[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, this is Bloodied Porcelain.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: You may know me as the storyteller for Hunter, Wayfarer and Psion Apotheosis. What you're about to listen to is what we call a Hype Train episode for our talk show, After Dawn. After dawn is a show where the casts, storytellers, and even artists are interviewed about their roles in bringing the shows to life. Hype Trains, though, are dedicated to letting you, our listeners, know what to expect from an upcoming season of our featured show.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Hype Train.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Episodes are always released immediately to the public on day one, but our other episodes are released on our Patreon for a full month before they're released to the public. So if you like what you hear and you want to hear more, please take the time to look us
[email protected] HallowedHavenStudios. Thanks. Now on to the Hype Train episode for Scion Apotheosis Season 1.
[00:00:49] Speaker C: Good morning, Holodhaven family, and thanks for joining us for after dawn, where we talk to the creators and the players in our various games here at Hollow Haven Studios. I am Scott, and I am here with my friend Griz, and we're going to be talking to some people today.
[00:01:06] Speaker D: How we doing?
[00:01:08] Speaker C: Good. How are you doing?
[00:01:09] Speaker D: I'm doing great. Today we have an extra special guest. We're going to have Bloodied Porcelain, who's going to be the storyteller of our Scion game, Apotheosis.
How we doing, Porcelain?
[00:01:23] Speaker A: I'm pretty good. Nice to see you guys.
[00:01:26] Speaker D: Yeah.
Now then, this is going to be a wonderful episode because it is all about the absolute hype that we have for Apotheosis.
[00:01:39] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, it's going to be super cool. I think I'm looking forward to it. I've seen the art. It's all good.
[00:01:45] Speaker D: Yes. So I got to ask you just to get this started, why Scion for this?
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Well, I mean, the story that I'm planning to tell is a very distinctive, distinctly scion story.
I love mythology and I love urban fantasy, and scion is kind of like the perfect marriage of the two. In fact, if I had to put it into a genre, I would say it's urban mythology.
It's, you know, all of those cool mythologies that everybody loves to read about.
Aztec and Norse and Irish and Greek and all of that kind of brought into the modern day where the gods walk among humans and they have kids with mortals, and then those kids go on to be heroes and to fulfill, you know, to attempt to fill the shoes of heroes. Like Heracles and Achilles and all of that Beowulf. So yeah, I thought it was a very cool system.
So I put it on a list of systems that I was open to running, but I didn't really have any firm ideas yet. And I let the greater family at Hollywood Haven Studios basically fill out a poll and I went with the most popular picks. Sion was at the top. And just under Sion was Vampire the Discourade. And just so happens that Sion was the one that I got the best idea for between the two of them. So that's what I went with.
[00:03:34] Speaker C: The best idea, you say? What was the inspiration? What was the inspiration?
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Oh, goodness.
A lot of it just came from cracking open the books again and talking to one of my best friends who is also a fan of Sion, about some of the stuff that was in the lore and kind of kicking back and forth ideas and brainstorming until something stuck.
And then that very quickly snowballed into, well, if I went with that, then I could also pull in this, this, this, and this. And, oh, wouldn't it be cool if it connected to this piece over here?
And that tends to be how my mind works. I'm trying not to give away exactly what the story is.
[00:04:22] Speaker C: No spoilers. No spoilers here.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: But if I had to say, what do I pull Influence from?
American Gods by Neil Gaiman is the big one, the biggest.
[00:04:35] Speaker C: I was going to ask that one. Yeah, I was going to ask.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: But also I discovered Percy Jackson as an adult after I had a kid and was looking for books that I could give to my kid who was struggling with being on the spectrum and probably ADHD at the same time, and just sort of trying to figure out why they were so different and how to help them be okay with that. So I sat down and I read the entire series of books in like two weeks, mostly over the weekend between work weeks.
And I was just like, oh, that's a really neat idea. It was like American Gods just scaled back so that it was a little bit more child friendly and in a lot of ways a little bit a lot more fantastical than American God says. So I feel like Scion kind of hits that perfect sweet spot between the two.
[00:05:37] Speaker D: That's awesome.
Okay, so given that we are trying to hype this up, but at the same time, no spoilers and you're pulling from them and no spoilers and you're pulling from Percy Jackson, American Gods, can we ask for like a kind of a brief overview for people who haven't read up on it. Like, what can we expect lightly story wise, you know what I mean?
[00:05:59] Speaker A: If we're talking about themes, themes and tones, I can tell you that my intention is that this season for hhs, this particular story is going to be very, very intense, very high octane, very kind of in your face about the clear and present danger that the characters are in.
With Wayfarer, I sort of allowed the story to go through these, like, peaks and valleys with intensity, which I did on purpose. You know, I wanted the players to have a chance to kind of really get into character and kind of explore, like, their interpersonal relationships a little bit more. Because it's going to hurt so much worse when I kill them later.
But with.
[00:06:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: But with Sion, with Scion, like, kind of the whole point of how it is to be a demigod, to be this person with divine ichor in your veins, is fate has this immediate and constant pull on you and is kind of always dragging the big bad, nasty things in the world to you so that you are forced to face them and reckon with them.
Because that's where the stories of myth and legend comes from.
So my thought was, well, what better way to introduce especially a lot of my players, Most of my players have never played Sion before.
Several of them had never even heard of it before seeing my ad and were like, they didn't entirely know what to expect. And I was just like, well, you're definitely going to get a crash course because the whole point of this is to take them out of the frying pan and directly into the fire where they're going to start as mortals and they're going to very quickly find out that they're more than mortal and yet still very easily killed. And they're gonna have to kind of grapple with that, with the clear and present danger and the constant threat to their lives, while also trying to figure out who they are in a world that is going to be very Alice in Wonderland for them for a while.
