I Love This Cast And I'm Excited About The Things I've Got Planned For Them! It's A While Since I've

I love this cast and I'm excited about the things I've got planned for them! It's a while since I've had the chance to run Heart – the campaign I ran in lockdown is up there with my best ever roleplaying game experiences.

Characters in Heart choose a Calling – the reason they're down in this extremely hazardous place – and the rulebook has this note saying that having everyone choose the same Calling can give you a nice focused campaign. That note has intrigued me for ages, and when better to give it a try than in a two-and-done game? So all four of our delvers for this game are seeking Enlightenment: they believe that somewhere in the City Beneath lies the means to achieve an otherwise impossible goal.

Tune in this time next week

Four delvers rove deep, deep into the unreality of the City Beneath.

Each seeks to achieve the unimaginable.

But in a city shaped by desire, it can be dangerous to want too strongly...

Twitch

ActualPlayUK - Twitch

I wanted to let you guys know how important this story has become to me in light of the war in Israel. There’s no way you could have intended this, but your meditations on the callous disregard for human life in favor of capitol and the way governments side with power over their people are hitting me so hard it’s unreal. Carpenter in this recent episode worrying about the idea that people are just people who still choose to ignore and perpetuate horror made me legitimately tear up.

Thank you very much - that's really kind of you and it genuinely means so much to hear it.

Yeah, that line really whacked me back in the face when I was working on the sound design, too. (It really helps that Méabh so magnificently captures the quiet, angry, wondering humanity of Carpenter so well in that moment.)

It's a very minor thing in the wider context, but it's been swimming in my head all day and all night; yesterday we had the Prime Minister of the UK briefing to the press that it is inherently "provocative and disrespectful" for people to march through London for a ceasefire in Palestine during WWI's Armistice Day next weekend - because the "sanctity of the day" must be protected.

On one hand, that feels a breathtakingly obvious and cynical strategy to defame, misrepresent and (I think crucially) exogenise dissent against the government's foreign policy.

But it also feels, in a way that I hope we've always been clearly trying to yell about with TSV, like a real symptom of how deeply fucked-up our country's narrative-building around itself truly is; the bewilderingly successful extent to which strong, emotive, reassuring stories delivered from positions of authority continue to be used as a cover for base hypocrisies, inhuman cruelties, and selfish interests.

And the invocation of "sanctity of the day" to mean "pure and unchallengeable supremacy of a century-old war in our hearts, minds, and newspapers" really speaks to that. (I guess it feels like an inverted version of that Dr Strangelove quote, doesn't it? 'Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room.' / 'Armistice Day is no time to call for peace.')

Our media and political classes can lead a call to worship the 110-year-old icon of peace, the half-fled and semi-religious memory of it and the comforting traditions and rituals surrounding it-

-and they can use that icon, in turn, as a weapon to condemn hundreds of thousands of their own citizens from all faiths and all backgrounds who are marching for peace right now (while continuing to ignore the three-quarters of the population who want them to call for a ceasefire).

They can use that icon of peace to callously dismiss the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians suffering right now under a brutal succession of atrocities, and to downplay Western complicity right now in allowing those atrocities to continue unchecked, all in favour of the reassuring idea of showing respect for and paying silent obeisance to a ghostly Tommy soldier in a Brodie helmet with a plastic poppy tucked into his lapel.

A man who was sacrificed, and who must be forever remembered for his sacrifice.

If the superstructure is big and loud and hungry enough, maybe we won't pay too much attention to the screams coming from the base.

Anyway, to find a grace note - we know that we're writing often quite bleak and cruel stuff at a very bleak and cruel time. And while we of course didn't intend a direct comparison to current-day events, it really means a huge amount to hear that someone's finding it meaningful rather than, as we often fear, just too much of reality. So thank you again very much.

I say this with genuine love: I love this rash of small time internet creators starting the most unlistenable tabletop roleplaying podcasts you've ever heard. It feels like a companion to how every group of 20somethings in the 1990s used to have a shitty garage band. We need more of that shit.

You'll never guess my dashing quest-giver NPC's deal

🐔 Now playing in the Studio

The Bureautopians’ third quest: support others’ development by breaking Sir Ansellus the Daring’s chicken curse.

Follow us on your usual podcast app - search Merely Roleplayers or head to www.merelyroleplayers.com

GUIDE: Josh Yard

STARRING:

Natalie Winter as Bess, the Invoker

Chris Starkey as Neville Flounder aka The Living Shadow aka Night Gannet, the Spy

Strat as Jerome Picklepants, the Wizard

Dave as Josh, the Magician

ROLEPLAYING GAME SYSTEM: Quest by The Adventure Guild

MUSIC BY: Alexander Pankhurst

EDITED AND PRODUCED BY: Matt Boothman

I'm re-listening to Within The Wires while at work this fall and season 4 just started...

I have always assumed that we, the listener character, were Sigrid. It always made sense to me.

I have no reason to believe that. Today I realized... we, the listener character, might not be Sigrid!

Who are we!?!