Evictions, resignations and other monumental exits
All right, luvvies? I hope everyone's enjoying Wimbledon, the only sport I actually care about watching, as opposed to just liking being around people while it's on. It's felt like a lot of upsets this tournament - those first few days, it was top seeded players dropping almost as fast as members of Boris Johnson's Cabinet this week. I'm writing this on Wednesday and hoping that by the time it reaches you, Kyrgios and Johnson are both GONE.
Coming right up
Merely Roleplayers
Audio drama pilots
Other bits happening in the background
Enamel animals
Merely Roleplayers
continues to move along on your screens and behind the scenes.
On your screens: The Feed.
We're in the endgame of our game of Unreal now, where everyone in the supporting cast has been evicted and there's only player characters left in the house. The settings we're using - with just three players, and evictions every turn - mean that we're all more likely to be evicted than to succumb to the Weirdness, which is a bit of a shame. But my main worry was that the Weirdness would stay too vague the whole way through, and that thankfully hasn't happened - enough of us have got weird enough that I think you can sense the general shape of it now. It's still possible one of us will tip over from 'aware and convinced' to 'finally comprehending', but even if not, I think we've told the story of the Weirdness fully enough.
Behind the scenes: 6 of 8 episodes of Vigil: Quarry are ready to go, and one of the remaining two is already in progress. I'm hanging on until it's all definitely done to start publishing episodes, just to be absolutely sure of not having to break mid-production.
And then behind the scenes – coming up in the Studio, after Quarry finishes airing:
MONUMENTAL EXIT: A MERELY ROLEPLAYERS STUDIO PRODUCTION
After 67 years, Bilbo Biltong is finally quitting the band. Somewhere out there is a star worthy of stepping into his well worn shoes - but where?
We're playing Fiasco, Jason Morningstar's game of towering ambition and poor impulse control, and going rock'n'roll with it - but like, rockstars who've been on the road a long time. Who are largely pickled at this point.
Josh Yard (Vigil's Jinny Greenteeth, The Feed's Henry, The First Nova's Olwyn Callahan) plays Bilbo Biltong, the original and outgoing vocalist and theremin player
Natalie Winter (Vigil's Gwynned, Dr Magnethands' Souper-man) plays Sue Sherpa, original fan turned multi-instrumentalist and confidant of Bilbo
Alexander Pankhurst (Vigil's Graham, Dr Magnethands' Soft Skull) plays Mike Sherpa, roadie, avant-garde stone carver, and identical twin of Sue
Matt Boothman (that's me! it's a GMless game!) plays Greg Nevin, sad sack stone carver and - perhaps - heir to Bilbo's coveted vocalist position...
Monumental Exit is pretty much fully produced (bar my interval interjections, which I always have to wait and record near the air date). We have a backlog again, huzzah! This should mean that once we start releasing episodes again, we shouldn't need another long break like this for a while.
Looking even further ahead, the next two Vigil recording sessions are scheduled but haven't happened yet, and ideas are bouncing around for the next Studio production as well.
Visit Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast
Also coming up! (So much news!) Fiona Howat invited us back for another guest game on her podcast, What Am I Rolling?
You might remember a group of us joined Fiona a while back for a game of Jay Dragon's haunted summer camp game, Sleepaway:
Well, it seems we behaved ourselves well enough to be invited back, this time to play Jay Dragon's latest game, Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast. It's a slice of life game, with a Studio Ghibli feel to it, and some of the biggest leaps forward in Belonging Outside Belonging game design since the style made its debut in Dream Apart/Dream Askew. One thing that sets Yazeba's apart from any game we've played before is that it comes pre-populated with characters - all you have to do is choose your role. Our game features:
Fiona Howat as Sal, night porter and songwriter
Alexander Pankhurst as Parish, former knight, current frog and chef
Natalie Winter as Hey Kid, demon child
Strat as Amelie, robot cleaner
Matt Boothman (that's me!) as Gertrude, masked teenage runaway
I don't know when our game will air - that's up to Fiona's schedule - but follow What Am I Rolling? and you'll be sure to catch it. If you've got the time, grab the two episodes where Fiona plays Long Haul '89 - they're brilliant.
Oh and hey - if you're at all into RPG actual play (and if you're not, I'm so sorry for that whole section), you owe it to yourself to follow Dr Emily Friedman on Twitter. A null-regret follow. Stuff I've said in previous newsletters about the different features of the format, and how we're collectively inventing a new storytelling medium, all that jazz? The doc's miles more developed on every point. Go do it.
Dead Weight
is what I'm now calling what was Trickledown City, which was Project Tallneck! I changed the name again literally a day after announcing it as Trickledown City in my last newsletter.
Also, thanks to a 'make me excited about your work in progress in just three words' meme on Twitter, it also now has a tagline.
But the real news here is that the pilot script is as done as I can make it. I've read back through it a couple of times to try to catch and correct any inconsistencies, and that didn't make me hate it, which is a win.
Next step: get some folks together for a table read, so I can find out if it actually makes sense/is speakable out loud.
And because I couldn't possibly keep moving at anything less than breakneck speed, I've started writing a new pilot for a completely different audio drama. For now, this one is Project Snakeskin. It uses a setting I've had in mind for several years, but which until now has been something of a setting in search of a story to tell in it. I started thinking about it again recently, and it must have been updating in the background all this time, because suddenly I had fixes for a load of issues I struggled with last time I was thinking seriously about it.
I don't have the elevator pitch down for this yet, but here are the main points. It's a coastal city, and in the middle of it there's a patch of thin reality, where every so often it's possible to see and communicate with things from other dimensions. Nobody can cross - it's a window, not a door. But you can trade. A memory or an emotion for some alien sense or power, perhaps. The city's Mayor made the first really significant bargain: he sold the citizens' dreams in exchange for the power to shield the city from the coastal erosion that's threatening to topple it into the sea. Now not only is the city not falling in the sea, the citizens don't need to sleep, making citizenship attractive for artistic types.
So: an interdimensional window, a population with a variety of strange powers, a Mayor who overreached and made a decision he may not really have had a mandate for. Those elements have been constant since I first started working on the setting. And then lately, I started thinking about a new character to drop in. And I made a list of some jobs they could have. And I wrote 'spy'. And I stopped writing the list, because that was it; that gave me the framework I'd been missing to turn a fun setting into an actual story.
I've started drafting some scenes at a new queer writers' group I joined, which meets weekly in pubs and parks. We get drinks, chat a bit, put our heads down and write whatever we're writing for an hour or two, surface, talk a bit more, and head home. It's just the ticket to make writing a thing I make space for in my week, and to curb distractions while doing it - a pub is a more distracting environment than at home, but I know that at the group, there are people there to see me if I stop writing and start looking at my phone instead. So it helps concentrate the work and make the most of the time. The group was a lucky find, so here's hoping it keeps going.
Irons in the fire
Organising promo exchanges for the two upcoming Merely Roleplayers productions (gotta remind people we're out there)
Finalising production on episodes 2-5 of the Merely Roleplayers Replay
Polishing and laying out issues 3-5 of the Sherrydown Enquirer, with the aim of all three being available by the end of Vigil: Quarry
Trying to find space to play some roleplaying games for fun!
Enamel pinimals
Left: a black enamel pin with gold edges, of a black cat accompanied by bats. This was a reward for backing Rae Nedjadi's Our Haunt, a Belonging Outside Belonging game about ghosts haunting a house together and trying to remember parts of their lives.
Right: a red enamel pin with silver edges, of a silhouetted hippo. Another reward, this time for ordering coffee from Kiss The Hippo.
Play on,
Matt x