Books
This week I read:
The Return of the Black Company by Glen Cook
I really liked the nonlinear storytelling in Bleak Seasons, it was just the right balance of confusing and enlightening to keep me going. She Is the Darkness was mostly linear, but with some nonlinear parts to it. This book did feel like a bit of a disconnect from the previous books, with a different narrator character, but that worked well too: it gave us a different perspective on the more familiar characters of the earlier books. I thought the ending was done particularly well.
Next up is The Many Deaths of The Black Company, the final two stories, which I will be starting tomorrow.
Roleplaying Games
This week, some new books arrived:
The Delta Green core rulebooks, a scenario book, and the Impossible Landscapes campaign. The new edition of The Tome of Adventure Design, which I got backed the kickstarter for. And finally, a book I’d given up all hope of ever receiving, plagued with shipping issues for like a year and a half, Into the Wyrd and Wild!
I’ve decided that the one-shot next month will be Delta Green, and I’ve given the players a few scenarios from the books above to choose from. I’m quite looking forward to this: I like the system, I like the setting, and as I’ve said previously I’m thinking of running Impossible Landscapes as the next campaign. So hopefully the players like it too.
Impossible Landscapes is a collection of linked scenarios which take place over decades, and it’s been very hard to resist running the first scenario as our one-shot—but I have to, I want to do it really well with all the players totally on-board with a more character-focussed cosmic horror game, so I don’t think it’s suitable as our very first foray into Delta Green.
Sylea Rising
This week we finished Mission to Mithril, with the player characters outgunning the mercenaries so much that they managed to get the merceneries to pay to have their lives spared.
Next week the trip to the Ancients site on Indmen resumes, but first they’re going to have a run-in with an old enemy. In character creation, one of the players rolled up this event:
Your unit is slaughtered in a disastrous battle, for which you blame your commander. Gain them as an Enemy as they have you removed from the service.
The same player rolled up an enemy in the previous campaign too, and we had a lot of fun with that NPC: Crayg, the mercenary who hated the player character’s guts. So, a spiritual sequel to that character is returning in this campaign: Captain Crayg of the battleship The Archon’s Fist, who is going to show up at the beginning of next session, delay the player characters for a few hours while he has their ship searched, and who will make loud statements about “smugglers” and “coercion” before finally letting them go.
Of course, it’s possible they’ll try to do something to Crayg, but this encounter is mainly foreshadowing for Flatlined, as Crayg will make another appearance at the end of part 1 of the campaign, drug them, and get them shipped off.