[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, this is Bloodied Porcelain. 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 of 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 that we put on every week to life. Hype Trains, though, are dedicated to letting you, our listeners, know what to expect from an upcoming season of our featured show. Hype Train. 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 end up liking what you hear and you want to hear more, please take time to look us
[email protected] HallowedHavenStudios Thanks. Now onto the Hype Train episode for Scion Apotheosis Season 2.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Good Morning hollowed Haven family. This is after dawn, the show where we sit down to have a cup of coffee with the cast, crew and creators behind the Hollow Haven Studios Productions. I'm Sol and I'm joined by my co hosts, Griz.
[00:01:02] Speaker C: Hey, how you doing? I'm Grizz and today we've got a special episode. Instead of our usual sit down, we're going to be talking about Hallowed Haven's upcoming flagship show, Apotheosis. It's season two, a continuation of a Cyan first edition game. And to talk about that we are joined by bp, the storyteller for the campaign. How you doing bp?
[00:01:21] Speaker D: I'm doing pretty good. How are you guys doing?
[00:01:24] Speaker C: All right.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: I'm doing just fine as well.
So let's start off with a easier question. Could you give us a brief synopsis of what Apotheosis is for those who might not have seen the first season?
[00:01:40] Speaker D: Okay, Apotheosis is a Scion game and Psion.
The only way or the best way that I can describe it is it's modern mythology. It's like if you took Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Percy Jackson and you slam them together.
Same basic principle. It's a modern day world. There's a little bit of a masquerade a la vampire. The masquerade going on and the players play the children of gods from various pantheons.
Scion itself is kind of an adventure story where we and adventure and lore, heavy story where the characters get to in season one got introduced to the concept of being a scion, being born with Divine ichor by being hunted and nearly eaten by giant wolves from Norse mythology that were after their hearts.
And, you know, they. They kind of went on to.
They fought the wolves a little bit. They met, you know, they met an oracle. They met some dwarves, and they ultimately made the. Questionably, the questionable decision to instead of kill the Big Bad, to try to redeem him.
And that's how we ended the first season, was with basically, like, a court trial that the scions asked for.
[00:03:27] Speaker C: Caught you off guard.
[00:03:30] Speaker D: In the. Like, it caught me off guard when a play. When the player who instigated that entire thing came to me between sessions and was just like, hey, I know we've only got three episodes left, but have you considered we don't kill the Big Bad? And I went.
I mean, I considered him winning.
Like.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: Consider his continued existence with yours.
[00:03:57] Speaker D: Right. I didn't. I didn't consider you trying to save him.
[00:04:02] Speaker C: I can fix him.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: He's so damaged. I must fix him.
[00:04:08] Speaker D: And they. Yeah. So she mapped out what she wanted to have happen, and we had a. We had a discussion about it, and I made it very clear that I was not going to guarantee any level of success. I said that it was entirely on you. You could try, and this could still fail. It's not going to be easy. And in the end, they barely eked out a win. They won by a single vote.
And that vote was a toss of the coin.
[00:04:36] Speaker C: Ooh.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: From Ganesha, if I remember right.
[00:04:40] Speaker D: Yes.
She leaned hard into his position as God of Luck. And I said, well, if she's gonna do this, then I'm gonna flip a coin. So I did.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: So that's how it's gonna be.
[00:04:52] Speaker D: All right, then I warned them it wasn't gonna be easy. And there were a couple. There were. There were some good moves on their part, and there were, you know, there was one or two slight missteps, and in the end, everybody. Every other God, it was.
They were one for one on each side of the argument. So.
[00:05:16] Speaker C: Ooh.
Well, given all of that.
All right, so we know that Hallowed Haven has a tradition of placing all their flagships in that same kind of similar universe. The Hallowed Haven Cinematic universe. That's. I guess we're just going to call it now, is this campaign going to be the same universe as any of the other flagship shows or adjacent to them?
[00:05:41] Speaker D: Yes and no. Because our shows can and sometimes do, but don't always interconnect. All of our World of Darkness stuff, for the most part, takes place in the same World, maybe not at the same time. We've had some shows that were back in the 90s. We've had some shows that are modern. Um, and I made the decision during goodness, Season one of our Hunter game, Wayfarer, which was my first flagship show that I ran for us. I think I made the decision that one of the big bads and one of the players stories was going to be Loki of the Norse pantheon, knowing that if I ever ran a Psion game, I was going to have Loki missing from that world. And so when I finally decided to break out the bottle of champagne and crack it over the hull of the ship and run something in Psion, that was the first thing I decided, that was the first thing I set in stone, was that Loki had been missing for 30 years and nobody knew why or where he'd gone. And as it turns out, it was because he hopped through a portal and was in the world of Darkness and had gotten stuck there and was gonna need help getting back.
Which just got resolved in season two of Wayfair a few months ago.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: Oh, boy. So now. So now look, he's back with the cigarettes and milk that he went out for 30 years ago.
