Encounter Party: From Idea to Television in Under 5 Years
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The show is currently available in the US-only so non US viewers will need to use a VPN.
“I have an idea.”
- Brian David Judkins
When Brian David Judkins says those words to you, it’s always worth listening. It’s December of 2018, and I’m standing on the street outside my day job, where I’ve taken 30 minutes off work to take a call with a friend. For the next 15 minutes, Brian pitched me on an idea for a Dungeons & Dragons TV show he’d been mulling over. I got very excited. You see , separately I had spent multiple years developing an idea for a Dungeons & Dragons TV show that I hadn’t yet figured out the hook for.
Brian’s pitch proposed an answer to a problem I’d been stuck on for a long time. Excitedly, I set a followup call with him for after work.
That night, Brian and I had a call that lasted many hours where we bandied about ideas, debated aspects in the macro and micro, and when the dust settled we had a very defined outline of an idea. An epic fantasy TV show, with hour-long episodes, improvised for the audience in real-time through playing Dungeons & Dragons, captured using the visual stylings of a single-set unscripted/reality tv show.
As two actors with no clout in this industry, getting from idea to TV show was going to be nearly impossible at that point. Luckily I had been producing a very different fiction podcast where the capture style was somewhat similar. We decided to make a proof-of-concept podcast (set in Magic: the Gathering’s plane of Ravnica) to test the waters and see if audiences would respond well to our style of storytelling.
Next came a nationwide casting call to find our table. We put the word out through our networks, on some well known blogs and forums, and started interviewing people. In January of 2019 we locked in our cast. Joining myself and Brian at the table were Eddie Cooper, Sarah Babe, Andrew Krug, and Landree Fleming. Our cast was based in Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and New York City. We booked flights for everyone and set recording dates for mid-February in Brian’s living room.
The final person added to our team is maybe the most unsung hero of our show: Will Melones, our audio engineer, who has been part of the sound capture for every season of Encounter Party. Early on in our release our show received tons of reviews for its sound quality. This is first and foremost attributable to Will.
In February we all gathered in Chicago, many of us meeting in person for the first time. We sat down at a table, knowing nothing about each others’ characters, and began to play. 5 days later, at 8–10 hours a day, we stopped recording. There was a palpable excitement to the room. We could all feel something exciting, new, and different had just been captured. What do we do with it? We honestly didn’t know yet.
We said our goodbyes, hoping audiences would react well enough to justify making future seasons. It was time to edit.
Editing the first season of Encounter Party campaign 1 was a massive game of trial and error. We tried out musical styles, episode lengths, audience focuses, ad break timings, and more. Each episode of our show reduced over 3 hours of raw footage into episodes that averaged 55 minutes long. We were nervous. Were we cutting too much? Was making an entirely story-focused D&D show antithetical to the experience audiences wanted? We were leaving inside jokes, player interactions, and wonderful moments on the cutting room floor by a ruthless process driven by one question:
“Is this moment for the audience or for us?”
Whenever the answer was the audience? It stayed. Whenever the answer was the players? It went away.
That first 5 days of recording turned into 18 episodes. We took a deep breath, uploaded the episodes to release weekly, and waited.
We published the first episode on Friday, March 22, 2019, and the second episode on Saturday the 23rd. On Monday the 25th I woke up to see that we were near the top of Apple Podcasts’ New & Noteworthy charts for the Gaming category. We stayed there for 8 weeks. Through the run of our first season the audience feedback was nothing short of incredible. The thing that excited us the most? A majority of our listeners were not D&D people. Many had never played, or hadn’t played in many years. Our show spread quickly through Magic: the Gathering communities, Fantasy Novel communities, and Improv communities.
As our first season wrapped up we then waited to see how people would react to the show after it was completely on demand. Our numbers jumped. Current listeners went back and re-listened to the whole thing, new listeners joined our Facebook Group and started discussing theories. Party People (as our listeners/viewers are called) were polite and never spoiled the show for a new listener, instead interacting with them using the knowledge of where they were. Goading them into future listens. The community popped up organically and took care of each other quickly.
We knew very quickly that we needed to continue the show.
We recorded season 2 in October of 2019. Excitingly for him (but sadly for us) Eddie Cooper’s career in New York theatre took off and he became unavailable to record with us. We set off on another nationwide casting call to find a new 6th player for our table. David Lee Huynh joined our table for that second season. We again flew to Chicago, recorded for 6 days this time, and headed home with a new 20 episodes to edit.
We launched Season 2 in January of 2020, with our first episode more than doubling our season 1 records for downloads in a 24 hour period. We watched the audience continue to grow quickly as every new episode saw more downloads than the one the week before it.
March 2020 the world was overshadowed by the global pandemic. Our specific manner of recording ended up helping us here because we’d already recorded a season that would release through May. Where many shows had to pause, or move to new recording formats/styles, we already had our season finished. However it was clear we needed to record a third season quickly, as we could feel the momentum moving faster than ever before.
2 weeks after our finale, Kelly Knox featured us in an article for Nerdist which became our first press coverage.
In June of 2020 we carefully travelled everyone back to Chicago, this time by cars instead of planes, or for our one team member flying, with enough time to quarantine after arrival to be safe. We recorded Season 3 in 7 more days. We completed the story of the first campaign. Tears were shed. Hugs were distributed, and then we all went home. This time with no knowledge of if or when we would ever get to do this again.
I got to work on editing.
