#099

Work

Again, not very much to report this week. Hopefully more soon.

Books

This week I read:

• Scenic Dunnsmouth by Zzarchov Kowolski, an adventure module for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, though I think it should work for most RPG systems without too much modification. It’s a book about how to randomly generate the scenic swamp-village of Dunnsmouth, and the various horrors that may lurk within it. As the village is randomly generated (even taking the relative positions of the dice you roll into account), two instances are very unlikely to be the same, so it should have good replayability (perhaps with a bit of reflavouring of magic and renaming of NPCs each time).

• Kobold Guide to Gamemastering by Sean K. Reynolds et al., a collection of essays on running games. I didn’t find this one as useful as their guide to worldbuilding, but there are still some good tips in it. I’ve also got their guide to plots and campaigns to have a look at.

I’ve also been reading the third Malazan book. I’ve now got over a hundred unread books in my London flat, so I’m going to cut down on buying new books for a little while.

Games

Pulp Cthulhu is going strong, though my players haven’t quite got the hang of how much more luck they can get away with spending now. We’re mostly through the Peru chapter and, I think, likely to wrap it up next session.

Link Roundup

• The Glatisant: Issue #6
• “What is Role-Playing?” A Different Approach
• Two articles from Signs in the Wilderness about random map generation:
  • Randomly-generated Maps
  • Random Map: terrain table
• TRAVELLER: Out of the Box–The Casual and Improvisatory Nature of Early Traveller Play
• The Uncanny Valley Is Wrong
• #07 - NixOS Weekly
• This Week in Rust 350
• Issue 223 :: Haskell Weekly
• Masks of Nyarlathotep - How We Roll Podcast