Luthic, goddess of orcs, in Uncaged: Godesses

Roothold, the Throne Room of Luthic

Jessica Marcrum: You are in Roothold, which is in the plane of elemental chaos. And after a lot of adventuring, tunneling through sheet rock, you arrive at an enormous hall made of onyx, ruby quartz, and glimmering star sapphires. Sitting on the throne is a hulking, muscular man carved of rock with dancing gemstone eyes.

He laughs as he braids the hair of the goddess lounging in his lap: Luthic, the Blood Moon Witch. Her body, though hardened from battle is relaxed into his, her face radiating sheer joy. That is of course, until she notices you.

Luthic, godess of orcs, in Uncaged: Goddesses. Art by Kendal Gates.

Follow wherever you get your podcasts:
RSS | Apple Podcasts | SpotifyGoogle Podcasts | Amazon Music
Audry | Castbox | Castro.fmDeezer | HubliHeartRadio | ListenNotesOvercast |  Pandora  | Player FMPocketCastsPodcast AddictPodchaserPodhound | Radio Public | Rephonic | RPG Casts | Series Seeker | Stitcher | TuneInVurbl

Join the Scintilla Studio Patreon

Uncaged Anthologies

Lucas: Welcome back to Making a Monster. This episode, I’m bringing on some guests I’ve been hoping to reach since day one of the project, believe it or not. Uncaged: Volume One released to the DM’s Guild, D&D’s online storefront for user-created content in June of 2019. Each adventure subverts tropes around a female mythological creature, including hags, harpies, and medusas, and it was a sign that D&D players were hungry for nuanced, thoughtful explorations of RPG monsters, and the marginalized myths that inspired them. And that volume has since sold more than 5,000 copies. The team is now working on their fifth volume of Uncaged anthologies, this time focusing on goddesses and that volume is set to be released on February 22nd. So with me are Jess Marcrum writing director and adventure author for Uncaged, and David Markiwsky, producer and project manager. Welcome to the show, guys.

Jessica Marcrum: Hey, thanks for having us.

Lucas: So tell me a little bit about you how long have you been playing Dungeons & Dragons?

David Markiwsky: Yeah, I started playing D&D just at the tail end of fourth edition. About, I got about six months into a campaign and then realize that fifth edition was a little faster to run since swapped over to that. And much ever since.

Jessica Marcrum: I got halfway through character creation for 3.5. And then game ended up not happening. And then I didn’t play again until I was almost 30 and, got into role-playing and not with D&D actually with tunnels and trolls of all things. And, then started playing some dark sun and didn’t really look back.

Lucas: I haven’t heard the name Dark Sun in a long time. That’s one of those settings that didn’t really make it to fifth edition officially, did it?

Jessica Marcrum: No, but I wish, I hope that it can, there’s a lot of fun there.

Lucas: When did you guys make the switch from playing the game to writing for it? Is this a part of what you do in your day job?

Jessica Marcrum: I’m a social worker slash trauma therapist and my day job. The first thing I ever wrote for game design was actually Uncaged Volume One. And now I have two full-time jobs.

David Markiwsky: I think I had been DM-ing for about four months before I started writing something for DM’s Guild started off with

little pay-what-you-want adventure. I think it was in 2016 or 2017 was when I wrote it.

Jessica Marcrum: Oh, so experienced, David.

Lucas: That would have been right after the DM’s Guild went live here. You’re on the vanguard.

A hag stands on the cover of Gimble's Guide to the Feywild by David MarkiwskyDavid Markiwsky: then after that, I think Gimble’s Guide to the Feywild was my next big thing. And the last thing that I wrote before getting in with Uncaged.

Lucas: And you guys are just a small part of a team by the time we’re now working on volume five, how many people are involved in this?

David Markiwsky: So in goddesses we have just over 70, I think we have 72, add all of our sensitivity readers, artists, editors, proofreaders. I think the original volumes were about 150 people total. It sounds about right. Cause I think we only had like 30 artists for all four of those volumes.

Jessica Marcrum: which is bananas to me.

Lucas: That’s

David Markiwsky: Well, it’s more bananas that we have that many artists for goddesses.

