O mnie

Perhaps The Weirdness Returns

This week, I took a break from working. This was the longest time I've taken off since July. It was wonderful to take an unplanned break.

Once again, my financial dependence on an employer makes me very sad.

Books

This week, no books. I'm thinking that I need to find some new reading material. The majority of the books I've left are RPG rulebooks or nonfiction. I only read them when I'm feeling the need.

Gaming

Ars Magica

I ran the first session of my brand new Ars Magica campaign this week. The players were recruited to help find the missing village children, whom no one had seen in several hours. It was the evening of the vernal hours that night, a night filled with magical and folklore. The children were enticed by the story of a kelpie who was determined to tell their story of drowning unwary victims.

There was nothing to do. The players had to (1) locate the entrance to fairyland, (2) walk straight through a fairy-tale forest that was designed to confuse them sense of direction, (3) drive away the Kelpie. It was very easy to complete, and there wasn't any choice for the players. I came up with an intentionally simple plot so that we'd be able to gradually get used to the system. This turned out to be a good choice because even with this, we needed to go through the spell creation rules numerous times (which I was expecting). I was surprised to learn that they initially saw the large faerie horse beast and decided to fight it physically. However, after one almost dying (doing the Ars Magica equivalent of making death saves), and another realising there was a magic solution I'm hoping they'll have the confidence to try magic first next time around.

Although I didn't know how the duration would be however, I did have a different adventure (visiting and making an impression on the abbot at the nearby monastery) that I planned but didn't have the time.

Inscryption

This week I played Inscryption. It's a strange deck-building/escape-room game that makes you feel as if you're in the cave of a mad game master who is making up rules as the game goes.

The first part is. There's another part that is quite different from the small amount I've played to date, and I'm not sure whether I'll give it the chance, considering it was the strange atmosphere that attracted me to the game at first. Maybe the weirdness comes back. I'm not sure if it's worth it to spend the effort to find out.

We've set a release date for Minecraft 1.18 on the 30th of September!
Nici's blog

I'm not a huge Minecraft player nowadays, and I'm usually bored once I've got a self-sufficient base running (which takes no time at all) since building huge things isn't my thing at all. I'm definitely not the game's target market.

But I do like giving it a go every now and again, and playing with my friends. 1.18 brings some pretty fundamental changes to world generation that I'm excited about testing.

Miscellaneous

I was capable of catching up on TV this week, watching The Mandalorian and Foundation. Both were pretty great, many very cool visuals (like this FTL jump from the first episode of Foundation00In fact, I think this is the single coolest version of FTL jumps I've seen. If this series had been released before I started my Traveller game I would have been convinced to redesign all the standard ship deckplans to have a big rotating black hole-powered jump drive.

). I'm looking for more.

If I had to make a complaint, it would be that I find the Empire storyline from Foundation more compelling than the Foundation storyline. I think this speaks to the sorts of stories that I like. The Empire storyline revolves around large, galaxy-shaking events and the fall of an era. It's more about the events than the characters. While the Foundation storyline is more about the individuals and the events are much smaller in scope. But I prefer large-scale events!