Books
This week I read:
Volume 17 of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime by Fuse
I found this volume okay overall but a big chunk of it just felt like wasted space. Rather than a single story, it’s a few short stories focussed on different characters. I like that, it’s an opportunity to show off some things we don’t usually get to see; but the longest of the stories by a significant margin was all about the actions of a character who had travelled to a parallel world… so it’s not really connected to the events of the main story at all, and it wasn’t even an especially good side-story. It felt like it could have been removed and the volume would only have been better.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
This week a few threads came together:
- We have the goblin / halfling struggle, which has recently turned into all-out war.
- We have the players’ deal with the local thieves guild, to supply them a large amount of contact poison in exchange for information on how the halflings are making their poison.
- And under the surface, we have a power struggle in the goblin court, with the king’s legitimacy threatened by him not having some lost “goblin sceptre”.
The players decided to make a deal with the goblins: to contribute to the war effort in exchange for anything the goblins find relating to the poison manufacture. The goblins agreed, and scored a great victory right in the nick of time, as just that very same day one halfling managed to escape the siege to go and recruit some mercenaries. So I guess he’ll come back to Arden Vul in a couple of days to find his old boss dead.
The players have now helped out the goblins twice, so the king pulled them aside, rewarded them richly, and then turned the conversation towards ways they could help the goblins even further. “You guys seem good at finding things,” he opened with, “well could you perhaps find this sceptre for me?” And so he gave the story, that some upstart had challenged his rule due to not having this sceptre that nobody had heard of, and the party have now agreed to look for it.
On the way out they had an informative but slightly threatening chat with Sir Sorrow of the Sun-Scarred Knights who said that her order was concerned with maintaining stability in the halls, and to not take any actions that might encourage the goblins to further reckless warfare.
Next week will be the last session before I go to Japan, so we’re going to try to wrap up a couple of threads, and then pick it back up in May.
Miscellaneous
Unfortunately, I’ve spent most of this week recovering from being unwell. I’m nearly back to normal now, but there’s some sort of lingering throat infection. Hopefully that’s gone by the time I fly out to Japan.