#239
Apr 16, 2023
Books
This week I read:
Delta Green: Handler’s Guide from Arc Dream Publishing
There is a lot here. Most of the book is metaplot (a history of Delta Green and similar organisations, and their conflicts and activities, even bringing in real-world conspiracy theories as “real” things in the setting), a bestiary of alien horrors, and a collection of spells. Which is very cool and would be a lot of help if I were writing my own campaign, but I’m not: I’m going to run Impossible Landscapes. So, not very useful. Yet. Hopefully in the future. It was all good for getting a feel for the sort of setting and game Delta Green is going for, though, and there was some campaign-running advice which will transfer.
Roleplaying Games
Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier
Alas, the three new players couldn’t make it, and two of the regular players also had to skip on short notice. Thankfully, one current player and one ex-player were able to attend, so we still got to play (with them each running two PCs). It was fun, but as a means to induct new members into the group, it was an abject failure. Oh well, maybe next time will be better.
Heaping more misfortune onto the pile, one of the regular players who had to miss this session said that he’d have to miss every session until at least the end of next month, and may not be able to play even after that. So I’m assuming the worst case for now, that he’s out of the group.
Which means there are only two regular players left in the group. That is not enough for most games. It’s a bit of a crisis situation, the group desperately needs some new committed players or it may just fizzle out in a matter of weeks.
But how do you find new players for an RPG group?
Miscellaneous
I made some changes to bookdb this week, for the first time in a while. Since I’m getting more print-on-demand books these days1, and those tend to have EANs rather than ISBNs, I added EAN validation. I also changed it so book codes have to be one of three formats:
isbn-and then a valid ISBN10 or ISBN13 codeean-and then a valid EAN8 or EAN13 codex-and then anything
Whereas before it was totally freeform, but if the code was a 10- or 13-digit number it’d be validated as an ISBN.
Then, I was so disgusted by the state of the code that I refactored it a bunch (only breaking it twice in the process), and even added a few tests for the ISBN and EAN validation, using Hypothesis, which is one of those tools I’ve always wanted to use but never had reason to. In fact, this is possibly the first time I’ve ever written Python tests.
Link Roundup
Roleplaying games
Miscellaneous
Though, these are RPG books from DriveThruRPG. If the group falls apart I guess that’ll slow down my RPG spending…↩︎