The ending of the world begins on a Friday in the year 200X. It begins in the sunny Californian town of Beach Bay, where nothing ever happens. It begins over the town, as an alien spacecraft descends from the heavens to reign destruction and chaos. It begins under the town, as the dead are reanimated and shamble towards horrified civilians. It begins on a road through the woods, where a group of teens flee from a car crash to a magical glade where an ancient god gifts them awesome power. It begins in detention, where the teens first meet.

The story of Champions of the Earth can take many different directions. And these aren’t decided by a single person but by every cast member, as is the nature of actual play podcasts. Beyond that, this show is unique because it’s also a live recorded beta test. Unlike other well-known actual plays where the rules and mechanics of the game being played have already been decided and homebrews are included at an individual Storyteller’s discretion, the players are also giving their input in how this game should look in future.

Storyteller, or rather Game Master, Collin Kelly also designed the game. The tabletop role playing game Champions of the Earth uses the Op20 system and allows you to play as Sentai heroes known as Champions. Your powers are elements: vitae (life), terra (earth), ignis (flame), glacies (frost) and lux (lightning). They form an armour that gradually adapts to your imagined ideal of what would best protect you. A totem animal may appear as a mech to fight your battles and take you to incredible places at the blink of an eye. And sometimes, in the heat of battle, your powers will merge into one giant warrior with ten times the strength of the individual.

That form is known as the Ultimate Champion. But becoming the ultimate version of yourself isn’t as easy as pressing a button on the console of a fantastical vehicle. Especially not with all the disasters, and Champions of the Earth is disasters all the way down. As player and sound designer Jesse Vigil described their campaign after the end of the second arc, ‘There are literal disasters, there are emotional disasters, and there are teenage disasters walking around in sneakers and asking strangers on the internet if UFOs ever cause zombies.’

So let’s meet some of those teenage disasters.

Vitae: Olive (Gina DeVivo)

DEVIVO AS OLIVE:
I don’t know if I can kill anything…

KELLY AS ICOSAGON:
Cold, flame, earth and light… Life… Go, Champions and defend the Earth!

DEVIVO:
I’m going to gather my chi. We’re on a hill? I want to open my hands up to the sky, face them and start somersaulting down the hill. Like, when you’re a kid and you just feel really alive and full of ‘ahaha!’ silly energy? Just going to start rolling down the hill.

Purple Champion Olive Fairchild, with the primary personal trait Free Spirit, seems an obvious case for the argument that these teens were touched by destiny. Homeschooled by her hippy mother and practically raised in the outdoors, Olive understands nature and mysticism. Starting her sophomore year at Beach Bay High School after her mother’s marriage to everyman Mark, then, is a massive culture shock. Olive is the weird girl who doesn’t understand that she’s being weird, who doesn’t care what others think of her but cares for them.

Her wide-eyed wonder at the powers she’s bestowed should come at no surprise, of course. Olive’s worldview isn’t shaken quite as much as the others’ because the unfolding events affirm many of her esoteric beliefs. What shakes her more is a growing guilt that she’s failing to prevent harm coming to others. But that doesn’t mean she’s a pushover. There’s more to Olive than meets the eye; hints from DeVivo that her life isn’t as sheltered as it seems. As the campaign unfolds, Olive’s naiveté never really goes away. Instead, it becomes an ideal that she stands by: the belief that there are always good things worth fighting for.

Terra: Martha (Martzi Campos)

CAMPOS AS MARTHA:
I’m here to try! I am always trying. I will never stop trying and yes, I know that makes me a loser and a nerd and the most unpopular girl in school and it makes me hated but every day I wake up and I try.

In a twist of destiny, an actual earthquake in the studio inspired Campos when she picked Gold Champion Martha Calloway’s element. Martha’s primary personal trait is Part Time Job and she gets a lot of mileage out of it considering the bookshop, The Wrinkled Page, closes (for reasons presumably unrelated to the world ending) in the first episode. Because Martha has a plan: save for college, get good grades, go to Harvard, graduate with honours, get a good job.

