#299
Jun 23, 2024
Books
This week I read:
The Man Who Sold the Moon & Orphans of the Sky by Robert Heinlein
This is two novels in one, which aren’t really related other than being about space. But they’re both enjoyable, fast-paced, and short (which is a nice change from some of the huge tomes I’ve been reading recently).
The Man Who Sold the Moon is a series of short stories about the development of technology up to the colonisation of the moon. It predicts some weird things that didn’t actually happen (like launching spacecraft with huge catapults, to get around the weight of extra fuel). It’s funny that this was written in 1949, and in the introduction Robert Heinlein says that the pace of scientific development has always surprised him, and that he thinks the year chosen for the first manned flight to the moon in this book—some time in the ’70s—would be improved upon in reality. And it was!
Orphans of the Sky is a generation ship story where the inhabitants have forgotten Earth and believe the ship to be the universe. It’s a common trope—maybe it wasn’t in 1963—but done well. I found it strange how throwing knives were the weapons of choice, but then realised it’s because guns in a spaceship are a bad idea: another trope I’ve seen before but not, I think, with such a significant impact on the culture portrayed in the story.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
This week the players dealt with a guardian monster they’d left hanging around for a few sessions, and found more ancient coinage than they could carry. Not sure how to deal with this vast horde of wealth, they paid a bunch of goblins a few hundred gold to keep an eye on it, and moved enough of it to a secure location to level up a few characters. There’s still over 200,000 coins left behind, though. And a cool statue.
The life of an adventurer in Arden Vul! Sometimes you’re a penniless beggar, all your treasure taken by the dragon; sometimes it’s as if you’re blessed by Lucreon himself!
Next week the players are off to avenge some of their fallen comrades, recover lost magic items, and then finally return to the mysterious location they refer to as the “spaceship” armed with a Comprehend Languages spell.
I’ll need to review the alien material…
Starforged
We decided to give up on Starforged this week. We just weren’t really clicking with the system, we were doing a lot of rolling with very little narrative between rolls—which, funnily enough, is exactly the criticism that traditional games without narrative mechanics get; but we never really had that problem until we played a game with narrative mechanics!
One of the players is going to run us through a short dungeon, using Old School Essentials, over the next couple of sessions. Then I’m taking over to run a short campaign of The One Ring, which caught my eye recently. Another player wants to run a Troika campaign, so in principle I’ll yield to them at some point… but they’ve wanted to run this Troika game for years and never felt ready, despite our encouragement, so I’m not really holding my breath.
I’m glad we tried Starforged, but it wasn’t for us.