Pieces Falling Into Place - Erylian Extra - July 2021 Edition

Hey Adventurers! Boy has it been a while. There have been quite a few ups and downs in the time since writing the last newsletter, but I think things are turning up right now. A couple weeks ago I broke down and gave an open account of what I have been struggling with over the last couple months. If you missed that, you can find the post here. I promised a newsletter to help get things back on track and the more I’ve been writing this the happier I have been about how things are going!

Podcast

A New Adventure Begins - Erylian Epic - Arc 1 - Episode 1 [Remastered]

After returning from their mission to wipe out the goblin and kobold army that had attacked their city of Riven, the party spends their first night celebrating the victory (or catching up on lost sleep). Never ones to waste time, they spend the next day restocking on supplies and finding a few items in the city’s trading center before gathering together once more. They request an audience with the guild masters in to inform them of their next planned adventure before heading out of the city.

After what has been pushed back for far too long, I have finally wrapped up the remaster of Arc 1 - Episode 1 of the Erylian Epic. It may have taken longer than I anticipated, but I am very happy with how the episode has turned out. Things will be a little weird going forward as I am not having to balance between editing new content and finding time to work on further remasters, but I will try to keep things moving on both fronts.

Back on the Mics

I do have some exciting news for the story going forward however. We have been able to get together to record again. August is a busy month for the entire cast, mostly centered around us attending our local renaissance faire, so there won’t be much podcast movement in the month ahead. However, we did get two recordings in the bag that I plan to get out as 2 to 3 releases. What is coming up will be a special sort of history of the show, a discussion that built off of a few questions that listeners and the cast came up with, and our first real session back.

For reading the newsletter, here is a little tease to get you excited for what is to come. In the History of Adventures in Erylia, we sit down and talk about how we met and started playing D&D together, including giving some details to the campaign before the podcast and why The Mieveht Story is our first arc when it is not the “main” campaign. In our Q&A, we did what we do where we took a few questions and managed to dive deep into them ultimately answering questions no one even thought to ask. And in EE-3-2, our first real episode back since September of last year, the Erylian Epic party makes their way into the city of Port Norsal and learns about The Midnight Carnival.

New Mic Excitement

While on this second hiatus, I was able to pick up a new microphone for my streams, the Zoom ZDM-1. Brief technical information about this mic. It is a large diaphragm, broadcast style, hypercardioid, dynamic microphone. In less technical terms, this style of microphone does a much better job of picking up what is directly in front of it, and rejecting the sound from everywhere else. This mic passed the testing that I was doing with it on stream and with the help of funds from our Patreon Supporters and my own Twitch Subscribers, I was able to get them for the whole cast before we started recording again. After finishing up the remaster, I pulled in the audio files from our first recording  back on the new mics and immediately saw a world of difference. It is damn near silent in everyone else’s tracks while someone is speaking. This will allow me to stop cutting the audio from tracks where people aren’t talking that caused a bit of echo and reverb previously, which will speed up that part of the editing process in new recordings.

Above, on the top is what the audio looked like before. You can clearly see that whenever someone is talking, there is signal being picked up in everyone else’s microphone. How much of that signal was largely determined by how close they were to each other as well as how well the speaker projected their voice. On the bottom you can see that that is all but gone. There are some little spikes across mics if someone does something loud, but I am no longer fighting that mic bleed just from people being in the same room while we record.

World of Erylia

New Newsletter Segment

Originally, I was planning to keep this section as part of the podcast segment of our newsletter, but I think it is better to keep that section more focused on the recording and releasing of podcast episodes. So when we have news about things that are related to the show, but are more about the world of Erylia that the show takes place in, we will start including a World of Erylia segment as well.

We’ve got some of what I think is the most exciting World of Erylia news we have had in the last few years.

Return To World Anvil - The World of Erylia Wiki

Let’s start with the lore side of things for people that are more interested in learning more about the world and my world building. I recently resubscribed to World Anvil and have been working on getting some information ported over to it. I will caution anyone that visits the World of Erylia wiki on World Anvil has the chance to come across spoilers, but I am trying to cover major spoilers. With the party heading to the city of Port Norsal as we began recording again, I spent most of my recent world building time beginning to rewrite the article for it. You can find out more about Port Norsal here.

Beyond that, as I am editing an episode or think of things, I am coming into World Anvil and adding at least the basic articles for things that come up. A lot of these new articles are very basic, but getting them started gives me a base structure to start building off of and getting information linked together. If you are interested in watching The World of Erylia grow outside of the podcast, I encourage you to follow the world. Whenever I make significant progress, I am sending out notifications to followers for updated articles. I am also trying to write much of the articles as podcast agnostic, meaning I am trying to keep the basis of the article from a world view and not a podcast view. I have also worked out a template for including podcast spoilers for those that wish to avoid that.

New Art?!?!

Also. WE ARE GETTING ART DONE!!!! We have not had any new art done for the show in over 2 years. Art is expensive and we have been putting a lot of our more recent funds into working on a big gear improvement. The bulk of the gear upgrade is done and will be heard in upcoming episodes, but I was able to take some of the shows budget now and put it towards art. We do not have any of the drafts yet since this was a very recent thing, but we have already commissioned an artist that right now is working on some items from the world of Erylia. Next month we should be able to show off art for Fioch, the great axe that the party of the Erylian Epic discovered in their pre-podcast campaign arc and are heading back to Riven to see what the Guild Master’s have learned about it. Since I started writing this we have actually gotten our first draft sketches, which are being shared with our Patreon Supporters.

Streaming

Some Slight Schedule Changes

We haven’t had a lot of big news as far as streaming goes over the last few months, mostly just shaking things up a little bit and finding a new groove. The three of us have really been getting back into Minecraft playing on a new modded server with the Roguelike Adventures and Dungeons modpack. We have also been trying to make sure at least one week per month we play a game where more friends and viewers can join us, usually playing Golf with Your Friends. The best way to know when we are playing and hop into a game with us is to join us in our Discord.

Real Life

Mead Making - On Stream!

I did an experiment with a special stream last month. The audio needs some work before I do more in the future, but I decided to spend one of my stream nights hanging out and working on my mead projects. You can watch the VoD here. To give a quick update on all of the mead works, most everything is in an aging and flavoring process, but a few things were bottled during that stream. I actually cannot start any new brews because I have ran out of airlocks.

In Bottles : Chocolate, Coffee, Pom-Hib v2

Flavoring/Aging : Sarsaparilla, Licorice, Traditional, Honningbrew, Nord, and Juniper Berry.

A couple of the bottles are going to come with us to the Renaissance Faire, while others will be saved to age even further. The Nord and Juniper Berry are planned to be give as Christmas gifts at the end of the year. And the rest are all just flavors I wanted to make but still need time to age.

Gondor of The Emerald Coast

Through a strange order of events, I have become aware of a sport called Belegarth. One of the podcasts I listen to, Inter-Party Conflict did an episode where they were joined by some friends of theirs who do foam fighting. While chatting with them in the Inter-Party Discord, I was able to learn about my own local community for Belegarth - Gondor of The Emerald Coast. After chatting for a while in their own Discord, I went out to a practice to meet everyone. They are great people who did not hesitate to put a weapon in my hand and I was able to jump in with them. You would not believe the kind of work out this is. Sure, the weapons are all foam, and to the outside world it is very nerdy, but for all intents and purposes, it is a combat sport. I look forward to joining them in the future.