I spoke with Jeff Stormer, host of Party of One Podcast about the secret to making guests unhinged, what makes superhero stories good, and the secrets of hair care success.
Edited and adapted from a conversation on 7/23/25
Part 1: Party of One
Alex: You run Party of One!
Jeff: I do! Ten years!
Alex: I believe that is the actual play with the most episodes?
Jeff: The most systems featured, specifically. I’ve run the numbers. We have featured more role-playing games in terms of named games and systems than any show in the history of actual play.
Alex: Incredible. And tell me, what is the format of that show?
Jeff: Every episode I sit down with a guest one-on-one. We play a self-contained two-player role-playing game. Different game, different guests on every episode. It allows us to spotlight a different game, spotlight a different interesting person and then create an experience that combines the best of a gameplay, a live story experience, and a creative process interview.
Alex: You were recently interviewed by Rascal, it was a great interview. Is there anything you wish they had asked you?
Jeff: Other than the secret that makes my hair consistently so great, no. It was a fascinating interview. Rowan [Zeoli] is on a whole other level in terms of being insightful and brilliant. If anything, there were a few questions that she had asked that didn’t make the final cut that I was surprised by, but I walked away from that interview sort of disarmed.
Alex: Okay, well I have to ask, how do you keep your hair so luscious?
Jeff: If I knew I was going to give that answer, I’d have looked at the product. It’s some sort of goop. It’s not a pomade, because pomade comes out hard. It’s a softer pomade kind of goop that I buy at the CVS for five dollars. [Ed. Note: It is the Garnier Fructis Pure Clean Finishing Paste.]
Alex: I’m now aware of two hair care / RPG enthusiasts, you and Tony [Vasinda]. It’s an unexpected crossover.
Jeff: It’s one of the things that Tony and I have bonded over. It’s one of the things I like about Tony.
Alex: I’m sure you get this question all the time. Where would you tell people to start with Party of One?
Jeff: The short answer is wherever. The short answer is find a guest or a game or a genre. The nice thing about the show is every episode is an on-ramp. The fun thing about every episode being a self-contained story experience is that every episode can be someone’s first episode so I would say it depends a lot on the type of listener that you are. If you are a games person looking to discover games, find a game that you have wanted to check out. There’s a pretty non-zero chance that we have played it at some point. If you are a general pop culture-y person, find a few names of people in the indie art space that you think are neat. If you’re more of a fiction/podcast/storytelling person we’ve got pretty detailed breakdowns on our website of [things like] genre and setting and time period to give an idea of the kind of story that you would want to hear.
Alex: You said the episodes are fully self-contained. Given that it is a two-player podcast, you are more resistant to running in-jokes and back-references, because you do have a new cast.
Jeff: We’ve put in some in-jokes. I do love admittedly hiding Easter eggs in the show and referencing other episodes within episodes, just as a treat for me, as a way to make me laugh and as a treat for the listeners that find it. I don’t think anybody’s ever found the Easter eggs that are hidden in there but we do occasionally include a reference or two in the background just to see who’s paying attention.
Alex: Are you willing to spoil any of those?
Jeff: A topic that comes up on the show very, very often is professional wrestling, probably because I am broken and brain-poisoned in a very specific way. And I love more than anything name-dropping wrestlers that we created in other episodes to create the idea that all of these different wrestling stories are happening on the same circuit or happening in the same kind of indie wrestling scene. It culminated in a very fun way on our 300th episode. We played a game that was written for the show called Rumble. It’s a game about a wrestler trying to survive being in a 30-person royal rumble, and we then made every wrestler that was in that episode a previous wrestler that had appeared on the show—
Alex: You’ve had 30 wrestlers on the show?
Jeff: We’ve had at least 30 wrestling-themed episodes. The number might be 3 or 4 actual wrestlers as guests, but in terms of games we’ve played, we had enough to feature 30 wrestling-themed characters on the show. We play a lot of wrestling games!
Alex: For not being an explicitly wrestling-themed podcast.
Jeff: It’s just a topic I think too much about.
Alex: Part of that Rascal interview, you talked about how the show has matured. How did it start, and [in what ways] has it changed from that first episode to the most recent?
