And we’re back with our August blog! Where’s the summer gone? Where’s the year gone? Goodness me, it has been quite the whirlwind. The weather is starting to get a little bit cooler, so I hope wherever you are, you are comfortable with the levels of temperature you are receiving. Out here, things have cooled down a bit since that giant supernova turned the corner.
Let’s take a look at the August image, which you’ll see at the top of this blog. This was a tricky one to generate: a down darker trails prospector holding a Winchester rifle, investigating some slime that was coming out of the rocks. I was thinking of an “mi-go mine” sort of thing. AI doesn’t like producing violence, which I think is quite a good thing, but when you’re telling a story, it can be kind of tricky not to include these things. The man was simply holding a rifle to defend himself, so I had to tweak this one a little bit in Photoshop. I managed to get him staring at something in the distance, and you can see my original idea of the slime dripping off the rocks in the foreground. I had to draw everyone’s eye with the silhouette of a kind of werewolf-type monster in the background, silhouetted against the sunlight. In a storytelling image, you don’t really have to provide reasons for all imagery; it can just be there, and the brain will understand quite well what it needs to do with it.
Productions & Editing
Moving on to productions, we are back with the Miskatonic Playhouse, playing Kat Clay scenario. When you look at the Miskatonic Playhouse, both of the keepers separately wanted to run the scenario before we actually connected they we both by Kay! And we had a wonderful session the way it should be. We had four wonderful voice talent people with good quality microphones who knew what they were doing with their kit and game. Hopefully, that will be a very simple edit as opposed to the monster six-month-long edit that has finally just about been wrapped up in the month of August!
Games Played
That leads us then onto the loads of games that have been played. We had the final episode, the finale of the Eternals Lies campaign.
My character Ellie Bannister in her various guises!
This has been a very fun and unexpectedly fun campaign to do. This has been Trail of Cthulhu, so no spot hidden, no luck, no points, so to speak, no sanity losses, although it has comparable mechanics for each of these. We saved the world! It’s a campaign you have to go through, putting the clues together, visiting the sites, wondering what’s going to happen. It was a little confusing in its story, but I think that’s deliberate. When you think about cultures on Earth or indeed the Cthulhu mythos, you will have Cthulhu, Nkulu, and all the different names that the tribes know the Great Old One as. So it was good to have that confusion for our own investigators. Did we win? Yes! The mechanics of the game didn’t really help (sorry, Pelgrane Press) and there are a couple of little parts of the rules we bounced off, but the right thing happened. Then, because of the Trail of Cthulhu story system, it was left up to the players what happened to their character as opposed to rolling dice leaving things up to chance. We saved the world – with a bit of a sacrifice, but that’s absolutely fine as it was an NPC and a character’s sanity, and it was all good. We didn’t have to race through space and blow things up, instead it relatively was a quiet, calm, negotiating sort of final.
We then had great fun in the Orient Express. There is a villain on the Orient Express that has been plaguing us, sometimes they were a beneficial monster to us, other times not so much. In the showdown, which is predefined in the Orient Express usually happens on the train but when it happened for us, we were actually at a wedding! It was the poor wedding guests who were turned against us at a hotel we’d chosen for our recouperation. At every turn, our adversary was there, doing things with us, manipulating things. no spoilers here, but if you know the villain of the Orient Express, we did defeat them. My character’s medical skills were called for, as in a single round, two of the investigative party were “killed” – knocked down to zero points, suffering from a major wound and unconscious. It was actual triage situation for me as the player! I had to say to the players, “Who has the highest constitution? I’m going to have to save to the one with the lowest constitution first.” The character with the highest CON has a better chance of making their constitution roll and surviving to the next round when I could get to them because I can only treat one person at a time! Fortunately, it was a hard success on the medical and medicine rolls to save our engineer, and in the next round, I was able to make a… I failed a first aid roll, but I had enough luck to take me down to a success, and then another hard success on my medical roll.
When we were fighting, we were kicking ass we were rolling extremes. At first, we thought our engineer had done impaling damage with a shotgun for 76 points of damage, but unfortunately, you can’t impale with a shotgun, so it was ‘only’ 48 points. Our librarian had done impaling damage for 26 points. I had done impaling damage with a machete for 13 points. Adding to the mix was out Occultist using a certain little dagger from a certain little episode the she has been hanging onto – doing permanent damage with that little dagger. We were cremating the remains of the unfortunate that had been killed, and the villain rose up again and dissolved away in front of us. The keeper did say, “You have been successful.” So that was a little bit of a triumph, which was very good fun.
Last note on game play, I picked up the Call of Cthulhu bundle for the Alchemy virtual tabletop. I was a backer of Alchemy when it first came out because I liked the look of it and using the system was very cool. But as we all know, it’s an extra expense to buy Call of Cthulhu for your tabletop system so when Alchemy practically gave away Call of Cthulhu, I mean 18 credit units of your local monetary system for the, starter set, the entirety of Masks of Nyarlathotep, plus the Keeper Manual, plus the Player’s Guide, plus No Time to Scream, what’s not to like! The interface looks lovely and I must do a video on it as folks new to it that have only used to Roll20.
That’s about it for August. Let’s turn the page in the calendar and look at the September image. Ah yes, this is a gaunt goth woman standing in a church. Next month, September, it’s going to be all about the new games in which I’m going to be playing. Thanks for reading, and roll for sanity again soon!