The Storyteller Who Builds Worlds - Patrick Perini (Unbalanced Encounters)

There are storytellers—and then there is Patrick C. Perini.

To describe Patrick solely as the creator of Unbalanced Encounters would be to miss the point. He’s not just a podcaster, director, or writer.

He’s a builder of ecosystems, a conductor of emotional resonance, and above all, someone deeply committed to the art of storytelling for its own sake—not its monetization, not its marketability, but its meaning.

Raised in the theater, sharpened by improv, and seasoned by years in tech and game design, Patrick’s approach blends performance with precision, heart with logistics. He doesn’t just run games—he runs experiences.

His Discord isn’t just a fan server—it’s where listeners become collaborators and collaborators become friends. And the podcast? It’s not just something you listen to—it’s something you feel.

Patrick’s storytelling is influenced as much by Appalachian folklore and Princess Mononoke as it is by the chronic realities of illness, the philosophies of Miyazaki, and the hard-won lessons of startup culture.

The result is work that resonates because it’s lived. He doesn’t chase trends—he builds worlds that endure.

If you’re discovering Patrick through Unbalanced Encounters, The Long Rest, or his eclectic collaborations, prepare for more than a show. Prepare for a world built on intention, a creative ethos that values community over virality, and stories that linger long after the credits roll.

Visit pcperini.com to explore his work—and maybe become part of it.

Can you share your journey into storytelling and how it led to the creation of Unbalanced Encounters?

Yeah, absolutely. So I started storytelling fairly young, actually. I grew up in the theater surrounded by theater people, was taught sort of improv at a young age, and more serious dramatic acting as well at a young age, so I'm remarkably less good at that.

And, you know, kind of fell away from it a little bit when I moved into sort of the tech world and the video game world. But even then, I was always looking for the excuse to storytell, right?

I was starting companies, recruiting people, storytelling and storytelling. I was, you know, kind of launching products and doing the early marketing and storytelling. And so at a certain point, I realized I just wanted to, you know, strip back some of the facade and do it for its own sake, not necessarily for the commercial viability.

And so I kind of got into the world a little bit, wrote a novel. Again, no commercial success off of that, but some really encouraging words for some people who were pretty entrenched in the creative industries and convinced me to dip my toe, which is where I met Emily Graymar, who is now my wife. And she and I, very early on in our relationship, decided that we wanted to do an actual play we like, actual plays.

And we thought we could do that. We could do that, right? And yeah, it's really just because of us wanting a pet project that Unbalanced Encounters came together.

How have your experiences in acting, improv, and stage management influenced your approach to game mastering and podcast production?

I think a lot of these are pretty obvious. Acting and improv, very critical skills for game mastering and podcast production. I think that's a little self-evident. But stage management is a great pull because I think it's often not considered in the same way.

I think that stage management and sticking to a timetable, sticking to a script, either literally or an outline, what have you, is really an underrated skill for game mastering.

And I think that knowing the logistics side, knowing the logistics side is a critical skill for game mastering. And a big part of what makes Unbalanced Encounters such a good show is really our ability, but my ability a little bit, to be able to land a cliffhanger, to be able to land a stinger line. Believe it or not, that's very rarely done in editing. And that comes more from stage management than from acting or improv.

What inspired the unique setting and narrative of Unbalanced Encounters: Rally?

Emily and I both really like folklore. Emily grew up in England, is very attached to sort of the English countryside. I grew up in Appalachia and am just a big fan of those stories and the energy of that space, and, you know, the feeling of the grass, you know, and the twang. And we decided we wanted to do something in that space.

And so we looked to things that we loved, to media influences that we loved, Princess Mononoke being a huge one for Raleigh. And that helped us kind of cultivate the question, What happens when the rapidly industrializing civilization clashes with the ancient nature and the ancient nature starts to push back and everything kind of grew out of that?

What strategies have you found most effective in marketing Unbalanced Encounters to a broader audience?

