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Popverse is celebrating Samhain the best way we know how - which is, of course, a deep dive into horror TTRPGs. You'll recall our trainride through Legends of Avantris's Crooked Moon adventure we published at the beginning of October, and now, we get to hear about a completely unique Dungeons & Dragons liveplay show from the hosts themselves: Monty Martin and Kelly McLaughlin, who you may know as YouTubers The Dungeon Dudes.

The show in question is Tales from Woodcreek, an all-new, groundbreaking webseries that weaves escape room puzzles and reality TV antics into the blooming tapestry of the TTRPG liveplay (or actual play) medium, with which you may be familiar thanks to hits like Critical Role and Dimension 20. But even if you are familiar with those series (or hell, even the Dungeon Dudes' own series Dungeons of Drakkenheim), we're fairly certain you won't be prepared for Woodcreek.

Why? Well for one thing, it welcomes celebrities from the liveplay space and beyond into its twisted tale of TTRPG terror - including Ms. Marvel herself, Iman Vellani, Star Trek's Wil Wheaton, and Overwatch lead Anjali Bhimani - and it's DM'd by one of the most prominent D&D nerds in Hollywood today, Daredevil's own Deborah Ann Woll. 

But don't just take it from us. Ahead of Tales from Woodcreek's debut on the Dudes' YouTube channel October 31, Martin and McLaughlin were kind enough to sit down with Popverse and tease what was in store form their own perspectives. What follows is that conversation.

Popverse: Tales from Woodcreek is such a departure from what you typically do on the Dungeon Dudes channel, and moreover, from traditional TTRPG actual play. Can you talk about how it came to be?

Kelly McLaughlin: I give all credit to Deborah Ann Woll. She was the DM of this whole project, and she had the conceptual idea for it as well. She's a big puzzle fan and immersion, so those are the two things that she wanted to lead with. When she presented the idea to us, we were confused, like, ‘What are we going to be doing?’ She was like, ‘Yeah, we're going to be playing  DnD, but you're going to be getting up and interacting with parts of the world like it's an escape room, and we're going to film it like it's a reality TV show. Monty and I said yes, because we love and trust Deb, and we were like, ‘This sounds cool,’ but we didn't really understand how it works. When we arrived on set, though, it was magical.

Monty Martin: Initially, we were approached by Deborah Ann Woll and producer Ed Gass-Donnelly about participating in this, so we've been chatting about it for well over a year -, almost two years now. That was how we were originally introduced to Deb, and from what I understand, Ed has been a fan of our show and Drakkenheim [the Dudes’ 5E adventure world]. They had been following our videos for a while, and Ed is another Canadian-based, film director, writer, producer. So he had been collaborating on projects with Deb, and they talked about their mutual interest in DnD and they said, ‘I watch these Dungeon Dudes guys, should I reach out to them and just see if they want to collaborate on something?’ That was how the entire project came together. Then Deb had this vision for what they wanted to do, which, yeah, we really didn't have a sense of what it was going to be until we got on set. 

McLaughlin: We had so many meetings with them where we kept being like, ‘Can you explain again exactly what it is we're doing?’ They would explain it, but I feel like it's one of those things that's really hard to explain if you don't have something physical to actually see. We would walk away from every meeting, and Monty I were like, ‘What are we getting into here?’ Not that we didn't trust it, but it was like, ‘I can't visualize what this looks like.’ But the moment we got on set and started filming it, you know, I got it.

McLaughlin: [Tales from Woodcreek is] a weird beast, because I felt it wasn’t just about maintaining a role-playing character. I was too busy trying to solve puzzles and move around the room, so I kept breaking my role playing. But in that respect, we were also kind of immersed in it ourselves.

Martin: And I think that speaks to Deb as a DM. There's this overlap between the player and the characters.

