All of the words said out loud for S04E10 of Audio Drama Debut, my podcast showcasing new audio drama, fiction and RPG trailers.
F/X - Fountain pen writing, and then being capped.
The Librarian: Hello there. Welcome back to the Library of Audio Fiction, where we have dramas, books, stories, actual plays, and a few other things. I'm the Acquisitions Librarian, responsible for collecting and cataloguing all of the new podcasts.
Please be careful in the office, we've been having some problems here with the recent renovations. When the builders were around, I happened to borrow one of their cement mixers as my magimix was on the blink. Unfortunately, it seems I didn't properly clean it out, and some of the brickwork is now crumbling. Nothing too major, hopefully.
F/X - Brickwork falls.
But, I've been quite busy this week collating all the new shows that started in August. If you're interested, I put a file of them somewhere. It's labelled "episode description" if you want to have a look round this office.
But this is rather embarrassing, I'd literally just put them up on the noticeboard, and then I found another new one. Honestly, neverending journey, this is.
That new show was called Centromika, and it's the audio journal of someone sitting in a monitoring station above Jupiter. Apparently, people who do this job tend to go slightly mad from loneliness, so it's part of their emotional therapy to express these feelings into the ether.
And they have a lot of sweary feelings. After a couple of years of being alone, they are not very happy, so this is a show you'll want to pick up if you enjoy a wet little person going through some things. Nice to have a space show that's quite this raw. Smashed through the first three episodes, and it's now on the podcast app.
I will say, episode three in particular is very good. I won't give too much away, but there is a mindfulness exercise that does not feel very mindful. That poor chap does not enjoy the colouring in book. I'm also very fond of the theme. Very Blake's 7-y. Very short and sweet, but sets a tone very quickly.
So it's a single actor science fiction podcast, with very human emotion at the centre of it. Less than twenty minute episodes, of which there are currently three, so an easy listen to catch up with.
Continuing the single voice theme, Lauren Shippen has a new show out called Breaker Whiskey, which is very short form (generally about three minutes) and released daily (Monday to Friday). It's got a similar sort of feel to Alice Isn't Dead, with the main character providing slightly philosophical monologues as they drive across America, but here there's no specific person they're hunting for. Instead, they're looking for just anybody, after some event that wiped the vast majority of people from the face of the earth.
It's more or less being written as it's being recorded, so it does feel a bit rambly, but there's enough slow world-building to keep the attention. It's just hit episode 30, which is probably around the hour and a half mark, so not too difficult to catch up. It also reminds me of Mercury: A Broadcast of Hope, which is a daily show about zombies that's been running for about three years at this point. It's the soap opera model, where you have to just be able to jump in at some point and have a little recap occasionally. Not many shows do it, other than Mercury, you know most fiction is designed to be short-form, season-built, so it's interesting to see how long this wrong for.
And finally a couple of actual play podcasts. The first is Dark Nexus, which I'd particularly noticed because it's just been it's first birthday. I do enjoy having my AudioFictionUK twitter account that does these anniversary tweets - so first birthday and then 5, 10, 15 if still around - that's also my slight cheeky way of checking the ongoing status of podcasts. Have they fallen off the internet, have they been abandoned, so it helps the data keep cycling through.
It's a pathfinder show, using the Strange Aeons path, so it's very Lovecraft, horror, Cthulhu focused. I've only just started it really, got about half a dozen episodes in, and it's making a pretty fair effort at staying grim. Horror in ttrpgs is always difficult because while people are having fun at the table, obviously that can break the tone frequently and easily. It seems like the best way to get the tone, is you're often re-performing things. So you have the game, you can use what you can use, and then you re-record certain elements, just so you can hit the horror. That is obviously, additional work, so it doesn't happen a lot.
But there's some nice missing memory plot elements in here that are being slowly explored and that give a feeling of a world slowly being expanded, as the characters re-learn about themselves and the world around them, and there's also some character conflict, both inter-party and with the NPCs that feels pretty genuine. I find myself keep coming back to it to see if it grabs me and keeps me.
And finally a silly one just for me, Far and Away, which is a D&D podcast - only one episode out thus far. And it's running that isekai style, so transferred to another world, not necessarily reborn, that's been increasingly popular in anime for the last few years. And I've seen a bit of an uptick in actual play podcasts as well over a few years. You can feel an inspiration line there.
Mostly personal interest becaust it's set, or at least the people are captured from Manchester (where I was born and raised), and they find themselves in a little shop that wasn't there yesterday, and whisked off, to be involved in a quest. It's a little amateurish, you can tell it's early days, I'm not sure if they're necessarily professionals, but we'll see if the locality element means I have a soft spot for it.