Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to explorers of elsewhere meet the crew series. I am Dan. Hello. Hello. And joining me is the wonderful Julia.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Hi.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello. Hello. You're here to present us the final crew member for our second campaign, Alicia Rising. Aren't you?
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Last but not least.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Definitely last but not least.
Well, we might be excused for kind of not noticing your character, given that they're all so sneaky and unseen. But just to kind of bring her into the spotlight a little bit. Tell us a little bit about Magpie.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Right, so Magpie is a lurk, the kind of most roguey of the rogue archetypes in the blades in the dark system. So she's kind of a bit of a cat burglar, sneak thief type character. She is an ace of r, which is one of the elf like races in elsewhere.
Unlike her colleague Algonon, she has not been beset by the mysterious red eye affliction since the eschaton. So, yeah, she is of a family that was not.
Is it a spoiler to say that she is not of a family that is cursed for their support of the Arcane dragons?
I think. I think I've done her with purple eyes because I'm a sucker for purple.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: So she's an ace of art lurk. She's probably in her kind of late 20s, age wise. And, yeah, she is of fairly noble heritage. And again, unlike Alganon, she has surviving family in the city and she has found herself in this position of leading a fairly double life as a kind of noble socialite as far as her family is concerned. But then sneaking off and moonlighting as a sort of thief burglar rogue type for this crew of smugglers.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Amazing. Okay. And so almost like a mix of femme, Bruce Wayne and Robin Hood.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Yeah, kind, I guess Robin Hood is a good analogy because although that character wasn't never rich himself, the similarity, I suppose, is that she is very concerned about the city and the people of the city in a way that her kind of noble family are not. They're a bit oblivious. They are living in their ivory tower.
But for various reasons, Magpie has developed a bit of a social conscience and feels a bit terrible about her privileged upbringing and really wants to do something for the city. She wants to give something back. She doesn't want to just live that oblivious, rich lifestyle that she's been afforded. Although even the rich are having a fairly lousy time since the city was encased in a bubble in a sea of distressed souls with no sunlight.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Yeah. No one's having a good time.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: No. But at least some people are a bit more comfortable and well fed than others.
Amidst all of the misery.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: Well, I mean, given that, I'm guessing Magpie isn't her real name, but.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: No, it's not.
She's adopted this alias of Maggie. Or Magpie is her kind of lurk alias. That's what she would put on her calling card if she had.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: I mean, given that she's grown up in a relatively lady dar kind of mean, what was it really that kind of made her want to start rolling around in the muck with all the commoners?
[00:04:26] Speaker B: I think she never felt like she fitted in with her family. Sure, she was always a bit more of. She always asked questions, she answered back. She didn't just meekly accept what people told her she ought to do. And quite early in her life, around sort of the age of eight, I think, she befriended one of the servants in the household, kind of fairly young ace of r called Samuel, who kind of took her under his wing a bit and taught her some useful but slightly naughty skills, like being able to pick locks and being able to sneak about and not be spotted. And she just found it really fun. I think she loved it. It was different from what she was meant to be doing. It was a bit.
So Samuel became a bit of a confidant. He never overstepped any boundaries. It was always a very appropriate friendship between the two of them. But he did teach her these skills to sort of set her up with alternative options, I suppose, was the idea. And so it was always disguised as etiquette lessons, dancing lessons, and actually, she was learning how to twirl about and swing a rappier and all these fun things that she actually really wanted to do, but would not have befitted the young lady of the household.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Sure. Okay, now that jacks. And that's a pretty compelling kind of character motivation campaign. So I'm excited to see how that pans out, because to be honest with you, I can't see anything going wrong with this.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Absolutely not. No, it was all fine. And she lived happily ever after, and she's fine now. But no, what actually happened is she grew up into her teens kind of learning all these skills, getting really good at them. She started kind of practicing, first of all, nicking things from her own household, see if she could get away with it before putting them back again. And then she started moving on to kind of friends houses, houses around the neighborhood.
And, yeah, it kind of all went.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: From very, very good. Well, so for this character, for the character of Magpie, obviously, we've already mentioned sort of like chain Robin Hood ideas, but were there any kind of core inspirational points that you were drawing from that influence this character?
