#304
Jul 28, 2024
Books
This week I read:
The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien
Last read in 2016, according to bookdb; I re-read this in preparation for starting a campaign of The One Ring. It’s just great. I love well-done mythology, whether it’s fictional or real-world. I’d forgotten that Celebrimbor, who along with Sauron forged the rings of power, was a descendant of Feanor: the House of Feanor really goes all in when it comes to ruining worlds!
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
This week there was a bumper extra session, reorganised from last week: 6 whole hours of Arden Vul!
The first session, on Monday, takes the record for the session in which the most in-game time passed. A whopping 45 days elapsed, as three party members spent several weeks learning to read and write fluent Rudishva (using some useful books and also the helpful AI, Akla-Chah). The rest of the party spent that time transporting a treasure haul of 200,000 ancient coins to the bank, curing a bunch of people magically transformed into toads, and gathering rumours about the Cult of Set: even going so far as buying (and then freeing) a slave, to question them about the notorious slavers’ guild.
Then, as a little by-the-way, they decided to end the session by waking up a Rudishva from a cryo-pod and parading them around the dungeon (well, not really, but there were a lot of witnesses), which has set tongues wagging, and will certainly attract attention.
In the second session, at our usual time on Sunday… it was a bit all over the place, really. The players had a plan to explore a certain area, but that got swiftly abandoned because they found some graffiti referring to vampires; and they just kind of bounced around several other areas of the dungeon for the session.
They ended the session pursuing a supposition which is reasonable based on the information they have, but not correct, so I expect next time will also be a bit unfocussed when they realise that and have to backtrack.
The One Ring
This week we kicked off the campaign with session 0, character creation, and then some adventure! I started by giving some info about the setting and themes, and having just re-read The Silmarillion and been thinking about this for a few weeks now I distilled those themes down to:
The Lord of the Rings is about loss and fading glory and the sense that everything now is but an echo of greater and more meaningful things that came before.
The Lord of the Rings is about evil, which can never truly be vanquished from the world, and must be constantly forced back by the effort of good people, but which can overwhelm even the noblest of hearts in a moment of weakness.
The Lord of the Rings is about hope: that the world is, overall, just; that evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction, and that good will triumph in the end, so long as there is one person left fighting for it.
And The Lord of the Rings is about finding treasure.
It’s a flawed world on a generally downward trajectory. But despite all that, it’s a world we know and love and are excited to adventure in.
We’re really leaning into the tropes. The party was brought together by Gandalf the Grey, and the call to adventure was the blacksmith of Bree bursting into The Prancing Pony while the PCs were present exclaiming “goblins have taken my daughter!”
The players killed some orcs, rescued the daughter, and followed tracks to an orc-den in the Weather Hills. Hooray!
The system really does feel like Lord of the Rings specifically, and not just a generic fantasy game set in Middle Earth. The character backgrounds, the skills, the “hope” and “shadow” mechanics… it all comes together.
We’re really looking forward to seeing where this goes.