We haven't. I can't lie to you. We're friends. I wouldn't do that to you, right? Marketing is this big unpredictable beast. And if you talk to anyone who's intellectually honest about the process of marketing, And I love especially Sam Reich's stuff with the dropout, you know, sort of takeoff, you know, meteoric rise for them.

He talks about like, there but for the grace of God, you know, I'm sitting on the curb, right? It's luck. It's luck. It's luck. It's luck. And I think that the two things that I have been saying and thinking very recently when we're thinking about marketing have been, you have to have these two things.

The first is, is whatever you're making, your show or whatever, good enough that when someone finds it, they stay, they love it, they can't get enough.

Because if you don't have that, it doesn't matter how many people are going to see your thing because they're not going to care. They're not going to like it. And so that's critical. The other thing that is critical is do you love the process enough to really stick with it for maybe years until you get lucky?

Because if you don't, you're going to burn out. And if you burn out, you're not going to be around long enough. You're not going to survive long enough to get lucky. And that's what it takes.

That's what it takes. It takes getting lucky. There's no other way around it.

How do you utilize social media platforms to engage with your listeners and promote your content?

Not well. We're hoping to get a little bit more mileage out of short form video in our season two as we're being more intentional about creating that kind of content. But we don't do a great job of that, frankly, because we haven't found it consistently valuable. It's been very fits and starts.

Can you discuss any collaborations with influencers or other content creators that have helped boost your podcast's visibility?

Same with collaborators. Can you discuss any collaborators or influencers or other content creators that have helped boost your podcast visibility? Aside from the people who are on the show itself. And again, I'll say that's largely Cinderblock Sally. you can find on YouTube and Twitch who has his own audience.

He's a, you know, brilliant game designer, homebrew, creator extraordinaire. Some of his shorts tend to do a little bit better just because he's got a very big, motivated audience. But in general, it's just not, it's just not there.

You have to, you have to get lucky finding your own audience. And we've mostly found ours off of social media, word of mouth and so forth. So influencers and collaborators, eh, mixed bag.

What role does your YouTube channel play in your overall marketing strategy?

Pretty much the exact same answer it's one of three or four platforms that we make sure we put content up on when we are releasing the show because people do listen to the show in youtube you know as a youtube video um but the numbers are not astronomical they're not even they're definitely not the first most popular platform they might not even be the second.

How do you measure the success of your marketing campaigns and adjust them accordingly?

We take a stab we see if it feels right and We do our best to try to listen to the audience when they tell us something meaningful. And beyond that, I don't have any wisdom for you here. I really, really believe with all of my heart that marketing, of course, you have to consider your audience.

Of course, when you're making anything, you have to consider your audience and you have to consider how they're going to react. You have to consider whether or not what you're making is worth their time. And you have to consider whether or not it's the right thing to put in front of them for sure. A lot of people are doing that. And so the rest is just luck.

What monetization strategies have you implemented for Unbalanced Encounters, and which have been most successful?

We have done two. Only two. We've done a little bit of advertising. Very small amount. We have done, goodness, I think, one or two little one-off $10 jobs for friends. And we've done a bigger campaign for Magpie when they released their Ravscallion game, or rather they did the backer kit for it.

We had gotten a chance to play a preview of that game, pre-release version of the game for our The Odyssey bonus arc, which Ibrahim, who was on that show, suggested got us in touch with them. We loved it, so we offered to do some advertising because it was convenient timing.

And, you know, a little bit of, you know, not a trivial amount of money for us and hopefully a little bit of help for them. But nothing crazy. Where most of our money comes from, and we're not talking a lot of money, it's Patreon and our audience, our backers, who really keep this thing alive in a very, very real way.

How do you balance creating free content with offering exclusive paid content to your audience?

So for about a year and a half, we were doing these bonus arcs to try to drive people sort of behind the paywall. And I think it did work to an extent, but it's a very expensive thing to do.

Making whole absolutely incredible feature film length podcast episodes with full soundscaping and semi improvised, you know, kind of, I mean, almost entirely improvised.