Jessica Marcrum: Yeah, it’s true. Goddesses has such good art though.

Lucas: Who’s the core team I’ve spoken on a previous episode to Ashley Warren, and I corresponded briefly with Gwen Bassett setting this up. Is there anyone else in kind of the core creative team whose name I might know?

David Markiwsky: Yeah. So, Gwen Bassett and I are the project managers on Goddesses. Jess has the writing director we also have an editor director as well. Laura Evans who kind of managed and coordinated all of our editing and proofreading efforts.

Jessica Marcrum: And Ashley’s kind of our producer emeritus.

David Markiwsky: yeah, exactly. Ashley hasn’t been as much involved in like the nuts and bolts of creating the fifth volume. We kind of took that on from her, but she’s been here to guide us through everything.

Lucas: Can you guys break down for me, how you put this set of adventures together?

David Markiwsky: Yeah. So, it started mostly with the pitching phase. We got over 200 pitches, I think 221 pitches total is how many we got. And we were originally only planning on having 20 adventures in the book. And we ended up adding an extra one on there. Just because we got so many good ones, but part of what our we had a team of people to review the pitches because there were so many of them and each one was over three or 400 words.

So we had eight different people that were kind of scoring the pitches. one of the things that were criteria we scored on was how much does this sort of align with what Uncaged is about, how “Uncaged-y” is this? Then that of into like feminist representations and twisting on tropes and representing things that aren’t normally represented – all that kind of got in there.

Jessica Marcrum: And can like, if this is an evil can they still have good reasons for being evil without it being like surprised they were good all along.

David Markiwsky: Exactly. And I think that, like, we really especially tackle that in the next phase. Once we kind of our pitches and brought all the authors on board. We had everyone write outlines and Jess in particular, but also rest of the admin team spent some time going through all the outlines and offering that kind of feedback on like, okay, well, we’ll need to push this a little bit more in this direction, a little bit more in that direction.

And then once we got into the actual writing, then I think Jess got into the nuts and bolts , of some of the adventures.

Jessica Marcrum: Our tagline for this was basically. Just because she’s evil doesn’t mean she doesn’t have her reasons or something it was phrased nicer, but that, that’s kind of how it was.

David Markiwsky: Every villain has her reasons.

Jessica Marcrum: There we go. Thank you. And just like how Uncaged’s thing was, every monster has her story kind of thing. And so we really wanted to stick with their villains, but they also have their reasons. And our team that David mentioned to review pitches was us on the admin team, but also a diverse group of people who had been involved with Uncaged before, like previous writers and artists on it.

And then also people who had not been involved with on cage before, but were very familiar with it. So like people who have run a million adventures from Uncaged we could. Like people who knew what we were looking for and have a good idea of what, sounds like a fun adventure for you?

Lucas: Yeah, fantastic. And I guess in the spirit of continually editing down I know we’ve chosen one monster in particular for today. And I suppose I should pause to kind of address the phrasing here. I’m using the word monster in the sense in which Dungeons & Dragons uses it that is anything with a stat block, I’m going to be conflating goddess and monster in this conversation, and I don’t think there’s anything I can really do to avoid that.

Jessica Marcrum: If it has a stat block, it can be killed.

Jessica Marcrum: Which is why some of the goddesses in this don’t have stat blocks. The ones you encounter in their room, some of the authors were like, You cannot kill her here’s things she can do to you though.

Lucas: interesting. So, so does I’m going to spoil a little bit. Does Luthic have a stat block then? Or are we operating in this kind of non-mechanical, non-combat space?

Jessica Marcrum: She has a big, chunky stat block. She has two full page stat block.

Lucas: My gosh.

Jessica Marcrum: She is CR 30. She does a lot of things.

Lucas: When you were building Luthic, is she a conversion from an older edition? Does she appear elsewhere in D&D lore, or was she spun out of whole cloth for Uncaged anthologies?

