#305
Aug 4, 2024
Books
This week I read:
Volumes 7 to 9 of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe
The anime ended with chapter 3 of volume 7, so most of this was new material to me. A bit strange that the anime stops part-way through a volume, but I suppose they wanted to finish off the mage exam arc. The story keeps its theme of the past gradually being forgotten, while showing the present as a consequence of this now-forgotten past. Incidentally, I realise now that this is one of the themes I really enjoyed in The Lord of the Rings, but the knowledge of that had slipped away…
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
An “unjustifiably forgotten” novel, as the cover review says, and one I picked up from the Dolmenwood inspirations list. Lud-in-the-Mist is a fairytale-like book, in a similar vein to The King of Elfland’s Daughter where the mundane world is close to the border of fairyland: a place that sensible folk don’t like to think about. There’s drama, revenge, deception, murder, and at the end of it all the understanding that being too sensible is bad for the soul, and we all need a little of the whimsy of fairyland to be fully human. It’s really good.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
I like to title my session notes: last week was “The Wrong Caves” because the players thought they were exploring somewhere else. This week’s is “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once”, due to the one player (the other was off this week) seemingly trying to pursue all the party’s goals at the same time.
So the party are busy wandering around making enemies, while also expanding their tavern, recovering and selling valuable treasures, and hiring spies and assassins to make yet more enemies with!
I need to put some notes on my game calendar. There will be a reckoning sooner or later.
The One Ring
This week we picked up with the company at the end of an orc-trail heading into the Weather Hills. A dark cave entrance before them, with no other obvious signs of entry.
With some cunning they managed to thin out the numbers, leading to a battle of the two PCs against two orcs. One of the orcs was especially big and tough. I intended this fight to be difficult but, partly because we’re new to the system, partly because we only have two PCs, it ended up being lethal.
The problem was that we had one PC hanging back to fight with their bow, which meant the other was up front tanking these two orcs. They chose to fight in “open stance”, which doesn’t convey any particular advantages or disadvantages, and they missed a fair few attacks. Missing an attack when there are two opponents who then get to attack you afterwards leads to the damage stacking up pretty quickly. As they were getting close to death they tried to run, but couldn’t, their resources were too low. So instead they switched into “forward stance”, which gives a bonus to attack, and actually did really well—but not enough to turn the tide.
They wounded the orc commander before being skewered by a scimitar, buying time for the other PC to make their escape.
We had a short break, and then came back to talk about it. Thankfully nobody was too put out. The player of the dead PC made a new character who, in time-honoured tradition, is a close relative who wants to avenge them. The surviving PC composed a stirring song about the bravery they had witnessed. We recognised that the combat was so difficult in part due to only having one melee fighter, so we introduced a third PC which the two players will share control over.
They also met up with their patron, Gandalf the Grey (he was bringing the new PC to Bree), and through him I gave some rumours and foreshadowing of where the adventure might go.
So, after a break of two weeks to recuperate and prepare, the company returned to the cave. This time, they didn’t manage to sneak up, and lost the element of surprise. But, with new comrades ready to bring the fight against the shadow, surely they will prevail now!
Miscellaneous
I migrated bookdb and bookmarks from actix-web to axum.
When I rewrote them in Rust from Python, I looked at a few web framework options and found they all had fairly poor multipart form handling1, but that actix-web looked the best of a bad bunch. I’ve revised that opinion now based on my experience of actually using actix-web (it looks easier at first glance but there’s still a lot of work) and of using axum in thing-doer (it’s pretty nice).
Also, as a lesser bonus, axum shares more dependencies with the rest of bookdb and bookmarks than actix-web does, so switching would reduce dependencies and improve compile times.
So I rewrote them: bookdb PR#359, bookmarks PR#595.
Link Roundup
Roleplaying games
Which is maybe not too surprising if most people are writing JSON APIs rather than traditional websites. But I will not succumb to temptation and make submitting a form require javascript!↩︎