[00:07:15] Speaker D: Yeah. I don't know how big of a role he's going to play in this season. We'll have to see how the story goes. The players are going to be quite busy with some. With the consequences of their actions from the end of season one, and how much involvement Loki wants to have in all of that is kind of up in the air right now.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Understandably so.
So for those who haven't actually, like, seen the system at play, but might have seen some storyteller systems, can you tell us a little bit about how Scion actually works? Like how is it different from the usual vampire hunter, werewolf, any of those D10 storytelling systems?
[00:08:08] Speaker D: So the reality is that it's also a D10 storytelling system. So they're actually. There's more similarities than dissimilarities.
Scion has purviews and epic attributes, which are like the big thing that separate this system from other old White Wolf. Now World of Darkness or Onyx Path systems.
In World of Darkness and White Wolf games, especially, like Vampire and whatever, you have disciplines, and that's effectively what purviews are. They're kind of like disciplines, except that purviews are grouped together by theme, like earth and water and death and darkness and sun, things like that. And then you've got epic attributes, which are basically, they take your core stats and they make Them, like, properly epic. They're like, if you have dots in this epic attribute, you get things called necks, Naxir, basically, additional powers. Some of them are considered always on, like, they always just work the way that they do. Some of them you have to, like, spend legend, which is a little bit like spending like a blood point if you're a vampire, in order to activate them. And they let you do things like leap incredible heights or charm an entire room of people with a smile, that sort of thing. So the biggest difference, I guess, is mostly the epic attributes and the knacks, because they put the myth in the idea that this is a game about urban mythology.
They make the characters larger than life, I guess, is the best way to describe it until you've seen it in action. It's a little hard to describe to people who are not accustomed to having two different sets of strength points. That sort of thing makes sense.
The dice pulls in Scion also tend to get way bigger.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I remember that from the earlier season. Like 10 or 11 or 12 or more dice all at once.
[00:10:30] Speaker D: Well, okay, to be fair, when we got to 10, when we got to 10 plus, it was usually because they were. There were multiple people contributing to the role. It was, I'm going to do this thing to see if I can give that person more dice, which is a little bit baked into the system and a little bit homebrew on my part, because I like games where I promote a lot of team play.
You know, yes, it's cool for every player to have a moment to stand out, but I also tend to present problems that cannot be solved by one person. You've all got to work together.
And so that's what happened. And that's how we got moments like Sarah's baby driver episodes where, you know, she had everybody in the car with her, but everybody in the car was doing something different to help her be better at driving.
You know, I think it was Chris was spotting for her, and Koda and Oliver were doing things in, like, the backseat to help, and I had them roll. And then based on their roles, I think I, like, cut the number in half and I gave her that many extra dice.
And it just so happens that they rolled like, well, pun intended, like gods, and bumped her from like a 3 or 4 die pool to like a 10 plus.
But it was very cool.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: Fair enough.
Do you have any information about the cast for season two?
[00:12:00] Speaker D: I do.
So coming up. So this season we have Gary and Coda are recurring PCs that are coming back. We have a new PC, who is getting introduced, who's being played by Gavin Reed's words over on TikTok. He's amazing. Go check him out.
And we have a bunch of returning NPCs that are coming back. We're going to see Kareem, we're going to see Artemis, we're going to see Bastet, and we've got a bunch of new ones. Loki might show up, depending on what his player decides he wants to do and how he wants to meddle. Stefan is coming back, and I've added in some other interesting people. We've got someone coming in who's going to be playing Louisiana.
We have a special guest coming on for the first handful of episodes is going to be playing a fellow scion who's going to be helping them out because Sticker, who plays Coda, can't be with us for the first handful of episodes. So we have someone coming on who's going to play a guest role in the band to help even out the numbers until Coda can can join them.
Played by Stabby, who was in the Bed of Roses, which was our Witcher Chronicle.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: Okay, excellent.
[00:13:37] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
So I have to ask. And of course, this is a hype train. This is a hype episode. You know, we're all getting excited, so obviously no spoilers, but what are you most excited about for this?
[00:13:53] Speaker D: The consequences of their actions.
[00:13:55] Speaker C: Wow, that was fast. Okay.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: Jesus.
[00:13:58] Speaker C: That was aggressive.
[00:14:02] Speaker D: You don't understand.
They completely derailed my story at the end of season one, and I was happy for them to do it, but I, you know, there are gonna be consequences for what they did, and they're gonna have to deal with those.
[00:14:18] Speaker C: I'm sorry, we need to take the mic away from me. Just a little farther away. A little farther away.
Goodness. Yeah. Of course.
[00:14:26] Speaker D: I'm very excited.
I'm also really excited for all the new people.
We've got a bunch of new NPC voices, We've got a new player voice.
It's a lot. It's an even bigger juggling effort than I had to put in for season one, but I'm really excited.
[00:14:47] Speaker C: Anything other than the consequences of their actions?
