Top 6 “Completed” Actual Plays

If you enjoy playing tabletop role-playing games, you’ve probably at least heard of Actual Plays, or APs. The modern idea of an AP has been around for well over a decade now, having really found their stride with heavy-hitters like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone. They can be edited or unedited, live or pre-recorded, video or audio, and span across a wide range of genres, playstyles, game systems, budgets, and production values. If you’re new to the medium, or you’re only familiar with some of the big names and you’re looking to branch out, here are some of my favorite APs, all of which are completely finished stories which stand alone – that means no worrying you’ll never reach the end of your favorite character’s narrative arc, no need to wait until next week for another episode, and no fear that they will simply fall off the internet and stop making the show (which, as those of us immersed in the medium will know, is not uncommon).

Exandria Unlimited: Calamity

Okay, yeah, I’m cheating a little bit with this one. Technically, this is Critical Role – it was streamed by Critical Role during the main campaign’s timeslot, features several CR cast members, is played in straight-up Dungeons & Dragons, and produced canon within CR’s fictional universe. That said, I had to include it (and not just because it lets me put the words “Critical Role” in the article a bunch of times for the SEO of it all).

Guest GM Brennan Lee Mulligan (whose name you’ll see again later in this article) does an absolutely stellar job leading the dark story of the final day of a decadent society headed for its inevitable doom. The players (Aabria Iyengar, Lou Wilson, Luis Carazo, Marisha Ray, Sam Reigel, and Travis Willingham) take on the mantle of the Ring of Brass, 6 key players in the floating city-state of Avalir.

In just 4 unedited episodes (long though they are), they tell a truly gut-wrenching tale of loss, destruction, betrayal, fear, and just a touch of hope. Mulligan’s capacity to improvise entire monologues is on full display here, as he regularly produces turns of phrase that would make many scriptwriters jealous, and the cast’s improvisational and acting skill is clear in moments of both deep emotion and great humor. (“Nice to meet you, I’m Bolo.”) You know it’s good because I, a lapsed CR fan, was curious enough to return and entranced enough to watch the whole thing. And yes, I will watch Mulligan’s return to the GM chair with Critical Role, in the Downfall mini-arc.

View the Exandria Unlimited: Calamity playlist.

Shield of Tomorrow

Now that we’re all settled in, let’s get into some more unfamiliar territory. Shield of Tomorrow is an unedited video AP of Star Trek Adventures, a game released in 2017 by Modiphius Entertainment. (Shield of Tomorrow began its run prior to the official release of the game.) If you aren’t familiar with Star Trek Adventures, it uses a system similar in complexity to D&D 5e, but one fairly distinct in execution. It is also a system that is laser-focused on reproducing Star Trek stories, and the cast of SoT really takes that baton and runs with it.

GM Eric Campbell takes center chair, alongside his core crew of Aliza Pearl, Amy Dallen, Bonnie Gordon, Gina DeVivo, Hector Navarro, and Sam DeLeve, as well as a handful of guest players. All of this in the short, sweet timeframe of… uhhhh, let’s see here… oh right. Fifty-three three-hour-long episodes, for a total runtime of just about 159 hours.

But despite its length (and if you’re familiar with some other, more popular APs, such as the one I discussed just above, you know that 159 hours isn’t even particularly long), Shield of Tomorrow is a true standout. It tells a genuinely incredible Star Trek story, and in true Trek fashion, the diversity of both the cast and their characters contributes heavily to that quality.

For example, DeLeve plays Junil Rue, a Joined Trill who has become the USS Sally Ride’s head Security Officer despite a physical disability and PTSD-like symptoms due to a near-miss with the Borg Collective – and Campbell does an excellent job portraying an Admiral who doesn’t think they should’ve gotten the job, in case you were concerned this show was all going to be sunshine and rainbows. Many Trekkies will talk about their favorite series as being “their” Star Trek – The Original Series, Deep Space Nine, Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds. My Star Trek is Shield of Tomorrow. It’s that good.

Watch the Shield of Tomorrow playlist.

Friends at the Table: Sangfielle

We’re going to step away from unedited video APs for a moment here, and move into the realm of podcasts. Audio APs are generally my preferred format (because I can listen to them while driving or doing chores), and Friends at the Table is one of the very best ones out there. (Just ask The Adventure Zone’s own Griffin McElroy, he’ll tell you himself.) Friends at the Table has been running since 2014, but they keep things fresh by running (usually) medium-length campaigns that (usually) have concrete endings, then moving on to other stories (and genres, and games).

I had a hard time picking one to feature here, in fact, because pretty much everything they’ve made is incredible, from the mecha anime-style Counter/Weight to the fantasy heist Marielda to the off-the-wall urban-fantasy-slash-Twin-Peaks-inspired Bluff City, but I landed on Sangfielle because it’s A) fantastic, B) fairly unique amongst APs in tone, and C) a truly standalone season of FatT, with no sequels or related seasons. (Yet.) In Sangfelle, GM Austin Walker and the titular Friends (Ali Acampora, Andrew Lee Swan, Art Martinez-Tebbel, Jack de Quidt, Janine Hawkins, Keith J. Carberry, and Sylvia Clare) portray the adventures of the Blackwick Group, a loose collection of freelance mercenaries in the haunted territory of Sangfielle – “The Bloodfields.” Surrounded by a massive ring-shaped city built to keep the horrors from spreading, Sangfielle is home to charismatic vampires, talking skeletons, ancient eldritch deities, debatably-sapient-but-definitely-malevolent trains, and countless other strange and terrible things, including almost all of the PCs.

