Welcome Mythos investigators to a new year! We’ve managed to make it through January, and there’s a New Year’s resolution – we’re going to have regular monthly blogs. Isn’t that exciting? Well, I want this blog to actually add up to something. The whole idea of having a website where I actually have to pay money for it, is for people to read it, so there should be something here. Plus it’s a kind of journal that I can look through and look back on for myself

As I sit down, I look at the calendar where I mark my activities and above these is the wonderful image of two explorers in the Arctic on a snowmobile miles from anywhere, discovering a pool of liquid that glows a red light on them and strange symbols on an ice-covered rock. This is the January image you see at the top of this page.

Stagefright!

What happened in January? First off, we were helping the Miskatonic Playhouse record their next main stage production. The Playhouse has a number of outputs, a lot of which go out on Twitch, but the main stage productions are the ones I take care of where we take our time, space the game over series of episodes and add some Syrinscape sound scapes to add to the story!

We had a lovely cast, but there were slight hiccups. We experienced what I call a double failure – the Zoom didn’t record individual channels, so we relied on everyone to provide local recordings. Unfortunately, one participant couldn’t provide a local recording either. So we ended up with what I’ll dramatically call a minimum viable product where the track we had of one participant is from the main mix with all the other voices.

In these cases, I have to spend around 12 hours going through four hours of audio, extracting that participant’s lines from the main mix onto a separate track. This allows those lines to be processed individually like we can with the people who provided a local recording. This is the stuff you don’t hear about on the podcast – when a button or two doesn’t get pressed, it can literally take a day or more to fix the issue!

Fast Talk and Adventuring!

Then we had some more recording fun, but this time, everything went well – hopefully you’ve had a chance to listen to the fabulous Brinosaurus who took us to Wistovia. Wistovia is just a fabulous place to have adventures. Please do listen to the interview as we tell you all about Wistovia and more! And with any luck I’ll be able to bring Wistovia to life with the Miskatonic Playhouse.

The Cosmic Outpost continued with the Eternal Lies campaign – a Trail of Cthulhu campaign. It’s essentially Masks of Nyarlathotep but slightly less world-ending in scale, but equally as globe-trotting with a cult of people who are well-connected and a real evil entity behind it all! No spoilers here, but my character ended up with quite a significant injury on her butt!

Moving on, we were then back on The Horror on the Orient Express as Doctor Harold Lewis. We arrived at another location and very similar things happened to a poor lady that had happened to a previous lady. Her father has gone missing, but he wasn’t dead because that’s what it was at the last station. I’m beginning to think that The Horror on the Orient Express could probably do with a spruce up of the plotlines! I hear there is an improved version in the works but this is amongst all other works Chaosium are tasked with.

We did have a slight diversion from the Orient Express as we played a game of Mäuse Ritter which, for those who don’t speak German, is a Mouse Knight. The game sounds simple, some mice went to a medicine cabinet, found some medicine and then came home. That was pretty much the crux of the adventure, but it was a really good fun low input game where we just created some mice with weapons, armor, and traits that we portrayed to get ourselves through and beat the crap out of some rats and reason with a cat. A few other games I’d probably want to play more than Mouse Ritter if offered again, but it was a nice, fun distraction nonetheless.

We also recorded a second Fast Talk podcasts in a month and I can let you know that we are talking to Mike from Mr. Spike’s Bedtime Stories. Wonderful chap so I hope you’ll check that one out as I edit it next week.

Conventions!

The Cosmic Outpost is going to be very busy this year when it comes to conventions because I had a really nice time at UK Games Expo last year where I was helping out on the Sirenscape stand with the Miskatonic Playhouse. I was just talking to people and it was just nice to engage with other gamers and find out about the games they play. All being well I shall be back at UK Games Expo helping again.

I’ll also be at the very first UK Chaosiumcon run by Chaosium which takes place a week before UK Games Expo. Not sure what it is going to be like but if it’s anything like the American Chaosoiumcon then its should be great fun.

And in the distance of time I hope to get to Dragoncon in November as a fair few other Podcasters are going so it seems to be the place to be!

I think that pretty much wraps up January. Lots to look forward to in February – I’ve got another Fast Talk coming up and want to get the first in a series of character videos out soon. But as we turn the page on the Calendar from January to February, the February image is a dwarf standing with his Warhammer looking out from Castle battlements.

Thank you for reading, and we’ll roll4sanity again soon.