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Kelly McLaughlin and Monty Martin know a thing or two about TTRPG liveplay (or actual play, depending on who's talking about it). As hosts of the Dungeons of Drakkenheim saga that appears on their YouTube page, The Dungeon Dudes, the pair have worked with folks from the Critical Role cast to the Dimension 20 team, and now, they've combined forces with D&D genius Debra Ann Woll for an all new kind of live play experience, Tales from Woodcreek.

In case you don't know Tales from Woodcreek takes the format of TTRPG liveplay and weaves in escape room-like puzzles that players must get up and solve, all while on a real-life set that corresponds to the places in the story. When it drops this Halloween, Tales from Woodcreek will be pushing the boundaries of what can be done in the liveplay medium, and so as we interviewed the Dudes ahead of the game, we had to ask where they think the medium will go next. 

"If you look at Critical Role in the beginning," Martin answered. "Or even our show, it's pretty scraped together. It’s scrappy, and a lot of actual play remains pretty scrappy. I think that, in terms of where [Tales from Woodcreek] 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 [...] rather than like more maps, more miniatures and more terrain."

"I'm very interested to see how people will respond to this direction," martin continues, "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. 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?"

Beyond just the LARP-like, enhanced visuals of the series, though, Martin also believes that the future of TTRPG liveplays may follow Tales from Woodcreek in that the nitty-gritty, mechanical elements of D&D play may be trimmed down for more story-forward episodes.

"[Tales from Woodcreek is] going to be much more tightly-edited down for a one-hour format as well," he says, "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."

All that said, though, the one thing that the Dungeon Dudes don't want you to think is that they know exactly where the liveplay medium is headed, as McLaughlin was sure to clarify before our interview wrapped.

"We’re still a little bit in the Wild West of actual plays," he told us, "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," McLaughlin concluded, "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."

Technically, Kelly, they have two fully animated TV series. But we know what you mean.

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

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