"True Tales of the Illuminati is the wackiest, most ridiculous fun. Get swept away into a witty, space-time spanning rollercoaster ride of Looney Tunes hijinks and cartoonish comedy. It reminds me of my favourite audio fiction comedies, from Victoriocity and Wooden Overcoats to Oblivity and The Amelia Project. If you want your ears full of laugh out loud audio mayhem, please help bring this project to life!"
- Ella Watts, BBC Studios, Doctor Who Redacted
Well, hello there.
In 2020, we created an audio sitcom adventure about conspiracies gone disastrously wrong--a show where we follow the misadventures of a band of Illuminati goons as they careen helplessly through history snatching defeat from the jaws of other, weirder defeats.
Our first season followed our protagonists as they tried, and disastrously failed, to keep the secrets of the pyramids in ancient Egypt. For our second season, we killed Stanley Kubrick, defamed our only non-controversial national heroes (astronauts, not that dog who fights fires)(also that dog is really ableist) and nuked our way to the moon.
Now, we want to take things back… to the 18th century, and show you what happens when our world-spanning conspiracy runs into a bunch of nerds in Bavaria, who keep talking about things like “truth” and “freedom” and “enlightenment.” A bunch of nerds calling themselves… The Illuminati?!
Tasked with taking down the low-rent secret society of their staggeringly prestigious counterparts, Beck and her team will face their toughest challenge yet. What’s thornier than manned spaceflight? Feelings! But what could go wrong? After all, some upstart group of monograph-publishing debate-havers couldn’t possibly compete with a secret order as old and vast as human civilization itself. Right?
But despite their confidence, they find themselves slipping into the world of the enlightenment intelligentsia… a world both decadent and deadly!
The money will allow us to record our third season in the beautiful Bridge studio, letting us achieve the ensemble-style chemistry we crave, nay, demand in order to make the perfect conspiracy entertainment experience. Backer tiers include rewards as exciting as selecting additional minisodes for future seasons, exclusive cut scene recordings from the "word graveyard," and sweet pins! That’s right, pins!
What We Need & What You Get
"One of the funniest scripted podcasts out there, with brilliant characters and a wildly imaginative world. We need more!"
- Tom Crowley, Wooden Overcoats, Victoriocity, Crowley Time with me Tom Crowley
Many listeners have bemoaned that True Tales only provides three [top quality, some say "lavishly produced"] episodes of content per season. Well, this season we outdid ourselves; there are five fully written and edited episodes of season three, bringing True Tales to the same length as a British comedy series! No longer will you be able to turn to us accusingly and say "This is even shorter than Ghosts!" Ok, it's still shorter than Ghosts. But only by 1 episode! Was Ghosts a good reference to use? Let us know in your donation note!
With bigger episodes comes a bigger budget, though, and right now our crowdfund will need $9,000 to produce all five 40-minute+ episodes. It's a big number, and we may not make it--we are committed to producing as many episodes as we can with what you give. If we only make enough for 3 episodes, we'll produce 3 episodes and then come back, begging and crawling and gnashing our teeth like the worms we are for you to give more to produce the ending. "Just throw us a few more bucks, baby!" we'll say. "Don't you want to know the big twist ending?!"
We know you do.
REWARDS
What, you want more than the warm glow of helping us achieve our dreams? You can get the following "THANK YOU!!" rewards for backing us at the following levels:
TIER 1: DIGITAL WALLPAPER($5)
Have you ever wanted to decorate your laptop, desktop, phone, digital watch, body, or other to show your devotion to the Illuminati? Well now you can, with appropriately-sized, beautifully made digital wallpapers! Wow! Now that’s fashion!
TIER 2: EARLY EPISODE ACCESS ($15)
Most listeners will have to wait for each episode to come out when the new season airs. You can listen to the full season all at once, a month before it airs, because you're a paying customer.
TIER 3: STICKERS ($25)
We'll send you one of our lovely die-cut stickers to put on your water bottle or in the streets of your sleepy college town as a thank you for supporting the show. Show off your sticker and say, "yeah, you got these idiot jokes because of me. And I have proof!"
TIER 4: WORD GRAVEYARD ZINE - ($40)
Whenever we write a season, we cut literal DOZENS OF PAGES of jokes, sometimes whole scenes or side-plots, and leave them on the cutting room floor. Then, sobbing pathetically, we shout "I'm so sorry baby! I love you, it's just not working out!", scrape them off the floor, and put them in a document known as "The Word Graveyard", where jokes too good to be lost to time are stored. We will compile a LIMITED ISSUE ZINE with cover art and commentary on the scenes lost to time JUST FOR YOU.
TIER 5: PINS ($50)
Bluff your way into the inner halls of power with an official Illuminati Pin bearing our logo and the illuminati’s oldest and most well known motto - Illuminati Ollominoto! Be careful, if you get caught they will kill you. Stamped metal! Nice finish! Union Made! SHIPPING IS NOT INCLUDED. OVERSEAS ILLUMINAUTS TAKE HEED!
TIER 6: CUSTOM CAST GREETING!($100)
Do you ever think to yourself, "I wish I was like god, commanding the cast of my favorite comedy podcast to speak my divine words?" Now you can be! For $100 you can get Beck, Jackie, Ishmael or Dal to record a very special message. Do shout outs! Manifestos! Your own True Tales fan fiction monologues! (note: be cool with this or it’s No Sale. So I guess you're more of an archangel? You read the bible and get back to us.)