[00:08:28] Speaker D: Sounds like a bumpy ride over there.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. That's the intention.
[00:08:33] Speaker D: Oh, yeah.
[00:08:36] Speaker C: How long?
How long? Sorry. How long should we expect this high octane, like, jaunt through modern myth and legend to be so that we know how long to be following?
[00:08:47] Speaker A: Oh, well, I don't know if there's going to be a season two. A lot of that has to do with what the players want to do and where the story ends up by the end of the first season. But the first season is going to be 10 episodes we play weekly. So it's about two and a half months.
[00:09:06] Speaker C: Okay.
That's not too long. I mean, if you're used to following these kinds of things. Right. That's relatively short in comparison to certain other giant shows that people watch.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't have the longevity that the greats like Matthew Mercer have. I just don't.
I fell in love with the shorter form of things that you see in a lot of, like Dimension 20, like LA by Night, where the seasons are much shorter and a little bit more scaled back. And I find that it's more digestible and it's easier to run personally for me to come up with a story that I can be like, okay, here's a very firm beginning, middle, end. It's not this endless thing where I'm like, oh my God, how am I going to keep doing this every week? I just don't have that stamina.
[00:10:01] Speaker C: Plus, if it's high octane like you're saying, that is going to be a decent amount of stuff to digest anyway, right?
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Oh, for sure. Yeah.
[00:10:10] Speaker D: Yeah, sorry about that. I was like, well, granted, but at the same time, 10 weeks, some of your players haven't played the game yet. How has it been, you know, putting all of this together? Because it seems. That seems intense by itself, let alone the actual running of the game.
[00:10:30] Speaker A: It's been a little stressful.
Not really because of my players. For the most part, my players have been pretty fantastic. They've been very prompt about getting the things that I need them to get done done.
The intensity has been the tension and the stress has come from just that. I have a lot of moving pieces I have to manage.
For those who maybe haven't spent a lot of time with HHS before, I'm one of the founders, so I'm not just running my show or my game. I'm kind of like the person who manages most of the stuff here at the studio.
Including this. Including this.
So I'm sort of the person who kind of has to make sure that things are getting done when they need to get done. So when you take that and add on to it the fact that I've got a fairly large scale endeavor, I've branched into things that I did not do with Wayfarer with Apotheosis, where I've been like, oh, well, I learned how to do this, so I'm going to try this out. Or I have this idea that I have never tried before, so I'm going to try this too.
There's a lot of going back and forth on that for me with this. So it's been. It's been fun and I'm doing it all during the holidays, which has been great because Wayfair ended and then I was just like, oh, thank God, I've got three weeks off. And then I went, oh, God, I've only got three weeks off.
But I've had a lot of fun in spite of the stress of it. It's been a lot of just moving at a breakneck for three weeks, and I imagine it's going to continue at a breakneck for the next 10. And then I'm going to take a really long nap, hopefully.
[00:12:31] Speaker C: Well, it sounds like you're getting ready for the long haul. So what are you most excited about with this game?
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Oh, the cast.
I have a fantastic cast of players, and beyond just the players, I have a rather large cast of SPCs, guest players who all know who they're going to play. They've all worked really hard on the characters that they're going to be portraying, and sheets are basically done for almost all of them. I think we've got one that we have to wrap up, but that particular SPC won't be showing up until about halfway through the season. So I'm not super stressed about that right now, but I'm really excited to have this stellar group of voices that get to help me breathe Myth into the mundane.
[00:13:30] Speaker C: That was a very cool way to end that whole bit there. I like that.
Breath into the mundane. Very cool writing that for future use, for sure. Well, this has been great talking to you, and I really am looking forward to watching this one.
Being a player is one thing, but sometimes it's fun just to be involved by listening to what's going on and being part of the story in my head, essentially.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
And honestly, getting to watch the way people who watch the streams react to things was one of my favorite things to do with Wayfair. I loved watching the chat, so I'm very excited to see what the chat does with a show like Apotheosis, which is a very different flavor. It's not World of Darkness. It's not.
There is. There are going to be some horror elements because, let's face it, this is HHS and this is what we do. But it's not going to be like all horror all the time. You know what I mean?
So I'm really excited to see how people react. I'm super excited to see how my players who don't, especially the ones who don't really know anything about Xion, how They cope and what they think is going on. Because I've purposefully tried to build in some things to subvert expectations is even for. Especially, even for. But especially for my, my more experienced players. I've. I've got a. I've got at least one person at my table who has definitely played before quite a while. It was a while ago, but he's played before and he's got many, many years of experience on me and I've. I've purposefully tried to build into some, in some surprises just, just to, to get, just to see how he handles it. So.
[00:15:27] Speaker C: All right, well, listeners, you heard that participating and watching and chatting in the chat is going to be part of the show. So do it. That's my last bit. All I gotta say.
[00:15:39] Speaker D: All right. And with that, thank you, Porcelain, for doing this for us. I am so excited. Yeah, absolutely. So for everyone who was just listening in after dawn, we'll be doing future episodes. We'll be interviewing cast members, SPCs and of course Porcelain again, hopefully as soon as we can, and getting their low down on episodes afterwards. And this is how it haven't Studios Production, thank you so much for listening and Porcelain, thank you again.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:16:17] Speaker C: Hi everyone.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: For those of you who want to be able to hear after dawn in a timely manner every week, back us on Patreon. All of our episodes will be. All the full length episodes will be on Patreon every Thursday at noon for a month and then they will be released live. So if you wait and you don't back us on Patreon, you're going to be getting all of these a month after they were actually recorded, a month after the excitement from the show has already passed. So tune in there and we will see you later.
[00:16:55] Speaker D: Bye bye, everyone.
[00:16:58] Speaker C: Bye.
