Books
This week I read:
Volume 6 of Delicious in Dungeon by Ryoko Kui
Not much to say: it’s more of the same.
Roleplaying Games
Cartographic Curiosities
Got some unfortunate feedback after this week’s session: the players aren’t happy with the difficulty. As one player put it, “I can’t think of a single encounter so far that we actually profited from in a way that felt satisfying”.
That’s not good. But looking back, I can certainly see how that could be the case.
On the plus side, they all like the setting. So hopefully this is salvageable. Going forward I’m going to be freer with information (which is never a bad thing, since I am their eyes and ears), we’re introducing a few new house rules, and I might revise the random encounters.
If that’s not enough, I might try switching systems entirely to something more heroic than OSE, perhaps Worlds Without Number. Watch this space.
Wicked Ones
Session 2 this week, in which we finished setting up the dungeon and the local area, got to recruit some minions and torture a prisoner, and then fight off a significant adventurer invasion. I toned the adventurers down a bit since only two of the four players were present, but they were still a pretty significant threat: one of them made it to the throne room and had one of the PCs in a bad position before the other took them out.
Still getting used to the rules, but we’re getting better. The hardest part so far for me has been remembering to have the players describe the outcome of their rolls (with me jumping in at the point it goes wrong), which is very different to most RPGs, in which the player describes how they start but the GM takes over the narration as soon as the dice are rolled.
Hopefully all the players will be present next week, and we can get to some monstrous action.
Miscellaneous
Cult of the Lamb
I started playing Cult of the Lamb today, it’s a lot of fun.
It’s about being an undead lamb in service to a dark god, recruiting followers and furthering your aims through extreme violence. I’m not very far into it yet, but I’m enjoying it.
Doom Emacs
I’ve decided to stick with doom emacs. It’s not perfect, there are some things it does differently to my old config which I’m not decided on yet, but on the whole it feels like an improvement.