Seventh annual report

Each year I do a brief episode to say how the podcast is going and what the plan for the year is. First, however, thanks. Games From Folktales comes to you from the unceded lands of the Yugambeh People. Games From Folktales is made possible by its the patreons, who are covering its current hosting fees. In the past when the monthly patreon amount has gone a little over what’s needed for hosting, I’ve splurged on extra podcast time. I don’t need to do that any more, so I’m gathering a little war chest to pay for deck plans, cover art and maps to suit the Venice book. More on that later.

Last year my podcast host changed my price structure so I get a lot more podcast minutes per month. I’m writing more than in previous years, but I’ve been filling a lot of that extra time with Librivox recordings of relevant material. This has altered the balance of the podcast. It doesn’t seem to have put people off, so I’ll be continuing with that.

Statistically there were 10 150 visits to the blog last year (via Jetpack) and 7 070 episode downloads (according to Libsyn). That technically means the number of listeners has doubled in the last year to 195 per episode. I know those statistics can be a bit flaky because of bot scrapes from people writing their own podcatchers, but regardless, if I could get 150 people together at a con every week to talk Ars, that’d be great. I’m not trying to have a commercially-successful podcast as a side hustle, so I don’t need to hit the thousand downloads per episode that unlocks automatically inserted advertising. I’m glad people like it.

So far there’s been no replacement for the Celinni materials which you were getting one per month last year: soon there will be. It’s a book called Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mireless which came into the public domain this year. It’s marvellous and I was going to record it myself, but someone else at Librivox pipped me at the post by a literal day, and so we will use her recording. That team is just barrelling through the book at multiple chapters a week. Between now and then we may fill in with a courtesy book from Venice which affected Elizabeth’s court called Il Galateo. After that, The Discoverie of Witches, which is a Tudor skeptic’s guide to how stage magic was done in period.

The Venice book is going well and the Patreons voted that it will start as an Ars book, then I’ll considier how to recut the material into Magonomia/Fate and a single-player journalling game.
Most of my writing time this year has been focused on City#23, which is a challenge to write every day about, in my case, Mythic Venice. The amount of material is already quite large. It’s sufficient to write a set of adventures now, but not quite a gazetter, for which it needs a few extra bits and pieces as laid out in the “shopping list” episode at the end of April. The current plan is to write up all of the suitable characters from the “Facetious Nights of Straporola” as faerie guides, then go back to the shopping list, fill that then condense it down into the rough draft of a book. After that I’ll need to give serious thought as to if it is an ashcan or if I want to try to make it a formal product with a kickstarter, professional art and distribution.

Venice – Dungeon #23 for May has been delayed for a few days which is why you had (what was going to be) November’s monster of the month instead. Similarly the quarterly digest for April is now so late that I’m just going to roll it and the June one together.

In terms of future episodes the ones currently loaded on the Libsyn server are as follows. An asterisk means its the monster of the month:
June
1* The Marrying Monster (Japanese folklore through an American lens. A sort of ghoul or witch).
15 The Shrine of Death by Lady Dilke (Mystery cult initiation)
? The cider magic episode needs to come out after the Bestiary is live because it has spoilers and rights issues. It’ll be in here somewhere.
July
6* The Horror of Chilton Castle by Lady Dilke (straight up monster in a basement).
20 A Vision of Learning by Lady Dilke (straight up monster in the covenant courtyard)
August
3* The Seventh Incantation by Joseph Brennan (A cthulhu Mythos story now in the public domain).
September
7* The Visitor in the Vault by Lady Dilke (A haunting – frankly Lady Dilke rocks and more people should know about her.)

Again, thank you all for listening.