The collaborative storytelling in The Adventure Zone is a mix of improv and guided story - UCB meets Choose Your Own Adventure. ( The Ringer is an affiliate site with SB Nation, which, like Polygon, is a Vox Media property.) When Griffin presented them with a scenario that resembled, say, Alien, Travis, Justin, and Clint could just lean into the moment right away instead of stopping and considering it. Travis, a full-time podcaster, says he and his brothers, who both work at Polygon, have an “inherent shared lexicon” of games, movies, and shows, since they all grew up watching and playing the same things as kids in the late ’80s and ’90s. The heavy dose of pop-culture references helped the audience envision the story while giving Travis, Justin, and Clint cues to react to various situations. There are Fast & Furious–meets– Wacky Races battle-wagon contests, an Alien-inspired fight aboard a slowly sinking space station, a Wild West–meets– Groundhog Day plot in which the adventurers live the same hour over and over again, and interdimensional travel to different planes and worlds. In crafting the 69-episode world of “Balance,” dungeon master Griffin pulled from all corners of pop culture. Most importantly, The Adventure Zone birthed a story that its fans would say stands up to anything seen on screen or page during its three-year run. All of those bonds, collectively, transformed what was supposed to be a one-off joke episode into a program that is regularly one of iTunes’ top-20 comedy podcasts, has nearly 10,000 five-star reviews, and sells out periodic live shows in minutes. The relationship between the fans and the McElroys opened up a world that celebrates and thrives on its diversity, while the connection between the listeners themselves inspired a universe of art dedicated to the “Balance” arc. The attachment of the brothers to their characters resulted in rich, complex, and hilarious personae. The best stories are defined by the bonds they create, and “Balance,” the first season of The Adventure Zone, which concluded in August, created those bonds in spades. The McElroys listened to their fans, and four months after that pilot episode aired as an part of My Brother, My Brother and Me, the McElroys reaired it as the first installment of a new, ongoing series titled The Adventure Zone. “Seeing it reflected through their eyes kind of clued us in that we weren’t making a comedy podcast, we were telling a story.” “They were invested in the characters, in the relationship,” Travis tells me. There was just one problem: Listeners loved the episode so much that they clamored for the McElroys to turn it into a series. They just wanted to mess around, tell a few dick jokes, then get back to their regularly scheduled programming. The rise of these podcasts has coincided with a renewed interest in tabletop gaming, which went through a lull after D&D’s peak popularity in the ’70s and ’80s.īut the McElroys weren’t trying to break into the actual-play podcast genre. Among notable actual-play pods are Critical Role, the Dungeons & Dragons podcast and videocast run by Matthew Mercer Friends at the Table, hosted by Waypoint’s Austin Walker, wherein every story is told using a different game system like Dungeon World or The Sprawl and smaller shows like the Shadowrun podcast NeoScum. Think The Lord of the Rings in podcast form, except the path of the story depends on the players’ decisions and the roll of some dice. The master leads those players through an adventure, giving them scenarios and settings to which they have to react. One host acts as the game master, while the others play original characters that they’ve created. The plan was to record just one episode.Īctual-play podcasts - in which people play tabletop role-playing games in character - have sprouted up in droves in recent years. Justin and his dad, who live in West Virginia, played a wizard named Taako (yes, pronounced taco) and the cleric Merle Highchurch, respectively Cincinnati-based Travis played the fighter Magnus Burnsides and from Austin, Texas, Griffin was the dungeon master, leading his family through “The Lost Mine of Phandelver,” the campaign that comes with the D&D fifth-edition starter set. Their solution: to play and broadcast a single game of Dungeons & Dragons with their father, Clint. In 2014, brothers Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy needed to bank a filler episode for their popular comedy-and-advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me while Justin, the eldest, was on paternity leave.
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