Leaflit: Streaming, Controversies, and Creating a TTRPG

Join Malcolm and Simone in an engaging conversation with Leaflet from the YouTube channel 'Leaflet and Asari.' They delve into her experiences in 'nerd culture,' her career at iconic companies like Riot Games and Blizzard, and her creation of popular game characters like Lux and Pantheon. The discussion covers Leaflet's beginnings in streaming, the challenges she faced, and how she transitioned to YouTube, along with her involvement in various game projects and novels. They also touch on controversial topics, cultural commentary, the differentiation between streaming and YouTube audiences, and the exciting release of her free-to-play game, Lyrian Chronicles, by Angel's Sword RPG.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone and I have a guest here today, who is one of the channels that I actually watch the most outside of our own, which is Leaflet from Leaflet and Asari, and if you haven't seen her channel she does cons well, I'd say, like, right leaning by today's standards takes, maybe not by old standards takes, takes place.

Bye. On a lot of topics, but she has a lot of experience in I guess I'd call it nerd culture. Early in her career, she worked at companies like Riot Games and Blizzard. I know you design

Leaflit Mitsuha: lux. Lux is One of the ones that I, that's probably the, that's probably the one that most people know about. Yeah, looks.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah and then the Spartan looking one. Yeah, Pantheon. Look for the rework, yeah. And I really like you in one, as an example of, and I wanted to talk with you, as well as, as through your evolving fan base as somebody, I think you started in streaming, right?

Like, like, like streaming video games and

Leaflit Mitsuha: stuff. Mostly video games. I started actually I think [00:01:00] 2011, 2012. Holy moly. Yeah. There is a site called own 3d back then. It was like before there wasn't Twitch, Twitch became, Twitch is just in, but their competitor was own 3d. And then They folded and then I, I messaged Justin.

I was like, Hey, can I get like partner? Cause it was partner on own. They're like, nah, I'm like, so then I kind of just stopped streaming for a bit. And then, yeah, it ended up coming back later.

Malcolm Collins: So you built your audience on streaming and now you've, I don't know, is YouTube like your main goal right now, or do you mostly stream and YouTube's like a secondary thing for you?

Leaflit Mitsuha: The funny thing is, is there, they're, they're kind of separate because I do the live streams, but I actually don't. Manage too much on YouTube I don't really have time for it because I'm, as you know, I'm working on, like, the other, the game projects and we'll also have, like, novels coming out and stuff.

So we're working on all I'm working on that stuff because I'm like, the lower person for the [00:02:00] company. So I'm working on that. You're doing like a

Malcolm Collins: game. We had Archon recently. He's also doing a game. We're doing a game. I like this. I like this new thing. Everyone is like all the, all the like, based influencers need to be making games because this is where we're going to get like interesting ideas.

What is actually, before we go further, I want you to talk a bit about this game because I'm, I'm just interested in like sure.

Leaflit Mitsuha: It's a, it's basically, I, I play a lot of like tabletop, a lot of Dungeons and Dragons Pathfinder. And some other Japanese games, and I want we wanted to make, like, our dream game.

So our idea was to make that game, but, like, free to play and constant updates because, like, 1 problem that, like, like, Dungeons and Dragons has, for instance, is. Everyone has to get the book. So sometimes you have people that don't have the book and then updates like say, there's like a really broken mechanic in the game.

They can't really update it. You have to update it in like a magazine. Right? And then now nobody has the same rules because not everybody saw the magazine. [00:03:00] So the idea behind our games, everything's online. And we patch every like two to three weeks. So it was like new classes, new items, new races being added all the time.

Okay, wait. So what, what, what's the theming of

Malcolm Collins: the universe?

Leaflit Mitsuha: Actually, everything is linked to the stream. Like, like me and like my mom and. The novels, they're all linked in the same universe.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, I don't know the novels, so tell me about, is this a fantasy universe? Is this a generic fantasy? What's the twist on the generic?

What's the

Leaflit Mitsuha: It's kind of like, like a, it's fantasy, but it has like high power, and like high, high magic. Sort of, people that like things like anime would like it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah yeah. Okay, I think I know what you mean. When you say high power, do you mean sort of like high elf culture, i. e. like high culture high power fantasy?

Like, there's

Leaflit Mitsuha: a lot of, like, magic and like, like, some abilities are super ridiculous. Like, there's like chronomancer class in our game and they can just stop time. And like, they can, they can just completely stop like a non So that we have a differentiation between like [00:04:00] Heroic units, which are like the like player characters, and then the non, one's called grunts and almost all the enemies are grunts except for like bosses and grunts are basically susceptible to like these big, like magics, like insta kills and like time freezes and stuff like that.

Malcolm Collins: So like the DND world before the I forget that event.

Leaflit Mitsuha: I don't actually, the truth is I don't know much about the DND lore itself because I've always homebrewed. I've always been like that person to homebrew everything. So like.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on, you, you at least played through that recent D& D game. I did, I

Leaflit Mitsuha: did, I played that one, yeah.

Baldur's Gate, okay, so,

Malcolm Collins: so it was implied in Baldur's Gate. Sorry, I just, I'm sorry, I am a nerd for lore. I love deep lore stuff. Me too, I love it. Okay, okay, okay. But D& D, actually, the lore is not that good. There's some, like, really good lore. If you're, like, into lore, I can be like, Oh, you gotta go into this lore.

Like, this lore is great. D& D lore is Top tier lore is either gonna be Vampire the Masquerade, Absolutely top tier lore, Or who else has top tier lore? Warhammer 40k has top tier [00:05:00] lore. Not Warhammer Fantasy. And but anyway, so in Deity, they mentioned it a few times in this is that the world used to have like tons of magic and then the god of magic, I think her name was Mithra, she's the one that Wes's face like had a crush on or something.

Anyway, like the world somebody cast like a too high level spell and it ended up breaking. Oh yes, to try to like take her power or something, and it ended up removing her for a split second, but then that ended up like causing all the cities to crash because they were all floating, and then she made it so no one could use top tier magic anymore.

People will probably draw that comparison to your world.

Leaflit Mitsuha: It's possible. I mean, like the whole world actually came about from D& D games. So we played D& D for like years. Like, this, this campaign, I think I have, I have some ridiculous amount of hours in like world 20, but I DMed multiple campaigns in this world.

And then that world became the foundation for like the s