#097

Jul 26, 2020

Work

Not much to say about this week, as I was on support for two days, then back on the team, then off for Thursday and Friday. It was nice to have a little break though. I’ve been toying with the idea of taking one Friday a month off. It’s nice to have a longer (even if only slightly) weekend every so often.

Books

This week I read:

I’ve also been reading the second Malazan book and the RuneQuest Glorantha rulebook.

I expanded the RPG section of my book wishlist with some more setting books, as it’s always nice to have more to draw upon in my games. Running Call of Cthulhu with all the standard Mythos monsters works, but can get a bit repetitive. The last thing you want is the players saying things like “oh, another Deep One.” I think The Gardens of Ynn could work as part of a Dreamlands sequence in a Call of Cthulhu game; that would be fun to try out.

Games

This week I switched my Call of Cthulhu campaign to Pulp Cthulhu, and we started playing the Masks of Nyarlathotep prologue chapter. MoN is a very long campaign, but the prologue is nicely self-contained, and one of the players wants a story about Nyarlathotep, so it’s a good fit. I think it went very well. We got to use a few of the new Pulp rules, and everyone had a good time.

The downside is that MoN is a long campaign, but I’ve been getting into the mood to play some RuneQuest… do I need to start a third RPG group?

Miscellaneous

I played around the new GPT-3-powered version of AI Dungeon, it’s pretty impressive. I decided to start it with a very Call of Cthulhu-esque prompt:

Your good friend Jackson Elias calls for your help with a telegram scarce on details. Something about the ill-fated Carlyle Expedition of 1920, where everyone ended up dead. He said he’s found something. You arrive at his hotel room and knock on the door, but get no response. The door is ajar. You push it open and see

And got this cool short story which could easily serve as the introduction to a game scenario. Not bad!

I particularly like this bit:

The old ones. The Great Old Ones. The Lords of the Outer Rims. The Elder Gods. Gods from before the gods, some say. They dwell in a realm of twisted madness that lies on the far edges of reality, just outside the material world.

I find that really interesting, because I can only find “Lords of the Outer Rims” used in the context of Star Wars—so GPT-3 has recognised that it’s used in a similar context to “Great Old Ones” and “Elder Gods” in weird fiction!