#308
Aug 25, 2024
Books
This week I read:
Volumes 2 to 12 of the 20th Century Boys “Perfect Edition”, which is volumes 3 to 24 of the original manga, by Naoki Urasawa
Well, I’ve now read the whole thing. It’s just as great as I thought it would be. I was pleased to discover that the film adaptation is quite faithful. By necessity it has less focus on some side details, a bit more focus on some bits that make good cinema (like the big music festival towards the end, or the final battle against the giant robot), but it still more or less covers everything accurately.
I’m not so sure about the ending though, that the villain, the masked “Friend”, was the same person throughout the story. Friend dies several volumes in, two characters present confirm his death (no pulse), and when Friend reappears later, multiple characters say it seems like a different person, and also his personality changes. So it really does seem that Friend died and his second-in-command staged a phony “resurrection” scene to take up the mantle. Which is what the characters think is happening too. So, to then say “actually, it was just one person all along who was secretly resuscitated after being shot but then pretended to be dead for weeks” doesn’t feel right to me.
Apparently there is hot debate over whether this was the originally intended ending, and I can see why. It’s a twist that’s not foreshadowed at all, which is the trick of a hack writer, whereas the rest of the story up to that point is well written and internally consistent.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
This week the players finally, finally, did something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time: they got out their ropes and iron spikes, and climbed around the Great Chasm. There are little secret nooks and crannies accessible from the chasm on nearly every level of this dungeon, which so far they’ve not interacted with at all. It took a rumour of a specific tomb, and spotting a cave opening in about the right place on the edge of their torchlight.
Now, the cave they found wasn’t the right one, but hey at least they kept exploring and have found some things. Hopefully it’ll continue.
Behind the scenes, there’s a big change brewing in the dungeon, triggered by the players’ actions, which I look forward to unleashing in a few (in-game) weeks. Something is about to shake Arden Vul that hasn’t made its presence felt for nearly 3000 years.
The One Ring
I went into this session with anticipation, and a little worry, as I expected this to be a tipping point: the players had followed the original plot hook I gave them to a substantial obstacle, and I didn’t know what they would do next. Would they try to push on and find a way through? Or would they decide to leave it and follow up one of the other leads they have to further their patrons goals? Or would they decide to do something totally different and on their own initiative?
This is the sort of moment I struggle with, as a GM, and why I tend to like detailed settings like Dolmenwood and Arden Vul: no matter what the players decide to do, there’s a lot of guidance on how I can react. Eriador is not very detailed in the same way. There’s a lot of lore, sure, and even a hexmap, but it is not a hexcrawling setting where each hex has interesting content already written for me.
I also didn’t really know if I’d communicated enough of the wider issues of the setting for the players to make a decision other than to just hurl themselves against this big obstacle. I didn’t want them to feel that that was their only option.
Thankfully, I was worrying too much, and it turned out well. The players decided to leave the obstacle aside for now, and came up with a goal I’d not considered at all: they want to get the Bree wardens, rangers, hillmen, and elves of Rivendell (or some subset of those groups) to patrol the Great East Road from the Shire to the Misty Mountains, keeping travellers safe from the orc bands they know to be roaming around. That is a great idea, and also easily leads into side-quests as all of those groups will want the party to do something for them before they even consider this.
But first, the party have decided to check out rumours of a haunting…
Miscellaneous
I’ve got the urge to redecorate again or, rather, to actually decorate my flat beyond the living room. I’ve not really done much in the bedroom, entrance hall, or upstairs landing: just got some basic, functional, furniture. But I feel like making it nicer.
Some ideas floating around in my head:
- I could get some prints from Ze Burnay to decorate the hallways.
- I could get a nice coat rack, shoe locker, and little bench to put beside the front door.
- I could replace the small and not very nice looking clothes storage “unit” (I hesitate to call it a chest of drawers, or really any other recognisable piece of furniture) in my bedroom, and the bedside table, with a nice matching pair and put some prints by Ulla Thynell on the walls.
I’ve put quite a lot of effort and money into making my living room look nice, as that’s where I and guests spend most of my time; whereas decorating other rooms feels like a bit of a waste (I’m mostly in my bedroom to sleep, so does it really matter what it looks like?) so it’s always easy to prioritise other things. But I feel like changing that.