Jessica Marcrum: So she, despite having a lot written about her, I could not find any stats her in previous editions. There’s just a lot of lore over five editions that describe what she can do and how she does it. And so I took all of those powers and put them into her step block. So her big things are that she has claws that can extend to be 10 feet long or eight feet long. She can bore through solid rock. can fly. She can cause blood rain that, weakens her foes and insight a frenzy that strengthens her wounded allies that makes them stronger. can inflict terrible diseases on others and make everyone around her vulnerable to disease. And she can heal wounds as long as she’s touching the ground, because her boyfriend, whose home she is at, is the God of earth. She also can’t be paralyzed, petrified, blinded, or deafened if she is touching the ground,

Lucas: naturally.

Jessica Marcrum: of course. So I gave her a lot of stuff to do that, you know, ties into that. Plus just stuff you get from being a god.

Lucas: What role did she generally fill or rather, where did you find her in these older stories?

Jessica Marcrum: Luthic gets really poorly treated in a lot of the lore because she does all of this really cool stuff. She gives the orcs like visions of the blood moon, which incites them to battle and makes them into warriors. She’s there when every orc is born, she’s there when every orc dies. yet she’s really ignored by most orcs just seen as like Gruumsh’s wife and disregarded by the rest of the pantheon – most of which are her children. So her husband and her children all treat her like trash and the. Except for like her clerics who are called the orchid clause of Luthic, all also kind of are like, whatever about her, but it’s canon that she’s like the smartest person in the pantheon and the only one who’s good at battle strategy. She’s also the only one who knows how to heal apparently. So, you know, she, she does all this and doesn’t get any credit. And so this adventure is her acknowledging. Then she needs a little bit of credit.

Lucas: Let’s talk about Luthic as a goddess because D&D has a particular way of handling divinity, assigning them to domains, which is not something that every religion has done nor the ones that do consistently throughout history. If we were to assign Luthic a domain, how would you do that? And what would you say falls within her purview?

Jessica Marcrum: She has to actually she’s the life domain on the nature domain, but for our purposes in the book, she’s in the life domain. When we were working on the book, we looked at all of the neutral and evil goddesses, and most of them fell into life, death and trickery. Is that right?

David Markiwsky: It’s kind of interesting. In like the previous Uncaged books the adventures were broken up by tier, but since this time they’re all tier four, we couldn’t really do that.

And especially because the difference between level 17 and level 19, isn’t very apparent in a tier four adventure. so level ranging them. Wasn’t great. so we ended up breaking the whole book into domains. And what we found when we were doing that, was that a lot of the domains that get assigned to the gods or the goddesses, always a hundred percent makes sense.

They kind of go like anything this goddess has ever done is trickery? Oh yeah, they tricked somebody? They must be a trickery domain. Oh, they grew something or they healed somebody? They must be life domain.

Jessica Marcrum: It’s so weird.

David Markiwsky: Like, the Great Mother, the primordial beholder goddess, is one of the ones that appears in the book. assigned like the life domain, the war domain, there were a few random ones for it that just of didn’t really make sense.

Lucas: What does that tell you about D&D?

Jessica Marcrum: Well, at one point, I did go look and see how many of the goddesses had an epithet that had bitch in it. And. It was a lot. And I was sad that Luthic didn’t have one. So I originally gave her one in the bad ending. And so many editors were like, this is terrible

because I guess if you don’t know that, like over half of the goddesses have “the bitch whatever”, like “the sea bitch”, “the storm bitch”, “the rage bitch”, “the night bitch”, then, you know, just calling a goddess, “the something bitch”, people are going to be like, wow, harsh. But it’s like, no, she, she gets to be with all of her friends now.

Lucas: I didn’t even know that. And I’ve spent way too much time doing this kind of research.

David Markiwsky: It’s the type of quality research that goes into Uncaged books.

Jessica Marcrum: I think that was Ashley’s original, like what pushed her to want to do Goddesses was seeing that Umberlee had two of them. It was like “the bitch queen” and “the sea bitch,” and she was like, we need a Goddesses book to redeem Umberlee.

David Markiwsky: That was the genesis of the Uncaged: Goddesses book was what, three years ago in the Uncaged discord, when were talking about Umberlee being called bitch. And we were like, we need to do a book of Uncaged goddesses, and then it kind of fell under the radar for a few years until we dredged it back out of the sea again.

Lucas: What did you want players to, to pull from this encounter? What did you want them to feel or to understand in a new way, just after having met Luthic?

