Tue Nov 15 '22 Announcement
almost 2 years ago
– Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 11:45:47 AM
Wow, hi folks! Thank you so much for being here. As a small studio fighting for existance in uncanny times, it really means a lot to know we're in such good company.
We're up on the final week of the campaign! This is where things get interesting. The most funding happens at the beginning and the end. We can use any and all help we can get to make this final push happen. If you have any means of spreading the word about this project, or people you can share it with directly, we'd be greatly appreciative. We're making something for all the fans of historical fiction, table top roleplaying, horror, audio dramas, queer romance, and sci-fi in your life.
Our big news in the past week is that our current season, "Night at Howling House" has wrapped. All episodes are out now and ready for binge-listening.
It's our adaptation of the classic Call of Cthulhu scenario, "The Dare" but with a Mystery Program twist that anchors the narrative to 1920s Arkham and expands and alters the story in new and dynamic ways.
In terms of campaign updates: much to our surprise (and delight) the hottest item that's not hardcover RPG books or herring coins is the Mystery Box! There's only 4 left!
If you've got any hot takes on places we might be able to promote this campaign, ways we could better get the word out, etc - we're all ears and ready to team up to take this project to the limit!
Thu Oct 27 '22 Announcement
almost 2 years ago
– Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 05:47:45 PM
Hello incredible, amazing backers! Cat here!
Gosh! These past couple weeks have breezed by! Thank you so much for being here. We're over 20% of the way there and almost to 50 backers. There's still a long way to go, but we can do it with your help. Please tell everyone you know. Spread the word by any means at your disposal. Write about it. Share it. What's so special about this story? Keep reading to learn about the real-world history we're uncovering surrounding the first women in the Bureau of Investigation. This project will tap into fascinating facets of U.S. history that no one is writing about in fact or fiction.
But first - there's lots going on in the Mystery Program world!
In the next two weeks our final two episodes of our current season "Night at Howling House" will release. We're so excited to see folks' reactions to it. These final episodes especially are where things start getting really wild and diverge significantly from "The Dare", the scenario it's based on. Meanwhile, I've been on a tour of interviews and guest spots across a bunch of different podcasts where I've discussed many different aspects of Mystery Program.
In more pop culturely discourse, you can hear me on Horror Queers discussing the nautical horror of The Lighthouse and on Album ReBrews I unpack my deep love for and personal connection to Kate Bush's 1985 record, Hounds of Love. But as far as Mystery Program discourse, you may be interested in:
I'm on Lez Hang Out discussing the consciousness expansion of queer horror, how integral creating and playing Estelle Thorpe in our season "The Terrible Secret of Lot X" was to my own personal journey, and the transformative power of roleplaying.
AND I'm on Write Now being interviewed by Sarah Rhea Werner, who plays Special Agent Lenora Lake in the season we're currently crowdfunding. She and I discuss the collaborative storytelling techniques the Omniverse team and I have honed throughout Mystery Program and other RPG Audio Dramas as well as the strange history of real-life Special Agent Lenore Houston, who inspired Sarah's character.
If that sounds intreaguing, have a listen to the episode, OR keep on reading either here or via this Twitter thread where I've shared a little bit of her mysterious life.
Special Agent Lenore Houston was one of only three female Bureau of Investigation agents hired before 1972. Her history is shrouded in mystery and in the process of writing "The Case of the Penumbral Gate", we hope to uncover more of her real history and embue our fictional Special Agent Lake with authentic experiences pulled from Houston's life.
As Sarah pointed out, in this photo Special Agent Houston "just looks f---in' PISSED."
When J. Edgar Hoover came to power, he asked for the resignation of the two existing female agents, Davidson and Duckstein. Houston has the strange distinction of being the only female agent hired during Hoover's nearly 50 years of tyranny as Director of the FBI.
Side note: Duckstein, who we can't find any photos of, has her own wild story and Hoover targeted her for testifying against the Bureau's illegal investigative techniques. We're looking into her too. Below is an excerpt from page 547 of the Investigation of the Former Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, in which Duckstein is intensely charming in her enthusiasm to point out some creepy perps in this scandal.
Hoover, famously misogynistic (see below letter from 1971), was against Houston becoming an agent, but after pressure from the Pennsylvania Governor & a Congressman on her behalf, he conceded & she was an active agent from 1924 to 1928. Who was she and how did she have such powerful allies? No one knows.
Houston was born in a town that no longer exists (Collamer, PA), went to Swarthmore College, belonged to Pi Beta Phi - the first female secret society in the US, and was unmarried. Between graduating college and becoming a Special Agent at 45 there's 20 years unaccounted for.
