Dungeon Master Harry McEntire and players Holly Bennett, Doug Cockle, Alex Jordan, Ben Starr and Aoife Wilson make up Natural Six, one of the coolest live-play groups performing today. Matt Chapman tracked them down at MCM London Comic Con
Sometimes you walk into a room and there’s an energy crackling in it. As we enter a private upper room in Excel, Natural Six (the people we might have expected to be rolling their eyes as they wait for us to cross the expansive floor of MCM Comic Con) are deep in a conversation we can get on board with. “This guy who was there 45 minutes before my mate, they opened the doors, he’s the first person in the queue, and they said, ‘You can buy two packs’ and he just walked out. He was a scalper, he wanted to buy loads of boxes,” says actor Harry McEntire, before voice actor Ben Starr adds, “I do think, and this is not a disrespect, that Pokémon has become what NFTs wanted to be. They’re a better investment than property.” “I saw someone’s post that they had kept their McDonald’s Szechuan sauce from Rick and Morty in a container for nine years, and when they went back to check, the thing had exploded. They didn’t put it in the fridge,” actor and voice artist Alex Jordan offers. “Put it in the fridge!” Harry says agonisingly, before running with the theme, “I like it when you see the people who are opening World War II rations. Have you seen that? It’s great. You can buy rations they gave to paratroopers in 1941 and you twist it all with a little metal thing.” “Hi,” says Holly Bennett, Content Creator, PR and Community Manager, as she rearranges the chairs for us to chat more easily, “we’re a D&D actual play series, specialising in Pokémon cards and old rations.”
A thought flashes into our heads: “It’s like the nerd Avengers has assembled.” Having skated the worlds of gadgets, movies, sci-fi, Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop gaming so far in journalism, we’re not sure that if one of them dropped Thor’s hammer at our feet we’d feel worthy enough to pick it up. These might just be the coolest people we’ve ever met.
Every D&D group has an origin story and for Natural Six it feels like the strings of fate were pulling particularly hard. Alex went to a BAFTA Games social night where he got chatting to actor and voice artist Doug Cockle about D&D. A week later, he bumped into Ben on a video game job, who he had met at another game social, and he thought he also seemed like somebody who might be down to play some D&D. Writer, Producer and Host Aoife Wilson and Holly had worked in the games industry for 10-plus years. Holly met Ben at a house party, and then Ben contacted her the next day to ask, “Do you want to play D&D?” At that same house party, Ben got talking to members of the Oxventure D&D actual play. “And every time I said I wanted to play D&D,” Ben recalls, “they said, ‘Have you ever met Harry McEntire. He’s amazing. He’s like the best D&D player we’ve ever played with. You’ve got to meet Harry.’ And so I reached out.”
Harry’s experience with Oxventure was also somewhat fortuitous. He was at MCM London in October 2021, the first show after Covid, signing for the hit TV show The Last Kingdom. “I said to my booker, ‘All I want from conventions is to play D&D on a live show, that’s all I really care about.’ One of the Oxventure cast couldn’t attend, so I came on and guested. I asked my agent, ‘Which one is it, by the way?’ And he said, ‘It’s MCM.’ I didn’t know what MCM was. I was literally imagining it being in a card shop or in a game shop. So I Googled it and went, “Oh no!’”
Having been pulled into fate’s inevitable web, a WhatsApp group was started. “And then we thought, we should we just meet up and see if we actually get along,” Aoife remembers. “We went to a pub and had five bottles of rosé. And that’s when we said, ‘By the way, Doug, this isn’t just a game, it’s an actual play.’”
Another issue to conquer was how six people with such busy schedules were going to meet regularly. You might think it’s tough getting your friends together to roleplay, but imagine if that group contained the iconic voice of Geralt of Rivia (Doug) from The Witcher video games or Mr. Hands (Alex) from Cyberpunk 2077!
“As I’m sure pretty all of your readers will have come across, the one thing that everyone says about roleplaying is the problem of how you get six people around the table consistently. It’s really hard, considering how busy everyone is,” Ben (the voice of Clive Rosfield in Final Fantasy XVI) admits.
“About twice a year we sit in the studio and we open up all our diaries, and there’s invariably at least one or two people who say, ‘Before we start, once we get to August, I’m so sorry, I can do this Monday, and that’s it till October,” Harry adds, before Aoife ends with, “We’ve scheduled until 2027.”
“The way that you should do an actual play, if you are starting and you’re trying to build an audience and a community, is you do it on Zoom, you record remotely, someone sticks it together in an edit, and you gradually expand into the space you create for yourself as that community grows along with you and is able to financially support you,” Harry says, as if he’s reading from the actual play manual, before tearing the metaphorical book in half. “We knew we didn’t want to do that. We knew we wanted to make something that felt like an elevated home game, with some of the bells and whistles that you would love to have in your own home game, and it immediately became apparent that that was going to cost money. We didn’t have the money to fund it ourselves.
