From the airwaves to the stage
All right, luvvies? It's a bit of a limbo letter this month, with a potentially exciting announcement that I have exactly zero concrete details about as I write this. You know how it sometimes feels like nothing's happening until it's all happening?
Coming right up
- Next up in the Studio on Merely Roleplayers
- Doing it live
- Commemorative pins for some good things
The First Nova
is the next Merely Roleplayers production, opening in the Studio on 10 August, once Vigil: Tourist Trap wraps in the Main House.
https://twitter.com/MerelyRoleplay/status/1411694033529757698
Theme music by the multi-talented Alexander Pankhurst. It's good, right? And I know the story it's going to be introducing, and it's exactly the vibe. The lightness of touch running through the vastness and the mystery.
As regular readers will know, for this production we're playing galactic (2nd edition) by riley rethal. The 'Nova' is one of the playbooks you can choose for your character. None of us played a Nova, and we realised in our post-show debrief that we'd sort of accidentally played out an origin story for the Nova as a concept. Hence The First Nova.
galactic doesn't have a game master role, so I get to be a main character in this one, which is exciting. It's space fantasy, so I made a character with four arms, and was extremely pleased with how I got to use them.
The cast also includes a guest: Fiona Howat of the What Am I Rolling? podcast, which a few of us appeared on late last year playing Sleepaway by Jay Dragon, which, like galactic, is based on Avery Alder's diceless, game master-less Belonging Outside Belonging system. And this production introduces a new regular cast member, Marta da Silva. There are some great moments in this one; you won't want to miss it!
While we're gearing up for The First Nova to start, I'm hard at work in the background planning the next Vigil production, which looks like it'll air straight after The First Nova in September. This will be the first Vigil production with returning, established player characters, and I'm excited about a) seeing how they all start to develop in their second outings and b) putting different combinations of players and characters together.
The first three Vigil productions were more about establishing the characters than anything else. Giving them a threat to respond to, to see how they'd all react. Now that we're into second helpings, there are also people's ongoing storylines to bear in mind. The scheduling has been an interesting challenge: first of all, who's free to record on the same day; then, of the combinations available, which ones have goals or priorities I can weave together with the right monster?
So, if we put these four together, I might need more than one monster to make sure everyone gets to advance or pay off their character arcs in this production. But with these four, I could come up with a single threat that can pull on different people's threads in different ways, focusing the action without making anyone feel like they were 'just along for the ride' this time.
More on this in the next issue, I expect, but I'll leave you with this breadcrumb: the baddie in Vigil IV is something that's already been mentioned, though not by me, in an aired episode of Merely Roleplayers.
Merely Roleplayers in 3D
It's a Merely Roleplayers-heavy issue this time; that's where all the movement is at the moment!
I can't remember when we first started talking about live shows. I want to say it was around when we were wrapping up the Blackshaw Saga and thinking about what to do with the podcast next, but we're all theatrical people, so maybe there was talk before then.
In any case, we're in the early stages of developing a Merely Roleplayers live show concept. We're thinking of seeing whether we can translate this thing from the airwaves to the stage. Blackshaw's recent return to the stage must have whet all our appetites for more (and that'll be coming to the Blackshaw Arts Hour podcast feed soon).
Too early right now to say anything about where or when a live show might happen, but it's not just an idea in the backs of our minds any more: it's something we're actively developing.
As a rough idea of where my head's at - and please don't hold me to this, this is super early pre-pre-brainstorm stuff - I'm imagining something a bit more up and mobile than your average actual play podcast live show. The default podcast live show format is basically transferring your recording setup onto a stage. If it's a live appearance at a convention or something, that's usually all you can do with the facilities available. You aim to reproduce the audio experience that the audience has come to expect from your podcast, except that they can see your faces and you can't edit out your stumbles.
I want to aim for something a bit more theatrical, even if that means the live show experience is a bit different to what you get on the podcast. I'd especially like to avoid pinning the cast into chairs under tables if we can.
At the same time, I don't necessarily want to hide or downplay the roleplaying game element of our format. Using roleplaying game rules to make the story dramatically unpredictable is part of our brand, and (hopefully) what people will want to see out of a Merely Roleplayers live show (as opposed to any other production, podcast-related or game-related or not).
It's basically about recognising that the format of a live show is different to a podcast, and committing to making the most of what the new format offers. It's visual, it's immediate, it's unpredictable, it offers the parallel storylines of the story being told and the players telling it. It should be all those things the most that it can.
Developing the concept is almost definitely going to involve designing a game, or at the very least hacking an existing one to fit our purposes. I've wondered before about what it would look like to design a game specifically for performance in front of a non-player audience; maybe I'll get to answer my own question!
Like I said up top, exciting ideas but not much in the way of details yet. Stay subscribed for details as they emerge, of course.
There's magic within
Left: the beautiful shiny logo of Y Ddraig, the tea shop at the heart of NPC Tea, a comic by Sarah Millman that just wrapped up. You can now get all eight issues collected as a 270-page hardback. The use of colour and composition in this comic is not quite like anything else I've read.
Right: double helix by Science Scribbles, because by the next time I send you one of these I'll be fully dosed up with Moderna. Just seething with busy busy mRNA. I'm going to have super extra reinforced triple helixes with 200,000 memo groups, like Leeloo in The Fifth Element.
Until then,
Matt x