Breachside Broadcast

Breachside Broadcast is an audio home for fiction set in Malifaux, and its numbered Chronicles installments work like an anthology of short stories credited to different writers. The format is easy to learn. Each installment opens with a paragraph of scene-setting about one corner of the setting, names the story and its author, and the reading begins. The same brief sign-off comes at the end, promising more tales of action and adventure. The setting changes from one installment to the next. The Huckster's Panacea, credited to Cindy Gunnin, is framed by the drunkenness filling Malifaux's taverns and speakeasies and by the people trying to hold it back. At its centre is Slippery Sam Goggins, who turns up at Miss Peabody's recovery rooms with Mick and Harry in tow and a big miner named Connor McGinty slumped in a wheelbarrow. Miss Peabody remembers the recovery room McGinty wrecked the last time he was admitted. Sam has sat through her classes, though, and knows exactly which argument will change her mind. The scene turns on a grin he has to hide. By the close the focus has moved to Jacob Lynch, heading back toward a casino and thinking about what these folks will need now that their cure is gone. Honey Smuggling, credited to Aaron Yoder, moves to the bayou and the smugglers who trade there in illicit goods. One long passage belongs to Isabel alone. She paddles as islands rise from the river at sunset, spots her mark of three rocks beneath a pine, and sits by a small fire at a hidden cache. The story closes on a tense exchange with a Gremlin called Jethro Benoit, just after the banjos fall silent. Singing Song, credited to Stacey Zend, is the most openly comic of the three. Three tanuki named Bao, Nobu and Teiichi are after song, a liquor distilled by the monks of the Fermented River and described as tasting of burnt cream, honeyed oatmeal and fresh pine. Their plan is a single coat with all three stacked inside it, shuffling past a monk who snores like a distant train. Across the three stories, drink and contraband keep resurfacing, and the plots belong to small-time schemers. The prose is built from concrete texture, from calloused hands on a paddle to gravel grinding against a keel. Chronicles is one of several named strands on a feed with a sizeable back catalogue. Each introduction sets out the corner of Malifaux in play before the story starts, so a newcomer is never dropped in cold.