NPH visits The Locksmith’s Dream!

What a crazy couple of weeks!

We have had a superbly busy few weeks, which have whizzed by with very lit­tle time for read­ing or writ­ing but a lot of being in places and with people.

CONTENT WARNING: Name drop­ping galore ahead!

Dreams in the Manor House

This last week has con­tin­ued a mad­ness of the whirl­wind that we have been liv­ing in! We joined up with our amaz­ing team in Tre­owen for a week for two runs of The Locksmith’s Dream.

So here comes my big name drop. For our week­day run, we had Neil Patrick Har­ris and Emi­ly Jil­lette join us for the expe­ri­ence! They had a great time and described it as “Stun­ning” and “Like step­ping into a nov­el”. I’m so delight­ed that they, like every­one else, had a great time. You can hear the full response from Neil here and you can bet I’ll post extracts from it reg­u­lar­ly for a while!

Addi­tion­al­ly, we got to spend time play­ing with the new char­ac­ters. I love how col­lab­o­ra­tive our process is. Our act­ing team are a joy to work with — we give them a skele­ton and some words then they per­form mag­ic! There is more com­ing from them soon on the web­site and on the social channels.

What happened at Innsmouth…

On the week­end before the events, we attend­ed the first Inns­mouth Lit­er­ary Fes­ti­val organ­ised by Tim Mendees and Rob Poy­ton of the Inns­mouth Book Club Pod­cast. We haven’t tabled at a con of any sort before and tak­ing an immer­sive expe­ri­ence to a trader’s hall was quite an under­tak­ing. We learned a lot, met fan­tas­tic peo­ple and had a great day.

Our table was rather filled by our mod­el house, char­ac­ter min­is and puz­zle box­es, and it did attract lots of atten­tion. As did the love­ly Matt Wood, of Edwyr­dian Tales join­ing us in cos­tume and look­ing fabulous!

The pan­els held at the event were real­ly inter­est­ing with some fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple tak­ing part. And in par­tic­u­lar I enjoyed watch­ing a series of com­e­dy Love­craft­ian short films by Lack­ey & John­son which I high­ly recommend.

A real high­light for me was meet­ing many inter­est­ing and inter­est­ed peo­ple. The afore­men­tioned Chris Lack­ey of The pod­cast Strange Stud­ies of Strange Sto­ries, and Greig John­son were a delight to chat with and I hope to spend more time with. We also met Paul Frick­er and Mike Mason of Chao­sium and had some real­ly inter­est­ing chats about pos­si­ble future plans.

We also joined Rob and Tim in the Gilman House Hotel for a great chat on their pod­cast about our work and design process for Key of Dreams, as well as RPGs, films and lick­ing wall­pa­per (Ivan- not me!) If you want to lis­ten to the four of us ram­ble on very enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly you can do so here! We’ve also been chat­ting with them about more future plans and pos­si­bil­i­ties for next year’s fes­ti­val. Colour me very excited!

But for now, it’s time to recov­er and unpack.