The audio attached to this post is clipped from this month's Watch Out for Fireballs! Dispatch.
Hello! We are excited to share some big news with you. Later this year, we will be launching a new premium podcast that is a deep dive into Baldur's Gate III. We're calling it "Real Lich Hours". It will be a weekly show at the $5 tier, with the first handful of episodes being free to everyone so you can get a taste.
One of the reasons we started Bonfireside Chat was because Dark Souls was too good of a game to not make a show about. We feel the same way about Baldur's Gate III. Add that on top of our pre-existing love for Dungeons and Dragons and the Forgotten Realms, and it just makes sense that we'd be doing this.
Let's talk about how the show will be structured. It will be a bit different than Bonfireside Chat, with less emphasis on locations and more emphasis on individual quests and the characters, world-building, monsters, and lore around them.
The conceit will be to make it resemble a periodical like Dragon magazine, with weekly recurring segments and sidebars that focus on things like monster ecologies, character deep dives, and the particularities of the Forgotten Realms and the Sword Coast. This will be in addition to the kind of dissection of encounter design, tactics, and lore that we normally do. The emphasis will always be to single out and answer the question: "What's cool about this?"
We will also be pursuing a gimmick, for lack of a better word, that the show playthroughs we do will be divided by morality. Kole will be playing a real saint, a paragon of good, and Gary will be indulging in every form of evil crapulence available to him.
Baldur's Gate III being the expansive and generous miracle that it is, it will take a long time to cover. When we finish, if this show gets traction and it feels like there's demand (and interest on our part) we might continue onward to talk about other games in the setting. Possibly including going back to the other Baldur's Gate games, or even returning to Planescape: Torment to do a season on that setting and its factions.
There are all kinds of possibilities.
There are some details to this rollout and how it will affect both Bonfireside Chat and Watch Out for Fireballs!, so check out the points below.
Bonfireside Chat will become a seasonal show. This means when FromSoft puts out new content that fits our format, the show will resume at the $5 tier just like before. The current run will continue through the Elden Ring miscellanea (soundtrack, cut content, mods, etc.).
When Shadows of the Erdtree comes out, we will do however many episodes it takes to cover that at the quality and level of thoroughness you've come to expect.
We understand this might not be welcome news for people who are here for Souls and only Souls. But switching our attention to Baldur's Gate III and really giving our all to something we know we'll be enthusiastic about will make a better show than stringing BSC along by taking gambles on increasingly obscure Soulslikes.
When a Soulslike comes along that we're super excited to cover, we will cover it on Watch Out for Fireballs! To that end, we're pre-announcing that in January we will be covering Blasphemous II on that show.
There are several reasons we're doing this, but the primary one is that Soulslikes commonplace now in a way that they weren't back when something like Lords of the Fallen (the old one) came out. They can be analyzed in the context of a broader range of games, not just on a specialty show. Additionally, non-From Soulslikes don't usually warrant more than the WOFF! level of zoom.
Fans of WOFF! know that every December we pick a PC-style RPG and camp out on it for the whole month. Real Lich Hours could be seen as an eternal PCRPG Winter, but we don't want to stop covering those on Watch Out for Fireballs!.
We will instead be focusing on more games from the genre that can be covered in an episode or two, similar to how we've recently been handling the Summer Console RPG for a while. Mammoth games might still be considered, we're just winging it like always.
We are currently working on getting official art and music for the show, and doing prepping and playing so we can structure the launch and really hit the ground running. Keep an ear out for more announcements!