Pusher Update - August 2017

Welcome to the second Pusher update for the Friends at the Table Patreon! 

This time, we're going behind the scenes on more music, a little GM prep, and the first batch of the postcards!

Wave to me, I'm in Seance!

By now, you should have your first postcard in hand (and the second one will be there shortly! Janine wanted to offer a little bit of insight into the process of designing the card, and also offer two special images for Pusher-level backers: A color palette and a close up look at the ship silhouettes she designed! (Can you name them all?)

Janine writes:

"I wanted our postcards to feel consistent with other art we’re using for this season, especially given the wildly different styles and subjects we’re planning to cover. So I looked to the wonderful podcast art Craig Sheldon (@shoddyrobot) made for us to help build a basic palette for the Twilight Mirage itself using Coolors, a site/app that helps you find nicely matched colour schemes."

"This palette is really just a jumping off point, and you’ll probably noticed that the first postcard diverges from it a little, but the important thing was to capture the feeling of a sunset that kind of runs across the whole spectrum. I think? We got there?? Regardless, this base Mirage palette is something I plan to draw on (in sections) going forward, and hopefully the end result will be a really cohesive series."

Music, Moths, and Marielda

At the bottom of this post (in orange text) you'll find a couple of m4a files from Jack! This month, they're two music demos that didn't work their way into the show.

The first, "Adaire & Moths," Jack wrote before actually hearing the first episode of Season 3, Winter in Hieron: "Having only seen the post-game chat and not yet heard the episode, I was convinced that Janine's new character had a power about moths, when in fact, she'd been attacked by them." This is why it's important that Ali and I get Jack rough cuts of episodes as early as possible!

The second, "A Marielda Funeral," reflects a different problem though: My own habit of totally pivoting on what's going to happen. At the end of the ninth episode of Marielda, "The Valentine Affair Pt. 4," I closed with Audrey seeing a vision of Maelgwyn killing his father, the King-God Samothes, and then by breaking out of narrator voice and speaking directly to players and audience: "Next Week," I say, "The Funeral of Samothes." 

Except I tried really hard to design a fun funeral heist and couldn't do it. The only reason I was jumping ahead so quickly at that point was because as good as Marielda was, Keith had told me that he was itching to get a turn at the table after being on the back burner for so long after The Quiet Year, which was fair.  

I'd originally planned on doing both an assassination episode and a big final heist at the Hanging Gardens of Maelgwyn as they slowly transformed into the tower in the City of First Light that we saw Samot in in season 1. From the start of the season, that was where things were (loosely) going. And so when I showed that vision, it was me getting ready to fast-forward past the assassination and then open the next episode up with the realization that Maelgwyn had gone and done it, and that the Six, at this point, may as well commit to what they were doing instead of fighting over whether or not to pull the trigger.

But... almost immediately after recording that, I started to want to dig into the emotional context to that event. 

"Let's open on Maelgwyn/Castille next game. Before he kills Samothes," I wrote in our Blades in the Dark discord. "I really want him to ask her if she can get drunk." I wasn't joking, honestly. And we got that scene, sort of, later. When a statue and a demi-god emptied bottles of wine into their mouths and made out.

In any case, I started back pedaling from "The Funeral of Samothes" as the final arc. The heist design itself was fine—and I'd love to use what I'd designed some day—but it sped through what I knew had to be the emotional core of Marielda: How would the Six get caught up in the squabbles of the gods? Could Maelgwyn kill his father? Would the Six be torn apart by this? In my rush to find an ending, I'd almost skipped over the climax in favor of the denouement. 

Thankfully, I pumped the breaks and started seeing the bigger picture:

In the end, focusing on the party and the killing was the right call. We've had three Days of High Sun at this point, but is any more memorable than this one?

Per Jack, "A Marielda Funeral" is a sketch of a track that would've turned into the dirge playing as Samothes was carried into the Tower/Tomb by his Paladin. Which would've been dope. "I scrapped it," he told me, "but bits of it got near to 'Red Jack' or 'The Warmth of Love.'" No such thing as wasted work. Everything is a bridge.

Sidebar: In going back to confirm this, I realized that all of Marielda is only 10 recordings! Just two recordings of The Quiet Year and then eight of Blades in the Dark (Quickstart), which is wiiiild. Also, the fifth recording opens with me saying that losing a recording of "us goofing about sandwiches" isn't a big deal "maybe on Patreon one day." Welp, here we are...

Sidebar #2: 

For the record? Yes. Yes it is.

And before I go (and for posterity), here's a look at the map for the final adventure:

Hope you enjoyed this update! Look for another in just a couple of weeks!

-Austin