Jessica Marcrum: So, none of them fought her in the fight, which is why I had David uh, run three different versions of her, I think. But yeah, that seems to be a very Uncaged thing actually, is that you get to the big monster and players tend to like have a conversation instead. Although I did set a thing so that like, if you really want to fight, Luthic will fight you and you don’t have to kill her. She is very hard to kill.

But I just wanted it to be a fun fight. Like one where her actions kind of work together like so she can it rain, blood that makes you more weakened to necrotic damage. And then some of her other things do necrotic damage and she can spell cast, but doesn’t really need PSEO, but she can, if. For whatever she can call on allies who were in the throne room to fight on her behalf.

Cause there’s people worshiping her and her boyfriend and there, and she can give them advantage on the attack role because that’s, you know, part of her thing to buff her allies. And you get her down weak enough, she has one of those mythic actions from Theros and she turns into a big cave bear.

David Markiwsky: Yeah, that was probably one of my favorite little editions was that cave bear, mythic action.

Lucas: Is she connected in some way to sort of the cave bear idea?

Jessica Marcrum: They’re one of her sacred animals and she is known to transform into cave bears. So initially I had her starting the fight as a cave bear, but then after David was running it a bunch, we agreed that it was a, I think it was David’s suggestion, actually, it would be more fun if once you get her down to zero hit points, she regains 200 and is a bear now.

David Markiwsky: Yeah. And like the, that whole kind of fight with her the, probably the best part about running it, at least as a DM and that all the players really, I don’t know if enjoyed would be the word was that Luthic was super mobile and just chased people down. The all the casters of the party when I was running it, we’re constantly trying to get away from her.

And she was just pursuing them and like all the way back and forth across the throne room. No matter if they threw up walls, no matter if they threw up spells, she would just chew through it, trying to get at them. So that like bringing that cave bear in. When you think you finally got her down is like, oh, is finally over.

Oh, wait, no, the chase is not okay.

Jessica Marcrum: Yeah, she has 50 foot move speed, 50 foot fly speed, and a burrow speed, 50 feet.

Lucas: don’t mind. Gosh you cannot hide from Luthic. That’s incredible.

David Markiwsky: In play testing, that was very much like you can’t hide was definitely the theme. Cause we’d have wizards. They would throw up a wall of force and she would burrow underneath it. You’d have like the teleport away and she’d do a bonus. Like there was a bonus action for a pursuit, I think.

Jessica Marcrum: Yeah. She tunnels and knocks everybody around her prone.

David Markiwsky: I think it was a legendary action actually. But yeah. Anyways, she would, every time they’d try and get away, she’d be right on their heels again. So it was definitely a theme of play-testing.

Jessica Marcrum: Yeah, that’s fine. And she can also choose to just ignore spells because she’s high enough level to do that.

Lucas: I should ask before we move on from this particular point I think there’s only one officially published CR 30 creature. I could be wrong about that, but only one comes to mind.

Jessica Marcrum: The tarrasque.

Lucas: Yeah, that’s yeah, the big one. This kind of specifically designated as a world ending catastrophe the, the point of reference for all other difficulty curves in the game.

So when you were designing for a challenge rating that high what did you have to, what did you have to do to occupy this space at the very top of the games, difficulty curve?

Jessica Marcrum: Oh, there’s a couple. Now Tiamat is also CR 30, as is aspect of Tiamat and aspect of Bahamut.

David Markiwsky: Yeah. The Tiamat one was one of the uh, so like one of the things that I did was kind of go through all the, the avatars, goddesses, anyone that got a stat block and try and measure where they were. And Tiamat was actually the, the measuring stick she’s pretty much one of the only goddesses that has a stat block currently.

So was kind of like the be a little bit higher, can be a little bit lower, but should be somewhere around this amount of stuff. But it was also where we, lot of the, the extra features that ended up making their way into most of the goddess stat blocks come from. So things magic immunity and stuff like that.

Jessica Marcrum: Yeah, I know we took it wasn’t just us, but like Tiamat and Sul Khatesh from Eberron were two that I think a lot of people used as references possibly Xariel too, for some of the more undead. I know I looked at Orcus for a couple of things just to kind of figure out how Orcus works.

