The Adventure Zone was one of my favorite podcasts for quite some time. I was always tangentially interested in Dungeons & Dragons, though I never went further than making a character on a sheet. But after one night of playing board games with friends, one of them recommended I give The Adventure Zone a try. I was not familiar with the McElroys back then, and had only heard of their more popular podcast My Brother, My Brother, and Me. I did not expect listening to three brothers and their dad going through a D&D campaign would hold my attention, but I absolutely loved it. Their sense of humor, camraderie, and varying degrees of experience with Dungeons & Dragons made for a perfect blend for someone like me.
The first campaign they completed, known as the Balance Arc, is unquestionably my favorite. What began as a modified version of a generic starter campaign, veered into a wild multi-dimensional story with wizards, existential threats, and Garfield. I’ve listened to a few of their other campaigns which vary from pretty good (Amnesty) to frustrating (Graduation) but none have hit the same as Balance. After years of fans making art and their own visions of what the main characters look like, the McElroys released a graphic novel series of the Balance Arc. There are some minor changes (names taken from the original starter kit were changed to avoid copyright) and some added visual gags that wouldn’t work in an audio format.
Part 6 is probably the weakest of the bunch, though that was true for this part of the podcast as well. It is an interesting idea, where the players are forced to partake in a variety game show that basically continuously punishes them. There’s no real winning or losing. The point of the game is to keep the suffering of the characters going. For this reason, it forgoes a lot of the standard mechanics of D&D, which removes the narrative skeleton that was present in all of the other stories. It is a mixed bag in the end, and the graphic novel can’t do much to improve upon it. But the artwork is still fantastic, and I am happy to have it sitting on my shelf next to Chapters 1 -5.