But, you know, very, very, very heavily improvised play that's then very heavily edited into something that feels a little bit more, you know, kind of intentional. It's a lot of time. And so we decided to pivot.

We decided that going forward, we were going to release everything that was behind the paywall and not put any of our new stuff behind a paywall. And instead, you know, we're going to paywall gate, you know, things like merch and so forth that are not necessarily the heart and soul of what we do.

Because we're putting too much time and energy into things that, you know, while certainly our most generous audience members were getting to see vanishingly small number of our audience members. And they wanted to share with their friends and couldn't. So it just wasn't right for us.

Can you share insights into your Patreon experience and its impact on your podcast's sustainability?

So I have two minds here. On the one hand, Patreon was around when we were getting started, and it was so easy to get set up and start bringing in cash. And for that, indispensable, right? I think two days into our Patreon launching, we were break-even on costs. And, you know, we keep costs low.

It's hosting fees and licensing for music and stuff. It's nothing hectic. but it was day two of having our Patreon up. Fantastic. An absolute godsend, and I don't know what we would have done without it. Longer term, they don't necessarily prioritize the needs of smaller creators.

So if you're not going to be the person who's pulling in 10,000 plus patrons a month, a lot of their feature work goes into things that have nothing to do with you. A lot of their feature work goes into stuff that is, you know, prioritizing these sort of live releases and, you know, communicate with your audience.

And, you know, when one-tenth of one-tenth of our audience is on Patreon, it's just not relevant, right? And so, you know, between that and the fact that they can take a pretty sizable chunk, you know, up to 40% if we're using their merch, usually less, but, you know, it's a decent amount of money, We have decided that they're no longer serving us.

So Patreon was perfect for what we needed it to be in the beginning. And now has maybe outlived its usefulness by just a bit. So we are actively in the process of migrating away.

What challenges have you faced in commercializing your podcast, and how have you overcome them?

The answer to this question is really just my own stubbornness. I got in this to do the art, right? That's what I'm here for. That's what I like. That's what I enjoy. I didn't get in this to build another company.

I didn't get in this to commercialize another product. I didn't get in this to crack D&D podcasting and hack it and make a bunch of money. I frankly doubt whether or not there's a bunch of money to be made if you're not one of the World's Beyond Number crew. With all love to them. They're so talented. It's not the space, right? It's not the space to hit a commercial home run. It's a space to do something meaningful artistically.

And so that stubbornness has manifested itself in a number of ways. We don't pursue the marginal ad dollar, right? I don't go after MailChimp and be like, you know, give me podcast download, you know, advertising dollars. And I, frankly, we don't go to many TTRPGs, right? There are a lot of them out there. A lot of TTRPG-adjacent companies out there, like Wormwood or whatever, that, you know, quite frankly, I wouldn't work with because they're not great. And I get to be picky when I'm maintaining creative control. The show has an opinion. The show has an ethos. And it has a philosophy.

And none of those things line up with money, you know, prioritizing commercialization. And that's on me, right? We also do a great job of sort of hammering home to our audience how much it matters that they help us. And I think that, you know, we could maybe learn a little bit from Max Fund Drive, which I think does a very elegant job of fundraising, doing a fundraising drive for their audience.

Big fan of their work. We could maybe learn a little bit from them, but we don't usually hammer that home. You know, it's the thing we touch on occasionally. And so the biggest hurdles have been largely self-imposed, you know, a reticence to overextend for the sake of the almighty dollar. But this is something that I think we do really do very well.

How do you foster a sense of community among your listeners?

Oh, boy. So I mentioned we don't really do social media super well. We do respond to things that come in on social media, comment and so forth and our email is on our website unbalancingcounters.com

I respond personally to all of them that I think that's actually how we got in touch for this interview um you know we're we're good about that for sure the discord is where we live and I know a lot of people have discords and I know a lot of people say that they have discords where they foster community it's different.