Lucas: And just for context, Tiamat and Bahamut being the Forgotten Realms’ “yin and yang” of draconic deities.

Jessica Marcrum: Xariel’s the Archduke of Avernus from Descent into Avernus. Sul Khatesh is from Eberron, and is “one of the great overlords who holds dominion over the world of fear, war, and death.”

Click here for more episodes on the Eberron campaign setting!

Writing Goddesses for D&D

Lucas: What were some of those things that mechanically belonged only to goddesses that, definitely let players and DMs know that that is the caliber of creature with which we’re working?

David Markiwsky: Yeah. Like limited magic immunity is the one that came. I think it’s directly on Tiamat stop block. And all the different goddesses have some form of magic, resistance or magic immunity to them. The weapons, anything they do is going to be a magic attack another one.

Jessica Marcrum: Also disincorporation is a big one that’s in Tiamat, but it’s like, if they drop to zero hit points and die, they don’t actually die. They travel back to their domain and then reincorporate at some point.

David Markiwsky: Yeah, absolutely. And I think pre yeah, everyone would have legendary actions, but also the resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, slashing. I’m pretty sure appears in every single goddess as well.

Jessica Marcrum: Yeah. I think they all have some kind of absurd immunities and truesight is a big one that everybody has in various degrees. I remember you made me shrink Luthic, cause it was hurting all of your casters because I gave her truesight and tremor sense. And you were like, she can’t have this much of both.

Lucas: Yeah, that’s, that’s an interesting interaction. And a lot of this, a lot of those particular mechanics are our account are encompassing a lot of really interesting literary tropes as far as what they can see and what they can feel. And the penetration of illusions.

And there’s something to be said here about the continual falling off of illusion as a school of magic relative to the rest. But that’s a different podcast. I think.

David Markiwsky: Yeah. And like, I think that’s a, it’s probably a good point that there’s actually like this weird, in tier four, things like true sight and tremors, hands, blind sight, they’re all a little bit more common, right? Once you get into higher level monsters. But there’s like a weird intersectionality of them where they’re okay on their own. But yeah, start stacking them up, they start to remove so many options. That was something that I think we kind of figured out in the first round of play testing where it wasn’t the fact that something wrong with a monster having tremor sense and true sight. But that when you have them both together, eliminate all the options.

Like there’s, there’s no way to kind of trick your way past it once you start stacking them over each other.

Lucas: You’re kind of also bumping against the sort of “rocks fall and everyone dies” trope where “you’re dead because I say so”. You’re on the razor’s edge between having something that you can interact with meaningfully in a combat position and something that’s just beyond your ken as an adventure.

David Markiwsky: Yeah. absolutely. And it really comes to that, like sure. It makes sense. A goddess should be able to see through your tricks and like most of them, but there should still be a way. Right? And I think the tremor sense one was because during play testing I had two players and one of them was trying to go in with a disguise and got saw through and the other one was like, well, then I’ll go underground and like turn it into an earth elemental and earth glide! Well, with tremor sense she could see that too. So it kind of like, we, I think we went through a checklist together of like, these are all the ways that someone might try and approach trick their way through this: will any of them work? Some of them probably should work.

Jessica Marcrum: Yeah, we really wanted, not just for Luthic, but for all of the encounters in this to be possible, but difficult. And especially when you’re at tier four and you have, I mean, that’s ideal for any encounter, but at tier four, when you have so many options at your disposal, the last thing you want is a, well, you can’t do that cause I said so.

Lucas: If the tagline for this is “every goddess has their reason,” what is Luthic’s reason?

Jessica Marcrum: Oh, I mean, that’s kind of what you find out over the course of the adventure, but

Lucas: Oh, no. Have I asked for spoilers?

Jessica Marcrum: No. And this, I mean, I, I talked about in the author’s notes, how it was kind of very loosely inspired by the Russian folktale of how the sun was brought back to the sky and also the nineties classic, How Stella Got Her Groove Back because Luthic is kind of fed up of being ignored and mistreated by not just her pantheon, but all of her worshipers and just decides to not one day and leaves and goes to her hot young boyfriend’s house and has no intention of returning.