To put it succinctly, Martha’s a nerd. And whilst she is as anxious as most other nerds in fiction, she differs from many in that her anxiety doesn’t make her timid; it makes her ruthless. Whilst she never prepped for encounters with the supernatural, she immediately shuts down whatever internal crisis that should trigger and instead invents a crash course for how to handle the situation: research any historical or mythological references for the phenomena she encounters and practice using her powers. Make sure she knows what her teammates are up to, because apparently she can’t deal with everything on her own.

After all, dealing with everything on her own is what Martha’s used to. As the show develops, Campos reveals that in Martha’s two-person household, her mother is not the adult. To top off Martha’s inner turmoil, her growing closeness to the new girl in school is bringing up questions about her sexuality for herself that she really doesn’t want to delve into, especially not when said new girl is obviously into the bad boy. And then the new guy’s got surprising depth to him, as well? It’s an incredibly difficult situation for anyone to be in, let alone a teenage girl, but Campos pulled it off so well she was nominated for her voice acting in both comedy and drama in the 2018 Audioverse Awards.

Ignis: Nico (Jackson Lanzig)

LANZIG AS NICO:
I know you might have liked your lives before. And it might be easier for me to say this because I didn’t. But our lives aren’t the same any more. We have different responsibilities and we have to fight differently. I’m not telling us how to fight. God knows, I should be no leader. But I think we do need to fight.

It says a lot about Metalhead Nicolai Chakoumakos that despite having lived in five different places in the US since the age of four, he never lost his Greek accent. The Red Champion has issues. He’s always getting into fights, headphones blaring heavy metal, smalltalk is pointless, throwing up horns and catchphrase ‘Hail Satan’. Adults single him out, other kids are scared of him, outsiders flock to him. Nico is, always, full of rage.

His biggest outlet for that is music. In every school Nico’s attended, he’s formed a band. He plays the drums like his life depends on it and feels most at home in a moshpit. His own home is small, but full of love. Nico’s mother is dead and his father does the best he can. That’s not easy, because as Lanzig reveals, Nico’s also had some much worse coping mechanisms. But with people in his life that he can look up to, he’s getting better.

Becoming a Champion of the Earth is his wildest dreams come true but at a cost. His fire powers amplify his internal instability. Yet Nico’s also spent years reading comic books and Tolkien and yearning for his own adventure to begin. When it comes, these stories are what guide his moral compass.

Glacies: Huxley (Jesse Vigil)

VIGIL AS HUXLEY:
I mean, you don’t have to do anything in life, but I strongly suggest the healing power of a party.

Primary personal trait Life of the Party Huxley is new in town. He’s also the only one of the champions who hasn’t been raised by a single parent ‒ Olive’s stepdad Mark having only recently come into her life ‒ but that doesn’t mean his parents are ever there. As such, he’s the sole occupant of their nouveau riche family manor on the outskirts of town, and as Vigil reveals over the course of the show, he’s desperate to fill the place with people.

Huxley begins the story as a punching bag for bullies and monsters and is easily mistaken for a self-absorbed pushover. He’s dismissed as soft (the worst thing a boy can be in 200X) by those who don’t realise that people who’re considerate of everyone will also consider every single option, not just the straightforward ones, in a fight. It also doesn’t help that Vigil went with a risky build for his PC and made Style his highest modifier, meaning he needed to be more creative in combat to justify using it. As a result, any failures Vigil rolls are more spectacular than most ‒ as, of course, are his successes. When push comes to shove, Hux will go to great lengths to protect those around him. Though he’s not proud of it, even the most underhanded deals are on the table if it means others are safe.

Lux: Mel (Amanda Powers)

POWERS AS MEL:
I was not going to shoot him. You find that if you’re threatening enough, you don’t have to. It’s kind of a superpower ‒ before I got actual superpowers.

The players joke that this Champion’s black armour and light powers qualify her an eclipse. The difference to an eclipse being that Bombshell Melissa Queen doesn’t want to let anyone in. Mel is the effortlessly cool girl simply by acting like she doesn’t care about anything. Everything about her ‒ biting sarcasm, swearing, accentuated makeup, flowing blonde locks, smoking when the teachers don’t catch her, doing things with boys that are none of your business because life is too short for pining, clothes as provocative as she can get away with and boots that will stomp all over your hurt feelings ‒ is designed to look unflappable and untouchable.

