So… once again for reasons well beyond my control, I lost access to this blog site and it was down for a couple of months. I tried to find the lessons inherent in this experience, think I picked up on one or two, and now hopefully with them learned and now that I’m finally back online it’ll stay that way indefinitely…
For my disclosure on this or any of my posts or pages… please visit my Disclosure page.
Rather than detailing everything I’ve been up to for the past five months, instead it makes sense to just try to recap some of the major highlights and get things back up to speed.
Over the past few months the views of my first Magick 101 lecture have slowly been creeping towards 400, with about one in four viewers making it to Part 2, and three of those four making it beyond that. And my subscriber numbers have even crested two dozen! I know in the arena of YouTube, those numbers aren’t even “peanuts”, but at least some people must be getting something out of the videos, so I’d say the Reliquum YouTube Channel is off to a good start at least.
Since the site went down, I also gave my next lecture: Magick 201: Crafting Items for Spellwork, and while it has its good parts, I don’t feel like I have enough content to make a decent new video from the material I captured quite yet. The Theosophical Society in Maryland has invited me to give more lectures which will give me additional material I’ll want to make more of these videos, but with so much else going on right now I told them I’d need to push any new classes to at least January 2018, which they seem fine with.
Giving my Magick 201: Crafting Items for Spellwork lecture
For reasons that don’t bear going into, Serial Artist is no longer being published by Markosia. Kevin and I have gotten our rights to that book back and have decided that we’ll be self-publishing it, and so it is now available exclusively as a Deluxe Edition on Kindle Direct Publishing. We were able to add over 20 pages of previously unpublished work we couldn’t fit into the original edition, and we even launched with one of Amazon’s free download promotions, so hopefully some new fans will discover the book… available now!
Serial Artist: Deluxe Edition (contains 21 additional pages of previously unpublished artwork)
I took my trip out to the southwest to visit Aaron for his 40th birthday as well as discuss our Black Knight project. We spent some time in the areas in, around, and between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, NM… as well as spending a few research trip days up in the Colorado Rockies seeing old mining towns like Durango, Silverton, and Ourey. Black Knight aside, this trip also was great fodder for researching the wider Reliquum world as well as for Blackspire.
Chimney rock near Ghost Ranch, made famous by the painter Georgia O’Keefe
Along the “million dollar highway” between Durango and Silverton, CO (named because back in the 1930’s it cost $1M a year to maintain)
Silverton, CO – much of the original town’s buildings are still intact and in use
Epic waterfall outside of Ourey, CO and near a pretty precarious stretch of the “million dollar highway”
Ourey, CO, the kind of place where if you weren’t out by the first snowfall, you were spending your winter there….
I’d collected some wild sage growing outside of Ghost Ranch, and the gem shops in Ourey were particularly outstanding (I picked up a few stones for myself and my wife) so all in all a very enriching trip magickally speaking as well. Unfortunately, Aaron let me know some time after my return to Maryland that he no longer felt capable of being the artist to bring my vision of the Black Knight to life. A disappointment to be sure, but I already have new ideas of how to one day breathe life into that property. Ultimately, I feel like energetically, all my work was leading up to that eventuality one day anyway, so I’m not as disheartened as perhaps I should have been given how much work I put into that project already… oh well, so be it… I’ve had other things going on anyway…
Back in June, my good friend (and former co-worker) Jim Meyer, who Jenny and I saw open for Bobcat Goldthwait (see: Funny Date Night) recently invited me on as a guest on Laughfinder, the podcast he is a part of.
Laughfinder: Baltimore’s premium, comedy-based Pathfinder RPG Podcast!
