Probably a lot of engrish. Need grammatical corrections.
Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk (the Dungeon of Naheulbeuk) is a French audio story telling the story of a group of adventurers in a fantasy world. This one-man amateur franchise became a successful hit in France and is today 5 seasons long, creating a new kind of medium: the MP3 saga.
Origin
In 2000, John Lang (known online as Pen of Chaos, or PoC) created for fun an audio sketch with highly modified voices, parodying role playing games such as Dungeon and Dragons, and uploaded it on his website[1]. The sketch started to gain some reputation, and PoC decided in January 2001 to redo the whole thing better, with a new first episode explaining how the group arrived to the dungeon.
Precursors
The idea of comedic sketches with high pitch voices mostly came from Les Deux Minutes du Peuple, a French Canadian series of audio sketches realized by François Pérusse, who became quite successful in Quebec and France.
The story itself came from numerous fantasy works such as The Lord of the Rings or Dungeon and Dragons, but the author said he was mostly inspired by a more obscure work: Les Merveilleuses Aventures de Kalon by Asp Explorer.
Plot
A patchwork of noob adventurers is enrolled by a mysterious man to explore the Dungeon of Naheulbeuk, a tower leaded by the dark wizard Zangdar, and loot the twelve and last statuette of Gladeulfeurha, which reunited with the others will summon an ancient and unknown prophecy. The main characters meet each other for the first time at the entrance of the dungeon, are all level 1 and never did any quest before. Their inexperience and the strong personality of each one will lead them to extreme and funny situations, highlighted by the absence of affinity among the members of the company.
After the first season, the victorious group leaves the actual dungeon, but the members are always stuck together by unfortunate series of events.
Characters
The characters are all unnamed, and only known by their race or their class.
- The Ranger: self-claimed leader of the company, the Ranger is a former chair builder wishing success to finally be respected as he should be. He try to manage cohesion is such a clumsy group, but his own cowardice and incompetence and the impulsive attitude of his companions mostly lead to the failure of his plans.
- The Dwarf: dirty, greedy, selfish, annoying, racist… in the end a typical dwarf. He is only here to loot the more money and treasures he can, not caring about any of his companions, especially the Elf. He always has inventive ways to solve problems, most of the time impossible to realize.
- The Elf: a female (very bad) archer with a nice pair of… boots. She is extremely nice and naive, and started the whole adventure thing only by boredom, not knowing what awaited her. She is always arguing with the Dwarf about anything.
- The Enchentress: this ginger wizard is the smartest member of the group, but is also very confuse and mistake her curses. Her continuous flow of knowledge quickly bore her companions, but often solve the issues the group meets.
- The Ogre: a massive, quite stupid creature who does not speak human and is always hungry. He does not really understand the purpose of the quest, but doesn’t really care either. The Enchentress is his best pal, mostly because she is the only one who speaks the ogre language.
- The Barbarian: ferocious and unmerciful, the Barbarian only wants to kill any foes that will cross his path. He is far from brilliant and not very talkative either. He usually screams “Brawl!” any time he can.
- The Thief: an extremely coward man, who always suggests the safest way possible. Despite his occasional help, he is mostly scorned by the others, and also suffers from a huge lack of luck.
Success
The series became through the years a huge hit in France, almost only by word of mouth. It eventually became successful enough to allow John Lang to live only by the money receive by the selling of numerous goodies such as CDs of comedic songs (even doing live concert with his band called Naheulband), roleplay figurines and above all the hardcover comic adaptation by Marion Poinsot, ongoing since 2005 with more than 11 issues.
In 2001, PoC’s friend Knarf (who did some roles in Naheulbeuk) started his own saga, Les Aventuriers du Survivaure[4], a parody of science-fiction franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars. John Lang assures several characters in this saga. It has later also been adapted in comic book, again by Marion Poinsot. The story in even more far in the comic than in the audio saga, the first season not finished yet in MP3.
After the first two seasons (2×15 episodes), John Lang started to write the story as a novel, because he started to be frustrated by the narrative limitation of the audio support, and seasons 3 to 5 (respectively named La Couette de l’Oubli, L’Orbe de Xaraz and Le Conseil de Suak) were released in 2008, 2009 and 2011 (L’Orbe de Xaraz even winning the Prix Merlin). But PoC doesn’t forget his old fans, and the story is also adapted in comic book and some exclusive scenes are done in MP3. He now plans to rewrite the first two seasons as a novel, planning after that to finally translate his entire saga in English.
Legacy
The success of Naheulbeuk growing, a lot of other persons started their own audio adventures, popularizing the “MP3 saga” term and Naheulbeuk by the same. The Netophonix[2] website counts more than 750 MP3 sagas[3] (though more than 75% of them are unfinished, sometime even barely started). The most famous complete MP3 sagas are Reflets d’Acide (a fantasy adventure entirely in rhymes), Adoprixtoxis (a sci-fi spoof with a lot of pop culture references), Banal Fantasy (a Final Fantasy VII abridged series), Chez le Psy (the consultations of a bad psychiatrist) and Trimoria (the imaginary adventures of a mad man).
External References
[1]Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk– Official website
[3]Netophonix – Sagas list
[4]Les Aventuriers du Survivaure– Official website