YouTube Actual Plays are a big deal these days. Groups of friends gather together to film their 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons playthroughs and, in doing so, garner rabid fanbases who fill Madison Square Garden. You may well have heard of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Critical Role and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dimension 20, but there are hundreds of other groups streaming their roleplays to the world. But one in particular is doing it the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Warhammer way.

OddVoid creators Dan Saye and Jamila Hall are A♛ustralian actors living in Canada, and have collaborated on many occasions in the past, dating back to theatre groups in their homeland. When Saye pitched the idea of a Warhammer Actual Play to Hall, she couldn’t believe it hadn’t been done befo💟re.

“It’s weird that it hasn’t happened [before],” Hall felt at the time and recalls to me via video call. ”That there isn’t a🧸 huge one already.”

However, there was a long way to go before Heretic Hunt, the first Actual Play from OddVoid, hit our YouTube screens. They had to figure o൲ut a game system, write a story, paint terrain and miniatures, and find a cast to bring it to life. With the latter, Hall had one major rule to follow: “The story needed to be told by people that really understood what 40K was and what that universe was.”

Assembling A Team

As well as creating the concept of Heretic Hunt, Saye acts as the Dungeon Master for the group and edits all the footage into approachable episodic💃 chunks. Hall♒ is similarly doing double duty, acting as the show’s producer and undertaking the role of Aedeva, the Inquisitorial retinue’s resident psyker and ballroom extraordinaire.

“We were very intentional about the people that we liked, that we would really want to work with,” Saye explains. He used his connections from the competitive Warhammer circuit – or as he calls it, “by being a big nerd” – to reach former Games Workshop presenter, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rogue Hobbies founder, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Gundam-obsessor Louise Sugden, who in turn put them in touch with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Chris ‘Peachy’ Peach. They chatted online and via WhatsApp for about six weeks 🧸before bringing in the final cast member.

Three days before filming started, voice actor Greg Jones came on board. You may recognise his dulcet tones from Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, but he’s also voiced Horus Lupercal himself as well as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a certain bear in Baldur’s Gate 3 (he’s credited🏅 as having an ‘onomatopoeic’ role).

“How could you not say yes to this?” he laughs. “I was just ecstatic because I've loved this universe𒉰 since I was 13. So getting to tell our own little story, it's just very exciting.”

The team met for the first time just a day and a hal🏅f before filming started, which they feel bled through into their characters, who were also meeting for the first time. While Saye had originally thought about making a group of Planetary Defence Force soldiers made up entirely of Fighters and Barbarians, the ragtag bunch of misfits worked better for narrative reasons. And when it came down to it, every decision i𝓡n Heretic Hunt was made to improve the narrative.

Choosing A TTRPG

“I chose D&D because first and foremost, I'm fluent in it and I like it,” explains Saye. “We all were aware of it in some way and we all liked it. It's the game we wanted to play. It's the re🍬ason we didn't do the series in French. I speak a li🧸ttle bit of French. I'm not fluent. So if we had to do it in French, it would have been a much more challenging experience.”

“Oui,” Peach concurs.

The decision to play out this Warhammer story in Dungeons & Dragons has pro💃ven surprisingly controversial. Fans of Imperium Maledictum, Dark Heresy, and other Warhammer TTRPGs have taken offense to the fact that their favourite wasn’t chosen for this Actual Play. While Saye owns and enjoys each of those systems, he and Hall felt none of them were the right call for a televised production.

“It would have mඣeant that the series was about teaching the players to play the game rather than us just telling a story [...]” he says. “We very early on decided that the game we played wasn't important. It was the story we told.”

Hall goes on to explain that she and Saye tested numerous systems, including Dark Heresy, Wrath and Glory, Imperium Maledictum, and Vast Grim, the latter of which she particularly enjoy⭕ed. They were atmospheric and crunchy, but which was the best for storytelling? It was only ever Dungeons & Dragons.

"There are some incredible GMs out ther🍌e, but I've got to say Dan is easily up there with them" - Gregꦚ Jones

But barring Saye, the cast didn’t have much experience with Dungeons & Dragons. Jones and Hall had only played it once before, and Peach had messed around as a Half-Orc during his time at Games W𒅌orkshop, as well as some Elder Scrolls-based roleplays with fellow GW alum Duncan Rhodes. Sugden was not able to join our call.

However, they picked it up quickly and, under the masterful ꧑direction of Saye, had soon got to grips with their characters and were tackling whatever their cunning DM threw their way.

“They were d🉐oing all kinds of weird stuff that I'd never seen,” Saye explains. “I've been playing D&D for years and years, a couple of weekly games. And yet they were reinventing the wheel every single time. That's the beauty of RPGs and the beauty of this story.”

Though new to the system, the 🦂cast does everything a good roleplaying group should. They adopt a pet, befriend an enemy, throw the DM’s plans out the window to the extent that Peach had to set up a terrain painting conveyor belt because they headed somewhere completely different than Saye had planned. One moment in particular sticks out to me, where Aedeva uses Compel to force an opposing soldier to waltz with her for the entirety of a combat (and the five hours and 57 minutes after). This is the sort of creative play that you might expect from a seasoned veteran, not someone just figuring out the rules of engagement.

