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Keeping up with our fans' creativity ended up being far more daunting than we ever imagined. For a while there, it was raining packages like frogs and lizards. Wait. That's a package full of frogs and lizards! Michael, you SO don't want to know how much intra-team taunting there was about sending you crickets. We couldn't possibly keep up with the duties of caring for the entire Technocolor Plague, so we sent a number of the critters on for adoption to other fans.

Worse horrors were waiting for us, including a magic amulet (!), stolen office documents (!!), a tutorial on how to make puzzles from red circled words (!!!), and a puzzle that has officially stumped the team (it might involve CALCULUS!!!!) It took us weeks to construct the responses after we woke up from the temporary comas, sorry the return fun took a bit longer than we anticipated. We think the lack of memory of calculus might be a sign we suffered some brain injuries from this experience. We hope it wasn't the frogs that did it to us.

Today's mail brought the total number of packages up to 16, and also brought along a new high-water mark for package from the farthest away (Kiwis in da house!) The package was almost too pretty to open, but we have obligations, don't we? Choice! Art of a darker sort (nightmare?) also came in from this side of the pond as well. Click in to see more. We're going to start getting self-conscious about how creative all of you folks are!

There have been whispers floating around for days that something truly frightening was waddling its way towards us. I heard people were already placing bets. *gulp*

When it arrived today it looked like a duck, and it quacked like a duck, walked like a squid, and smelt like KLOO! Red origami cats? Green origami dog? Cryptic note? Time for some puppetmaster kung-fu combo moves!

 

Maybe it was something in the odd expression in the faces of the cats that seemed suspicious. Maybe Providence's floppy ears were arranged just a little too jovially. Or maybe it was the hint that something was right under our nose. KLOO? How do I make a spoiler tag on this blog?

Since the last roundup, another seven strange packages have arrived on our doorstep ... each more disturbing than the last. That makes an even thirteen so far!

Eldritch-induced carpal tunnel? An Art voodoo doll? A painted nightmare that stares back at you through the package (click to see the reveal)?

The scariest thing is that I've heard rumors that something truly wicked this way comes. I can hear the heavy footfalls of the postman, dragging his heavy burden down the sidewalk. You folks continue to amaze us. And scare us. Just a little.

As promised earlier, Jim has whipped up a second track of exquisite corpse -- "Calls to Marie" also features another mix from John Vanderslice's "MGM Endings" (this one a track called "They Won't Let You Run, Pt. 2".) Speaking of which, J.D. and I caught John's show last night here in Orlando and he's gone interactive ... somehow we ended up in an 80-person sing-along on the street outside the show at 11PM. You owe it to yourself to check him out if he's coming to your town.

Eldritch Errors Soundtrack
Track 1 - "The Providence Nightmares" (16.45 MB MP3)
Track 2 - "Calls to Marie" (5.7 MB MP3)

When we put out the call for creativity last week, we knew we were asking for it. It is, of course, completely appropriate that the first package to arrive would contain a Cu-Thule-loo challenge coin (smells like a clue!) We've also had a comic book, some creative expressions, and a bribery attempt as well! I shudder to think at what the mailman might bring next week to top it. I'm happy to update everyone that after the first week, we've received six requests for challenge coins (so don't panic if you were afraid the rush would hurt you if you haven't already sent in an SASE.) Five of those have gone back out in the mail already. Muwahahahaha!

Shared nightmares were a major theme of B.A. Saint-Feline's journey in "The Providence Prophecies," and participants emailed and called in their own nightmares (both real and imagined) to B.A. continuously as the nearly five-month story unfolded. We used a service called JConnect to manage the phone calls -- part of that service includes voice mails emailed to you as MP3s. Hundreds and hundreds of MP3, each more frightening and disturbing than the last.

GMD Studios Lead Developer Jim Rhoades took on the task of starting to craft all that audio into an exquisite corpse, a collaborative narrative of "The Providence Prophecies" (at least a part of it) as told through the dream calls. A lot of cataloging and editing later, he had reduced it to a chilling 12 minutes plus extended audio collage of atmospheric crafting courtesy of the wonderfuly deconstructed remixes of John Vanderslice's in "MGM Endings" (a free download from John's site) -- catch him on tour now (I will on Monday.)

Pieces of this are going to end up in other places (including the new Eldritch Errors site redesign), but the "extended remix" is just for fans: consider it the first installment of the Eldritch Errors Soundtrack (and not the only installment you'll get before the interlude is over.)

Eldritch Errors Soundtrack
Track 1 - "The Providence Nightmares" (16.45 MB MP3)

Independent artists have a long, fine history of stealing production value from the real world for little or no expense, a technique that works equally well for producing an independent film as it does for producing immersive experiences like ARGs, LARPs and Eldritch. It requires a certain tolerance to risk and an attitude best summarized as being willing to ask for forgiveness instead of seeking permission. If you wanted a firmer risk test, it might be "could we cease and desist if someone asked us to, and would that limit most of the liabilities of trying this wacky idea?" If the answer is "yes" -- even if that cease & desist might come from an Attorney General or Microsoft -- you might be in a position to steal some production value from the real world as well. Here's two ways we did just that in Eldritch, one involving a psychic in New York City and the other a storage facility outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

As has become tradition in the Alternate Reality Gaming community, we will be joining the players for an IRC chat about the experience. Of course, anyone with interest in the project is welcome to attend and we hope that you'll be able to make it.

The chat will be held Monday, September 10 (yes, that's tonight!) at 9:30 PM EDT / 6:30 PM PDT in #stfeline on irc.chat-solutions.org. If you don't have an IRC client, you can connect to that server through both unfiction and ARGNet. For more information, check out this unfiction thread.

We're really excited about finally getting to chat without the curtain coming between us, but as this is only an interlude, there will be many questions that we cannot answer. We do hope that you will understand and not throw virtual tomatoes at us in return for the inevitable winks and dodges. Don't worry, if we can't discuss it, it just means that you'll get your answer in a far more exciting way. There's still plenty of interesting things to talk about and, I'm sure, some of the discussion will go on to inspire future posts here at Schmeldritch.

We hope to see you there tonight, and we'll link to the log of the chat from this message after the fact. 

One of the few downsides of staging an event inside a public storage facility is the lack of electricity in the units. Apparently that (at least in part) is to help prevent crystal meth labs from setting up shop (may I also suggest you avoid using in-room coffee pots in hotels?)

Without power (or with very limited power), our major concern was lighting, and our experiments with glowsticks seemed to produce the most reliable results. The designs for the central set piece, an altar, began to morph to serve as the light source for the rest of the room. Our preliminary tests the week before (pictured here) gave us enough confidence to skip electric lighting altogether. Inside, we show you the how-to steps.