Books
No books this week.
Roleplaying Games
Cartographic Curiosities
Three of the players couldn’t make it this time, is there just something about this time of year which makes RPGs hard to schedule?
So it was mostly a shopping / admin / NPC recruitment session with the two players who did show up. We switched from the standard OSE retainer rules to the draft Dolmenwood ones from the Patreon, and they’re so much clearer, which made the process a breeze (well, as much a breeze as rolling to determine the race, class, and stats of 10 NPC adventurers can be).
We ended with the party arriving back at a dungeon they left partially explored a few in-game weeks back, finding signs that someone else may have gone in and made off with some of the treasure. We’ll pick it up next time with hopefully more of the players present.
Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier
I and one player returned to the dungeon this week. Many player characters died, but one made it out with the treasure! All’s well that ends well.
I’ll definitely bring in some house rules to increase survivability if I run Arden Vul.
Finding new players?
Alas, there’s been no progress on this front. At all. We’ve all asked our gaming friends, and none of them can commit to a new weekly game.
It’s not looking very likely that Impossible Landscapes will start in June. I could run it with just two players, but I’d enjoy it much more with four players and since you can’t really run the same campaign twice I’d rather put it off than compromise.
So really there’s only two things left to try:
Change the schedule. Maybe a different day or cadence would work better. I definitely want a regular schedule though, trying to schedule a game session-by-session is a nightmare.
Run an open-table game as a recruiting tool. This would need to be something easy for players to drop in and out of (like a megadungeon). It would be a pretty big tonal shift for the group though, as everyone we’ve played with so far has been a friend or a friend of a friend, not a stranger found by advertising online.
It’s not a great situation to be in.
Miscellaneous
I’ve watched a few films this week:
The Objective (2008), which is totally a Delta Green operation set in Afghanistan. A mysterious CIA agent commandeers a unit of soldiers to go into the desert ostensibly to find some important Afghan cleric, to get a recorded statement of support from him, and to use that to win the locals over. In actuality, the CIA are aware of a supernatural phenomenon in the area, the cleric is an informant who’s been keeping an eye on things, and he’s sent word that something’s up. Bad things ensue.
Sicario (2015), which is by the Dune / Arrival guy so I expected great things from this but didn’t really find it that interesting. It’s about an FBI agent who gets pulled into a mysterious task force to take down a Mexican cartel. The film is well done, it just didn’t really grip me.
Life (2017), in which scientists on the ISS get a sample of Martian soil which has a cell in it. They realise the cell is dormant but alive, and they manage to stimulate it into activity and proceed to study it as it adapts to its new environment. Bad things ensue in this one as well. I just like films where things go badly wrong in weird ways.