McLaughlin: She kept saying, ‘I want the audience to know you as much as they know your character.’ So although we were playing characters, we were fully immersed. If you watch the trailer, there's a full-on jumpscare that I’m reacting to. There's a little clip of me with a lantern going down a hallway, and somebody just banged on the wall. I was trying to be in character in that moment, but then the moment the bang on the wall happens, I lost my character completely because I was too busy being so scared of everything. To me, that was part of the fun of the show. Yes, we're bringing characters to the table, but it's also about the Dungeon Dudes being brought into an improv, haunted house, escape room, DnD set that we’re dealing with.

Martin: Yeah, I think what audiences can expect is a bit of a synthesis of DnD actual play mixed with Escape Room, filmed in the style of reality TV. A lot of actual play is traditionally filmed with very fixed cameras. Players just sit around a table and that's it. But for this project, we had wireless mic packs that we were mic’d up with. Camera crews were on their feet, running around and chasing after us. And while there are times where we are sitting around a table and rolling dice and while playing characters - that does happen - there are other times where we are on our feet solving puzzles, wandering through these really fantastic environments. 

Can you talk a little bit about where you filmed?

Martin: The entire thing was shot on location at a place called Black Creek Pioneer Village, which is in North Toronto. It's a historic site that has these really immaculate vibes, because it captures that historical period.

McLaughlin: The Pioneer Village is open to the public during the day, so one of the great things is that we filmed from usually 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. We're being filmed at night, and considering it's a haunted house vibe, we're there in the pitch black. The vibes were there, we were so immersed.

Martin: To then add on to that, a really phenomenally talented props crew came in to build additional props and puzzle pieces and things that we got to interact and play with. It was a really immersive experience. There were times Debra would be DMing and say, ‘And now you are in the room that your characters are in. Go explore.’

MacLaughlin: [During those times], she would be running around holding a dice tray, and she had given us all of our character sheets and a little booklet with a strap that we could wear over our shoulders. And those had very easy access that had all of our skills on the outside. So if I'd be looking around a room, and we have like this weird poem or something that we have to decipher, I would say, ‘Well, my character's a bard. I'm really good with like, poetry or something like that. Could I roll investigation?’ Or if we encountered a magical device, ‘Can I roll arcana?’ Or, because I'm a bard and I know poetry. ‘Can I roll performance to see if I can learn something?’ And Deb just had a bunch of hints ready. She would run up, we would roll for our character, then she would give the person who was asking the question more information to help them along with, solving a part of the puzzle. So it does bring that D&D element back in, even when we're doing an escape room. 

Martin: Deb also found really cool ways to make the puzzles feel like a very organic part of the narrative that she was telling. A lot of the puzzles have this feeling of nvestigating a haunted house or, a bit of a ghost story in the investigation, which was a lot of fun for us to experience. Oftentimes, we could we could apply that sort of creative thinking to the situations as well, to be like, ‘Well, this is a haunted school house; what is the logic of a school teacher?’ And we would use that to investigate the clues, to solve riddles and figure out what we needed to investigate. And then occasionally, we had to fight some ghosts along the way. 

Of course.

Martin: There was a lot of really environmental storytelling that was done with the different buildings that we filmed in. Each pair of episodes is filmed in a different building in the Pioneer Village, so we had episodes that were in, like, the old school house, and episodes that were in the old manor. We’d go into the granary or something, and then there was a mill. The puzzles, too, fed into those sort of environments. 

Martin: The high level plotline is this: Woodcreek is a haunted and cursed village that has apparently been cursed by a witch. All of our characters were playing descendants of the four families that were influential in the village. We all have this tattoo marking on our palms.We were kind of investigating what happened and why this place was cursed. Every location involved  one of our characters encountering their ancestors and trying to unravel, like, why did this happen? 

We’ve talked a bit about your DM, Deborah Ann Woll, but I wanted to switch gears and talk about your fellow castmates. There are some incredible folks playing this game - you two and Anjali Bhimani are the core cast, and then Jessica Henwick, Shaun Majumder, Iman Vellani, and Wil Wheaton show up as guest stars. What are those folks like as fellow players?

