Books
This week I read:
Hawkmoon: Count Brass by Michael Moorcock
In this trio of stories timey-wimey shenanigans happen and the results of the climactic battle from the previous Hawkmoon trilogy gets changed: Count Brass survives, Yisselda and the others die, and so Hawkmoon has no children. But he remembers the previous reality, and the drive to undo the change—even at the cost of sacrificing his friend Count Brass—is the driving force here.
Along the way we get Agak and Gagak story again, which was originally an Elric story, but now retold from Hawkmoon’s perspective. It does feel a bit cheeky publishing the same story twice just changing the viewpoint character, especially as this also happened before with an Elric / Corum story, but I suppose they were fun stories.
I’m not sure when these stories were published originally, but at least in the in-universe chronology they’re pretty final: we end with no more Eternal Champion. However, in the Moorcock Collection they’re less than half way through, there’s still several other manifestations of the Champion to go. I think I’m going to read some other books for a while, and then dive into the stories of Jerry Cornelius.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
First session of 2024, and it was a doozy. Accompanied by a band of goblins, the players finally opened the big doors they found way back in session 15 (September last year), and found their way into the goblin warrens. Well, not only did they find their way into the goblin warrens, they gave the goblins a brand new, direct, route to the surface which doesn’t pass through the territory of any other faction.
The goblins are going to love this, the humans of the surface not so much.
We spent almost the entire session just exploring the goblin warrens and talking to people there, including a band of NPC adventurers the party had met before. So the players have got some new information, the potential friendship of the goblins (if they don’t mess things up), and a direct route to the middle levels of the dungeon.
Miscellaneous
nyarlathotep lives again! With a new CPU, motherboard, and case, it is working better than ever before. I don’t really need such a powerful machine as my home server, but it’s certainly nice to have it.
I am definitely glad to have my DNS adblocking back, I’d forgotten how awful browsing the internet on a phone was without it.
In other news, it’s a new anime season again. Unfortunately, there’s really not much that catches my eye. There’s Dungeon Meshi, of course, but other than that I think I’ll just give it a miss.