Good Time Society has a Kickstarter for their new show, “Good Time on the Clocktower,” that actual play fans will love. Becca Scott, Good Time Society co-founder, hosts the show with a star-studded cast. The series features a group of talented performers playing Blood on the Clocktower RPG. As part of the Kickstarter, Good Time Society debuted two pilots.
Both episodes feature major players in the actual play space including “Dimension 20” stars Brennan Lee Mulligan, Aabria Iyengar, Rekha Shankar, Vic Michaelis, and many others. Each player takes on a different role in the town. Following the death of the most beloved person in town, Scott, they slowly weed out who they think the killer is. However, a few are working against the rest as the demons responsible for the murder.
In an exclusive interview with Temple of Geek, Scott explained why Blood on the Clocktower is perfect for a show. Scott also broke down the casting process and what she learned from filming the pilots. Scott shared how it feels to have the support of fans and the exciting stretch goals.
Why Blood On The Clocktower Is Perfect For An Actual Play Show
Temple of Geek: I love the first two episodes, the pilots that you guys released. This feels like a heightened version of the game werewolf allowing people to continue to participate even after they’ve been killed. I’ve played werewolf myself. When I got knocked out of the game early it became boring watching everyone else play while I had to sit on the sidelines.
Becca Scott: Steven Medway created Blood on the Clock Tower. He was inspired because he had a similar experience playing Werewolf. Which one night Werewolf can be very fun, nice quick, easy party game.
If you want to play a real game and dig deep, Blood on the Clock Tower is a way to get that truly immersive feel where everybody gets something juicy to do or at least can dig in or not as much as they want. It’s always important even if they have no idea what’s going on because that final ghost vote can make or break the whole game.
After falling in love with the game, why did it speak to you as the perfect show?
Becca Scott: I think I really wanted to film this game because it’s extremely difficult to film. It requires a lot of cameras, it requires a lot of microphones and it requires a lot of cast. It requires a lot of just footage and so not anybody can just do it and do it well. So it really is a way to showcase something really unique that Good Times Society is capable of. And also, it’s my new favorite game.
What inspired you to run a Kickstarter for this as opposed to your other projects?
Becca Scott: Truth be told is because we usually get stuff funded by the game publisher and [The Pandemonium Institute] just doesn’t have the resources to fund something at the scale that this game requires to do it well. Kickstarter or crowdfunding or Patreon or something like that is the only way this would be possible.
Becca Scott Talks Casting & Highlighting Smaller Game Companies
Temple of Geek: I love that you guys get to shine a light on a smaller company through that.
Becca Scott: Everybody that works there is amazing. [Jamie “Jams” Mercado] who’s in our videos is their full-time social media person as well as, I don’t know their specific title. They probably do a lot more. They recently moved to where the company is located and everybody I’ve met there is absolutely incredible.
You guys have already reached three of your stretch goals with, what does that mean to you?
Becca Scott: We’re two days in and we’ve already reached some of the stretch goals that we are showing. There is a maximum number of episodes we could do and we haven’t reached that yet. But the main stretch goal is going to be adding more episodes, which I’m really, really excited about. The more episodes we get to do, the more people I can bring in from other quarters of the internet and hopefully surprise guest cast will also become additional stretch goals we can offer.
But you asked how it feels. Sorry to not answer your question. It feels absolutely incredible. I’ve always known that the people who watch myself on the internet are absolutely amazing that have a really wonderful community online that supports what Good Times Society is trying to do, spreading joy of gaming everywhere in the world.
But just to see people put a dollar amount to what that means to them is really, really powerful for me. And I know that they’re speaking with their dollars to say that they support us and I really feel that love.
What was the casting process for the pilots? It’s such a great group with people, you can tell have played together and known each other a long time.
Becca Scott: Yeah, it is truly people who I’ve already played with a bunch, mixed with people that I just knew would be awesome at it. I was like, you have to play specifically because I need you in this video. Aabria [Iyengar], Rekha [Shankar], Brennan [Lee Mulligan], Vic [Michaelis].
I was like, not only do people just really want to watch them do anything, but I just knew that they have the type of personality and the type of brain that it’s so fun and funny to watch work like this. When I’m storytelling, get the unique advantage of seeing and appreciating all of their specific moves in the moment, which is so much fun for me.
I love Aabria just sniper shoting Brennan there.
Becca Scott: Aabria just immediately called him out. He can get nothing by her, but imagine if they were on an evil team together. That’d be too powerful.
Unstoppable.
Becca Scott: Good thing they are forces of good in the world.
Vic Michaelis Was A Must For The Good Time On The Clocktower Pilots
Temple of Geek: Are there any moments from the two pilots that really stand out to you as kind of moments where you’re like, oh, this is exactly why I wanted this to be a live play?
Becca Scott: Everything Vic says as the imp is a standout moment for me. And the reason why we shot in this specific week that we did was because VIP was shooting the week before and I was like, we got to move it because I really, really want Vic to be in it.
Because they had been the imp in a home game and I just saw the way that they seamlessly were talking as they selected their kill in the night, so no one suspected them and they just have this way of playing it so straight where if you know what’s going on, it’s like, oh, you’re so good and oh, how dare you say, oh, I’m the saint. Everyone’s going to think I’m evil. Right. So fun.
