deck from—

Hallie (as Hopper)

Do you need more pockets?! I have pockets!

Emily

[Laughs.]

Tom

Jesus fucking Christ.

[Music ends. Whooshing sound signaling a scene change.]

Kyle

So, what happened there is Hallie described out of character what her character Hopper does and then speaks as him, then I respond as the world, because this is improvised. We’re coming up with it on the spot.

The only thing besides us that controls what happens is dice. Characters go around, they do things, and then if we aren’t sure whether or not they succeed…

[00:10:00]

if a character is trying to climb a very high wall for example, or trying to convince someone who doesn’t really wanna listen to them, we roll a die. The higher the die roll is, the better someone does.

Hallie

[Grunts.]

Kyle

What?

Emily

[Smiling.] Do you have something to share with the class?

Hallie

[Defeated.] No. No I do not.

Kyle

You sure, Hallie?

Hallie

I made my sound effect. That was my—I made my sound effect.

Emily

A fun fact is that some people roll poorly.

Hallie

Hmm.

Emily

Consistently.

Hallie

Hmm!

Tom

Wow.

Kyle

Yeah, dice are cursed. That’s also unrelated for this.

Hallie

Hmm!

Kyle

The dice favor some of us more than others.

Hallie

Oh man, do you wanna get real supernatural? Just take a look at my dice. That’s all you gotta do.

Kyle

[Laughs.]

Hallie

[Squirming sounds.]

Kyle

Anyways. There’s more information to the dice rolls beyond that. If that’s all you know, that we’re making stuff up and high rolls are good, you’ll be fine.

{## 4. What’s the roleplaying system that we use and how does it work?}

But, if you wanna know about our system, I spent a lot of time on it, because we are playing a brand new system called Under the Neighborhood by Kyle Decker. That is… that’s me. I made this, specifically actually for this podcast.

Under the Neighborhood is a roleplaying system that’s kind of a fusion between Cypher System, which is the system that we used for our previous season, our previous story, and Powered by the Apocalypse, which is a vague category of roleplaying games that often share certain systems but don’t have to. Essentially, if you call yourself Powered by the Apocalypse, you’re Powered by the Apocalypse.

The goal of any roleplaying system is to create a specific kind of story. Dungeons & Dragons, the most popular one, sets you in a fantasy world where you’re going around as massive heroes, slaying monsters and conquering beasts, and almost inevitably starting a small business.

What Under the Neighborhood tries to do is emulate dual-world kids’ cartoons. Examples that we have for that is Amphibia, a show where a normal girl gets stuck in a world comprised entirely of frog people. We have the Owl House, the story of another teenage girl who ends up in the Boiling isles, a weird dark fantasy realm full of bizarre creatures and magic that comes from “magic sacks?” Or, Gravity Falls, a show about cryptids living in the woods around a small town.

There are a whole bunch of other examples we could come up with. Star vs the Forces of Evil is one. Duck Tales has the adventure component but doesn’t have a dual world in it. A lot of Disney stuff… We’re not a Disney show, we’re independent, we’re not affiliated with Disney in any way. No, we’ve stayed away from the long angry claw of the homogenous mouse! But, those shows are a good reference for the kind of fun adventures we’re trying to emulate.

So, essentially this system is designed to tell stories about normal people going on fun adventures in a world that is split in two.

In Under the Neighborhood, when we roll we roll using two six-sided dice. Those are the dice you normally have hanging around. You’re gonna play them for something like Monopoly… but not Monopoly, we aren’t playing Monopoly here, we’re playing Under the Neighborhood.

You roll two six-sided dice, and how you do depends on your roll. If you roll a 1 to 6 you get a failure. Whatever happens, it’s bad for you. if you roll a 7 to 9, you get a mixed success. You succeed but at a cost or not quite in the way you want. Maybe I successfully climbed this wall but I realize I don't know how to get down and I’m very afraid.

Hallie

[Laughs.]

Kyle

A 10 to a 12 is a full success. That is, unequivocally, you did great. Awesome job. Thumbs up. The only other thing I wanted to mention about the system is its big unique thing, the slice of life complications.

In the shows that we talked about, almost every adventure starts with something mundane. Spoilers for Amphibia Season 2, there’s an episode where an old frog named Hop Pop commits a string of crimes with a theater troop that commits crimes and then has to chase them and a giant worm… but this all starts because he sees a group and is like “I’ve always wanted to be an actor, I’d like to act.”

