#212

Oct 9, 2022

Books

No books this week!

Roleplaying Games

A few times now the timings have worked out such that I’m running sessions of all three campaigns in the same week. It’s fun, because they’re all pretty different, but I’m glad it’s not every week, and that there’s not four of them.

All went well, players in every game had a good time, and I’ve had to come up with some rules for the fairy horses one group of players got with their wish at the end of Winter’s Daughter:

Wish-granted Fairy Horse

Beautiful, silver-dappled mares and stallions of dashing grace and free-spirited intellect. Natives of the forests of Fairy, where they roam on quixotic quests. Bound to the party by a wish granted by Princess Snowfall-at-Dusk.

AC 6 [13] HD 3+1 (15hp) THAC0 17 [+2]

Attacks 2x hoof (1d6)

Move 240’ (80’) Morale 10

Saves D12 W13 P14 B15 S16 (2)

Alignment Neutral. Curious, driven by wanderlust

Intelligence 13. Sharp-witted

Speech Sarcastic. Woldish, Sylvan

Pure Iron:

As fairies, fairy horses suffer 1 extra point of damage when hit with weapons of pure iron.

Summoning:

Whistle when outdoors and outside of a human settlement, and the horse will come.

The same horse comes for the same rider every time. If the horse is killed, a new one replaces it.

Riders:

Fairy horses never serve a rider against their will; rider and mount treat each other as equals.

Once per day, while the horse is summoned, gain a +2 bonus to a saving throw.

Terrain:

Where mortal horses can only be led, fairy horses can be ridden.

Where mortal horses cannot be taken at all, fairy horses can be led.

Miscellaneous

Anime

The new season has started, I’ve been checking out a few shows and current favourites are Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer (continued from last season), Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, and My Master Has No Tail. I’m also going to check out Housing Complex C and Chainsaw Man at least, and probably a bunch of other things too.

The backlog just keeps growing…

NixOS

I did a lot of tinkering with my NixOS config this week:

  • I replaced all the shell scripts with nix run commands (PR #133)
  • I switched away from my custom monitoring scripts in favour of Alertmanager (PR #134)
  • I refactored all the shared config to make options more uniform and greatly expanded the README (PR #137)

Will I ever stop tinkering with it? No.

But this is generally a nice improvement fixing a few dissatisfactory bits which have bothered me for a while. For example, it’s now very obvious what configuration applies to a host (just the contents of the host-specific folder and the shared/default.nix file, every other file is opt-in only). The only large thing remaining on my radar is swapping out docker for rootless podman, but I’m in no hurry to do that.