The End Is The Beginning Is The End Of Kollok

Games The End Is The Beginning Is The End Of Kollok Rob Wieland Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I am an author and game designer writing about tabletop RPGs. New! Follow this author to improve your content experience.

Got it! Jun 26, 2022, 10:57pm EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin HyperRPG teams up with AMC FearHQ for KOllOK, an interactive surreal horror experience. HyperRPG As in so many aspects of tabletop gaming, Dungeons & Dragons is the king of actual plays. The most famous of these is Critical Role but there are hundreds, if not thousands that have followed suit.

Role playing games no longer require someone new to be brought into the hobby by an old hand. They can watch their favorite game being played via a few clicks on the Internet. The actual play is still a form of entertainment in its infancy and it’s already changing.

Many actual play casts are branching out away from D&D and showing off the wide variety of games available to play. The team at KOllOK (pronounced COAL-lock) is blurring the line where television show ends and actual play begins. “Our big goal on KOllOK, ” said KOllOK co-creator Zac Eubank, “is how do we take this kind of content, which is improvisational storytelling with dice, and make it appealing to a broader audience? To make is appeal to your average Netflix viewer?” Eubank has been in the actual play game since the beginning.

He helped launched the actual play movement while at Geek & Sundry as one of the original poducers of Critical Role. Now he’s partnered with AMC’s FearHQ to push the boundaries of actual play into something entirely unique. MORE FOR YOU ‘Demon Slayer’ Season 2 Finally Has An Actual 2021 Release Date Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ Season 2 Not A Sure Thing, Says Director ‘Genshin Impact’ Still Refuses To Increase Anniversary Rewards, Despite Fan Outcry “We went into this from the start saying this is not a mechanics based story,” said Eubank.

“We spoke directly to the creators of Kids On Bikes and they were like ‘yeah, go for it, we wanted a narrative based game. ’ A lot of indie games focus on do whatever you want, just tell a good story. This is my tenth year of making actual plays.

The more we do it, the more we try to deconstruct it down. ” MORE FROM FORBES Build A Better Magic School With The Kids On Brooms RPG By Rob Wieland KOllOK uses Kids on Bikes as the core of its gameplay, which was inspired by the so-called “kids on bikes” genre that covers adventure stories like The Goonies, E. T.

The Extra-Terrestrial and the Netflix juggernaut Stranger Things. The show began as a strange little town story about Kollok, Washington but has blossomed into something much weirder. One of the key components of these turns are the show’s secret weapon: the Twitch chat is always running and the creators are not afraid to take a suggestion from the audience and run with it.

MORE FROM FORBES A Look At The Role Playing Game Behind Amazon’s Latest Series By Rob Wieland “[The audience is] heavily influential,” said Eubank. “I don’t see the point, as a producer, doing this live on Twitch unless there is interaction. If I was going to pre-record this and not have audience interaction I would make a short film.

If we’re going to do it live on Twitch, I want to use the tools that Twitch is providing as an advantage to enhance the story. ” The most recent season has taken a more surreal turn. The story has gone from a small town like Hawkins to something more surreal and horrrifying like Twin Peaks.

The penultimate episode, Council of the Gods , features a massive cast of streamers, voice actors and other nerdy celebrities playing the powerful figures looking down upon the world of KOllOK. “We’re bigger, everything’s bigger, everything’s more ambitious,” said Eubank. “so let it be the gods of this world.

We literally messaged the nerd gods; Markiplier, Mari Takahashi, Troy Baker. We went all out. We went all out to try to get as many of our nerd gods in a room together.

It’s a lot of big personalities to manage but everyone was on top of it. ” The season finale is scheduled to air on AMC’s FearHQ Twitch channel on Monday, June 27th. The creators hint that what’s in store will not only encourage new viewers to go back and watch from the start but also reward longtime viewers with payoffs and questions answered.

“KOllOK is, in and of itself, a mystery show,” said Eubank. “I always try to tell people who are just now discovering KOllOK, they are just now hearing about it, it’s okay to be confused. The people who have been watching this show for three years are just as confused as you.

It’s built that way. It’s built to make you ask questions about what’s happening. I can say that things are going to happen on Monday that people are not expecting.

Some of it has been hinted at from day one. ” Rob Wieland Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.