“Welcome to the land of AnGond Ardii, the land of the Red Grasses. Where magic and machines have intersected in wondrous ways, home to adventurers and automatons. Where wizards may use spell books or sniper nooks. A place that blurs the line between high fantasy and science fiction just enough to piss off fans of either.”

‘The Pilot’

Hello everyone! I hope you’ve all had a good winter, holiday season and Hogmanay. As we enter the new year I decided to kickstart things with an article discussing one of my favourite things in the last year. The hilariously chaotic, silly, heartfelt, and phoenix-like Adventure Is Nigh! 

Adventure is Nigh is what’s known as an Actual Play or Live Play series. This is the formal name for when a series is produced – usually for online video content or podcast platforms – where a group of individuals play a role-playing game as a group of specific characters. The game involved is usually Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder or on rare occasions more specialised variants such as Warhammer 40,000: Wrath And Glory. There is also often a Dungeon Master like figure who masterminds the setting and adventures and on occasion will fudge the rules a little to allow cool things to happen. The gaming sessions are often recorded or live-streamed and then edited to a workable length for an audience to enjoy the best moments be it total disasters, hilariously stupid heist plans or unbelievably cool battles against nightmarish threats. 

What about Adventure Is Nigh itself? It’s a YouTube video series produced by the channel Second Wind, a company collective of collaborators that was forged out of the ashes of a company exodus from another YouTube channel. One known as The Escapist at some point in 2023. Without going too far into the weeds, the first two and a half seasons were produced during the team’s time at The Escapist and during the exodus, Adventure Is Nigh migrated as all the players, editors and dungeon master were part of the founding group of Second Wind. After this, remasters of the first two seasons were released alongside the full third season.

As for the characters and the basic general plot, here are the basics (and I do mean BASICS.)

• First we have Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw as Mortimer Rafflesworth-Everwind Smythe, a charismatic gentleman thief style rogue and bard whose bardic instrument is the power of the untruth. Combined with a few secrets revealed later. He also somewhat considers himself the ‘leader’ of the group.
• KC Nwosu as Sigmar Iceblood, an Aasimar (think magical Lord Of The Rings style elves) archer and artificer with a very straightforward mindset to problem solving, a habit of getting everyone in trouble and a highborn lineage he actively chooses to refute.
• Amy Campbell as Dabarella Yeetster, an adorable yet terrifyingly powerful Tabaxi (cat person) with the personality of an sweet-hearted and entirely sincere person with the eventual end goal of becoming a world famous chef.
• Jesse Galena as Grinderbin, a Dikarya (mushroom person) who aims to open a discount magical items shop while also having some secrets of his own even he is unaware of. He is also incapable of lying to a ridiculous degree. 
• Jack Packard as the Dungeon Master or DM who devises the stories and setting, voices all the side characters, and must deal with the insane strategies the players devise to solve his conundrums.

The basic early plot involves the adventurers being tasked with recovering a legendary magical artefact known as The Jade Homunculus while having to deal with the machinations of a mysterious woman from Sigmar’s past and a group of thieves who work for a low-life member of the florafolk. From there the adventures snowball, involving a Lovecraftian worm monster, various different groups of royalty, the world’s most obliviously helpful old man and what I can best describe as sentient paint just to name a few examples.

The comedy from the group is just perfect. As the players and characters get to know each other, they bounce off each other wonderfully, planning both together and separately with a spark that soon turns this group of screwballs into characters I feel like I know or would want to hang out with. Some strategies and plans feel like heists you might see out of classic Tom And Jerry or Scooby Doo while other moments feel sincere enough that I just want to hug the group or tell them everything will work out…eventually. 

On top of that, Jack Packard’s world building for AnGond Ardii makes it feel like a cohesive world. Yes a lot of the names for people or places are groan worthy dad puns but the story line genuinely flows well, building off the actions of everyone and previous storyline events with a consistency that is genuinely impressive. On top of this, his ability to improvise when something unexpected or weird but impressive or cool happens is also worth addressing as a decent number of DMs would simply force the story to follow a pre-planned path through combat, side characters or some other method. It is a practice known as railroading and is unfortunately prevalent in some sections of the wider RPG community. 

I also feel the need to congratulate the members of Second Wind as a whole for embracing the fan community that has built around them. This includes the cast and crew of Adventure Is Nigh who have made several videos answering fan questions, a mini documentary of sorts behind the series, numerous side-quest adventures with other characters which tie into the main plot, and celebrated the release of official merchandise for the series from plushies to T-shirts, pins to an Adventure Is Nigh add-on for a pre-existing board game known as The Red Dragon Inn and official Adventure Is Nigh dice. This enthusiasm for the series from the players, editors and other team members at Second Wind makes everyone feel like a real collective in the true sense of the word. I mean there’s a reason I bought the Dabarella plushie and I know people who’ve bought some of the others.

Lastly I also must congratulate the art director, character design creator, co-writer and co-editor Omar Ahmed who very rarely appears on camera outside of behind the scenes videos but is frankly integral to making the series work as his consistent style – designed to be a close match for Yahtzee’s art style from his prior series (later modernised into Fully Ramblomatic for Second Wind) – is such a simple and easy to understand art style as well as to use for expressions that it feels like an audience member’s dream! Omar has been part of the Adventure Is Nigh team since its inception and it feels that a lot of the charm for the series comes from his character design and general art designs. Be it Grinderbin the mushroom man, a helpful but quite possibly senile old man, a soulless robotic automaton, a literal giant crab monster or the charming albeit egotistical attitude of Mortimer? All of these characters fit their purpose wonderfully and have an endearing spark to them that is so perfectly Omar.

In all honesty? This series makes me smile. I understand it won’t be for everyone but I’m always looking forward to new episodes and I’ve already evangelised its enjoyability to a few of my friends so here’s hoping some of you will join me in venturing through the land of the Red Grasses alongside the owners of the Adventure Is Nigh…t Club (Yes they actually did call it that.) and see what crazy adventures they’ll get up to next! Thank you for humouring your humble scribe and I hope to have another piece worthy of your delectation soon.