A New Year Approaches - Erylian Extra December 2020 Edition

For this edition of the newsletter, I am going to be experimenting with a bit of a new format. As the things related to our community grow, so is this newsletter, and I think this new formatting will help with keeping track of things in the future as well as give me a better outline for planning what to write about. 2020 has been an interesting year. For all of us. And while there a good many things from this year that I am sad about, personally and globally, there are some things I am happy for, this community being one of them.

Podcast

A Sewer Of Flying Daggers - Mieveht Story - Arc 1 - Episode 8 [Remastered]

The party finally finds Xanphia, chained up, located in the sewers beneath the city of Mieveht. While the rest of the party works to free her, Sug listens in on a conversation between her captors, learning more about how she ended up in this mess. Knowing they are in no shape to confront the cultists who took her captive, the party quickly flees from the sewers. But will their lack of prior exploration come back to bite them?

We're back into the full swing of the remasters now. This month brought us a remastered version of Episode 8 of the Mieveht Story, where the party unchained Xanphia and took her away from her captors in the Under City Sewers.

Through The City We Go - Mieveht Story - Arc 1- Episode 9 [Remastereed]

When I wrote the outline for this newsletter, I had some ambitions to finish up the next remastered episode. However, much like last month, the vacation I have had from work did not yield the best production in the editing side of things. Instead, I have been using the content creator time of these past few weeks doing other little things. However, I have started working on the next episode, which is where I made a very interesting realization.

Almost Done with Mieveht Story - Arc 1!!!

While looking at the episode list in preparation for MS-1-9 [Remastered], I came to a realization that I hadn’t even considered until now. There is only 1 more episode after this for the first arc of Mieveht Story [Remastered]! I'll be super happy to be at a point where we can talk about the entire first arc of our story being remastered. And I have learned a lot about us and our growth as a show going through this first arc of remasters. I am really interested to see what will change as I remaster the first arc of the Erylian Epic. I have been cutting an average of half of every episode in this remaster process. I want to see when or if this changes in the next section. I think I will take an editing break once this first Remastered Arc is complete to focus on writing and campaign prep for when we are able to start recording again. It feels like to finishing of this arc will make the perfect point to give myself a month off from editing to focus more on writing and world building.

Streaming

Streaming Page on the Website

It has been a little over a year since we started streaming weekly on a schedule, and for the most part, we have been doing really well with our weekly streams. Some minor changes have had to happen because of schedule changed in our personal lives, but we have pretty consistently been streaming at 8:30pm (Pacific Time). If you haven’t made it to our streams in the past, these Wednesday night streams have been Chantalle, Caitlin, and Damian getting together to play some Multiplayer games and just have a fun night with friends. This is even a time for people in our Discord to join us to hang out in voice chat, as well as for us to interact with people in our stream chats.

Going into 2021, we’re going through a small step in evolving as streamers and the streaming association as Adventures in Erylia. The biggest step in this direction is you will now see a streaming section on our website. We’ve actually had a live page, which shows all 3 of our streams and chats at once, on our website for some time, but it was never very visible for anyone outside of our streams and our discord. The new streaming page takes that same live page and expands upon it, adding a calendar of our scheduled streams, as well as a home for our stream related polls.

Adventures in Erylia Streams - Community Choice

One of the bigger changes coming to our streams in the new year will be the Community Choice streams. Every other week, our Wednesday night streamed game will be decided upon by our community by voting on the poll on the Streaming Page of our website or linked to from our streams. We have come up with a preliminary list and will evolve the list as we go. Every other week is a new poll, so make sure to come back and make your voice heard for what games you would like to see us play. One of the major reasons for this is to try and create more variety in the games we play instead of falling into a rut of only streaming the same 2-3 games.

Adventures in Erylia Streams - Streamers Choice

While we want to bring the community more into the streams we are doing, we still want to have the ability to decide games to stream based on what is exciting us that week or what event we are grinding on as well. So every other week, in between the Community Choice weeks, we will be streaming a game of our choosing.

Discord Role - Streamer Watch

A new role has been added to the Discord, the @Streamer Watch role. We want more people coming to our streams because they want to be there. So we are implementing a role that can be self assigned in discord that will be added to our stream notifications so that you will be notified even if you are not actively on discord at that moment. You can get the role right now with the command “!join-streamer-watch” For now, the command will give you the role, but I am still working on iterating it in case there are any hiccups with it’s use with out bots.

Discord

Creating a Larger Sense of "Community"

A number of small changes have been made to the discord in the past month. It is a bit of a personal note from me. With Mandalorian starting back up again and my wife and I working our way through Lucifer; also with me being inspired to re-read(listen) to the Eragon books, I found myself going to other servers to talk about my thoughts and feelings in regards to these topics. Partially this stemmed from me getting back into Eragon through some comments from someone in another discord server, and having a ton of servers that are into starwars, so I already had places to talk about them. However, I realized I never felt like I had a place to do that in our own server, so I decided to change that. The Adventures in Erylia Discord Server now has a place to discuss books as well as movies and television shows. These do not need to be current, but I am asking that spoiler tags are heavily used, as someone may be inspired to start up on their own and I do not want them to be spoiled if they aren't ready for it yet. The channels have instructions for spoiler tags in the header, you can highlight text (on PC) and get a pop up to add the spoiler tags, or jsut remember that you add || before and after text to turn it into a spoiler.

Supporting Fellow Creators

Again, inspired by my habits in other servers, I have decided to open up some parts of the discord to other creators. There is now a role for Podcasters and Streamers to allow them to post in our traditional announcement channels for these topics. These channels are on a long time cool down and the roles are no-longer freely assignable, so as to avoid abuse. I have added in a "support ticket" bot on the server if you would like to request these roles, but bear in mind that these roles are solely at our discretion so it will also depend on how you have previously interacted in the server. You are still free to mention content in the general channels, but be aware that spamming will not be looked highly upon.

A Bit Of A Face Lift

This is a pretty minor change, but I have added icons to many of the channel names in the Discord server. A lot of larger servers I am in do this to make it easier to recognize the channels more at a glance.