The Adventure Zone

• 1. Introduction

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  The Adventure Zone started as a joke, buried inside episode ninety-seven of My Brother, My Brother and Me. In May 2012, the McElroy brothers were fielding a listener's question about a Dungeons & Dragons game. Justin McElroy named the bit on the spot: The Adventure Zone. Two years passed before that name became a real game night around a table, then a podcast that has run for more than a decade. To date, the family has played through eleven campaigns, trading off who runs the game and which fictional world they build. What turns a passing joke into that? And what does it take to keep four family members improvising together, campaign after campaign, for over ten years?

• 2. The Bureau Of Balance

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  In the summer of 2014, the McElroys sat down with their father Clint to try the newly released Starter Set for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, published that July. The set's included module, The Lost Mine of Phandelver, carried them through their first few sessions. On the 18th of August 2014, that earliest recording aired as a one-off episode of My Brother, My Brother and Me, filling in while Justin was on paternity leave. That December, the game left My Brother, My Brother and Me behind and became its own biweekly show on the Maximum Fun network. Griffin McElroy ran the game as Dungeon Master, in a campaign later named the Balance Arc, which reached its finale with Episode 69 in August 2017.

  Balance follows a global war across the world of Faerûn, set off by seven magical artifacts called the Grand Relics. Once the war ended, knowledge of the relics was wiped from nearly everyone's minds, except the Bureau of Balance, the organization built to recover them. Griffin sent his brothers' characters after each relic in turn: Taako, an elf wizard, Merle Highchurch, a dwarf cleric, and Magnus Burnsides, a human fighter. Some of the quests came from unlikely places. The heist-and-race episodes of Petals to the Metal occurred to Griffin while he was watching the film Fast Five, and the body-horror of The Crystal Kingdom came to him while watching Alien. The campaign's climax, Story and Song, brought back old allies and foes to face a cosmic threat known as the Hunger.

  Throughout the run, Mort Garson's "Déjà Vu," from his album Ataraxia: The Unexplained, served as the show's main theme, alongside original music Griffin composed himself. Three special episodes, billed as The "The Adventure Zone" Zone, aired during the campaign as an informal chat show about the game. Balance's popularity was already clear by 2016, when a graphic novel adaptation of the story was announced. When the campaign wrapped, the family didn't retire the format. Instead, they tried other games entirely, starting with a superhero one-shot called Commitment.

• 3. Different Game Masters

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  Commitment, the first experimental arc, put Clint McElroy behind the screen for the first time, running a superhero game using the FATE system. Its four episodes followed agents of the Do Good Fellowship, a "cult adjacent" organization built to improve the world through technology and science. Griffin McElroy then took over as the game's "Keeper" for Amnesty, played with the Monster of the Week system from Evil Hat Productions. Set in the fictional ski-resort town of Kepler, West Virginia, it follows the Pine Guard fighting monthly "Abominations" that cross over from a dying world called Sylvain. The family called this run "Season 2," and it stretched to 36 episodes before ending on the 23rd of September 2019.

  Travis McElroy became Dungeon Master for the first time on Graduation, set at Hieronymous Wiggenstaff's School for Heroism and Villainy. The campaign ran from the 31st of October 2019 to the 15th of April 2021. Reviewers criticized Travis's inexperience and the campaign's large cast of non-player characters. Around the 20th episode, Travis considered stepping back and letting someone else finish the season, but decided that would be unfair to the players who were invested.

  Ethersea, announced on the 3rd of May 2021, put Griffin back in the Dungeon Master's chair for a campaign set in the submarine city of Founder's Wake. He drew inspiration partly from Robert Ballard's book The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep-Sea Exploration. Its first five episodes used a separate world-building game called The Quiet Year before the story proper began that July. Hiring editor Rachel Jacobs allowed the show to move from a biweekly to a weekly schedule. A related mini-series, Imbalance, released that November under the name The Zone of Adventure, with Aabria Iyengar as a guest Dungeon Master and video posted to YouTube instead of an audio-only feed.

  Justin McElroy took his turn as Game Master for Steeplechase, set inside a sprawling amusement park, after the family adopted a seasonal format in 2022. He credited the documentary series Defunctland as an inspiration and based the campaign's home layer, Ustaben, on the real park Kings Island. Episodes opened with clips of a character called "Krystal with a K," voiced by Autumn Seavey Hicks in a parody of Disney food vloggers.

  Clint McElroy returned to the GM's chair for Outre Space, his first time since Commitment in 2017, continuing the 2019 comic War of the Realms: Journey into Mystery with guest players Kate Welch and Gabe Hicks. Griffin then ran Versus Dracula, inspired by Curse of Strahd and public domain material such as Frankenstein; Travis based his character Crawford on his own maternal grandfather, Crawford Kitchen. Travis served as "Zookeeper" for Abnimals, a campaign styled after 1990s cartoons like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, dropping profanity to reach younger listeners and opening with a new song written by Jonathan Coulton. Griffin returned once more for Royale, a Squid Game-inspired contest between 64 wizards competing to join a powerful group called the Octave.

