The Future of Tales of Mystara 

If you've followed my Tales of Mystara podcast from the beginning then you'll remember how it was at its inception. The whole thing came about during the famous Covid 19 Lockdown! I was house sitting for my aunty who was away when the lockdown struck so I ended up staying there for a very long time! It was quite obvious at some point the creative juices would begin to flow as there was little else to occupy my time during that period.

I decided originally to start a series of video tutorials all about how to play D&D solo. These videos were just made on a phone camera with an editing app. This is literally all I had. Making these videos got me thinking about a project I'd started a few years before where I attempted to make a solo actual play using audio and music and trying to do silly character voices. I'd abandoned this idea after quickly realising it took a great deal of time! Then I heard Tale of the Manticore and immediately I just wanted to copy him!

The first series of Tales of Mystara was thrown together, and there is a lot I could have done differently. I also had a long hiatus half way through and then had to come back and finish it. The character voices are daft and embarrassing, but I liked the format. When I started doing the Palace of Evendur series I put much more effort in but I kept coming back to the idea of wanting to make video versions of the podcast as my Solo Dungeon Crawler YouTube channel has always done much better than the podcasting stuff. I'd also experimented on there with video actual plays, which to date have been largely unperfected.

My Castle of the Quest series playing OD&D and discussing rules has been a lot of fun to date, so it made sense to compare Tales of Mystara to that in an effort to make the podcast more interesting and differentiate from Tale of the Manticore and the disciples of that style. So this is why, since picking it all up again, Tales of Mystara has seen a shift in the way I present my solo BECMI campaign.

I still keep coming back to the problem of it not having much of a visual element though. I upload the entire backlog of episodes to YouTube, which I recognise as the format I want to focus on. So, to fix this problem I put together a few little scenes in OBS studio to try and add something visual. I'm now appearing on camera, which does not feel natural for me at all!

To accompany me, I've started including some image slide shows of various things such as Character Sheet information, maps and so on. I've also started including some discussion of the history and lore of Mystara.

The changes I've been making are progressive and experimental, so I'll hope you can put up with me while I keep tweaking things. I'd also like to apologise in advance for poor lighting on the webcam. I'm not a lifestyle YouTuber, I'm a hobbyist who likes to share! So, sometimes the output methods can be a little crude, but I am endeavouring to make small improvements over time.

I really hope anyone who watches the new episodes of Tales of Mystara enjoys what they see and hear. Please, do let me know what you think of them.

I hope you all have a great week!