[00:14:51] Speaker D: Well, I mean, like I said, I'm excited for the increased cast.
I'm excited for all the new people who are joining us. Bookkeeper is coming on to play Lou, and that's going to be amazing because he's just great and he knows a ton about Sion, so I'm very excited to have him in a role like that.
I'm super thrilled to have somebody like Gavin come on. That voice is just magic. And I'm just very happy to listen to it.
It's going to be distracting during sessions because I could just listen to him read the phone book, and it would be great.
But I will endeavor to carry on and not get too sidetracked.
[00:15:40] Speaker C: We'll have somebody ready to snap their fingers in your face, like, during session, like. No, no, no. Focus up.
All right. Yeah. No, thank you. I mean, that's a lot of energy there.
[00:15:55] Speaker D: Good God. I am most excited for the consequences of their actions. I can't give a lot of spoilers. There were some hints of what some of those consequences would be at the end of season one, which was stuff like, in order to avoid Stefan being killed and facing essentially the death penalty, they had to agree to some measures.
And a lot of this has to do with the fact that because they didn't get very many, they didn't get as many votes.
If they'd gotten an overwhelming majority or even a decent majority, it probably would not have been so hard on them. They probably would not have been so hard on them. But because it literally came down to a single vote, they were required to.
Stefan was locked away in Loki's cave and is effectively being tortured in a mini version of what his father, Loki, went through. You know, it's. It's short periods of time rather than all the time, because he would just die if he was subjected to the same stuff that Loki was for as long.
And in order to have a chance of him ever really getting out, the agreement was that they had to perform Labors for each of the pantheons, except the Norse, who don't get a Labor of their own because they get to keep him captive, they get to be his jailers.
So over the course of the next season or two, they get to go around and figure out what the Labors are and then perform them. And when they're over, Stefan at least has a chance of getting out again, assuming that he's been on good behavior. And they've done everything else that they're supposed to do. There were some other things that came up, some other agreements that single members of the band made with certain gods that they will inevitably be forced to reckon with.
And all of that is layered on top of the fact that they never really resolved the wolf thing in season one. Saving Stefan is all well and good, except that now Stefan's lieutenant, Gwen, is in charge, because she didn't die either, and she's a significantly less stable force than Stefan was.
Gwen is very angry and feeling incredibly betrayed and is going to hold back a lot less than Stefan did when he was running things.
So that's always going to kind of be like an ever present threat in the background that they're going to probably have to contend with now and then, even if it's not their primary focus anymore.
[00:18:48] Speaker B: Well, damn, it's gonna be rough for them then.
[00:18:51] Speaker D: Damn, it's gonna be a rough time.
They've got a lot to deal with and I'm excited to force them to face the consequences of their actions.
Teach them why they should hesitate before making deals with gods or agreeing to things without getting second opinions. Cough. Coda. Cough.
[00:19:21] Speaker C: No, that's not right. That doesn't sound.
[00:19:23] Speaker D: That doesn't track for her at all, does it?
So that's what I'm most excited for. Sorry, go ahead.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: It's all good. So when should we start expecting to be able to watch this campaign?
[00:19:44] Speaker D: Our premiere is October 6th at 8pm and just like every other show that I do, it's every Friday from 8 to midnight.
We may be off the Friday immediately after Thanksgiving. A lot of that's going to depend on availability of players and SPCs, but I'm hoping we'll get to play that night.
So we will have to see and we run through until the studio goes on break, which is the second week of December, I believe.
[00:20:31] Speaker C: All right.
Well, in the meantime, do you have any tips for people in the chat to get involved? Anything you want to see from the viewers?
[00:20:42] Speaker D: If you want to get involved, one of the best ways to do it, honest to goodness, is to join our Patreon.
You can listen to our behind the scenes stuff. You can, if you are at a high enough tier, you can vote on in game events.
You get to have priority when submitting questions for afterdawn. So if there's anything that you want to know from me or the cast, and you are a patron, your questions kind of get bumped to the top of the list and they're less likely to get dropped off of the list when the list gets compiled.
Other than that, pop in on the discord. Make sure that you're there for the streams. We don't necessarily react verbally during the story because we don't want to lose the pace, but we tend to chat back and forth with people who are listening in a lot.
And people talked about season one a ton on our discord, so I have no doubt that there will be a lot of that with season two as well.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: Looking forward to seeing it.
Well, I think that this is enough to hype up this campaign and I know I'm very excited to witness what's going to be happening. So we hope you all are as excited to watch the show as we are. Thank you for watching and as usual you can join us to have as we have a cup of coffee with the cast, crew and creators of Holidayn Studios each week. These episodes are dropped Thursdays at noon for the $5 plus tier on our Patreon and but they' released to the public a month later. So if you want to stay up to date, you have to be subscribed.
I'm Solomon, thank you for listening.
[00:22:33] Speaker D: Goodbye.
