Join us for a 1-hour LIVE watchparty of the very first episode of Into the Darklands, streaming early on VivaPlus on September 25th at 8AM NZT. Britt Scott Clark, Brynley Stent, Ben Van Lier, Adam King, legendary DM Robert Hartley, and director Ben Williams will be in chat, watching along with you live as the adventure begins!

When:
Wednesday 24th September – 1:00 PM PT (USA)
Wednesday 24th September – 2:00 PM MT (USA)
Wednesday 24th September – 4:00 PM ET (USA)
Wednesday 24th September – 9:00 PM BST (UK)
Wednesday 24th September – 10:00 PM CEST (Europe)
Thursday 25th September – 6:00 AM AEST (Sydney)
Thursday 25th September – 8:00 AM NZT

You'll also earn a limited time exclusive badge for being there from the very beginning... see you over on vivaplus.tv for the party!

Episode 1 will release as normal on October 2nd on Youtube!

Do we need to do some kind of Kickstarter to upgrade VLDL's air conditioning?? 😂

I can't wait for these players to get past the "I don't understand anything at all" phase of the game.

Oh, man. If Rowan had gotten a minute alone with his minion, he could have faked being the undertaker perfectly. Sometimes in Clocktower, being assertive about getting private conversations is worthwhile.

8:10 rob shitting himself cus he knows he shouldn't have said "evil corner"😂

I get that everyone is just pulling people off into conversations and also weirdly intruding on other peoples private conversations but the fact that the evil team haven't talked to each other privately in the first 2 days is not making me confident they can win this.

Genuinely annoyed at how invested I was in this by the end of the first video.

That call back to “Hot Rob” was gold. (The correct answer is best part is His Mind)

Rhi and Phoenix are so good! Rhi has great instincts! ❤💙

I've been seeing some confused comments so I thought that maybe this might help some people new to the game.

Blood on the Clocktower is a social deduction game in a similar vein of Mafia or Werewolf, but with two major differences: Players are never eliminated and every player gets a special ability.

NO PLAYER ELIMINATION - Death is not the end in this game, if you die, be it by demon or execution, you are still a full participant in the game. Your role is not revealed, you can still share info, talk to others, and help solve the game. The penalty for death is your character's ability is no longer active, you only get one final vote for execution, cannot nominate, and the evil team is one more player closer to their win condition.

CHARACTER ROLES - every player gets a special ability of some sort. There's no such thing as "just a villager". Some abilities are stronger than others, some actively hinder your team, but every character has some impact on the game and often a big piece of the puzzle is determining which characters are in play or not.

Each player draws a token (the bag in episode 1) which has 8 roles chosen by the Storyteller (Rob) from the "script" - The red phamlet they all have which shows the characters and their abilities. In Trouble Brewing (the name of this particular script) there are 13 Townsfolk, 4 Outsiders, 4 Minions, and 1 Demon for a total of 22 potential characters. It may seem overwhelming at first, but you're not expected to memorize all the characters, you can always read the script and ask the Storyteller for help. It's recommended for new players to play at least a few games of Trouble Brewing to get a hang of the game, then move onto Bad Moon Rising to get a feel for how deaths can be used to solve games, then Sects & Violets for wild plays and chaotic nights. Then if you ever get tired of those three, well, mix the characters up and create custom scripts. There's a ton of playtested ones online or try your hand at making your own. There's currently 135 characters released (75 from the base game and an additional 60 which can't be physically purchased yet but are easily found in the wiki) so there's a lot of different ways to build a script.

Personally, I think Blood on the Clocktower blows all other social deduction games out of the water. It solves my main gripe with most social deduction games where if you're killed you don't have to just sit around and do nothing - often times I find the dead players end up having the most conversations and get the most trust merely because they're dead, and surely an evil player would never be killed by the demon right? All the different roles mean you can play the same script and have a completely different game every time. I've run tons of Trouble Brewing games and there's still interactions and strategies that surprise me. The online community is great, I've rarely had a bad experience even with random players. The only real criticism I have for the game is if you want to play it in person, you do need a decent sized group ready for a 2 hourish game - so as always the scheduling is the final boss.

Judging by the obscene amount of commenters posting vain assumptions about the game based on their experience with Werewolf, you guys should’ve really included the storyteller spiel included in the Grimoire explaining how the game worked, the different character types, and the mechanics of death not being the end

The lack of communication between demon and minion is so frustrating, especially due to how powerful the spy is as a role! He doesn't need the demon bluffs and can create a perfect alibi until the imp jumps and could have made the demon's undertaker bluff work perfectly (because otherwise it's a horrible role to bluff)

fun show that ALSO doubles as a way to get to know more about the cast.

it's really interesting to see them interact with each other outside of their characters.

I like this series Thank you VIVA

when phoenix said "with cuddles" i imagined a clown named Cuddles

24:50 easily the most mind blowing part since the locket. I never knew that

I'm loving this so much!!!!!

When Rhi and Phoenix opened up to each other the chance of them winning skyrocketed

For the commenters who are confused as to why the dead players can continue to communicate... that's in the rules of the game.  The great thing about BOTC that sets it aside from Werewolf is that you can die but you are never eliminated. You still continue to play the game and share information and win or lose with your team. The storyteller will never reveal your character or why you died (in more advanced scripts, the WHY is as important as the WHO) so you still have to gain trust as a dead character.  The evil team wants to kill off the good team because they lose their special abilities, they cannot nominate and only have one ghost vote available to them for the whole rest of the game. Finding players to trust is important because no one player will hold all of the information by themselves so you need to figure out who you can trust so you can combine your information to win the game.

I don't know what's going on here, but I'm here for it!!