Friday, August 16, 2013

Announcement: ERFWORLD

I've played this announcement very coy up till now, and actually meant to make the big post this morning, but my day job wouldn't leave me alone. (Sigh, stupid day job, I don't know why I do it. Oh yeah, money and health insurance.)

Anyway, those of you who know me may remember that a while ago I started bugging everyone about a Kickstarter campaign to fund a set of motion comics and animations at erfworld.com.

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A brief digression on what the heck Erfworld is:

I'm a huge geek, like some of you may also be, and as a demon-worshiping pimple-popping glasses-adjusting virginal young Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast, I was very much into Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick.

It was a comic about gaming that made gaming jokes and yet, over time, turned into a real story about characters with depth that made you remember how great and thought-provoking D&D could be when you weren't just munching Cheetos and slaying kobolds. What else could you ask for? (And it was written by the guy who took second place to Eberron in Wizards of the Coast's "Design a D&D Setting" competition, but that's another digression.)

I, like tens of thousands of other Order of the Stick fans, was surprised and bemused to see Rich Burlew have a guest comic at the end of 2006. This weirdly cutesy, surreal "Erfworld" certainly wasn't about D&D but about some kind of homebrew old-school miniatures game on a hex map, packed chock-full of lame puns, esoteric Internet meme references and characters who took themselves very seriously despite being modeled on the proportion of Polly Pocket dolls.

Like most Order of the Stick fans, I was confused, then dismissive, then absolutely hooked.

Erfworld has progressed from that day forward to becoming an impressive soap opera, philosophical meditation on the nature of war and absolutely crazy gonzo work of detailed on-the-fly worldbuilding all in one. It's undergone several format changes and been through some rocky times with artists being replaced and updates being put on hiatus, but I've joined the legion of fans who've stuck with it through all the troubles.

And, seriously, this story about "dwagons" and "twolls" and "Lord Stanley the Tool" made it to one of Time Magazine's Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2007.

...And then Rob Balder, the author, put out a casting call for voiceover artists to help further the multimedia-ification of Erfworld.

You know what I had to do.

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Fast-forward to today, and I'm incredibly honored to be the voice of the Epilogue chapters to Erfworld Book 2, presented in the format of illustrated text-with-audio.

The characters of Erfworld and the setting of Erfworld are incredibly fun to inhabit behind the mic. It's been a blast working with Rob so far and I hope to continue doing so for a long time.

For those of you who glazed over during all the geeky crap up there, trust me, go to erfworld.com, start with Book 1 and get in on the craze. You won't regret it -- indeed, the only thing you will regret is that you have to make it all the way to the end of Book 2 before you get to hear my mellifluous voice.

For those of you for whom "hex-based miniatures" sounds like some kind of unpleasant disease -- especially those of you who miraculously might be reading this because you're an Important Showbiz Person looking to Sample the Quality of My Work -- let me just say this is some of the more rewarding character work I've ever done, and I truly hope that I've managed to convey pathos, human drama and depth in a narrative littered with cutesy twee nonsense (which is what those of us who love Erfworld have always loved about it).

Without further ado, permalinks to the first two episodes of the Erfworld epilogues:

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/08/book-2-epilogue-01-artemis-decrypted/

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/08/book-2-%E2%80%93-epilogue-02-%E2%80%93-jack-decrypted/

Stay tuned, more to come!

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