Welcome to the March blog here at Roll for Sanity – it’s been another month of creativity! I’m very pleased about getting a character creation video done, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start by talking about the header image that you see. It’s another one from the Roll4Sanity Calendar and can be best described as a “Playboy Fairy.” It wasn’t meant to be a Playboy fairy, but I’ve included it because of just the imagination of well, you can’t get away from that AI! It gave this character such great hair, reflections, background, the way the light falls and the figure.

The interesting part was that the prompt was to describe a cosplay person pretending to cast a spell. So when the image first came out, the hand was raised and obscuring the character so I used a technique called inpainting where you change part of the image based on its contents and I was able to lower the hand. I’m very pleased with this image and hope you like it too!

Playing Games!

What did we do in March? A lot! First off, we had more games. We finished our chapter on the Orient Express where we were finishing up taking care of business. While our Orient Express hasn’t been terribly violent so far because of the style in which we’re playing, this time round we had combat. I was quite pleased with my character’s gunshots as he finished off three combatants quite readily with his gun. Before that though we had a couple spare weeks as regular players were away so we player “Genius Loci” from the Doors to Darkness collection and also play “Unland” from Fear’s Sharp Little Needles collection. At the end of Unland, we made SO many good rolls, someone on Roll20 must have been having an all red game! We then rounded off the month with a flashback side quest to the Orient Express where our characters are roman legionnaires  and are investigating what could be described as a plague. Not entirely sure why you need the Falcone Legion to do it, but we have been tasked to do it.

Then, we had more games. The Singers of Dhols game wrapped up a little quicker than I expected which I felt bad about as my character made an action with what I thought was an hour or so left in the game and boom, it was the game ending action! Would I describe the scenario as a tad on the railroad? Possibly. The agency could’ve been stronger, but I enjoyed playing it and was a very good fun, weird little game. The following week I joined this group again with another Call of Cthulhu game I’ve heard a lot about – “The Code” by John Hook. I thought I’d played it before but realized it was actually “The Trap.” Now, I am playing “The Code,” and it’s a dinner party where you go there to enjoy yourself, but something happens, and things aren’t quite what they seem. Whether or not you will escape the house alive remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, on the other side of gameplay, we had the Eternal Lies campaign. Remember, this is the Trail of Cthulhu game, and our characters are taking it very, very steady. They’ve arrived at a new location, so it’s a new chapter, and now we’re in Malta! What a lovely place, with sunshine, great sea, not too many beaches… My character had some special skills when it comes to medical situations and was able to talk their way into the hospital but certainly persuade someone to help them and got access to a patient’s medical records. It’s quite good fun! We’re still there to cause chaos and in true Cthulhu fashion we’re looking for some dynamite!

Productions!

We are continuing with our Fast Talk and have released the amazing Bridgett Jefferies’ Fast Talk! A link to the page is here if you haven’t had a chance to listen to Bridgett yet. She tells us what to expect from the Chaosium Conventions that are coming up so go take a listen. We recorded another Fast Talk production this month that is going to be giving you the output (or rather, the results) of an Actual Play podcast survey which was done and had a good lot of good results. That’s on the next Fast Talk, which will be called “Up the Creek.” And I can tell you now, it’s a fun and interesting one to listen to.

We released a character creation videos for a Cthulhu by Gaslight character. I’m planning on doing these campaign characters, but let’s just say it’s a lot of work! In the meantime, because we had the Cthulhu by Gaslight Keeper’s Guide released this month, I wanted to do Victorian. It was really good fun but when I picked the Victorian Adventuress occupation, it wasn’t really coming together, but then I managed to think of the backstory, get an idea of what was going on, and the other character came together! It was really quite fun coming up with the characters’ narrative because of how they ended up having a Mythos experience. That was nice to write the backstory. So if you haven’t seen that video, a proper link to that is here.

Then we’ve been doing a few bits and pieces for “The Temple” explanation video. It’s coming along nicely, but I’m just waiting for a decent solution for creating consistent characters now. Just touching on AI a little bit, there are many ways that cost money or that cost a lot of time and money to make the story and at The Cosmic Outpost, we don’t have lots of time and we prefer creative solutions that are not too expensive.

We have scheduled – it’ll be interesting to see what you make of this one folks a video that I recorded back in January. We are doing a past-times video for the Gaslight era because you have your backstory sure, you have your character, but what do they do when they’ve just spent the day in the London fog defeating the Mythos? What do they do to relax. I think I’ve called it “10 Things to Do,” or something lie that but it was a fun one to research, record, and put together. And I hope you like it.

And if you’re reading this blog, thank you very much. It’s always nice to have eyes on my ramblings. I don’t expect anyone to read these blog posts, but I do like it when people stop by.

But that’s enough rambling from me for this month so let’s turn over the page and we have Cthulhu an old West gambler playing cards. That will be the next image you will see for the April update. I hope I’ll see you there, and until then – will roll4sanity again soon!