Adventures in Erylia started when Damian, the DM, told his wife Caitlin, that he wanted to start up his own D&D game. After having been a player in other games, Damian was inspired to start creating his own world and start telling a story in it. This world is what became Erylia.
Through a shared interest in Critical Role, Caitlin brought in her co-worker, Christa. The two of them were joined by another co-worker, Chantalle, who was interested in the opportunity to hang out and play games. None of them had ever played Dungeons and Dragons or another tabletop RPG before.
Rounding out our group of five, Christa brought in her then boyfriend, now fiancé, Chris, who was also a fan of Critical Role and who had played Dungeons and Dragons many many years ago.
With a focus on roleplay, heavy editing, and in depth production, Adventures in Erylia straddles the line between being a traditional Actual Play Podcast and being an Audio Drama. Our story takes on a slower, simulationist, pace to allow plenty of time for the player characters to explore the world, interact with NPCs, and get to know one another in game as their own people. Our recording sessions would look a lot like many people's home games. We use the time to hang out, get off topic, and share side stories. That all changes once the audio hits the editing booth as countless hours are spent distilling the audio down to the story we are telling to keep it moving forward and engaging to a listener. The listening experience is enhanced through the addition of background music, setting ambience, and sound effects. Our goal is to tell a story where closing your eyes will let you feel like you are watching it happen around you. If this sounds like the show for you, then check out our episodes below.
We're in the final stages of getting the last commission from our Guild Masters commission series wrapped up. With this finishing up, we are in need of a new list to chose from for future commissions! We'd love to hear what characters or items you would like to see us have commissioned and they will get turned into a new pool to chose from in future polls over on Patreon. Click on the main post for this announcement to see a Google Form to fill out.
It's 2023 and time for a facelift for Adventures in Erylia. You're now checking us out on our brand new website! The new website should be pretty familiar to our old one, but it has been rebuilt on a whole new platform. In search of more customization options, we have moved from Squarespace over to Webflow. We are really excited for some of the new features and more granular customization that we have on Webflow.
After much time away, the party is finally back at The Guild Hall and can relax for a night, or so they hope. Kenina finds herself whisked away in a dream once again to confront Doitean and learns a lot about the history of Dragons.
Upon waking up the next day, each member of the party finds themselves called in front of the guild masters, alone. Rem is given a mysterious letter and a package. Ariel is asked about her experiences with the spear. Kenina confesses about her meetings with Doitean and her connection to Fioch is brought up. Everyone is asked if they believe Tempest is a good fit for their group and if she is ready for the journey ahead.
Believing that everyone is on board with the path that has been laid out in front of them, the Guild Masters call the entire party in together in order to point them in what they believe is the next best direction. The party is told that they should seek an audience with The Queen of The Faevale.
After what has felt like years, though has really only been a few weeks, our adventurers have finally returned to the city of Riven. After saying their goodbyes to Thorstag and the crew of the Iron Cask, they make their way to The Guild Hall to meet with the Guild Masters to debrief them on the situation with Grimfang and The Spear, as well as see what they have learned about The Axe. The party, including Tempest, are given one last chance to turn away before entering a one way door into a saga that will change the course of their lives, and perhaps all of Erylia.
As the party tries to sleep, it becomes clear to them that Ariel’s attempt to cleanse The Spear has not worked. After Thorstag and the crew are woken up by the commotion, he levels with them that they need to talk to the crew about what is going on. The party meets with members of the crew to make it clear that the issues that have been happening since they boarded will leave with the party once they land in Riven later that day.
When I originally started to use this website as a blog as well, it wasn’t really my intention to only ever do the World Building Wednesdays. But alas, with a family, a full time job, and a podcast to edit, finding the time for that has been difficult. Aside from the world building, I will probably never have a consistent blog schedule, but I want to start fitting more in. For today, there are some tools I am in the alpha for that I wanted to write about.
A few weeks ago, I was falling behind on things. It started with being behind on editing an episode, and that followed to not having anything written for World Building Wednesday. From that, The Week of Excuses was born. It was originally a pretty tongue in cheek statement to explain not having content on time, but I decided to run with it. At the end, I said that when I got to the calendar building portion of things, The Week of Excuses was totally going to be a thing.
It's been a long time. Far too long. Our last recording session was on 10/15/2022... That was over six months ago! After that, life for the cast just got very chaotic and busy. But we were able to get together last weekend and sit down for a long 4 hour session filled with roleplay, exposition, and hooks for what the party might do next.
Adventures in Erylia is a small independent podcast that is funded by the cast. One thing that we do not have the budget for is having art done to help visualize the world that we have made and are playing in. For that, we lean on the support of our Guild Members over on Patreon. Thanks to their continued support in what we are doing as a show, we have been able to commission a number of one of a kind pieces of art for the show.
Daniel Lee was the first artist that we started regularly working with to have custom commissions done for the show. Damian discovered his art through one of the Dungeons and Dragons subreddits and immediately fell in love with his style. After getting the opinions of the rest of the cast and everyone agreeing that we wanted to pursue working with him, we reached out to Daniel for a commission. We started small, having him bring Fioch, the great axe that the party delivered to The Adventurers Guild, to life. We got that commission back in August of 2021 and have been working with him since, doing art for multiple legendary weapons and characters.
SketchGoblin is an artist I have seen all over the place, for quite a long time. I can't remember if I first came across one of his illustrations on Reddit or on Twitter, but I immediately knew I wanted to have our first full group art done in his style. Our first art commission was the Erylian Epic party, which has become a part of our album art for the show. I think it works great used in this way because the large blocks of colors from the vector style drawings keep the characters recognizable, even when scaled down. He was a great artist to work with and we would recommend him to others as well.