A Q&A With Venture Forth’s Shane O’Loughlin!
We celebrated spooky season by venturing into the Dark Heart of Andaluria with our friends at Venture Forth! And to mark the occasion we’ve asked one of their founders, Shane O’Loughlin, to reflect on the experience.
Dark Heart of Andaluria is a campaign frame from Daggerheart: Hope & Fear, that sees a sun-kissed, luscious landscape besieged by horrific monsters after dark. Read on to learn more about Venture Forth and their one-shot!
Tell us about Venture Forth and the folks who are involved...
Venture Forth has been creating weekly actual plays since 2020! We have hundreds of episodes across multiple campaigns that take place in our homebrew world of Elbor. We pride ourselves in a highly theatrical, immersive, and dramatic style designed with the audience’s perspective in mind!
It was founded by myself (Shane O’Loughlin), Rebecca Hausman, and Russel Bartek, and we’ve had the honor of rounding out the ensemble with the talents of Rodney Campbell, Seth Fowler, and Kat Harris Mojica.
Tell us about your Dark Heart of Andaluria one-shot in your own words...
The Dark Heart of Andaluria campaign frame is a fecund playground for us to explore darker themes, more gruesome aesthetics, and a lower level magic system than our usual high fantasy romps. Get ready for your skin to crawl and your heart to ache as we pull from some of our favorite influences like Bloodborne, Castlevania, Resident Evil, and the Witcher.
What was your experience of incorporating the Daggerheart: Hope & Fear expansion?
The new classes are to-die-for and I’m really impressed with how lovingly our players embraced their mechanics. The Witch’s ability to commune is a powerful storytelling tool, the Warlock’s Favor system presents incredible opportunities for the GM to flavor interactions and rolls with fear, the Brawler is an unstoppable force to set up climactic moments, and the Assassin has surprising flexibility to creatively solve problems. I also love the inclusion of the transformation mechanics and the new adversaries are all my personal bffs!
What do you think makes Dark Heart of Andaluria different from other horror-skewing TTRPG settings?
In a word, it’s sunny. Andaluria being a lush and bountiful land makes it more surprising, and in a way, more worth saving. The night is dark but when the sun rises this place is beautiful and full of life.
Do you have any advice for GMs wanting to set a suspenseful or spooky atmosphere for their players?
Buy-in is everything. If you try to scare your players without them knowing that’s the goal, you’re going to have an extremely frustrating experience. Tell the players up front “this is a horror setting, please don’t make a PC named Bobo the Clown.” You might get some resistance and it’s important to be flexible, but if you get your players excited about the idea of a novel setting that’s not the usual power fantasy they’ve come to expect, they’re going to be primed and ready to get the pants scared off of them. Also worth mentioning: boundaries, lines and veils are super important to establish up front!
Do you have a favorite new class, feature, or mechanic in Hope & Fear?
Honestly our cast has made each of these classes look both diabolically powerful and ripe for telling impactful, moving stories. If I had to pick I’d probably say the Witch – it’s so good at finding secrets and manipulating the battlefield, and there’s some game changing AOE bursts in there too!
You made a music video to accompany your actual play - where did that idea come from?
Since our start, music has been an integral part of Venture Forth’s identity. In our current campaign I play a bard who’s been chronicling our lore into songs every few episodes. As I started working on Dark Heart I had the meta idea “what if this story is a legend in another world that this guy is singing about” to create a tenuous connection between our campaign and this actual play. Actual plays at their core are about creating a sort of shared head canon, and the audience gets to choose what they keep – songs have a similar openness to them, so it was just too good of an opportunity to pass up!
You can check out Dark Heart of Andaluria in Daggerheart: Hope & Fear which is available everywhere now! And check out Venture Forth’s Dark Heart of Andaluria one-shot on their YouTube channel!
Dark Heart of Andaluria art by Shaun Ellis