[00:07:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
Part of the reason I chose a lurk was because I don't tend to play rogue characters. I've played a lot of DND. I've never played any blades. I usually go for quite charismatic characters, bards, sorcerers, things like that. Things that I can really get my teeth into the roleplay. But I've never role played someone who doesn't want to be seen and is a bit more perhaps reserved or serious. So that was part of the reason I wanted to play a character like that. And when I was thinking about the kind of person or archetype that I wanted to base her on, her story on, I immediately thought of one of my favorite npcs from Dragon Heist, Water deep dragon heist, which is A-D-D. Fifth edition module which I dm'd for a few friends a couple of years ago. Well, a few years ago now. One of my favorite, for anyone who knows it you probably are aware of, there's an NPC called esvil Rosnar. And spoiler for Water Deep Dragonsent.
Go on about like 20 or 30 seconds or something if you don't want to know her alter ego in that module. So it turns out that she is moonlighting as a famous cat burglar called the Black Viper, who was an actual cat burglar about 100 years previously. Obviously died because I think they were human. But she has sort of picked up the mantle and she's a young noble woman who essentially nicks things because she enjoys it and has various motivations of her own. And she's a kind of antagonist in the story. But I kind of made her into a potential ally for the party because I thought she was really cool. She was one of my favorite people to role play.
Magpie's got that vibe to her. The kind of the noble young woman who isn't content to toe the line, has a hobby. Yeah, exactly. She's got a side gig.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Okay, amazing.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Well, that was a big one.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: That's kind of what I shaped the story of Magpie around in terms of her personality. I guess I've been playing way too much boulders gate three lately, as you know. And I'm a massive fan of Shadowheart, who I think has probably the right vibe for her. That kind of slightly standoffish, slightly sarcastic, posh voiced kind of character because she would have a posh voice. I'm not interested in playing into that whole, oi, governor, I'm pretending to be one of the common folk kind of thing. I'm not going to do that.
She speaks like she speaks, but she just doesn't make a big deal of the fact that she's actually quite rich, or not rich in her own right. Her parents are rich, rather, which is part of the reason why she has to do this job, as it were. It's the way that she makes money, because one of her biggest pursuits is donating to the poor around the city. So she needs a means of doing that. And once the eschaton happened and the bubble sprang up around the city, mum basically went, look, you're cut off. You're not donating any more of this ridiculous money to charity. We need to look after ourselves now. So she supplements with her criminal activities, essentially.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: So what I'm hearing, it's a noble cause for a noble girl. So it's almost like you've planned it.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. And of course, there's nothing else lurking in her backstory at all. There's nothing bad. Nothing bad ever happened. She's fine. She's absolutely fine.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: Absolutely fine.
Okay, so we've got this quite kind of compelling character, but there's quite a lot of people that are very good at sneaking around and getting into places they're not supposed to. What is Magpie's biggest brag?
[00:11:02] Speaker B: I guess she is an infiltrator. So she's got this perk, as it were. I don't know if you'd call it a perk or a feature that the lurk gets in blades, where she's really good at cracking into things, through locks into safes, things like that. That's kind of her thing. I felt like that was more what I wanted, the route I wanted her to go down, rather than. She's not really a kind of a hunter or an assassin or anything. She's more of a I sneak in, I break into things. I sneak out, I get the job done kind of. Kind of person.
So I think maybe her biggest brag would be something like, there was a safe in. In a kind of location owned by the tellers, and she managed to crack into it not once, but twice.
And it was supposedly a really uncrackable safe. And that she's managed to get into more than once. And just every time she does it, they go, how did anyone do this? And they up the security and she gets back in and she does it again.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: Just leaves a note the second time.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Ha ha.
I just love this idea. She's got this terrible sense of humor and she loves to leave just ha ha in a note or something. There's not even a joke. There's not even a zinger. It's just I did it.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: Well, it does look like we've got a good set up. And now we have the full picture. We'll start to see how these five kind of gangers start reacting when the shoulders begin rubbing.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: So if you wanted to see that, then the best way to do it is to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell icon for notifications of when we release new content because campaign two is due to start and there's.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Going to be quite a lot of.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Frequent stuff, so we wouldn't want you to miss it.
So.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: Thank you, Julia, for running us through magpie.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Hey, no problem.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: Thank you for watching and or listening, and we'll see you next time. Bye.