There’s another one from the show Gravity Falls where the main character, Dipper Pines, he’s a 12-year-old boy, and this older surly teen challenges him to a fight. In an attempt to avoid this fight, Dipper brings a Street Fighter, fighting video game character to life and then sends this digital character to fight a teenage boy on his behalf.

That’s pretty much how they all start. They start with something mundane which then, because of the magical nature of the world, spirals into something silly and fun.

[00:15:00]

The way we do this in Under the Neighborhood is that every session starts with us sitting down and providing a boring complication for somebody else, and normally we do it for somebody’s character, but since we haven’t said our characters yet, let’s do it for each other.

Let’s say we’re gonna do an adventure starring the five of us and I want to give a complication. My complication could be that Emily accidentally stepped on their glasses and the glasses store is closed, so they’re going the whole day without glasses.

Hallie

[Giggling.] Glasses store… Not the glasses store.

Ari

[Laughing.] My complication for Hallie is she can’t get into the carwash.

Tom

Fucking rude.

Hallie

Oh! The thing that actually happened to me today?

Tom

Fucking rude.

Hallie

Yeah, the thing that I said, hey, this would make a great slice of life complication except that it’s because it really happened to me. I would never have been able to make it up. For context, listeners… This might all be cut. Who knows?

[In the Hall of the Mountain king begins.]

I tried to go through a carwash today but it wouldn’t accept my card, so I tried a different card and it wouldn’t accept that card. Then I tried a third card and it didn’t accept that card because of a network error. Because it wasn’t accepting my cards, the door to go through the carwash wasn’t opening so I couldn’t just cancel and drive through the carwash and then leave. I had to back up through the carwash, except that was impossible, because it was a curved carwash lane.

I tried! I did my best. But when my car started going (screech) because I couldn’t get the curves right—they’re much harder going backwards—I just drove back and tried my cards again and they still didn’t work. So then, I parked my car in the carwash lane, went inside, asked the man “can I please… can you free me from the carwash lane?” And he thought that the exit door wasn’t opening, but then he saw what the problem was and came outside. He said “huh, that’s a weird problem I have literally never seen before.”

When my cards wouldn’t be accepted, then I had to go back in, wait for another man to buy chips and soda and then charge the carwash to the cash register, get a code, and then could I use it to go through the carwash. The entire carwash process took me 23 minutes.

[Music ends.]

Ari

TLDR, Hallie is stuck in the carwash!

Hallie

[Silly angry sounds.]

Kyle

So, everyone would suggest a slice of life complication. After all those, we would choose which one was our favorite, which out of this group I think we would pick the carwash, probably.

Ari

[Delighted.] Probably.

Hallie

Rude.

Kyle

Then, we would take that and that would be a core part of our story. What we would do is then we would add our magical world on top of that and just have fun. In this case, Hallie’s character got stuck in the carwash, but oh no, let’s say we’re playing Amphibia, the game we’re playing is about a frog world, so instead of being in the carwash, Hallie’s snail is stuck in the hopwash which is the name of their version of the carwash in the frog world.

Hallie

Please, don’t make me stuck in the hopwash. Why would you do this?

Kyle

Instead of being something that spreads water, I don't know, it’s like an angry stork that shoots water out of its gullet.

Hallie

[Laughs.]

Kyle

As we play on, the stork ends up eating a snail or something like that. What starts as a very mundane, very boring story eventually turns into our heroes trying to rescue their snail car from the hopwash crane.

Hallie

Don’t hurt my Kia snail. My Kia snail deserves the best, and he finally got a really good carwash today, so I would hope that… [Stammers.]

Kyle

[Laughs.]

Hallie

I confused myself. Cut all of that.

Kyle

So yeah, once we start with our slice of life complication, which one is our favorite, and we layer our fantasy world on top of it, we then do that improvised back and forth. Everyone describes what they do, I describe the world, and then we roll when we aren’t sure what would happen, if someone tries something that wouldn’t clearly succeed or clearly fail.

