Encounter Party began life as a podcast where Brian David Judkins and Ned Donovan told fantasy stories through the mediumof Dungeons & Dragons. The goal, they tell me, was not to have people tune in to watch their favourite actors play D&D, but to stick around for the adventures they weave throughout each episode.
After resounding success as a podcast, it now joins Heroes’ Feast and Faster Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! on a new D&D-themed Freevee channel called Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures, coming to TV for the first time tomorrow.
A short introductory episode shows the cast as they first step foot onto the new Encounter Party set, seeing the fruits of the podcast laid bare. Many were even brought close to tears.
“There’s something overwhelming about it finally happening,” Donovan tells me. “Encounter Party was a labour of love of Brian, me, and the cast, pounding out a show. To walk on set and experience a character I built, ten feet tall, staring down at me in the back row of a movie theater, and to see a set I only conceptualised, and to see everyone out there… that was emotional. Because when we created the podcast, we said to the cast, ‘Our aim is to do this as a television program’. We asked them to trust in us that we could get there. To be able to sit on that set with that cast and look around the table and say, ‘We did it, is so emotional to me.”
Donovan is one of the party members, playing along with the rest of the cast that includes David Lee Huynh, Landree Fleming, Sarah Babe, Andrew Krug, and Khary Payton. Judkins takes on the role of DM, which allows him as an executive producer to oversee more of the production without spoiling the story or the surprises for his players.
“I feel very blessed to work with a business partner who stays out of my way,” Judkins jokes, before quickly taking it back. “As DM, it’s my job to get everything to the table. Once there, Ned gets to take over more. But I was there a full week before production started, so I saw everything getting built. And one of the things that gave me a lot of confidence was meeting the lighting designer, the guys building the set, the sound guys, and about two out of three of every person I met was like, ‘Yeah, I played D&D,’ or, ‘Oh man, remember theDark Towerruns from the ‘80s?’ There were people familiar with the game and with this play storytelling genre, so I knew we were gonna get a lot of support.”
“This brilliant set was designed by Narbeh Nazarian,” Donovan says. “They built a set that doesn’t feel constrained. One of the things we found with a lot of programming is there are walls right behind people and that can make you feel pushed forward. There’s a lot of value to that but we wanted to feel that open space and have breathing room so that when you swung your arms you weren’t afraid you were gonna hit someone. All of that is in service of allowing the whole set to feel like it can be as big as it wants or as small as it wants based on what Brian is doing as a DM and I think Narbeh’s work is exquisite in giving us that freedom.”
Something unique about the set is the side room. When playing D&D, the party isn’t always physically together in the game. That means one player might discover something that the others then shouldn’t know about, because they aren’t there. Typically, you roleplay and pretend you’re not clued into this prized information, but Encounter Party takes it a step further. Because it wants to be a serialised story with genuine in-character reactions, it has a private room where the DM can take people called the Kitchen.
“When we filmed in Chicago [for the podcast], right next to where we recorded was a kitchen,” Judkins tells me. “Whenever we needed to step outside and talk about stuff without burning airtime and money, it was Ned saying, ‘Can we go chat in The Kitchen real quick?’ [For the TV series], it was the showrunner John Platt’s idea to have a high-top where people can go have private conversations. As the DM, I was like, ‘Yeah, I loveasynchronous playin gaming’. That sort of side Kitchen area is a nice little throw to our roots in name only. We hope in future seasons to be able to expand on it in more and more clever ways.”
Another key part of ensuring genuine reactions from the cast and telling an organic story was to introduce each other’s characters to one another on the first day of recording.
“We built our characters privately with Brian,” Donovan says. “So that first day of filming is the first moment I met any of these characters. I get to learn about them in real-time and my character gets to only react to what I know. We want the audience to learn things about them at the same time we do, and that means players are holding their stories close to their chest, because why would they trust these people they’ve just met? In doing so, you get to watch a party form in real time in a way that is so gratifying for an audience like you get in a scripted television show.”
“There’ll be a brief moment where one person will share a personal anecdote, because now they’re more comfortable. And you’ll see some characters share with other players earlier than others. It creates an honest, open, truthful dynamic that many Actual Play programs don’t get to have.”
It’s not just the introduction of a set that has shifted Encounter Party from its podcast origins, it changed its name ever so slightly too. It used to be called Encounter Party!, with an exclamation mark, but for TV, it was dropped. Donovan and Judkins’ excitement to tell the story behind it was palpable, and speaks volumes to the passion behind the show.
We dropped the exclamation point to be less childish.
“The exclamation point was completely unnecessary,” Judkins says. “It was a Broadway joke because many musicals on Broadway add an exclamation point to make it sound big. We had a gentleman named Eddie Cooper who joined us for the first season, and we had Ned with a musical theater background. We had Landree Fleming on the cast, a prolific musical theater director out here in Chicago. It was a joke not just to be Encounter Party, butENCOUNTER PARTY.”
“I do the community management,” Donovan says. “The social media for the show, things like that. The amount of times I would have to fix an autocorrect because I would write in Encounter Party exclamation point, and then it would capitalise the next word, it drove me insane. Dropping the exclamation point was as much as a protection of my sanity as anything else.”
It’s a less theatrical name, but a more theatrical show. The set is its own character, with beaming lights ushering in moody ambiance and thrilling action, the table being spaced in such a way as to give everyone plenty of room to be expressive.
“I’m not a tall guy, so me sitting in my stool and standing were the same height for camera,” Judkins says. “That allowed me to be up. So once we got in there, I find I need to stand when I do combat just because I get so excited. We had a nice huge space, which made everything feel bigger, which means I got to move around the table. The show is 22 episodes, which is a lot of time, but the story doesn’t just get bigger, I think I also get bigger as we explore the space more. It was cool not to feel like you were stuck at a table.”
Encounter Party is an incredibly unique D&D show, with a story so engrossing that it truly is like tuning intoan improv drama, the actors lost in their performances. It debuts tomorrow, with 22 episodes set to unfold, and we’ve been promised that things will only get more and more theatrical as the series goes on.
The Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures channel is now live and the rollout schedule is as follows:
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