On what I thought would be a forgettable Saturday night, December 12th of 2020, I sat in my bedroom watching Twitch streams and chatting with Discord friends. One of those friends was Tony.
Let’s back it up a bit. Weeks prior, a streamer I was subbed to decided to make an RP section in her Discord server. She explained on stream that she was opening up a private channel where subs could participate in weekly D&D nights. I had no idea what Dungeons and Dragons even was, but it sounded fun to me and I had an acting itch that hadn't been scratched since college. So, I joined the channel and made my first ever character.
It was a Dragonborn circus performer with a thick Scottish accent. I would not get to use an accent or even look at a battlemap, however. You see, what was implemented was a sort of D&D Lite game. One of the Moderators acted as our dungeon master while players typed to each other in the new private text channel. Once in a while we would use an automated bot to roll hits, but most of our time was spent typing silly roleplay scenarios to each other. It was pretty fun, sitting there, figuring out how to type so that a Scottish brogue came across; but it didn’t fully scratch that aforementioned itch.
Rewind one more time… While this D&D stuff was cultivating, Tony and I had been working on a podcast that would never air. As we sat in a Discord call, recording our first episode, stopping the tracks, and uploading them to the cloud; I mentioned that I was joining a private Discord channel for D&D nights. “WHAT???” Tony shouted through his podcast mic. “Are you kidding me right now? Let me play, I wanna play.” This is all paraphrased of course, but as I let Tony down easy, informing him that it was subscribers only, he opened up about his time playing D&D when he was younger. It was a huge part of his life that he missed heavily.
In the following weeks, I kept Tony updated on the Discord, shared my first ever character build with him, and after saying for the millionth time that he wanted to play… I sent this message:
If you’re reading this, it probably means you are already a devoted listener of the DND404 podcast and you know, generally, how this story goes. Four dudes create a ridiculous tabletop podcast about a mischievous Tiefling, a boisterous Golliath, and an aloof, four-foot-tall Mini-taur. But how did we get there?
It took Tony and I almost three months to get a group together. People said yes, then bailed. Some turned us down, others ignored our request entirely, but thanks to Tony, Jared and Alec heeded the call. Tony had abandoned the previous podcast we were working on (by abandoned I mean lost the recordings) and suggested we turn our efforts towards making this Dungeons and Dragons campaign into a podcast. It should be easy with all of our streaming experience, plus, Jared, Alec, and I had never played before. We thought it would be fun for listeners to follow us as we fumble our way through a campaign and, so, we got to work.
Ubruhum, the Tiefling ranger, First Mate Shoth, the Halfling barbarian, and Galebre Solkath, the High Elf sorcerer walked into a cave and prepared for battle. These were the premade characters Tony gave us to play in our tutorial sessions. We had two, before ever pressing record. The first was in a deep, dark cavern where we were chased by a Gelatinous Cube. The second was in an airship where our path led to a deathly fight with a Balgura.
Just like that, we had a crew together, ready to embark and on March 10th of 2021, we recorded episode 1 of the podcast.
If you would like to hear more about everything leading up to our episode 1 release day, please leave a detailed comment on what you would like to know about the process. I will be writing another article in the next month or so about what it took for us to turn a year of recording, editing, and meetings into a digestible show on Spotify.
Best,
Dan A.K.A. Minnis PebbleWalker
Let’s talk about the “woke” X gesture
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