For us and that's sometimes hard to get your head around so tell you a little story so shortly after we start rally somebody comes into the community and they immediately are like one of our bigger fans right they're hanging out and at the time which we're going to pick this back up in season two we were doing live listen-alongs to do episode releases so i would hang out with some of the members of the community occasionally another cast member or so and we would just you know do fan art doodles and drop memes and whatever this person was showing up very very regularly and we got to talking and uh he ended up hanging out a couple of times uh in sort of the community events that we sometimes do within our discord and then eventually uh hanging out a couple of times not necessarily the community events and now they are one of the most indispensable members of the unbalanced encounters team they do incredible story and production work for us and have for at this point years uh and they are beyond the shadow of a doubt a friend they're coming to visit emily and i uh later this year.

And that doesn't happen when was the last time dimension to somebody you know was watching dimension 20 and just hanging out in their peripheral space this is not somebody this is not you know a even a Jordan Brown who's like i'm making content that's adjacent to this no they were just hanging out in the discord and they're not the only one this is not a one-off sort of thing.

Our character artist for season two came in exactly the same way, started out fan art in the show when they were listening along to episodes. And, you know, and God, I can't count the number of people that we've actually gotten to know through this process, through mostly the Discord.

A couple other places, but mostly the Discord. Which you can find at discord.gg slash Unbalanced Encounters, by the way. It's a good time. It's a little slow at the moment because we're in between seasons. But it's a very, very thoughtful space.

Can you share examples of listener feedback influencing your content or storytelling?

Too many to count. Too many to count. NPC names like Reevesy Hopper Swallop, the Frog from Arc 2 of Rally, or Percival Thickbottom, The aptly named Thick-Bottomed Museum Curator from Arc 5 of Rally, all the way through to a magic item that really stands out for me.

And this is sort of major Rally spoilers, so spoiler tag. One of our patrons created a magic item called the Bond Blade. And the Bond Blade was given to Sam Oliver's character, June Snowthorn, who was a monk who got to sort of pluck the weave of things tethered to existence.

And if you cut that weave, you could disconnect people from memory so people would forget them or potentially from ever having existed. Their bond to reality. And that's exactly what the Bond Blade did. And it was that that feature of it was a one time use. And I think she got it in arc two, so it's maybe arc three.

So it sat on a shelf for 15, 20 episodes until the first episode of the finale, when she used it to not just kill the man who killed her father, but to erase him from ever having existed. It is the kind of narrative beat that I aspire to as an author when I have complete control.

A patron designed that. Because they listen, because they care, because they're clever, because they're storytellers just like us. So that's what we try to do with the show.

What initiatives have you undertaken to encourage listener participation and engagement?

I mean, I definitely covered a couple different ones. We ask our patrons to submit us all sorts of things. We ask questions in the Discord. We have those listen-alongs where people genuinely, you know, are in communication with us about the show.

My DMs are generally pretty open on Discord, so people have DMed me character art that has eventually become canon. They've DMed me ideas, clever theories that have eventually shaped my own thinking. It's collaborative. We really do it together.

Could you tell us about your upcoming project, The Long Rest, and its Kickstarter campaign?

The Long Rest is not affiliated with Unbalanced Encounters in any particular way but I am sort of the multi-hyphenate on that project i'm scene director and writer helping with production a couple other things um and emily is actually in the show she plays McRothiel Barrington Quinn.

I have no idea how you spell that. And obviously she does a fantastic job. The Long Rest is an audio drama. Very, very cinematic. I want you to think about what it's like to listen to a movie, right? And each episode is feature length, about hour 30, hour 45.

It has an absolutely incredible cast, a crew of wayward souls, that classic kind of adventuring trope of, you know, all walks of life, have been brought together by a masterful manipulator who needs them in a particular place in order to pull off something. And in the process, right at the beginning, he has already betrayed them.

And they have to choose, do they come together, put aside their differences and their own internal struggles to rise to the challenge and thwart him, or will the aforementioned tear them all apart? It is a tremendous amount of fun, and it is going to be coming to Kickstarter in the coming months. Our timeline, as most things in entertainment are, especially pre-funding entertainment, is a little loose.

