Books
No books this week.
Roleplaying Games
The blog post I wrote about my Arden Vul campaign got featured in The Glatislant this week, which was unexpected, but nice to see. That post has jumped straight up to #3 most viewed of all time.
This week there’s been some interesting kickstarters:
- Knock! Issue Four
- Let Us Build a Tower: A Mythic Bronze Age Adventure in Babel
- Beyond the Pale: a folktale adventure
But I think I’m all kickstartered out for December now, having backed all three. I wish the RPG industry could just stop releasing new books for two or three years so I have time to catch up on everything…
The Halls of Arden Vul
As usual, the players did not do at all what I expected them to this week. We began with a bit of a lore dump from the magically preserved 250-year-old man they rescued. He told them all about the previous attempt to retake Arden Vul for the empire, and the ultimate failure of that attempt in the face of some sort of magic weapon of the trolls.
He name-dropped a bunch of important people and locations, so I expected the players to go follow up on those. Nope. Instead, they went to loot some treasure they’d seen but not claimed previously, and on the way there one player said “you know, I think there could be a secret door in this section of corridor” — which proceeded to derail the entire session, as they found a network of secret corridors and spy-holes letting them peer into all sorts of rooms they’d not yet visited.
But that’s all good, the point of a secret door is to be found after all. It would just be kind of nice if we went one session without adding to their to-do list.
Advent of Code
December is here, so Advent of Code is upon us once more. As usual, I’m giving it a go in Haskell. I usually get bored around the 15-day mark, so we’ll see how far I get this year.
The difficulty this year has felt a bit all over the place. Part 2 of day 1 had a gotcha that felt a bit beyond a day 1 puzzle, then day 2 was really simple, then day 3 jumped straight to 2D input. Though, it must be pretty hard to come up with 50 suitable puzzles every year.
Miscellaneous
The other day, Discord prompted me to log in again on my desktop (I guess it had been a while), but it wouldn’t accept my password: my password was 128 characters long, and at some point since I set it, they restricted the input field to 72 characters!
I couldn’t even change my password from a still-logged-in session, as the “current password” field on the form was also limited!
“Fortunately”, it seems that they always just silently truncated my password, as I discovered I could just delete everything after the 72nd character and log in just fine. Yay?