#237
Apr 2, 2023
Books
This week I read:
Delta Green: Impossible Landscapes from Arc Dream Publishing
Wow. This is going to be a wild ride.
Volume 15 of Overlord by Kugane Maruyama
I enjoyed this, but felt it was a little… short. It’s got fewer pages than the previous couple of volumes, and not that much happened. Not really sure why this story arc is split across two volumes.
Something I am looking forward to seeing is the resolution of an old bit of foreshadowing, a suggestion that perhaps Albedo and Demiurge are beginning to doubt Lord Ainz—which doesn’t come across in the anime at all so far—as in this volume Albedo voiced the opinion that perhaps Lord Ainz was just making something up as he went along, and she thought some of his praise of her was sarcastic. It’ll be interesting to see how Albedo proceeds, as she knows that publicly questioning Lord Ainz without getting the other guardians on her side first is tantamount to suicide.
We know that other players have come from Yggdrasil before, but where are they now? Did their NPC companions eventually realise they weren’t gods, and struck them down?
Roleplaying Games
Schedule changes
This week I and the Sylea Rising players had a chat about the campaign, and decided to end it even sooner than planned. So now the plan is:
- 04-09: final session of Sylea Rising
- 04-16: Old School Essentials Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier
- 04-23, 04-30, 05-07: we’ll figure it out at the time, maybe boardgames or something
- 05-14, 05-21, 05-28: Alien Chariot of the Gods
- 06-04: no session
- 06-11: session 0 for Delta Green Impossible Landscapes
We’d previously planned for Sylea Rising to continue until the end of May, so this is a pretty drastic change. We don’t even have plans for three of the sessions!
I decided to broach the topic and suggest ending the campaign early for two reasons. Firstly, since deciding on the start date of Impossible Landscapes, I’d found myself counting down the Sylea Rising sessions, thinking of them as a hurdle to get through rather than a thing fun in its own right. That’s how I started to feel when we played Wicked Ones, and it’s not good. Secondly, one of the players—the player most keen to do Traveller in the first place—was pretty quiet for two sessions in a row, they brushed it off when I checked in with them, but I suspected that they were getting a bit bored of Traveller as well.
And I was right.
Nobody had really wanted to say anything, thinking that everybody else was having fun, but the general feeling was that we’d played a lot of Traveller over the last year and a half, and that it was probably a mistake to jump into Sylea Rising so soon after we ended our previous Pirates of Drinax campaign (which itself kind of fizzled out rather than reaching a satisfying conclusion). We all like space opera, but we need variety too.
Communication is important. Nobody wants a dull game with no investment which kind of limps towards a conclusion. Better to end things sooner and do something quick and easy before the next campaign starts.
Sylea Rising
So this week was the finale for the Vargr Gang.
We wrapped up the psion-drug plotline, which I had intended to last for two sessions but the players essentially speed-ran the last few parts of the scenario, including deciding to take combat drugs and sprint through the mad scientist’s space lab to find him before the drugs wore off.
Can’t really do a space-dungeon crawl if the players aren’t crawling.
And then they killed the mad scientist in the very first round of combat, before he even knew they were there and could turn on his combat robot. Oh well. They had fun. I can bring out a mad scientist monologue in another game, I suppose.
So next week will be a totally unexpected session for the Imperium Gang! Maybe Chariots of Fire, since I decided not to combine that with Rule of Man Commemorative in the previous session.
Miscellaneous
I watched season 2 of The Boys this week. I liked how the racist character called Stormfront who whipped people into a frenzy through memes was a literal Nazi who had been alive since the early 1900s. Well, season 3 next. Time to see what Homelander did to annoy the right-wing viewers.
It’s also time for the new anime to start. I’ve got a few things I’ll definitely be checking out, like the second seasons of Ancient Magus Bride and G-witch, but I still need to give the season chart a proper look-through.