Deborah Ann Woll and filmmaker Ed Gass-Donnelly didn't sit down and decide to make a Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in a haunted colonial village. But when they stepped foot inside Toronto's Black Creek Pioneer Village with a loose idea in mind, the pair found themselves enchanted by the weathered schoolhouse, creaking staircases, and centuries-old buildings. The deeper they explored, the more the location revealed the story they wanted to tell. The fictional town of Woodcreek grew naturally out of a very real, very spooky place. Tales from Woodcreek was born.

“We just got so inspired by the place,” Gass-Donnelly told Polygon shortly after season 1 began airing. “Because this was a site-specific place and show, we really tailored a lot of the adventure to the location,” Woll added.

The 2025 series followed a tight-knit trio of adventurers — played by Anjali Bhimani alongside Dungeon Dudes creators Monty Martin and Kelly McLaughlin — as they worked to unravel the mystery of a centuries-old witch's curse hanging over Woodcreek. But Tales from Woodcreek almost never feels like a traditional actual play show. Players still gather around a table to roll dice and roleplay, but they just as often find themselves creeping through historic buildings at night, deciphering handmade props with a blacklight Lantern of Revealing, or solving puzzles woven directly into the environment.

The show also incorporated different guest stars for each two-episode mini-arc across its eight episodes, cutting together confessionals from the entire evolving cast with all the D&D gameplay and environmental puzzle-solving. Tales from Woodcreek came to blur the line between actual play, escape room, and reality television in a way that makes it feel wholly unique.

Woll and Gass-Donnelly always envisioned Tales from Woodcreek as an anthology, and had loosely settled on a second season inspired by the golden age of Hollywood. But much like the first season, the campaign didn't truly crystallize until they discovered a mysterious old mansion tucked away somewhere in Canada — and they refuse to reveal where.

"Our basic pitch was Clue at the Overlook Hotel," Woll tells Polygon, referencing the vast, eerie, and horribly haunted hotel from Stephen King’s The Shining. "We think we found our Overlook Hotel."

Gass-Donnelly describes the location as a sprawling 1920s-30s mansion that an architect spent the past 26 years painstakingly restoring. Complete with hidden passageways and strange architectural details, the house immediately sparked ideas for puzzles before he and Woll had even begun writing the campaign.

"Even just some of the wording that was written around the house, we were like, 'This feels like an escape room,'" Gass-Donnelly says.

Woll recalls spotting unusual symbols in one of the bathrooms and immediately thinking, "There's a puzzle right there."

In early July, the pair released a black-and-white teaser trailer for Tales from Woodcreek season 2 in which Woll appears wearing what looks like a flapper dress and talks directly to the camera (season 1 featured similar asides as recaps at the start of each episode). She speaks of a “ritzy bash!” at the estate of the motion picture moguls known as the Bickell Brothers. The Clue vibes are readily apparent, and season 2 is already starting to feel like a D&D murder mystery party. That trailer also confirmed a Kickstarter launch date of August 11 to support season 2. If all goes well, production is expected to begin this winter.

The puzzles, however, have already begun. Shortly after the trailer’s release, I received an unassuming brown envelope in the mail. Inside was an assortment of weathered and burned papers, along with one of the small burlap sacks used in season 1 as a clue. Inside was a small metal key. A letter from Woll dated 1929 had a cipher that led me to bickellbrosstudios.com where, after solving a Caesar cipher, I was able to log into the account of “Ms. Green,” the Bickell Bros. Studio’s receptionist. In a secret note from her, it’s made clear that something shady is going on with the Bickell Bros.

Subsequent clues, released as Kickstarter updates, reveal that several actors working for the fictional Bickell Brothers Studios have begun disappearing, transforming the campaign itself into the opening act of season 2. Were they kidnapped? Killed? ...sacrificed?

The latest update points to Dungeon Dudes (the channel that hosts the show) and Ginny Di (who is confirmed as a new core cast member in season 2), along with Legends of Avantris, Theatre of the Unaligned, DnD Shorts, and Taylor’s Tavern Tales. Each channel is expected to reveal more hints or clues about the unfolding mystery as part of an ongoing augmented reality game (ARG) that will lead directly into season 2.

