Leveling up actual play production with Many Sided Media

Actual Play production finds itself in a liminal state as the once-folk art tradition continues to solidify into a recognized (if not yet mainstream) storytelling medium. With more creators than ever flooding the scene, attempting to find their footing—and hopefully a living—in the industry, the make-it-up-as-you-go mindset of early AP productions is giving way to increased professionalism among what scholar Em Friedman calls the “ambitious middle.” If you’re a Rascal reader, you’ve likely seen this term mentioned before: the wave of actual players and studios emerging from the post-2020 quarantine period with little-to-no financing, but strong artistic visions for the type of stories AP is capable of telling. To match those initial visions to their final product, studios such as Many Sided Media—run by Elliot Davis, Shenuque Tissera, Brian Flaherty, and Abby Hepworth—have taken the lessons they’ve learned from other media projects and molded them to fit the amorphous form of actual play.

Many Sided Media’s actual play series My First Dungeon has created some of the industry’s most polished non-D&D actual play podcasts over the last few years. The Ten Candles and Orbital Blues seasons garnered awards on the Audio Fiction World Cup circuit—the latter of which inspired a wave of Orbital Blues actual plays that cropped up in late 2023 and early 2024. Their most recent seasons partnered with some of the most recognizable publishers in mid-level TTRPG such as Rowan, Rook, and Decard, Possum Creek, and most recently Soul Muppet using Paint the Town Red. My First Dungeon’s sound design, done by Brian Flaherty with bespoke soundtracks by BE/HOLD, rivals that of the most prominent in the medium, as evidenced by Flaherty’s recent work with industry giant Worlds Beyond Number. 

At the time of this interview, they had recently ended their season of Mythwork’s The Wildsea, a game set in a world where society fell to a magical ardent wave. It turned the planet’s surface into an ocean of treetop canopy populated by anthropomorphic plants and animals, leviathan monsters, and endlessly diverse cultures. The cast of My First Dungeon’s Wildsea season—which includes guests such as J. Strautman (Planet Arcana), Kendo Smith (Tales Yet Told), and Noordin Ali Kadir (Gudiya)—use the game’s mechanical framework to dissect how memory and culture shape identity in a world where a person can be anything from a moth entity or hivemind of bats, to a living tree escaped from a cannibalistic cult. Leaning into the maritime adventure element of the setting, Strautman, Flaherty, and BE/HOLD composed original sea shanties (tree shanties), building on themes of yearning and the inevitable loss that grounds this adventure’s emotional core.

Earlier this year, Rascal sat down with Wildsea GM Elliot Davis and the season’s producer Shenuque Tissera to discuss what goes on behind the scenes to bring these types of productions to life—including sourcing games, finding sponsors, and the unsexy work of being an actual play producer—and why that invisible labor is necessary to making this artform sustainable.

This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and flow.