Six of The Best With ERIK 'Midnight' MENARD

Here is the second part of my special Six Of The Best section on my favourite gaming podcast: Midnight's Lair, hosted by Canadians Luc Millette and Erik Menard. They give genuine, entertaining, proven advice from the broad spectrum of games they - and their friends - have enjoyed over the years. The show is also home to the excellent Gaming Ether segment, hosted by Troy Holaday, subject of a previous Six of The Best interview.

How did you both get into role-playing games in the first place?

Well... to be honest, looking back it the weirdest thing. Back in the early ‘80s my family had been living in South Florida. We dropped in to our local K-Mart (I don't think Wal-Mart was even in Florida back then) to pick up a few things, and as was our habit, my sister and I moseyed back to the toy department (that was back in the days before Adam Walsh was abducted from a Florida Mall), finding no new Star Wars Figures available.

I decided to check out the books, I was heavily into Piers Anthony's Xanth series and was anxiously awaiting the newest book. Needless to say, it wasn't there, but there was this interesting game box sitting there in the fantasy and science fiction section called Dungeons & Dragons, the top featured a knight drawing a bow and a wizard holding a torch and an wand facing off against a red dragon sitting on a horde of gold.

I had a visceral reaction to this strange looking game; I knew I had to have it, I knew it with the same certainty that I needed oxygen to survive!

Now, I remember I was in the dog house with my parents at that particular moment, over what I can't for the life of me remember, and I had already used up my allowance for the week so I was gonna have to have to do some serious begging!!

Well, I guess I must have given one of the better performances of my life cause I walked out of that K-Mart that evening with "My Precious".

I think I spent the next couple of weeks creating characters for this amazing game!

Jump to three months later when I stumbled upon the AD&D Player's Manual, and my fall to the dark side began in earnest.

It wasn't long before the four glorious tomes graced my bookshelf, and the dark mistress of RPGs had indeed claimed me as her own. (Yes, I discovered AD&D exactly at the time when the Fiend Folio was first released).

I spent months and months reading and rereading the books and the copies of Dragon magazine I'd managed to acquire, but I couldn't get my best friends to try this great new game, it was too weird for them, and they were confirmed nerds and geeks all. I had ascended to a whole new level of outcast geekiness.

It wasn't till I attended Coral Spring High School (for the last half of my freshmen year and first half my sophomore year) that I discovered others of my ilk; for lo and behold they had formed an after-school AD&D club, and I was initiated amongst their tribe as a full member.

When my family returned to Canada, I had learned the skills necessary to read the secret signs of our fraternity, and that's how I found Luc and P.Michael at my new High School, and we've been together ever since!

How different is the Canadian gaming scene to that of the United States?

In the early days it was hard to get a hold of materials if you didn't live in a major metropolitan area with a large percentage of English speaking population, and in Quebec that means Montreal.

Although Sherbrooke and the surrounding towns and villages had a relatively high percentage of English, and/or bilingual kids, it only had one small shop with very limited shelf space devoted to Role-Playing games. I think kids in the UK probably had better access to RPGs that we did in the mid ‘80s.

Now, I honestly don't see a difference between gaming in the U.S. and Canada, but Quebecers have often been accused of having a very American outlook on things.

It's really hard to judge the difference appropriately as were not exposed to that much U.S. gaming; based on the evidence of last year's GenCon I'd say when it really comes down to it, gamers iz gamers everywhere in the world!

Thinking about all the campaigns and one-shot adventures you have played over the years, could you describe a single moment, either as a player or games master, that encapsulates for you just what is so amazing about role-playing games?

I think my best RPG experience took place during our long running "Pantheon" Villains & Vigilantes Campaign.

The campaign consisted of four players (Mark Taylor, Francois Verpaelst, Jeremy Kidd, and myself )and the GM (P.Michael), and our characters, the hero team who had just recently began to call themselves "the Pantheon" (The Incredible Speck, Cosmic Wolf, The Comet, and Midnight), had been whisked away to a parallel dimension against our will, and to some extent without our knowledge.