We began pitching the TV show around this time. Right before we released season 3 of the podcast, Syfy Wire published an article about our future plans which gave us even more audience attention. Season 3 saw our podcast receive more than 7 times the number of downloads of our entire first season in the first month of release.
As the third season released, Brian and I got to work on pitching the show. We met with producers, studios, and distributors from all over the world. For the next 2 years we would get so close to finding the right partner only for the deal to fall apart right at the finish line, or one side would walk away because it wasn’t quite the right fit.
In the fall of 2021, we were close to a deal with a studio who asked a very simple question. “If we’re in, how much will it cost to license Dungeons & Dragons from Wizards of the Coast?” We now had all the answers to the questions we felt Wizards might ask, and so we set off to chat with them.
The very first person we talked to was Greg Tito. We are so thankful to Greg for taking our call, and taking this idea seriously. Within minutes he fired off email introductions with other teams at the company and new meetings were set up.
We next met with Lindsey Quintana, another unsung hero of Encounter Party. Lindsey has been a champion of our show from the very beginning and has been closely aligned with the project ever since. Her leadership, guidance, advice, and good company is a major reason why the show is as good as it is.
Lindsey forwarded us along to a team at a company called Entertainment One who we didn’t know. Right before Christmas of 2021 we ended up on a call with Ashley Alexander who was one of the producers on the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves. Ashley quickly became another major champion of our show. Encounter Party the TV show absolutely doesn’t exist without her tireless work and support to this day.
Early in 2022, after a multitude of meetings, it became clear to Brian and I that we should make this show with Entertainment One rather than the previous studio.
Between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023 the show was refined further. We were now making a TV show alongside Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, and Entertainment One. There was a 20 episode order, an unfathomable number in fiction television these days. Our show’s core team expanded to include Tom Danon (Producer) and John Platt (Showrunner).
We were flying on all areas of pre-production. Khary Payton (The Walking Dead, Teen Titans Go!) was added to our cast, evening out the party at 6 people.
The only question mark was when would we actually film this show? Early in 2023 we got our answer. We would be filming the show in Los Angeles for the final two weeks of April. We would start editing the show the following Monday.
So to Los Angeles we all went. For the next two weeks we played Dungeons and Dragons from 9–5 Monday to Friday. We got to meet Khary in person for the first time as we sat down to play together. We had grown from 6 people in a living room with one audio engineer, to 7 people on a sound stage with a crew of over 20 people.
We captured the entire story of campaign 2 season 1 in 9 days. The 10th day we used to film pickups, closeups, miniature work, and other things needed for the post-production process. We had a raucous wrap party with cast and crew on the final Friday. Brian and I remarked to each other that that night at GuildHall in Burbank had the exact same feeling as the day we finished season 1 of the podcast. There was a sense of excitement from everyone involved. We could all feel something exciting, new, and different had just been captured. Tears were shed, hugs were given out, and away we all went.
Well, everyone but me. I stayed in LA for another month to edit the show with Andrew Krug.
Encounter Party took another 4 months to edit completely. Our post-production team finished 22 hour-long episodes right at the beginning of September. Now all eyes were on the release date, set for November 14, 2023. Episode 1 of Encounter Party the TV show would arrive on peoples’ screens just under 5 years after that very first phone call with Brian and I.
Season 1 would release for almost 5 months of episodes. I still to this day don’t remember the last time a fiction television show received a 22 episode order. Let alone a fantasy fiction television show.
Tonight, April 2, 2024, is the Season 1 finale. Starting tomorrow morning all 22 episodes of season 1 will be available on demand to watch on Plex for free, no logins or signups needed. If you haven’t watched the show yet, you can now make your way through it. Our show is a fantasy mystery thriller, all improvised in front of you by playing Dungeons & Dragons. Each episode is an hour long. What we set out to make in December of 2018 is now a reality.
When this show launched in November of last year, we achieved the vision we had after that phone call. Now with the end of season 1 approaching, we can’t help but feel gratitude for every single person who has had an impact on our show along the way. Every listener and viewer who clamored for this to be made. Every friend who gave us advice, every colleague who made an introduction, every producer who took us seriously. A half decade of my life has been dedicated to making this project happen.
It has been the greatest joy of my professional life, and will continue to be as we look to the future.
The Party People have been the bedrock for propelling this show to greater and greater heights. From pushing us to the top of Apple Podcasts’ New & Noteworthy charts, to exponentially increasing our total downloads season over season of the podcast. Reviews, recommendations on social media, and a massive word-of-mouth campaign has continuously helped us to achieve greater and great things.
During the whole period of time between April of 2021 (end of podcast season 3) and May of 2023 our fans were clamoring for news on Campaign 2. The only answer we were allowed to offer was “we’re working on it, stay tuned.” We had fans hypothesizing that the show was dead, we simply weren’t telling anyone yet. We had people guessing that we were going to release a podcast with upgraded sound effects. Not a single person came close to guessing that it was so much bigger than anyone was imagining.
Well we find ourselves in a similar situation now. With the finale tonight our fans have been asking about season 2. What happens next? When can they expect more? When will there be an announcement? To that I simply say this.
Thank you. Thank you for loving us enough to care. Thank you for helping us grow day in and day out, week over week, month over month, year over year. Thank you for connecting with our stories, with our format, with our table. So with all the love I have to offer, with every fiber of my being I offer you this answer:
“We’re working on it, stay tuned.”
