#298
Jun 16, 2024
Books
This week I read:
Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
The final book of the trilogy, and a little different to the prior two books. While the first two were more or less thinly veiled political theory, this one was rather more personal, focussing on the ever dwindling survivors of the original colonists: now all 200+ years old. The anti-aging treatments were no longer enough, as the super-old faced increasing cognitive issues and even sudden death due to poorly-understood causes.
Though, politics is still a major theme, focussing on the relationship between Earth and Mars, the creation of a Martian constitution and planetary government, and (after a time skip) the relationship between Earth, Mars, and other colonies elsewhere in the solar system, after developments in spacecraft engine technology rendered colonisation further afield feasible.
They do end up solving the issue with the anti-aging treatments towards the end of the book though, which brings me to my main criticism of the series: the pace of scientific breakthroughs is too fast. In the first book, we see a colony mission to Mars using technology that doesn’t seem wildly beyond what we have today. Then they cure aging. Then there’s space elevators, 0.25c spaceship engines, artificial intelligence, colonisation of the entire solar system, easy genetic modification of adult lifeforms… so much, in comparatively so little time, a mere 200 years or so.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
Back to a full house.
This week the party dealt with the goblin situation by assassinating Gislu, the rebel, and all his followers thanks to an ok plan and a few good reaction rolls. I need to decide what the fallout will be though: the Cult of Set were deciding how to capitalise on this goblin situation, then a few party members were seen asking around about the goblins and even visiting them mere hours before all the goblins suddenly dropped dead due to poison. Not very subtle, really.
Then they went to the surface, solved a puzzle which opened up a secret door to another level, and nearly got killed by animated statues. After making their escape they ran into an annoyed dragon who wasn’t too happy about their “landscaping”, as he put it, and demanded a pile of gold. I demanded so much I thought they’d have to go adventuring to find a haul to pay off the dragon with, but they could actually afford it with what they had in the bank.
On the whole, I wasn’t very satisfied with this session. The players spent a lot of time discussing how to deal with Gislu, I had to keep nudging them to actually make decisions and do things rather than discuss in circles. The dragon situation was intended to trigger a time-sensitive delve to find a new treasure haul, but it didn’t, so it just felt like I was arbitrarily fining them almost all of their treasure.
Well, next time they’re off to recover some magic items lost by previous dead PCs, which is something they’ve been looking forward to for a while, so that’ll be fun.
Starforged
I think we’re starting to get the hang of the system, though we’re still doing a lot of rolling compared to how much narration there was. But we split the GM authority much better (I’d asked the others to help me keep myself in check), and we had a fun tropey adventure involving space cannibals and ancient alien labyrinths.
We failed in our first vow, so for the moment we’re working on one of the PC’s background vows; but I’m trying to keep an eye out for opportunities to swear new vows and so go on new adventures.
Miscellaneous
I upgraded my machines to NixOS 24.05, and everything seems to be going fine.