jelloapocalypse
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The Big "Sweetwater" Breakdown [Patreon Exclusive]
🕑 Added 2023-08-20 07:48:46 +0000 UTCEDIT: Video updated and fixed! Thanks for your patience!
In 2019, during the development of Epithet Erased, I conceptualized another TTRPG I wanted to run. This one would be unlike my other games. It would be horror-themed, grounded in reality and suburban misery with player character death not only likely, but almost guaranteed.
Sweetwater had five players: Austin, Will, Mo, Savvy, and Christian. Their players were not in any kind of party. They would each play alone, unable to watch each other's sessions until the full thing had been edited together. In fact, players themselves were allowed to be killers.
I spent a literal thousand hours studying and preparing for this game, creating a murder mystery that could be investigated from any angle like a Murder Metroidvania. But alas. In the end, it was not to be. Scheduling conflicts, tech issues, and simply having Way Too Much Stuff To Do got in the way for years. And now, Roll20 updates have even destroyed the visuals of the beautiful maps I spent so much time working on.
I also drew over a hundred unique icons for this campaign from scratch. Because if you're going to have a murder campaign, everyone needs to be equally suspicious, which means they need to be equally unique!
Yesterday, 3 years after our initial planned start date, I finally sat all the players down in a call to tell them exactly what I had planned for Sweetwater. We go through all 60+ maps, talk about all the many characters and the many murders I had planned, and then tell the players all the ways I imagine they could've DESTROYED the campaign I set out for them.
This video is a flyover of 1000 hours of work, so obviously it is very long. I hope you guys enjoy learning about all this and seeing all my hard work, but before you watch, some content warnings! Sweetwater is a very mature production with themes of death, murder (including child murder), drug usage, frightening imagery, on-screen blood, audio descriptions of intense gore, and sexual situations. If you're ok with that, please proceed!
Here are some timestamps for those interested:
0:00 - Brief Overview
7:29 - Player Introduction
11:16 - Edited Prologue + Animated Opening
26:06 - Meet the Player Characters
50:00 - A Brief History of the Town
1:04:27 - The 1st Episode (Rowan's Story)
1:40:35 - The 2nd Episode (Police Investigation)
1:53:52 - The Mystery Hooks
2:02:55 - The Treasure of the Forest
2:32:05 - The Haunted Train
2:46:47 - The Death of Lilac Franklin
3:01:17 - The Core Mystery of Sweetwater
3:48:42 - Will the Real Murderer Please Speak Up?
3:56:14 - The Rest of the Maps
4:37:37 - The Rest of the Icons
4:41:55 - The True Killer
If you watch this video and have questions about this campaign or the characters, please leave them below! I could talk about Sweetwater and all its intricacies for twice as long as I did in this VOD. Also, I'll be uploading all of the icons and artwork here if you're interested in using them for anything. Axolotl patrons are also free to request a copy of this game on Roll20 so you can mess around with the maps. I was never able to run this game, but if you can reuse any of the assets, feel free! (NOTE: I cannot offer the edited visuals of objects I made because they were bought from packs and heavily edited. If Roll20 lets me transfer games to other GMs and it keeps everything in tact, you're free to use those maps though!)
![The Big "Sweetwater" Breakdown [Patreon Exclusive]](https://img10.patrefans.com/storage/3/lo/vw/563145-019e879d-3932-79ed-9540-d56544c33c41.jpg)
Comments
Cronomancer
“So this town has cryptids in it.” HMMMMMM
Cronomancer
Hmm… a small town in the middle of nowhere near a larger more prominent town with a lake and many mysteries abound. Where have I heard that before? I think I’m getting an Echo of inspiration. ;)
Fan Trades
If I recall correctly, Riley is a character from Anime Campaign that was supposed to be recycled into Sweetwater. Is there any chance of any Sweetwater characters being recycled into Epithet Erased or other projects? I could very easily imagine the Cafaros being one of Island Country's Trade Families, lmao.
JelloApocalypse
They're in chunks so I'd have to edit them together and tbh I really don't want to
Beckett’s Bricks and Broadway
Can you release the raw streams of Rowan, Janet and dark humor Percy’s sessions please
Chrono101034
This is so fucking good this alone pays for the 5$ tier
Arika
I'd love to be use the roll20 maps for a vampire game Im gonna be running! They are so well done!
Muse
This was so interesting and cool, I'd love to watch a mystery ttrpg ran with professional actors like this. Loved Eunice as a villian. Is there a reason you picked realism in terms of intense research for drugs and weather patterns etc? Did it help guide the creation of the mystery elements?
Kettle GB
What's the music that plays when the wickerman shows up?
psychogaze
It's sad that this project got shelved, yet Killer Frequency saw the light of day. Seriously though, you put a *lot* detail and thought into all of this! And boy do I now understand the plight of gms more than ever. I hope someday you can recycle some of the ideas into other projects. The coroner especially.
Leafalie
(slight spoilers for anyone reading comments) Finally made the time to watch this. Holy crap this is fantastic. You have an insane attention to detail and so many different connected plot threads. My favorite detail is that there is a cryptid and a cult and even ghosts - and none of them are really antagonists. It makes the world feel big! Not to mention the crazy amount of maps. So many maps. Sucks that the project had to get canceled especially with the amount of work you put into it. It would have been great. Thank you for sharing everything! Love your storytelling, and I’m yet again hyped for the rest of the epithet story to eventually get told
JelloApocalypse
The trick is that if you make a cop a main character then they need to be likeable and everybody fails this every single time and that's why True Crime sucks, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk
Chandler B
This was a really cool video; I would've loved to see your take on a true crime type murder mystery play out, but I totally understand and cannot blame you for deciding not to when your time is being taken over by other good but time-consuming things. The first 10 minutes also made me jump and, this is probably the weirdest thing that has stayed in my mind about the breakdown, but if the new type of chocolate the company made was real I would for sure try it; something with a cookies n cream, mint and vanilla taste sounds right up my alley.
verdragon 5
With the amount on research on meth Jello had to do, you might as well call this series Breaking Brendan, which, coincidentally, could also be the title for a documentary on the production of the first season of Epithet Erased
Markisgay
If this became like a book module I would pay a bajillion dollars to own it. God damn those maps are beautiful. I loved listening to all of this.
JelloApocalypse
Not especially. Will helped me build the bar and we did a little bit of riffing about Shots. He's essentially a quiet, dismissive guy who happens to be really good at picking up rumors. I don't think he was super close to a single other character in town. I sort of wanted a location for ghosts to gather if needed, and I wanted it to be a place like a bar instead of something stereotypical like a graveyard. There were a lot of PCs who I mentally catalogued early on as "important" and "unimportant" (Hannah and Rowan were important while Ken was super not), but Shots was the only one I was like "There's no chance of you getting involved with this mystery" and I stopped considering his involvement altogether.
Jau
Great video! Totally understand why it ended up cancelled, but god this would have been /phenomenal/ as a show. I wanted to ask because it was slightly glossed over - what was the deal with Will's third character, Shots? Is there anything more to him than being a bartender maybe-ghost?