All of this is enabled by the games used by the Friends to play this season.

(Yes, I said games; one of the hallmarks of FatT is their habit of playing key moments in other game systems.) The season starts with The Ground Itself, a storytelling game they use to design their central location – the town of Blackwick – and its environs. The bulk of the story is run using Heart: The City Beneath, a horror TTRPG about delving into a cursed, fleshy unreality, and being the kind of person you have to be to do that sort of thing. (They also use content from ICHOR-DROWNED, a third-party supplement for Heart.)

The Friends also play the games Inhuman Conditions, Anamnesis, and A Visit to San Sibilia to great effect. In addition to the “critical worldbuilding, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends,” as the Friends often say at the top of each recording session, Sangfielle strikes true when it comes to discomfiting horror, off-beat humor, and moments of high drama and tension. All of this is accented by the original score, composed and performed by cast member Jack de Quidt, which takes an already-great show and turns it into something truly special.

Check out Friends at the Table: Sangfielle

Oathsworn

Speaking of podcast APs with original scores, it’s time to talk about another one that’s just a little bit cheating. As I write this, Oathsworn is technically still dropping episodes of their final arc – but it’s going to wrap soon, and if they fall off the planet before the final episode hits the feed, then you can all @ me, I guess.

Oathsworn is a dark fantasy AP, primarily played in Band of Blades, a swords-and-some-sorcery military TTRPG heavily inspired by the video game XCOM. It combines the core mechanics of Blades in the Dark with the pre-built events and branching paths of Fall of Magic and the long-haul tactical feel of a legacy board game like Frosthaven. Brendan McLeod GMs missions, but the moment-to-moment story is developed collaboratively alongside players Devin Nelson, Gavin Fregeau, Kris Allison, and Matthew Guzdial.

I make a point of collaborative storytelling in this show not because other APs and TTRPGs aren’t collaborative but instead because this one is particularly so. PCs change hands from mission to mission, depending on which characters are taking part. NPCs back at camp are much the same, based on which characters are in a given scene. It all lends itself to the idea of the story’s Consonant Legion as an entity in and of itself, no matter which soldiers are present – or even which soldiers make it back from each mission.

And yes, character death is very much present in this AP, living up to the ideals promised, but not fully executed, by most Forged in the Dark games. Oathsworn manages to strike an impressive balance between individual character arcs and overarching plot, making it so that yes, while you do really want to know what will happen to that one soldier who was pulled into a fallen star, you also never lose sight of this ultimately being the story of a military campaign. It’s a real feat, especially with PCs changing hands, which would cause most tables to lose consistent characterization. Oathsworn may be the least well-known of my choices on this list, but that doesn’t have anything to do with its quality.

Listen to Oathsworn.

Protean City Comics: Outstanding!

Unlike my previous entry, Outstanding!, and its broader “imprint,” the Protean City Comics podcast, have not released an episode in many years. Despite that, I consider PCC, which almost exclusively uses the fantastic teenage superhero TTRPG Masks: A New Generation, to be one of my favorite APs, and I still hold out hope that one day they’ll make more. Outstanding! itself is a short-run series set in the Protean City universe, featuring a relatively large cast of PCs who are all youngsters, brand new to hero-ing, ready to be put in their place by their elders (and then, of course, save the day in the end, and learn something about themselves while they’re at it). Clocking in at just 16 hour-long episodes (not including brief character intros, one blooper reel, and a pair of episodes tied to a Halloween special in the broader AP), it’s one of the shorter listens on my list, but that doesn’t make it any less impactful.

Elsbeth Denman GMs Outstanding!, which is no small feat given her table of 9 (you heard me! nine!) PCs. Players Adam, Alice, Ariel, Brea, Gabriella, Izzy, Jeremy, Scott, and Thomas portray orphans who live at the Protean Center for Outstanding Youth, a home for superpowered kids, including everything from a genius-level roboticist to a superhero influencer to a sapient mouse with superstrength. The format of the podcast mirrors that of superhero teamup comics, in that episodes generally feature only a few of the main characters, with plenty of mixing and matching between arcs. Somehow, in those 16 hours, they manage to squeeze in full character arcs for all 9 PCs and tie them together nicely into one big story. If you’re looking for something that’s more Robin than Rohirrim, Outstanding! is an excellent choice.

Listen to Protean City Comics: Outstanding!

