It was supposed to be a goof.

In 2014, brothers Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy needed to bank a filler episode for their popular comedy-and-advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me while Justin, the eldest, was on paternity leave. Their solution: to play and broadcast a single game of Dungeons & Dragons with their father, Clint. Justin and his dad, who live in West Virginia, played a wizard named Taako (yes, pronounced taco) and the cleric Merle Highchurch, respectively; Cincinnati-based Travis played the fighter Magnus Burnsides; and from Austin, Texas, Griffin was the dungeon master, leading his family through “The Lost Mine of Phandelver,” the campaign that comes with the D&D fifth-edition starter set. The plan was to record just one episode.

Actual-play podcasts — in which people play tabletop role-playing games in character — have sprouted up in droves in recent years. One host acts as the game master, while the others play original characters that they’ve created. The master leads those players through an adventure, giving them scenarios and settings to which they have to react. Think The Lord of the Rings in podcast form, except the path of the story depends on the players’ decisions and the roll of some dice. Among notable actual-play pods are Critical Role, the Dungeons & Dragons podcast and videocast run by Matthew Mercer; Friends at the Table, hosted by Waypoint’s Austin Walker, wherein every story is told using a different game system like Dungeon World or The Sprawl; and smaller shows like the Shadowrun podcast NeoScum. The rise of these podcasts has coincided with a renewed interest in tabletop gaming, which went through a lull after D&D’s peak popularity in the ’70s and ’80s.

But the McElroys weren’t trying to break into the actual-play podcast genre. They just wanted to mess around, tell a few dick jokes, then get back to their regularly scheduled programming. There was just one problem: Listeners loved the episode so much that they clamored for the McElroys to turn it into a series.

“They were invested in the characters, in the relationship,” Travis tells me. “Seeing it reflected through their eyes kind of clued us in that we weren’t making a comedy podcast, we were telling a story.”

The McElroys listened to their fans, and four months after that pilot episode aired as an part of My Brother, My Brother and Me, the McElroys reaired it as the first installment of a new, ongoing series titled The Adventure Zone.

The best stories are defined by the bonds they create, and “Balance,” the first season of The Adventure Zone, which concluded in August, created those bonds in spades. The attachment of the brothers to their characters resulted in rich, complex, and hilarious personae. The relationship between the fans and the McElroys opened up a world that celebrates and thrives on its diversity, while the connection between the listeners themselves inspired a universe of art dedicated to the “Balance” arc. All of those bonds, collectively, transformed what was supposed to be a one-off joke episode into a program that is regularly one of iTunes’ top-20 comedy podcasts, has nearly 10,000 five-star reviews, and sells out periodic live shows in minutes. Most importantly, The Adventure Zone birthed a story that its fans would say stands up to anything seen on screen or page during its three-year run.

In crafting the 69-episode world of “Balance,” dungeon master Griffin pulled from all corners of pop culture. There are Fast & Furious–meets–Wacky Races battle-wagon contests, an Alien-inspired fight aboard a slowly sinking space station, a Wild West–meets–Groundhog Day plot in which the adventurers live the same hour over and over again, and interdimensional travel to different planes and worlds. The heavy dose of pop-culture references helped the audience envision the story while giving Travis, Justin, and Clint cues to react to various situations. Travis, a full-time podcaster, says he and his brothers, who both work at Polygon, have an “inherent shared lexicon” of games, movies, and shows, since they all grew up watching and playing the same things as kids in the late ’80s and ’90s. (The Ringer is an affiliate site with SB Nation, which, like Polygon, is a Vox Media property.) When Griffin presented them with a scenario that resembled, say, Alien, Travis, Justin, and Clint could just lean into the moment right away instead of stopping and considering it.

The collaborative storytelling in The Adventure Zone is a mix of improv and guided story — UCB meets Choose Your Own Adventure. At the start of every arc, Griffin would tell his brothers and father their setting (e.g., a town reminiscent of the Wild West) and objective (say, finding a chalice capable of controlling time), and then let them explore from there. Every sub-arc within “Balance” had its own objectives (obtaining one of seven all-powerful magical items) as well as obstacles preventing the adventurers from succeeding. Sometimes, that obstacle would be a battle, while other times it would be a puzzle they’d have to solve. While Griffin would have some scenarios and fights planned out, the story mostly developed on the fly in real time. Often, episodes would end on cliffhangers, leaving listeners with a two-week wait to hear the resolution.

