"The Last Hope", a totally serious AP about pirates, Premieres Today!

Roll for Distraction has just started their new actual play season, The Last Hope, which will be a campaign of the swashbuckling system Honor + Intrigue! H+I is a 2d6 system about swashbuckling heroes, with inspiration from classic tales such as The Three Musketeers. We'll be playing as a rag-tag crew of pirates fighting against the encroaching British empire in the early 18th century. Aboard our trusty ship the Silver Siren we'll sail all across the Caribbean and pre-revolution America, as we search for a key to renewed freedom from silly British monarchs.

You can watch the first episode here: YouTube Spotify

Roll for Distraction features six IRL friends who decided to start documenting their escapades during the pandemic, when they were forced to play remotely. While their adventures began with Dungeons & Dragons, the show was completely reformatted after the OGL fiasco. Rather than continuing their D&D games, the group shifted its focus to instead be about discovering what else is out there, with short campaigns of about 10 episodes each highlighting less-known systems.

They started with a Cyberpunk RED campaign titled The Family Jewels, which followed a family planning a heist against their greedy corpo grandfather. Then they played a Lancer campaign titled The Lost Colony, which was a runaway success that got their YouTube channel from under 300 subscribers to over 1000 in about a month. Next they played a game of Monster of the Week titled The Devil You Know, which followed college students in New Jersey hunting (and being hunted by) the Jersey Devil. Most recently, they a played of game Salvage Union called Starfall, where they played as post-apocalyptic mech pilots scouring a wasteland for a mythical city.

Seasons run for around 10 episodes, and each episode is edited to be about 1 hour in length, so the time investment is comparable to a season of a typical streaming show. Episodes come out every other Friday at 10:00 AM EST, on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Podbean. YouTube members can watch new episodes 24 hours early. The show’s guiding mantra is “unprofessional gameplay, presented professionally”, meaning that while we keep all the puns, jokes, and titular distractions in the edit, we still make sure to create a pleasant audio-visual experience and tell a good story.