That’s all we’re gonna discuss for Under the Neighborhood today, but as I said, it’s a brand new system and there is a lot to it beyond just what I said. If you’re interested in Under the Neighborhood, we have links in the description of this episode. The description is just… if you look up this episode, there should be a section with words next to it. That’s the description. Almost always it’s below the episode when you look at it on your phone.

If you want the full list of rules for Under the Neighborhood, which I spent a lot of time working on, you can purchase the game. We also have a free version with a lot of the rules stripped out just so you can practice playing the game, practice the core of it without getting bogged down in the details, and just really playing with that slice of life complication and then improv added on top of it.

{## 5. What is the world of Quest Friends! Hereafter like?}

That free version, as well as the paid version, will include information about our world of Hereafter.

[00:20:00]

Because at long last, we’re finally here. If you’re someone who already knew how a roleplaying system worked, someone who didn’t sweat the details of Under the Neighborhood, and someone who already knew what a podcast was… we finally hit it, the section full of new information for you.

Quest Friends! Hereafter has nothing to do with our previous season. Our previous season was a sci-fi world. We’re not that. We are in the modern day, more or less.

Is it 2022 in the world of our game? Probably, but it’s Ghost 2022, because in the world of Quest Friends! Hereafter the world has been split into the realms of the living and the dead. The way the world of Quest Friends! Hereafter works is you start “here.” The Here is the realm of the living. It’s where living people live. It’s where we are right now. This is our mundane world. It looks pretty much the same as our world does but with some changes, because ghosts exist and that would change things. I mean, ghosts might exist in this world too, but everyone knows that ghosts…

Hallie

[Types loudly.]

Kyle

What is our “we love ghosts” chant, Hallie?

Hallie

Remember when we did our stream where we were like ‘oh, thanks everyone for listening to Season 1. Here’s Season 2. We love ghosts!’ And we bothered all of Tom’s neighbors, or Tom was at least worried about that.

Kyle

Okay fine, here’s our chant of us mentioning this during our season finale from last season.

[Whooshing sound signaling a scene change.]

Kyle

What if the magic was death?

Ari

[Laughing.] What if the—

Tom

Motherfucking ghosts!

Kyle

It’s ghost time, baby!

Hallie

Ghosts!

Ari

Ghosts!

Tom

We love ghosts!

Hallie

We fucking love ghosts.

Kyle

[Chants.] We love ghosts!

[Others join in for two chants.]

Tom

We can’t be chanting this right now. It’s so late at night.

[Whooshing sound signaling a scene change.]

Kyle

So ghosts exist, but for the most part, people living in the Here are people who look like you and me. They are people who are alive. Then, when you die, you go to a place called the Hereafter. The Hereafter is filled with ghosts and ghouls and skeletons and zombies and vampires and whatever other creatures we decide to add. Essentially, if it is an undead mythological creature, it is there in the Hereafter.

That’s the basic gist. You have the Here where people who are living live, you have the Hereafter where people who are dead live, and by going to a thereport, which is essentially an intermortal airport, people can freely travel from one realm to the other.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Kyle, so alright, if you die you go from the Here to the Hereafter. What if you’re in the Hereafter and you die?

Hallie

Yeah! We thought about that. We have an answer, and Lucas Bang will talk about it in a future episode. Listen to find out.

Kyle

In addition to humans who regularly go from the Here to the Hereafter to the afterworlds, there are creatures called Necromon, and if it sounds like we just made a ghost Pokémon, that’s because we did. It’s Pokémon, baby, but also Yu-Gi-Oh!, but also Cardcaptor Sakura.

Hallie

[Laughs.]

Tom

[Dejected.] It could be Digimon… digital monsters.

Kyle

Necromon. They’re cute little critters. Some of them are very ghost-themed. Some of them are just—

Hallie

Avocados.

Kyle

Avocados.

Hallie

A weird bird we like.

Kyle

There’s a crayon.

Hallie

Any animal that we have taken a fancy to, we have somehow turned it into a Necromon.

Ari

It’s very true.

Emily

Any animal, like a book.

[Laughter.]

Hallie

Yeah, exactly.

Tom

The majestic book in its natural habitat.

Kyle

Our story begins with a child trying to find her Necromon to participate in the intermortal Necromon championship. It’s like the World Cup plus the Olympics but it’s just one sport and that sport is children dueling with books, birds and avocado.

Hallie

It’s the world you’ve always wanted. You don’t have to lie to us.

