Ten years ago this month, when The Adventure Zone started as a one-off actual play experiment on the My Brother, My Brother and Me podcast, two of its four hosts worked here, at Polygon. In fact, Justin and Griffin McElroy helped co-found this place, after we worked together at another video game website (RIP Joystiq) as far back as 2007. I mention this, in the interest of disclosure, because I am not impartial when it comes to all things McElroy.
It’s been 10 years since the show began and rapidly grew across many seasons and hundreds of episodes, across a bestselling graphic novel series and countless live shows. I can measure my life alongside its evolutions.
When I listened to the first episode of The Adventure Zone — this would be the introductory Balance arc, up and running on its own podcast feed later in 2014 — I did so while building some basement shelves, in part to hold some kid stuff overflow for a 9-month-old upstairs. The most recent episode I listened to was the pilot episode for TAZ’s new season, Abnimals (not a typo), during a recent family drive to the beach, with a now 10-year-old listening along. The theme song is still stuck in his head (more on this later).
“Imagine a world in which all of the anthropomorphic animal hero shows of the ’90s and early 2000s existed at the same time,” explains this season’s Dungeon Master, Travis McElroy (or “zookeeper,” as the team floated in an early episode shared with me). “And within that world there were three team members who had been removed from their former teams for various reasons now trying to form their own kind of ragtag group trying to exist in this world of heroic teens. And this time no swears.”
Those three team members include Roger Mooer, a Charolais cow — well, technically a bull — with a knack for spy stuff and a gift for ballroom dancing, as played by Clint McElroy, their dad; Navy Seal, an aquatic commando who is also a beefy anthropomorphic Ross seal and is not and has never been, it must be noted, a member of the armed forces, as played by Griffin McElroy; and Axe-O-Lyle, an extreme firefighting axolotl who can regrow his limbs… but it’s kind of embarrassing, as played by Justin McElroy.
Why the shift to a family-friendly format? “What sort of changed my mind on it was seeing how meaningful it was to me to find decent stuff that I like listening to with my kids,” Justin says. “We have a few podcasts that they’re obsessed with and it’s nice to find ones that I’m into too. So making something that could serve that purpose I feel was also sort of a public good, or at least serving our audience well.”
“Recently, as I’ve been doing meet-and-greets and we’ve been doing conventions and stuff, there’s just a lot more kids coming through,” Travis agrees. “Twelve-year-olds with their graphic novels to be signed, and a lot more people talked about their kids being into The Adventure Zone.”
Outside of an absence of swearing, I asked how they’re choosing to adapt their improvisational storytelling for younger listeners. Should we expect something akin to a G rating?
“I don’t know, nobody said G-rated, Chris,” Travis says. “PG-13, maybe…”
“I like TV-Y,” adds Griffin.
Travis continues, “I’ve gone back through and watched a lot of the source material cartoons and thinking about it in that framework of what those setups are, what they’re doing and what the stakes are, because, for example, with the original 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they made the Foot Clan robots. So we can just kick him in the face all day. It’s robots, man! Don’t even worry about it.”
The pilot episode I listened to had henchmen who were knocked out, but never killed; environmental attacks instead of weapon-based attacks; a Big Bad doing a heist (greedy!); and some longer story arc mystery with a surprise cliffhanger ending. All the while, the play system Travis designed for the series — which rests on rolling two to three d8 dice — provides plenty of room for the flexibility and improv that has defined the show’s last decade while also emphasizing momentum.
So we can just kick him in the face all day. It’s robots, man!
“I am trying to keep action and momentum in my head,” explains Justin. “When we were doing previous seasons, the comedy was almost always the point. And so if something’s funny but not necessarily propulsive, we’ll kind of sit in it and mess around with it until it stops being funny and then move along. But I have been cautious in my head thinking this isn’t going to be interesting if you’re younger; you just want something to happen. Let’s make something happen. And if something hasn’t happened in a while, I’ll make something else happen.”
For the tabletop role-playing curious kiddo in your house, this may help whet their appetite for their own seat at the table, but it won’t give them a framework to host their own adventures.
“When I made up the rules system, I wanted something that isn’t chunky, isn’t complicated so that we don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining or adding up various die. I wanted it to be like, You roll, good, go. So that we could focus more on moving the story forward and doing the action,” Travis explains. “There are some wonderful versions of actual play stuff that you watch or listen to and learn how to play the game. I mean, it’s wonderful, but that’s not what I pictured this season to be and so I didn’t want it to be school. I didn’t want it to feel like school.”
What does come through in Abnimals is a focus on family, Clint McElroy — in a fitting role for the patriarch of the family — says. “One thing that runs through everything we do in TAZ that is also applicable here, and this was a constant in [Teenage Mutant Ninja] Turtles and a lot of those other shows, was family. I don’t think there’s any way we could do something that didn’t have something to do with family, whether it’s found family or actual family coming together. We’re going to explore that in Abnimals as well.”
You can listen (with or without your family) to the first episode of The Adventure Zone: Abnimals when it premieres on Sept. 19, but until then I’d encourage you to indulge in the season’s theme song, with music by Eric Near, lyrics by Near, Justin McElroy, and the internet’s Jonathan Coulton, and performed by Coulton.
In spite of what you have heard
We’re at the height of our powers
Atop the tallest of towers we stand
(They’ll never stop us now)So take my hand if you trust
That we will do what we must
Until it’s turning out just like we planned
(We’ll find a way somehow)Yeah the road is long
But our mojo’s strong
And unless I’m wrong (and I’m not)
We’re at the height of our powers