Hello and welcome to the Roll4Sanity blog, as the temperature starts to turn a little colder, September draws to a close, and we edge ever nearer the overindulgence of horror that is Halloween. Let’s start with the calendar image.

This one depicts a femme fatale, sitting at her mirror in a green dress, glancing over her shoulder as though she’s just heard something. It came out of a conversation with ChatGPT, which one moment came up with an amazing image but next seemed reluctant to produce a female figure in this pose at all. But we got there save the two candlesticks, a single glove! For me of the appeal of the character applying her makeup as if caught mid-thought how that old Vargas pin-up aesthetic come through in a noir sensibility. The wood texture of the dresser, the figure, bathed in warm candlelight when outside it rain and single street lamp in the dark. I do find it slightly amusing that the AI produced something this atmospheric and sultry, given how reluctant it usually is to go anywhere near that territory. Make of that what you will.

Productions & Editing

Time for a bit of a moan, I’m afraid. It’s been a three-session month on Vermis, with each session running around four hours so twelve hours of raw recording there, plus roughly another couple of hours still to come. All told, we’re heading towards six sessions and somewhere in the region of twenty-plus hours of material once it’s finished. This hasn’t been one of the easier projects to bring together, and here’s why.

We have this wonderful modern ability to send voices instantly across the internet and yet computers still, somehow, cannot agree on how quickly they arrive. All of our voice actors send their audio over Zoom, which lands on Newman’s computer as a combined feed. I then have to line that up against the OBS video recording I’ve made separately. Normally Zoom is excellent at keeping everyone synchronised, but for whatever reason, that hasn’t held true this time. Some voices are landing three frames early, others seven frames late, and nobody agrees with anybody else.

I do have a plugin that can stretch and nudge a WAV file back into sync with the video but it only works in thirty-minute chunks, and only one audio track at a time. Which means four hours of audio, across six different characters, has to be broken into thirty-minute segments, resynchronised individually against the master track, six times over, for every single chunk. Piecing that jigsaw back together in the video editor afterwards is, shall we say, a fraught process. The fact we have a plugin to help is a positive. Perhaps the plugin will improve one day, get a bit more memory to work with, handle everything in one pass. Until then, it’s eyeballing waveforms and squeezing whatever I can out of the editor.

Adventures Played

Vermis has rather taken over everything this month, in front of and behind the camera. In-character, we’ve been the quintessential hackers, throwing real-world technology at the problem of trying to thwart a cult and track down our missing compatriot. I don’t think that’s giving away too much. My character, Finn Murphy, has had some genuinely good luck — keep an ear out around episode five or six for an incredible run of rolls, where we were probing a very difficult computer system and I kept landing hard success after hard success. Always satisfying when that happens.

Conventions

We may need to wrap the final session up after Miskatonic Repository Con, which is looming on the horizon for the weekend of the 23rd to 25th of October — right across the UK’s clocks changing too, which will no doubt play havoc with everyone’s game timings. Thankfully we have Hammertime for exactly this problem, so if you’re heading to Miskatonic Repository Con, use it to check your own local time for whatever you’re booked into. I’ve got a panel I’m hosting myself this year as The Cosmic Outpost Podcasting in the CoC Scene, alongside Scott Dorward, Alex Sun, and T A Newman, on the Friday at 12:30 EDT so please do come along and watch me get overexcited about podcasting. Head over to the Miskatonic Repository Con website for the full schedule and sign-ups.

Looking Ahead

That’s about it for what’s been a fairly dull, routine sort of month, technically speaking — I won’t bore you any further with the finer details of my synchronisation troubles.

Let’s turn the page to next month’s image: a suspicious-looking gentleman in a fedora and an oversized trench coat, holding a golden orb close to his face. What’s the story behind? We’ll find out next time, after Miskatonic Repository Con has been and gone.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll Roll4Sanity again soon.