Notes

Perhaps The Weirdness Returns

This week, I took a break from working. This is the most contiguous time off I've had since July, so it was very refreshing to take some time off.



Again, my financial dependence on my employer makes me very sad.



Books



This week, no books. I think I need to find some new reading material again The majority of the books I've left are RPG rulebooks as well as nonfiction and I only go through them when I'm in the mood.



Gaming



Ars Magica



This week, I ran the first session of my brand new Ars Magica campaign. The players were asked to help in the search for the missing children from the village. They hadn't seen them in hours. It was the evening of the vernal hours and a night of magic and folklore. The children had fallen in love with the charm of a kelpie determined to tell the story of drowning innocent victims.



There was not much to do. The players were required to (1) locate the entrance to fairyland, (2) walk straight through a forest of fairy tales which would attempt to confuse them sense of direction, (3) drive away the Kelpie. It was a breeze to follow, and not many options for the players. I thought of a simple plot in order to be able to gradually get used to the system. This turned out to be a great idea, as even with just this, we needed to go through the rules for creating spells several times (which I was expecting). I was shocked to learn that they first noticed the huge horse-like faerie creature and decided to take on it physically. But after one of them almost dying (doing the Ars Magica equivalent of making death saves) and another one realised there was a solution that was magical I'm hoping they'll be more likely to try magic first the next time around.



While I wasn't sure how it would take I did have another trip planned (visiting and making impressions on the abbot of a nearby monastery) that I planned but didn't have time for.



Inscryption



This week I tried Inscryption. It's a strange deck-building/escape-room game that gives you the feeling of being in the cave of a mad game master who is inventing rules as they go.



The first part is. There's a third part that appears to be very different from the little of it I've played so far I'm not sure if I'm going to give it much of the chance, considering it was the strange atmosphere which really attracted me to the game initially. Maybe the weirdness comes back. I'm not sure if I would like to wait to find out.



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



I'm not a huge Minecraft player these days, I'm usually bored once I've got an self-sufficient base running (which takes no time at all) since building huge things doesn't appeal to me at all. I'm certainly not the game's target audience.



It's something I enjoy doing every now and again and also playing with friends on servers. 1.18 brings some fundamental changes to the world generation, which I'm eager to try out.



Miscellaneous



This week, I watched a bit of television: I watched The Mandalorian and Foundation. Both were pretty great, lots of very impressive 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 come across. I would have been tempted to redo the deckplans for the ship when this series was available before I started my Traveller game.



). I look forward to more.



If I had to make a criticism I find the Empire storyline of Foundation much more enthralling than the Foundation storyline of Foundation. I think this speaks to the kind of stories that I like. Acesasoft The Empire storyline revolves around large galaxy-shaking events, and the collapse of a dynasty. It's more about the events than people. The Foundation storyline is more about the people, while the events themselves are small in terms of size. But I do prefer large-scale events!


My Website: https://acesasoft.com/