A 5th edition (or 4th edition prior to episode 126) Dungeons and Dragons real play podcast from Geekly Inc. The podcast initially followed the Ätlän-tã Fælcons, a semi-stable group of four (formerly five) adventurers as they wake up on slabs without their memories, start and end a demon apocalypse, rediscover their pasts and get into all kinds of hijinks.
After Episode 253, the campaign follows a mostly-new group of adventurers, the Tower of Grey, as they are tasked to re-assemble and destroy a god-killing relic.
As of mid-2019 the podcast has been re-branded as Greetings Adventurers, amid concerns that new listeners may be turned off by the misrepresentation of the show as Alcohol-Induced Idiocy.
New episodes are released every Monday at Geekly Inc
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This podcast contains these tropes:
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Adorkable: Toby, as a cheerful naive gnome "boy" (he's actually around 40 - nearly a man in gnome years) with a passion for pranks. Also Jaela in her more innocent, pre-timeskip moments, such as her early awkward attempts at flirting with Aludra. - Anachronism Stew: Apparently CVS (aka Carpet Very Sexy) sponsors Trant Thumble's fighting arena and libraries set in the D&D universe use card catalogs and the Dewey Decimal system.
- Jett Razor is packed with anachronisms, being a Sid Vicious-styled bard who inexplicably owns a pager. Even as a native Nareevian, this doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
- Blood Knight: Thom the Dragonborn takes this to its extreme. This is why his Blooddrinker treats him with regard - no-one else could sate Blooddrinker so well. As detailed under Combat Sadomasochist, he even enjoys spilling his own blood and mechanically benefits from being bloodied.
- Jaela, and to a lesser extent Titus Harper and Rowan often enjoy their own carnage too.
- Blood Sport: Tum's adoptive father, Trant Thumble, is fond of having his "children" fight each other to the death inside a packed arena.
- Chest Burster: Happens to Aludra and Thom after the sladdi infect them with parasites.
- The Collector of the Strange: Trant Thumble adopts a wide variety of D&D species and calls them his "children." Others call them "Trant's freaks." Crosses over with The Collector
- Combat Sadomasochist: Thom the Dragonborn's whole schtick. He spends much of his time trying to become bloodied, often has weapons that can damage both him and his enemies, and actually becomes angry with fellow party members when they block blows or heal him.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Oddly inverted in that Tum keeps trying to get people to call him "Darkblade" only to find later that this is the name of a Thieves' Guild he was trying to join before he lost his memories.
- Evil Weapon: Blooddrinker is the quintessential evil weapon in that whoever holds it can hear it whispering in their mind to commit bloodshed and mayhem.
- The Fashionista: Junpei wants to look as dapper as possible - stealing fancy coats, frilly underwear and almost dying to get a pirate's tricorn.
- Fetish: Much of the early episodes are spent trying to find out what precisely gets Thom the Dragonborn off. There is a long list of individual enemies until they eventually realize its simple battle horniness. See entry for Combat Sadomasochist
- Foreign Culture Fetish: Steven Strom likes to talk about anime, JRPGs, regularly uses Japanese suffixes and named his chraracter Junpei Iori from Persona 3. The others waver between joining him and making fun of him.
- Good Cop/Bad Cop: More like good guard, bad guard - mentioned by name many times. Generally Tum plays the good guard and Thom plays bad (or sociopathic) guard.
- Heh Heh, You Said "X": Expect much juvenile snickering whenever someone calls an attack and it sounds vaguely wrong - doing minors is generally good for a whole party chuckle.
- Identity Amnesia: You wake up on slabs. You don't remember who you are. Go, make D&D happen.
- Killer Game Master: When the players tick off DM Thrifty he jokingly threatens them with 'you feel an aneurysm coming on' or 'a guard shows up and beats you' but its usually played for laughs and is then retracted.
- Leeroy Jenkins: Mike Bachman comes off as this quite often, especially in early episodes. Thom the Dragonborn is asked to check a hallway in the very first episode and the DM narrates him carefully sticking his head out only to have Mike insist that he just threw the door open and walked out there. Or the episode when he didn't realize Tum was bluffing/intimidating Mjolnir by asking Thom to cut his head off - Mike wasn't paying attention so he does as told, to the parties chagrin.
