Welcome back to the Roll4Sanity blog for June 2026, and boy, has it been hot. I really do feel that our cover image captures the mood perfectly this month. The story behind it: I wanted to create some practical investigation videos that people could use should their characters ever find themselves in awkward situations. I remember playing Pipeline and having no idea what to do when stranded in the Arctic wilderness, surrounded by snow so I thought it would be useful to have that kind of information available for players. This image represents exactly that: our investigator, out in the middle of the desert atop a rather smug camel, trying to find their way to the adventure ahead.

Productions & Editing

This month we’ve really been concentrating on getting The Overhead Encounter finished. I do love using Syrinscape for sound, but sometimes you need something very specific – a 1980s card machine, the calibre of rifle fire from an M16, even the doorbell of an 80s service station. It’s been genuinely fun pulling all of that together. The audio edit runs separately from the video edit; the video side is a lot more straightforward, since there’s a visual element to keep people engaged, rather than relying on sound alone to do the work.

The Phobia Shorts are continuing too, and we’re well into the C’s now. They’re proving to be a bit of a headache, mind the video file formats keep causing problems. Slow but steady progress.

Adventures Played

We had the final, final session of Horror on the Orient Express this month, and my character, Celia Rutherford, was able to be, I don’t mind saying, be a little bit of a badass. The situation called for some genuinely horrific measures, no spoilers here, but she dispatched some very bad people and looked rather good doing it. The finale presents you with a terrible choice: stay, or leave, even when leaving seems like a bad idea. My character got dressed up and walked through that ‘door’ with a gun in one hand and a champagne glass in the other, took care of business, and it was thoroughly satisfying.

What I wasn’t quite prepared for was how much the characters had earned that ending. Even though this final adventure was relatively short, we had four very different characters who came together, solved a mystery, survived, and came out the other side changed by it. They all ended up gathered around an art gallery – one whose exhibits all represented the horrors of the Orient Express campaign. Genuinely poetic final words for the whole thing.

I do want to try and carry this group on into Masks of Nyarlathotep. It’s quite an undertaking, but we may just need to wait until everyone has the free time to commit. If we do go ahead, I suspect we’ll skip the summer and pick it up again as the nights draw in and there’s less daylight to enjoy.

Conventions

It was lovely to be a guest at A Weekend With Good Friends, the online convention run by the Good Friends of Jackson Elias community. I got to sit and chat with people about favourite adventures — I mentioned how much I enjoyed The Hammersmith Haunting, and talked about others I haven’t had the chance to play myself but still rate highly, like The Tartarus Intercept. It was nice to be able to give people watching some sense of what we consider the standout adventures, because on the Playhouse we simply can’t play every submission that comes our way — there are too many. We have to run a scoring system and pick the ones that rise to the top, not necessarily because they’re objectively “better,” but because they’re more playable for one reason or another. It was a nice opportunity to stand up and recommend some genuinely great titles.

Forever GM

Over on the Forever GM side, our Masks of Nyarlathotep B-team — the backup characters, the also-rans, whatever you’d like to call them — finally got their moment in the spotlight. We sent them off on an adventure called Swamp Song, which you may have caught if you watched the Miskatonic Playhouse playthrough; it was only up on Twitch briefly. The backup characters find themselves in New Orleans, trying to attend a book signing by Jackson Elias, the author — except, in true Mythos style, Mr. Elias has gone missing. Through a slightly railroaded but enjoyable adventure, they end up in the right places, talking to the right people, and slowly uncovering the truth behind his disappearance…

Looking Ahead

That brings us to next month’s calendar image. Let’s turn the page — and goodness, this is one I’ve wanted to create for a long time: Cthulhu, sitting in a bar, playing cards. We’ll do a full breakdown of that one next time. I hope you’ve all managed to stay as cool as possible while El Niño continues to remind us all what a force of nature really looks like. Thanks for reading, and we’ll Roll4Sanity again soon