Small-town weirdness, loud-table panic.
The Consultants follows a rotating table through Cloudcatch, Norville, and Beringtree Manor, where suburbia and old houses hide supernatural wrongness. The pleasure is in the group logic: clues, rolls, panic, and ridiculous side comments all arriving at once.
PRESS PLAY
The Consultants is a fantasy actual-play series about a group of characters trying to make sense of places that behave as if reality has been badly filed. It is quick, noisy, and reactive. The recent episodes center on Cloudcatch-adjacent mysteries, first inside Beringtree Manor and then in the unfinished suburban development of Norville. Both settings feel domestic on the surface. Neither stays safe for long. At Beringtree Manor, the group searches for Sumaya Steele, a missing local teen who has been found wounded but alive, only to discover that leaving the mansion is not simple. Blueprints stop matching the building. Footprints suggest someone else is moving with purpose. A shadow, a locked-in attic, strange compulsions, and a hidden conference room full of bodies turn investigation into containment horror. The players respond with the exact mixture the show runs on: tactical concern, rules chatter, gallows humor, and sudden arguments about what the obvious next move should be. Norville shifts the flavor without slowing the table down. Brick is missing, the locals seem wrong, and the town's badges, vests, old power lines, memory slips, and cheerful suburban surfaces create a different kind of dread. The funniest moments often come from practical questions asked in impossible situations. Someone is threatening violence, someone is checking whether a town pays utilities, and someone else is still trying to remember who cares about Brick. That friction is the show's engine. It treats mystery seriously enough for clues to matter, but not so preciously that the table cannot laugh at a strange vest, a failed lie, or a character becoming accidental bait. The scenes stay concrete and the players keep poking every weak spot in the premise. It is messy in the useful way. For listeners who enjoy actual play as a living room argument with monsters just offscreen, The Consultants has momentum, bite, and a strong sense of weird place.
Made for: Best for fantasy actual-play listeners who like supernatural mysteries, fast table banter, and characters arguing through danger. It also fits fans of messy clue-chasing more than polished audio drama.
What sets it apart: The show stands out through its friction between eerie, concrete mystery scenes and a table that keeps puncturing tension with sharp, chaotic reactions. Clues are treated seriously, but the path to solving them stays gloriously untidy.
The streets of the quaint, little town of Cloudcatch teem with preternatural horrors that the townsfolk, like lifelong resident and retiree Helen Collinswood, look past without a second thought. To transplants like the Kentuckian detective Brik Breaker, or Illinoisan librarian Rowan Bailey, the strange goings-on in town are given more heed; in Brik’s case, rapt interest, and in Rowan’s, exerted disregard. For career “psychic” Cain, who has only been living in town a few months, he can always explain away the unnatural knocks and whispers emanating from the fog. And for Anya Supernova, who has just rolled into town, th...
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Collaborative deduction turns missing people, altered memories and impossible spaces into a supernatural mystery whose rules are discovered aloud.
The Consultants lets a supernatural mystery emerge through play: a group of characters investigates vanished people, impossible barriers and places that interfere with memory. Its Actual Play format makes uncertainty part of the story.
A haunted suburb steals memories; you get dread, dice, and a delicately deployed deli-meat threat.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Norville turns a missing-Brick search into a weird, high-friction town visit where every answer sharpens the next question.
The Consultants sends its group into the unfinished suburban development of Norville, southeast of Cloudcatch, where Brick is missing and the locals already feel a step out of joint.
A road-bound mystery where memory slips, barriers hold, and the group is briefly unseen.
This episode keeps the party on the road while a barrier refuses to budge and the surrounding crowd barely seems to notice them. The mystery tightens through memory slips that suddenly clear, with Helen recognizing people she had not placed before and Rowan taking down names as…
Norville gets sold like a dream and investigated like a joke with teeth.
The episode opens like a polished sales pitch for Norville, framing Bob and Martha's home as an easy, stylish start to home buying, with large living spaces, outdoor privacy, wooded surroundings, and Cloud Catch only 20 minutes away.
A locked-room crawl where footprints, shelves, and a dry Dewey joke carry the scene.
The episode turns on a locked room that opens into another locked room and then into a hallway of doors, while the investigation keeps circling the footprints on the floor.
A mansion search tightens around Sumaya Steele as locked doors, secret passages, and a time limit keep the table scrambling.
Anya Supernova's arrival gives the mansion search another moving part, and the hunt for Sumaya Steele keeps the stakes clear while Brick and Kane run straight into the locked front door.
Grim fantasy at mud level.
Fantasy rereads with jokes sharpened into arguments.
The group reaches Norville with Brick still missing.
A sudden memory blast hits the table.
Norville gets a sales pitch and a headache.
A fictional conversation about a kid wanting to buy a drum kit with after-school job money, interspersed with ads for Chase banking and UMass Lowell's Online MBA.
A group discovers a secret vault and conference room filled with decaying bodies in a manor, investigating the cause of death.
The team must escape a mansion with a wounded teen while resisting a mysterious force and uncovering secrets.
The room keeps folding back on itself.
A new potential ally, Anya Supernova, joins the group, and the mansion search opens up fast.
The DM introduces ARC 2 of a D&D actual play podcast, explaining the lower audio quality due to old microphones, then begins the story with a character finding a mysterious manor.
In the finale of Demon of House Bovine, the group splits up as Cain confronts the murder suspect Henry alone, while the others sense something is wrong.
Introduction to a Monster of the Week actual play podcast where characters are introduced and the system is explained.
This episode begins with ads for Tire Rack and United Van Lines, then transitions into a worldbuilding session describing a fictional English-style village called Cloud Catch.