#iHunting in the Cinema: How an Indie TTRPG Got the Big Screen Treatment

In this issue, we’re looking at iHunt, a new TTRPG project that you might see at a movie theatre near you.

 iHunt is an indie TTRPG and novel series by Olivia Hill and Filamena Young that uses Evil Hat’s Fate system to explore a world where hunters go after monsters in the gig economy. Earlier this week, Variety announced that #iHunt would be adapted into a film directed by Scott Glosserman and produced by Lilly Wachowski’s Anarchists United.

There’s also a TV pilot in the works alongside a vertical series. It’s a major step up after their short film got attention at film festivals last year.

TTRPG Insider spoke with Hill via email about how the film adaptation came to exist, what it means for the TTRPG, and more.

The interview was edited for clarity.

How did #iHunt come to exist?

I feel like I’ve always been working with my partner, Filamena Young, on #iHunt, even though it’s really only been 10 years. Everything I did prior was part of it. From working overnights at a Honda plant, going to school during the day, and working at a Mongolian Barbecue in the evenings, to working on games about vampires and werewolves and elves on motorcycles, to door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales, to being cursed at from the other side of a call center phone, to editing college essays on Fiverr, everything was prep and research for killing monsters in the gig economy. 

November 2016, some giant gaping asshole became the most powerful man in the world. I was working full time teaching. I was teaching community classes at night. Then, working on Fiverr. I realized I was grinding myself to the bone just to make ends meet, and these guys would never, ever be seen as the real monsters they are. So I wrote about being a gig worker killing vampires. It quickly became a novel. 

Then, since I worked on a ton of RPGs prior, some of my fans said they’d love to see a roleplaying game set in the #iHunt world. So we adapted it, trying to make it as biting and on-point as the novel. It blew up. We were living in Japan at the time, and thanks to Covid we had to leave. But #iHunt helped us buy our first house when we came back to the USA. 

When did you consider turning it into a larger media property? How did it get the attention of Anarchists United?

During the first year of Covid, some Hollywood friends and colleagues and I took it out and pitched it as a streaming series. We pitched to a dozen networks, and almost all of them loved it. But we kept hearing the same story. “We love it, but we can’t green light anything for the foreseeable future unless it’s a reboot of a safe IP.” So that didn’t happen.

But for the past four or so years with my friend Stirling Matheson, we’ve been working on a few avenues, centered on my feature film script. As it picked up momentum, so did we. We filmed a short called Loose Threads that’s won a couple of awards. Filamena and I filmed our own short called Nine, which was featured on Shudder. We hired a professional producer, Matt Skrobalak, with decades of experience. He’s been a godsend, turning these dreams into reality. Since then, we’ve started building a pilot for streaming and a vertical drama. We’re shopping them in addition to the film. 

Once we reached that stage and were looking for partnerships to make the movie happen, we reached out to Anarchists United Studios and Lilly Wachowski. They’re a queer-owned nonprofit organization with the express goal of increasing access to diverse voices in film. They’re also expressly equitable—everyone involved gets a stake. However, they rely on donations to keep supporting queer art.

They loved #iHunt and wanted to be a part of making it a success. Now, we’ve signed on the director of one of my all-time favorite movies, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. Scott Glosserman sat down with us and discussed #iHunt in a way that literally left me crying. He GOT it. He got it in a way I’d never seen anyone before. He talked about a lot of the subtler aspects, the metaphors and elements I don’t shine a huge light on, but were evident in the screenplay. I can’t describe how good it feels to have a personal hero praise your work on that level. 

What does the adaptation process look like? How involved are you (Liv) expected to be in the film process?

So NORMALLY, adaptation is a fairly one-sided process. You, the creator, sign an option agreement and a license agreement. Then, someone writes a screenplay and someone directs it. Sometimes the author gets brought on to consult or even polish the screenplay. 