“Griffin was creating a world where we could walk into any building we wanted to,” Travis says, likening the experience to playing an open “sandbox” video game that had a specific final goal, such as BioShock, “but we were still, storywise, moving toward a climax, moving toward a final boss battle or encounter that would make everything make sense.”

If the brothers wanted to achieve something, like sneaking past armed guards, convincing another character they were on their side, or hitting an enemy, they’d have to roll a 20-sided die. The success of any action would depend on whether the number rolled, in addition to whatever bonuses each character had due to various stats, was high enough to beat the corresponding difficulty check (DC for short), as decided either by the rules or the DM. For example, if a character were in a dark room and wanted to notice whether they felt a breeze coming from a certain direction, they would roll a “perception check.” If they rolled something high, like a 15, the dungeon master might tell them that they feel a breeze behind them. If they rolled, say, a 3, they wouldn’t notice a thing. While it may sound tedious and complicated, especially as a storytelling vehicle, the rolls actually enhanced the story. A low roll could introduce sudden peril, while a high roll might snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

At times, Griffin was critiqued by some D&D diehards for guiding the players too much, “railroading” them onto a fixed path rather than giving them complete freedom. Travis says he has never felt constrained, and that many of the moments that might have seemed planned appeared that way only because Griffin is so good at pivoting and improvising when Travis, Justin, and Clint do something unexpected (which happens often).

One of the show’s iconic moments follows this pattern. Taako, Merle, and Magnus have reached the end of a brutal gantlet of battles in an arena called Wonderland. Except instead of collecting their prize, they are confronted by one of the bosses of the arena, who possesses Magnus’s body and sends his soul onto the astral plane. Taako and Merle then work together to reel Magnus’s soul back to the physical realm, albeit into the body of a mannequin. As Griffin said in a later recap episode titled “The The Adventure Zone Zone,” he had already planned what would happen to Magnus on the astral plane as Taako and Merle fought “evil” Magnus and the other boss, Lydia, on the physical plane. But Justin and Clint ruined those plans in an instant, forcing Griffin to completely adjust what came next.

Another gripe about the podcast concerned the McElroys’ penchant for bending the rules of D&D. Justin might cast one or two more spells above his daily allotment, or Griffin would let a failed check slide. Yet it was never the McElroys’ goal to play a by-the-book version of D&D, but rather tell a great story through the lens of the game. If the rules had to be bent, or even broken, in service to the story, so be it.

As the podcast developed, the audience grew with the characters, but also grew with the brothers as they grew with the characters, feeling more comfortable in their skins and making decisions that the characters would make. Before long, mere numbers on a sheet indicating dexterity, strength, intelligence, charisma, constitution, and wisdom — the six stats in the game that determine how good a character is at certain skills, such as stealth, investigation, athletics, casting spells, and many more — were transformed into fully formed personae. It was thus equally rewarding to hear Taako go on a date with the Grim Reaper, or Merle reconnect with his children, or Magnus form a bone-deep friendship with a rogue named Carey as it was to listen to the team defeat a giant purple worm.

If the “Balance” arc had only been about Taako, Merle, and Magnus, it still would have been a very good podcast. Yet while fans certainly cared about those three main characters, it was the wealth of fully developed non-playable characters (NPCs) that brought the world within “Balance” to life. These are not common NPCs like we often see in video games or tabletop RPGs, placeholder innkeepers or town officials who give the main character a quest and have little else to say. In The Adventure Zone, there’s Angus McDonald, the genius boy detective and maybe silver dragon who always greets the three heroes with a hearty “Hello, sirs!” There’s Lucretia, the director of the Bureau of Balance, who agonizes over a terrible choice she made to save her friends from themselves. There’s Jenkins, the evil wizard from the second campaign, whose introduction might be the funniest minute and a half in the entirety of “Balance.” There’s Carey, Killian, N03l (Noel), Johan, Davenport, Barry Blue Jeans, Avi, Lup, and Kravitz and a whole host of NPCs whose relationships with the three main characters give the arc life and color.