In some cases, she isn’t wrong. High school is not worth getting worked up to Martha levels over. But her blasé attitude is sometimes no more than nihilism ‒ nihilism stemming from hurt. For all her posturing, Mel is the most afraid of the Champions. Not just of the monsters, but of this whole supernatural world she’s being sucked into. Being emotionally linked to some people she knows from school is also the worst. Nico might be the kind of mess she’s attracted to, but that doesn’t mean she wants to meld minds with him. Martha, Olive and Hux, meanwhile, are just too much. Gradually, though, it becomes clear that the others need Mel’s scepticism to balance the team out. And Mel might be cynical, but that doesn’t mean she’s close-minded: she appreciates what the others can offer her, too.

Mel is a patchwork of contradictions, a study of teenage apathy. Her aloofness makes her a fierce fighter and an unyielding defender. Learning how she interacts with the people she cares about is deeply fascinating, especially Mel’s relationship with her sister, as Powers modelled Mel after her own big sister in her teenage years.

Destiny (Collin Kelly)

KELLY AS ICOSAGON:
Your power comes from within. There is a reason this world is worth protecting. It is because of the ineffable energy that is in each and every one of you and animal and plant, everything that has life is infused with this. When you die, your bodies pass on. That energy returns to the ley lines. The flow of energy. It is unravelled, spread out and recombined and rewoven once again. With birth comes life, comes power, comes energy.

The teens are brought together in what they prefer to think of as accidents, but what the omnipotent god ironically named Icosagon (Mel cleverly shortens it to ‘Ike’ one time to rile them up), who takes the form of a colour-changing icosahedron and lives in a crystal glade accessible through a fort in the woods Olive built some years ago, insists is destiny. Icosagon is a channel for the Champions’ powers, which interact in a ‘power trumps power’ way so complicated players rely on a diagram (first a table and then a so-called ‘Pentagram of Power’) to understand it ‒ which may also be a good idea for listeners trying to understand the PC’s relationships.

On top of designing the system, Kelly spins the threads players can pull on for the plot: the robotic aliens in dragonoid crafts, the disgusting zombies (like inside-out people or fused-together rabbit corpses) of curious origin, the school hyping up to Homecoming. Every battle, be it mundane or supernatural, is thrilling. Even without visuals, each character has moments that will leave jaws on the floor.

The cast emphasises that Beach Bay is not representative of any actual places in the oughts. Like the shows they’re emulating, Beach Bay is an idealised version of life in the oughts ‒ even when discussing heavy topics, there are certain things that don’t show up in this story at all. For another comparison, the issues the Keep It Steady teens deal with don’t exist here. There are no US troops stationed in the Middle East, bullying but no bigotry, wealth inequality and nods to the Global Financial Crisis but no in-depth exploration. If the cast doesn’t want to deal with it, it doesn’t exist.

What makes the world feel real is the emotional landscape. The PCs’ families: annoying but sweet siblings and parents who don’t quite understand their children but want only the best for them. The PCs’ friends: Martha’s friend Chestnut McGee whose biggest scoop with the Beach Bay High Video Yearbook would prove the existence of alien life if their cameras could show anything, Mel’s friend Heather who knows the dirt on everyone, Nico’s bandmate Tarquin who’s always down to jam and eat.

The Ending

VIGIL:
The Golden Age of radio was the 30s and 40s, primarily. So what ended up happening was, I heard history like, playing out through ads for goods that were rationed during wartime or for the necessity of having coal to survive a long winter or public service pleas to donate blood to the Red Cross or how to support troops overseas. And it was strange to hear these artefacts like, welded to this content. And it was so much more like a time machine to hear what people were going through on a daily basis than anything I got in any History textbook.
And global war left this scar across an entire culture and some of that was these literal grooves in a wax cylinder that were there for all time. And became this glimpse into how everyone who might be listening was suffering or was nervous or was afraid or uncertain and at the time that they were recorded, they couldn’t possibly imagine that this kid fifty years later, sixty years later, was going to be sitting in his bedroom, safe, in the 90s ‒ which now seems like the safest possible moment to have been in ‒ listening to these and trying to understand what they were going through. And it kills me, to a degree, that our own radio draw, is going to carry one of those scars, now.