- Long-Runners: Started in 2012, currently working on season 9, 300+ episodes... Pretty good for a real play D&D podcast started by a group of people who had no idea what they were doing in their first episode. "Go ahead. Go. Make Dungeons and Dragons happen, you guys." -DM Thrifty
- Master of Illusion: As a lich powerful enough to make the Raven Queen concerned, this is one of Sinu the Red's skills. He has enough mastery to produce a flawless illusory facsimile of his hometown and everyone in it for an indeterminate amount of time.
- Mobile City: The so-called "Gnoll Death City," dedicated to the Gnoll god Yeenoghu which is carried by (based on Bachman's rough calculations) 21 million gnolls, leaving a mile wide trail of blood in its path.
- Mundane Made Awesome: An early, Thanksgiving-themed episode sees the party take on a "Dreadwing Behemoth"...which turns out to be a giant turkey.
- One-Steve Limit: Thom and Tum are close enough that there is often confusion over who is doing what or what damage is being done to whom. And in the fact that Tum's player's name is Tim and the first episodes are fun. Steven Strom lampshades this at one point by pointing out that there are two Michaels on the podcast, though one goes by Mike and the other is often referred to by his twitter handle 'Thrifty' or 'Thrifty Nerd.'
- Or Was It a Dream?: Implied when the crew finds sand in their underwear after a few dream-like dragon encounters in the desert.
- Our Dragons Are Different: Or rather dragonborns... There is quite a bit of argument in the beginning over whether dragonborns have tails and what precisely Thom's genitalia entails.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: When Steven Strom couldn't make podcasts DM Thrifty would find an in-game reason for why he wasn't around - e.g. struck with a petrifying beam and stuck in a shed, kidnapped by fellow githyanki and taken to the astral plane, etc. Or the episode Mike Bachman forgot what day it was and showed up way late so Thom spent the episode making out with an enemy to explain why he wasn't doing anything.
- Rule of Funny: Many of the party's decisions are based solely around this and not any real strategy or forward thinking. Faced with a perfectly ordinary battle everything can go sideways as the players themselves dissolve into utter chaos and start doing things simply for the lulz rather than to win the encounter.
- Running Gag: "We all agree, so we do it."
- Jennifer's consistently terrible rolls, and Tim worrying about her "curse" spreading to his dice.
- The possibly non-existent episode of Family Guy that featured Bruno Mars as a guest star.
- Mentioning waking up on slabs whenever someone is asked to recap further than the last episode.
- Lahni's addiction to egg salad sandwiches, to the point that the Tower of Grey pays her exclusively in egg salad sandwiches. And related, pointing out that as a high-level monk, she doesn't even need to eat.
- Shattering the Illusion: When the group finally discovers Teddy Dozar in Tarry Hollow, this happens to the entire town. Tarry Hollow and all the people in it are revealed to be an illusion created by Sinu the Red - the town itself is nothing but a ruin in the present day. What exactly the group was eating during their few days there is never revealed.
- Spin-Off: The cast have a large number of side quests (called 'random encounters') but at least one occurs in the same universe as the main quest and involves characters that at least know the names of the main show's characters (or are possibly related to them).
- Thieves' Guild: The party occasionally crosses paths with the mysterious Darkblades. Tum himself is briefly a member.
- Unwitting Pawn: Our heroes become these after Fennekin tricks them into bringing him the artifacts needed to start the demon apocalypse.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: Bachman’s short-lived character Bananas Foster, killed by Thrifty out of spite almost immediately.
- Wham Episode: The cast run a kickstarter and someone pays money to kill off a character - RIP: Tum 'Call Me Darkblade' Thumble
- Episode 79 sees Aludra and Thom betrayed and killed by Fennekin, and Harper literally stabbed in the back by Roz.
- When All You Have Is a Hammer…: It's fun to listen to the cast try to force skill challenges in their favor, e.g. bluffing traps or trying to intimidate inanimate objects.
