#095

Work

This week was supposed to be about taking it easy and doing some team stuff, before getting back into the project proper next week, but I ended up using scraps of spare time here and there to completely rewrite our prototype, changing a core assumption.

Though it was nice to be able to spend multiple days getting stuck into something which might have gone nowhere and been thrown away. We’ve been in a “discovery” for the past 6 weeks, so I suppose technically that’s always been the case; but it’s certainly easier to just do random exploratory work when you don’t need to think about writing up cards or even how you work is going to fit in with others.

I think going forward I’ll try to write more exploratory cards, as we’ve had a lot of fairly concrete ones.

Books

This week I read:

• The Ritual, by Adam Nevill.

  There’s a recent film of the same name, which I saw first. They’re both very good, though the second half of the book and film are pretty different. The book has a pretty significant shift in tone (though still remaining horror). I think the film probably made the right choice in changing it, I’m not sure the second half of the book would have worked as well in the more limited time available on screen as it did in the book.

Games

My Call of Cthulhu game reached the thrilling conclusion of the current story arc: the investigators ventured to Costa Rica and then Canada to find the two magical crystals keeping Gla’aki imprisoned on Earth. They disabled one crystal, Gla’aki mind-controlled an unwary investigator and made them disable the second, and Gla’aki returned to space.

With a few unforeseen consequences.

Next session we’re going to switch to the Pulp Cthulhu rules and play the Peru chapter of Masks of Nyarlathotep (MoN). I have run MoN before, but not with the pulp rules, and also this time we’re not necessarily committing to the whole campaign, for now we’re just doing the prequel. One of the investigators owes Nyarlathotep “a moment of their time”, so I’m looking forward to that coming up at a suitably dramatic moment.

Overall I think this story arc went well. None of the three players had played Call of Cthulhu before, but they picked up the rules pretty easily and enjoyed the game. I did float the idea of changing game systems if people had had enough of Call of Cthulhu now, but no, they wanted to continue.

Link Roundup

• Vital Signs: The Woman Who Needed to Be Upside-Down
• Issue 219 :: Haskell Weekly
• This Week in Rust 346
• How to Run a Biblical Campaign
• Getting There is Half the Fun
• Using Notion.so for Lazy D&D Campaign Planning
• Campaigns: Saga vs Episodic - Running RPGs
• Diving into West Marches
• The Fabulous Fashion of the Minoan Civilization