Notes

Perhaps the Weirdness Resurfaces?

I took this week off work. This was the longest period I have taken off work since July. It was wonderful to have an unplanned break.



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



Books



This week, I've no books. I'm thinking I should find some new reading material. Most of the books I've left are RPG rulebooks or nonfiction. I only read these when I feel the need.



Gaming



Ars Magica



This week, I held the first session in my new Ars Magica campaign. The players were asked to join the search for the missing children from the village. They had not seen them in hours. It was the vernal equinox-a night of magic and folklore-and the children were under the influence of a kelpie, who was determined to play out its story of drowning innocent victims.



There wasn't much to do. The players had to (1) locate the entrance to fairyland, (2) walk straight through a forest of fairy tales which would attempt to confuse their sense of direction, (3) drive away the Kelpie. It was very easy to manage and the players had a few options. I created a deliberately simple plot in order to be able to get comfortable with the system. This proved to be a good idea considering that even with this we had to consult the spell creation rules a bunch (which I was expecting). What I didn't think of was that at first they saw this massive creature from the faerie realm and thought "well, we do not have any spells to protect ourselves from the fey, so we'll have to physically fight it". But after one of them nearly dying (doing the Ars Magica equivalent of making death saves), and another realising there was a solution that was magical I'm hoping they'll be more likely to try magic first the next time around.



Although I didn't know how it would take however, I did have a different adventure (visiting and making an impression on the abbot of the nearby monastery) which I had in mind but didn't have time for.



Inscryption



This week I played Inscryption. It's a weird deck-building/escape room game that makes you feel as if you're in a cave with a mad game master who is inventing rules as he goes.



It's at least the first part is. There's another part that appears to be very different from the small amount I've played so far I'm not certain if I'm going to give it much of a go, as it was the bizarre atmosphere which really attracted me to the game in the first place. Perhaps the strangeness returns. I'm not sure if I want to spend the time to discover.



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



I'm not a big Minecraft player these days, I'm prone to becoming bored once I've got an self-sufficient base in place (which isn't a long time at all) since building huge things doesn't interest me at all. I'm certainly not the game's target market.



However, I like playing with it every now and again, and playing on servers with my friends. 1.18 brings some very fundamental changes to world generation that I'm excited about testing.



Miscellaneous



I was able to catch some television this week, and I watched The Mandalorian and Foundation. Both were great and had plenty of amazing visuals, such as this FTL jump in episode 1 of Foundation00. In fact, it's the coolest FTL jump I've ever seen. If this series had been released before I started my Traveller game, I would have been very convinced to redesign all the standard ship deckplans to include a huge rotating black hole-powered jump drive.
PHOTOGRAPHY BLOGS


). I am 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 a reflection of the stories I like. The Empire storyline is about large cosmic events, as well as the end of a dynasty. It's more about the events rather than the people. The Foundation storyline is more about people, while the events themselves are small in terms of size. But I do prefer large-scale events!


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