Planning & Pre-Production.

I’d wanted to work on an actual play show for a while, and got to work assembling a cast in late 2019, following the release of Still Lives. I started messaging some friends who I thought would be good fits, and we began talking through the look, feel, and brand of the show.

Something I really wanted to emphasize, knowing the campaign I had planned for them, was the twofold exploration that’s central to many RPGs. One one hand, the players are exploring the world of the game. On the other, we’re all exploring this narrative space, and we’ll all be equally surprised by the results. Running the game doesn’t tell me anything about how it will turn out in the end — the only way to know is to reach the end. I emphasized that exploration motif in our branding, with a lot of weathered, aged paper, compass imagery, and leafy, deep green backgrounds.

At the same time, I very much do not run a standard, D&D-alike high fantasy game, and I wanted to make sure that our branding didn’t read as medieval, or give off a classic, Tolkein-style fantasy vibe. I mitigated that largely with my choices of typefaces. I tried to evoke a much later exploratory ethos by modeling our web design and promotional materials after the designs of 20th century National Park advertisements.

Production & Release.

I learned a lot about press interaction while working on my previous two podcasts, Still Lives and Magical History. For this show, I made sure we had a strong press kit and sent out press releases before our first episode aired. Still Lives and Magical History has done well enough to give this project a pretty significant boost, and we were featured on a number of lists of shows to look out for and upcoming podcasts.

We recorded this show remotely via Squadcast, and I edited it down in reaper. This was a new task for me — I’ve done lots of editing work for scripted shows, but editing down several hours of unscripted content into a solid, contiguous episode that still tells the complete story wasn’t something I’d done before. It’s a complicated process, but a fun one. The editing on this show was really tight, and I was proud of the production quality. The emphasis on heavy editing was one of the many things that set us apart from other actual play shows.

Our show pulled its music from Bandcamp artists who used a Creative Commons license, and in an effort to buck high-fantasy convention I used mostly chill, dreamy lo-fi & electronic music.

You can listen to the first episode here: