Sneak peek: The Sherrydown Enquirer
All right, luvvies? We’re into the season of last things of 2020. Last big shop of 2020. Last book started in 2020. This is my last newsletter of 2020. Let’s get this year done.
Coming right up
What influenced Merely Roleplayers: Vigil?
Games I’m playing
Sherrydown Enquirer sneak preview
Pins to pin down a tone
Vigil: Playtime
concludes with Act 5 on 22 December. Here’s Act 4, to get you caught up:
All creative work is influenced by things that came before. And I think it’s important to have influences outside the medium you’re working in; if we all stay strictly within our borders, all art will eat itself. So while I can definitely point to other actual-play roleplaying game podcasts that have influenced Merely Roleplayers (Campaign, The Adventure Zone), there are ingredients from farther afield in the witches’ brew that is Vigil as well.
From theatre (of course): Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth. The thing that stuck with me most from Jerusalem was its vision of an ancient and barely tamed English magic. I still get chills when I remember the scene, late on in the play, of Johnny Rooster Byron relentlessly beating a drum to try to awaken the ancient giants of the land. It’s important to me that Vigil puts a particularly English twist on the monster of the week genre - particularly English rather than British, because I think Englishness and what it’s become is something that desperately needs examining at the moment. Jerusalem’s sense of mystical things long forgotten, but still present, slumbering, just waiting for the right person or the right call, is the essence of English magic to me.
From literature: Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence and Kate Griffin’s Matthew Swift and Magicals Anonymous series. The Dark Is Rising for that same sense of magic being a thing powered by ancient history and memory - the idea that the act of remembering is magic in itself. They’re some of the first books I can remember checking out of the library. And then the Griffin books for their take on the magic of cities and modern life: hi-vis jackets as the basis for invisibility enchantments, magical beings born from the intimate things whispered into the telephone lines, apocalyptic harbingers of cities’ death-by-developer.
Music: The Freedom Spark by Larrikin Love. It’s cheeky, it’s a bit queer, and it’s got big love for the nation’s natural landscape while also looking sidelong at the dark things that can happen there, half in the undergrowth and half in the late summer sun. I aspire to that energy.
Movies: The Cornetto Trilogy directed by Edgar Wright, and particularly Hot Fuzz. Hot Fuzz’s valorisation of policing is probably due some reexamination in 2020, huh? And in Sherrydown, I’m aiming for a rather more charitable portrayal of middle England town life than Sandford, Gloucestershire (partly because I personally don’t want to play a lot of suspicious, Brexity townspeople). But the tone of these movies is absolutely something we’re taking as a touchstone for Vigil. They balance comedy and silliness with fairly serious peril and genuinely earned emotional moments. We don’t want to take ourselves too seriously, but we’re not just bringing you 45 minutes of forgettable froth every fortnight either - we want something substantial at the core of it that you can bite into.
And that’s just the influences I’m personally bringing. The players are approaching the story through their own lenses too - they talk about them in the Backstage episodes, so that’s a reason to tune in to those!
In my orbit
If you’re missing the Merely Roleplayers cast who don’t appear in Vigil: Playtime, several of them made guest appearances on the What Am I Rolling? podcast recently, playing Sleepaway: a Belonging Outside Belonging roleplaying game about camp counsellors who half-remember being traumatised by a monster when they were younger, and who try to protect their campers from the same danger.
Keep an eye on the Black Armada shop over the next few weeks for a new game called Wreck This Deck, by Becky Annison. I got it early from their Patreon and I’m finding it the perfect lockdown roleplaying game. You play a black magic practitioner who binds demons into a deck of cards to help protect a community that matters to you. It’s a solo game, combining journalling with arts and crafts, but it also encourages you to post your modified, demon-possessed cards on social networks and to interact with other players who are doing the same. It gives me the feeling of playing a game with other people, but without having to be on Zoom for hours at a time.
Work in progress
This is a sneak preview of the front page of the Sherrydown Enquirer, a Merely Roleplayers tie-in and Monster of the Week mystery supplement.
The Enquirer is an in-world artifact from Vigil: a community newsletter produced by a concerned and semi-clued in citizen of Sherrydown, trying to WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!! their neighbours.
It’s also a game supplement - a scenario, or a mystery, as Monster of the Week calls them. If you play Monster of the Week (the roleplaying game by Michael Sands, published by Evil Hat), this issue of the Enquirer will give you all the details you need to run Playtime - our current Vigil story - as a game for your group. Even if you don’t play, you might be interested to know things like just how much punishment the monsters could take and dish out.
And the letters page provides some tidbits of lore, which might hint at things to come in future Vigil productions. If you want to play along with us in the same setting, the lore stuff should help you flesh out your version of our world.
This whole thing is a bit of an experiment. I haven’t seen any other actual-play podcasts doing anything similar - saying “hey, if you enjoyed us playing this scenario, maybe you’d enjoy running it for your friends and seeing what they do differently”. Which is odd - once you’ve planned a scenario like this, it’s not a lot of extra work to polish it into something someone else could use.
I also haven’t seen a lot of Monster of the Week content with an English flavour to it; American-ness is baked into the game to some extent, but I think we’re managing to English it up just fine.
So maybe there’s a gap in the market here? Let’s find out.
I’m just in the process of getting this first issue of the Sherrydown Enquirer sense-checked, to make sure someone who isn’t me actually could use what I’ve written to run the game. Once it’s finalised, I need to make the PDF accessible - something I handily got training to do as part of my day job over the past couple of weeks. And then I need to formally register self-employed so I can get the tax details I need to sell things on Itch.io. I’m hoping I can get all that done and get the first issue on sale in January. If all goes well, there’ll be a new Enquirer issue for each new Vigil production, so you can play along with us. I’ll consider it a success if I sell enough to cover the hosting bill for Merely Roleplayers.
Pinning down the tone
The tone I aim for in roleplaying games I run, summed up in two pins. Left, from Shakespeare’s Globe - I don’t love the typography on this one, so I don’t wear it out much, but I couldn’t resist a pin memorialising this very good stage direction from a big mess of a play. And right, from comics writer and artist Marc Ellerby, creator of Chloe Noonan, Monster Hunter, who now I think about it could very well be another influence on Vigil…
Until next time, trample borders, take your influences from wherever you fancy, and I’ll see you in 2021.
Matt x