#262

Sep 24, 2023

Books

This week I read:

Roleplaying Games

The Halls of Arden Vul

This week my players made a plan before the session. This is great. I love talking about the game (it’s so fun), and I love plans (I can focus my prep).

They didn’t actually follow the plan once the session started, but I suppose you can’t have everything. But they did find a few fun things: they managed to pick the lock of a big door which had defeated them previously, gaining access to a new region of the main dungeon level they’re exploring (and also unleashing a dust monster in the process, we’ll see what comes of that); they decoded one of my clues leading to a connection with a different level; and they found a very significant item (though they don’t know it yet) which ties in with some of the hidden deep lore of the setting.

In less good news, our VTT of choice, Owlbear Rodeo was pretty laggy today. I’ve heard that it can strugle with big drawn maps, but I didn’t think we’d reached that point yet. Hopefully it was just a temporary issue today, and not a sign that we’ll need to switch to another tool.

Miscellaneous

I was seized by inspiration to make some improvements to my DNS nameserver this weekend:

The combination of #264, #265, and #267 make it possible to implement integration tests on a single host. I could run a mock nameserver on, say, port 5354, and resolved on port 5353 configured to talk to it. Then I just need to hard-code responses to all the queries my mock nameserver may get, then use dig or something to query resolved and check the responses are correct. I haven’t written any integration tests yet, but I think it would be a valuable exercise.