The Adventure Zone - The Adventure Zone Primer: Where to Start

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

New to TAZ and not sure where to start? Start right here! A part of the MaxFun Block Party, Griffin, Travis, Justin, and Clint give the 101 on the different TAZ story arcs and give recommendations on which to listen to first! Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointaz

Hello, everyone. We are the Macquarie's the hosts of the Adventure Zone. And if you're brand new to the Adventure Zone, you know, listen, there are podcasts out there, folks, a lot of them. More every day, it seems like. And whenever someone tells me, oh, you got to check at this show, oh, man, you love this. And then I look and I see that there's like hundreds of episodes. I have no idea where to start. So overwhelming. I never know where to begin. So, hi, I'm Justin. What? What we thought would be a fun thing to do would be to, suggest to you where you might start

with the adventure zone. Let's give you though, before we get to that, very quick pitch, Griffin, what is the adventure zone? Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. It's the actual play show. If you're listening to this,

you probably know what that means, but if not, why would they, why on earth would they not listen to our show but know of the genre? Tabula rasa, man. Tabula rasa. Tabula rasa.

Thank you. Hi, I'm Clint. I say tabula rosa on the show. That's dad's fun. It means we actually play games and tell stories and do jokes and have fun as a family. And you can join in on that. The fun, not the family part. That's probably not going to happen.

Yeah, all openings are closed. Right, yeah, yeah. Not accepting new. I would also say if you're saying like what makes you guys different from other actual play podcasts and shows and stuff, we don't so much worry about the mechanics of the game so much as we focus on like story. and mostly trying to make each other laugh or frustrate each other. It's one of those two often. And the thing is we've done multiple different stories. We haven't just stuck with like, you know, one storyline or one set of characters.

And so the good news is for you, if you're looking for a place to start, you have a lot of different options. Now, you know, perhaps you would think that the obvious place to start is just start at the beginning and go on, but I thought maybe we could take turns, Justin, you suggested. If you were going to start, if say a friend of yours is like, I've been thinking about listening to the Adventure Zone, where should I start? What would you tell them? Okay, so personally, I would pick up with Ethersea. When you're looking at the show, you're going to see different what we call arcs, and those are completely separate stories.

Some are longer stories that take dozens of episodes. Some are very short stories that take one or maybe a few. The one that we're doing right now is called Ethersea. We're playing a game called, oh, excuse me, Dungeons and Dragons. Sort of a modified version of it. It begins with the prologue where we play a game called The Quiet Ear, designed by Avery Alder. And what Ethersy is the story of a, basically a city that is drawn to the oceans

by an apocalypse and are carving out a new life of themselves below the sea. And it's about three adventures. A lot of the arcs end up being about three adventures because there's four of us. And one person has to be the boss or game master if you prefer. So it's about three adventures that are discovering a sort of building their relationship and looking for their fortune underneath the ocean. It's cool. We're still kind of figuring it out.

We've just recorded our, I think, 11th or 12th episode as you're listening to this. So we're still kind of figuring it out, and it's the thing that most people are listening to right now and talking about. So if you want to be part of the ongoing conversation, just catch up. I would personally start by catching up with Ether C and then getting those new episodes weekly as they are released. It's a fun story so far. And like I said, it's still very nascent. But I think if you were to want to start listening right now, that's what I would do. Now, I might suggest if you're looking, maybe your friend is like, I don't really want to commit to like a whole arc, like a whole thing.

And I'm not really interested in gameplay so much as I just want to be entertained. I would check out, we did a one-episode kind of arc. I mean, if you can call it that. It's a one-shot based on a game system that we designed ourselves that we ended up calling Dadlands. in which we all play different kinds of dads in a post-apocalyptic wasteland run by different dad factions. So you have like your Disney dad and your car dad.

And I try to remember... Coach dad. I was the grilling dad. The grilling dad. And that was run by Brennan Lee Mulligan of... You probably know from Dimension 20. He is another person in the actual play community. And we made that game ourselves with some help from Jen Alice and Keith Baker of Together Studios. And it is very light on mechanics, very light on worrying about, like, how a game works,

and mostly focuses on just being silly. So if you have a friend who's not really interested in RPGs, that's a pretty good place to start. The first arc we did, the first thing we did, the first episodes of the Adventure Zone, take place in an art called Balance, which is our longest arc, and probably the story we are known most for because we're releasing a graphic novel adaptation that we're up to book five of? Four is out. Five is coming. I see, I see. And yeah, I think the reason that that might be a good starting point, despite the fact that maybe it's a little intimidating because of its length, it's 69 episodes, which is really good. So nice, nice.

It is really us learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons while we play it. Because none of us really had experience with RPGs like this before we started doing Adventure Zone. Adventure Zone actually started out as a bonus episode for My Brother, My Brother, My Brother, and Me, another show that we do. So if you're coming at this completely fresh, starting at balance, not only sort of familiarizes you with our most known. story, it will also teach you the rules of Dungeons and Dragons because God Almighty did it take us a while to reach a level of, I'll say, competence, pseudo-competence with it. Very nice way of putting it in. Like a loose, slippery grass, you know, like our hands are covered in some sort of butter. Precisely. Yes. Maybe familiarity might be a better term. That might be a little too

forgiving. Right. For me, I think a really good starting point is, the beginning of amnesty. Amnesty was what we technically referred to as our second season, and it uses the Monster of the Week by Evil Hat. It was a very atmospheric, very evocative, if you're into like cryptozoic stuff and kind of spooky, kind of, I would say urban fear, I mean, Monster of the Week is right there, right? So like a supernostic. or like charmed or Buffy or something like that. And it was a different kind of game system for us in which we had some, the characters had some familiarity with each other, but at the same time, they kind of were discovering

about themselves. And like I said, it was really spooky, but a lot of fun. It really felt to me like we were really hitting our stride in Amherstribe. And, you know, we had some, some big milestones in there. I mean, sure. People, people died. Whoa. Whoa.