As Lucrécia Ludovico Alves writes for Split/Party, ‘most TTRPGs don’t really think about endings… At some point you will get to max level, get all options, a campaign will end, or some thing that it may serve as an ending and the game ends. Most of the time, [a game won’t end unless there are] forces outside of the artform, and those are the ones determining how a TTRPG ends.’

The ending of the world takes place in the year 2020. Kelly, emboldened by the success of his beta test, has launched a Kickstarter to bring the game he’s designed into the world, and that goal not only smashed its original goal, but its stretch goals as well. The crowdfunding campaign was so successful, in fact, that the game will no longer be issued in the planned multi-zine format, but will instead be printed as a physical book. There are opportunities for Kickstarter backers to take part in playtests and share their experiences on a Discord server. Meanwhile, the podcast has had some technical difficulties during recordings, but the sessions have been some of the most emotional as the campaign’s third arc winds down.

Then an airborne virus emerges and develops into a pandemic. The world is forced into lockdown, for varying lengths of time. The cast, who work as creatives and/or academics, must adapt to working remotely. There may be additional stressors behind the scenes, as hinted in previous instances.

Whatever the case, the RSS feed has last been updated in November. There are no updates on the feed in January, February, March. Only in early April does a new episode appear. After the previous cliffhanger, the new episode is a dénouement; the Champions returning home after an epic battle. In the midroll, Vigil explains the stressful situation. He tells listeners he has some remaining recordings from before the lockdown, which he plans on releasing when he can edit them.

No more episodes appear in the feed. In 2020, Kickstarter backers receive a PDF copy of the book, but from all accounts the playtesting Discord server sees little action. For the audience at large, there’s also little interaction on social media. A year or so later, the announcement is made that Champions of the Earth is no longer a part of the Nerdsmith Network. In 2022, after sporadic updates, the physical rulebook and merch is finally sent out to all backers. Seeing the justified questions from backers about when they’ll receive what they paid for is saddening when on the podcast, Kelly talked with such passion about this project. On Vigil’s website, he writes about the project:

The game now exists in the wild, but it was a bumpy and expensive learning experience in bringing a physical book to market while the pandemic spiked shipping, manufacturing costs, and general logistics in ways the Kickstarter budget and our own personal budgets had to stretch to meet.

Time and time again, the cast spoke about the struggles of being creators in today’s media landscape. More and more jobs are being lost, more and more independent companies being merged or downsizing or going bankrupt. In 2024, the situation has only gotten worse. There is an absurd notion that because anyone can tell a story, being a storyteller is easy. But Champions of the Earth stands as proof that telling stories for a living, work that society as a whole has never managed to quantify properly, is incredibly labour intensive. Sometimes, telling a story burns you out.

So what comes next?

Maybe the final recordings have been completely edited on a drive Vigil has lying around somewhere. Maybe they were never touched again. Maybe they were deleted or corrupted. Maybe the RSS feed will be updated someday. Maybe listeners will hear where Huxley’s parents actually are, or the aliens making their move from behind the moon, or Chestnut breaking into a government facility, or whether Hecate made the rose Hyde gave to Olive.

But as it stands, there have no been updates to the podcast. As time went on, ‘A Better Life Right Now (Part One)’ became an epilogue of sorts.

But Champions of the Earth has always had more than one storyteller. The cast all worked together to tell this story. And if they can’t tell the story but you still want to know how it ends, then maybe telling the story falls on you.

Vigil’s last notes on Episode 30 indicate that the treasure hunt across audio files is still ongoing. You can always speculate what happened next. You can always read or tell how the story goes on in fanfiction. You can even, if you are fortunate enough to own the rulebook, gather five friends of your own and play your own game of Champions of the Earth, as these people did:

https://www.tumblr.com/ssunsxt/733929637159354368/okay-so-my-friends-and-i-have-been-working-on-this

The ending of the world has already happened. What happens next is up to you.