Episode 133: The Dead Of Tetra Manna by Mark L. S. Stone
Erik of Ciohar is a mighty warrior, defender of his land, and not at all bad with the ladies. But after his last mission to the dread city of Tetra Manna, he is not the man he used to be (literally). Is he still a hero? Can he serve his people as he used to, and can the dark magic of the Tetrans be overcome?
Afterward, Rish and Big talk about the long and winding road in producing this story, world-building, and Comic-Con. Plus, somewhere in there is an announcement about the Parsec Awards.
Special thanks to R.E. Chambliss, Julie Hoverson, Kim Price and Joe Zieja lending their voices to today’s episode, and to Lisa Wilde for today’s episode art.
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http://traffic.libsyn.com/dunesteef/Dunesteef_133_The_Dead_Of_Tetra_Manna_by_Mark_LS_Stone.mp3%20Related Links:
Mark L. S. Stone’s Site
Renee Chambliss’s Site
Julie Hoverson’s 19 Nocturne Boulevard
Kim Price’s Ladies of Leet Podcast
Joseph Zieja’s Site
Artist Lisa Wilde’s Showcase
Artist Lisa Wilde’s Blog
Making the Cut by Chris Lester at Metamor City Podcast
Music was Maavrick’s Tear’s Marsh by
Arnaud Condé, and Omnipresence and The Sky Is Inert by Dereleech.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
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The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine 
September 3, 2012 at 12:36 am
In the story there was one thing that seemed to be left dangling. I didn’t quite get what the ghost of Eric hanging like a balloon attached to the corpse-Eric did or what its role was. I might have wanted to hear something about how Nara reeled it back in or something.
About the production. I’m often hesistant about the fully produced ones because the clumsily inserted effects that pay no attention to the flow and pacing of the story more break the mood than enhance the atmosphere. Not this time; the finished production was smooth and it ran along just as it should.
A choral recitation is a difficult act to pull off well. Rish was worried about the comprehensibility of the speech; that bit worked. But to get the lines sound understandable usually requires slowing the diction down a lot from usual human rate. Expectedly, the prosody was slow, but happily easy-ish to understand. Moreover, I was very happily astonished at the conclusion where the Congregation managed to sound embarrassed and contrite; getting emotive tone through in choral recitation is really hard, and here you do that quite totally well!
Thank you for another interesting and enjoyable episode. I will be staying subscribed.
September 3, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Thanks, Pirvonen. I was still pretty paranoid while listening to the finished product as to how clear the dialogue was, and I’ll have to admit there were a couple of moments where I wished I had put sound effects in (like the horsehooves when they were riding, even though I consciously skipped that when I went through it because the sound I had was way too much of a gallop, and it seemed distractingly wrong for the scene). Sound effects are a strange thing, because you can feel hammered by too many of them (we’ve all heard those productions) and you can also feel their absence where there’s too few.
In an upcoming story, the producer didn’t really put sound effects in, and I did a kind of “Foley pass” where I added things in “live” while I listened to it through headphones. It ended up being really fun, and reminding me of the radio plays during the Golden Age of Radio. I enjoyed that quite a bit, and I know some like Bryan Lincoln enjoy creating their own sounds . . . BUT since the episode hasn’t aired yet, I don’t know if it will work or not, or if someone will think, “What’s with all the grunting and clomping? I would’ve enjoyed the story more without the distractions.” Guess we’ll see.