Whoa. Spoiler. Well, I didn't say who. Right. I would mention, though, that it, if you're listening to, if you want to start with amnesty, um, amnesty started when we were doing some like shorter runs. So you're going to want to go for, um, the, like, there's a chunk of them earlier than you'll see the actual episodes start. Does that make sense?

Is that the best way of explaining that? So when you think you see the beginning of it, go back just a little bit because there's like a couple that we were doing in like trial runs and that's the one that we ended up doing. We also did a bonus show. We did a live show The Ballad of Bigfoot, which was an amnesty story based on Oh Dang Bigfoot stole my car with my friend's birthday present inside

designed by Paul Etton. Yeah, let's be clear. That's the name of the game system and it's incredible. It's an incredible game. We played a couple one shots that I just want to touch on real quick. We did Hoot Nanny, where the first one of that we did at the stage of the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, which is the previous home of the Grand Old Aubrey. And so that was like our first kind of we sang in that one, which was like new for us in front of an audience.

With them good family harmonies. Indeed. And that was playing a game system called Lasers and Feelings designed by John Harper and the Double Clicks. there's actually a virtual live show of that coming up November 5th that we're doing where you actually watch the video of us playing so if that sounds interesting to you you can go check out that first episode

and the second episode of that is actually in the Max Fun Drive bonus content feed so you can find that there and I know it's my own game but if you like something a little grittier and a little old Westy might I recommend Dust Game called Urban Shadows

Designed by Magpie Games and it's about like an Old West kind of like alt reality in which there are humans and vampires and werewolves and ghosts and demons and I ran that one

and had a great time doing it and it's just it's a little bit more I would say it has kind of a similar I don't know I mean serenity and Firefly can I say that has a little bit of that feel to it except not like

So not really like it much. No, yeah, it's just like, I guess the old Westy part of it. Okay, I get that now. And once you get deep into it, man, there's so much waiting for you on the other side. An incredible community of amazing people. Just so many merch. A lot of fan art. A lot of merch.

And merch, though. The merch is what we really want to drive on. The merchandise is a real profit center. Should people, like, should people also, like, if you want to start with balance, also, So we have a graphic novel based on balance that would be a fine, like if you wanted to like get going quickly on something. That would be a fine place to start too is reading the graphic novel. It's sort of like a boiled down version of what we've been doing, what we did in that podcast arc that'll take you a lot less time. If you're in the mood, just like get cranking on it.

And the cool thing about the graphic novels is while it is where we, you know, kind of boiled down the story, it's expanded because it's, it's, it's, bigger because the art by the amazing Carrie Peach just makes it bigger and you've got so much to look at and it's absolutely a ton of fun. A feast. A feast for the senses. A visual feast. One more

thing though I do want to say like maybe none of this has been interesting to you at all. Absolutely. Totally get it. I would make one pitch though to check out the music of the Adventure Zone because it has been I will brag on my little brother for a minute, some of the most amazing stuff to come out of us doing it.

Griffin makes original music for episodes, and those have done, like, people love them, right? They have been much beloved, and they are, there's some real absolute jams in there. And so if that sounds interesting to you, totally check that out. If you just, like, searched for the music of the Adventure Zone, you will find it, and it's really good. So that's, I feel like you are now equipped with everything you need to know. No matter where you start, as long as you do start, that would be fantastic. That would be nice. Yeah, we'd really like that.

We hope that you like it and like us. We worked hard on it. Yeah. So just please love it. Yeah, just be nice about it. Well, dad phones are doing. I don't know what the other guys are doing. I'm working on it really.

Yeah. I'm working on in the background here. I can't even focus on what's going on. If you are, if you for some reason want more granular information about the show than this, you can go to bit. bit.ly slash tas reference and that's got a bunch of sort of supplementary details about about the show. Oh, and we just recently started releasing episodes weekly. So that's a new thing for a long time. Years and years and years and years we're doing every other week. Now it's weekly. So you have even more reason to listen. Catch the wave. Yeah. Get on board. Chew-choo. Oh, and if you start one of

those arcs, don't Google around about it because you never know. I mean, that's probably a self-explanatory, right? But like, I don't know. There might be spoilies. There's spoilies. Yeah, there's spoilers. Okay, that's it. Oh, are there two versions of the first episode of balance?

Yeah. Well, there's, uh... Should we clarify? Yeah, there's one episode that, uh, is like three hours long or something. And then if you find episode 1.5, that is cutting down a lot of, like, discussion about rules and flipping through pages of books and whatnot to just, Just in the story points. Yeah, we didn't know we were going to do more of them.

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Okay. You'll scamp, get out of here. Go, listen. Yeah. 1.5, you know, 2X, whatever you need to do to choke through it.

You know, as long as you get that merch crank it. I think everybody is agree with it. It doesn't matter what you. There's no wrong place to start as long as it ends at mackerelmerch.com. Yeah. All right. Bye. Adventure.

Ahoy. We say that in your episode. You? Yep. Maximumfund.org. Comedy and culture. Artist-owned. Audience-supported.