Notes

Perhaps The Weirdness Returns

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



My financial dependence on my employer is making me very sad.



Books



This week, I've no books. I'm thinking I should acquire some new reading material again: most of the books I've left are RPG rulebooks and nonfiction, and I only read those when the mood strikes.



Gaming



Ars Magica



This week, I ran the first session of my brand new Ars Magica campaign. The player characters were enlisted to assist in finding the missing village children who had not been seen for several hours. It was the vernal equinox-a night of folklore and magic-and the children had fallen under the influence of a kelpie, who was determined to play out its tale of drowning unwary victims.



There wasn't much to do. The players were required to (1) discover the entrance to Fairyland, (2) walk straight through a fairy-tale forest that was designed to confuse their sense of direction, (3) drive away the kelpie. It was a breeze to manage and the players were left with a limited number of choices. I thought of a simple plot to be able to get comfortable with the system. It turned out to be a great idea because even with this, we needed to go through the rules for creating spells numerous times (which I'd expected). What I didn't expect was that at first they saw this massive faerie horse beast and thought "well we don't have any magic to stop the fey. So we'll have to physically fight it". However, after one of them almost dying (doing the Ars Magica equivalent of making death saves), and another realising there was a solution that was magical, I hope they'll be more likely to try magic first next time around.



I was definitely not able to anticipate how long it would take. I had a whole second adventure (visiting and making a favorable impression on the abbot from the nearby monastery) planned which we didn't have the time to explore at all.



Inscryption



This week I got into Inscryption which is a bizarre deck-building / escape-room game which feels like you're trapped in an escape room with a crazy game master who's composing rules as the game goes.



The first part is. Based on what I've observed, there is a second part that seems very different. Alusky's I don't know whether I'll give it a lot of my time but it was the weird atmosphere that attracted me to it in the first place. Maybe the oddity returns? I'm not sure I want to spend the time to discover the truth.



We've set a release date for Minecraft 1.18, the 30th!



I'm not a huge Minecraft player nowadays, and I tend to get bored once I have a self-sufficient base running (which doesn't take very long at all) because building large things doesn't appeal to me at all. I am not the target audience for the game.



It's something I love doing every now and then, and playing with friends on servers. 1.18 brings some fundamental changes to the generation that is currently in the world, which I'm eager to test out.



Miscellaneous



I was capable of catching some TV this week, watching The Mandalorian and Foundation. Both were fantastic and had plenty of amazing visuals, such as this FTL jump in episode 1 of Foundation00. In fact, it's the most amazing FTL jump I've ever seen. I would have been tempted re-do the ship deckplans when this series was available prior to the time I started my Traveller game.



). I'm looking forward to 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. This is an expression of the stories I enjoy. The Empire storyline is about large epic, galaxy-shaking events as well as the demise of the dynasty. It's more about events than people. The Foundation storyline is more about the people, while the events themselves are less in terms of size. But I prefer large-scale events!


My Website: https://alusky.xyz/