Jeff: The show’s origins really begin with producer of the show Jen Frank. When the two of us moved in together, had left a D&D group, and she had floated to me the idea of finding games for the two of us to play together. That was the two-player games inception of the show. The second half of that was we had been approached by a friend of ours, another podcaster, who was getting ready to launch a podcast network, and he asked me, hey do you have pitches? Do you have shows that you would want to make? And in talking with Jen she says the sentence that changed it all, which was “Hey, you play a lot of these two-player games, do you want to just do that?” This would have been 2014, so pre Critical Role, pre Dimension 20. Post One Shot, because that was the show that made me fall in love with actual play. But there just weren’t that many shows doing things in the space period, and there certainly weren’t shows featuring two-player games. It was a pretty novel approach.
Jeff: That was the origin point of the show. We both sat down and said we’ll make it until we get bored, and see where we go. We’ve got 10 years in October, and we’ll see if we get bored. But in terms of how it’s matured, the biggest thing [is that] we started the show with an idea that it would be sort of a comedy/fiction podcast in the way that a lot of the other actual plays that we were hearing at the time, and the explosion of actual plays afterwards kind of took the place of comedy fiction podcasts. Post 2020, that second wave of shows where it became dramatic fiction, it became narrative fiction, it became a storytelling medium. Where we’ve really evolved over the years and in the last two, two and a half years especially, is realizing we have a lot more in common with non-fiction interview programming than a lot of the more fiction-driven shows that I listen to that exist in the space.
Jeff: We’ve realized that we’re playing a slightly different game than a lot of the other shows in the space. And what makes the show work isn’t the stories being told on the fictional level, but the interplay between guest and hosts when a shared storytelling experience forces them to lower their guard a little bit. The magic of the show is ultimately when you as the listener are hearing two people share a moment that feels a little bit like you’re not supposed to be there, and like you’re hearing something maybe you’re not supposed to. More so than, oh wow I’m hearing a really great story that’s transporting me to another place in time.
Alex: The Hot Ones comparison really is apt.
Jeff: It feels right! Once that came up on a phone call with my dear friend Ned Donovan, that changed the game because we realized that is the show at its best, is when I have brought the guest to a place where they are showing a side of themselves that is novel to the listener, and we’re just using a game and a storytelling thing to do that instead of hot chicken wings.
Alex: How do you decide what games to play?
Jeff: This is part of where the Hot Ones comparison, or where the interview comes in. Ultimately it’s really driven by the guest more than anything. This has been an area where we’ve evolved over time. There was a period where a big focus for us was game designers playing their own games. That was great for a period but we’ve realized that the heart of things, the most effective things, are talking to a guest [and] getting to know who they are on a really personal level on a really direct, one-to-one level, figuring out what they’re excited about, whether that’s within games or whether that’s outside of games entirely, and then saying here are three or four games that fit that vibe. Here are three or four games that speak to a thing that you love that is going to force you to lower your guard and be excited in a way that is open and honest and vulnerable and bring you to the emotional equivalent of that space that you’re in when you’ve eaten the last dab.
Jeff: One of the reasons we’ve played so many wrestling games on the show is that’s a topic that I love a lot, and when I put it in front of the guests, we get to this place where we’re both so excited that you hear that, you hear it in their voice. It’s an easy fandom experience to latch on to where somebody lets their guards down, and is just gushing about the things that they enjoy. And to me that’s the secret sauce of the show, that’s my last dab is when I find a game and a topic where I can get you giddy and excited and occasionally crying, those are the things where I’m like, I’ve done the work, that’s where the system has done its magic. It starts with the guest, and it really is how can I identify the things that you don’t feel normal about, that you are unwell when you talk about, because I want you to talk extensively about those things on mic.
Alex: And wrestling in particular is always cranked up to ten, I don’t think it goes below 8. Do you have a white whale, a creator or a game that you would love to bring on that you haven’t been able to?
Jeff: I’ve got a thousand. I’ve got a running list. A big goal of mine this year is to [send] a lot more one-in-a-million shot emails. One in particular I will be very open about, a dream guest for me is John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats. As a creator that I like and admire, and who has made art that speaks to me, and has talked about enjoying games. To me, that is all the check marks of a dream guest. There are other, much weird guests I would point to and say, like yeah, obviously I would love to sit down with Weird Al Yancovic. I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to make that happen, but I’m certainly gonna try!
