Goblins and gift guides (Patreon)

Hi folks,

It is hard to believe that it is already December and that the end of the year is almost upon us!

With the holiday season looming, if you’re looking for gift ideas, be sure to check out our official merchandise stores for gifts themed around your favourite podcasts!

For t-shirts, stickers, posters and more for all Rusty Quill Original shows, check out rusty-quill.dashery.com (currently on sale!)

For a Rusty Quill Gaming dice set or a very limited-edition The Magnus Protocol signed script, check out Dice Dungeon

For two Magnus-themed perfume scents (available both in the United States and Internationally), visit Sucreabeille

For wooden dice towers, storage boxes and homeware themed around Rusty Quill and Magnus, visit HarpsCorp

For a limited-edition Magnus microphone, visit Sontronics

Purchase The Magnus Archives Roleplaying Game from Monte Cook

Pre-order The Admiral plush from YouTooz

Pre-order Magnus-themed teas and coffees from The Gilded Teafling

Next up, as a quick reminder, don’t forget to submit your entry for Rusty Fears 7, our legendary horror writing competition. Find out more, including the prompts and a link for the submission form by checking out this post.

Finally, today we are delighted to welcome Gals & Goblins to the RQ Network. Gals & Goblins is a TTRPG actual play that loosely follows the rules of Dungeons and Dragons and strictly follows the Rule of Cool. Traverse the magical realm of Eldrivale and begin your studies at Frogmont Adventuring Academy for young women – what could possibly go wrong?

As always, we have an interview with the team behind Gals & Goblins exclusively for our paid members to find out more about the show!

Tell us who you are and a bit about Gals & Goblins.

Okay, picture this: three Gals—Campbell, Lilly, & Olivia, meet at a quaint university in Texas where they’re each getting their degree in Theatre. They get cast in a play called She Kills Monsters, which is all about playing Dungeons & Dragons. For research purposes, they start playing the aforementioned game. . . and they haven’t stopped since! 

Along the way, they make sure to rope in their longtime Goblin friend, Jared, who always has interesting stories to tell. Would you be shocked to hear that he also has a degree in Theatre? Now, all four of us are best friends who need to see each other at least 4 times a week or we shrivel up and DIE! 

Now, on to the more official part about what our show is! Gals & Goblins is an Actual Play Podcast that loosely follows the rules of Dungeons & Dragons and strictly follows the Rule of Cool. Our purpose is to cultivate joy and camaraderie through play. We use performance as a stepping stone to build community with our audience and provide them actionable ways to create their own adventuring party. 

We are part of the movement to tell anyone who might have been previously excluded from the TTRPG community: "We belong here, and so do you!"

Our main story is about a group of teenage adventurers uncovering mysteries at Frogmont Adventuring Academy for Young Women. To pursue the truth, the Gals embark on a journey full of friendship, betrayal, sacrifice, and shenanigans. 

What got you into podcasting? 

Telling stories together has always been what we do for fun, whether there’s an audience in front of us or we’re sitting in Olivia’s living room. That desire, mixed with our love for podcasts in general, led us to explore the medium for ourselves! 

We were introduced to actual play podcasts by our costume shop manager at university. Together, we listened to beautiful campaigns and hilarious adventures as we built costumes for whatever production we were mounting at the time. In case you’re wondering, our gateway TTRPG podcasts were Dungeons & Daddies, The Adventure Zone, and NADDPod.

As it turns out, the process of creating a podcast has major overlap with producing theatre. Have we mentioned that we all got our degrees in Theatre yet? We’ve been on the production side of multiple projects, so we have a unique concoction of skills that lends itself perfectly to creating a storytelling podcast! All those hours spent creating production calendars, sound designing, improvising in our acting classes, and marketing plays and musicals to convince our friends and families to buy tickets while we were in school have really paid off.

What are you most proud of about Gals & Goblins? 

While we could talk your ear off about the hilarious & heartwarming stories we’ve woven with our complex yet lovable characters, that wouldn’t be the right answer to your question. The community that we’ve built through the stories we tell is what we will always be the most proud of! There’s no better feeling than waking up on the morning of a new episode release, opening Discord, and seeing people react to the most recent story developments while they theorize about what might happen next. 

Many of our listeners have formed their own D&D groups with fellow community members after bonding over a shared love for the show. People have created original characters that attend the magical boarding academies featured in Gals & Goblins, and some are even building a digital yearbook with all of their characters included! 

We’ve had the opportunity to host two live Actual Play shows this year, and people traveled from all over the country to meet up with their fellow listeners and to let us play D&D for them. We never considered that as a possibility when we started our show less than 3 years ago, and it wouldn’t be a reality if we didn’t have such a lovely community supporting us. 

When you listen to our show, we want you to feel like you’ve been invited into our living room and are playing D&D right along with us. The best part is: it doesn’t matter if you know a single thing about the game we’re playing! All we care about is making sure you have fun and feel welcomed into our silly little community. 

We hope y’all join us at the table soon! 

(Image description: Left: a photograph of the four Gals & Goblins cast members sitting on a sofa holding microphones and laughing. Right: Podcast artwork for Gals & Goblins – a lined page full of doodles or swords, dice, frogs, cats, stars and more. In a handwritten style font is the title: Gals & Goblins).

You can listen to Gals & Goblins wherever you find podcasts, on the Gals & Goblins website or by visiting the Rusty Quill website. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving a rating or review, as this is the best way to support a show!

Have a good week all!

The Rusty Quill team