Most Dungeons & Dragons campaigns begin like this: A group of fantasy characters with different skills and backgrounds come together in a shared space (typically a tavern) and learn about the mission that will kickstart their adventures together. The characters are meeting for the first time, but the people playing them usually aren’t, since the original tabletop fantasy role-playing game was designed to be played among friends.
The campaign I’m participating in today is different. Firstly, most of the players here didn’t know each other. And secondly, they were also recording a podcast—a show whose listeners also won’t know them, at least not at first. Welcome to D&D Anonymous.
Dungeons & Dragons was created in the ‘70s by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, hobbyists who wanted to infuse the strategy war games they loved with the fantasy flavor of The Lord of the Rings. Several editions have updated and revised the rules in the years since; the most recent is Fifth Edition (or 5E), whose easy-to-learn rules and diverse character prompts have catapulted D&D into a new era of popularity. That fandom has been further boosted by a plethora of D&D podcasts like Critical Role and Dimension 20, which offer a window into the game via other people’s campaigns. Do that many people really love listening to a game they’re not playing? Indeed they do; Dimension 20 sold out Madison Square Garden last year.
It helps that these podcasts are often populated by actors who bring their charisma and performance skills to the role-playing experience, and whom the listeners get to know alongside the characters. The Dungeon Master (or DM) of D&D Anonymous, who prefers to remain anonymous himself, wanted to do something different.
“When you listen to D&D podcasts, people get a lot out of understanding the relationship between the player and the character,” he tells BKMAG. “I thought mixing that relationship up and having a table where you don’t know who is playing each character makes you focus more on the character and not think so much about the person behind them. I thought it’d be a cool experiment.”
Photo by Francisco Hernandez
I witnessed that experiment firsthand when I arrived at Astral Sound studio in Bushwick on a winter Tuesday. One by one, the other players showed up in the building lobby, whose centerpiece was a large koi pond totally devoid of koi fish. The group was a mix of the DM’s friends, who have played D&D together before, and an assortment of Brooklyn micro-celebrities, including podcast hosts and a City Council member.
Everyone had already conceived their characters with the DM beforehand, but creating a D&D character requires lots of statistics decided by dice rolls. So some players still had to figure out a few numbers by rolling from shared bowls of dice (“wW’re practicing D&D communism today,” the DM joked as he passed them around), and the magic-casting characters looked through index cards printed out with spells to determine their powers. Then it was time to enter the world.
D&D campaigns have the option of playing in a pre-made setting (such as the classic fantasy of the Forbidden Realms or the steampunk noir of Eberron) or making one of their own. The latter is what this DM chose, and it’s a world he’s been building for years, with the hopes of eventually writing a novel around it. He calls it Caerron, and its most distinguishing feature is its unique weather. In addition to the four seasons we know and love in New York, there’s also a fifth called “Sunfall,” and for hundreds of years, the sun didn’t rise at all. The sun is therefore highly valued, the subject of religion and the namesake of the world’s primary polity, the Kingdom Under the Sun.
Once we had all finalized our characters, the party was introduced to a rich noble from the Kingdom Under the Sun with a mission for us. He wanted the group to retrieve a lost treasure for him—a treasure that just happened to be underwater. This mission was largely chosen by the players, who were able to vote ahead of time on several prompts that the DM had come up with. That list included fighting a war, a more political arc with high lords and ladies, and one that was just called “carnies,” in which everyone would play a misfit of some kind. “Underwater heist” was the winner.
How might a bunch of fantasy characters make it underwater, you ask? A submarine, of course! But instead of the cylindrical submersibles of our modern era, this “submarine” was just… a giant metal egg. My character, an artificer named Alphonse Slothrop, was one of two pilots for this strange vessel. Other characters included academic experts in the treasure being sought, a political aide to the rich noble with her own mysterious connections, and a few warriors.
“When you’re putting together a table, you’re making a vibe equation,” the DM says. “You have to bet a lot on who’s going to play well with who. Especially with people who have never played before, that gets a little harder.”
But to his surprise, the new players took to the game like naturals. My fellow submarine pilot was a first-time player who committed to a Russian accent and never dropped it. The city councillor, meanwhile, played one of the academics, and immediately started treating the other expert with hilarious condescension.
“I played a lot of RPG video games growing up, like Skyrim. I always wanted to play D&D, but it felt pretty inaccessible,” the councillor, Chi Ossé, tells me afterward. “I don’t think I met anyone in my upbringing who played D&D. So when [the DM] sent me a Twitter message and my team flagged it, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll play! When else am I going to?’ I thought it was the perfect timing to cross something off my list.”
Will Connell played a hard-drinking warrior who managed to get drunk before we even got in the submarine egg. He’s played with the DM before, and was blown away by the new energy.
“I was really impressed with all the first-time players,” Connell says. “That’s not because I think D&D is impossible to pick up, but leaning into it when somebody’s trying to do a high-level podcast production is a whole other beast, and I was just really impressed with what everyone did.”
Photo by Francisco Hernandez
“I think it’s so easy when you start a D&D campaign, especially with strangers, to just try to get along,” the DM says. “But everyone came in acting so fucked up and catty!”
Part of that may have just been the Brooklyn spirit.
“LA is kind of the capital for basically every other D&D podcast,” the DM says. “So ours definitely felt very uniquely Brooklyn. I don’t see a game like the one we played happening anywhere else. It was very specifically deranged, a real chaotic New York energy.”
It didn’t take long for that chaos to manifest. Perhaps going underwater in a giant egg sounds dangerous to you. Well, it certainly was for our characters. Despite being a trained pilot, Alphonse hit his head a little too hard on the way down, and exited the game early. That’s how the dice roll sometimes.
I was there for the beginning of the mission and saw the pieces set up. From talking to the DM, I also have an idea of how it ends. By the end of the second and final day of recording, only a handful of characters were left—but between them, they had a complete story.
“This let me play with my favorite part of fantasy writing, which is when not everyone knows the same information,” the DM says. “I gave everyone the pieces of a story to tell, and it didn’t all really come together until the end. Then people realized, ‘Oh my God, that’s why we’re here.’”
The post The “Real Chaotic New York Energy” of a Dungeons & Dragons Podcast appeared first on BKMAG.