[Ed. Note: if you have the ear of either of these two, drop a line].
Alex: Taking the flip side of that question, is there a game you wish you could play, but couldn’t figure out how to make work for two?
Jeff: Yes, it’s the game I wrote and brought to Kickstarter and functionally couldn’t promote on my podcast. I wrote Mission: Accomplished! In 2017. It’s a comedy roleplaying game about spies and HR meetings. You play a team of super spies that are in a meeting with management after saving the world where they have to figure out who violated HR policy, who is getting fired, and who’s getting a promotion. I wrote this game, I designed it, I built it, and once it was done and ready to go to Kickstarter I realized it does not work with fewer than not two, not three, but four people. The joke structure of the game requires four players. A GM, who is the mission control, a manager to be the voice of upper management. There is a winner and a loser to the game, but it requires someone specifically to be the loser, to get what appears to be the bad ending. Someone has to get second place, the joke being that they get the promotion and the corner office, and the company credit card. And then it requires a person to do better and get first place so you reveal the actual punchline of the game, which is that that person did their job too well and gets shipped off to an extra-governmental training facility to be enlisted int he suicide squad. The joke of the game required multiple layers that you could not replicate with two people. And when I realized that, it killed me. [I said], well damn, this is what I’ve been doing for three years.
Alex: Is it ever a struggle to keep the show fresh? How do you stay inspired?
Jeff: Constantly. A big part of that is that we regularly take time off. Every six months, Jen and I will take time just to say, hey are we still liking this? Do we still like making it? Are we still vibing with it? How do we want to change it? Are we bored? What parts of the show bore us, and what do we not want to be doing anymore? Another big part of it is making sure that I am prioritizing taking those big chaotic shots and lining up the guests that feel like a crazy out of this world get to me. Because I’m certainly not getting paid to make the show, so making sure that I’m hitting the personal artistic goals that make me want to continue to do the thing. And one of those things is getting to feature cool people on the show that I admire who I feel like I get to kind of thank for doing the work that they do. And that’s a big way for me to stay excited, is to make sure that I have episodes in the future that I’m looking forward to releasing because I’m excited about the guests and games that we have lined up.
Part 2: Game Design
Alex: Hosting Party of One is not the only hat that you wear in the RPG space.You’ve talked about Mission: Accomplished! You’ve also done Anyone Can Wear the Mask. Can you talk about what other hats and roles you have?
Jeff: I’ve been designing games on more of a hobbyist basis. It’s not my primary thing, and I’ve realized over the years I don’t want it to be. I’ve been a games publisher for — God, I’m close to ten years — it’s been a wonderful experience. I’ve got a game coming out in 2026, 2027 called Canon/EYEs that is the thing that I’m the most excited about and the most terrified to put out in the world because I’ve been working on it for five years. It’s a game version of a book club about superhero archaeologists uncovering the secret magical history of the world and using that to dismantle an evil corporation with a smiling cartoon mascot.
Alex: I was going to ask for a pitch, but I didn’t need to.
Jeff: I got it in the chamber! I’m so proud of that game. It’s gone through a lot of iterations, it’s gone through a lot of emotional journeys. It was a game that originally wasn’t going to see the light of day for very specific personal reasons. It was originally a love letter to a specific pop culture franchise that I love by a creator who I wish would die in a fire. It was originally my love letter to this one specific comic, and then that creator came out to have abused dozens, if not hundreds of people, and so I said fuck this game it’s going in the trash. Only to kind of pull it out of the trash years later, sand off that creator’s influence, and focus it in other directions, and kind of refocus on the game’s true heart which is about the ultimate question of how do we take the pieces that matter to us from entertainment that has been sullied by forces beyond our control. It felt increasingly right to make that game and to release it into the world with that context and with that thematics in mind and say I owe it to myself and I owe it to the Jeff that cared about this game and this franchise and this content to do my own liberating of the game and the art that I care about from the hands of the person that I wish would die painfully on a toilet.
Alex: In the process of phoenixing the game, has it become more or less personal?