But me? I grew up with indie art. I grew up with Anne Rice and Interview With the Vampire, in which she wrote, produced, and was heavily involved in the process. I grew up with Hellraiser and Clive Barker writing and directing it himself. My favorite bands all run their own labels. I also know a million horror stories of adaptations that just did the source material no real justice and ultimately ruined it in the eyes of the viewing public. So I decided very early on that I needed to be a fundamental part of the production from start to finish. I want #iHunt and my art to live and die on their own merits and my hard work. I’m a full-on producer. I have authority over casting decisions; I get to approve our director; I wrote the screenplay; I’m collaborating on the budget, the studios we hire, and everything from the bottom up. Once we go to production, I’ll be right there on set giving guidance to our director.

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Bringing iHunt to Other Media Properties

While you're in the early stages of iHunt's film development, how will this project affect the other aspects of the transmedia property? What does it also mean for the TTRPG?

We have a ton of great #iHunt material planned. And some that isn’t really PLANNED, but we PLAN to PLAN for them. Our 5.5 D&D hack of #iHunt exists as a little ashcan, and while I intended to fully flesh it out… I don’t really want to. Honestly, playing it does what it needs to do, and I feel like #iHunt fans can adapt their own material if they want to take it further. I’m proud of those, but as funny as it may be, I don’t want to be a D&D third-party company. I can’t do it if I don’t love it, and I realized we just don’t love it that much. 

We do have some very exciting plans for a #iHunt Second Edition. I don’t know that it’s going to be a FATE hack like the previous edition. The exciting thing is that this time we might not have to do it all ourselves. When we did the first edition, I did 100% of the art and layout, and Filamena and I each wrote about half of it. This time, I want to collaborate with other people to flesh out the world of #iHunt. I want other attitudes and perspectives. 

We’re also talking to some studios about collaborating on a few versions of an #iHunt video game project. These are too early to get into, but we’d love to work with a studio that has a cool, ambitious, and realistic vision for what #iHunt could be.

My other big desire is to do an Actual Play series with a solid production value. I really feel like that’s the best way we could show off a new edition alongside the various film projects. 

How are you and the team supporting you thinking about expanding into television, film, verticals and other aspects? It seems like a lot of work to balance.

My co-producer Matt Skrobalak is “an actual, literal wizard.” He thinks in Trello. He has a brilliant organizational mind, and working with him has really allowed Filamena and me to CREATE. It’s wonderful. In the past, the only reason we’ve been unable to do more is just that it’s hard juggling all that WHILE doing the creative work. My dream is to just lock myself in a room and let someone turn it into an audience and a bigger production. 

Before we started on the film, we would release a #iHunt “zine” every month, ranging from 20 to 50 pages. And that was fun and great, but from an organizational standpoint it was a nightmare. We were juggling so much material to publish and market, all while working on the NEXT material. 

Do you have any ballpark estimates for when we might see anything come out of these deals? 

It all depends on financing. There’s a dream scenario where we take #iHunt to AFM (American Film Market) next month and immediately find a sales agent who is also a financier. It’s actually not out of the question at all, but it’s the perfect grand slam version of the production. Then we’d be shooting the film in the Spring. Then… well, it depends on distribution. Which is a whole ass thing. We could see it Halloween 2027! But… NOBODY KNOWS!

Realistically, there’s no good answer to the question of when a pre-production piece of mass-market media goes live. Obviously, we’re pretty far along. We’re featured in Variety. But there’s always the chance everything falls apart, and we never see anything on screen. That’s a reality of every single production up until you’ve watched the credits roll. We don’t expect that to be the case. We’ve been met with nothing but excitement at every level. We currently have industry veterans reaching out to mentor us and welcome us into the business. We have genre experts telling us how excited they are to be fans of the final products because they're so fresh, interesting, and deep. We have people pitching licensed products and spinoffs. I think we really have something special here, and we’re SO excited to share it with the world.

Thanks to Olivia for chatting. You can check out her TTRPG work on itch.io right now, including #iHunt.

What are your thoughts? Send any scoops, tips or press releases to [email protected].