Books
No books this week.
Roleplaying Games
The Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society II kickstarter arrived this week: 6 new volumes, plus a mini volume on starports of the Spinward Marches, and a cool Traveller’s Aid Society patch:
I got the PDFs a while ago, so I’ve already read all the material. But it’s nice to have the physical copies at last. I used volume #7 in today’s Sylea Rising session, when I needed to quickly improvise some unexpected space travel, and so wanted some random events that could occur in jumpspace.
Cartographic Curiosities
This week the party stumbled upon a little dungeon I’d wanted to introduce for a while: Tomb of the Serpent Kings, though I’ve reskinned it as “Tomb of the Goat Lords” and placed it near Lankshorn.
So far they’ve explored a little, overcome the trapped main door, and dealt with some undead. I think I’ll have some tomb-robbing fairies start to sneak in now that the entrance is wide open, which should be a fun little encounter when the players realise they’ve been followed.
Sylea Rising
We finished Murder on Arcturus Station!
The players went through all the suspects, picked out the one they thought the most likely, and then contrived to have one player lure her away from her room while another searched it. And they found the critical clue, the means by which she could have overcome the door logs to commit the murder without leaving a trace. Armed with this discovery, the players confronted her, and managed to good-cop / bad-cop their way to a full confession.
All very good… except that it took 45 minutes, and then I still had over 2 hours of session to run, with little prepared. I expected them to bumble around a bit more, not to hone in on the one critical clue right at the start.
So I called an emergency break while I finished preparing for the start of the next adventure (I’m glad I started thinking about it last week). I wanted to give the players a choice of what to do, and also to inject some of the larger-scale politics, and the solution I came up with was a bulletin they’re issued by their employers. I gave them the bulletin, we had an hour-long shopping trip, and then they set off to go survey a planet for lanthanum deposits.
We ended the session with them arriving, but having damaged their jump drive on the last step of the journey, and with them not having brought enough spare parts with them (because they’re cheap). So, that’s a cliffhanger.
Advent of Code
Well, I made it to day 15, then day 16 just looked like too much work. This is about the point at which I drop off every year, so it’s not too surprising.
Dwarf Fortress
This week I bought the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress, hoping to finally be able to get into the game now that it has a GUI. And I have! I’ve done little else with my free time this week but play.
I’m on my third fortress (I didn’t lose the first two, I just used them to learn the mechanics before starting my “real” game), and it’s actually less difficult than I expected. I think I’m somehow being very lucky, as the three giant monsters I’ve had show up all kind of wandered off and did their own thing, rather than attacking me. Nor have I been attacked militarily.
So I’m just building my nice fortress, training my militia which as yet has only been used to kill thieves. I need to start a megaproject, clearly.
Link Roundup
No links this week.