#166

Ars Magica

I ran the first session of my new Ars Magica campaign this week. The player characters were enlisted to help find the missing village children, who nobody had seen for some hours. It was the vernal equinox—a night of folklore and magic—and the children had fallen under the influence of a kelpie, which was intent on acting out its story of drowning unwary victims.

There wasn’t really much to do, the characters just had to (1) find the entrance to fairyland, (2) walk in a straight line through a fairy forest which would try to confuse their sense of direction, and (3) drive off the kelpie somehow. Very straightforward to run, and not much choice for the players. I came up with an intentionally simple plot so that we’d be able to ease into the system, and this turned out to be a good idea, as even with just this we had to consult the spell creation rules a bunch (which I’d expected). What I didn’t expect was that, initially, they saw this large faerie horse beast and thought “well, we don’t have any spells to ward against the fey, guess we have to physically defeat it”. But after one of them almost dying (doing the Ars Magica equivalent of making death saves), and another realising there was a magical solution, I hope they’ll be more likely to try magic first next time.

I definitely failed to predict how long it would take though, I had a whole second adventure (visiting and making a favourable impression on the abbot of a nearby monastery) planned which we didn’t have time to get into at all.

Inscryption

This week I got into Inscryption, a weird deck-building / escape-room game which feels like you’re trapped in a cabin with a mad game master who’s making up rules as he goes.

Or at least, the first part is. There’s a second part which seems very different based on the little of it I’ve played so far, and I’m not sure if I’m going to give it much of a go, as it was the weird atmosphere which really attracted me to the game initially. Maybe the weirdness returns? I’m not sure I want to put in the time to find out.

Minecraft

We’ve got a release date for Minecraft 1.18, the 30th!

I’m not much of a Minecraft player these days, I tend to get bored once I’ve got a self-sufficient base up and running (which doesn’t take very long at all), as building big things doesn’t interest me that much. I’m definitely not the game’s target audience.

But I do like giving it a go every now and then, and playing on servers with friends, and 1.18 brings some pretty fundamental changes to world generation I’m looking forward to trying out.

Roleplaying Games

• Building Better Gods
• The Haunting - How to Run Call of Cthulhu
• Real-World Herbalism for DnD Campaigns

Miscellaneous

• Even Rainbows Have a Dark Side