Jeff: Probably more personal I think that it’s found [a new] angle. It started out as like here’s what I love about this one specific comic, and it has become here’s what the act of creating art means to me, and here’s what draws me to studying pop culture, and the act of loving art and the social creation of art, and all of these things. It has become a much more personal and visceral and meaningful thing for having been phoenixed from — it’s originally kind of a lark, a thing I designed as a lark that became a thing that I designed because it was personally relevant.
Part 3: Supers
Alex: Talking about superheroes, it seems like you are a fan of the genre, but not, — if I’m mischaracterizing you, please correct me, — but it seems like you’re not a fan of Four Colors in terms of comic influence.
Jeff: I love some four colors! My college degree is in superhero comics, I’ve followed the form my entire adult life. I love the larger-than-life of it, I love the aspirational fantasy of it all, and I like when that manifests in a four color context. The thing I bounce off of, that maybe comes across when I’m skeptical, is that it’s impossible to say that there is not a degree of idolization of a specific status quo when it comes to picturing a particular pastiche. I think I bounce off of a particular dishonesty of loving superheroes for what they are, loving superheroes on a surface level, versus what they really truly represent to me as somebody that has spent his entire life neck deep in the form.
Alex: What is it that appeals to you about the genre? Is it that aspirational culture?
Jeff: In the history of superhero comics there is a distinct subtext that they are a power fantasy for the marginalized specifically. They are — in their earliest iteration and this runs through the entire hundred year history of the form — the conception of the superhero was the creation of two poor Jewish kids from Cleveland watching [Adolf] Hitler rise to power in the late 30s dealing with a terrifying threat of rising fascism both locally and internationally and imagining a person, an entity, a construct that would look out for people like them. That is a pretty straightforward picture of Superman’s origins and that thread runs through superhero comics and that myth — I hesitate to say mythology because I kind of hate that designation — but the folklore of that I think is what keeps me coming back. The blending and use of the fantastic to foreground this beautiful kind of power fantasy of the oppressed and the marginalized and the ordinary is what I love about it. The thing I push against is when that becomes cop shit, when that becomes a defense of an already broken status quo.
Alex: I like that answer.
Jeff: I’ve thought a lot about it!
Alex: I want to pull that thread one more time. Superheroes are often reactive, they are maintaining the status quo. Someone does something, they stop them. Can that be adapted in, say a TTRPG, without removing agency, or getting to cop shit?
Jeff: The thing that I would challenge there is the reactive nature of heroes does not necessarily have to be in response to someone violating the status quo. The status quo itself can be the element that prompts a hero to react. The thing I would point to is Action Comics number one. The first thing that Superman does in action comics number one is beat up a domestic abuser, threaten a pro-war politician into backing into de-escalating a military conflict, and I believe it’s like threaten a corrupt politician. Those injustices, those very real injustices can be the thing that they react to.
Jeff: This is why I think I bounce off of pastiche, and why a lot of four color stuff I bounce off of, is because often those violations of a status quo are implied to be the actions of individuals that are acting against societal interest, as opposed to what I think is the far more fruitful thing, and where superheroes really gain a sort of magical power is when those manifestations of the violations of a status quo are not inherently disruptions of the status quo, but are representations of the ways that the status quo is already broken. Kingpin is a person who could, in the real world, have real power. Lex Luthor would, in the real world in front of us, have unimaginable, untouchable power. The magic of superheroes is that when you present this very real way in which the status quo is already broken then that superheroic element becomes changing a status quo for the better, or challenging a status quo. There’s the critique that that becomes unrealistic because we can’t completely upend the world. But I also think that comic books are — I’m gonna say this with having a degree in comic book lit and 20 years of reading them — they’re stupid stories for babies and children. The joy of it is the unrealism of it. The unrealistic element that you can punch the concept fascism [as opposed to individual fascists] in the face is part of the magic of it. I do not demand real world implications from it because I am not turning to superhero stories for a practical guidebook in how to oppose fascism in my life, I’m looking for the inspiration in how Superman helps people and how I can adapt that into my own life, not a one-to-one comparison.
Alex: You want them to fight the machine, and not just the face of the machine.
Jeff: Precisely! The best supervillains across the board are representations of the machine.