McLaughlin: A lot of the names on this project are like people that, you know, I know and respect, but I've never had the opportunity to meet. It's so funny - this happens to us a lot. I'm feeling starstruck before they show up. I'm like, ‘Oh my goodness, Iman Vellani is going to show up on set today. What do I say? What do I do?’ And then she shows up and she's just such a cool, normal person and we just chilled and hung out. She had never played DnD before, but she was so great. Of all the [guest stars], Wil Wheaton was the only one who had played before. 

Martin: Jess Hennick and Shaun Majumder; this was all their first time playing anything like DnD. In all those cases, actually, it was a lot of fun. Part of that was because, on set, a lot of preparation was needed before each shoot day to get everything ready. So we actually had about 2 or 3 hours to hang out with everybody before things got rolling.

McLaughlin: We were the resident DnD experts, so every time that a new cast member would show up, they'd be like, ‘Oh, you've never played before, talk to the Dungeon Dudes.’ Then we’d sit and basically say, ‘Don't worry about it. All you need to do is look at this on your character sheet and roll some dice when Deb tells you to. But most of the time, just play your character and act.’ Yeah, they may not be players, but they're professional actors. 

McLaughlin: You know, Monty and I were the ones who knew the mechanics, but we were also so far out of our element, because mechanics were a smaller part in this. I was just blown away when Iman Vellani showed up was like, ‘Yeah, I'm this character,’ and her and Deb start having a scene. I'm standing there with Monty like, this is two actors acting, and  just a nerd standing in the room while it's happening. Everybody did such a phenomenal job on their episodes that they really bring the show to life. And it's all improv - so you're watching them come in with the character and bring the show up multiple levels by just being there and participating. 

Martin: Having Deb as your DM, who's experienced with planning adventures and creating and having the immersive environments, the conceits of the escape room element also made it really easy for people to grasp what was going on. Because it was so immersive, right? You just had to be in the moment. There's there's still a handful of moments where you'll get to see the Dungeon Dudes being the Dungeon Dudes and pulling out like our character mechanics and and rocking a combat or two. But, for the most part, it was a really in the moment experience. 

McLaughlin: One of the lessons that I'm constantly taught, especially when you're playing with people who are excellent at improv or that are new to DnD, is the idea that, like, your character sheet is not the be-all, end-all of what you can do on your turn. Shaun Majumder, specifically, had an animal companion, and he kept making choices that like, instead of them being mechanically good, in the end, he was going in on storytelling. He just kept doing things that I was like, ‘I would have never done that, but man, is it funny.’ And it's a good story he's telling. I was like, ‘That's better. This is better for that.’ 

Martin: Kelly, myself and Anjali Bhimani were the consistent core that are in every single episode. But every single one of our guests, even though they were only with us for two episodes, each of their characters had a full arc. That speaks to all the planning and the real vision that Deb brought to the project. 

Tales from Woodcreek is a fascinating evolution of TTRPG liveplay, which is a medium that’s still in kind of an infant stage. What do you think is next for the medium? Will there be more blending of reality show/escape room elements like this?

Martin: A lot of this is powered by Ontario Creates grants, and our producer, Ed Gass-Donnelly, was a real expert in seeking funding opportunities to make this project a reality. This enabled us to do a level of production and employ sort of the resources and language of more traditional television. This is like a cool thing because, when you have resources and a budget, you can achieve different things with actual play. But if you look at Critical Role in the beginning, or even our show, it's pretty scraped together. It’s scrappy, and a lot of actual play remains pretty scrappy. 

Martin: So I think that, in terms of where, where this pushes things in a new direction is: it definitely shows a lot of potential about working on location, using a lot more nontraditional visual elements and more and more escape room elements rather than like more maps, more miniatures and more terrain.  I'm very interested to see, how people will respond to this direction, because it was much more on our feet. We've seen actual plays that have done the whole thing where the players are then animated, or they get out afterwards and cosplay. This was much more in the moment.

