Welcome to the April Blog (Even If It’s May). This slightly later April blog for you begins with, of course, this wonderful image that you see at the top of the screen. This is one of the better of the images that came out as part of the Calendar with the Cthulhu as an Old West gambler and a barmaid next to him. When this image was made, a bar wench was not permitted, so I had to go with an elf bar server who ended up in some kind of cloth bikini with blue hair and Cthulhu still playing cards. When a new platform comes out, I do try and see what images the AI engines can make with this being one of the benchmark prompts I use!
Productions!
On with April! What did we achieve in April? For the Miskatonic Playhouse, we wrapped up season 2 of Mr. Whisper, which I’m very happy with. The story we’re working on for you folks at the Miskatonic Playhouse is good fun, with some good themes and a good range of characters, each with their own character development and plenty of horror. That’s in post-production, which is good news. For Roll for Sanity, we put out the Fast Talk Show “Up the Creek” where we spoke to Charlie about the Delta Green production that he is doing and we also shared information on his podcast survey, which was very interesting to see that roughly an hour or so is a good length for a podcast.
Playing Games
Moving on to the games that have been played, it’s been a fun sort of month. The epic Eternal Lies Trail of Cthulhu campaign rolls on with us doing various things in Malta and Mexico and having a particularly good gunfight. Some bad guys were dispatched quick fast and in a hurry. But it also exposed some of the rules in the Trail of Cthulhu system that I wasn’t too sure about. If you’re in a gunfight and you can see each other, you’re pretty much standing there shooting at each other with no dodge or cover. You basically have to have the most hit points and roll highest on the dice. I need to look at the Trail of Cthulhu rules a little bit more as there has to be more to it than that!
Over in Call of Cthulhu land, we had Part 2 of “The Code,” which was good fun to play. My character ended up going places he didn’t expect and trying to work things out cleverly. Nearly made it if it hadn’t been for those pesky bugs. If you know “The Code,” you know what I’m talking about. On the Orient Express, we finished up our Rome chapter, finding out what we needed to find out. If you play that chapter, it’s a nice piece of lore for the adventure, explaining where the antagonist comes from. That was good fun, and we roll into the next part of the Orient Express, where we have just arrived. There seems to be a lot of concentration on chickens, which leads me down a certain folklore route about chickens and cabins in the woods. It’s fun, if not a little terrifying for our characters!
Conventions
May is gearing up to be busy with the Cosmic Outpost materialising at the UK Games Expo and Chaosium Con. At Chaosium Con, we are still on course to be performing an actual play with the amazing Mike Mason and crew from the Miskatonic Playhouse. I hope it’s fun and that I do a good character portrayal. Then I’ll be at the convention talking to whoever I can find, seeing what tips they have for playing a game of Call of Cthulhu. On Sunday night, I even have a game with Call of Cthulhu writer Matthew Sanderson, who wrote the wonderful Saturnine Chalice among other things. I’m very happy to be in one of his games with a friend of mine coming all the way from Germany. It’s good to see the people you’ve been playing with online. Not all of us are lucky enough to have a home group to play with, so conventions are a nice opportunity. After Chaosium Con, we’ll be going to the UK Games Expo in Birmingham. Hopefully, my voice won’t be completely shot because I’ll be volunteering at the Syrinscape stand, telling people all the wonderful things Syrinscape can do. I’ll also be playing some short one-hour games of Call of Cthulhu, which I’ve been working on. Hopefully, I’ll do it in Gaslight, maybe 1920s, maybe Fall of Delta Green era. I might have to use Trail of Cthulhu for that one. I’ve got a space one, which would be quite nice. I’ll see how that shapes up in May and which shows off Syrinscape the best. Over the next few blogs, I’ll tell you all about it.
So, that wraps up the April blog. Let’s turn the page on the calendar and see that we have a muscular young adventurer with ropes all around him, as though he’s going to swing across a ravine in some kind of heroic adventure. We’ll hear the story about that one next time. Thanks for reading, and we’ll roll for sanity again soon!