TIER 7: PHONY EXECUTIVE PRODUCER CREDIT ($250)
Have you always dreamed of becoming an executive producer? Well this will almost help you! Be added to a special list of Phony Executive Producers in our credit roll. Now $$$affordably priced$$$. Don’t try explaining the whole arrangement on a first date though, they will leave.
TIER 8: PICK A MINISODE FOR BETWEEN SEASON 3 AND 4 ($300) (limited to five backers)
We have a long list of ideas for minisodes. You can pick one for us to write! Can you suggest one? You can, but you can only make us record it if we add it to the list! Your powers are, sadly, not limitless.
TIER 9: REAL EXECUTIVE PRODUCER CREDIT ($750)
The lie becomes real and reality becomes a lie! You’re officially actually an executive producer on this show! Not like those chumps from Tier 7! Pad your resume! Impress your friends! Seduce your gender expressions of preference! Your money is paying for a (pick one) full day of recording/a whole season of actor pay/a ton of sound design, and you deserve to be recognized for that.
TIER 10: YOUR PERSONAL MESSAGE IN THE SHOW (BE COOL) $1000
We reserve the right to request modification or refuse based on explicit content, promotion of certain products (including but not limited to investment products, AI asset generators, or military or defense products), etc.
OPTIONAL TIER: MAX OR KATE RUN YOU A TTRPG ONE-SHOT (limited to 10 backers) - $500
Have you ever wanted to play in a tabletop role-playing game but didn't want to be bothered with learning rules beforehand and all that crap? Kate or Max will run you a single-session of a comedy-themed RPG for you and the other backers at this level! Potential choices include Paranoia (Friend computer demands you choose this!), Fiasco 2nd edition (GMless, but we'll facilitate play), TROIKA! and more! Can you request an RPG? You can, we do not promise to run it! Will we run D&D? We will agree to run a game that has Dungeons and/or Dragons, but not a game called that!
STRETCH GOALS
STRETCH GOAL 1: PAY OUR PEOPLE MORE!
For our first stretch goal, we want to pay everyone who contributed to this project a better rate. Enough that the government will notice!
If we make it to $11,000, we'll increase what we pay our actors and sound designers. It's important to us to compensate our talent as much as we can with our limited cash! Right now we can afford “mates rates,” but this will let us pay them what would be an actual wage.
STRETCH GOAL 2: SEASON FOUR!
If we make it to $20,000, we'll produce a fourth season, without another crowdfund. Season 4 draft scripts are currently in progress, so for the folks who have been itching for more episodes, making this 20K goal guarantees we can start production on more episodes, set in the early 20th century and featuring the ones, and onlies, HARRY HOUDINI AND ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE!!!!
The Impact
"True Tales is a fantastic, hilarious workplace satire, perfect for the post-truth era."
- Henry Galley, Less is Morgue co-creator
This is a labor of love and a homegrown production made with local talent in a city with fairly modest creative opportunities, and every dollar pays an artist. We don’t run ads, and we don’t have a subscription platform- instead, we’d like to do it our way: keep putting it up free for anyone to listen, and do so by funding the whole project with your donations in one shot.
We’ve already released two seasons of our show; you can listen now if you want to see where your money will be going. True Tales is only getting better the more we make of it, and we’re going to keep making it for as long as you’ll let us. We love this show, and we hope you do too.
In fact, we love it so much that we're releasing all-new minisodes during this crowdfund! That's right, starting off with our launch, and then at $3k, $6k and $9k, we'll be releasing a new minisode to reward all of you out there for believing in us! The first one is already on our feed RIGHT NOW!
![]()
Risks & Challenges
One advantage of having produced our first season already is that we have a roadmap of how things can go right… and wrong. But we live in times even more unstable than a human Djoser-hedron, so the risks and challenges inherent to studio recording and producing creative work all definitely apply to us as well, including such disastrous scenarios as:
Another lockdown, which would keep us out of the studio. While we can produce minisodes and short content remotely, our experiences producing minisodes have re-affirmed that a studio process, where we can gather everyone at set dates and times to record with professional grade equipment and studio technician expertise, is what is best for our cast and ourselves.
A financial or natural disaster that impacts one of us, one of our actors, or our recording space. The first pandemic closed down the studio for over a year, and many studios were financially impacted. Studios might not be able to weather another financial impact of that scale.
An actor could have life or priority conflicts that result in their leaving the cast, a process that would require us to commit time and resources to deciding how to deal with their absence in our production and/or find an Illuminati-approved replacement.
Or some other form of completely unforeseen social implosion or financial implosion we cannot control!
True Tales is a production of which we're enormously proud and we're dedicated to producing more content. But there are, alas, some things even the Illuminati itself cannot control, and those things could cause significant challenges and delays. If only we had a working weather machine...
Other Ways You Can Help
Tell your friends! Tell your enemies! Warn your lovers! Tap your vast networks of media and entertainment industry contacts! Carry on about us online and ask people to give us their money! Make a piece of fanart! Please! We want fanart of this show so bad, that would rule! Anything you want to do to tell people about our show, we will appreciate and treasure.
There’s a laundry list of indiegogo share tools you can use right from this page. Help us spread our Illuminati propaganda far and wide. Illuminati, Ollominoto!