A little more about the story we tell
I mentioned it when we started up but our podcast, Crudely Drawn Swords has been running for a couple of years now and on Thursday I posted our fiftieth episode. That is something in the region of 45 hours of collaborative improvised storytelling on our part and it has made me think a lot about the genre we are part of. Using a game as a way of creating fiction has been around as long as Dungeons & Dragons, but having the capacity to share that with a larger audience is much newer and the outcome is pretty interesting.
One thing that I have been thinking is how much space you have for your story and your characters - aside from soap operas, a fifty hour story is pretty unlikely to show up on radio or TV, most audiobooks come in shorter too. Of course, most authors have control of where their characters will go and what they will do, they may say that a character did something unexpected but it doesn't happen every single week. I find this interesting because it means my work as GM is mostly set dressing and preparing places rather than events. When our team of questionable heroes turned up in the city they recently arrived in, I had some threads ready for them to pick up, but I definitely wasn't expecting them to put on Live Aid. It is challenging and fun to roll with the punches and help to use them to drive the story forward and I love doing it.
The other thing is that thousands of people have listened to our antics- we are finding an audience, we have some pretty good iTunes reviews and even turned up on a Top 5 List a few months back. At the start of December we got to hang out with a bunch of other tabletop podcasters at Dragonmeet and even played in some crossover games.
Between planning, recording, processing, editing, composing music and mixing the show takes up the majority of my spare time, but I'm realising I'm alright with that. This is my novel and yes it's a weird audio-drama that comes in somewhere between Pratchett and Erikson at his most ridiculous but it's a grand, epic, story I am creating with my awesome friends and I am super proud of what we are doing.