During a battle to contain an Alien encroachment into this dimension (Inadvertently caused by the self-same heroes), The Incredible Speck was struck a mortal blow by a spray of acidic blood from the dying Alien Queen.

The team dropped everything and immediately rallied around our fallen friend, trying valiantly to cheat the Grim Reaper of his claim over our friend's gallant soul. We absolutely refused to abandon our friend to this fate.

In the end, one of the others willingly offered his very soul to powers unknown, in barter for Speck’s continued existence on this mortal plane, the final cost is still not known to this day.

It was some of the best, most intense, and fun ROLE-PLAYING I've ever experienced, and I think that we, the players, benefited from the expression of loyalty and friendship expressed by our characters.

To this day if there is a grouping of friends that I find myself waxing nostalgic over time and time again its that little group.

I realize that the whole episode suffers greatly in my retelling, but it has become the gold standard by which I judge any RPG experience.

What made you decide to start podcasting and how did you come upwith the format of Midnight's Lair?

Well it all started last year at tax time when I pre-spent my tax return on a 30GB iPOD Video. I wasn't long after that that I discovered podcasts, and it wasn't more that a couple of hours after that, that I discovered gaming podcasts.

I think the first podcasts I subscribed to were The Bear's Grove hosted By Sam Chupp, The Dragon's Landing hosted by Chuck Tinsley & Lonnie Ezell, and Gamer: the Podcasting by the Mad Three.

I remember thinking that the hosts of these shows were having a blast and that I'd love to do something like that.

Then I thought: "Heck, I wonder what it would take to do something like that?", and that thought was quickly followed by: "I could probably do that!"

This, of course, got me to thinking: "Who could I get to do this with me?"

Out of all on my close friends I knew Luc would, at least, hear me out before telling me I was crazy, and hanging up on me. So I called him and explained my hare-brained idea; he did indeed call me crazy, but admitted that the idea had a strange fascination for him. I think the actual quote was: "You know the idea is interesting but ... Weeeeeiird !!!"

From there it was really just a matter of procuring some recording software and hardware, and hashing out what we were gonna talk about. I don't think thatthere was ever really a doubt in my mind after that first call to Luc that we were gonna do this.

Could you explain what equipment you use to record and distributethe show and give me an idea of how long it takes to record and edit an episode?

For hardware, we record with between 2-4 Nexxtech unidirectional Dynamic Mics (3303018) and a Behringer Eurorack UB1202 Mixer.

For software, we record using Audacity a free audio recording and processing software, but we use a piece of software called Mixcraft by Acoustica to assemble, edit and mix the various tracks in to a cohesive whole. After we save the final product down to an MP3, I upload it to our Libsyn account.

I then post the link to the episode on our Wordpress blog. We have a Feedburner account that acts as our RSS Feed. it points the RSS2 source back on the Wordpress blog and makes it available to iTunes and the other podcast directories.

We also use Podpress and Podtrac on the wordpress blog to allow people to listen to the show directly from the website. (Note from Luc: “See what I mean? He lost me at 'For hardware...'")

On average it take 1.5 times the length of the final show in actual recording time. Editing takes an amount of time equal to the final show lenght times two to two-and-a-half. Research time varies from show to show.

From the Midnight's Lair message boards I see you both read comics as well. Are there any titles around at the moment that you would recommend people to pick up?

Yep, I'm a big DC Fan!! But at the moment I'm a lapsed collector I have six months of back issues to catch up on sitting in my book case, I haven't read anything since week two of 52.

I must say that, from everything I've heard, and the snippets I've caught, I HATE what was done in the Marvel Civil War, but that's a story for a whole other article.

But for me it's hard to beat the JLA, JSA for your basic super heroey goodness!! I guess that's one of the reasons that we started the Vanguard City Project over on the Midnight's Lair Bulletin Boards, to create a Alternative Role-playing setting to the Big Two publishers that could be used with Mutants & Masterminds and other RPG systems.