What from the pilots do you think worked really well? And what are maybe some things that you’re like, okay, learning from that, this is what I would do in future episodes.
Becca Scott: Thank you so much for asking this because I had a big hand in editing these episodes and I want to change so many things. I have a whole Google doc where I list them all, but not only do we have a lot more space now so we can create a lot more depth between the cameras and the players and we can have people spaced out further apart and we can do more with lighting because of the space that we now have.
But also people say such funny stuff in the night, so I’m not going to cover that this time. I’m going to let them know they can puzzle things out or talk about trebuchets, whatever they want to do. We could just cover what happens in the night in a subtitle. It doesn’t matter. To really highlight and build the drama. What definitely worked was people facing off, so finding out a new way to do that, but what didn’t work was the specific color of the spotlight.
What I knew when we were filming I would want to do completely differently is the set overall, we kind of just did, worked with what we already had and said, you know what? We’ll tell people when we have money to spend, we will have a full set. And what they’re getting is a taste of what the cast is going to be like and what the gameplay is going to be like. But I learned so much from doing these about all the things and ways I can elevate it in the future and some are going to be juicy surprises.
Do you kind of know what you want the set to look like going forward?
Becca Scott: Oh yeah. It’s going to be darker. It’s going to be mysterious. It’s going to be more shadowy. There’s going to, I can give this away. There are gravestones that are going to be in the set because people can buy their name on a gravestone as one of the backer rewards.
That’s going to be probably a private conversation area as well as really elaborate areas where people can chat. And then the town square I think is maybe not cobblestone, but maybe some stuff way better. I feel like we can really, with what we’ve already raised already do a really cool set.
Becca Scott Shares How Dropout Has Influenced Her As A Creator
Temple of Geek: Speaking of the rewards, some of them are such cool experiences that people get to have that you wouldn’t get in a normal just watching a TV show. What inspired things like getting to play it digitally with you or even coming to LA to play in person?
Becca Scott: Well, Chris Grace runs weekly games on his YouTube channel, Noobs on the Gooftower, which is the best name and jealous of it every day. But there’s a huge online community that plays online games every week, and so that is just a very achievable thing. I haven’t run many on there, but I have definitely been a player in a lot of them and the app is so streamlined.
So that’s actually a really easy one where I can take some of the players that are in the episode that are interested in just playing anytime and bring them together with backers, run it because we were given such a unique opportunity with this game to share it with more people and to play together in that way just seemed like a perfect easy thing.
And then the playing in person, I didn’t know it would be as popular as it was. We might be needing to add more games, but I’m really just floored that people were willing to support at that level and would be down to make a whole vacation out of flying to LA to play this game. So we’re going to make worth people as well.
What have you learned from your experience with Good Time Society and Dropout that you want to bring into this?
Becca Scott: I learned something new every time I’m in the Dropout studio. Just the way that crew are treated. I’ve heard PAs, production assistants say they have never been treated better on a set than on a Dropout set.
That is something that’s really important to me for everyone that works on my productions and comes into my studio, even if we’re not the highest rates in LA. But we want to make sure everybody’s treated with respect and paid their full day rate and walks away having a good time because we’re in this weird niche, extremely ridiculously fun industry. If people aren’t having a good time doing it, what is the point? Let’s just go do temp jobs.
Correct me if I’m wrong, that you guys moved to a new studio space.
Becca Scott: Yeah, that’s why this is plain and boring back here, but this is our conference room. Nice. Yeah, these are the games, but basically we took over what was a limo garage and so yeah, we definitely have area to work with. We’re making it more suitable for production because for production you need things to hang the lights from on the ceiling.
So that’s the kind of stuff that we have to work on installing bit by bit, but we have a lot more space than we used to. The pilots were shot, the walls are exactly behind the curtains you see, and we did not have much more room than that. It was a very tight squeeze to get that many people in frame in that space, and now we just have so much room for the cameras to breathe.
I always like when there’s depth of field in a shot, so you won’t know where the back of the room is because it will be lit in such a way that it’ll be so much more dramatic and we can do so much more in so many different ways. I’m so excited and I’m so grateful that we’ve grown to the point because of people’s support that we could move. It was very cool.
Becca Scott Talks Good Time On The Clocktower Stretch Goals
Temple of Geek: Are you looking at working with smaller companies like with this project in the future?
Becca Scott: If people are interested in us doing more crowdfunding, I don’t know if anything’s going to get this kind of support and reaction, but there’s only one way to find out, and I’m really excited to not only continue working with small publishers to do the sort of stuff we’ve done in the past that is promotional content, showing off people’s games, but also to have this other venue where I’m not beholden to anybody but the people who want to watch the content. That is super freeing for me because we can just have freedom to make cool stuff with no one having to review it.
I’m so excited. I don’t want to jinx it, but I’m like, you’re two days in, you already have four extra episodes.
Becca Scott: I have a feeling we’re definitely going to end up with more than the four we have today just based on the general trajectory of how these things normally go. And we still have 28 more days, so we’re going to definitely get to a few more episodes, I think, which it’s so amazing to just, you really believe in something and you put it out there and for people to accept it and say, yes, you’re right, this is a good idea. It is very rewarding.
“Good Time on the Clocktower” Kickstarter ends April 10 at 7pm PDT. You can become a backer for the series now.