  By the time Abnimals aired, the show had been running for ten years, long enough that some listeners were introducing their own children to it.

• 4. Behind The Board

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  Episodes generally run around 90 minutes, edited down and layered with music and sound effects. Until 2022, each show opened with a recap of the ongoing story; after Steeplechase, that recap gave way to "Steepywatch," a parody of Disney park vlogs. Versus Dracula instead opened with humorous excerpts from Dracula's own journal, while Royale returned to a more traditional recap format.

  The "The Adventure Zone" Zone, introduced in 2016, is an unnumbered talk-show episode that airs between campaigns to close out one story and announce the next. Like other McElroy shows, The Adventure Zone includes a mid-episode break for sponsored ads. Early on, listeners could pay through Maximum Fun's "Jumbotron" service to have messages read aloud. Demand grew so high that Maximum Fun's servers crashed during a sales event in late 2017, prompting a brief raffle system in May 2018 before Jumbotron was discontinued.

  The show is often represented by the stone rune ᛥ, originally the symbol of the Bureau of Balance in the first campaign. Fans have long suggested items for "Fantasy Costco," a running joke store from Balance where characters shopped between quests, and cat-themed merchants recur across nearly every setting. The character Indrid Cold began as an Amnesty NPC tied to the world of Sylvain before turning up, unexplained, in the separate world of Dust. Clint McElroy also occasionally plays a recurring cameo of himself as a background "space janitor."

  A planned "Laughter & Love" family tour in April 2020 would have brought Adventure Zone performances to Boston and Baltimore, but the COVID-19 pandemic canceled it. Instead, the family staged virtual live shows in new one-off settings such as Fur, with guest Erika Ishii, and Hootenanny, before touring in person again on the "Fancy Takes Flight Tour" from March to July 2022. Later live shows largely used the Angrave setting from Versus Dracula, pairing it each time with a different piece of public domain material.

  In September 2023, the family streamed "lofi taz radio ᛥ," a video featuring 4 hours and 20 minutes of Griffin's original music from the show, styled after other YouTube lo-fi streams.

• 5. Critics And Fans

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  Justin McElroy has summed up the show's audience simply: "it has a following." The Adventure Zone holds a 4.9 rating on Podbay and a 5.0 rating on Apple Podcasts. The family has sold out dozens of live shows since 2014, and episodes have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times, especially among younger and LGBT+ listeners.

  The Mary Sue called Balance "one of the most moving and epic adventures of recent memory," with particular praise for its climactic ending. Author Patrick Rothfuss went further, saying the show possessed "some of the finest storytelling I have ever experienced. In any genre. Ever."

  The Mary Sue praised Amnesty's "uniquely compassionate kind of story-telling, based on connection and hope," while Comic Book Resources called it "filled with great characters, goofs, and heart-wrenching moments." The Escapist praised both seasons of Dust, noting it delivered "a tight, satisfying mystery" alongside familial humor, including the cast's collective roast of Griffin's character Errol.

  Graduation drew sharper criticism, with reviewers pointing to a confusing plot, an overabundance of secondary characters, and dice rolls with few real consequences. The Mary Sue wrote that Travis "went a bit too far in crafting his own narrative and didn't let his players, well, play enough." Even so, the show was praised for making Fitzroy Maplecourt its first asexual character. Em Rowntree of The Geekiary took a more forgiving view, writing that "the heart of TAZ... is a sort of very stupid and unexpectedly emotional outrageousness. It soars when it's narratively unjustifiable."

  The Escapist called Ethersea a "solid entry" while criticizing its slow worldbuilding and its overarching plot. The same outlet described Steeplechase as a "return to form" for the show, praising its smaller, self-contained heists. Comic Book Resources singled out the character Shlabethany, introduced during the Passion's Cove episodes.

  None of that back-and-forth stopped Balance from making a second life on paper, arriving in bookstores as a graphic novel series starting in 2018.

• 6. Beyond The Podcast

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  Carey Pietsch illustrated the Balance graphic novel adaptation, written by the McElroys and published by First Second Books starting in 2018. Each volume covers one quest from the campaign. Six volumes have been published so far, and the final one, Story and Song, is set for release in July 2026. The first volume, Here There Be Gerblins, topped the New York Times' best-selling trade fiction list, becoming the first graphic novel ever to do so, and volumes two through five repeated the feat.

  For the launch of the sixth book, The Suffering Game, the family produced original artwork. They demonstrated it on an episode of The McElroy Family Clubhouse, then auctioned it off to support the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.

  Peacock announced in January 2020 that it had commissioned a script for an animated adaptation of The Adventure Zone. By July 2020, the McElroys said they were developing a pilot that would differ from both the podcast and the graphic novels, possibly with a different voice cast. Travis McElroy said in 2024 that the project had fallen through, blaming shifts in the entertainment industry after the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether that return ever happens, the family has said the door to an animated Adventure Zone remains open.