In the early days of podcasts, I was working at a college radio station called KJACK. I had been podcasting radio shows for a while at that point, mostly doing improv comedy shows with my friend John. We had the idea to run a D&D podcast when the medium was still developing, and I decided to run the show with a focus on roleplaying and storytelling. The result was Listen Check, a show dedicated to the adventures of Soren, Rupert, and Dewey, who were played by my two closest friends and my brother. The show began by introducing the players to a gang of heisters and misfits, and by the end, each of the player characters were powerful agents of their own agendas, even using the final episode as a showdown with a god.
Listen Check was and remains some of my proudest creative work to date. I was at the time of recording making the leap from intermediate DMing to expert DMing, and I feel that I did strong work telling the story and filling the world with colorful and meaningful details. But what really struck me as the most worthwhile element of the show was how strong the players are as roleplayers. Soren carries on a realistic romantic relationship with an NPC. Rupert builds a business and develops a new language of magic. Dewey fully inhabits a personality which adds real complications to situations, no matter the details. I was and am proud of my friends for how special they made this show.
For years, I kept the files for Listen Check on a hard drive and didn't do anything with it. I wasn't sure about paying to host it and didn't think anyone would really want to listen to a podcast with three-hour episodes. And the rules for radio broadcast are different from podcast rules, and I didn't want to make any missteps with the modern format of podcasts. But with the advent of this site, I realized that if people are interested in what I've written about the game, they may well be interested in this old show. So I've added the show to the podcast archives, and now you can listen in to the gang's old adventures.
A bit about the show: the campaign takes place in a port city called Torga, known for its criminal residents and its strict law enforcement. The players are members of a gang called the Keys to the City, led by an enigmatic half-elf named Erasmus Chaff. Erasmus leads the gang on a heist, discovers he has magical lineage, and faces off with a law enforcer who has his number: Insellor Diesef, an elven member of law enforcement and a skilled detective. Meanwhile, the gang is held by orcish god Gruumsh to a bloody revenge quest and tortures the player characters with nightmares when they don't cooperate. All of these things happen while the gang completes quests around the city, and things do get complicated quickly; there is also the magical serial killer on the loose, ancient ruins nearby to investigate, and a host of issues that keep the gang struggling to persist.