But in the coming months, the Kickstarter is going to be launching. We're going to have our first episode out, and that should tee us up for, I believe it's an eight-episode block that we're looking for. It might be ten if we hit a stretch goal. I forget exactly, but that's the goal.

How has collaborating with talents like Emily Greymoore and Dallas Goldtooth enriched your projects?

Well, that, listen, that feels self-evident. Emily is my wife, and she's the reason why I get to do this. She's, listen, I could turn a phrase, but she's the one with the talent. She's the one with the heart. And I know that feels like it might be a cop-out, but I wake up every morning so grateful I get to work with her and enable the work that she does.

It's the best thing I've ever done in my life. And I'm so proud to be able to say that I get to be on shows with her. It's so much fun. I also am not going to turn this into the How Much Do I Love Emily hour I just did that episode over on Dungeons & Degrees Somewhat recently Maybe we'll link to that if I can get a link But Yeah, let's talk about Dallas I mean, listen, Dallas Brilliant actor, you know, heart of gold Funny guy What really stands out To me For Dallas is willingness to, I think, artistically take risks on, I mean, Crisis Filmography speaks to that for sure, you know, everything from Reservation Dogs to the Fallout series is just, you know, it's, you know, he has a He is a frankly crazy breadth of work that he's done.

And to throw the long rest into the mix, you know, going from all of these TV shows that he does and all of these sort of weird projects that he gravitates towards to, you know, this high fantasy audio drama where he plays a trickster god that is also sort of the narrator of the show is one of the things that I really admire about him. because it's, you know, there's no project that's too small. There's no project that's too out there.

There's no project that's too, like, not in step for him when he loves what it is. And from our interactions, it's pretty obvious that he loves working with the long rest. So I hope that should I find any amount of commercial success beyond my independent work, you know, as a performer, a writer, or whatever, that I will continue to doggedly adhere to the experimental and the idiosyncratic the way that Dallas seems to.

What lessons have you learned from previous projects that you're applying to The Long Rest?

Everything I do is a culmination of everything I've done. There's been product management work that I've needed to know how to do. There's been team management work that I've needed to know how to do. Obviously, all the writing is a culmination of all my writing practice and skill.

I am perpetually a student funneling my own lived experience back into the test in front of me. And it's been a pretty, pretty wild journey. But the nice thing about The Long Rest is that we've been really well supported.

The showrunner, Koda King, has pulled together an incredible crew, an incredible team, impeccable cast. And it's one of the few projects where I get to kind of stay in my lane. Which is, as we'll see in a question here in a second, a little uncommon for me.

How has your background in technology and game design influenced your storytelling approach?

You've got to make people feel something. What the hell does that mean? So, in game design, and I think game design a little bit more than product design, but game design in a lot of ways. We navigate by feeling. And you learn that when you read the Jesse Shell book and all the other game design stuff that you do when you're studying this sort of academically.

It ultimately boils down to players of games navigate by feeling. And they need to have those feelings activated in order to feel like there's a sense of progression. In order to feel like there's a sense of clarity. In order to feel like there's a sense of motivation. I know what I need to do.

And therefore, I'm going to engage in the play system that has been constructed here, right? And again, all things that are true, I think, to a degree in product design, maybe to a little bit lesser of a sort of amorphous narrative extent, because generally you have a little bit clearer of a mandate, but not much less. You need to still activate those feelings in order to be a good product designer.

And I think that that is fundamentally how I engage in telling stories. Every moment should make you feel something. And theoretically, those moments that make you feel something should hang together into a bigger over of feeling, a journey of feeling. But it's the moments and the moments should make you feel something. And when you keep that in mind and you're constantly trying to engage that from your players, it makes you a pretty damn good GM.

How do I make my players feel something? How do I help them make their characters feel something and then in turn evoke feelings in the other characters? And once you've got that positive flywheel going, you're really telling an interesting story. Because one is a story, but the expression of a character's motivation through their available means. that motivation is often a feeling.

Can you discuss any challenges you've faced due to chronic illness and how they've shaped your creative process?