Gass-Donnelly says the idea was to make the crowdfunding campaign feel less like a conventional request for money and more like an extension of the show itself.

“If we’re going to do a Kickstarter, how can we actually make the idea of the Kickstarter campaign a campaign in and of itself?” he says. “Even if they don’t give us the money, they can still play.”

For Woll, the ARG also offers a way to establish the history of this new setting before the second season has even been filmed. By following the clues and unlocking more pieces of the Bickell Brothers mystery, viewers will arrive at the eventual campaign with a better understanding of the people, places, and secrets that shaped it.

“We could begin to build the lore of this location so that through supporting the Kickstarter and unlocking all of these little bits of history of this place, you’re actually preparing yourself to have a deeper experience once the show is created,” Woll says.

That approach is also meant to preserve the handmade identity that defined the first season. Woll and Gass-Donnelly assembled much of the original show themselves, often late at night, with props built from craft supplies and practical effects held together by ingenuity more than money. Even if it receives a large amount of funding, the pair promise that season 2 won’t sand away that scrappiness. Instead, the Kickstarter would ideally give the team enough time and resources to make those ideas more ambitious — and to compensate the people making them.

“We will never not be scrappy,” Woll said. “But we just want to continue to evolve. Can we have bigger, more intricate props? And some of that has to do with just time. And time requires paying people for their time and their energy and their creativity.”

Gass-Donnelly was even more direct about the limits of the first season, which he described previously to Polygon as having been made largely through “sweat equity and generosity.” The production frequently pushed its resources to the edge, with cameras overheating, props barely functioning in time, and entire sequences dependent on practical effects that had little room to fail.

The goal is to ensure that Tales from Woodcreek continues to feel personal. Woll still wants to handwrite the letters. She would simply prefer not to be doing it at four in the morning. For all its secret passages, practical puzzles, and reality-TV flourishes, Gass-Donnelly also stresses that season 2 is not abandoning the tabletop game at its center.

“We never want the show just to become LARPing,” he says. “Some of our favorite episodes are still, at the end of the day, players sitting at a table. It’s just a table in a really cool location.” The challenge is to keep honoring what D&D is while also “completely flipping the table.”

The 1920s setting will certainly change how D&D looks and feels. Woll said the players will still use recognizable classes, spells, and mechanics, but they’ll be encouraged to reinterpret them through the technology and occult culture of the era. A magical effect might emerge from some peculiar piece of analog machinery rather than a traditional wand, while early photography, phonographs, electricity, and séance culture all offer their own form of low-tech wizardry.

“You can make this anything you want,” Woll said. “If you like old folk horror, if you like 1920s séance fodder, then you can make this anything you want it to be.”

Season 2 will also alter the cast somewhat. Bhimani, Martin, and McLaughlin are all expected to return, while D&D content creator Ginny Di will join them as a fourth regular player. Woll said Ginny fit so naturally with the original group during the filming of a promotional Session 0 that bringing her into the core cast became an easy decision. But there will also be celebrity guests that rotate in and out.

Woll described the series as an anthology that can shift between genres, eras, and locations while maintaining a connective thread back to the village of Woodcreek. (For season 2, at least one of the missing actresses calls Woodcreek her hometown.) Gass-Donnelly compared it to expanding outward from a single town into an entire county, where generations of characters and stories can spread far beyond the place where it all began.

Woodcreek may have started as a haunted village hidden inside a pioneer museum, but it was never really about the village itself. It was about Woll and Gass-Donnelly leveraging unique locations to bring D&D immersion to a whole new level. Season 2 is already taking things a step further with the ARG woven into the Kickstarter campaign. And “Clue at the Overlook Hotel” sounds like a terrifying experience I wish I was a part of. One thing’s for sure: I can’t wait to see what creepy secrets Bickell Manor has in store for the players.