#301
Jul 7, 2024
Books
This week I read:
Dämoren by Seth Skorkowsky
What is the ‘ä’ doing there? I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve been aware of Seth Skorkowsky’s books for a while (I follow his RPG youtube channel), and a few months back he did a video to celebrate that it had been 10 years since he launched his Valducan series with Dämoren. I liked the sound of it—modern-day people bearing ancient holy weapons to kill demons—and decided to check it out.
It was pretty good. It’s an action story that doesn’t take much thinking to enjoy. I liked the supernatural aspect, and the twist about the holy weapons revealed at the end. I’ll probably check out the others in the series.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
I finish every session of Arden Vul thinking that, despite the progress the players made, they’ve somehow, yet again, ended up with more new questions than answers. And this week’s session was no different: realising that they were having a hard time putting together a timeline of Arden Vul just from exploring the place, they spent some time in the troll court asking questions. They got some answers, sure, but those answers have just led to more questions.
Next week they plan to check out the mysterious “beacon” that they managed to open up a couple of sessions back. I am very excited for this, it’s a mystery they came across in the very first session (there’s an obelisk just inside the city gates with an inscription referring to the beacon) and now, 50 sessions later, they will finally learn the truth…
The One Ring
This week, after two sessions, we finished the short dungeon one of the players had made. Next up is The One Ring! I’ve got a rough outline of a first adventure and have been preparing for session 0, which will be on Friday the 12th. After the session 0 I’ll tune things for the characters and think about seeds I can plant for a second adventure. This will be the first totally homebrew campaign I’ve ran in a while, it’ll be fun.
We’re going to play with the same tech stack as Arden Vul: Miro, Google Sheets, and a Discord dice bot. I checked out the Foundry system for The One Ring but it seems to have some bugs, and is a little clunky in parts, so we’ll just do it the low-tech way.
Miscellaneous
Once again, it is a new anime season. I haven’t really gone through everything yet, but no doubt I’ll pick up two or three shows.