Inspired by what Ryan calls the PaizoCon PFS Contract Controversy, and the holiday season, he and Cathy look at the age old advice, “don’t be a jerk.”

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SHOW NOTES

So this is it.

Before Cathy joined the cast with episode 222, replacing Matt as second chair on the Private Sanctuary, Matt and I recorded a farewell 3.5 Minutes in which we declared the podcast retired. We recorded it two weeks ahead of its scheduled release, and in that time, I reflected on what we’d said. I owe this podcast any fame I can claim in the gaming industry. Without The Private Sanctuary podcast, Jeff Greiner would never have approached me to record a Pathfinder segment for The Tome Show, which quickly evolved into Know Direction. I met Robert Thompson and Wolfgang Baur, eventual publishers of my first game design credits (Strategists & Tacticians and Kobold Quarterly 13’s Gnomish Flying Contraptions) through interviews on Know Direction and (then 3.5) Private Sanctuary. I gained a deeper understanding of the 3.5 system and the intricacies of its rules writing reviews for the old website, 35privatesanctuary.com. As I edited our somewhat light farewell, my passion for the Private Sanctuary reinvigorated. It wasn’t the Private Sanctuary’s time yet. Cathy agreed to join me as my new co-host, and we recorded another 30 episodes (granted, not all including Cathy, but most).

And then December 2014 was upon us. I had a GMing episode to record, which I have long found the most difficult to come up with ideas for and organize. But I knew what I wanted the end of the month’s flavour episode to be: Don’t Be a Jerk, based on a situation that arose at a Pathfinder Society game at PaizoCon. And if we released it in time for Christmas, I got to link it to one of my favourite Spongebob Squarepants moments. And then late December 2014 was upon us, and the GMing episode was not scheduled or recorded, we were past the holidays, and I had no idea what the January episodes would be about. So I made other arrangements.

I am not particularly proud of this episode. I stutter through a good bye that’s an average bye at best. At different points, I throw Matt and Jay, both of my former co-hosts, under the bus.There’s no deeper meaning or deliberate intent to that, but it does reflect the fact that now is the time to move on. I could ask Cathy if she’s willing to re-record parts of the episode, but I don’t know what I would replace them with, and this episode is already very late. While in a lot of ways the original bow out that was recorded for episode 221 but never released was a more fitting and appropriate farewell to the podcast than this one. But for all that would have made PS 252 -Don’t Be a Jerk nothing more than a weak episode if it were not my and Cathy’s last regular episode, the energy and tone to the episode prove that now is truly the time to move on.

Which isn’t to say that I regret not ending with 221. We recorded 30 more episodes. In that time, we finished the next wave of Class Features, which brings a sense of finality to a major component of the series. We finished 2014 together. We had another year of fun, informative episodes, And we brought in Alex Augunas as our Crunch co-host. Hopefully those first few episodes we recorded prove that the Private Sanctuary baton is being passed to the right hands. Unlike after episode 221’s near finale, 252 is not the podcast’s last episode. Starting with episode 253 in January, there will be new tenants in the Private Sanctuary. Alex will be joined by Anthony Li, whose advice you might recognize from our Behind The Screens blog series, and whose voice you might have heard in a few recent episodes of Know Direction. If schedules permit, and if they’ll have us, Cathy and I might drop in on their recording of their first episode as hosts of The Private Sanctuary podcast.

Thanks to everyone who has ever listened to the Private Sanctuary. Thank you all for sharing links, telling friends, posting in the forums (that I really miss) or commenting on the episodes. 35privatesanctuary.com did not become the online have for 3.5 loyalists that I originally envisioned, mosly because it didn’t need to be, but it was an amazing community that I am so happy to have been and continue to be a part of. After all, we are all welcome in this Private Sanctuary.

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