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If you’ve never heard of The Adventure Zone, you might have just stumbled upon a whole lot of new listening material — as well as a promising new story to get excited about and follow along with. The Adventure Zone is a famous and long-running actual play podcast. “Actual play” refers to any podcast consisting of the hosts playing tabletop role-playing games. Many series, like the smash hit Critical Role, use ultra-popular role-playing games like “Dungeons & Dragons,” while others focus on more niche games. The Adventure Zone is hosted by brothers Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy, primarily known for their comedy advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me, along with their father, Clint McElroy.
The Adventure Zone has gone through several different seasons. Each season tells a story in a different genre, and many even use different role-playing games, though more often than not, the foursome is playing “Dungeons & Dragons.” After the end of the most recent season, The Adventure Zone: Graduation, fans were excited to see what would be next. What they’re getting is looking to be a real treat: The Adventure Zone: Ethersea takes place in a ruined world where overuse of magic has rendered the surface uninhabitable, and civilization has migrated under the water. Submarines, sea monsters, and sunken ruins abound!
Who could say no to that? But to really understand what makes this new season of The Adventure Zone so uniquely exciting, a new fan needs to know a little of the show’s history leading up to this point. With all of the strengths and shortcomings of the previous seasons in mind, Ethersea starts to look like not only a promising story of nautical adventure but also the culmination of everything The Adventure Zone has been for its entire run.
The Adventure Zone Origins
The concept of The Adventure Zone started when Justin, Travis, and Griffin answered a fan question on My Brother, My Brother and Me about a game of “Dungeons and Dragons,” and the brothers decided they wanted to play a game themselves. A standalone episode was uploaded to the My Brother, My Brother and Me feed, and it’s not hard to tell that Justin, Travis, Griffin, and Clint were having fun, with no idea that they were recording the first episode of a years-long podcast series. Griffin, who served as the Dungeon Master, even used one of the premade story campaigns that comes with the Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition Starter Set, and a couple of the other hosts used pre-made character sheets. But soon after, they decided to make The Adventure Zone into its own podcast.
The Adventure Zone: Balance
This slapdash beginning is a lot of what gives The Adventure Zone’s first season, Balance, its brilliant manic energy. The show always remains faithful, if sardonically self-aware, take on the tropes and conventions of “Dungeons & Dragons.” But Griffin also demonstrated that he was eager to depart from the typical high-fantasy script he had set out for himself. Early on into the story, our wizard, fighter, and cleric are recruited by a clandestine organization with a headquarters built on an artificial moon, which feels more like something out of a science-fiction epic than your typical high-fantasy yarn.
From there, Griffin sends them on a series of quests that are informed by the fantasy flavor of “Dungeons & Dragons,” but that also switch genres frequently. There’s a murder mystery, a Mad Max-esque monster truck race, and even an Alien-inspired search through an abandoned spaceship. Because of this madcap approach to storytelling, Balance is able to be anything and everything. But the most amazing thing is that with some careful worldbuilding and a few well-placed retcons, Griffin manages to coral this wild hodgepodge of ideas into a cohesive and affecting story. For many fans, Balance is still the crowning achievement of The Adventure Zone and probably always will be.
The Adventure Zone: Amnesty
The next major arc, The Adventure Zone: Amnesty, represents a departure from the lightning-in-a-bottle wildness that was Balance. This time, Griffin returns as Game Master but aims from the beginning to tell a cohesive story in a single genre: kitchy, monster-of-the-week horror set in rural Appalachia. Given the genre, it’s fitting that this season sees the hosts playing not “Dungeons and Dragons” but a lesser-known role-playing game called “Monster of the Week.” In Amnesty, our heroes discover that a faerie world exists in parallel to our familiar human realm, and must guard against the monsters that regularly step through the veil.
Amnesty’s planned story approach has its advantages, from extremely strong, tight character arcs to the opportunity to explore a single tone and setting in more detail. Additionally, “Monster of the Week” is a great game and it’s fun to see the hosts depart from their typical “Dungeons and Dragons” milieu. All things considered, Amnesty is a great time, and stands as an excellent story well-told.
The Adventure Zone: Graduation
Graduation, which was The Adventure Zone’s most recent season to wrap up, sees the group return to “Dungeons & Dragons,” with Travis taking over as Dungeon Master. Like Amnesty, Graduation aims to tell a consistent story, this time in the ever-popular wizard school genre. The twist is that this school doesn’t train wizards, but heroes and villains (as well as sidekicks and henchpeople).
Travis uses his consistent tone and setting not to tell a tightly structured story but to guide his players through a series of fluid events in a world that feels lived-in and naturalistic. Graduation has a slice-of-life appeal that the other seasons can only achieve in small doses and is able to play with more running plotlines than any previous series of The Adventure Zone. This approach makes it unique in the show’s history.
The Adventure Zone: Ethersea
And now for the main event! As of right now, we only have a few episodes of The Adventure Zone: Ethersea, but those episodes, along with information from other sources, hint at a very, very promising product. First of all, the premise of the series is just incredible. It’s hard not to look forward to submarine battles, undersea steampunk technology, and the mysteries that lie beneath the surface. The animated trailer is also excellent, and the music in it, composed by Griffin McElroy himself, is sure to send chills up your spine.
Griffin McElroy is the Game Master of Ethersea, and most of the podcast will be played in “Dungeons & Dragons.” However, the first several episodes are devoted to setting up the world in which the rest of the story will take place. To achieve this, the crew plays a game called “The Quiet Year,” which is about gradually adding features to a map as a community progresses week-by-week through an entire year. These set-up episodes are a lot of fun and are already beginning to establish some of the world-building elements that will be present for the rest of the campaign (see if you can find the horseshoe crab-dogs from the trailer in Episode II).
However, the hints we’ve gotten about the gameplay in Ethersea’s future are even more exciting. Griffin will be adding a couple of new mechanics and systems to the baseline rules of “Dungeons & Dragons,” including an exhaustive submarine combat system. He talks about that system with fellow actual play veteran Brennan Lee Mulligan in a special live stream. In that conversation, he also talks about the story structure he plans to utilize:
I’m breaking this campaign down — or at least hoping this campaign will break down — a lot less into these huge ten-episode, super, like, dense, and always trying to be very narrative-forward arcs, and much more like, two or three episodes — here’s a board of jobs that you all as contractors can take on. Pick which one you want to do — go out and do it.
Griffin McElroy
That’s a level of freedom that no previous season of The Adventure Zone has really attempted. There’s a chance that this could make Ethersea a less cohesive story, but we know from Balance that Griffin can elegantly bring together a whole bunch of different plot points, as well as tones and genres. Since Ethersea will have a consistent tone and setting, there’s no reason to think that Griffin won’t be able to make a strong story, even with a freeform structure. From the trailer to the music to the gameplay, there are a lot of reasons to be excited for The Adventure Zone: Ethersea. However, the best reason might be how it builds upon previous seasons of The Adventure Zone.
Culmination
There are many ways that Ethersea develops ideas and approaches from other seasons of The Adventure Zone. Like Amnesty and Graduation, Ethersea aims to tell a cohesive story with a single setting and tone, which continues to develop upon the more scattered approach of Balance. Like Graduation, it balks long, involved story arcs for a more naturalistic progression of events, but gives the players more freedom than ever before. Like Balance and Graduation, Ethersea focuses on “Dungeons & Dragons,” which means that hardcore “D&D” fans will be able to get their fix where Amnesty might have left them out to dry. However, Ethersea also experiments with other games like “The Quiet Year” and adds new mechanics to the baseline “Dungeons & Dragons” rules, which will satisfy those who might be bored with the typical “D&D” fare fans got from Balance.
Ethersea seems like it will strike an excellent middle-ground that previous seasons have yet to achieve in terms of both storytelling and gameplay. It’s taking some of the best parts of those previous iterations of The Adventure Zone, combining them, and developing them even further to create a product that’s sure to be a blast from start to finish.
Catch it!
The Adventure Zone: Ethersea releases every other Thursday, as well as most major podcast apps. No prior knowledge of The Adventure Zone is needed to enjoy it, so it’s a great jumping-on point for new fans. However, if you’re an old fan who knows The Adventure Zone front to back, you might get even more out of this exciting new season.