TODD INTERVIEW, Hugh Janus the Thicc

August 31, 2026

Hugh Janus the Thicc: An Interview With Todd

Hey GMs! Today I'm interviewing the big man himself, my buddy Todd. Besides my wife, Todd is the person I've played the most amount of tabletop with. We played a campaign for a good 5 years or so in my homebrew setting, Oboreta, in which he portrayed a bombastic goliath named Hugh Janus the Thicc, a man known for his powerful glutes, excellent mead, and penchant for pissing.

Todd is also my partner in crime and the brains of the operation over at Big N Lizard, our indie tabletop game studio. We're currently working on our first game, Pantheon Loreholders, a card battler where you draft warriors, gods, and monsters from various mythologies and engage in strategic battles using a unique Yahtzee-style push-your-luck system, where you roll for resource points to spend during your turn. Click the link if you wanna take the demo for a spin, but that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about our epic campaign!

First off, tell me about the character you played in our campaign.

Todd: He's got a really big ass, a really big sword, really big muscles, and a really big heart. He's fought (and/or had relations) his way across the world of Oboreta, and nothing seems impossible for the guy.

Mitchell: He certainly made his mark. We still play in that setting, and he gets referenced probably every other session in one way or another. Somebody goes to one of his mead halls, or they're dealing with a threat that's way too difficult for them and they're in way over their heads, so they call him up. He shows up, blows a hole through the monster, says "that's all you had to do," and leaves.

Todd: Like I said, nothing is impossible for a guy who fights with coconuts and makes friends wherever he goes. He's a legend.

I have two questions that might have the same answer. What was your favorite moment of the campaign, and what was the most memorable moment, like, do you have a moment you remember super clearly even all these years later? Bonus question: funniest moment?

Most memorable:

Todd: So many moments were memorable for so many different reasons... You had the ambiance down. [At the kill the king part] there was some sort of chanting going on with harp strings in the background that added to the whole "holy s***" of it. I can't remember exactly what happened, but I remember time stopped, and someone at the table said to Miki, "hey, you're about to kill the king."

Mitchell: Right, it was basically pounding in her head: kill the king, kill the king, kill the king.

Todd: I think I remember that, maybe this was meta-gaming, maybe not, but I remember sitting there thinking, in character, for the narrative: you're killing the king. Not because you don't want to, but I think you gave her the choice, and I remember thinking, "I can't really say anything here, but I'm gonna say something: you gotta do it, you gotta do it."

Mitchell: I had her roll to resist it, and she got like a 14 or something. I was like, this is a sleeper agent drilled into your brain, a 14's not gonna do it.

Todd: So, sorry king, but you're gone. Right after that I had a shift at Target, and I had to go to work. I remember just standing there thinking, how can I just organize shelves after that?

Mitchell: I've been trying to chase that high ever since.

Funniest moment(s):

Mitchell: What was your funniest moment, the thing that made you laugh the hardest?

Todd: My funniest... give me a second.

Mitchell: Didn't you mention it was his mead halls?

Todd: Nothing is impossible.

Mitchell: Wherever somebody feels like partying, one just shows up, and it's never clear whether it's magic or whether Hugh is just so fast that he builds one in a second and is gone before anyone even knew he was there. I knew someone would want to roll a perception check to find out why it's happening, so my plan was that if they rolled high enough, I'd just say, "yeah, he's doing it, but he's never gonna tell you how or why."

Todd: He might not even know himself.

Mitchell: The roll to get a straight answer out of him is a 60.

Todd: He talks in tongues and riddles. But I think my favorite was when I grabbed the magic rock that made me roll on the wild magic table or doing the "shaking the fish at the gods" ritual. You'd designed a whole table, and there was only one roll that would even activate it.

Mitchell: It wasn't really a table, more like 19 options where nothing happens, and if you rolled a 10, you got summoned by the tropical goddess of death, who's thrilled about all the people you're killing with coconuts.

Todd: She's a tropical death goddess.

Mitchell: I made that chart thinking, "it'd be so funny if you rolled a 10," and then the very next session, you rolled a 10, right off the bat. I couldn't have planned that if I tried.

Todd: It happened right as you said, "yeah, I built a table this time-"

Mitchell: There was also the time you two infiltrated the elven ball.

Todd: Oh man, I don't even remember why we did that.

Mitchell: It was high security, so you had to break in, one of you sneaking in as a guest, the other as a servant. For whatever reason, you two decided Hugh should be the guest. Miki said, "I'm gonna do his makeup so good they'll think he's an elf."

Todd: Isn't Miki's actual race an elf? Or is it Martian?

Mitchell: She's an alien, like the Precursors from Halo. Her civilization isn't around anymore, but yeah, she looked elf-like enough to pass. Which is why it was so funny that you guys decided Hugh should be the guest instead of her. Miki was going to teach Hugh a bunch of elven phrases. He made an intelligence check, rolled an eight, and I told him he could memorize exactly two sentences. You guys picked "I'm so happy to be here," and "I need to use the bathroom."

Todd: And hey, that's all we needed. We got in, we got out, no one was any the wiser.

What do you feel like I did a good job of during the campaign?

