Ghost Wax · Far and Tall Tales

Season 1 Postmortem and Q&A

November 28, 2023·1 hr 21 min·7 clips

Stephanie's horror movie scream was so realistic she feared police would be called.

1. The Ghost Wax Season 1 Postmortem and Q&A is a behind-the-scenes conversation hosted by creator Robert Knutson, covering the full Season 1 arc and answering questions from the Ghost Wax Discord community. 2. The episode features Stephanie Olsen (voice of Pip, writer of major Pip episodes), Brian (writer and actor who plays Echoes and wrote the Balancer), and Aaron Schoenrock (producer, sound designer, and voice of Luca). 3. Robert opens with a disclaimer: the episode is full spoilers for Season 1 and should not be listened to before completing the show. 4. Robert announces Ghost Wax 1910, an expansion season of approximately 10 episodes for Patreon subscribers, set in early 20th-century America and London, featuring Von Sid, Olivia, and Amia. 5. The 1910 season is framed around the real historical surge in spiritualism and occultism from the mid-1800s through the turn of the century, including spirit photography and what Robert calls 'what that psychic surge may have done to the world or what it might have awoken.' 6. Robert describes the planned structure of 1910 as individual cases with an overarching whodunit or 'what-done-it,' approximately 10 episodes. 7. Aaron describes the production workflow: scripts take a few days to a few weeks, actor coordination and recording takes up to a week, then three editing sessions of two to four hours each — selecting takes, building conversational pacing, layering music and sound design. 8. Robert notes that the 45-episode Season 1 was achievable at consistent quality because the workload was distributed across many contributors; he advises aspiring podcasters to find collaborators rather than attempt solo production. 9. Aaron explains that Ghost Wax records actors separately rather than together to ensure clean audio files and editorial flexibility, allowing him to select best takes and construct timing in post. 10. Stephanie describes Pip's origin as a tarot reader who can see the future but must pretend she cannot — a dramatic irony she had worked out from the character's first episode — and admits she created the character partly to have someone she could cosplay. 11. Robert describes Stephanie's contribution to Ghost Wax as primarily character development and evolution, crediting a Dungeons and Dragons-influenced 'what does your character think?' approach that is unusual for traditional writer's rooms. 12. Brian describes his approach to writing as always trying to do something structurally new to maintain his own interest, citing his Balancer character as an attempt to create a genuinely amoral entity — something that kills the innocent or saves them based entirely on cosmic energy balance rather than any concept of right or wrong. 13. Robert connects the Balancer to a broader Ghost Wax theme: exploring 'really alien' ideas about humanity — things 'underneath there' that people do not associate with themselves — as the actual source of horror. 14. Robert reveals that Von Sid originated in an unfinished fantasy novel where a necromancer-investigator interviewed the reanimated dead — but evolved for Ghost Wax when Robert processed the death of his little sister, who died approximately ten years before the recording. 15. He describes the character's arc shifting from 'wouldn't it be great if we could talk to people we've lost?' to something about not clutching at that loss but instead finding peace — reflecting his own decade of grief processing. 16. Aaron says his favorite characters are the monster-y voices because each recording is an opportunity to ask 'how can I fuck this up and make it weird?' — and that he deliberately asks not to know much about Luca so that his in-the-moment read feels fresh. 17. A Discord question about whether all magic practitioners must work for the Hamsa leads to a discussion that lands on the conclusion that the Hamsa's control instincts 'can be as villainous as any of the glories they face' — with Brian describing a power-level-based threshold above which the organization sends Blades immediately. 18. Robert reveals the lore behind why Reclaimers are rare: the Venerim (senior Hamsa) deliberately restrict teaching necromancy due to its historical corruptibility, and in the 1910 season a traumatic event wipes out the Reclaimer Order, leaving Von Sid as the last survivor and unable to take new apprentices under Venerim constraints. 19. The episode is structured as a casual living-room conversation with frequent tangents, laughter, and in-jokes; it functions as both a production commentary and a lore document for invested fans. 20. Listeners who have completed Ghost Wax Season 1 and want creative process discussion combined with canon lore reveals will find this essential; those who have not seen the show will encounter significant spoilers throughout.

As heard by us

A spoiler-rich season-one wrap that turns production banter into real emotional context.

Ghost Wax's season one postmortem is warm and openly spoiler-heavy, but it never feels detached from the work itself. It traces how a two-person project turned into a larger circle of actors, writers, and collaborators, and it gives Von Sid the most attention.

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Why you'd press play

Finished season one? Pull up a chair for the full-spoiler post-mortem.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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