Hello, and welcome back to the August blog. What a hot month it has been, but more on that later. Really glad you’re joining me for this one; it’s been quite a month. We’ve had a solar eclipse and, sadly, some real losses too, which we’ll come to shortly. But first, our calendar image.

This one is my tribute to a very cheesy 80s song by the London Boys called “Chinese Radio” a Eurodance duo who sadly passed before they could really get going. “Chinese Radio” tells the story of someone on a sanity-fuelled trip through their own mind, unsure whether they’re coming or going, and I’ve imagined it here as a Delta Green agent lying in his hotel room while his astral form looks on, perhaps searching for someone out there, waiting somewhere in the rain, you can read more here – My Chinese Radio. I’m really pleased with how this one turned out; lots of lovely parallel lines, which AI models don’t always handle well, and always worth checking, the correct number of fingers throughout!

Productions & Editing

It has suddenly become a very busy month, thanks to a secret production I can’t say too much about just yet but hopefully we’ll be able to share more around Christmas. What I can tell you about, is a special production for the Miskatonic Playhouse: we’re running through Vermis, with a very special guest joining us – one of the best Call of Cthulhu YouTubers on the internet. I get to actually play in this one myself, which is a treat. Vermis is a long one, more of a mini-campaign than a single scenario, and the sessions are running long, we’re probably looking at 20 to 25 hours of audio to post-produce by the end of it. I’m still working out how long the individual episodes will be; certainly longer instalments, just to get us all the way through what’s proving to be a really fun game. Even if the temperature in the studio was over 30 degrees!

It’s an interesting experience playing a game while also producing it. You end up thinking about things like: is this a good moment to break? If there’s a hiccup, where exactly do we pick back up, and how do we make sure that doesn’t look clumsy in the edit? And of course, there’s both an audio and a video component to think about for the Playhouse release. Between Vermis and the secret production, that’s my editing schedule pretty much locked in through to Christmas. I did also hear last night that Mr Whisper Season 3 is getting underway though realistically the editing on that will have to wait until next year. If we do start recording, I’ll need to brush up on my London accent.

Adventures Played

I had the privilege of being asked to playtest a scenario that a Keeper known as Steph is taking to NecronomiCon in America. It was a really nice take on the “underground dwellers” trope — I’ll leave the specifics vague, as the scenario deliberately keeps the telltale signs of what those dwellers actually were out of the early game, and it leant nicely on some genuine local folklore. My character was a Time Team-esque figure, more interested in the history than the money, while the other players were corporate types who had great fun pushing their own agendas as they uncovered increasingly hideous goings-on. Hopefully Steph will put this one out on the Miskatonic Repository, because it’s a genuinely fun scenario to play.

We also started a session of Delta Green, as you may recall — we’ve paused Masks of Nyarlathotep until schedules line up again, so we’re filling the gap with Delta Green in the meantime. The scenario we’re playing is Convergence; I hadn’t heard anything about it beforehand, but it’s a properly X-Files-flavoured piece of Delta Green. I had great fun building my character, whose actual name currently escapes me, but whose codename is Doctor Megablast. We’re set in 1996, so he’s an Amiga obsessive — drawing rather shamelessly on some of my own real-world nostalgia, since I always wanted a proper Amiga with a Video Toaster and all those graphics capabilities, and to be able to knock out tracker music in the style of the Amiga-era classics of the time. The sound capabilities of that machine really were second to none, and it’s been fun channelling that nostalgia into the character. Will he survive? I genuinely don’t know — apparently Convergence can be a fairly deadly scenario, and we seem to be doing well so far, but we’ll see how that holds up.

There are also a couple of other games on the go at the moment that I can’t talk about yet. What I will say is that it’s been personally rewarding playing a character of faith this time round, yes, folks, I do believe in God, and while I wouldn’t call myself the best Christian going, I’d still call myself one. In this live-and-let-live sort of world, I hope that’s not a problem for anyone reading a blog that otherwise deals in cults and eldritch gods!

Conventions

Miskatonic Repository Con is shaping up to be a lot of fun. There’s a good selection of panels lined up, including one on podcasting, and others covering various Call of Cthulhu topics. Last year we had Paul Fricker join as a judge for the Miskatonic Repository competition, and I believe he may well be returning for that again this year.

Do make sure you attend if you can as it’s a genuine treat to get to play scenarios run by the very people who wrote them for the Repository. While it’s always great when a Keeper runs someone else’s scenario well, there’s an extra dimension entirely when the author themselves is running it for you. Having played Viral and now being partway through Vermis, both run by their author Alex Guillotte, I can vouch for just how much that adds to the experience.

In Memoriam

Before we move on to next month’s image, a more reflective note. We had a beautiful eclipse this month that I hope you managed to protect your eyes and catch it and on the same night, the Perseids gave us a scattering of bright stars overhead. I mention that because this month we also lost three genuinely bright stars of our own.

First, we lost Dolly Parton. If you don’t know who Dolly Parton is then you might like to find out. To me, Dolly was an institution of pure loveliness famously self-deprecating about her own glamour, always in on the joke, and somehow both larger than life and completely down to earth at once. She made it not just acceptable to look like how you want to look but aspirational to be exactly who you were, unapologetically Her films and music were just of her personality with her warmth and generosity of spirit, entirely universal. If you haven’t already, take a little time to look into the tributes being paid to her. Her light may have left this world, but it will keep shining in an enormous number of hearts.

Almost immediately after, we lost Tim Curry. Depending on your particular film diet, you might know him from Legend, from Annie, from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, from Clue, from The Hunt for Red October, from Home Alone 2, or from a dozen other places entirely. He was a masterful singer with the Rocky Horror picture show being where I first encountered him myself, as the gloriously deranged Frank-N-Furter, a performance that somehow made being different feel cool. He later took that same energy into Monty Python’s Spamalot on Broadway, among a great many other roles. Whether you remember him on screen or hear him in song, he’s going to stay vividly alive in an enormous body of work and certainly in my memory.

And making it a trio, we lost Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime. As a Gen Xer, that voice is practically hardwired into me booming through the television as the Decepticons tried to steal Earth’s energy in the form of Energon cubes, with the Autobots standing in their way. Cullen held that role for decades, and if you’ve ever heard Optimus Prime speak, you know exactly the calm, steady authority I mean. Believing in yourself. Not judging others. Being the one who helps. It’s remarkable how much of that came through in a voice alone.

All three of these people, in their very different ways, embodied a kind of quiet self-belief and generosity of spirit. The world feels like a genuinely complicated place at the moment, with a great deal competing for our attention, and I think there’s real value in pausing to notice what people like this actually stood for. I’m better off for having grown up with these performances, and I’d gently encourage you to let a little of that influence how you move through the world too.

Looking Ahead

Let’s turn the page to one of the most suprising AI images I’ve managed to produce: a woman sitting alone in a candlelit room, applying her makeup – the very essence of a femme fatale. I’ll tell you more about her next time.

Thank you for reading, and we’ll Roll4Sanity again soon.