Todd: You role-played all the characters well. There were some hiccups with the sound, but not enough to ruin it for me. That was just me being picky about my own immersion.

Mitchell: Yeah, sometimes I'd leave the wrong track on too long, and combat would be over for like five minutes before I noticed.

Todd: But for the most part, you had the ambiance down. The fact that you even thought about ambiance at all. Most other DMs I've played with haven't used sound in any way, shape, or form.

What did I not do well? Maybe the same answer, but what would have made the campaign more fun?

Todd: I don't know if this necessarily would've made it more fun, but it would've been cool if we'd kept the same characters the whole way through. I get that D&D characters die, it's part of the narrative, but we had different people come in and out of the campaign. Some I wish had stayed. Others... not so much.

Mitchell: That's just how long campaigns go, people come and go, and you always end up with a couple of OGs who stuck around the whole time. Any long-form campaign has that problem, and there's always going to be that yearning for the original squad. It's part of why I keep running games in this same setting. I'm chasing the magic. I want to keep exploring this world, coming up with reasons for why things are the way they are, and building whole 20-session stories around one aspect of it, going deeper and deeper.

The Drag: Looking back at the campaign, what were the moments that dragged for you? Was it long combats, getting bogged down in lore, or something else?

Todd: Honestly, if that were the case I probably wouldn't remember it, there's a lot from the campaign I don't remember just because it went on for so long. But I can't think of a time I felt like it was lagging or dull. There were definitely times I zoned out, but that wasn't because I was bored, that's just how I am. You'll say one thing and I'll get a thought and run away with it.

Mitchell: That tracks with something I've been running into lately. I've been converting all our old session notes into a novel, and one of the biggest problems with it is the character-dump at the beginning. Introducing an entire crew of unique characters all at once. That's too many names too fast, especially for a reader. When we sat down at the table and I introduced five characters to you, you already knew each other, but asking a reader to memorize nine names in a couple of paragraphs is a big ask.

Todd: I feel like Lord of the Rings, or Song of Ice and Fire, or pretty much any big fantasy series does that too, though I can't name a specific example.

Mitchell: Sure, but I don't want character creep to be a problem even if I'm the only one bothered by it. Maybe I add a prologue, or introduce characters more slowly. That's actually why, in the campaign we're playing now, we've stuck to one town the whole time. We go to adjacent towns occasionally, but for the most part it's the same six guys interacting every session, and at most we introduce one new person at a time.

Todd: And you get some really good character development out of that.

Mitchell: Right, you get to deepen relationships with existing characters instead of spreading thin. And as a DM, you avoid the running joke from our old campaign, where someone would ask "wait, who is this guy?" and you'd have to Ctrl-F his name, watch it come up 200 times, and think, "how do you not know who this is? You two shared your first kiss together!"

Do you feel like the ambiance and combat music I used helped with immersion, or was it distracting?

Todd: Nah I liked it. I don't think it distracted me at all.

What would Hugh's theme song be?

Mitchell: Like, what plays when he walks in, and everyone's thinking "oh no, we're never gonna make it," and then a song kicks in, and everyone turns around and sees him strutting in?

Todd: Oh man, there's so many moments where I'd think, "this song would've been perfect for this." Off the top of my head: "Here Comes the Boom." That's the funniest thing I can think of, though it might be a little too on the nose. I'd want to think about it more.

Mitchell: Is Hugh an on-the-nose kind of guy? What you see is what you get?

Todd: Not necessarily. I mean, yes and no. He's a big, strong guy, but he fights with a coconut. He's got layers.

Mitchell: He's got layers to him.

Todd: Yeah, dude. He's got layers.

The DM-Player Dynamic: Since we're friends outside the game, do you think that made it easier to push boundaries with Hugh's antics, or did it make it harder to separate the game from reality when things didn't go your way?

Todd: I gotta think about that one. Do you mean like, was I comfortable having him do all the wacky stuff?

Mitchell: Yeah, like, if I were a stranger, it might feel weird to say "my character does this," or maybe you'd hold back if you could tell I had something planned and didn't want to mess with it. Did you ever feel that at any point?

Todd: No, though that might just be me. I've never played D&D with strangers, so I don't really know how I'd react, but I definitely enjoy it more, and I'm more loose, free, and comfortable playing it with my buddy than I would be with a stranger.

Mitchell: You get to be who you were always meant to be.

Todd: Exactly. And honestly, we didn't know each other all that well when we first started playing, so we were kind of in the same boat there.

Mitchell: That's true. And now we've ended up in each other's weddings.

Todd: I was actually thinking about that earlier today. It must have been our fourth or fifth session, you handed me the invitation with the mustache on it, and I looked at it, figured it was something for the game, and just set it down. Then you and your wife were just staring at me like, "open it."

Mitchell: Tabletop brings people together. So does The 1975, apparently.

Todd: Yeah, dude. I was honored.

We went on a couple of tangents, so this got edited around a little bit, but that about covers it. Todd said it best: "unedited, loose, raw, that's us."

One more time, go check out Pantheon Loreholders! If you're in the Baltimore/Delaware area, we sometimes go to playtesting events, so check out our site for where you can find us in person. Later!