I haven’t worked any jumping sharks in yet, but I do have my first Podcast in the works!
Not only is it an overdone medium, but we’ll be beating more tar out of the topic of Dungeons and Dragons!
I played part way through my first campaign recently, thanks to my buds in my improv troupe: The Eels (more on them later). We’d been playing through our improv campaign and I thought a couple of things:
My rolls are so bad so consistently I should be the dungeon master.
It would be super cool to be the dungeon master.
So I decided to dungeon master!
And I’ve had the itch to put out something new in the world, and track my progress in some publicly visible way with a comedic format.
I’m opting not to give myself a chance to overthink this, I just want to tell a fun, funny, epic story, with my friends, using a home-brew campaign and 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons rules as the framework of our game.
Right now I think it would be fun to treat it like part DM Log and part Live Play DnD Show.
The cast of the campaign are a bunch of funny improvisational actors, and will be randomly assigned characters in our zero session (the first session in DnD where you establish the rules, characters, world, etc.)
Each episode they’ll be trying to survive my sandbox world and I’ll be trying to craft a story for our adventurers without railroading them too badly.
The format will definitely evolve a bit over time, but currently it’s going to look like this:
Brief – at the top of the episode we talk over the DM’s plans for the Episode in a quick, spoiler free fashion.
Live Play – pretty quickly we’ll get into live play with the adventure party.
DeBrief – the format will evolve a bit, as we’ll record multiple episodes per play session, but the debrief will be the DM recapping or reacting to what happened, and sometimes pulling the players in to react.
In the first session I’ll also “call the shot” and guess how many episodes we’ll need to complete our campaign.
To keep things lean, I used a few different resources to put it together:
Process: a custom version of Sly Flourish’s Lazy DM Guidebook
World: I used this intractable and Procreate on my iPad mini to make the map
Characters and Story: I used Open AI and heavily curated the results to come up with characters to assign to players and a fun world for them to explore in.
I wanted to mitigate work to start the campaign, but also not get too attached in case my players jettison parts of their characters or edit things heavily
Everyone Has a Podcast Except You – I’ve made music for several years, but this was a helpful tailored rundown of audio production and release for the world of podcasts by the McElroys!
DND Podcasts for Research & Inspiration:
Not Another D&D Podcast
Critical Role
Do You Even D&D
Dimension20
Hopefully it goes well! Hopefully we get some listeners. But if not, that’s alright, too. It’s mostly a way for me to track my own progress as a DM.
I’m supposed to finish recording the Podcast Episode Zero (not to be confused with Session Zero for the players, podcast episode zero is basically just an ad), and will post that on here once it’s up!
Comments