Minionworks

Minionworks produces several series of podcasts featuring people playing different tabletop role-playing games.

We're a group of geeks and tabletop enthusiasts from the greater Houston, Texas area who got together in January 2014 and thought it would be a good idea to turn our weekly Dungeons & Dragons® game into a weekly podcast series.

We're still regretting the decision.

It is a dark time across the land - the foxlord, Renard, casts a long shadow from his castle across all Four Corners. In the wake of his rule, a perpetual autumn shrouds the land in red and gold. Food rots in fields, but never ripens. Each new moon, the furred folk of the Four Cities send their tithe of youth to his court. Drawing stones from his cauldron, some join his army… and others his larder. In the southern city of Clowdertown, resistance grows. Brought together by the raccoon crime boss, Papa Ringtail, they will strike back at the foxlord's regime so that no more young will march into… Borchardbriar.

Four adventurers have been brought together by fate… and a goat… and tasked with taking on the villainous Count Strahd von Zarovich and save the village of Barovia. They've agreed to do it - for a modest fee, of course. Welcome to Freelance Heroism - a bi-weekly 5th-Edition Dungeons & Dragons actual-play podcast on the Minionworks Podcasting Network! Our current campaign is Curse of Strahd, a Gothic horror-inspired setting in the dangerous and fog-shrouded land of Ravenloft. While the setting is serious, our heroes are anything but. Will they survive the horrors of Castle Ravenloft and defeat Strahd?

When five hapless, wannabe heroes inadvertently cross paths with an eccentric, old wizard named Maximillian and save his prized journal, it starts a journey of epic proportions… and quickly goes downhill from there. Kildrek Bellringer is a cleric with a crisis - his faith in Moradin has faltered so much, he now believes his powers come from within. Stasi Xen is a fighter who can't overcome her matronly instincts and her fascination with luck and javelins. Bullock Borneoake is a brilliant, treasure-hunting psion with a list of phobias and neuroses as long as his robes. Sgt. Llewelyn “Sting” Buttercup is a pixie rogue with a serious case of PTSD and a serious-er lack of morals. Dog, a ranger raised by bears, is as simple as a… well… ranger raised by bears. Together, they'll uncover one of the biggest secrets that the mortal realm, or any realm for that matter, has ever seen… or die trying.

Welcome to Tumbleson County, 1933. God's country. The land of milk and honey. The home of southern hospitality. And, soon, the epicenter of the coming armageddon.

Set in Not-Mississippi, as Prohibition is coming to an end and ominous forces are circling the poor county like vultures readying for a meal, Tumbleson County is a place full of monsters, demons, and pure evil… and that's just the citizens. While the county's most powerful families fight amongst each other to secure their place at the table in the coming end times, a brave (and questionably intelligent) group of men and women and… animal… have banded together to try save their fellow Tumblesonians or, at the very least, themselves.

Harland Dooney was not your average Iowan farmboy. After witnessing an exhibition during a trip to the 1925 Iowa State Fair that introduced the young man to the world of animated films, he put down his plow and pitchfork and picked up pad and pencil. Four years later, with his belongings on his back and stolen money in his pocket, he slowly made his way towards Hollywood with the dreams of becoming an animator. After three years, however, those dreams had all but dried up when a chance meeting with the Marx Brothers turned young Dooney's fortunes around. The rest, as they say, is history.

Depending on who you ask, though, that history has a few different versions.

Some say Dooney, through hard work, became the greatest animator in the world through hard work, perseverance and a little luck. Others say that underneath that aw-shucks Iowan demeanor lay a cold, calculating, shrewd, heartless predator that stabbed every back he could get a knife into to claw his way to the top. And at least one crackpot writer out there thinks the guy just sold his soul to something that would make the Devil pee his pants. Regardless, Dooney rose to the top and now his characters are beloved the world over and, every year, millions of devout Doonatics make their way to their version of Mecca: Dooneyland.

It's the Most Magical Place Anywhere… even if most of that magic isn't of the fairy godmother sort.