One Year Making a Dungeons and Dragons Podcast – A Retrospective
I am the forever DM. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) in college and then used the game to stay connected with friends online after I moved away. There was one friend, Will, whom I hadn't spoken to in a couple of years. After attending his wedding, I reached out and asked if he wanted to do a podcast with me. That podcast was not a DnD podcast. It was a stream-of-consciousness, comedy-forward opinion podcast with little to no direction. It was called Do Our Opinions Matter?, and it was fun. Sometime later, I asked him if he wanted to stream a DnD game on Twitch. He had never played, but he enthusiastically agreed. We played, no one watched, we had fun.
Running the game live was pretty stressful. I felt I had little room for mistakes and was always conscious of every technical detail. It was ultimately another directionless mess, but it helped me discover the necessity of streamlining a campaign for public consumption. With this new knowledge, we set out to create a podcast. We reached out to another good friend, Bruce, and recorded 20+ sessions. We only ever edited three.
The whole thing was plagued with technical issues that we weren't aware of until we were too far in to go back and fix. Lessons were learned, one player decided this wasn't for them, and we went back to the drawing board. Will, Bruce, and I were still determined to make a damn good DnD podcast, so I spent nearly two years planning what would become The Neverthere, our first campaign in Nother Realm. We were actually streaming video games on Twitch as a large group, Nother Brothers, and thought we'd get everyone involved to join the campaign. Alas, there was drama, so we decided to keep the cast to just the core group.
Bruce, Will, and I set out on our adventure. Will’s musical collaborator, Ryan Springman, created an amazing theme song for the show. We recorded five episodes and released the first three on August 15, 2022. Somehow, we hit the top 100 of Comedy - Fiction on Apple Podcasts. I still have no clue how we managed that, but the moderate attention drove us forward. We took chances with collaborative storytelling, added music and sound effects, and spent far too much time adjusting elements that no one would ever notice. We still do adjust too much, but we’re far more efficient at it. We had an engaging story with compelling characters and good production value. And what did that amount to? A measly 163 downloads in the first month. We were ecstatic.
We played every week and released a new episode every two. The process got us ahead but allowed us to have a life and not stress when we missed sessions or just couldn’t get to editing for a week. After the first few episodes, Will took 90% of the editing burden. This meant I was able to plan more and really focus on the story. After nine episodes, we added another party member.
We all know that working with friends is a terrible idea, and working with family is even worse. But putting time-honored advice aside, we brought on Will’s brother, Fraser. Now we had a party of one probably-good guy and two morally darker-than-gray guys. Was I trying to make evil characters do heroic deeds of goodness? Yes. And it just works.
Fraser, who had never played DnD before, allowed us to take a step back and open the world up to people who didn’t know the mechanics of the game. It’s just sad that it took new listeners nine episodes to get there. Sorry, newbies.
Our party was nearly complete. Will’s character, a warforged cleric, was like a newborn baby who kept missing story hints and forgetting he had divine connections. Bruce’s character, a human barbarian, was a thug who was determined to do whatever he could to survive long enough to absolutely murder the man who killed his brother. Fraser’s character, an elf warlock, had eldritch blast. He was also a pirate who, of course, had ulterior motives. The three of them knew they could take whatever I threw at them, so we added a fourth player, Will’s other sibling, Emily. She rolled a halfling druid who was supposed to be good, but I’m not so sure anymore. Regardless, this effectively increased the length of all future encounters.
I’ve always felt that combat was my weakest skill when running the game. More players meant more complications and more time between turns. I should note here that we don’t use maps or any other visuals while playing. If I can’t explain something well enough for the players to act on, how can I expect someone listening to the podcast to follow it? The solution was to make simpler encounters with fewer but more interesting enemies. I didn’t do this for a handful of encounters, which made editing a massive pain. Sorry, Will.
Now we had THE TEAM. Will edited the episodes, Fraser converted for YouTube and made clips, Emily put content on Instagram, and Bruce picked up the video game streaming torch (we had all quit after the aforementioned drama). I guess I did stuff too (notherrealm.com is proof of this). We were moving ahead and reaching our first anniversary. At this point, we had been asking our listeners for feedback on anything and everything. The most prominent constructive criticism we received was that many things felt unfinished. The arcs never tied up in a nice bow, and we were often creating more questions with no answers.
I’m a writer, so I wrote The Neverthere as if it were a novel. The story was written to follow standard plot progression. In episodes one through three, we were introduced to the world and some main players in our conflict. Episode three culminated in the revealing of the story’s titular boogieman, the Neverthere. This entity was a beautiful tool. From our DnD livestream and first DnD podcast attempt, I learned that an easily consumable and, more importantly, enjoyable narrative required railroading. Little to no filler made for a better listening experience, and the Neverthere ensured that I could apply pressure when needed and manufacture forward momentum. Even in downtime, there needed to be character development. If chapters like Anarcus and The Forest of Liars felt like they had rushed endings, that’s because it was my intent. Though now I can see the issue. The content we were making, specifically a narrative-driven real-play Dungeons and Dragons podcast, wasn’t an audiobook. Our audience expected the kind of progression you’d find in a typical DnD adventure. And why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t our characters experience the catharsis of following a quest through to the end? I’m fixing that, and I don’t know if my players or our audience are ready. But they better be.
Nother Realm is turning it up in year two. We’ve got new and returning characters, impactful twists, and resolutions that will both satisfy our audience and progress the plot. We’ve learned so much from year one. We learned how to make a beautiful production and how to care for our story. We learned how to always have a backup recording and how to let out our laughs. And we learned how to give the characters a moment to breathe and tie up some loose ends. Bruce, Emily, Fraser, Will, and I are so excited to enter our second year of this labor of love.
If you’re looking for a TL;DR or how to not fail at this yourself, here are my key takeaways from my experience so far:
If you want to make a podcast, live stream, YouTube series, etc., start as soon as you can.
Archive that first thing and release your second (or third) much better thing.
If you’re worried about not having the right equipment, you’re wasting time. Get the basics and get recording. Equipment lists for your budget 100% exist.
Do this thing with people you trust and enjoy, plan for some of them to back out, then find someone who won’t (possibly because of family connections).
If you’re doing a long campaign, treat your arcs like predominantly self-contained stories. Wrap them up in an almost perfect bow but leave room to inject the right amount of primary plot (DM’s discretion).
Keep your players involved in their stories and ask them what they want to see. They’ll often have better ideas than you do about the entire plot, so listen and claim those ideas as your own.
If you’re a player, collaborate with each other and your DM. The world feels more real when it’s built by more brains.
Always make sure you press the record button on an armed track in your DAW. Sorry again, Will.
Listen and be open to feedback. I’m not always the best at receiving criticism, but I can attest that listening to it has never made me worse at what I do.
Looking back on the first 29 episodes of Nother Realm, I can admit that I’ve never been more proud of something I’ve put out into the world. Even though the things I’ve learned in the past year have made the show better, I still love every single episode we’ve made. So, thank you Bruce and Will for starting this wild journey with me, and thank you Fraser and Emily for deciding that you were down for this craziness. To everyone who’s touched a part of this, thank you for the time, energy, and creativity you pour into this world we’re building together.
Also, if you haven’t listened to Nother Realm yet, why not give it a try? You can find it on almost every platform.