It's funny because we just recorded the first episode back of unbalanced encounters after i had to take fortunately only a about a week off for a pretty bad chronic illness flare i know other people you know frequently need to take much more time off i've to take much more time off. This one was a little merciful, but it's never fun, and so it's a timely question.

I think when you go through the process of chronic illness, you learn two things. You learn first and foremost to be patient with yourself, which is a lot harder to do than with others. The other thing that you learn is you learn what it feels like to not be listened to, And that one sucks. That one really sucks. That one is hard to overcome. It's hard to advocate for yourself. It really is.

When you know how to be patient, and when you know how to listen, you are nine-tenths of the way to a healthy creative process. A healthy creative process is one that takes in everything it can and tries to deeply understand it. And that's from every angle. That's from your co-creators for sure at a high level. You know, if your co-creators don't feel listened to, why are they in the room? Right?

But it's also your environment. Are you listening to the animals that you see? Are you listening to the smells that you encounter? Are you listening to your body? Are you listening to that feeling of tension? Are you listening to your own sense of pacing? Your own internal rhythms? Because if not, then you're probably not going to understand a good story. there's a quote I guess I think it's a quote that I often attribute to how Miyazaki I'm not 100% sure how accurate this is but hey it serves me so fuck it in order to be a good storyteller you have to understand pain and the context that I believe I learned that from was him looking at a three-dimensional animation generation system that was causing very unnatural movement that didn't necessarily or that rather um betrayed that the algorithm that was generating the the movement.

Didn't understand pain and again i don't know how true this is but i've got a recollection of him likening it to a friend he has with sort of very crippling arthritis and and you know that that that friend's inability to move and how he would sit and watch and listen to that person's experience.

When you think of a Studio Ghibli film, and I often do, you have to think about the pain. You have to think about that experience of pain, moving through pain, avoiding pain sometimes, having to observe pain almost always.

And I think that that's a big part of what it means to tell a good story because it's how you show your audience that you're listening and i think that if you can't listen to yourself your body the people around you and your environment you can't be patient with that process you're gonna have a bad time so they shit my creative process indelibly and uh well i would never say that i was grateful for it at least i've been able to learn that in a way that i didn't have before.

What advice would you give to aspiring podcasters looking to blend narrative storytelling with TTRPGs?

What's that David Lynch quote from that one tv show when the horizon's at the at the at the at the top or the horizon's at the bottom it's interesting when it's in the middle, it's boring as shit. Know what the hell you're doing. What do I mean by that? You have a story in you. Maybe more, but at least one. That only you can tell.

Chances are the people you're working with due to. And if you show up to play a D&D game, and you play a D&D game, and you record it, and you put it out into the world, your horizon's going to be in the goddamn middle because that is not the story that only you can tell that is not the perspective that only you can offer that's the one that everybody can offer so if you can figure out why you need to tell this story what you need this story to be.

And again, there's a creative process in finding it. Experimentation is a huge part of this. But what's unique to your voice? Then you're going to have something. And then from there, I don't think it matters if it's good or if it's commercially successful. Because the world needs that experiment.

You owe it to yourself to try. And you owe it to the world to push that boat out into the water and see what happens. I live for and love experimental art. I got into this game because there were APs that were in existence that were so bad that I felt I needed to try my hand at it.

And that means that the bad stuff was actually valuable because it showed me that there was room for me to try to tell my story. But I never would have heard those bad actual plays if there wasn't something unique about them that made them float above all of the others. So be honest with yourself and open your heart to that thought of what is unique to your experience that is going to frame the story you tell.

How do you manage multiple roles—such as writer, composer, director, and producer—within a single project?

I work a lot. I work too much. I work too much. I work too much. I work too much. I find it fun. I often find it relaxing. I almost always find it gratifying in terms of, like, validating that I exist within the world, and that's something I'm working on in therapy. But I work a lot. In my life, I have had a lot of interesting moments. I have had a lot of weird stories. I've had a lot of crazy influences.

