Save the date for the first Interactive Soup
All right, luvvies? I was at the Edinburgh Fringe when the last one of these went out. We saw 17 shows in two and a bit days and dabbed every square on our bingo card except "someone we know is unexpectedly in the show". DARKFIELD have apparently been dredging my anxiety dreams for Eulogy, where you sit in a hotel laundry trolley in a pitch dark shipping container wearing headphones and worry that you'll be expected to give a speech in the next half hour, which obviously you haven't prepared for. At the other end of the spectrum, Trash Salad made it so we'll never look at lettuce, tortoises or green juice in the same way ever again. I remembered all the streets and shortcuts, but I'd forgotten what it was like shoving through milling crowds to get to your next show. It was the recharge I hoped it would be.
Coming right up
Sherrydown Enquirer
Interactive Soup
Now playing on Merely Roleplayers
New pins
Issue 4 of the Sherrydown Enquirer
is out now, but only for YOU. I'm releasing it to everyone else in a week's time (Friday 16 September), but for now you can only get it with the password REMEMBERTHEPAST, which I'm only telling to you.
Get Sherrydown Enquirer issue 4 - Bad Dog
Password: REMEMBERTHEPAST
It's a 17-page PDF zine, and inside is:
Bad Dog, a mystery for the roleplaying game Monster of the Week, which I wrote for the Merely Roleplayers production Vigil: Bad Dog
lore for the English market town of Sherrydown, where all our Vigil productions are set; this issue we have details about Scratchbinding, an annual local tradition based on a folk tale about the King tricking the Devil; and an interview with Mayor Jackie Dambrook about the English Sorcery Guild and how they're totally not the magical Freemasons, no no no.
Bad Dog is a mystery all about feeling like a trespasser in your own town, and it mechanically incentivises the players to rip out hostile architecture and CCTV cameras. In case you missed it on the podcast, here's the first episode of our playthrough to give you a taste. What will your group do differently?
Hope you enjoy being the only people with access to this for the next week - and I hope after that, once everyone can get their hands on it, you'll let everyone know why they should!
Get Sherrydown Enquirer issue 4 - Bad Dog
Password: REMEMBERTHEPAST
Interactive Soup
is an upcoming funding event for the interactive performance community in London.
When: Tuesday 5 October, 6pm
Where: Theatre Deli Leadenhall, London
I got involved in this after seeing a tweet by Chloe Mashiter describing the concept and calling for volunteers. Chloe organised a discussion event a few years ago that really helped me firm up some ideas about games, theatre and actual play, so I jumped at the chance to help out with whatever they had planned next.
The event is a community soup. It's not a concept I was familiar with before Chloe's tweet, but it's not a new one, either. Basically it's a way of a community pooling some cash and putting it towards a project everyone thinks is worthwhile, and strengthening the community at the same time.
So how it works is, you buy a ticket for £5, and that ticket gets you:
entry to the event
homemade soup to eat
a vote.
All the ticket money goes into a pot, and during the event, while everyone chats and gets to know each other and finds out about each other's cool projects, five people pitch ideas for what to do with the pot. Once all the pitches have happened, everyone votes for one, and whichever pitch gets the most votes gets all the ticket money to make their idea happen.
This particular community soup is for people in interactive performance - however you want to define that.
I'd been looking for a way to connect more to the theatre community in London (beyond my usual Blackshaw Theatre crowd), and also for ways to help and support others in the fairly shitty environment we have for the arts in this country at the moment, so I'm grateful to Chloe for starting the ball rolling and throwing the doors open for people to get involved.
If you need more info, there's an Interactive Soup website (which I helped structure and copy-edit) and a mailing list (which I wrote some emails for). Please do sign up to the mailing list if you're at all interested - it's a way for us to gauge whether there's enough interest to make this worthwhile, and it means you'll find out first when pitch submissions open and when tickets go on sale.
So if you consider yourself to be in interactive performance in any way, or you know anyone else who is?
Please share the website.
Please sign up to the mailing list.
Let's spread some cash around and do some good.
Vigil: Quarry
a Merely Roleplayers production, is now playing in the Main House.
Act 2 of 4. In which the hounds of the Hunt are revealed; the Hunt keeps recruiting; and Brier makes a mess of Melodies.
Say it with pins
Two brand new ones this month!
Left: a pale green enamel pin in the shape of a speech bubble, with the words "oh no" in black lower case text. From Alex Norris' Oh No Shop. Hopefully you know Alex Norris' webcomics already; this is the punchline of most of them. I'm just waiting for the right event to pair this up with my Sithrak pin for the webcomic crossover event of the decade.
— Alex Norris (@dorrismccomics) June 16, 2021
Right: a pin of the word "Formentera" in flowing yellow script. This is merch from Metric's latest album. I heard my first Metric track (Monster Hospital) on an NME cover CD (it was all Canadian bands, I discovered Land of Talk through the same CD). Since then they've become one of my biggest faves. I'm seeing them for the third, possibly fourth time next year when they come to London touring Formentera. I don't think this album is quite an all timer, but I do know that Doomscroller is going to kill live. It's an anthem of the age.
Don't doomscroll - play on,
Matt x