Dimension 20: A Court of Fey and Flowers

And here we stand, ready to talk about the popular kid. Dropout’s edited video AP Dimension20 has become a bona fide sensation, taking the quick wit and improv chops Dropout is known for, and putting it in the now-infamous Dome. If you aren’t familiar, Dimension20 is perhaps most well-known for Fantasy High, a D&D show focused on a modern high school run by a wizard obsessed with the idea of training adventurers – or, as he lovingly calls them, “violent, deranged lunatics” – to save the world from various and sundry world-ending calamities. That, however, is far from all the show has to offer. To date, Dimension20 has created over 20 seasons in 15 distinct settings, including the one I want to talk about in particular: A Court of Fey and Flowers. (Of note: unlike the rest of my list, most of Dimension20, including ACOFAF, is only accessible in full to Dropout subscribers. If you can spare the cash, though, it’s well worth the six bucks a month just for one season, much less all of them, and that’s not to mention all of the other very good content that Dropout produces – and if you have a friend with a sub, Dropout is openly okay with password-sharing.)

A Court of Fey and Flowers is a 10-episode series GMed by Aabria Iyengar, who does an excellent job combining D&D mechanics with some of the key features of the diceless system Good Society, a TTRPG designed to emulate regency-era drama, such as that found in the works of Jane Austen. Aabria leads her table (Brennan Lee Mulligan, Emily Axford, Lou Wilson, Omar Najam, Oscar Montoya, and Surena Marie) through a fascinating tale of drama, espionage, duels, scandals, and of course, romance – all painted upon the canvas of the topsy-turvy politics of faerie courts. PCs are fully specced-out D&D characters, but their classes and ancestries end up hardly mattering for mechanical purposes, and combat is rare. Skill checks happen with some regularity, mostly to determine the result of various verbal jabs, pointed inquiries, and emotional displays, but by and large, the plot comes through via improvised dialogue. The dice are used far more often as a narrative tool than a tactical one, and the story being told is well-served by that choice.

The use of the epistolary phase and the rumor and scandal phase from Good Society is also deployed extremely well in the show; it’s a delight to hear players read aloud letters that their PCs have written, whether to other PCs or to NPCs, (some of whom would otherwise have never been mentioned directly) and the rumors buzzing about fae society have massive implications throughout the campaign. It’s a fascinating exploration of how mechanics affect play, and how the choice of what mechanics to focus on (or use at all) can affect the emergent narrative of a tabletop game. (Also, Lou and Emily play cousins who live exclusively to cause problems for other people, and I personally believe that everybody needs to experience that dynamic as soon as possible.)

Watch Dimension 20: A Court of Fey and Flowers.

Stuff That Didn’t Make The List But I Want To Mention Anyway

I only had 6 entries, and frankly, I could have filled them all with Dimension20 campaigns or Friends at the Table seasons and walked away happy. (Maybe I’ll write an article about those after Never Stop Blowing Up or PALISADE wrap-up, who knows.) And yet I find myself with a glut of Actual Plays that I didn’t mention here, whether because they stopped producing episodes before they finished a campaign, they have not finished one yet, or because I just wanted to write about something else more – but I’m gonna list a bunch of the ones you may not have heard of at the bottom of this article because I think you should know they exist anyway.

If you take away nothing else from this article, know that there’s more out there than Critical Role and The Adventure Zone. There’s more out there than D&D, too! There are APs in every genre and format imaginable, so if you’re into the idea of improvised storytelling, you should give some of them a shot!

Abandoned or completed APs:

• Autonomic – family-friendly fantasy podcast about kids who are being trained to become the next generation of politically-empowered superheroes
• Campaign: The Mynock – humor-first Star Wars podcast, and the precursor to the ongoing Campaign: Skyjacks (in the same podcast feed, in fact)
• Champions of the Earth – podcast that is part AP, part live playtest of the GM’s in-development TTRPG, based on sentai media like Power Rangers and Kamen Rider
• The Magpies – acclaimed Blades in the Dark podcast, with all of the murdery ghosty shenanigans that entails
• Unspeakable Distance – podcast telling a sci-fi story of several people drifting apart from one another in the vast cosmos (featuring the author of this article as a player!)
• VAST – live-streamed video science fiction AP using a frankly ludicrous and absolutely delightful homebrewed dice pool system, originally broadcast on the now-defunct Project Alpha
• A Woman with Hollow Eyes – live-streamed video AP using the absolutely buckwild Invisible Sun system

Ongoing APs:

• Campaign: Skyjacks – podcast about sky pirates in a world inspired by the music of the Decemberists, recently featuring the ongoing development of a custom-built game system
• Character Creation Cast – not strictly an AP, but instead a discussion show where the hosts & rotating guests build characters in different game systems and discuss the merits of each
• Party of One – a new system every episode, featuring the host and only one guest
• Skyjacks: Courier’s Call – family-friendly podcast, featuring teenaged trainee mail-carriers in the same skyship-centric world of Campaign: Skyjacks
• The Unexplored Places – podcast with multiple campaigns of varying genres, currently playing a Weird West game set on a newly-settled planet
• Worlds Beyond Number – podcast with a heavy narrative focus in a deeply immersive, collaboratively-developed fantasy world with an all-star cast