Erylian Newsletter - August 2020
Back To Recording! - Major Retcon (oops…) - Change in Content Schedule - Revival of the AinE Twitch
This month was a pretty good month content wise for us, which is great! August is usually one of our slower months because in the pre-covid world, we would have spent every weekend this month camping at our local Renaissance Faire. We were able to take the planned time off for that however and get the group together for recording new content though! We also hit our 2 episodes released this month, even if they weren’t exactly on time.
This Month’s Releases
We released 2 remastered episodes this month! The Mieveht Story Arc 1, Episode 5 can be found here, and the Mieveht Story Arc 1, Episode 6 can be found here.
Here’s a summary of events from these episodes - Brit introduces the party to a contact of his, Gel. While the half-orc was not happy about the unknown and unexpected visitors, he gave the party some strict warnings on where they should “not” go poking their noses around, while keeping Brit back to settle his mistake. As the party makes their way through the Undercity, they gain some unwanted attention from the locals and are attacked. However, they prove to be much more than the ruffians of the undercity are used to preying upon. They continue their way along the path they were warned to avoid, in further search of Xanphia. After being ambushed by a strange ooze in the sewers below Mieveht’s Commons, the party hears voices ahead. There appears to be a group, far removed from any of the others, arguing about a girl. Could this be about Xanphia? As the party confronts them, it is clear that they have stumbled upon a strange cult, though they have no idea how it could be tied to their friend.
Back to Recording!
We got back together to record this month! It felt great. We have hung out as a group a couple of times in the last month or so, mostly to get us back into the swing of hanging out in person again without adding in the seriousness of having microphones in front of us. We are dipping our toes into streaming our recording sessions on Twitch now. We were doing this in Discord before, but moving to Twitch gives us the chance to reach a new audience. Unfortunately, due to scheduling, these sessions are late if you are in the Americas.
On August 15th we got together and recorded the final main episode for Arc 2 of the Erylian Epic. I am glad we were able to get the Grimfang fight handled before going into lockdown, but I was disappointed there was no chance for us to have an episode of what happened next. This was something we had a little bit of back and forth over. Do we come back after this hiatus with a new arc and just advance the story past the aftermath of the Grimfang fight? Or, do we just pick up where things left off so the party can have their natural resolution? I have already started editing the audio for this session and I am so happy we decided to let things wrap up in game. Here’s a sneak peak at just one scene from the upcoming episode!
We recorded on back to back weekends, something we haven’t done in possibly two years, to record the Erylian Epic Arc 2 Night Watch on August 22nd. The Nightwatch is our groups recorded meta discussion on the events of the previous arc. It is full of spoilers, but will give you some insight into how some of the pieces of the story went together and possibly clear up any questions regarding certain decisions either by the DM or the Players. We didn’t get any questions from listeners for this Nightwatch, but we did spend some time reading our recent reviews and going over a wonderful bit of feedback we recieved.
Major Retcon (oops…)
An interesting thing happened this past month. When we got to recording again, the show was supposed to cross over into a new month. This is a first for the show as I run a more drawn out timeline to try and give a greater sense of realism and immersion to the world. When the show was supposed to cross over from Belenus to Manannan, I pulled out the calendar and realized I had a problem. Each month is named after one of the core deities of Erylia. When I first put a calendar together, I had stuck with 12 months, like our own calendar. There are 14 deities… Once I realized this happened, I had to figure out how I would handle things. I have Erylia set as a 360 day year, 1 day for each degree of rotation around the sun. I didn’t want to give this up when changing from a 12 month year to a 14 month year, so I had to take days away from somewhere.
I didn’t plan on this, but I actually got pretty lucky when I rewrote the calendar. This is one of those things that is kind of hard to convey in text, so I’ll condense it down to the core parts. I decided to keep each season as 90 days. Fall and spring are each 4 months long, which shorter months. Belenus ended up being 32 days instead of 31. Since the game has all taken place in a single month so far, this means that the only effect this change had on the timeline is that things moved back 1 day on the calendar. Below is a PDF you can download of our new calendar, as well as scans of my notes while I was working on redoing things.
Change in Content Schedule
In the earlier part of this year the show went on a bit of a hiatus due to lock down caused by covid. We do not record very far ahead of our released episodes, so this meant that we quickly ran out of new content to release. During this time, we started the remaster project. This not only gave us something to release while we have not been able to record new content, but it was something we had gotten feedback about and had already wanted to do anyways. The biggest factor preventing us from doing so is time. No new recordings meant I had the same time I would edit a new episode to put towards remastering an old one. Getting back to recording does mean I lose that time again however. I do not want to give up on the remaster project though, so for the time being, the plan is to release one remaster and one new episode every month.
Revival of the AinE Twitch
One of the things that I have wanted to do for a while now is get our show onto Twitch. We have been streaming our recordings to Discord for a while now, but being on Twitch gives us the chance to encounter an audience that we do not already have. One of the things holding me back from doing this before was wanting to get our new mixer. There are still some things I would like to improve in that regard, but the new mixer does allow me to create a separate output for the Twitch stream with it’s own volume levels. Right now things are a static image, because I want a few more webcams before I think we could have a good enough video set up to add much to the experience. To stream our games, I have brought back the Adventures in Erylia Twitch channel. This is a channel we have used previously for our large group streams for Extra Life and will be home to our live recordings going forward, so make sure to follow the channel if you want to see when we are live! The channel will also serve as a host for whoever is streaming out of our group on their own channel and content related to the show may be streamed there as well, I have been working on getting things set up to stream editing of new episodes there.
Thank You For Reading!
If you’ve made it this far, at least some part of you must care about what we are doing as a show. Why don’t you come join our Discord and introduce yourself to the cast. Aside from a place to chat with us, we arrange video game nights through our Discord and we are welcome to all sorts of nerdy conversations!