Bitten GM Jonny maps hope against zombie dread

Bitten season – As Bitten prepares to return for its third season, showrunner Jonny (TalkingXP) frames the next chapter as a promise you can almost touch—if your party can survive the cost of hope. The game opens June 9 on YouTube at 5 PM PST.

By the time the group starts talking about a cure, it’s already too late to pretend the apocalypse is only a backdrop. In Bitten, the horror is personal and the hope is dangerous—something the players chase with the full knowledge that every roll can turn joy into consequence.

For Jonny, the showrunner and storyteller behind Bitten (who also goes by TalkingXP), that balance is the point. “If you like The Last of Us. this is like that but in a fantasy setting. ” he told MISRYOUM Culture News in a conversation timed to the show’s season-three premiere. “That’s what I tell everybody. It’s dramatic, funny, and sad. It’s like a road trip zombie apocalypse story.”.

The series is built on a campaign frame created by Jonny using Daggerheart. and it plays like an unedited. full table experience: quips and above-table moments are present. but they’re not meant to smother the narrative. “Watching it, you feel like you are among friends at a table telling a story together,” Jonny said.

Daniel (he/him) stars as Roila the Wizard, Kujo (he/him) plays Torin the Sorcerer, Kelly (she/her) is Crucible the Ranger, Meadow (she/they) takes on Ilora the Seraph, and Mere (she/her) portrays Hava the Warlock.

Season three is set to begin June 9 on YouTube at 5 PM PST.

The opening of this story has its landmarks. Jonny described where the party sits now: “To get somebody caught up. I would say that the party where they are now is searching for a cure 20 years after the beginning of this apocalypse and they are getting very close.” Between them and the cure. there are “unknowable amounts of barriers. ” and the show leans into what it feels like to be trapped in the space between loss and relief.

Jonny said the series’ tone is shaped by grief that won’t let go. “The first episode hits really hard. there’s so much loss that everybody experiences. ” he said. describing how that sense of loss sets the tone for the rest of the campaign. Bitten, he added, is built around isolation and loss, but held together by “that flicker of flame in the darkness.”.

In his telling, the campfire warmth of hope is never free. “You have this one little chance of hope and in drastic change which something that they all catch on and immediately rush after. ” he said. “That was the end of season one. They found that promise of the cure and now they are chasing after it.”.

The show’s zombie-fantasy blend also carries a recognizable echo of other monster-driven stories—especially the idea that the threat is corrupting. Jonny compared Bitten’s inspiration to the white walkers from Game of Thrones. while drawing a clear line between the two. “Outside of Game of Thrones which has the white walkers. they’re sort of similar in terms of like it’s it’s a corrupting force. ” he said. “But there’s a lot of intelligence with the white walkers that you don’t really see in our story. I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t some inspiration from that.”.

He was also clear about how long the concept has been gestating. “I was going to do this in D&D before actually, then Daggerheart came out at around the time that I wanted to start this campaign. Learning how the system works and how flexible it is. This is exactly what it needed to be.”

That systems-level fit matters in Bitten because the bite is the hinge between life and turning. Jonny said he ran into a problem when he considered the idea in D&D: there wasn’t a clean way to model the “bite mechanic”—the fact that a character is bitten and is going to turn. With Daggerheart, he pointed to the armor system. “You can decrease how many health points you mark based on your armor which is perfect for a zombie bite. ” he said.

He described how it works in practice: a player can “mark as much armor as you want—so if you have five slots and you need to take out two of them. for the next one you only have three and then so on and so forth until you don’t have any armor left.” For Jonny. that structure captures the real tension of a bite: “This perfectly encapsulates how dangerous a bite is and how important it is to have armor and be able to stave off those bites.”.

He also highlighted the mechanics of hope and fear. saying he played Daggerheart during the beta and loved how they influence outcomes. “The story always changes with every single roll you make,” he said. “Even if that means that everything is going great. eventually you will be getting to that point where there’s a cost to success.”.

Where other systems might keep tension external—through monsters or geography—Bitten builds it into the table’s decisions. “Being able to bring the absolute terror into my players when I say yeah I’m I’m gonna spend a fear for this. ” Jonny said. describing the moment when dread becomes a choice. “It’s so fun. at those very important moments in the story to. ‘Okay we’re gonna we’re gonna turn this up to 11. let’s let’s see how bad it really can get.’”.

The way Jonny mapped the campaign also explains why Bitten’s story doesn’t rush past its emotional beats. When asked whether he planned to take Bitten into multiple seasons. he said the original pitch was bigger in one sense and simpler in another: “I originally pitched this as. ‘Hey. you want to do like 10 episodes start off with?. Daggerheart’s birthday is coming up, we’ll do 10 episodes.’”.

Then the players changed the shape of the plan. “Of course the players bring forth these incredible stories that we have to delve deeper into,” Jonny said. “We are about halfway in to my 10 session plan with season three.” His initial story in his head was travel-based—“a few travel encounters. get to this place. move on to the next one. and then the final”—but time inside the fiction shifted everything. “It quickly turned into okay travel takes like one day per session and this is a week away in game time.”.

He credits the cast for insisting on depth. “This cast creates such good tension and story between each other that I couldn’t rush it,” he said. He described what he refuses to do even when schedules tempt him: “There was no way that I was going to stop and say. ‘Okay let’s wrap this super heartfelt moment. let’s put a bow on it and move on.’”.

Jonny said he’s the one bringing the world. but the players are the ones telling it. including “the weight of the conflicts that are unfolding in front of them.” “I never want to rush them in anything because that’s where the gold is. ” he said. In the end, the extra breathing room shaped the result. “It turned out so much better and more than I could have expected. We’re giving it breathing room and letting the story unfold naturally.”.

Bitten’s third season premiere arrives June 9 on YouTube at 5 PM PST. with the cast carrying a specific kind of momentum: not the kind that guarantees safety. but the kind that makes retreat feel impossible when hope is finally within reach. And for Jonny, that’s what the table—and the apocalypse—keeps asking them to prove.

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