Griffin voiced all of these characters and more, imbuing each of them with their own voice, style, and, ultimately, soul. It speaks to Griffin’s talent as an improvisational storyteller that every character feels unique and lived-in. If Justin, Travis, and Clint wanted to interact with a character beyond a cursory level, Griffin was happy to play along. Though the interaction might not have added to the story, it added to the world, which was just as important.

“That’s why, as far as I’m concerned, Griffin is an amazing [dungeon master], because his ability to not just craft a story that’s amazing but also his investment in the world led to NPCs that were as popular, if not more so, than the actual player characters,” Travis says. “I listen to a lot of actual-play podcasts, and I watch YouTube videos of people playing video games, and that’s an element that I don’t think I’ve ever seen.”

It helped, as far as listener investment is concerned, that almost all of those NPCs were named after fans. They saw themselves reflected in the world, both figuratively and literally. That went a long way in giving fans like Kate Sloan, who had the character Sloane named after her, a sense of ownership in the story.

“I’ve done a lot of cool shit, but it feels really meaningful to have found this piece of media that means so much to me and then to also be in it,” says Sloan, a freelance journalist from Toronto. “It was exciting to see a sapphic love story which I related to on a very real level, and then on a deeper level, which is that this character is named after me. I was going through a hard romantic thing at the time, and so the end [of the ‘Petals to the Metal’ story] really hit me. I was like, ‘Oh she’s going through some tough shit, too!”

In fact, while Griffin, Travis, Justin, and Clint were the main storytellers, the fans deserve credit, too, for giving shape to the story and world through their art, their fiction, cosplays, and even animations. After every episode, there would be a flood of art on social media reflecting the best moments of the episode, or expanding on a character’s story or interactions. It became a community that supported and encouraged people like Mickey Quinn, a storyboard artist at Cartoon Network, to share their art.

those tres hornie boys #thezonecast pic.twitter.com/rMI30SpBRJ — Mickey Quinn @ SHE RA ⚔️✨ (@mickequ) December 5, 2016

“Some of my best friends I met through [The Adventure Zone], because we all wanted to share our ideas about this beautiful thing,” Quinn says. “I think in today’s media landscape, fandom is becoming more of a part of the actual experience of the medium, even though it’s not directly inside of the media, because we experience things so socially these days.”

Destruction, at least in fiction, is terrifying only if the audience cares about what’s being destroyed. This is especially true of sci-fi and high fantasy, where the dangers facing alien or unfamiliar worlds can feel particularly muted. The audience cared about the fate of the world of “Balance” because they cared about the characters living in it. And that might be the enduring legacy of The Adventure Zone’s first season: The McElroys created a world worth saving. That’s exactly what happened at the end of “Balance.” Taako, Merle, and Magnus saved all of existence from being devoured by an entity known as “The Hunger,” cementing themselves as heroes of legend throughout the land.

The McElroys haven’t announced what Season 2 of The Adventure Zone will entail, aside from the fact that it most likely won’t be a story told through Dungeons & Dragons nor will it be in the world of “Balance.” In the interim, they’ve taken turns running new games with mini-arcs set in different worlds. Clint’s superhero-themed arc ended in November, and Griffin’s “Monster of the Week” story just began in January. Still, while the McElroys may be leaving the world of “Balance” behind (with the exception of live shows), it’s not as if its story will simply fade into the background. Bonds that strong don’t break so easily.

“There was just this feeling of having these friends you didn’t know about,” Quinn says of her Adventure Zone fandom. “In life, it’s really easy to feel like you’re alone and that nobody’s there for you, but I think something that happened in [‘Balance’], and something that’s important to remember in life, is you’re not really ever alone.”

Jordan White is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in ESPN, The Players’ Tribune, Vice Sports, Uproxx, Roads & Kingdoms and many other places.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed only five stats in D&D that affect characters’ skills. There are six stats, including constitution.