And they are as pinpricks of stars in an ocean of black void of working and being chained to my fucking desk. I don't recommend it. I recommend getting friends to help you as much as humanly possible. But it's just the way that I work. I will say if I had a piece of advice here, and that isn't the question, but if I do have a piece of advice here, figure out what you can't let go of.

For me, for Unbalanced Encounters, it is a little bit of the game running. I let other people GM. I let. We decide that other people should GM occasionally, but I'm very opinionated about that process, and so we're very cautious about it. but I think that editing is something I don't feel super comfortable letting go because I have such an opinionated approach to the way that the show should feel and the way that it should be edited.

So I give up other things. I give up story brainstorming. I give up game design and mechanic. I give up a lot of the production work when I can. So other people are doing the scheduling and coordinating um figure out what you can give up and then do your best to give that up and whatever you can't do well.

What resources or tools have been indispensable in your podcast production process?

None honestly i don't get culty about products uh i love some of the products that we use um i love my macbook uh it's my workhorse and i have my whole life on it um i'm a logic guy because I've been on Apple for forever. I really enjoy using Logic. It's a very fun flow for me. But everything else, I mean, we use Shure microphones mostly. They're good. They're solid.

If they weren't, we wouldn't use them. There's no adherence to that. And I think there are plenty of other microphones that are great and work, and we use them too sometimes. Same with our platforms. Podbeam, it's fine. Riverside, it's fine. I don't really get culty about product.

I will say actually the one thing that i do get a little culty about is notion uh and uh we have maybe one day i'll release this to the public maybe maybe one day i'll release this to the public but um uh we have a notion database big chonky thing uh that is our world glossary that also ties in really really deeply with our production pipeline uh and connects to sort of all of our workflow.

And so we really have a robust canon Bible that also contains like all episode summaries and all content warnings and all show notes and all participants and all credits. It's really quite something. But I built that up from scratch. So hard to say. Not exactly a resource that is available for most people unless people badger me enough. email me our email is on the website on balanceencounters.com and maybe I'll send you a link.

How do you stay updated with trends in both the podcasting and TTRPG communities?

I don't I live under a rock and I only watch cozy murder mysteries and British panel shows I don't pay attention to trends I learned this in the tech industry because I you know when you're young you follow trends really really hard And trends are just axioms, best practices, genuine things that we should be paying attention to that have not yet survived the test of time.

And so when they're no longer a trend, they'll either have died or I will hear of them then. And that's when it's relevant. Now, I do try to stay on the vanguard of my own work. I experiment a lot. I mess with stuff a ton.

You know, I play new TTRPGs because I want to play them more than because I think they might fit well for a show where they're part of, like, the community. But I don't need to be on the bleeding edge of anybody else's anything. Just my own.

What's next for you and Unbalanced Encounters? Any exciting projects on the horizon?

Yes! Yes. August 2025. We are going to be launching the first arc of our second season.

This first arc is going to be 12 episodes long approximately and it is going to be played in tales of the valiant we have not yet released the name that's hopefully coming soon but I can tell you which I think this might be the first place.

I'm saying it I can tell you that it is all of the twang and the grit and high-flying fantasy of what you expect from Unbalanced Encounters set in an absolutely ramshackle gold rush town we have most of our rally cast we have: Cinderblocksally, Craig Pate, Emily Graymore, Sam Oliver had to step away for this one should be back for another show down the line uh but in her stead we have been joined by caustic phoenix who is an absolutely incredible entertainer, Twitch streamer, one half of the D20 Deathmatch show, which is a blast.

We are so immensely blessed to have her on this journey with us. And I'm telling you folks, it's something special.

It's something real good. And I'm saying that before the original compositions come in and I know what the music sounds like, which is always when I get sort of fully hooked.

So if it's coming in way before we've done that, you know, it's going to be probably one of the best things we've ever done. It's really something else.

So August, give or take, 2025, be on the lookout for the first arc of our season two.

You're going to find that wherever pods are casted. You're going to find that on Spotify. You're going to find that on Apple Podcasts. YouTube Unbalanced Encounters over there.