The Adventure Zone — D&D has always had a certain kind of reputation: really slow, really rules-intensive and really math-heavy. For decades, potential fans have stayed clear because they didn’t want to crunch numbers in their spare time or didn’t want some dry, inaccessible “nerd” story consuming their lives. Even if you hate D&D — even if you quite frankly have zero interest in the subject — chances are excellent that you will still love The Adventure Zone.
The podcast spun-off of a one-of episode of My Brother, My Brother and Me, where three brothers and their dad play a game of D&D together and make silly jokes. It proved so popular that it quickly became its own show, whose first campaign lasted for 69 mind-blowing episodes. The arcs varied drastically in tone and content, from essentially being Murder on the Orient Express to Mad Max: Fury Road to Majora’s Mask. Its three-part finale, Story and Song, had me balling so hard on the highway that at one point I nearly totaled my car by swerving into a guard rail.
If you’re worried about the large episode backlog, don’t be. In the lead-up to whatever their second, long-running “season” turns out to be, they’re experimenting with a series of three or four episode mini-arcs. Everybody will take turns running a different game, with different characters, in different genres and following a different cast of characters. The first mini-arc — in which the brothers’ dad ran a superhero game using the Fate roleplaying system — has already wrapped, and future arcs include a Western, a Victorian-esque murder mystery, a space opera and some kind of supernatural investigation. With so many bite-sized campaigns coming down through the pipeline, it’s the perfect time to pick the series up.
Critical Role — When it comes to D&D actual play podcasts, they don’t come any bigger than Critical Role. It might not have been the first one out there, but it was the first to make it big: especially with a large, relatively mainstream audience. Live-streamed every Thursday on Twitch, new episodes are subsequently released on everything from YouTube to iTunes and are undoubtedly what Geek & Sundry is best known for these days.
Its large cast — twice as large as most other campaigns — is composed of extremely talented actors, whose distinct voices and intricate mannerisms go a long way to making each and every character feel unique and lived-in. Matthew Mercer is an exceptional Dungeon Master — probably the best one generating publicly available content out there — who somehow deftly juggles what would normally be an unwieldly cast while weaving together an epic narrative whose first “season” lasted 115 giant-sized episodes.
The series is now coming out of a brief interim following their now-completed campaign. Now ending a string of one-shots (one-off episodes generally disconnected from anything prior or upcoming), they are about to start a second major campaign — set years after the first, following an entirely new cast of characters. Even if its hundreds of hours of back-logged episodes are daunting for you to get into just yet, this upcoming campaign will doubtless prove to be an excellent jumping-on point for new fans.
Dice Funk — Probably my greatest podcasting find in 2017 was Dice Funk. And although it’s yet another D&D actual play podcast, it was designed around what is, quite frankly, an ingenious organizational technique. Each nearly-forty episode season is its own, self-contained story: set in a different time period, following a different plot and featuring an all new cast of characters. Between seasons, players are dropped and added, DMs swap in and out and the game sinks into its own complex and engrossing mythology that is unlike anything you can find anywhere else.
This means — unlike the previously mentioned, years-long campaigns that have massive and inaccessible backlogs to sort through before you get to the latest episodes — that it’s incredibly easy to catch up with the newest material no matter when you join in the fray. I actually started with the third season because somebody I followed from another podcast joined the cast partway through that season. After I caught up with the then-current episode, I went back to listen to the first season and missed out on nothing by entering more than 80 episodes into the podcast.
The first season is a Lovecraftian noir: a low fantasy, horror-themed, urban mystery. The second season is a high fantasy adventure inspired by The Wind Waker and The Princess Bride. The third season is a small town mystery more along the lines of Gravity Falls and Twin Peaks. The most recent season, which they have only just started, goes completely off the deep end (in the best possible way). It’s an “present”-set, urban fantasy whose protagonists include a Catgirl DJ (a reflavored warlock), a Human wrestler (a reflavored monk), a robotic thief and what essentially amounts to a Human Yugioh player (a reflavored wizard).
Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men — Although everybody and their grandma seems to love superheroes, the comics from which they sprung from are notoriously difficult to parse through. With some getting their start in the 1930s, many series are nearing a full century of back-issues to get through before you finally hit new ones. And all along the way there are retcons, reboots, spin-offs and crossovers to deal with, ensuring that you never quite get the whole story. Although efforts have been made to digitize and consolidate these back issues, the results have been incomplete at best and many critical stories still elude the casual reader due to their increasing rarity and expense.
Even among comic fandom, the X-Men have proven to be an especially hard franchise to break into. Due to their immense popularity since the 1970s, they have spun off into innumerable books and crossed over with nearly every other Marvel franchise. Many of their most iconic storylines involve time-travel and other dimensions, further complicating the already convoluted storylines. Trying to figure out who’s a Summers brother or whether Jean Grey was dead at any one given point of time is a maddening prospect for anybody but the most hardened X-fans.
Jay Edidin and Miles Stokes began their podcast with a simple mission: untangle the twisted, wibbly-wobbly continuity of the entire X-franchise. Every episode addresses a specific story arc in X-history, working through them chronologically and, as they began spinning off into different books, series by series. They balance their engaging and informative summaries with deft humor and insightful analysis. And with Disney buying out Fox (and subsequently getting back the coveted X-Men film rights), there’s never been a better time to bone up on what curveballs the House of Mouse might be throwing at the MCU in the near future.
Welcome to Night Vale — When it comes to the expanding roster of Night Vale Presents, it’s particularly hard to pick out a favorite. While some are strictly informative, many are deeply narrative and lean heavily into the bizarre. And although Alice Isn’t Dead has become a personal favorite of mine, there’s just something about the original that demands respect.
Based out of the fictional small town of Night Vale, the podcast presents itself as the local radio station’s news program, dictating the Lovecraftian comings and goings of the eldritch community. Covering everything from the newly constructed dog park (dogs are not allowed in the dog park) to the continuing exploits of Hiram McDaniels (a five-headed dragon) to the town’s rivalry with the neighboring Desert Bluffs community, it addresses all the absurdity of life with unwavering deadpan and impeccable comedic timing.
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