It was a match made in heaven. I was on for two of their one-hour episodes playing one of the members of an adventuring party called “The Odd Company”… “Renn Tallshoe” the shape-changing urban ranger that the special guests on the show each take turns running (Renn Tallshoe = “Rental Shoe”… get it?) . We had a blast, some very kind things were said about me and my work, and I even got the opportunity to talk a bit about Serial Artist, my Magick 101 videos, and (especially for the occasion) show off some of my Blackspire Studios miniatures. Links to these episodes are below:
Episode 042 Lady Gravy
Episode 043 Rumble with the Round Ears
Additionally, I ended up agreeing to give the Blackspire Studios treatment to the miniatures they use when they play Laughfinder. The Odd Company is such a colorful band of characters (and especially because they already had their own ideal unpainted figures) I knew it was going to be an enjoyable commission. I even surprised them further by creating a figure for the sorcerer’s monkey familiar and the samurai’s dire boar animal companion.
Laughfinder’s The Odd Company
I made them a special case to store their figures
The figures were revealed on the same episode that the legendary gaming creator Zeb Cook was the special guest! His work was a huge influence on me, so to hear that he was a fan of my work (and even asked Jim for one of my cards) was a big nerdy honor for me… check it out:
Episode 48 The Zebisode Part 1
Now I didn’t know it at the time, but when I was on the show, Laughfinder was getting over 12,000 weekly listeners, and at this point its continued to climb and is close to double that now. Additionally, after the show Jim and I got to talking and I ended up inviting him to become the central character for the Blackspire RPG Campaign I’ve been working towards. I knew he’d be the right person to serve as the audience’s point of reference while he explored the new world he was brought into, and I was right.
Around the gaming table for the Blackspire RPG campaign
I spent weeks in preparation for our first recording session (and first relaunch session for the old campaign) and the end results I think worked out quite well. To kick the game off with a old-skool backbone, I have the players exploring the grounds of the mansion of their new benefactor (and the wizard who brought Jim’s new character to life). As they explore different rooms I’ll remove the post-it notes covering them. After out first session he’s what they managed to explore so far.
With Jenny’s help I recorded both video and sound of the gaming session. The plan is to first create a “season’s worth” of episodes and put them out as a podcast first. I’ll then edit down the “rough cut” nature of each audio recording, and coupled with video of us playing, slides of art and other visual resources, and (hopefully) fan art from podcast listeners, I’ll create a series of videos of the Blackspire campaign and put them up as their own channel on YouTube.
At this point I’ve also been teaching myself Audacity so I can edit our audio recordings, and lay in background music, sound effects, and the like to punch up the story (it reminds me of Reading Rainbow when I was a kid). There’s a learning curve, like any new program, but I’ve also enlisted Frater Enlil’s masterful ear to give me feedback, and so hopefully he can help me give it a sound engineer’s touch. I’ve finished the rough cut of the first one-hour+ episode, and have enough material left to create a second episode’s worth, and while I was hopefully for more content my first time out, I’m satisfied with what we managed to capture, and given the usual technical difficulties we experienced this time too, I’m grateful to have even that much…
Jim tells me he’s loving the game and is excited to play again (and the B.R.U.W. crew is happy to be back in that campaign world as well) so I have high hopes for the future. Jim’s also recording a new comedy album this week at Magooby’s Joke House and we’ll certainly be in attendance to laugh along with everybody else and help him sound great.
I’m even working on some new ideas for a “spin-off” show that will eventually get Jenny back into the main Blackspire game as well… more on that much later… And maybe now you can see what format I think might (one day) breathe new life into the Black Knight property and be the ideal way to unveil my Reliquum RPG system.
I also had a very powerful, moving experience while meditating in the light of the solar eclipse on August 21st (I hope you had a positive experience that day too) but I’ll keep the details of the bizarre synchronicities I noticed private… other than it was part of a mass meditation concerned with energetically assisting with the raising of the public consciousness towards Full Disclosure… and I hope in whatever small way I could be… I was able to be a nudge in that direction.
Well, those are the major highlights that have happened since this site went down… I’m “up to date” now… so gods willing, I’ll be back to making my posts to this blog weekly… and will continue to do so for a long, long time to come.
Wednesday 9/20/17-
Sun: Virgo-
Moon: Libra (NEW)
For my disclosure on this or any of my posts or pages… please visit my Disclosure page.