Champions of the Earth

I am beyond excited to finally be able to talk about this.

So I have a new thing that combines several of my great loves: storytelling, games, radio drama, and Saturday morning cartoons. We released the first tease a few weeks back and the first episode drops soon, but this is Champions of the Earth.

I've become a huge fan of The Adventure Zone and cheered my friends on for the past year when they launched VAST on Legendary Alpha, perhaps a little jealous of all the fun they've been having. When coworker friend Collin Kelly told me about his own custom game system inspired by Power Rangers, Voltron, and Sailor Moon, we put our heads together and decided we wanted to do something different. 

So Champions is an "Actual Play" podcast, a live beta test of Collin's system, but we've plused it to the extreme. We cut out all the digressions and table talk unless it's especially funny or on-topic. We added sounds and environments to put our listeners in the middle of the story. We put together an incredible cast that I dearly love playing with and hanging out with every time we do the show. 

And the game is really good.

When I was growing up, tabletop RPGs were one step away from devil worship or abject social suicide. I love the times we live in, where the cast of Critical Role are rockstars and whispers of secret celebrity Hollywood D&D games get louder and louder every day. Playing this game with veteran storytellers and accomplished game designers is like being in the best writer's room that is also a game studio in the 90s. 

The story in a lot of ways is about us remembering what it's like to be teenagers. Given a chance to do it again, and given a chance to do it with powersuits and access to a giant battle robot, we all thought we'd be better the second time around. But since what happens in the story is determined by how we play the game (and some really cruel dice) nothing goes the way we all intended. But because of the cast and because Collin's an astonishing imrpovised storyteller, it's one hell of a ride. 

If you remember Power Rangers, this is darker, full of way more feels, but sacrifices NONE of the action, excitement, or thrills. 

Playing in this game and producing this show might be some of my favorite work so far. I can't wait for everyone to start hearing it. You can even subscribe right now on iTunes.