Excalibur Con Panel - How to Ruin Everything: Third Person on Conflict, Mishap, and Catastrophe in Storytelling.

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Zen (0:59)

Hey there, Zen here. On August 15th, 2026, Sarah, Matt, and I presented a panel at Duluth, Minnesota's Excalibur Con called How to Ruin Everything, Conflict, Mishap, and Catastrophe in Storytelling.

They say stories need conflict, but how do you know how bad it should be or even what it is? Join third person creators of the Midst Cosmos in a conversation about stories gone sideways, making terrible things happen to your beloved characters and how to balance catastrophe with fun in games, fiction, and more from the perspective of storytellers who do just that. I got excited and I forgot to record the first 60 seconds of the event, which was just us saying our names and explaining that we make podcasts. And since you probably already know who we are if you're hearing this, hopefully that is not too big of a loss. So let's get right to it with Sarah's opening comments about ruining things.

Sarah (1:51)

A creative exercise that we did pretty early on to help shape our thinking was looking at each of the three main protagonists and identifying what single event would each of those people hate the most, were it to happen to them.

Zen (2:11)

Worst day ever.

Sarah (2:12)

Worst day ever. And then how can we make that happen for them?

Zen (2:18)

As quickly as possible, as effectively as possible, and as disastrously as possible.

Sarah (2:22)

But storytelling isn't just about making bad things happen for no reason. Ideally, there is a reason for the terrible events that occur, and it will push the story in a necessary direction, or at least an interesting direction.

I'm also curious who in this room has played or heard of the game Fiasco? Does that ring any bells? Yeah, Jared. It's nice.

Zen (2:50)

You should look it up. You should also play it. It is fantastic. It might be my personal favorite game.

Matt (2:57)

Yeah, it is a delightful collaborative storytelling game where through any number of circumstances that you can kind of cobble together, you and your friends are able to sort of share the narrative structure of crafting a tale together. And one of the kind of mechanics of the game is something that in Fiasco is referred to as the tilt. This is sort of a event that usually happens maybe like halfway through the game that sort of re-combobulates everything. It is the conflict. It is the thing that is going to challenge your characters. It is the thing that's going to kind of upset the narrative flow.

And it's something that we found as we were playing Fiasco was just a really awesome way to kind of introduce conflict, to introduce challenge to the events of the story that we are working on telling.

Sarah (3:47)

Yeah, it's the nature of the till is a huge fundamental shakeup. So it's something that changes the status quo of the whole world and therefore affects what each of the characters' goals are. For us, for our storytelling style, it's worked really well. We've done this with each of our podcasts, Midst and Unend, kind of on a macro and a micro level, where once midway through the story and sometimes midway through individual seasons, we try to introduce something that just rips the tablecloth out from underneath everything and not in a neat, professional way where everything on the table remains where it was placed.

Matt (4:33)

Bad news.

Sarah (4:33)

In a catastrophic way. Yeah.

But you don't want just any disaster, right? You want a disaster that is actually your ally as the storyteller. So it may be ruining all of your characters' plans, but a well-chosen disaster should actually be helping your plans as the storyteller come to fruition. Otherwise, it's just kind of random nonsense, which can be fun in its own way, but that's not what we're talking about here.