The Adventure Zone: Dust!

The Adventure Zone ran a whole arc based on Urban Shadows, and it was amazing! The Adventure Zone is an awesome and joyful RPG podcast featuring the inestimable McElroys—specifically, Clint, Griffin, Justin, and Travis. They played a long, long campaign of Dungeons and Dragons which concluded in August of 2017 (and which is still well worth a listen—go look for The Balance Arc and start at the beginning!), and since then they’ve been experimenting with a few different systems and different GMs. They tried out Fate superheroes and Monster of the Week before moving onto Urban Shadows for their third experimental arc: Dust! Urban Shadows is our ENnie Award winning Powered by the Apocalypse game of political urban fantasy, featuring werewolves, wizards, and fae vying with each other in a modern day city. It’s inspired by fiction like The Wire, The Dresden Files, and The Shield. You can find out more about Urban Shadows here: http://www.magpiegames.com/our-games/urban-shadows/ And you can download the play materials to look for yourself here: http://www.magpiegames.com/our-games/urban-shadows/urban-shadows-downloads/ Between February 22nd and March 22nd the McElroys played five episodes in their Dust Arc, set in the wild west-inspired town of Dry River. Travis McElroy MC’d, and the cast features:

• Justin McElroy as Augustus Parsons, the Spectre Archetype, a former cashew magnate and kind of a cad
• Griffin McElroy as Errol Ryehouse, the Wolf Archetype, a would-be mayor whose political aspirations may have been broken by his permanently half-changed state
• Clint McElroy as Gandy Dancer, the Wizard Archetype, a wealthy and powerful researcher obsessed with becoming immortal at any cost

Their game was a bit of a modification of Urban Shadows, being set during the 19th century in a more rural area as opposed to a modern-day city, but it’s nothing outside the realm of possibility—in fact, the first Urban Shadows supplement, Dark Streets, includes a whole chapter on exactly how to shift the setting of Urban Shadows into the past! We won’t spoil anything about the game—you should go listen to it for yourself—but we want to thank the McElroys dearly for playing Urban Shadows, and highly recommend listening to the The Adventure Zone. For now, they’re moving on to play a massive campaign of Monster of the Week based on that mini-campaign, titled Amnesty, but they promised that Dust is far from done. We can’t wait to see what they do with it next! Thanks Clint, Griffin, Justin, and especially Travis for running! If you’re interested in picking up your own copy of Urban Shadows in print, you can do so at the Magpie Store here: Hardcover (http://www.magpiegames.com/product/urban-shadows-hardcover/) Softcover (http://www.magpiegames.com/product/urban-shadows-softcover/)