JourneyQuest: An Excellent Web Series for RPG Lovers

Those with good memories will most likely remember the web series The Guild, the one that catapulted Felicia Day to fame. It was almost at the beginning of the nerd craze, when the world was just discovering that popular culture didn't have to be the domain of a few awkward teenagers and that playing role-playing games, reading comics, and getting hooked on video games was perfectly fine.

Personally, I always hated "The Guild". It lacked intelligence and tried to capitalize on the emerging nerd culture using tired archetypes, almost bordering on mockery (a bit like the terrible "The Big Bang Theory"). That's why I love JourneyQuest so much, which is a web series made by and for role-playing gamers, that doesn't look down on or underestimate its audience, and delivers episodes full of humor and adventures.

The series tells the story of a rather dysfunctional group of adventurers: a knight, violent and quite idiotic from taking so many hits to the head; a completely inept and cowardly wizard, very similar to Rincewind; a good-natured and patient cleric; a brave elven archer and a bard who follows the group to write down their antics. In other words, all the members a good "party" should have in any pen-and-paper role-playing game. Good LARP, indeed.

And while it's true that the series doesn't look like a Hollywood movie, but rather like a project by a group of student friends in film school, the truth is that it's more than decent and the production improves as seasons go by. The script, as already said, doesn't underestimate the viewers and assumes you know the bare minimum to understand its premise and humor (which at times can be somewhat elitist).

The people responsible for JourneyQuest are the same ones who years ago brought us the cult gems of the "The Gamers" trilogy, seen only by a select handful of film buffs: "The Gamers" (2002), "The Gamers: Dorkness Rising" (2008) and "The Gamers: Hands of Fate" (2013). This series of films was about a group of friends who got together to play role-playing (pen and paper) and what we saw on screen were the adventures of their characters (which always, invariably, mixed with the real world). In other words, we're in good hands.

Currently the series has three seasons, with several episodes subtitled in Spanish (with the option of using YouTube's automatic subtitles for the rest). For the fourth season, the producer Zombie Orpheus Entertainment mounted a Kickstarter, about to end, and which seems unlikely to reach its goal (which would be a real shame).

In short, if you like role-playing games, if you're a fan of Terry Pratchett, if you don't like being underestimated and if you're tired of the bastardization of the hobbies you've enjoyed long before they became fashionable, JourneyQuest was made exactly for you. Access the full playlist, hit play and immerse yourself in the world of Fartherall. Enjoy!