Ned Donovan ’12 believes in the storytelling power of Dungeons and Dragons. “At its core, the game is imagination with your friends,” he said. “It’s making up a story and then telling that story collaboratively with other people. When you meet anyone who plays, they never talk about the game. They talk about the story they made with the game. That’s what everyone remembers.”
That concept is the heart of Encounter Party, a podcast-turned-television show that Donovan stars in and coproduces with Brian David Judkins ’08. Filmed in 22 episodes and available for viewing on the Plex streaming platform, the show features seven professional actors guiding various characters through the campaigns of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).
Both Donovan and Judkins had, separately, thought about a D&D-themed TV show in the past. But it wasn’t until they became close, after connecting at a convention, that the idea really took off, late in 2018. “At that time, I was producing a podcast where new plays from up-and-coming playwrights were produced as audio dramas featuring Broadway actors just reading the script,” he said. “I took the rough recording and edited it down, adding some music and sound effects. And that’s what Brian suggested we do with D&D.”
After playing campaigns and recording the audio for 8 to 10 hours a day for nearly a week, they edited them into individual episodes, which they released weekly starting in March 2019. The episodes were a mainstay at the top of the podcast charts in the gaming category.
With the podcast’s success serving as a proof of concept, the two began pitching the TV show to companies, eventually securing a deal with Wizards of the Coast, who had been publishing the original game since 1997. The first campaign was filmed in its entirety in April 2023, and the first episode was released that November