Trying Our Quest: A D&D Improv Comedy Actual-Play Podcast · Trying Our Quest

Ep 22: No Business Like Snow Business (Theatrical Winterlude)

March 4, 2026·1 hr 41 min·5 clips

Trying Our Quest opens with the group greeting listeners like it has been exactly one week since they last saw them. They joke about malware in the podcast, laptop cameras, and tape that supposedly fails against surveillance. The show then moves away from survival scores and into pet peeves. Janice’s minor illegal thing is littering, because it is rude and avoidable. The table treats that as a perfect place to escalate. The banter keeps moving before the travel can really settle. A later bit turns into a necklace joke, with the group trying to make the front read Juicy while the back says Pain. Someone offers Pan instead, and the whole thing becomes another example of the table finding a dumb phrase and refusing to drop it. The day shifts back to travel logistics. The party crawls down the road and starts asking whether they are heading toward the mountains, the priest, or somewhere else entirely. Lucy points out that the mountains are the relevant direction. One of the characters checks the arrow in a pocket and finds a real map on the back. The map shows a mountain range north of Ariax and, less helpfully, an Olive Garden. The Olive Garden is not a decoy so much as an offshoot, sitting half an hour out of the way on the Spine of Locan. That lands like a comic emotional incident. Rex reacts to the Olive Garden family connection, which raises the question of whether his dad really gives him a discount. The answer is basically no, or at least not in any simple way. The scene becomes another example of the group making a mundane detail weirdly important. The episode keeps balancing game movement with table chatter. It does not keep the joke material separate from the story material. The characters are still moving toward the hotel, still deciding whether to push through the night, and still reacting to the strain of the day. The comedy comes from the fact that all of this happens at once. By the close, the group is talking through camp setup and giving Patch space to take the lead. Even the coda leans into the show’s affection for names, old bits, and the pleasure of inventing people who then seem to exist.

As heard by us

A banter-heavy episode of malware jokes, pet peeves, and roadside absurdity.

Ep. 22 opens with the table back after a week away, joking about malware, camera tape, and anti-tape technology before the D&D thread properly gets moving.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play if you want your fantasy road trip interrupted by camera jokes and Olive Garden lore.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Trying Our Quest: A D&D Improv Comedy Actual-Play Podcast