Good news everyone! The pod-casting equipment has been fixed! I get to consume even more of my friends free time producing meaningless material for the ‘net! Yaaaaaay!
No really, that’s not a joke; we managed to find a way to get the audio equipment functioning again. I’m still not entirely certain how it all works, but it’s at least recording at superb quality and the software is even moderately user friendly once the hardware stops dicking around. Honestly through our best guess as to how we fixed things is by invoking technomagical wizards to make everything flow into their current and apparently correct state.
Did you know that you can hear sounds out of a headset that’s hooked into the microphone jack? What; no you didn’t because you’ve never tried on account of the idea being utterly retarded? Well what a cheeky fool you are! Ho, ho, turns out if you have an advanced enough microphone it can even play sound too! Although only at a very low volume, just to increase the potential you’ll think you’ve gone insane upon hearing it. We also went through a small mountain of adapters and in the end resorted to throwing away a previously thought crucial part of our system, but at the end of the long struggle we – to our utter confusion – have prevailed.
Consequently we now have pod-casts back on the menu. Hurrah! We even put together all the recording required for the first interview last night. It’ll likely be completed sometime this weekend – there’s still a bunch of editing that needs to be done to make it run smoothly. The important part is past though and things are looking up for future broadcasts.
I have to admit making the entire thing proved to be a lot less stressful than I anticipated. Things started off a bit slow due to nerves all around, but by time we got into the latter half of the interview we had worked that out of our system and it was just becoming fun. The interview is broken up by the individual question topics using music as brief interludes to allow us to do it in something other than one enormous take. It might not be the sort of thing that we’ll keep doing in the future though; once we got comfortable with the notion of being recorded the conversation reverted back to its usual flow, which was what I’m aiming to capture in conjunction with whatever topic is at hand. I ended up missing some good parts because the microphone happened to be off. Thus I’ll be testing the idea of just keeping the microphone on and editing the whole thing after this Thursday where we intend to do a quasi-review of the truly classical movie Hobo with a shotgun. I’m just going to stuff us all in one room right after we’ve seen it, flick the microphone on and let people talk. If it turns out to be crap you’re liable to never hear of this again, but on the off chance things go well it’ll be the sort of thing I want to make a common if not weekly feature.
In related news; I managed to nick a decent secondary microphone for the video camera. After a brief hitch in connecting things we got everything working fine. We’re set to start recording soon and the weather seems keen to play along with us; it’s been the nicest week all year. Regrettably everyone’s conflicting schedules means we probably won’t be able to whip together a fight anytime soon, but the option isn’t going to go away. We just need a bit of patience and we’ll see what we can do. Earliest possible is picking an evening this weekend, but failing that we’ll probably have to fall back to the weekend after – if weather permits by then.
Furthermore I intend to sit down with Josh and do the type-up of our interview this weekend. As I’ve said it’s going to contain the same questions, so don’t go hunting for tons of extra tid-bits from it. It’ll primarily be used to fill in any holes Josh thought he made in the interview and to provide access to the world for those who can’t be bothered to download and listen to the full pod-cast – which looks to be timing in at around 34 minutes. With the success of the first interview it looks like we’ll be trying another one in the future, possibly focusing on the divergent areas of his world and the conflicts in them. It could all wrap neatly into explaining some small part of the history he’s compiled, which to explore fully would take an entirely separate pod-cast.
And now for something entirely different; WoW DnD Wossit Thingy.
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So my group has now merrily sauntered through a chunk of what I planned last time. They visited the tower and poked around – the sneakier one of them found the broken stones leading to the basement but didn’t pry them open. No, they proceeded to Raven Hill (the other town) first. On the way I opted to roll and see if they’d be mauled by random undead due to the lovely nature of the forest and they got the lucky ticket. However, I decided to try and rope in something with the random attack that would be relevant to the rest of the story – mostly because they took for bloody ever to kill the damn undead and I didn’t want to waste a whole night without anything important happening. To this end I stuck a mage/warlock robed bloke up on a hill next to them when the undead sprung their little ambush. Once again armed with the finest subtlety known to man I ‘hinted’ that the big spooky cloaked figure might be on the side of the undead – in particular by having him wing a big old flaming boulder at the group when they were getting an edge against the skeletons, which really shouldn't have been too hard. I mean, it's multiple paladins and a crazy ass half berzerk elf, I expected the undead reaction to equate roughly to this:
Such wasn't going to be the case. Anyways,for his trouble mister cloaky-figure (No, he’s never going to get a name) caught a knife in the stomach. He’s not going to die from it, but I doubt he’ll ever return on screen alive. I was thinking I could use him as one of the few mages that Ramklin had managed to actually empower, including the possibility that some might be splitting off from him and trying to gain power in the forest all on their own. He may have to appear as a corpse somewhere to nail that point home.
Tonight I’m due to push the story along further and I figured I’d flesh it out here instead of just winging it. They only just reached Raven Hill at the end of the last game, so they’ll need to make inquiries and whatnot, stumbling about like heroes do when they don’t have a big red arrow pointing to the target that needs smashing, but really all that’s there is some facts about what Ramklin might be up to. I’m going to try and use Vhanis to nudge them back on the path to the first town (Darkshire) before the night drags on too much. As I think I mentioned last time they’re due to get assaulted on the way back – just outside of the town actually. The attack is going to come from the direction of an old abandoned church and graveyard off to the south. It’ll be made up of worgen running in their general direction and be heralded by arcane looking glows in the distance, and the sound of explosions.
Its here I want to introduce the idea that Ramklin is empowering people. The worgen are simply in flight. It’s another unintentional escape of worgen that Ramklin would’ve caught and stored in the church cellar, which got out when he tried to test a couple new mages against the beast. Their fighting ability proves effective if utterly uncontrolled and prone to blowing up everything rather than the target. Should our band of heroes go to the church directly they’ll find two empowered individuals dealing with a few mangled worgen that couldn’t escape fast enough. The mildly crazy people in question are going to have to have some sign that they were artificially made that way – the idea I currently have is just arcane glowing veins. It’s not very creative and I’m still thinking on something better, but that’s the fall back. They’ll attack our band with very explosive but uncontrolled magic should they see them. Ramklin himself will be on top of the church – the roof of which will be half collapsed. He’ll be on a gryphon to explain how the hell he got up there, and it’s through the hole in the roof that he will have blasted open the cellar below. Presumably he left his protégées down below before doing this. Should our group kill the crazy mages he’ll throw some rather nasty magic at them in retaliation. I want it to be clear that any of them taking him on alone would be suicidal.
Incase they can’t think of a way to drive him off he’ll either blast them enough that the smoke covers them from view and he leaves, or he’ll have a fit of rage at the deaths of his coven-members and the gryphon will spook and fly off with him stuck on it. Not terribly dignified, but who needs that when you can reduce some one and everything within ten meters of them to a smoking crater? Either way, the goal of the scene (even if they just fucking bolt the second they see Ramklin) is to have them go back and find the bodies of the empowered mages and identify the markings that distinguish them from other people, furthermore allow the NPC Vhanis to go “Why that doesn’t look good! This shouldn’t be happening to normal mages!”.
Once again; subtlety. My finest attribute.
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That’s the plan for now anyways, we’ll see how badly they can mangle it in a single night. ‘Till next time.
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