Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000159 · Podcasts → Long-form interview shows · 2014–present
The Adventure Zone
The McElroy family plays D&D for laughs and storylines
Rejected. It isn’t going to the Arctic.
“Three brothers and their dad played D&D for 69 episodes, and it ended up as a New York Times bestseller.”
Why Noah said no
The McElroy brothers and their dad started playing D&D for a podcast in 2014, and the Balance campaign became a bestselling graphic novel series. Welcome to Night Vale already covers the fan-driven fiction podcast, and if actual play gets a slot, Critical Role drew the bigger crowd.
- Rejected
- 28 Oct 2026
- Original size
- 86.2 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_Zone
What it is
A weekly podcast where three brothers and their father play Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop RPGs, released starting in 2014 on the Maximum Fun network. The first campaign, Balance, ran for 69 episodes across three years and was later adapted into a bestselling graphic novel series. People listened for the family's improvised jokes and the collaborative storytelling.
Why it’s internet culture
It showed that people online wanted long-form collaborative fiction and that they'd follow the same characters and world for years. Alongside Critical Role, it revived D&D from niche hobby to mainstream entertainment by making the game itself the content rather than just something people played privately.
Listeners followed one family's improvised Dungeons & Dragons game for years, made fan art and live show crowds out of it, and helped turn watching or hearing other people play tabletop games into a genre of its own.
What Noah read
The Adventure Zone is a weekly comedy and adventure actual play podcast, in which the McElroy family play Dungeons & Dragons along with other role-playing games. The show is distributed by the Maximum Fun network and hosted by brothers Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy, and their father Clint McElroy. Regular episodes of the podcast feature the family solving puzzles, fighting enemies, and leveling up their characters in a series of cinematic and humorous encounters. The Adventure Zone originated as a special episode of My Brother, My Brother and Me in 2014, which was spun off into a separate biweekly podcast later that year. The first 69 episode campaign Balance was followed by a series of short experimental arcs in the late 2010s, and subsequent campaigns have generally run for 30 to 45 episodes. To date, eleven campaigns have been depicted in a variety of game systems, with further settings used for live shows and donor bonus material. The show switched to a seasonal format from 2022, in which the family can return to earlier settings for further episodes. The podcast has been credited alongside Critical Role with the Dungeons & Dragons renaissance that began in the mid 2010s,…
The rest wasn’t kept.
History
Rejected
“The McElroy brothers and their dad started playing D&D for a podcast in 2014, and the Balance campaign became a bestselling graphic novel series. Welcome to Night Vale already covers the fan-driven fiction podcast, and if actual play gets a slot, Critical Role drew the bigger crowd.”