In her last year as an agent, Hoover personally wrote several memos retroactively placing her on leave (very unusual) until asking her resignation. Two years later she was institutionalized, reportedly hallucinating and threatening to shoot Hoover if she was ever released.
Houston died in 1933, and her strange final years suggest a sinister story. She moved from the Philadelphia office to the Washington D.C. office in 1927 and an outstanding carreer turns sour, the more Hoover directly gets involved. During a time where it was very easy to call a woman hysterical and have her institutionalized (especially a gender-nonconforming unmarried woman of almost 50) it's easy to read that Hoover silenced her. It's in his playbook.
Agent Lake's story is going to be very different from Houston's - very much her own, but very informed by Houston's life, times, work environment, and perhaps even the history of her fellow female agents. Though all of this informed the character that Sarah played in our initial roleplaying session, this history isn't at the center of "The Case of the Penumbral Gate". We're hoping that we'll be able to meet our stretch goal to do a standalone Agent Lake special so we can dive deep into all of this and tell the story of how untangling a conspiracy in Washington D.C. puts Agent Lake in Director Hoover’s crosshairs. There’s something weird going on and no one is listening. Naturally, this world-weary non-conformist has to take matters into her own hands.
If you want to hear this story and help us do reasearch that as far as we know no one else has done into the lives of these Agents, please spread the word far and wide. Let's see if we can get this campaign funded and reach these stretch goals!
See you next update!
-Cat
Fri Oct 14 '22 Announcement
almost 2 years ago
– Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 08:32:43 AM
Hello friends, supporters, acolytes, and prospective intiates! Welcome! We're so glad to have you here. I'm Cat Blackard, showrunner of Mystery Program, and I'll be penning our crowdfunding missives as we take this journey together - keeping you up to date on how we're doing, what we're planning, details on rewards, etc.
To kick things off I want to share with you how our show is made, because it's fairly unusual. To assist me, I've rendered some sinister geometry:
Currently, for "The Case fo the Penumbral Gate" - the season we're currently crowdfunding, we’re just after that first yellow dot (Recording), at the three-fold branching path. This campaign will help us fund everything that comes beyond.
Each season begins by recording a tabletop gaming session (Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu). Our Keeper, Luke Stram, creates the principal story/ campaign (with varying degrees of producerly input from myself). When we know roughly the kind of story we want to tell, I cast players who can bring the performance / embodiment we're looking for. I share with them details about the place and time they're starting from, and they develop their characters with story and stat assistance from Luke and I.
All the comedy and horror unfolds spontaneously as we put our sanity on the line and create this story together. You can’t fake the creative and emotional energy of living these adventures in the moment, but it takes the right people at the table to bring out the degree of immersion that we strive for with our series. When we set out to record, we have a plot, but we won't really know the heart of the story and what it's really saying until the characters come to life and the cast collaborates to create the true narrative. That's what's so exciting about storytelling this way - each season is unique and unpredictable.
(An illustration by Jarrod Pope for "The Terrible Secret of Lot X" book)
Right now, we have three new seasons recorded, all based on original scenarios by Luke: "The Case of the Penumbral Gate", as well as "Spoils of Innsmouth" and "Empire of Nightmares", which may be stretch goals or future crowdfunding campaigns, depending on how the cards fall. I'll talk more about those other seasons in a future update.
The next immediate steps are: editing the raw audio, scripting and re-scripting new and existing scenes, and coordinating with our composers to commission the new music we'll need to tell this specific story.
For editing and scripting, I think about the pacing, how the story will break down into episodes, what the larger story and themes are, what characters and subplots need more space to be explored, historical accuracy, and other variables as I combine the original roleplaying audio with newly scenes. I then bring back our cast to record new or alternate lines, and bring in additional actors to seamlessly meld our original live play recordings with audio drama elements. When all the final performace audio is assembled, our sound designer creates cinematic soundscapes and all the while we've been collaborating with our composer, Ryan McQuinn, to enhance the action and emotion through his incredible score.
Bringing this all together is a very intense and non-linear process that takes a lot of time and money to make happen - but the finished product is something truly unique. The scope of this project is why we're doing a crowdfunding event like this. “The Case of the Penumbral Gate” is our biggest season yet. It's our smallest core cast and yet the longest recording session we've ever done, with a plot that winds and weaves into truly unexpected places and subjects, and some of the most intense personal and emotional moments Mystery Program has ever had.
I can't wait to share it with you, and I'm so greatful that you're here. Thank you for joining us in bringing the darkness to light.
Love,
- Cat