“I've now gone and watched quite a few little online series of dᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚifferent productions and there are some incredible GMs out there, but I've got to say Dan is easily up there with them,”♌ Jones says.

Hall echoes these sentiments. “Why aren't there more shows and more Dimension 20s, more Critical Roles? The more I watched it, the more I was like, ‘because you need a Brennan [Lee Mulligan] or a Matt Mercer.’ [...] And I have 🐷one. As a producer, I was like, ‘we can make it because I've got one. It's Dan.’”

She praises Saye’s “insane trifecta of knowledge”, which consists ꦬof: a quick wit honed on the theatre stage, comprehensive knowledge of the game system, and rich ღexperience with Warhammer lore.

From Saye’s perspective, he’s just having fun with the game and universe he’s loved for d☂ecades. But he has one piece of advice for DMs out there: “make your players as excited about ཧfailing as they are about succeeding.” That’s how we get robots that can’t unlock doors and dance breaks in the midst of combat.

Adapting The Source Material

“We wanted to have fun with this and maybe be a little bit irreverent,” says Saye. “But you can't do that unless you actually care about the source material. You've got to know and love war 📖dollies. If you then want to muck around with it and not seem like you're just punching down or taking a shot at♚ something.

“We are very loose with the world that we play in and create, but under𝔉neath it, it’s a level of respect for the lore and deep cut understanding of the world that lets us do that.”

Like so much fiction, Heretic Hunt bends the rules of what we know in the 41st millennium. I’m certain that the Eisenhorn series would have been lambasted for inaccuracies if written by 40kLover69 on AO3 rather than by Dan Abnett for Black Library. The psyker isn’t a tortured soul and the Guardsman is disillusioned with his role in the Hive City, but this all allows for interesting characters to thrive and beautiful stories to develop.✨

"You've got to know and🃏 love war dollies" - Dan Say🎐e.

Peach and Sugden have such storied pasts in the hobby I won’t even bother explaining. Saye started playing Wa𝓰rhammer aged nine and Jones at 13, the former a lover of every flavour of dwarves from Fyreslayers to Votann, and the latter creating his own Mechanicus-aligned Space Marine Chapter, the Lectors of the Crimson Order.

It naturally made sense for Jones to play the Tech-Priest, then, but the cast leaned on their areas of expertise and gaps in their knowledge to inform their characterisation. Peach admits to not knowing a lot about the Imperium’s most mysterious machine cult, and specifically didn’t read up on them because his character, Earle Grey, wouldn’t have met many servants of the Omnissia🔯h before. Similarly, Hall’s Aedeva was an off-worlder, so her lack of experience with the 41st millennium could be a part of her character’s story, too. Once again, everything was about narrative.

Saye no🎐tes that every time Jones spoke in his Tech-Priest’s robotic voice, his recording software sent notifications telling him there was a glitch in the microphone, such was the quality of his vocal performance.

Hall therefore approached the show as she would any acting role: with intense research. She browsed Reddit, looked at miniatures, read novels, and leaned on her castmates’ expertise. When the shoot came 𒁃around, she might have been more prepared to enter Hive 𓂃Secundus than any of the others.

“I turned up with my notebook, this A4 book, and I had fully written out notes, lore, what everything was, [...] my color-coded tabs opened, my deck of cards,” she explains before Peach cuts her ofಌf. “She's like Hermione Granger,” he laughs.

“It was really comparable to playing a character in the Star Wars universe, but you've never seen Star Wars before,” she continues. “You hav♛e no idea what the Force is or what the Jedi are or who Yoda was.”

While she was a little more clued up on the Warhammer world than that, Hall also took inspirationꦉ from the miniatures that Peach creat🎀ed and (along with Sugden) painted for the series.

“I'd go to [Peach] with ridiculous c൲haracter ideas and a day later [he’d] be like, ‘so I built and painted this conversion of that character 🔯you were just talking about. It's okay if it's not right but what do you think?’ Meanwhile, there's beautiful hand-painted eyes on the drapes of a gown or something.”

The Future Of OddVoid

With the series fast approaching its fina⛦le – which the team promises to be explosive and unexpected to the point where it forced Saye, a veteran DM, to leave the table for ten෴ minutes in order to recover – I ask about plans for the future.

“There is absolutely a plan for se♐ason two,” Hall tells me. “When we set out to make this, it's al🐬ways been at least a two, if not three season arc.”

The problem is funding. As ever with fully independent productions like these, OddVoid needs to find a way to pay everyone involved 𝓀for Heretic Hunt to continue. Today, they’re launching a aim🐟ed at the most loyal viewers, which offers behind the scenes insights and nuggets of more OddVoid goodness.

“Our WhatsApp group chat is called 40K Love Island,” Saye says. The original idea for the show was to be a little more like reality TV, with cutaways to the cast talking to the camera. All of that was filmed but was left on the cutting room floor as Saye found it killed the pacing of the show. However, it makes for perfect Patreon offerings. You may also find out why Ginger was originally pitched as a (signi⭕ficantly less cute) Servo Skull.

Heretic Hunt’s suཧccess is clearly down to the hard work of all involved. Saye and Hall have treated thi💟s like they would produce a TV series, and it shows. The cast’s dedication to their characters, the universe, and telling a great story. At the end of the day, that’s what they’re all doing. Telling a story. And what a great story it turned out to be.