No D&D, No Experience Required: Inside Saving Throw Show's New Actual Play, Hellbent
Saving Throw Show's new actual play Hellbent drops the Dungeons & Dragons mold for a homebrewed weird-west system built from the ground up to welcome total newcomers — helped along by GM Jasmine Bhullar and on-screen pop-ups that explain the rules and rolls as you go.
Saving Throw Show, a veteran name in tabletop roleplaying content, is hoping to widen the audience for RPG "actual play" shows with Hellbent — a new weird-west series led by Game Master Jasmine Bhullar and built, system and all, for viewers who've never rolled a die in their life. Hellbent is currently releasing new episodes.
Actual play shows have traditionally drawn audiences already fluent in RPG terminology and mechanics — a real barrier for anyone curious but unfamiliar with the hobby. Hellbent is designed to clear that barrier entirely, pairing newcomer-friendly production with a homebrewed ruleset built specifically to be easy to pick up, whether you're new to the genre or a longtime player.
Hellbent is set in the Weird West — where the steampunk-cowboy energy of Wild Wild West collides with the gritty occult horror of Call of Cthulhu. Rather than reach for an off-the-shelf system, the show built its own rules on top of Free League's Year Zero Engine, layering in homebrewed additions designed to keep the dice cinematic and the story front and center. The rulebook is available for free on the Hellbent wiki.
"We wanted a system that gets out of the way of the story," said Dom Zook, executive producer of Hellbent. "The dice should make a scene more exciting, never bog it down — and that goes double when half the audience has never played before."
To back that up, Hellbent leans on a handful of techniques built specifically to welcome new viewers and keep the show feeling more like television than a traditional actual play: on-screen pop-up graphics that explain rules and RPG idiosyncrasies as they come up, episodes edited tightly for pace, a recap at the top of every episode, and an ongoing wiki fans can check instead of rewatching hours of footage to stay caught up.
Hellbent was shot in a small makeshift studio in Seattle, WA on a shoestring budget — pre-recorded and edited rather than livestreamed — with episodes averaging about an hour across an 8-episode season.
Joining Zook as producers are Rick Perry, a longtime creative producer on fan-favorite Dimension 20, and Jasmine Bhullar, a familiar face in the RPG community who leads the table as Game Master. Bhullar is a frequent GM and player on shows including Critical Role and Dimension 20, as well as her own independent actual play, DesiQuest.
With its alt-history setting, homebrewed system, newcomer-friendly graphics, and a tightly knit cast with chemistry to burn, Hellbent aims to be a new kind of actual play — one as welcoming to a first-time viewer as it is to a genre veteran.