Kyle

[Laughs.]

Hallie

We’ve done the work for you, and you’re welcome.

{## 6. Who are we playing?}

Kyle

Speaking of children, and ghost monsters, and tournaments! I should have just stopped with children because that covered the characters. The other ones are just things. Let’s talk about our characters. Who is populating our world? Who are our point of view characters? Who are you all playing?

Tom

I shall be playing this campaign Hilda Miszkiewicz, the guardian who pulls pranks. Hilda’s pronouns are she/her. Mechanically, Hilda is all about whimsical shenanigans and protecting the rest of the party. My initial moves have a lot to do with declaring people guilty or switching it so that I can use Heart, my strongest stat, instead of say Fierce or Slick. Character-wise, Hilda is… I don’t want to say a protagonist, because I desperately don’t want that.

[00:25:00]

Hilda is kind of like the kid who has entered into a strange new world in one of the example shows we compared this to with some small twists, but she is suddenly involved in much bigger adventures and is trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life.

Ari

I play Aurelio Enrique Hueso Canaca, otherwise known as Quique which is his nickname. He is the opportunist who adapts. As you can probably tell by his name, Quique is going to be really heavily based on Mexico, so he is basically a Mexican skeleton, because he is one of the residents of the Hereafter.

I’m going to both be leaning on the skeletony hijinks that he will be getting into but also I’m going to be getting into a lot of Mexican slang and stuff when I talk as Quique. I’ll have a lot of phrases and stuff and occasionally speaking in Spanish because I’m from Mexico so I like to show that part of my culture in my character.

Quique himself is an old skeletony man that just wants to live his life in peace. In the process, he gets into a lot of hijinks that he never asks for. His gimmick is that, since he is the opportunist who adapts, he adapts to a lot of the things in the environment to get the best of the situation.

Hallie

I am playing Sparky Malarky, she/her, the intuition who investigates. Sparky Malarky, contrary to what you would believe, has not hit her golden age yet. That is in the future… at some point. I’m lying. It’s not, it’s in the past. Sparky Malarky was an intrepid teenage reporter with her own little squad of mystery-solving friends a la Scooby Doo. They were called PICKLE, the Private Investigators… Limited Corporation.

Kyle

Is that what it was?

Ari

Where’s the…?

Hallie

I made this, but I forget it every single time I say it.

Ari

That doesn’t even spell pickle.

Emily

[Giggles.]

Hallie

Wait. Private Investigators Corporations Limited?

Tom

I know it’s like PICL something.

Kyle

Uh, let me… Private Investigators Corporation Limited Enterprises.

Hallie

Corporation Limited Enterprises! Okay, there’s an E on the end that I forgot about. So, PICLE! She was part of PICLE. She’s the only thing keeping PICLE going out there, alone, in her van, in the junkyard. You know, she’s gonna find the truth and she’s gonna spread it to the people and it’s gonna be awesome. She investigates, as her character summary implies. She’s also the intuition because she has a good intuition. Actually, her summary is very self-explanatory so I don't know that I need to do that.

[Self-assured.] Sparky Malarky, Ace Reporter!

Kyle

Peaked in high school.

Hallie

No.

Emily

I’m playing {censored with static} the {censored with static}.

Kyle

In addition to all of our main characters, we will also have a variety of NPCs such as Lucas Bang (fighter name: The Aggressive Bandit), the former champion of the Intermortal Necromon Championship, Oset Scuba, the head of ScubaCorp, the organization that runs the championship, and… Quique’s family, but not all of them because I can’t do that many voices.

Ari

But just know that he has a lot of family around.

Kyle

They’re just at every corner. Every corner. You lift up a mat? One of Quique’s family is there.

Ari

He has a lot of family.

{## 7. How can I listen to the first episode?}

Kyle

And yeah, that is a very brief summary of what our show is and what we’re doing. A quick couple of things about the next episodes coming up.

Next week on Monday, we’re gonna have All About Necromon featuring James D’Amato from the One Shot Podcast Network and the author of the Ultimate RPG Game Master’s Worldbuilding Guide. This session was recorded actually a long time ago, right after we finished the previous campaign, where we sat down with James and we hashed out some of the details about not only Necromon but about the first adventure our characters are gonna go on.

