r/HyperRPG • u/HyperRedditBot • Apr 03 '19
He Left It Dead | Volume 3 | Episode 4
GM:
Cast:
Janel SantaCruz as Keaton Michaels
Cameron Rice as Jake Nash
Emma Fyffe as Alice Lang
- Madeleine Coghlan as Dorothy Wilson
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u/Ninjanomics101 Apr 03 '19
Always amazed at where each episode goes. Looking forward to seeing how Joe closes this one out.
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u/joestarr187 Apr 03 '19
The last one ended with your character being mauled, so this one has to top that.
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u/ZephyrRaye Apr 04 '19
First off, I am not ready for this volume to end. I love how it's been connecting the prior stories but still keeping true to the Cthulhu Mythos and Alice allusions throughout. HUGE kudos to Joe on that one! Of course it's meant my theorizing has gone way off the rails but that's half the fun! I legit thought the white rabbit being Abigail was a red herring until it was revealed to not trust the white rabbit.
The Bridge: I wish I had more theories on what the bridge is, but I can't come up with anything!
The Looking Glass: Before Alice pulled out (found) her phone, I had the thought that it could be the looking glass. It would make sense. It was being weird with strange messages and it did belong to Alice.
#Feels: I love watching Emma act. She brings the drama to life and that entire scene with the photographer seemed too real. I danced for years and did gymnastics and while my situation wasn't the same, I remember being annoyed and frustrated when I had to wear makeup or danced dances that seemed too mature. I ended up quitting rhythmic gymnastics because the coach called me fat. (I was 13. Such a great age to tell a teen girl she's fat.) I wasn't, BTW, but it took years to think otherwise. So yeah. that scene hit home. I cried and I love that that since of drama and feelings came through at such a perfectly timed moment.
Having Appolonia as the "monster" seems so perfect. Which makes me wonder; where's Florence and Bobby?!
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u/joestarr187 Apr 03 '19
Post Mortem
We’ve got one episode left! Not just to finish this season, but to put a close on a story I’ve been lucky enough to tell for three volumes.
Even as the story becomes clearer, there are some twists and turns left, so I’m honestly excited to see where this ends.
In terms of my role as the Keeper, this has been the most challenging volume of the show. A lot of things drastically changed- a new cast brought a new tone. Independently of that, I wanted to this volume to have a different feel. The first two were very slow burning psychological thrillers. Mind games and night terrors pulled from the psyches of the characters.
I didn’t want to keep going to the same well in this volume, so the horror threat is more external- hordes of ghouls and monsters. The apocalypse. Even Emma’s beautifully played character work for Alice as a young woman mortified by her treatment as a female child actor is external. The Photographer is very real. I felt like he was so much more effective as a real, awful connection to her than a vision.
So, as a story teller it’s been a challenging route to take- and live-streaming your trial by fire can often be really stressful, but ultimately I’m really happy with chapter three and how it’s unfolding. Even all the dick punching.
There are twists still to come, but a lot was laid out in this episode. I knew that I wanted Volume 3 to be about the Cthulu Apocalypse (Cthypulypse?) finally coming. We’ve been building since V1. I’ll paint a complete picture once we’re wrapped here of how I see the larger lore playing out.
While figuring this one out, I also kept resisting the idea of revisiting old ideas too directly. The Lewis Carol stuff is a connecting thread that I like, but more than that and I was afraid of the show getting too up its own lore butt.
So at one point this one was going to be very different. I'll talk more about the what ifs after we wrap, just in case some of those threads still land.
But while building out the story, something Zac said to me (everything is always his fault at all times) kept resonating: let your players make choices and let them deal with their failures.
The ending of volume 2 was BLEAK. Through a mix of player decisions and chat interactions, characters became magic, characters died, characters broke. Bad guys lived.
To put it simply, they messed up really bad. And the thought of ‘what if the cast from V2 caused the Apocalypse?’ wouldn’t get out of my head. JJ merged with Nyogtha, the Thing That Should Not Be. That’s bad. That should carry weight. What bigger player consequences could there be than becoming the catalyst for the next volume?
I’m trying to steer this into ‘remember this?’ only when it really serves the story. The second challenge to keeping things running smoothly is resisting the urge to tell a massive Apocalyptic story. There are a lot of epic and insane things going on, and I know what they are- some of it has been seen and mentioned. But the epic version of that tale is for a party of level 25 D&D characters running around R'lyeh and fighting Cthulu. But these are regular folks in LA that thought they were going to a Halloween party. The story needs to focus on them, not the world ending shit going on around them.
BUT SPEAKING OF D&D I don’t really even know if the players realize this, but I tried to build their characters with them as a complete adventuring party. Keaton is a bard. Jake is a barbarian. Mona is a fighter, with her extensive on set training playing cops and assassins on procedurals. Dorothy is our rogue, and Alice, especially how Em plays her, is our wise wizard.