And so if adventures are like, no people are dying, you have to come back and do your job. Then there might be an altercation if they’re less than friendly in their approach. ‘Cause you know, she doesn’t just quit. She, she like middle fingers up releases the escape hatch on the airplane and fires two guns in the air before leaving. She, she sends a blood rain plague on everybody as she quits her job in epic fashion.

Lucas: That’s incredible. There’s there’s so much here. I don’t think I expected nineties coming of age to match Russian folktales, but here we are. Oh gosh. The Uncaged Anthology actually got a lot of press in its early days as kind of the feminist D&D adventure. It seems to me, that’s something you guys are fairly comfortable with.

So like in the context of what you’re trying to do with Uncaged, bringing someone like Luthic into this, what does she contribute to that conversation that none of the other goddesses do?

David Markiwsky: I think that all of the, the goddesses. and Jesse, you can speak to Luthic in particular. But bringing a goddess in, especially a goddess that has, is like canonically evil kind of gives you a different perspective that like, feminism in terms of an adventure doesn’t just encompass “take these things that are evil and make them good” or “remove their reason for maligning them”, that you can still have those, your own motivations still tell a story that’s still that’s centered on them.

Jessica Marcrum: Yeah, I think with all of the goddesses, lot of, most of our writers went really deep into the forgotten rooms lore, which the original Uncaged books didn’t so much, some of them did, but a lot of the Uncaged adventures were taken directly from fairytales and it was flipping fairytale and mythological tropes because these are.

D&D goddesses they’re taken straight from their lower and addressing issues in their lore. So with Luthics, it’s that she’s super powerful and super smart and doesn’t get any credit. So her adventure is kind of like, why am I putting up with this? It, her acknowledging her own worth and kind of forcing everyone to reckon with that, right?

Like what if, what if, what if you have a really attentive mom who just decides to stop momming one day? Like what happens? Some of the other adventures deal more with trauma that goddesses have. Undergone and reconciling their relationships with other deities or with their own family, with our Pantheon.

And some of them who had less lore about them the authors got to get a little more creative and either invent something cool for them to do, or kind of just explore like what their domain could be and aspects of how it works. That was very long-winded.

Lucas: No, that’s what I’m here for. What are you hoping that this particular adventure with Luthic is going to contribute to people’s understanding of their daily lives?

Jessica Marcrum: I hope that basically everybody who has had to put up with misogynistic nonsense at their work at their home sees that they have value because they might see themselves in lieu thick a little bit and realizes that they have value and they don’t have to put up with it. They can just leave if they want, or if they want to go back and make things better, they can do that too.

Lucas: Yeah, I know I’ve asked for probably a master’s level thesis that we, that we could be writing on this kind of material, but thank you for weighing in.

The Troubled History of Orcs in D&D

Orcs have had kind of a troublesome history over the course of, of D&D and especially in Forgotten Realms. There was an errata that came out recently that altered some of the lore that had been published. It’s kind of changed going into new editions of the game or new printings of some of these monsters. Is there something that you about Luthic that contributes to the conversation around orcs that you would want to make sure we cover? Or is that something that you’d rather leave to uh, to someone else?

Jessica Marcrum: I had concerns writing about orcs as a white writer. And that was one of the first things that I flagged for sensitivity reading was to have at least one person review the adventure to make sure that I wasn’t getting in into like tropey things with the depiction of the orcs. And like I’ve always loved orcs because I, I’m a tall girl and any time I see other tall buff women, I’m like, “Yes, we are the same!” But there so much more than that. Uh, So yeah, I, we got really lucky honey and dice sensitivity read for this one. She read for a lot of our adventures and was just really lovely. And having her insight on this was really helpful.

So that was, that was really great.

Lucas: Did that process change? The way you think about works is as to sort of expand it beyond this, this this fan, this try this sisterhood of tall girls.

Jessica Marcrum: I think, I mean the big thing was just depicting them as, you know, a full people in a full culture. And that’s really hard when you also want to focus the goddess herself and you have only 3000 words

and our limit. So, what I tried to do with this is put in like little bonus things that orcish players, not orcish players, or just characters might know, or people who grew up around orcs, but also people who worship Luthic, or are really into religions so that it wasn’t just like, oh, this is just an art or culture thing. Like, nobody else knows this, but you know, also if you know, religion, you might know this.