The episode releasing after that is Episode 1: An Oasis of Ghosts. This is a double-length episode that serves as the first adventure of our characters. The way our episodes are normally gonna work is that they are going to be multipart adventures, usually two-parters, that all have a kind of episodic format.

Episode 1: An Oasis of Ghosts is going to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Episode 2, after that, Hilda’s Rival, is going to be split into two parts, Episode 2-1 and Episode 2-2. That’s gonna tell another complete story. Then, when that one is done, we’ll move onto Episode 3-1 and 3-2 which will tell its own adventure.

[00:30:00]

Ari

It’s basically similar to some of the TV shows that we are inspired by where they are episodic but then they also build into an overall plot, eventually, but each episode or two-parter episode is a self-contained thing.

Kyle

Yeah. That is a perfect explanation. So again, next Monday, All About Necromon featuring James D’Amato, and then the week after that on Monday, April 4, Episode 1: An Oasis of Ghosts, a double-length adventure. Then two weeks after that, because we regularly have a biweekly schedule… Episode 2-1, two weeks after that, 2-2, so on and so forth.

You can find episodes at QuestFriendsPodcast.com or by searching Quest Friends! With an exclamation point on a podcatcher of your choice, so like Apple Podcasts, Stitcher… we should be on all of them.

We’re also gonna have listen-alongs when episodes release at twitch.tv/QuestFriends, so if you’d like to listen to an episode on the day it releases with other folks and then just hang out with me as I have a chill little hangout and play a game, you can check out twitch.tv/QuestFriends at 7 PM Central Time on the day the episode comes out. That’s gonna be every Monday that an episode comes out starting with An Oasis of Ghosts.

That’s pretty much that. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you really enjoy our brand new campaign with brand new characters and a brand new story. We’re very excited for the ghosty times. If you wanted to find anything I discussed at all—if you want to find our Twitch page, if you want to find QuestFriendsPodcast.com, if you want to find any of the multiple places I have put up Under the Neighborhood for purchase alongside the demo version… you can check the description to this episode. But, other than that, thank you so much for listening and, if you’re gonna listen to the James episode, we will see you… you will hear us… we will interact through the medium of you hearing us next week.

Hallie

[Giggles.]

Kyle

But for everyone else, whether you’re going to catch us on the day it releases or you’re going to listen to it right now, we will see you all on Quest Friends! Hereafter, Episode 1: An Oasis of Ghosts.

[Theme song plays and carries out to the bloopers.]

Kyle

I’m not even gonna have anyone suggest that. I think I’m just gonna have Hallie do her rant and move on from there, if that’s alright with everyone else.

Tom

That’s fine.

Ari

Sounds good.

Tom

I was just going to chime in: Hallie’s coffee pot is broken and she can’t make any coffee.

[Laughter.]

Ari

I almost said that!

Hallie

[Laughs.]

Tom

Just to, you know, keep the meme alive. In the future, viewers, you’ll understand that.

Hallie

I have one for Kyle, and it’s that the grocery store only has applesauce with the sugar added.

Tom

Ha!

Ari

Hallie picked a pepper that was the spicy one instead.

Hallie

Oh no! I did that. I thought it was a banana pepper and it was a Hungarian wax pepper and it hurt a lot when I ate it thinking that it was a banana pepper.

Emily

Necromon, which were the dead Pokémon that you talked about earlier.

Hallie

Her spirit Pokémon.

Kyle

Are they dead if they originated in the world of the dead? What happens to a dead Necromon? We’re not gonna answer that question. I don’t wanna go there.

Emily

They don’t die. I don’t wanna think about it.

Kyle

I’m imagining Ari in one of those formal interviews like, alright, Miss Penalba Tena, please tell us, what was your inspiration for Quique?

“Well, I was… Well, thank you, Todd. I was very inspired both to reflect my Mexican culture and also to reflect my experiences as a fucking skeleton!”

Rips off your mask to reveal that you’ve been dead this whole time. Nyeheheh!

Tom

The Red Skull pulling off the Hugo Weaving face.

Ari

I mean, you know… existentially speaking, we are all technically… We all technically have— [Laughs.]

Hallie

We all… yeah.

Tom

Pull off your face hard enough. We all have a skull waiting underneath.

Ari

Jesus Christ.

Tom

[Laughs.]

Ari

[Smiling.] What the fuck?