Announcement: The Well Below the Valley

I am starting a new project!

(“But don’t you have enough projects?” Yes. Yes, I do. Let’s not talk about that.)

On a rainy morning in 1922, an archaeologist is found dead in a London hotel room. At first, it is assumed his death was a natural one, but questions soon arise:

Who has been following the professor around Oxford?

What happened on his last field expedition, which was cut short and declared a failure?

What became of his crew?

And how did he drown, miles from the harbor and with no other sources of water nearby?

In a world still living under the shadow of the Great War, four intrepid investigators must discover the secret Professor Ragnarsson was murdered to keep, and learn that the world is darker and more terrible than they could ever have imagined–and that they are the only things standing between the earth and its total destruction.

Introduction to The Well Below the Valley

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You may have noticed the “Modules” tab above, under which lives my campaign-length module for the Call of Cthulhu RPG system, The Well Below the Valley. It was a huge undertaking, both to write and to format for the blog, and I’m very proud of the way it turned out.

Almost no one has read it. That’s okay. It was one of the first projects on the blog (along with the original, serial version of Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea), while I was still figuring things out. It turns out that people come here for prose stories, and if you’re not a game master or at least an avid player of tabletop role-playing games, this type of project will be utterly baffling to read. There’s a lot of numbers and jargon and weird formatting.

Still, I’m very proud of the work I put into it, and it might be one of my favorite stories I’ve come up with, so I wanted to do something else with it to make it more accessible. Thus, I am turning it into an audio drama, in the vein of 1920s radio plays (popular during the time the story is set) and modern dramatic podcasts.

I do not have the resources at the moment to produce something of this nature, so for now, it’s going to just be a script. Eventually, I hope to record it and hire voice actors and learn how to do sound mixing and so on, but that will be some distance in the future.

The complete script for one 20-30 minute episode will release once a month, on Patreon only. Episode One, “The Book of the Dead,” will be available by the end of March. If you’re a blog-only reader, I do apologize, and I appreciate you more than words can say, but I have two blog projects currently running, and I would like to reward my current subscribers for taking a bit out of their tight budgets to support me (and attract new subscribers to do the same). My Patreon is only $3 a month, and in addition to these episodes, you’ll get all the chapters that appear on the blog a week early. Plus, the more support I get, the more likely it is that I will eventually be able to record this project.

Also, a note: Patreon charges subscribers on the first of each month. If you subscribe before the end of March, you’ll get Episode One for free, as you won’t be charged until April 1.

Special thanks to Brooke Miller, Stephen Crane, Lili Crane, Jane McCreedy, and Chelsea Cheveria for supporting me on Patreon! You help me so much. I hope you enjoy.