The other ties were like, but if your character is an orc, they might actually know people who are being harmed by what’s going on to have that kind of tie there. Like you might run into some family the way to make it feel more personal to them, but yeah. And showing multiple types of NPCs so that it’s not depicting a monolith. So it’s less, orcs are like this and more. This ORC is like this.

David Markiwsky: We did try and like bring a lot of that same sort of care to all the adventures that we went through her in the book. And like having sensitivity readers is something that’s been important throughout. All of, not just on caged, but Jess and I have worked on together.

I’m pretty sure. So we did in sensitive sensitivity, readers, wherever we thought they might be helpful. Even in cases where we were like probably doesn’t need it here, but we’ll do it better, better to do it than not. So like, I think altogether we had 12 or 14 of the 21 adventures required sensitivity readers for one thing or another.

And not just for like the issues with orcs, but anything that that might be or might require more sensitivity, or maybe even in like in the case of the Luthic adventure where having an additional perspective might enhance the adventure or broaden the scope of what the writer would be able to kind of commit.

Jessica Marcrum: Yeah, we had a couple goddesses in this who their whole thing is specifically dealing with illusion or things that play with your mental health. So we had a lot of mental health reading for that as well.

Lucas: Yeah, that is also another podcast. And I hope, I hope you guys will come back because the, the door and there’s so much in uncaged, that’s like very much in line with what I want to do with this show.

Where to get Uncaged: Goddesses

So what’s the best way to to make sure I get a copy of Uncaged when it drops?

Jessica Marcrum: Follow David and Gwen on Twitter.

David Markiwsky: So yeah, Uncaged: Goddesses comes out on February 22nd. So which is Tuesday coming out digitally and in print the DM’s Guild You can follow either me or Jess or our other project lead Gwen on Twitter. And we’ll be about it over the next week or, and into perpetuity. Yeah, Probably longer.

Jessica Marcrum: And yeah, if you go to uncagedanthology.com, we’ll have a link to it there as well.

mind’s still kind of blown with all of the amazing artists and writers that we got this who want to be a part of our little book.

David Markiwsky: Yeah. Especially some of the artists I’m like, what do you mean you on Baldur’s Gate?

Jessica Marcrum: Yeah. We

David Markiwsky: What do you mean?

Jessica Marcrum: gate artists. We have, one of our writers is an original Fallout dev and writes for Star Trek. And I’m like, what are you doing here?

David Markiwsky: Well, that’s like when I, I didn’t realize Ivory wrote for Larry and on divinity to handy, they wrote an adventure for us

We were like, are you sure you mean to be here? You do know it’s revenue share. Are you, sure?

. every adventure got their own border and that was,

Jessica Marcrum: and David did it.

David Markiwsky: that was

me.

Lucas: man.

Jessica Marcrum: Yeah.

is no stock art in this book. It’s it’s all David.

Lucas: Incredible. Incredible. That’s it for episode one of season four of Making a Monster. And thank you for listening. If you like what you’ve heard and you want to support the show, please share it with the people you play games with. Your recommendation goes a long way to helping people trust me with their time and attention, and it’s a real gift to me and the creators I feature.
If you want to go deeper with the show, get stat blocks behind the scenes, content and other monstrous perks. You can support me on Patrion at patrion.com/scintilla studio. That’s S C I N T I L L a studio.

Join the Scintilla Studio Patreon
You can also use D and D to make a difference in animal conservation and the preservation of habitat by checking out book of extinction, it’s a BC three of extinct species brought to life again for Dungeons and dragons. We’ve got a three monster preview out already. So you can see if it’s a match for your table and learn about the stranger than fiction stories these animals encountered in real life.

Next time on Making a Monster:

James Introcaso: so that is the, the war spider in a nutshell. The other thing is that when it dies, uh, a swarm of baby spiders burst forth from its

Lucas: Oh no!

James Introcaso: so, uh, so yeah.

Lucas: James, why have you done this?

Scintilla Studio