Martin: I think that there's a lot of experimentation that does happen with actual play, where the visual and spatial elements combine to sort of ask: How do we bridge the gap between just the ‘seated, everything happening in our imagination’ type-play and bring more visual dynamics to it? 

Martin: One of the other things is that [Tales from Woodcreek is] going to be much more tightly-edited down for a one-hour format as well. We did several hours of filming, but it's going to be brought down in a tightly-edited fashion. It'll be interesting to see how that reads as well; how people look into that. Because I know, for many fans of the traditional actual play format, they love to see the warts and all. They love to be there for all the dice-rolling and everything. Whereas I would also say that this is one of the times when, like, my family, my parents, my siblings - they don't want to watch a four-hour actual play. When I told them these are going to be one-hour reality TV-style episodes, they were much more interested. So this is more of an accessible format for people that maybe don't get the roleplaying game side of it, but can they appreciate the sort of reality-TV side of it.

McLaughlin: We’re still a little bit in the Wild West of actual plays, when we look at how they move forward and how they progress. I don't think that there's any one answer, and I don't think that Tales from Woodcreek is necessarily the only answer to the progression of actual plays. But what I really love is that different people are trying things and seeing how we can evolve it in different ways. Tales from Woodcreek is just one version of looking at the core of what an actual play is and asking the question, ‘How can we make this stand out, and be more interesting, and do something different?’ I think we're going to see more people try different things, such as when we talk about animation or reenacting. I mean, Critical Role now has a fully animated TV series. We're in that era where I think that people can just try stuff and see how it goes.

Fantastic answer. So speaking of futures, what’s next for the Dungeon Dudes after Tales from Woodcreek debuts on Halloween? 

Martin: We’ve been calling this the season of the Dudes. The next 2 or 3 weeks is just a confluence of so many big projects that we've had on the go for a while, just all happening at the same time. In addition to Tales from Woodcreek, coming up on the 31st of October, the series finale of our Drakkenheim campaign, which ran for seven years, comes out on October 28th. We finally got to the end of our Drakkenheim campaign.

Martin: We're also launching a Kickstarter to convert Dungeons of Drakkenheim, our Emmy-award winning adventure that we brought to Kickstarter several years ago, to Dagger Heart. That’s in association with our publisher, Ghostfire Gaming, and Darrington Press is also involved in that. We're working with the phenomenal Mike Underwood to do that conversion. That's going to be November 4th. So that's all in the span of a few weeks.

McLaughlin: Then behind the scenes, we are in pre-production on our next actual play. It will be a more traditional actual play - we're not going to do the Woodcreek thing, which requires a much larger budget. But the dungeon dudes want to keep doing their actual plays. So in spring next year, we are going to be launching Seasons of Silence, which is our next actual play adventure. We've been getting our sessions, our heroes underway, finding artists and musicians to help us like build out initial material to push that out. We're getting ready to start filming that probably in the new year.

That’s so exciting! I know you can’t go into very much detail, but can you tease a little bit of what Seasons of Silence is going to be like? If not plot-wise, tone-wise

Martin: After the after the eldritch horror and political intrigue of Drakkenheim, we are going to be having a much more cozy and cottage-core campaign in Season of Silence. We’re going to be visiting a quaint and peaceful region in a new setting, where our humble heroes will be going on very cozy adventures. 

McLaughlin: We are very much trying to tap into, and the whole group has agreed to play with, what I call the ‘non-heoric heroes.’ The sort of characters that are thrust from everyday life into heroism through circumstance, not through them wanting to be heroes. It's going to be very cozy, but things might happen. You’ll have to watch to find out. 

Tales from Woodcreek debuts on the Dungeon Dudes' YouTube channel October 31.

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