“We looked into crowdfunding, and as soon as we decided that’s what we wanted to do, we understood that if you’re going to take money from people who are willing to take a chance on a hypothetical show, you’ve got to reward them with the highest production values you can. We were at Double Jump Studios, who were amazing, for the first two years, and they helped us put together those initial episodes at an extraordinary discount. We recorded a session zero, which we released, and we did a show at EGX.”
“EGX was the springboard, because at the end we had the QR code to lead the audience to the Kickstarter,” continues Alex, with Harry adding, “The Kickstarter hadn’t even gone live at that point.” “And then the dimensions were off on the projector and the QR code didn’t work,” Alex notes with a sigh.
But Doug knew something special was happening: “We used EGX as the proof of concept for the Kickstarter. We knew if people signed up, then we can at least start. But we showed up and the live show was packed, and it was largely because we were all known in the industry in one way or another. So people came to see the show and to see what we were all about, and they went, ‘These guys are great!’”
“It’s weird that we have this thing that started over some bottles of rosé and a dream,” Ben says, “This is our second job. All of us do other things, but we’re able to make it as good as it can possibly be, because doing actual play is very expensive…” “…Doing our version of an actual play is very expensive,” Harry corrects him.
“Our Christmas special is the most elaborate mini set we’ve ever had,” Ben remembers. “It cost so much that Alex put his own money in,” Harry explains, “because he outstripped any mini budget I had ever used in the main campaign, and money was a bit tight at that point!”
“Alex does nothing by half. Or by whole, quite frankly,” Holly chips in. “I think it took more time to even try and construct the cottage that you had made.” “Don’t call it a cottage,” Harry counters, “it was like a cottage on a royal estate!”
“It’s been wonderful, though, because from that point we knew how great our community was going to be,” Aoife says. “Each of us brought their own community into Natural Six, and watching that grow on Discord and elsewhere has been fantastic, because they’re all just so fucking cool and creative. The fan art and all of the additional stuff is amazing, and it makes you really excited to come to shows like MCM, because you get to actually meet them in person.”
“We were just walking across the floor out there in the middle of MCM and bumped into a person cosplaying as your character,” Alex says excitedly, with Holly adding: “And the Episode 50 outfit!”
While Harry takes on duties as the Dungeon Master for Natural Six, Aoife and Alex also have some DM chops. Is there a chance one of them might get a shot at Harry’s throne? “I’m comfortable doing our one shots, but I wouldn’t want to take on your world,” Aoife says honestly, which is music to Harry’s ears.
“In terms of who’s helming the main story, that very much feels like my thing now,” he confirms, “and I’d be pissed and worried if they all sat me down and went, we really feel Aoife should become the DM. But what we have talked about is maybe doing a miniseries or something similar.”
“And in my head, without being too specific, it’s a trilogy and we are still in Book One. After that, I’m going to need a little bit of runway to get Book Two ready. That might be a time I would be interested to see if Aoife, Alex or one of the rest of the gang wanted to do three to six episodes. It’s like The Silmarillion, when you start to read the expanded Tolkien.”
It’s possible that stand-in DM might have their hands full with Harry as a player. “I’m a forever DM really,” he states. “So my friends in my home game decided to honour me by DMing for me, so that I could play. They all prepped different bits of Lost Mine of Phandelver, and I played a character called Cyrus Obsidian, who was impossible to DM for, because I was such a problem player. I had problems with authority, and I would storm out of rooms – it’s really quite embarrassing.”
“How old were you?” Holly asks, with Harry replying, “Like 29! It was just before my 30th birthday. But I didn’t come to D&D until I was about 26 or 27, which is when I became aware of it, and then I started playing at 28. I didn’t know about it when I was a kid.”
“I was a forever DM for a very long time. My first time ever DMing was live on the official Dungeons & Dragons Twitch channel, for grime artists, so that was fucking terrifying,” Aoife shares, with Holly adding, “An incredible introduction, by the way, live on the official channel with grime artists.”
“DMing is easy,” Doug throws in, potentially baiting his fellow Sixers, with Holly interjecting, “DMing is fine, but not for you lot.” It’s up to Harry to spill her secret: “Holly said she’d never DM, and now she DMs on the sly at a local club.” “I’ll just say good luck to you all, because I’m a much meaner DM than he is. I’ll be looking to kill you,” Aoife offers, raising the stakes. But the last word goes to Harry: “I’m still looking to kill you all. Remember, there’s a live show later.”